Robert Silverberg - Thorns

The barrage of odors ceased.

Still the sleek shell slipped on, minute after minute. Now came sounds: tiny pinging bursts, great organ throbs, hammer blows, rhythmic scraping of rasp on rasp. They missed no sense here. The interior of the shell grew cool, and then warm again; the humidity varied in a complex cycle. Now the shell zigged, now it zagged. It whirled dizzyingly, a final frenzy of motion, and abruptly they were safe at harbor. His hand engulfed hers as he pulled her forth.

“Fun?” he asked unsmilingly.

“I’m not sure. Unusual, anyway.”

He bought her cotton candy. They passed a booth where one flipped little glass globes at golden targets on a moving screen. Hit the target three out of four, win a prize. Men with Earthside muscles struggled to cope with the low gravity and failed, while pouting girls stood by. Lona pointed at the prizes: subtle alien designs, abstract rippling forms executed in furry cloth. “Win me one, Minner!” she begged.

He paused and watched the men making their hapless looping tosses. Most far overshot the target; some, compensating, flipped feebly and saw their marbles droop slowly short of the goal. The crowd at the booth was closely packed as he moved among them, but the onlookers gave way for him, uneasily edging away. Lona noticed it and hoped he did not. Burris put down money and picked up his marbles. His first shot was off the mark by six inches.

“Nice try, buddy! Give him room! Here’s one who’s got the range!” The huckster behind the booth-front peered disbelievingly at Burris’s face. Lona reddened. Why do they have to stare? Does he look that strange?

He tossed again. Clang. Then: clang. Clang.

“Three in a row! Give the little lady her prize!”

Lona clutched something warm, furry, almost alive. They moved away from the booth, escaping a buzz of talk. Burris said, “There are things to respect about this hateful body, Lona.”

Some time later she put the prize down, and when she turned for it, it had disappeared. He offered to win her another, but she told him not to worry about it.

They did not enter the building of the flesh shows.

When they came to the freak house, Lona hesitated, wanting to go inside but uncertain about suggesting it. The hesitation was fatal. Three beer-blurred faces emerged, looked at Burris, guffawed.

“Hey! There’s one that escaped!”

Lona recognized the fiery blotches of fury on his cheeks. She steered him quickly away, but the wound had been made. How many weeks of self-repair undone in a moment?

The night pivoted around that point. Up till then he had been tolerant, faintly amused, only slightly bored. Now he became hostile. She saw his eye-shutters pull back to their full opening, and the cold glare of those revealed eyes would have eaten like acid into this playland if it could. He walked stiffly. He grudged every new moment here.

“I’m tired, Lona. I want to go to the room.”

“A little while longer.”

“We can come back tomorrow night.”

“But it’s still early, Minner!”

His lips did odd things. “Stay here by yourself, then.”

“No! I’m afraid! I mean—what fun would it be without you?”

“I’m not having fun.”

“You seemed to be … before.”

“That was before. This is now.” He plucked at her sleeve. “Lona—”

“No,” she said. “You aren’t taking me away so fast. There’s nothing to do in the room but sleep and have sex and look at the stars. This is Tivoli, Minner. Tivoli! I want to drink up every minute of it.”

He said something she could not make out, and they moved on to a new section of the park. But his restlessness mastered him. In a few minutes he was asking again that they go.

“Try to enjoy yourself, Minner.”

“This place is making me sick. The noise … the smell … the eyes.”

“No one’s looking at you.”

“Very funny! Did you hear what they said when—”

“They were drunk.” He was begging for sympathy, and for once she was tired of giving it to him. “Oh, I know, your feelings are hurt. Your feelings get hurt so easily. Well, for once stop feeling so sorry for yourself! I’m here to have a good time, and you’re not going to spoil it!”

“Viciousness!”

“No worse than selfishness!” she snapped at him.

Overhead the fireworks went off. A garish serpent with seven tails sprawled across the heavens.

“How much longer do you want to stay?” Steely now.

“I don’t know. Half an hour. An hour.”

“Fifteen minutes?”

“Let’s not bargain over it. We haven’t seen a tenth of what’s here yet.”

“There are other nights.”

“Back to that again. Minner, stop it! I don’t want to quarrel with you, but I’m not giving in. I’m just not giving in.”

He made a courtly bow, dipping lower than anyone with human skeletal structure could possibly have done. “At your service, milady.” The words were venomous, Lona chose to ignore the venom and took him onward down the cluttered path. It was the worst quarrel they had had so far. In past frictions they had been cool, snippy, sarcastic, withdrawn. But never had they stood nose to nose, barking at each other. They had even drawn a small audience: Punch and Judy hollering it up for the benefit of interested onlookers. What was happening? Why were they bickering? Why, she wondered, did it sometimes seem as though he hated her? Why did she feel at those times that it could be quite easy to hate him?

They should be giving each other support. That was how it had been at the beginning. A bond of shared sympathy had linked them, for they both had suffered. What had happened to that? So much bitterness had crept into things now. Accusations, recriminations, tensions.

Before them, three intersecting yellow wheels performed an intricate dance of flame. Pulsating lights bobbed and flickered. High on a pillar a nude girl appeared, draped in living glow. She waved, beckoned, a muezzin calling the faithful to the house of lust. Her body was improbably feminine; her breasts were jutting shelves, her buttocks were giant globes. No one was born like that. She must have been changed by doctors…

A member of our club, thought Lona. Yet she doesn’t mind. She’s up there in front of everybody and happy to draw her pay. What’s it like at four in the morning for her? Does she mind?

Burris was staring fixedly at the girl.

“It’s just meat,” Lona said. “Why are you so fascinated?”

“That’s Elise up there!”

“You’re mistaken, Minner. She wouldn’t be here. Certainly not up there.”

“I tell you it’s Elise. My eyes are sharper than yours. You hardly know what she looks like. They’ve done something to her body, they’ve padded her somehow, but I know it’s Elise!”

“Go to her, then.”

He stood frozen. “I didn’t say I wanted to.”

“You just thought it.”

“Now you’re jealous of a naked girl on a pillar?”

“You loved her before you ever knew me.”

“I never loved her,” he shouted, and the lie emblazoned itself on his forehead.

From a thousand loudspeakers came a paean of praise for the girl, for the park, for the visitors. All sound converged toward a single shapeless roar. Burris moved closer to the pillar. Lona followed him. The girl was dancing now, kicking up her heels, capering wildly. Her bare body gleamed. The swollen flesh quivered and shook. She was all carnality in a single vessel.

“It’s not Elise,” said Burris suddenly, and the spell broke.

He turned away, his face darkening, and halted. All about them, fair-goers were streaming toward the pillar, the focal point of the park now, but Lona and Burris did not move. Their backs were to the dancer. Burris jerked as if struck, and folded his arms across his chest. He sank to a bench, head down.