Thorns

by Robert Silverberg

  Burris said, “If Chalk can place me in another body—”

  “Yes?”

  “What will he gain from it?”

  “I told you. Chalk’s a humanitarian. He knows you’re in pain. He wants to do something about it. See him, Burris. Let him help you.”

  “Who are you, Aoudad?”

  “No one. A limb of Duncan Chalk.”

  “Is this a trap?”

  “You’re too suspicious,” Aoudad said. “We mean the best for you.”

  Silence. Burris rose, pacing the room in a peculiarly liquid gliding step. Aoudad was taut.

  “To Chalk,” Burris murmured finally. “Yes. Take me to Chalk!”

  EIGHT

  STABAT MATER DOLOROSA

  ■

  ■ In the dark it was easy for Lona to pretend that she was dead. She often mourned at her own grave. She saw herself on a hillside, on a grassy breast of earth with a tiny plaque set in the ground at her feet. HERE LIES.

  VICTIM.

  MURDERED BY SCIENTISTS.

  She drew the coverlets up over her thin body. Her eyes, tightly closed, held back the tears. BLESSED REPOSE. HOPE OF REDEMPTION. What did they do with dead bodies nowadays? Pop them in the oven! A bright hot flash. Light, like the sun. And then dust. Dust to dust. A long sleep.

  I was nearly dead once, Lona reminded herself. But they stopped me. They brought me back.

  Six months ago, in the full blaze of summer. A good season for dying, Lona thought. Her babies had been born. It didn’t take nine months, the way they did it, bringing them along in bottles. More like six months. The experiment had taken place exactly a year back. Six months for the babies to hatch. Then the unbearable publicity—and the brush with deliberate death.

  Why had they chosen her?

  Because she was there. Because she was available. Because she could not object. Because she carried a bellyful of fertile eggs that she wasn’t likely ever to need.

  “A woman’s ovaries contain several hundred thousand ova, Miss Kelvin. During your normal lifetime about four hundred of these will reach maturity. The rest are superfluous. These are the ones we wish to use. We need only a few hundred…”

  “In the name of science…”

  “A crucial experiment…”

  “The ova are superfluous. You can dispense with them and feel no loss…”

  “Medical history…your name…forever…”

  “No effect on your future fertility. You can marry and have a dozen normal children…”

  It was an intricate experiment with many facets. They had had a century or so to perfect the techniques, and now they were bringing them all together in a single project. Natural oögenesis coupled with synthetic ripening of the ova. Embryonic induction. External fertilization. Extramaternal incubation after reimplanting of fertilized ova. Words. Sounds. Synthetic capacitation. Ex utero fetal development. Simultaneity of genetic material. My babies! My babies!

  Lona did not know who the “father” was, only that a single donor would contribute all of the sperm, just as a single donor would contribute all of the ova. She understood that much. The doctors were very good about explaining the project to her, step by step, speaking to her as they would to a child. She followed most of it. They patronized her because she had had no education to speak of and because she was timid of embracing tough ideas, but the raw intelligence was there.

  Her part in the project was simple and ended at the first phase. They flushed from her ovaries several hundred fertile but immature eggs. So far as they were concerned, Lona could then drop into outer darkness. But she had to know. She followed the subsequent steps.

  The eggs were coddled along in artificial ovaries until they were ripe. A woman could ripen only two or three ova at a time in the hidden greenhouse of her middle; the machines could and did handle hundreds. Came then the taxing but not essentially new process of microinjection of the eggs to strengthen them. And then fertilization. The swimming sperms wriggled toward their goal. A single donor, a single explosive burst at harvest-time. Many ova had been lost in the earlier stages. Many were not fertile or not fertilized. But a hundred were. The tiny wriggler reached its harbor.

  Reimplantation of the fertilized ova now. There had been talk of finding a hundred other women to carry the hundred sprouting zygotes. Cuckoo fetuses, swelling the wrong bellies. In the end, though, that was considered excessive. A dozen women volunteered to carry to term; the rest of the fertilized ova went to the artificial wombs. A dozen pale bellies bare under the bright lights. A dozen pairs of smooth thighs opening not to a lover but to dull gray aluminum sheathing. The slow thrust, the squirting entry, the completion of implantation. Some attempts were failures. Eight of the sleek bellies soon were bulging.

  “Let me volunteer,” Lona had said. Touching her flat belly: “Let me carry one of the babies.”

  “No.”

  They were gentler than that. They explained that it was unnecessary within the framework of the experiment for her to go through the bother of pregnancy. It had been shown long ago that an ovum could be taken from a woman’s body, fertilized elsewhere, and reimplanted in her for the usual term of nurture. Why repeat? That had been verified, confirmed. She could be spared the nuisance. They wished to know how well a human mother carried an intrusive embryo, and for that they did not need Lona.

