Robert Silverberg - Thorns

“Yes. Beating terribly fast. You can’t see them, can you?”

“Just a blur.”

“I see the individual wings. Lona, it’s incredible! I see the wings! With these eyes!”

“That’s wonderful, Minner.”

“The bird’s a stray; probably belongs in Mexico, probably wishes he were there now. He’ll die up here before he finds a flower. I wish I could do something.”

“Catch him? Have someone take him to Mexico?”

Burris looked at his hands as if weighing the possibility of seizing the hummingbird in a lightning swoop. Then he shook his head. “My hands couldn’t be fast enough, even now. Or I’d crush him if I caught him. I—there he goes!”

And there he went. Lona watched the brown blur vanish down the garden. At least he’s going south, she thought. She turned to Burris.

“It pleases you some of the time, doesn’t it?” she asked. “You like it … a little.”

“Like what?”

“Your new body.”

He quivered a little. She wished she hadn’t mentioned it.

He seemed to check a first rush of words. He said, “It has a few advantages, I admit.”

“Minner, I’m cold.”

“Shall we go inside?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Anything you say, Lona.”

They moved side by side toward the door. Their shadows dribbled off to their left at a sharp angle. He was much taller than she was, nearly a foot. And very strong. I wish. That he would take me. In his arms.

She was not at all put off by his appearance.

Of course, she had seen only his head and his hands. He might have a huge staring eye set in the middle of his chest. Or a mouth under each arm. A tail. Big purple spots. But as the fantasies welled through her mind, it struck her that even those inventions were not really frightening. If she could get used to his face and his hands, as she had so speedily, what would further differences matter? He had no ears, his nose was not a nose, his eyes and his lips were strange, his tongue and his teeth were like something out of a dream. And each hand had that extra thing. Yet quite rapidly she had stopped noticing. His voice was pleasant and normal, and he was so smart, so interesting. And he seemed to like her. Was he married, she wondered. How could she ask?

The hospital door bellied inward as they approached.

“My room?” he asked. “Or yours?”

“What will we do now?”

“Sit. Talk. Play cards.”

“Playing cards bored you.”

“Did I ever say it did?” he asked her.

“You were too polite. But I could tell. I could see you were hiding it. It was written all over your…” Her voice trailed off. “Face.”

It keeps coming back, she thought.

“Here’s my room,” she said.

Which room they went to hardly mattered. They were identical, one facing the rear garden where they had just been, one facing the courtyard. A bed, a desk, an array of medical equipment. He took the bedside chair. She sat on the bed. She wanted him to come over and touch her body, warm her chilled flesh, but of course she did not dare suggest it.

“Minner, how soon will you be leaving the hospital?”

“Soon. A few days. What about you, Lona?”

“I guess I could go out almost any time now. What will you do when you leave?”

“I’m not sure. I think I’ll travel. See the world, let the world see me.”

“I’ve always wanted to travel,” she said. Too obvious. “I’ve never really been anywhere.”

“Such as where?”

“Luna Tivoli,” she said. “Or the Crystal Planet. Or—well, anywhere. China. The Antarctic.”

“It’s not hard to get there. You get on the liner and go.” For an instant his face sealed itself, and she did not know what to think; the lips slid shut, the eyes clicked their lids into place. She thought of a turtle. Then Burris opened again and said, astonishing her, “What if we went to some of those places together?”

Somewhat higher than the atmosphere Chalk soared. He looked upon his world and found it good. The seas were green verging on blue, or blue verging on green, and it seemed to him that he could discern icebergs adrift. The land was brown in winter’s grip, to the north; summer-green lay below the curving middle.

He spent much of his time in lower space. It was the best way, the most esthetically satisfying way, of shunning gravity. Perhaps his pilot felt distress, for Chalk did not permit the use of reverse gravitrons up here, nor even any centrifuging to provide the illusion of weight. But his pilot was paid well enough to endure such discomforts, if discomforts they were.

For Chalk it was not remotely a discomfort to be weightless. He had his mass, his wonderful brontosaurian mass, and yet he had none of the drawbacks thereof.

“This is one of the few instances,” he said to Burris and the girl, “where one can legitimately get something for nothing. Consider: when we blast off, we dissipate the gravity of acceleration through gravitrons, so that the extra Gs are squirted away and we rise in comfort. There’s no effort for us in getting where we are, no price to pay in extra weight before we can be weightless. When we land, we treat the deceleration problem the same way. Normal weight, weightless, normal again, and no flattening at any time.”

“But is it free?” Lona asked. “I mean, it must cost a lot to run the gravitrons. When you balance everything out, the expense of starting and stopping, you haven’t really had anything for nothing, have you?”

Chalk, amused, looked at Burris. “She’s very clever, did you realize that?”

“So I’ve been noticing.”

Lona reddened. “You’re making fun of me.”

“No, we aren’t,” said Burris. “You’ve hit quite independently on the notion of conservation of gravity, don’t you see? But you’re being too strict with our host. He’s looking at things from his point of view. If he doesn’t have to feel the buildup of Gs himself, it doesn’t cost him anything in the realest sense of the word. Not in terms of enduring high G. The gravitrons absorb all that. Look, it’s like committing a crime, Lona, and paying someone else to go through rehabilitation. Sure, it costs you cash to find a rehab substitute. But you’ve had your crime, and he takes the punishment. The cash equivalent—”

“Let it go,” Lona said. “It’s nice up here, anyway.”

“You like weightlessness?” Chalk asked. “Have you ever experienced it before?”

“Not really. A few short trips.”

“And you, Burris? Does the lack of gravity help your discomforts any?”

“A little, thanks. There’s no drag on the organs that aren’t where they really ought to be. I don’t feel that damned pulling in my chest. A small mercy, but I’m grateful.”

Nevertheless, Burris was still in his bath of pain, Chalk noticed. Perhaps more tepid, but not enough. What was it like to feel constant physical discomfort? Chalk knew a little of that, simply through the effort of hauling his body around in full gravity. But he had been bloated so long. He was accustomed to the steady aching pull. Burris, though? The sensations of nails being hammered into his flesh? He did not protest. Only now and then did the bitter rebellion surge to the surface. Burris was improving, learning to accommodate to what was for him the human condition. Chalk, sensitive as he was, still picked up the emanations of pain. Not merely psychic pain. Physical pain, too. Burris had grown calmer, had risen from the black pit of depression in which Aoudad had first encountered him, but he was far from any beds of roses.

The girl, comparatively, was in better shape, Chalk concluded. She was not quite so intricate a mechanism.