Robert Silverberg - Thorns

The doctors who had examined him had been confident at first that they could do something about the pain. All it took was the application of modern medical technology.

“—damp down the sensory intake—”

“—minimal dosage of drugs to block the afferent channels, and then—”

“—minor corrective surgery—”

But the lines of communication within Burris’s body were hopelessly scrambled. Whatever the alien surgeons had done to him, they had certainly transformed him into something that was beyond the comprehension, let alone the capabilities, of modern medical technology. Ordinary pain-killing drugs merely intensified Burris’ sensations. His patterns of neural flow were bizarre; sensation was shunted, baffled, deflected. They could not repair the damage the aliens had done. And finally Burris crept away from them, throbbing, mutilated, aggrieved, to hide himself in a dark room of this moldering residential colossus.

Seventy years before, the Martlet Towers had been the last word in dwelling-places: sleek mile-high edifices arrayed in serried ranks along the formerly green slopes of the Adirondacks, within easy commuting distance of New York. Seventy years is a long time in the lifetime of contemporary buildings. Now the Towers were corroded, pitted by time, transfixed by the arrows of decay. Suites of earlier resplendence were subdivided into single-room warrens. An ideal place to hide, Burris thought. One nestled into one’s cell here like a polyp within its limestone cave. One rested; one thought; one worked at the strenuous task of coming to terms with what had been committed upon one’s helpless form.

Burris heard scrabbling sounds in the corridors. He did not investigate. Whelks and prawns, mysteriously mutated for land life, infiltrating the crawl spaces of the building? Millipedes seeking the sweet warmth of leaf mold? Toys of the dull-eyed children? Burris stayed in the room. He often thought of going out at night, prowling the passages of the building like his own ghost, striding through darkness to strike terror into chance beholders. But he had not left the four walls since the day he had rented—by proxy—this zone of calm in tempest.

He lay in bed. Pale green light filtered through the walls. The mirror could not be removed, for it was part of the structure of the building, but it could at least be neutralized; Burris had switched it off, and it was nothing now but a dull brown oblong on the wall. From time to time he activated it and confronted himself, as discipline. Perhaps, he thought, he would do that today.

When I rise from bed.

If I rise from bed.

Why should I rise from bed?

There was an inner spike embedded in his brain, clamps gripping his viscera, invisible nails riveting his ankles. His eyelids sandpapered his eyes. Pain was a constant, even growing now to become an old friend.

What was it the poet said? The withness of the body…

Burris opened his eyes. They no longer opened up and down, as human eyes did. Now the membranes that served as lids slid outward from the center toward the corners. Why? Why had the alien surgeons done any of it? But this in particular seemed to serve no valid purpose. Top-and-bottom eyelids were good enough. These did not improve the function of the eyes; they served only to act as intrusive wardens against any sort of meaningful communication between Burris and the human race. At each blink he shouted his weirdness.

The eyes moved. A human eye moves in a series of tiny jerking motions, which the mind melds together into an abstraction of unity. Burris’s eyes moved as the panning eye of a camera would move if cameras were perfectly mounted: smoothly, continuously, unflickeringly. What Burris saw lacked glamour. Walls, low ceiling, neutralized mirror, vibrator sink, food conduit hatch, all the drab appurtenances of a simple low-cost room designed for self-sufficiency. The window had been kept opaqued since he had moved in. He had no idea of time of day, of weather, even of season, though it had been winter when he came here and he suspected that it was winter still. The lighting in the room was poor. Squibs of indirect illumination emerged on a random pattern. This was Burris’s period of low receptivity to light. For days at a time the world at its brightest seemed a murky darkness to him, as though he were at the bottom of a muddy pond. Then the cycle would reverse itself with an unpredictable flip, and a few photons would be sufficient to light up his brain in a wild blaze.

Out of the murk came the image of his vanished self. The obliterated Minner Burris stood in a blunted corner of the room, studying him.

Dialogue of self and soul.

“You’re back, you filthy hallucination!”

“I won’t ever leave you.”

“All I have, is that it? Well, make yourself welcome. A bit of cognac? Accept my humble hospitality. Sit down, sit down!”

“I’ll stand. How are you coming along, Minner?”

“Poorly. A lot you care.”

“Is that a note of self-pity I detect in your voice?”

“What if it is? What if it is?”

“A terrible voice, and one that I never taught you.”

Burris could not sweat any longer, but a cloud of vapor gathered over each of his new exhalator pores. He stared fixedly at his former self. In a low voice he said, “Do you know what I wish? That they’d get hold of you and do to you what they did to me. Then you’d understand.”

“Minner, Minner, it’s already been done to me! Ecce homo! There you lie to prove that I’ve been through it!”

“No. There you stand to prove that you haven’t. Your face. Your pancreas. Your liver and lights. Your skin. It hurts, it hurts—it hurts me, not you!”

The apparition smiled gently. “When did you begin feeling so sorry for yourself? This is a new development, Minner.”

Burris scowled. “Perhaps you’re right.” The eyes smoothly scanned the room from wall to wall again. He muttered, “They’re watching me, that’s the trouble.”

“Who is?”

“How would I know? Eyes. Telelenses in the walls. I’ve searched for them, but it’s no use. Two molecules in diameter—how am I ever going to find them? And they see me.”

“Let them look, then. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You’re neither pretty nor ugly. There’s no point of reference for you. I think it’s time you went outside again.”

“It’s easy for you to say that,” Burris snapped. “No one stares at you”

“You’re staring at me right now.”

“So I am,” Burris admitted. “But you know why.”

With a conscious effort he induced the phase-shift to begin. His eyes dealt with the light in the room. He no longer had retinas, but the focus-plates embedded against his brain served well enough. He looked at his former self.

A tall man, broad-shouldered and blocky, with heavy muscles and thick sandy hair. So he had been. So he was now. The alien surgeons had left the underlying structure intact. But all else was different.

The vision of self before him had a face nearly as wide as it was high, with generous cheekbones, small ears, and dark eyes set far apart. The lips were the sort that compress themselves easily into a rather fussy line. A light powdering of freckles covered the skin; there was fine golden hair almost everywhere on him. The effect was routinely virile: a man of some strength, some intelligence, some skill, who would stand out in a group not by virtue of any conspicuous positive trait but by grace of a whole constellation of inconspicuous positive traits. Success with women, success with other men, success in his profession—all those things accompanied such triumphant unspectacular attractiveness.

All that was gone now.

Burris said quietly, “I don’t mean to sound self-pitying now. Kick me if I whine. But do you remember when we would see hunchbacks? A man with no nose? A girl folded into herself with no neck and half an arm? Freaks? Victims? And we’d wonder what it was like to be hideous.”