  Did anyone need Lona now?

  No one needed Lona now.

  No one. Lona paid heed to what was happening.

  The eight volunteer mothers did well. In them pregnancy was artificially accelerated. Their bodies accepted the intruders, fed blood to them, folded them warmly in placentas. A medical miracle, yes. But how much more exciting to dispense with maternity altogether!

  A row of gleaming boxes. In each a dividing zygote. The pace of cell-splitting was breathtaking. Lona’s head reeled. Growth was induced in the cortical cytoplasm of the zygotes as they cleaved, then in the main axial organs. “As gastrulation proceeds, the mesodermal mantle extends forward from the blastopore, and its anterior edge comes to lie just posterior to the future lens ectoderm. This edge is the future heart, and it, too, is an inductor of the lens. At the open-neural-plate stage of development, the future lens cells are located in two areas of the epidermis that lie just lateral to the anterior brain plate. As the neural plate rolls up into a tube, the future retinal cells evaginate from the prospective brain as part of the optic vesicle.”

  In six months a hundred bouncing babies.

  A word never before used in a human context now on the lips of all: centuplets.

  Why not? One mother, one father! The rest was incidental. The carrier women, the metal wombs—they had lent warmth and sustenance, but they were not mothers to the children.

  Who was the mother?

  The father did not matter. Artificial insemination was a matter for yawns. Statistically, at least, one male could fertilize every woman in the world in two afternoons. If a man’s sperm had spawned a hundred babies at once, what of it?

  But the mother…

  Her name was not supposed to be released. “Anonymous donor”—that was her place in medical history. The story was too good, though. Especially that she was not quite seventeen. Especially that she was single. Especially that (so the physicians swore) she was technically virgin.

  Two days after the simultaneous centuplet delivery, Lona’s name and achievement were matters of public record.

  She stood slim and frightened before the flashing lights.

  “Will you name the babies yourself?”

  “What did it feel like when the eggs were taken from you?”

  “What does it feel like to know that you’re the mother of the biggest family in human history?”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Come live with me and be my love.”

  “Half a million for the exclusive rights to the story!”

  “Never with a man?”

  “How did you react when they told you what the experiment
was going to be?”

  “Have you met the father?”

  “ .”

  A month like that. Fair skin reddened by camera-glow. Eyes wide, strained, bloodshot. Questions. Doctors beside her to guide her answers. Her moment of glory, dazzling, bewildering. The doctors hated it nearly as much as she did. They would never have released her name: except that one of them had, for a price, and the floodgates had opened. Now they tried to ward off more blunders by coaching her in what to say. Lona said quite little, actually. Part of her silence rose from fright, part from ignorance. What could she tell the world? What did the world want from her?

  Briefly she was a wonder of the world. They sang a song about her on the song machines. Deep thrumming of chords; sad lament of the mother of centuplets. It was played everywhere. She could not bear to listen. Come make a baby with me, sweetie. Come make a hundred more. Her friends, not many of them to begin with, sensed that it embarrassed her to talk of It, so they talked deliberately of other things, anything else at all, and finally they simply stopped talking. She kept to herself. Strangers wanted to know what it was like, with all those babies. How could she say? She scarcely knew! Why had they made a song about her? Why did they gossip and pry? What did they want?

  To some, it was all blasphemy. There was thunder from the pulpits. Lona felt the tang of brimstone at her nostrils. The babies cried and stretched and gurgled. She visited them once, and wept, and picked one up to hug it. The child was taken from her and restored to its aseptic environment. She was not permitted to visit them again.

  Centuplets. A hundred siblings sharing the same group of codons. What would they be like? How would they grow? Could a man live in a world shared by fifty brothers and fifty sisters? That was part of the experiment. This experiment was to be a lifetime long. The psychologists had moved in. Much was known of quintuplets: sextuplets had been studied somewhat, and there had briefly been a set of septuplets thirty years before. But centuplets? An infinity of new research!

  Without Lona. Her part had ended on the first day. Something cool and tingly swabbed across her thighs by a smiling nurse. Then men, staring without interest at her body. A drug. A dreamy haze through which she was aware of penetration. No other sensation. The end. “Thank you, Miss Kelvin. Your fee.” Cool linens against her body. Elsewhere they were beginning to do things to the borrowed ova.

  My babies. My babies.

  Lights in my eyes!

  When the time came to kill herself, Lona did not quite succeed at it. Doctors who could give life to a speck of matter could also sustain life in the source of that speck. They put her back together, and then they forgot about her.

