Robert Silverberg - Thorns

They headed for the dropshaft together.

Just before he left his room, he notified Aoudad that he and Lona were coming down for dinner. Then they descended. Burris felt a wild surge of fear and grimly quelled it. This would be his most public exposure since his return to Earth. Dinner at the restaurant of restaurants; his strange face perhaps souring the caviar of a thousand fellow diners; eyes turned to him from all sides. He looked at it as a test. Somehow he drew strength from Lona and put on a cloak of courage as she had put on her unfamiliar finery.

When they reached the lobby, Burris heard the quick sighs of the onlookers. Pleasure? Awe? The frisson of delighted revulsion? He could not read their motives from their hissing uptake of air. Yet they were looking, and responding, to the strange pair who had emerged from the dropshaft.

Burris, Lona on his arm, kept his face taut. Get a good look at us, he thought sharply. The couple of the century, we are. The mutilated starman and the hundred-baby virgin mother. The show of the epoch.

They were looking, all right. Burris felt the eyetracks crossing his earless jaw, passing over his click-click eyelids and his rearranged mouth. He astounded himself by his own lack of response to their vulgar curiosity. They were looking at Lona, too, but she had less to offer them, since her scars were inward ones.

Suddenly there was commotion to Burris’s left.

An instant later Elise Prolisse burst from the crowd and hurtled toward him, crying harshly, “Minner! Minner!”

She looked like a she-berserker. Her face was bizarrely painted in a wild and monstrous parody of adornment: blue cheekstripes, red flanges over her eyes. She had shunned sprayon and wore a gown of some rustling, seductive natural fabric, cut low to reveal the milk-white globes of her breasts. Hands tipped with shining claws were outstretched.

“I’ve tried to get to you,” she panted. “They wouldn’t let me near you. They—”

Aoudad cut toward them. “Elise—”

She slashed his cheek with her nails. Aoudad reeled back, cursing, and Elise turned to Burris. She looked venom at Lona. She tugged at Burris’s arm and said, “Come away with me. Now that I’ve found you again I won’t let go.”

“Get your hand off him!” From Lona. The syllables tipped with whirling blades.

The older woman glared at the girl. Burris, baffled, thought they would fight. Elise weighed at least forty pounds more than Lona, and, as Burris had good reason to know, she was fiercely strong. But Lona had unsuspected strengths, too.

A scene in the lobby, he thought with curious clarity. Nothing will be spared us.

“I love him, you little bitch!” Elise cried hoarsely.

Lona did not answer. But her hand moved out in a quick chopping gesture toward Elise’s outstretched arm. Edge of hand collided with fleshy forearm in a quick crack. Elise hissed. She pulled back her arm. The hands formed claws again. Lona, squaring away, flexed her knees and was ready to leap.

All this had taken only seconds. Now the startled bystanders moved. Burris himself, after early paralysis, stepped in the way and shielded Lona from Elise’s fury. Aoudad seized one of Elise’s arms. She tried to pull it free, and her bare breasts quivered in the effort. Nikolaides moved in on the other side. Elise screamed, kicked, pulled. A circle of robot bellhops had formed. Burris watched as they dragged Elise away.

Lona leaned against an onyx pillar. Her face was deeply flushed, but otherwise not even her makeup was disarranged. She looked more startled than frightened.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Elise Prolisse. The widow of one of my shipmates.”

“What did she want?”

“Who knows?” Burris lied.

Lona was not fooled. “She said she loved you.”

“It’s her privilege. I guess she’s been under great stress.”

“I saw her in the hospital. She visited you.” Green flames of jealousy flickered across Lona’s face. “What does she want from you? Why did she make that scene?”

Aoudad came to his rescue. Holding a cloth to his bloodied cheek, he said, “We’ve given her a sedative. She won’t bother you again. I’m terribly sorry about this. A silly, hysterical fool of a woman—”

“Let’s go back upstairs,” said Lona. “I don’t feel like eating in the Galactic Room now.”

“Oh, no,” Aoudad said. “Don’t cancel out. I’ll give you a relaxer and you’ll feel better in no time. You mustn’t let a stupid episode like that spoil a wonderful evening.”

“At least let’s get out of the lobby,” Burris said shortly.

The little group hurried toward a brightly lit inner room. Lona sank to a divan. Burris, crackling now with delayed tension, felt pain shoot through his thighs, his wrists, his chest. Aoudad produced a pocket tray of relaxers, taking one himself and giving one to Lona. Burris shrugged the little tube away, knowing that the drug it contained would have no effect on him. In moments Lona was smiling again.

He knew he had not been mistaken about the jealousy in her eyes. Elise had come up like a typhoon of flesh, threatening to sweep away all that Lona possessed, and Lona had fought back fiercely. Burris was both flattered and troubled. He could not deny that he enjoyed, as any man would, being the object of such a struggle. Yet that instant of revelation had shown him just how deeply Lona already was enmeshed with him. He felt no such depth of involvement himself. He liked the girl, yes, and was grateful to her for her company, but he was a long way from being in love with her. He doubted very much that he would ever love her, or anyone else. But she, without even the virtue of a physical bond linking them, had evidently constructed some inner fantasy of romance. The seeds of trouble lay in that, Burris knew.

Drained of tensions by Aoudad’s relaxer, Lona quickly recovered from Elise’s attack. They rose, Aoudad beaming again despite his injury.

“Will you go to dinner now?” he asked.

“I’m feeling much better,” Lona said. “It was all so sudden—it shook me up.”

“Five minutes in the Galactic Room and you’ll have forgotten the whole thing,” said Burris. He gave her his arm again. Aoudad conducted them toward the special liftshaft that led only to the Galactic Room. They mounted the gravity plate and sped upward. The restaurant was at the summit of the hotel, looking outward toward the heavens from its lofty spot like some private observatory, a sybaritic Uraniborg of food. Still trembling from the unexpected onslaught of Elise, Burris felt new anxiety as they reached the vestibule of the restaurant. He kept a calm front, but would he panic in the supernal glamour of the Galactic Room?

He had been there once before, long ago. But that was in another body, and besides, the wench was dead.

The liftshaft halted, and they stepped out into a bath of living light.

Aoudad said portentously, “The Galactic Room! Your table is waiting. Enjoy yourselves.”

He vanished. Burris smiled tensely at Lona, who looked drugged and dazed with happiness and terror. The crystal doors opened for them. They went within.

There had never been such a restaurant this side of Babylon. Tier upon tier of terraces rose toward the starry dome. Refraction was banished here, and the dining room seemed to be open to the heavens, but in fact the elegant diners were shielded from the elements at all times. A screen of black light framing the facade of the hotel cancelled out the effect of the city illumination, so that the stars always gleamed over the Galactic Room as they would above an untenanted forest.

The far worlds of the universe thus lay only a short distance out of reach. The things of those worlds, the harvest of the stars, gave splendor to the room. The texture of its curving walls was due to an array of alien artifacts: bright-hued pebbles, potsherds, paintings, tinkling magic-trees of odd alloys, zigzagging constructions of living light, each embedded in its proper niche in the procession of tiers. The tables seemed to grow from the floor, which was carpeted with a not-quite-sentient organism found on one of the worlds of Aldebaran. The carpet was, to be blunt about it, not too different in structure and function from a Terran slime mold, but the management did not make too much ceremony over identifying it, and the effect it produced was one of extreme richness.