Robert Silverberg - Thorns

The sound began deep in his throat, a gargled, incoherent cry, and moved higher in pitch and volume as it progressed. Turning, Lona clung to him, pressing tight. Was his skin soaked with perspiration? No; impossible; it must be her own. He thrashed and kicked, sending the coverlet to the floor. She felt his muscles coiling and bulging beneath his sleek skin. He could snap me in half with a quick move, she thought.

“It’s all right, Minner. I’m here. I’m here. It’s all right!”

“The knives … Prolisse … good God, the knives!”

“Minner!”

She did not let go of him. His left arm was dangling limply now, seemingly bending the wrong way at the elbow. He was calming. His hoarse breath was as loud as hoofbeats. Lona reached across him and turned on the light.

His face was blotched and mottled again. He blinked in that awful sidewise way of his three or four times and put his hand to his lips. Releasing him, she sat back, trembling a little. Tonight’s explosion had been more violent than the one the night before.

“A drink of water?” she asked.

He nodded. He was gripping the mattress so hard she thought he would tear it.

He gulped. She said, “Was it that bad tonight? Were they hurting you?”

“I dreamed I was watching them operate. First Prolisse, and he died. Then they carved up Malcondotto. He died. And then…”

“Your turn?”

“No,” he said in wonder. “No, they put Elise on the table. They carved her open, right between the—the breasts. And lifted up part of her chest, and I saw the ribs and her heart. And they reached inside.”

“Poor Minner.” She had to interrupt him before he spilled all that filthiness over her. Why had he dreamed of Elise? Was it a good sign, that he should see her being mutilated? Or would it have been better, she thought, if I was the one he dreamed about … I, being turned into something like him?

She took his hand and let it rest on the warmth of her body. There was only one method she could think of for easing his pain, and she employed it. He responded, rising, covering her. They moved urgently and harmoniously.

He appeared to sleep after that. Lona, edgier, pulled away from him and waited until a light slumber once more enveloped her. It was stained by sour dreams. It seemed that a returning starman had brought a pestilent creature with him, some kind of plump vampire, and it was affixed to her body, draining her … depleting her. It was a nasty dream, though not nasty enough to awaken her, and in time she passed into a deeper repose.

When they woke, there were dark circlets under her eyes, and her face looked pinched and hollow. Burris showed no effects of his broken night; his skin was not capable of reacting that graphically to short-range catabolic effects. He seemed almost cheerful as he got himself ready for the new day.

“Looking forward to the penguins?” he asked her.

Had he forgotten his bleak depression of the evening and his screaming terrors of the night? Or was he just trying to sweep them from view?

Just how human is he, anyway, Lona wondered?

“Yes,” she said coolly. “We’ll have a grand time, Minner. I can’t wait to see them.”

“They’re beginning to hate each other already,” Chalk said pleasantly.

He was alone, but to him that was no reason for not voicing his thoughts. He often talked to himself. A doctor once had told him that there were positive neuropsychic benefits to be had from vocalizing, even in solitude.

He floated in a bath of aromatic salts. The tub was ten feet deep, twenty feet long, a dozen feet wide: ample room even for the bulk of a Duncan Chalk. Its marble sides were flanked by alabaster rims and a surrounding tilework of shimmering oxblood porcelain, and the whole bathing enclosure was covered by a thick, clear dome that gave Chalk a full view of the sky. There was no reciprocal view of Chalk for an outsider; an ingenious optical engineer had seen to that. From without, the dome presented a milky surface streaked with whorls of light pink.

Chalk drifted idly, gravity-free, thinking of his suffering amanti. Night had fallen, but there were no stars tonight, only the reddish haze of unseen clouds. It was snowing once more. The flakes performed intricate arabesques as they spiraled toward the surface of the dome.

“He is bored with her,” Chalk said. “She is afraid of him. She lacks intensity, to his taste. For hers, his voltage is too high. But they travel together. They eat together. They sleep together. And soon they’ll quarrel bitterly.”

The tapes were very good. Aoudad, Nikolaides, both of them remaining surreptitiously close behind, picking up scattered gay images of the pair to relay to a waiting public. That snowball fight: a masterpiece. And the power-sled trip. Minner and Lona at the South Pole. The public was eating it up.

Chalk, in his own way, ate it up, too.

He closed his eyes and opaqued his dome and drifted easily in the warm, fragrant tub. To him came splintered, fragmented sensations of disquiet.

…to have joints that did not behave as human joints should…

…to feel despised, rejected of mankind…

…childless motherhood…

…bright flashes of pain, bright as the thermoluminescent fungi casting their yellow glow on his office walls…

…the ache of the body and the ache of the soul…

…alone!

…unclean!

Chalk gasped as though a low current were running through his body. A finger flew up at an angle to his hand and remained there a moment. A hound with slavering jaws bounded through his forebrain. Beneath the sagging flesh of his chest the thick bands of muscle rhythmically contracted and let go.

…demon-visits in the sleep…

…a forest of watching eyes, stalked and shining…

…a world of dryness … thorns … thorns…

…the click and scratch of strange beasts moving in the walls … dry rot of the soul … all poetry turned to ash, all love to rust…

…stony eyes lifted toward the universe … and the universe peering back…

In ecstasy Chalk kicked at the water, sending up spewing cascades. He slapped its surface with the flat of his hand. Flukes! There go flukes! Ahoy, ahoy!

Pleasure engulfed and consumed him.

And this, he told himself cozily some minutes later, was merely the beginning.

On a day of flaming sunlight they left for Luna Tivoli, entering the next stage of their passage through Chalk’s aeries of delight. The day was bright, but it was still winter; they were fleeing from the true winter of the north and the wintry summer of the south to the weatherless winter of the void. At the spaceport they received the full celebrity treatment: newsreel shots in the terminal, then the snub-snouted little car rushing them across the field while the common folk looked on in wonder, vaguely cheering the notables, whoever they might be.

Burris hated it. Every stray glance at him now seemed fresh surgery on his soul.

“Why did you let yourself in for it, then?” Lona wanted to know. “If you don’t want people to see you like this, why did you ever let Chalk send you on this trip?”

“As a penance. As a deliberately chosen atonement for my withdrawal from the world. For the sake of discipline.”

The string of abstractions failed to convince her. Perhaps they made no impact at all.

“But didn’t you have a reason?”

“Those were my reasons.”

“Just words.”

“Never scoff at words, Lona.”

Her nostrils flared momentarily. “You’re making fun of me again!”

“Sorry.” Genuinely. It was so easy to mock her.

She said, “I know what it’s like to be stared at. I’m shy about it. But I had to do this, so Chalk would give me some of my babies.”