Robert Silverberg - Thorns

The ship heeled and pivoted gently, and the beloved white pocked countenance of the Moon came into view.

Burris touched Lona’s arm. She stirred, blinked, looked at him, then outward. Watching her, he detected the spreading wonder on her face even with her back to him.

Half a dozen shining domes now could be seen on Luna’s surface.

“Tivoli!” she cried.

Burris doubted that any of the domes really was the amusement park. Luna was infested with domed buildings, built over the decades for a variety of warlike, commercial, or scientific reasons, and none of these matched his own mental picture of Tivoli. He did not correct her, though. He was learning.

The ferry, decelerating, spiraled down to its landing pad.

This was an age of domes, many of them the work of Duncan Chalk. On Earth they tended to be trussed geodesic domes, but not always; here, under lessened gravity, they usually were the simpler, less rigid extruded domes of one-piece construction. Chalk’s empire of pleasure was bounded and delimited by domes, beginning with the one over his private pool, and then on to the cupola of the Galactic Room, the Antarctic hostelry, the Tivoli dome, and outward, outward to the stars.

The landing was smooth.

“Let’s have a good time here, Minner! I’ve always dreamed of coming here!”

“We’ll enjoy ourselves,” he promised.

Her eyes glittered. A child—no more than that—she was. Innocent, enthusiastic, simple—he ticked off her qualities. But she was warm. She cherished and nourished and mothered him, to a fault. He knew he was underestimating her. Her life had known so little pleasure that she had not grown jaded with small thrills. She could respond openly and wholeheartedly to Chalk’s parks. She was young. But not hollow, Burris tried to persuade himself. She had suffered. She bore scars, even as he did.

The ramp was down. She rushed from the ship into the waiting dome, and he followed her, having only a little trouble coordinating his legs.

Lona watched breathlessly as the cannon recoiled and the cartridge of fireworks went sliding up, up the shaft, through the aperture in the dome, and out into the blackness. She held her breath. The cartridge exploded.

Color stained the night.

There was no air out there, nothing to cushion the particles of powder as they drifted down. They did not drift, even, but remained more or less where they were. The pattern was brilliant. They were doing animals now. The strange figures of extraterrestrial figures. Beside her, Burris stared upward as intently as anyone else.

“Have you ever seen one of those?” she asked.

It was a creature with ropy tendrils, an infinite neck, flattened paddles for feet. Some swampy world had spawned it.

“Never.”

A second cartridge shot aloft. But this was only the obliterator, cleansing away the paddle-footed one and leaving the heavenly blackboard blank for the next image.

Another shot.

Another.

Another.

“It’s so different from fireworks on Earth,” she said. “No boom. No blast. And then everything just stays there. If they didn’t blot it out, how long would it stay, Minner?”

“A few minutes. There’s gravity here, too. The particles would get pulled down. And disarranged by cosmic debris. All sorts of garbage comes peppering in from space.”

He was always ready for any question, always had an answer. At first that quality had awed her. Now it was an irritant. She wished she could stump him. She kept on trying. Her questions, she knew, annoyed him just about as much as his answers annoyed her.

A fine pair we are. Not even honeymooners yet, and already setting little traps for each other!

They watched the silent fireworks for half an hour. Then she grew restless, and they moved away.

“Where to now?” he asked.

“Let’s just wander.”

He was tense and jittery. She felt it, sensed him ready to leap for her throat if she blundered. How he must hate being here in this silly amusement park! They were staring at him a lot. At her, too, but she was interesting for what had been done with her, not for the way she looked, and the eyes did not linger long.

They moved on, down one corridor of booths and up the next.

It was a carnival of the traditional sort, following a pattern set centuries ago. The technology had changed, but not the essence. Here were games of skill and Kewpie dolls; cheap restaurants selling dished-up dross; whirling rides to suit any dervish; sideshows of easy horror; dance halls; gambling pavilions; darkened theaters (adults only!) in which to reveal the sagging mysteries of the flesh; the flea circus and the talking dog; fireworks, however mutated; blaring music; blazing stanchions of light. A thousand acres of damp delight, done up in the latest trickery. The most significant difference between Chalk’s Luna Tivoli and a thousand tivolis of the past was its location, in the broad bosom of Copernicus Crater, looking toward the eastern arc of the ringwall. One breathed pure air here, but one danced in fractional gravity. This was Luna.

“Whirlpool?” a sinuous voice asked. “Take the Whirlpool, mister, miss?”

Lona pressed forward, smiling. Burris slapped coins onto the counter and they were admitted. A dozen aluminum shells gaped like the remains of giant clams, floating on a quicksilver lake. A squat, barechested man with coppery skin said, “Shell for two? This way, this way!”

Burris helped her into one of the shells. He sat beside her. The top was sealed in place. It was dark, warm, oppressively close inside. There was just room for the two of them.

“Happy womb fantasies,” he said.

She took his hand and held it grimly. Through the quicksilver lake came a spark of motivating power. Away they went, skimming on the unknown. Down what black tunnels, through what hidden gorges? The shell rocked in a maelstrom. Lona screamed, again, again, again.

“Are you afraid?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It moves so fast!”

“We can’t get hurt.”

It was like floating, like flying. Virtually no gravity, and no friction to impede their squirting motion as they slid hither and yon down the byways and cloacae of the ride. Secret petcocks opened, and scent filtered in.

“What do you smell?” she asked him.

“The desert. The smell of heat. And you?”

“The woods on a rainy day. Rotting leaves, Minner. How can that be?”

Maybe his senses don’t pick up things the way mine do, the way a human’s do. How can he smell the desert? That ripe, rich odor of mold and dampness! She could see red toadstools bursting from the ground. Small things with many legs scuttering and burrowing. A shining worm. And he: the desert?

The shell seemed to flip over, strike its supporting medium flat on, and right itself. The scent had changed by the time Lona noticed it again.

“Now it’s the Arcade at night,” she said. “Popcorn … sweat … laughter. What does laughter smell like, Minner? What does it seem like to you?”

“The fuel-room of a ship at core-changing time. Something was burning a few hours ago. Frying fat where the rods leaked. It hits you like a nail rammed up the nostril.”

“How can it be that we don’t smell the same things?”

“Olfactory psychovariation. We smell the things that our minds trigger for us. They aren’t giving us any particular scent, just the raw material. We shape the patterns.”

“I don’t understand, Minner.”

He was silent. More odors came: hospital-smell, moonlight-smell, steel-smell, snow-smell. She did not ask him about his own responses to this generalized stimulation. Once he gasped; once he winced and dug fingertips into her thigh.