Robert Silverberg: Thorns

“What is she doing? She’s naked?”

“Bathing,” said Nikolaides. “A hundred children! Never been had by a man! The things we take for granted, Bart. Look.”

Aoudad looked. The squat bright screen showed him a nude girl standing under a vibraspray. He hoped that Chalk was fastened to his emotional stream right now, for as he looked at Lona Kelvin’s bare body he felt nothing. Not a thing. No shred of sensuality.

She could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Her shoulders sloped, her face was wan, her eyes lacked sparkle. She had small breasts, a slender waist, narrow boyish hips. As Aoudad watched, she turned around, showing him flat, scarcely feminine buttocks, and switched off the vibraspray. She began to dress. Her motions were slow, her expression sullen.

“Maybe I’m prejudiced because I’ve been working with Burris,” Aoudad said, “but it seems to me that he’s very much more complicated than she is. She’s just a dumb kid who’s had a hard time. What will he see in her?”

“Hell see a human being,” said Nikolaides. “That may be enough. Perhaps. Perhaps. It’s worth a try, bringing them together.”

“You sound like a humanitarian,” Aoudad said in wonder.

“I don’t like to see people hurting.”

“Who does, aside from Chalk? But how can you possibly get involved with these two? Where’s the handle? They’re too remote from us. They’re grotesques. They’re baroques. I don’t see how Chalk can sell them to the public.”

Nikolaides said patiently, “Individually they’re baroques. Put them together and they’re Romeo and Juliet. Chalk has a certain genius for things like that.”

Aoudad eyed the girl’s empty face and then the eerie, distorted mask that was the face of Minner Burris. He shook his head. The car rocketed forward, a needle penetrating the black fabric of the night. He switched off the screens and shut his eyes. Women danced through his brain: real women, adults, with soft, rounded bodies.

The snow became thicker in the air about them. Even in the shielded snout of the womb-like car, Bart Aoudad felt a certain chill.

Lona Kelvin donned her clothes. Two undergarments, two overgarments, gray on gray, and she was dressed. She walked to the window of her little room and looked out. Snowfall. White swirls in the night. They could get rid of the snow fast enough once it hit ground, but they couldn’t keep it from falling. Not yet.

A walk in the Arcade, Lona decided. Then sleep and another day put to rest.

She drew her jacket on. Shivered in anticipation. Looked about her.

Pasted neatly to the walls of the room were photographs of babies. Not a hundred babies; more like sixty or seventy. And not her babies. But sixty baby photographs might just as well be a hundred. And to a mother like Lona, any babies might be her babies.

They looked as babies look. Rounded, unshaped faces with button noses and glossy, drooling lips and unseeing eyes. Tiny ears, painfully perfect. Clutching little hands with improbably splendid fingernails. Soft skin. Lona reached out and touched the photograph nearest the door and imagined that she was touching baby-velvet. Then she put her hand to her own body. Touched the flat belly. Touched a small, hard breast. Touched the loins from which a legion of infants had and had not sprung. She shook her head in what might have been thought a self-pitying gesture, but most of the self-pity had been drained away by now, leaving only a gritty residual sediment of confusion and emptiness.

Lona went out. The door quietly sealed itself behind her.

The dropshaft took her swiftly to ground level. Wind whipped down the narrow passage between the tall buildings. Overhead, the artificial glow of night pressed back the darkness; colored globes moved silently to and fro. Snowflakes danced against them. The pavement was warm. The buildings that flanked her were brightly lit. To the Arcade, Lona’s feet told her. To the Arcade to walk awhile in the brightness and the warmth of this snowy night.

Nobody recognized her.

Only a girl out by herself for the evening. Mouse-colored hair flipping about her ears. A thin-naped neck, slumping shoulders, an insufficient body. How old? Seventeen. Could be fourteen, though. No one asked. A mousy girl.

Mousy.

Dr. Teh Ping Lin, San Francisco, 1966:

“At the scheduled time of hormonally induced ovulation, female mice of the black-agouti C3H/HeJ strain were caged with fertile males of an albino strain, either BALB/c or Cal A (originally A/Crgl/2). Nine to twelve hours after the expected mating, eggs were flushed from the oviducts, and fertilized eggs were identified by the presence of the second polar body or by observation of pronuclei.”

It was a taxing experiment for the doctor. Microinjection of living cells was nothing new even then, but work with mammalian cells had been flawed. The experimenters had not been able to safeguard the structural or functional integrity of the whole ovum.

No one had ever informed Lona Kelvin that:

“The mammalian egg is apparently more difficult to inject than other cells because of the thick zona pellucida and the vitelline membrane, both of which are highly elastic and resistant to the penetration of a microinstrument, especially at the unfertilized stage.”

Crowds of boys were gathered, as usual, in the vestibule that led to the Arcade. With some of them were girls. Lona eyed them shyly. Winter did not extend to this vestibule; the girls had shucked their thermal wraps and stood proudly on display. This one had given her nipples a phosphorescence. That one had shaved her skull to exhibit the fine bony structure. There, voluptuous in the final weeks of pregnancy, a redhead linked her arms with two tall young men and laughingly roared obscenities.

Lona viewed her, edge-on. Big belly, bulky burden. Can she see her toes? Her breasts are swollen. Do they hurt? The child was conceived in the old way. Lona blinked. Gasp and thrust and shudder in the loins and a baby made. One baby. Possibly two. Lona drew her narrow shoulders back, filled her pinched lungs with air. The gesture raised her breasts and thrust them outward, and color came to her angular cheeks.

“Going to the Arcade? Go with me.”

“Hey, robin! Let’s chirp!”

“Need a friend, friend?”

Eddies of talk. Buzzing basso invitations. Not for her. Never for her.

I am a mother.

I am the mother.

“These fertilized eggs were then placed in a medium consisting of three parts modified Locke’s solution, one part 2.9 percent sodium citrate dihydrate, and 25 mg of bovine gamma globulin (BGG, Armour) per milliliter of the citrate-Locke’s solution. Penicillin (100 unit/ml) and streptomycin (50 micrograms/ml) were added to the medium. Viscosity of the medium at 22 degrees C was 1.1591 cp and its pH 7.2. Eggs were retained for micromanipulation and injection within a drop of the bovine gamma globuline-citrate-Locke’s solution (GCL) which was covered with mineral oil in a vaseline well on a microscope slide.”

Tonight there was a small surprise for Lona. One of the loungers at the vestibule approached her. Was he drunk? So sexually deprived that she was attractive to him? Moved by pity for the waif? Or did he know who she was and wish to share her glory? That was the least probable of all. He did not know, would not wish. Of glory there was none.

He was no beauty, but not conspicuously repulsive. Of medium height; black hair slicked straight forward almost to his eyebrows; eyebrows themselves slightly distorted surgically to arch in a skeptical inverted V; eyes gray, and bright with shallow craftiness; chin weak; nose sharp, prominent. About nineteen years old. Sallow skin marked with underlying striations, sun-sensitive patterns that would blaze in glory at noon. He looked hungry. On his breath a mixture of things: cheap wine, spiced bread, a hint of (splurge!) filtered rum.