Robert Silverberg - Thorns

This was no snobbery of boredom. He was sick, she realized.

“I feel so tired,” he said huskily. “Drained of strength. I feel a thousand years old, Lona!”

Reaching for him, she coughed. Quite suddenly tears were streaming from her eyes. She dropped down beside him on the bench, struggling for breath.

“I feel the same way. Worn out.”

“What’s happening?”

“Something we breathed on that ride? Something we ate, Minner?”

“No. Look at my hands.”

They were shaking. The little tentacles were hanging-limp. His face was gray.

And she: it was as though she had run a hundred miles tonight. Or been delivered of a hundred babies.

This time, when he suggested that they leave the amusement park, she did not quarrel with him.

On Titan she broke away and left him. Burris had seen it coming for days and was not at all surprised. It came as something of a relief.

Tension had been rising since the South Pole. He was not sure why, other than that they were unfit for each other. But they had been at each other’s throats steadily, first in a hidden way, then openly but figuratively and at the last literally. So she went away from him.

They spent six days at Luna Tivoli. The pattern of each day was the same. Late rising, a copious breakfast, some viewing of the Moon, and then to the park. The place was so big that there were always new discoveries to be made, yet by the third day Burris found that they were compulsively retracing their steps, and by the fifth he was enduringly sick of Tivoli. He tried to be tolerant, since Lona took such obvious pleasure in the place. But eventually his patience wore thin, and they quarreled. Each night’s quarrel exceeded in intensity the one of the night before. Sometimes they resolved the conflict in fierce, sweaty passion, sometimes in sleepless nights of sulking.

And always, during or just after the quarrel, came that feeling of fatigue, that sickening, destructive loss of stamina. Nothing like that had ever happened to Burris before. The fact that the fits came over the girl simultaneously made it doubly strange. They said nothing to Aoudad and Nikolaides, whom they occasionally saw on the fringes of the crowds.

Burris knew that the virulent arguments were driving an ever-wider wedge between them. In less stormy moments he regretted that, for Lona was tender and kind, and he valued her warmth. All that was forgotten in his moments of rage, though. Then she seemed empty and useless and maddening to him, a burden added to all his other burdens, a foolish and ignorant and hateful child. He told her all that, at first hiding his meaning behind blunting metaphors, later hurling the naked words.

A breakup had to come. They were exhausting themselves, depleting their vital substances in these battles. The moments of love were more widely spaced now. Bitterness broke in more often.

On the arbitrarily designated morning of their arbitrarily designated sixth day at Luna Tivoli, Lona said, “Let’s cancel and go on to Titan now.”

“We’re supposed to spend five more days here.”

“Do you really want to?”

“Well, frankly … no.”

He was afraid it would provoke another fountain of angry words, and it was too early in the day for them to begin that. But no, this was her morning for sacrificial gestures. She said, “I think I’ve had enough, and it’s no secret that you’ve had enough. So why should we stay? Titan’s probably much more exciting.”

“Probably.”

“And we’ve been so bad to each other here. A change of scenery ought to help.”

It certainly would. Any barbarian with a fat wallet could afford the price of a ticket to Luna Tivoli, and the place was full of boors, drunks, rowdies. It drew liberally on a potential audience that went far deeper than Earth’s managerial classes. But Titan was more select. Only wealthy sophisticates comprised its clientele, those to whom spending twice a workingman’s annual wage on a single short trip was trivial. Such people, at least, would have the courtesy to deal with him as though his deformities did not exist. Antarctica’s honeymooners, shutting their eyes to all that troubled them, had simply treated him as invisible. Luna Tivoli’s patrons had guffawed in his face and mocked his differentness. On Titan, though, innate good manners would decree a cool indifference to his appearance. Look upon the strange man, smile, chat gracefully, but never show by word or deed that you are aware he is strange: that was good breeding. Of the three cruelties, Burris thought he preferred that kind.

He cornered Aoudad by the glare of fireworks and said, “We’ve had enough here. Book us for Titan.”

“But you have—”

“—another five days. Well, we don’t want them. Get us out of here and to Titan.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Aoudad promised.

Aoudad had watched them quarrel. Burris felt unhappy about that, for reasons which he despised. Aoudad and Nikolaides had been Cupids to them, and Burris somehow held himself responsible for behaving at all times like an enthralled lover. Obscurely, he failed Aoudad whenever he snarled at Lona. Why do I give a damn about failing Aoudad? Aoudad isn’t complaining about the quarrels. He doesn’t offer to mediate. He doesn’t say a word.

As Burris expected, Aoudad got them tickets to Titan without any difficulty. He called ahead to notify the resort that they would be arriving ahead of schedule. And off they went.

A lunar blast-off was nothing like a departure from Earth. With only a sixth the gravity to deal with, it took just a gentle shove to send the ship into space. This was a bustling spaceport, with departures daily for Mars, Venus, Titan, Ganymede, and Earth, every third day for the outer planets, weekly for Mercury. No interstellar ships left from Luna; by law and custom, starships could depart only from Earth, monitored every step of the way until they made the leap into warp somewhere beyond Pluto’s orbit. Most of the Titan-bound ships stopped first at the important mining center on Ganymede, and their original itinerary had called for them to take one of those. But today’s ship was nonstop. Lona would miss Ganymede, but it was her own doing. She had suggested the early arrival, not he. Perhaps they could stop at Ganymede on the way back to Earth.

There was a forced cheeriness about Lona’s chatter as they slid into the gulf of darkness. She wanted to know all about Titan, just as she had wanted to know all about the South Pole, the change of seasons, the workings of a cactus, and many other things; but those questions she had asked out of naive curiosity, and these were asked in the hope of rebuilding contact, any contact, between herself and him.

It would not work, Burris knew.

“It’s the biggest moon in the system. It’s bigger even than Mercury, and Mercury’s a planet.”

“But Mercury goes around the sun, and Titan goes around Saturn.”

“That’s right. Titan’s much larger than our own moon. It’s about seven hundred and fifty thousand miles from Saturn. You’ll have a good view of the rings. It has an atmosphere: methane, ammonia, not very good for the lungs. Frozen. They say it’s picturesque. I’ve never been there.”

“How come?”

“When I was young, I couldn’t afford to go. Later I was too busy in other parts of the universe.”

The ship slipped on through space. Lona stared, wide-eyed, as they hopped over the plane of the asteroid belt, got a decent view of Jupiter not too far down its orbit from them, and sped outward. Saturn was in view.

To Titan then they came.

A dome again, of course. A bleak landing pad on a bleak plateau. This was a world of ice, but far different from deathly Antarctica. Every inch of Titan was alien and strange, while in Antarctica everything quickly became grindingly familiar. This was no simple place of cold and wind and whiteness.