Robert Silverberg - Thorns

Were the stars moving in ragged circles now?

She heard the hum of conversation all about her. For more than an hour she had been able to pretend that she and Burris had been isolated within a pocket of privacy, but now the presence of the other diners was breaking through. They were looking. Commenting. Moving about, drifting from table to table on their gravitron plates. Have you seen? What do you think of? How charming! How strange! How grotesque!

“Minner, let’s get out of here.”

“But we haven’t had our dessert yet.”

“I know. I don’t care.”

“Liqueur from the Procyon group. Coffee Galactique.”

“Minner, no.” She saw his eyes open to the full shutter-width and knew that some expression on her face must have scored him deeply. She was very close to getting ill. Perhaps it was obvious to him.

“We’ll go,” he told her. “We’ll come back for dessert some other time.”

“I’m so sorry, Minner,” she murmured. “I didn’t want to spoil the dinner. But this place … I just don’t feel right in a place like this. It scares me. All these strange foods. The staring eyes. They’re all looking at us, aren’t they? If we could go back to the room, it would be so much better.”

He was summoning the carrier disk now. Her chair released her from its intimate grip. Her legs were wobbly when she stood up. She did not know how she could take a step without toppling. A strange tunnel-like clarity of vision brought her isolated views as she hesitated. The fat jeweled woman with a host of chins. The gilded girl clad in transparency, not much older than herself but infinitely surer of herself. The garden of little forked trees two levels below. The ropes of living light festooned in the air. A tray slicing across the open space bearing three mugs of dark, shining unknownness. Lona swayed. Burris anchored her and virtually lifted her onto the disk, though to a watcher it would not seem that he held her in so supportive a way.

She stared fixedly forward as they crossed the gulf to the entrance platform.

Her face was flushed and beaded with sweat. Within her stomach, it seemed to her, the alien creatures had come to life and were swimming patiently in the digestive sauces. Somehow she and Burris passed through the crystal doors. Down to the lobby via quick dropshaft; then up again, another shaft, to their suite. She caught sight of Aoudad lurking in the corridor, disappearing quickly behind a broad pilaster.

Burris palmed the door. It opened for them.

“Are you sick?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’m glad to be out of there. It’s so much calmer here. Did you lock the door?”

“Of course. Can I do anything for you, Lona?”

“Let me rest. A few minutes, by myself.”

He took her to her bedroom and eased her down on the round bed. Then he went out. Lona was surprised how quickly equilibrium returned, away from the restaurant. It had seemed to her, at the very end, that the sky itself had become a huge prying eye.

Calmer now, Lona rose, determined to shed the rest of her false glamour. She stepped under the vibraspray. Instantly her sumptuous gown vanished. She felt smaller, younger, at once. Naked, she made herself ready for bed.

She turned on a dim lamp, deactivated the rest of the room glow, and slipped between the sheets. They were cool and agreeable against her skin. A control console governed the movements and form of the bed, but Lona ignored it. She said softly into an intercom beside her pillow, “Minner, will you come in now?”

He entered at once. He was still wearing his flamboyant dinner costume, cape and all. The flaring rib-like projections were so strange that they nearly canceled out the other strangeness that was his body.

Dinner had been a disaster, she thought. The restaurant, so glittering, had been like a torture chamber for her. But the evening might be salvaged.

“Hold me,” she said in a thin voice. “I’m still a little shaky, Minner.”

Burris came to her. He sat beside her, and she rose a little, letting the sheet slip down to reveal her breasts. He reached for her, but the ribs of his costume formed an unbending barrier, thwarting contact.

“I’d better get out of this rig,” he said.

“The vibraspray’s over there.”

“Shall I turn off the light?”

“No. No.”

Her eyes did not leave him as he crossed the room.

He mounted the platform of the vibraspray and turned it on. It was designed to cleanse the skin of any adhering matter, and a sprayon garment would naturally be the first to go. Burris’s outlandish costume disappeared.

Lona had never seen his body before.

Unflinchingly, ready for any catastrophic revelation, she watched the naked man turn to face her. Her face was rigidly set, as was his, for this was a double test, showing if she could bear the shock of facing the unknown, showing if he could bear the shock of facing her response.

She had dreaded this moment for days. But now it was here, and in spreading wonder she discovered that she had lived through and past the dreaded moment without harm.

He was not nearly so terrible to behold as she had anticipated.

Of course, he was strange. His skin, like the skin of his face and arms, was glossy and unreal, a seamless container like none ever worn by man before. He was hairless. He had neither breasts nor navel, a fact that Lona realized slowly after searching for the cause of the wrongness.

His arms and legs were attached to his body in an unfamiliar manner, and by several inches in unfamiliar places. His chest seemed too deep in proportion to the width of his hips. His knees did not stand out from his legs as knees should do. When he moved, the muscles of his body rippled in a curious way.

But these were minor things, and they were not true deformities. He bore no hideous scars, no hidden extra limbs, no unexpected eyes or mouths on his body. The real changes were within, and on his face.

And the one aspect of all that had concerned Lona was anticlimactic. Against probability, he seemed normally male. So far as she could tell, at least.

Burris came toward the bed. She lifted her arms. An instant later and he was beside her, his skin against hers. The texture was strange but not unpleasant. He seemed oddly shy just now. Lona drew him closer. Her eyes closed. She did not want to see his altered face in this moment, and in any case her eyes seemed suddenly sensitive even to the faint light of the lamp. Her hand moved out to him. Her lips met his.

She had not been kissed often. But she had never been kissed like this. Those who had redesigned his lips had not intended them for kissing, and he was forced to make contact in an unwieldy way, mouth to mouth. But, again, it was not unpleasant. And then Lona felt his fingers on her flesh, six digits to each hand. His skin had a sweet, pungent odor. The light went out.

A spring within her body was coiling tighter … tighter … tighter…

A spring that had been coiling ever tighter for seventeen years … and now its force was unleased in a single moment of tumult.

She pulled her mouth from his. Her jaws wrenched themselves apart, and a sheath of muscle quaked in her throat. A blistering image seared her: herself on an operating table, anesthetized, her body open to the probe of the men in white. She struck the image with a bolt of lightning, and it shattered and tumbled away.

She clutched at him.

At last. At last!

He would not give her babies. She sensed that, and it did not trouble her.

“Lona,” he said, his face against her clavicle, his voice coming out smothered and thick. “Lona, Lona, Lona…”

There was brightness, as of an exploding sun. Her hand ran up and down his back, and just before joining the thought came to her that his skin was dry, that he did not sweat at all. Then she gasped, felt pain and pleasure in one convulsive unity, and listened in amazement to the ferocious ringing cries of lust that were fleeing of their own accord from her frenzied throat.