Robert Silverberg - Thorns

Cunningly the garment shaped itself to his body.

The application took less than five minutes. Surveying his gaudiness in a mirror, Burris was not displeased. Lona would be proud of him.

He waited for her.

Nearly an hour went by. He heard nothing from her room. Surely she must be ready by now. “Lona?” he called, and got no answer.

Panic speared him. This girl was suicide-prone. The pomp and elegance of this hotel might be just enough to tip her over the brink. They were a thousand feet above the ground here; she would not botch this attempt. I should never have left her alone, Burris told himself fiercely.

“Lona!”

He stepped through the widening partition into her room. Instantly he saw her and went numb with relief. She was in her closet, naked, her back to him. Narrow across the shoulders, narrower through the hips, so that the contrast of the narrow waist was lost. The spine rose like a subterranean burrow, steeply, shadowed. The buttocks were boyish. He regretted his intrusion. “I didn’t hear you,” he said. “I was worried, and so when you didn’t answer—”

She turned to him, and Burris saw that she had much more on her mind than her violated modesty. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her cheeks streaked. In a token of pudicity she lifted a thin arm across her small breasts, but the gesture was purely automatic and hid nothing. Her lips trembled. Beneath his outer skin he felt the shock of her body’s impact, and he found himself wondering why so underfurnished a nudity should affect him this way. Because, he decided, it had lain beyond a barrier that now was shattered.

“Oh, Minner, Minner, I was ashamed to call you! I’ve been standing here for half an hour!”

“What’s the trouble?”

“There’s nothing for me to wear!”

He came closer. She turned aside, backing from the closet, standing by his elbow and lowering the arm over her breasts. He peered into the closet. Dozens of sprayon cans were decked there. Fifty, a hundred of them.

“So?”

“I can’t wear those!”

He picked one up. From the picture on the label it was a thing of night and fog, elegant, chaste, superb.

“Why can’t you?”

“I want something simple. There’s nothing simple here.”

“Simple? For the Galactic Room?”

“I’m afraid, Minner.”

And she was. The bare skin was goosebumped.

“You can be such a child sometimes!” he snapped.

The words fishhooked into her. She shrank back, looking more naked than ever, and fresh tears slipped from her eyes. The cruelty of the words seemed to linger in the room, like a silty deposit, after the words themselves were gone.

“If I’m a child,” she said hoarsely, “why am I going to the Galactic Room?”

Take her in your arms? Comfort her? Burris was caught in wild eddies of uncertainty. He geared his voice for something that lay midway between parental anger and phony solicitousness and said, “Don’t be foolish, Lona. You’re an important person. The whole world is going to look at you tonight and say how beautiful, how lucky you are. Put on something Cleopatra would have loved. And then tell yourself you’re Cleopatra.”

“Do I look like Cleopatra?”

His eyes traveled her body. That was, he sensed, exactly what she wanted them to do. And he had to concede that she was less than voluptuous. Which perhaps she also sought to engineer from him. Yet, in her slight way, she was attractive. Even womanly. She shuttled between impish girlhood and neurotic womanhood.

“Pick one of these and put it on,” he said. “You’ll blossom to match. Don’t be uneasy about it. Here I am in this insane costume, and I think it’s wildly funny. You’ve got to match me. Go ahead.”

“That’s the other trouble. There are so many. I can’t pick!”

She had a point there. Burris stared into the closet. The choice was overwhelming. Cleopatra herself would have been dizzied, and this poor waif was stunned. He fished about uncomfortably, hoping to land on something that would instantly proclaim its suitability for Lona. But none of these garments had been designed for waifs, and so long as he persisted in thinking of her as one, he could make no selection. At last he came back to the one he had grabbed at random, the elegant and chaste one. “This,” he said. “I think this is just right.”

She looked doubtfully at the label. “I’d feel embarrassed in anything so fancy.”

“We’ve dealt with that theme already, Lona. Put it on.”

“I can’t use the machine. I don’t know how.”

“It’s the simplest thing in the world!” he burst out, and cursed himself for the ease with which he slipped into hectoring inflections with her. “The instructions are right on the can. You put the can in the slot—”

“Do it for me.”

He did it for her. She stood in the dispenser zone, slim and pale and naked, while the garment issued forth in a fine mist and wrapped itself about her. Burris began to suspect that he had been manipulated, and rather adroitly at that. In one giant bound they had crossed the barrier of nudity, and now she showed herself to him as casually as though she were his wife of decades. Seeking his advice on clothing. Forcing him to stand by while she pirouetted beneath the dispenser, cloaking herself in elegance. The little witch! He admired the technique. The tears, the huddled bare body, the poor-little-girl approach. Or was he reading into her panic far more than was to be found there? Perhaps. Probably.

“How do I look?” she asked, stepping forth.

“Magnificent.” He meant it. “There’s the mirror. Decide for yourself.”

Her glow of pleasure was worth several kilowatts. Burris decided he had been all wrong about her motives; she was less complicated than that, had been genuinely terrified by the prospect of elegance, now was genuinely delighted at the ultimate effect.

Which was superb. The dispenser nozzle had spawned a gown that was not quite diaphanous, not quite skin-tight. It clung to her like a cloud, veiling the slender thighs and sloping shoulders and artfully managing to suggest a voluptuousness that was not there at all. No one wore undergarments with a sprayon outfit, and so the bare body lay just fractionally out of sight; but the designers were cunning, and the loose drape of this gown enhanced and amplified its wearer. The colors, too, were delicious. Through some molecular magic the polymers were not tied strongly to one segment of the spectrum. As Lona moved the gown changed hue readily, sliding from dawn-gray to the blue of a summer sky, and thence to black, iron-brown, pearl, mauve.

Lona took on the semblance of sophistication that the garment provided her. She seemed taller, older, more alert, surer of herself. She held her shoulders up, and her breasts thrust forward in surprising transfiguration.

“Do you like it?” she asked softly.

“It’s wonderful, Lona.”

“I feel so strange in it. I’ve never worn anything like this. Suddenly I’m Cinderella going to the ball!”

“With Duncan Chalk as your fairy godmother?”

They laughed. “I hope he turns into a pumpkin at midnight,” she said. She moved toward the mirror. “Minner, I’ll be ready in another five minutes, all right?”

He returned to his own room. She needed not five minutes but fifteen to cleanse the evidence of tears from her face, but he forgave her. When she finally appeared, he scarcely recognized her. She had prettied her face to a burnished glamour that virtually transformed her. The eyes were rimmed now with shining dust; the lips gleamed in lush phosphorescence; earclips of gold covered her ears. She drifted like a wisp of morning mist into his room. “We can go now,” she said throatily.

Burris was pleased and amused. In one sense, she was a little girl dressed up to look like a woman. In another, she was a woman just beginning to discover that she was no longer a girl. Had the chrysalis really opened yet? In any case he enjoyed the sight of her this way. She was certainly lovely. Perhaps fewer people would look at him, more at her.