Robert Silverberg - Thorns

Other things grew in select spots of the Galactic Room: potted shrubs, sweet-smelling blossoming plants, even dwarf trees, all (so it was said) imported from other worlds. The chandelier itself was the product of alien hands: a colossal efflorescence of golden teardrops, crafted from the amber-like secretion of a bulky sea-beast living along the gray shores of a Centaurine planet.

It cost an incalculable sum to have dinner at the Galactic Room. Every table was occupied, every night. One made reservations weeks in advance. Those who had been lucky enough to choose this night were granted the unexpected treat of seeing the starman and the girl who had had the many babies, but the diners, most of them celebrities themselves, had only fleeting interest in the much-publicized pair. A quick look, and then back to the wonders on one’s plate.

Lona clung tightly to Burris’s arm as they passed between the thick, clear doors. Her small fingers dug so deeply that she knew she must be hurting him. She found herself standing on a narrow raised platform looking out onto an enormous expanse of emptiness, with the starry sky blazing overhead. The core of the restaurant-dome was hollow and many hundreds of feet across; the tiers of tables clung like scales to the outer shell, giving every diner a window seat.

She felt as though she were tipping forward, tumbling into the open well before her.

“Oh!” Sharply. Knees trembling, throat dry, she rocked on her heels and quickly closed and opened her eyes. Terror pierced her in a thousand places. She might fall and be lost in the abyss; or her sprayon gown might deliquesce and leave her naked before this fashionable horde; or that she-witch with the giant udders might reappear and attack them as they ate; or she might commit some horrible blunder at the table; or, suddenly and violently ill, she might spray the carpet with her vomit. Anything might happen. This restaurant had been conceived in a dream, but not necessarily a good dream.

A furry voice out of nowhere murmured, “Mr. Burris, Miss Kelvin, welcome to the Galactic Room. Please step forward.”

“We get on that gravity plate,” Burris prompted her.

The coppery plate was a disk an inch thick and two yards in diameter, protruding from the rim of their platform. Burris led her onto it, and at once it slipped free of its mooring and glided outward and upward. Lona did not look down. The floating plate took them to the far side of the great room and came to rest beside a vacant table perched precariously on a cantilevered ledge. Dismounting, Burris helped Lona to the ledge. Their carrier disk fluttered away, returning to its place. Lona saw it edge-on for a moment, wearing a gaudy corona of reflected light.

The table, on a single leg, appeared to sprout organically from the ledge. Lona gratefully planted herself on her chair, which molded itself instantly to the contours of her back and buttocks. There was something obscene about that confident grip, and yet it was reassuring; the chair, she thought, would not release her if she became dizzy and started to slide toward the steep drop to her left.

“How do you like it?” Burris asked, looking into her eyes.

“It’s incredible. I never imagined it was like this.” She did not tell him that she was nearly sick from the impact of it.

“We have a choice table. It’s probably the one Chalk himself uses when he eats here.”

“I never knew there were so many stars!”

They looked up. From where they sat they had an unimpeded view of almost a hundred and fifty degrees of arc. Burris told her the stars and planets.

“Mars,” he said. “That’s easy: the big orange one. But can you see Saturn? The rings aren’t visible, of course, but…” He took her hand, aimed it, and described the lay of the heavens until she thought she saw what he meant. “We’ll be out there soon, Lona. Titan’s not visible from here, not with naked eye, but we’ll be on it ourselves before long. And then we’ll see those rings! Look, look there: Orion. And Pegasus.” He called off the constellations for her. He named stars with a sensuous pleasure in uttering the sounds of them: Sinus, Arcturus, Polaris, Bellatrix, Rigel, Algol, Antares, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Procyon, Markab, Deneb, Vega, Alphecca. “Each of them a sun,” he said. “Most have worlds. And there they all are spread out before us!”

“Have you visited many other suns?”

“Eleven. Nine with planets.”

“Including any of the ones you just named? I like those names.”

He shook his head. “The suns I went to had numbers, not names. At least, not names Earthmen had given. Most of them had other names. Some I learned.” She saw the corners of his mouth pulling open and rapidly drawing closed again: a sign of tension in him, Lona had learned. Should I talk about the stars to him? Perhaps he doesn’t want to be reminded.

Under this bright canopy, though, she could not leave the theme alone.

“Will you ever go back out there?” she asked.

“Out of this system? I doubt it. I’m retired from the service now. And we don’t have tourist flights to neighboring stars. But I’ll be off Earth again, of course. With you: the planetary tour. Not quite the same. But safer.”

“Can you—can you—” she debated and rushed onward—“show me the planet where you were—captured?”

Three quick contortions of his mouth. “It’s a bluish sun. You can’t see it from this hemisphere. You can’t see it with naked eye even down below. Six planets. Manipool’s the fourth. When we were orbiting it, coming around ready to go down, I felt a strange excitement. As though my destiny drew me to this place. Maybe there’s a little tinge of the pre-cog in me, eh, Lona? Surely Manipool had its large place in my destiny. But I can tell I’m no pre-cog. From time to time I’m hit with this powerful conviction that I’m marked for a return trip. And that’s absurd. To go back there … to confront Them again…” His fist closed suddenly, tightening with a convulsive snap that pulled his entire arm inward. A vase of thick-petaled blue flowers nearly went flying into the void. Lona caught it. She noticed that when he closed his hand, the little outer tentacle neatly wrapped itself across the backs of his fingers. Putting both of her hands over his, she held him by the knuckles until the tension ebbed and his fingers opened.

“Let’s not talk of Manipool,” she suggested. “The stars are beautiful, though.”

“Yes. I never really thought of them that way until I came back to Earth after my first voyage. We see them only as dots of light, from down here. But when you’re out there caught in the crisscross of starlight, bouncing this way and that as the stars buffet you, it’s different. They leave a mark on you. Do you know, Lona, that you get a view of the stars from this room that’s almost as piercing as what you see from the port of a starship?”

“How do they do it? I’ve never seen anything like that.”

He tried to explain about the curtain of black light. Lona was lost after the third sentence, but she stared intently into his strange eyes, pretending to listen and knowing that she must not be deceiving him. He knew so much! And yet he was frightened in this room of delights, just as she was frightened. So long as they kept talking, it created a barrier against the fear. But in the silences Lona was awkwardly aware of the hundreds of rich, sophisticated people all about her, and of the overwhelming luxury of the room, and of the abyss beside her, and of her own ignorance and inexperience. She felt naked beneath that blaze of stars. In the interstices of the conversation even Burris again became strange to her; his surgical distortions, which she had nearly ceased to notice, abruptly took on a fiery conspicuousness.