  A nine days’ wonder is granted obscurity on the tenth day.

  Obscurity, but not peace. Peace was never granted; it had to be won, the hard way, from within. Living again in darkness, Lona yet could never be the same, for somewhere else a hundred babies thrived and fattened. They had reached not only into her ovaries but into the fabric of her life itself to draw forth those babies, and she reverberated still with the recoil.

  She shivered in the darkness.

  Someday soon, she promised herself, I’ll try again. And this time no one will notice me. This time they’ll let me go. I’ll sleep a long time.

  NINE

  IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

  ■

  ■ For Burris it was something like being born. He had not left his room in so many weeks that it had come to seem a permanent shelter.

  Aoudad thoughtfully made the delivery as painless as possible for him, though. They left at dead of night, when the city slept. Burris was cloaked and hooded. It gave him such a conspiratorial look that he was forced to smile at the effect; yet he regarded it as necessary. The hood hid him well, and so long as he kept his head down, he was safe from the glances of the casual. As they left the building, Burris remained in the far corner of the dropshaft, praying that no one else would summon it as he descended. No one did. But on the way through the entrance, a drifting blob of glowing light illuminated him for a moment just when a homecoming resident appeared. The man paused, staring beneath the hood. Burris remained expressionless. The man blinked, seeing the unexpected. Burris’s harsh, distorted face regarded him coldly, and the man moved on. His sleep would be tinctured with nightmare that night. But that was better, thought Burris, than having the nightmare steal into the texture of your life itself, as had happened to him.

  A car waited just beyond the lip of the building.

  “Chalk doesn’t ordinarily hold interviews at this hour,” Aoudad chattered. “But you must understand that this is something special. He means to give you every consideration.”

  “Splendid,” Burris said darkly.

  They entered the car. It was like exchanging one womb for another less spacious but more inviting. Burris settled against a couch-seat big enough for several people, but evidently modeled to fit a single pair of enormous buttocks. Aoudad sat beside him in a more normal accommodation. The car started, gliding quietly away in a thrum of turbines. Its transponders picked up the emanations of the nearest highway, and shortly they left city streets behind and were hurtling along a restricted-access route.

  The windows of the car were comfortingly opaque. Burris threw back the hood. He was accustoming himself in short stages to showing himself to other people. Aoudad, who did not appear to mind his mutilations, was a good subject on whom to practice.

  “Drink?” Aoudad asked. “Smoke? Any kind of stimulant?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “Are you able to touch such things—the way you are?”

  Burris smiled grimly. “My metabolism is basically the same as yours, even now. The plumbing’s different. I eat your food. I drink your drinks. But not right this moment.”

  “I wondered. You’ll pardon my curiosity.”

  “Of course.”

  “And the bodily functions—”

  “They’ve improved excretion. I don’t know what they’ve done to reproduction. The organs are still there, but do they function? It’s not a test I’ve cared to make.”

  The muscles of Aoudad’s left cheek pulled back as though in a spasm. The response was not lost on Burris. Why is he so interested in my sex life? Normal prurience? Something more?

  “You’ll pardon my curiosity,” Aoudad said again.

  “I already have.” Burris leaned back and felt his seat doing odd things to him. A massage, perhaps. No doubt he was tense and the poor chair was trying to fix things. But the chair was programmed for a bigger man. It seemed to be humming as if with an overloaded circuit. Was it troubled just by the size differential, Burris wondered? Or did the restructured contours of his anatomy cause it some distress?

  He mentioned the chair to Aoudad, who cut it off. Smiling, Burris complimented himself on his state of mellowed relaxation. He had not said a bitter thing since Aoudad’s arrival. He was calm, tempest-free, hovering at dead center. Good. Good. He had spent too much time alone, letting his miseries corrode him. This fool Aoudad was an angel of mercy come to lift him out of himself. I am grateful, said Burris pleasantly to himself.

  “This is it. Chalk’s office is here.”

  The building was relatively low, no more than three or four storeys, but it was well set off from the towers that flanked it. Its sprawling horizontal bulk compensated for its lack of height. Wide-legged angles stretched off to right and left; Burris, making useful use of his added peripheral vision, peered as far as he could around the sides of the building and calculated that it was probably eight-sided. The outer wall was of a dull brown metal, neatly finished, pebbled in an ornamental way. No light was visible within; but, then, there were no windows.

  One wall abruptly gaped at them as a hidden portcullis silently lifted. The car rocketed through, and came to a halt in the bowels of the building. Its hatch sprang off. Burris became aware that a short bright-eyed man was peering into the car at him.

  He experienced a moment of shock at finding himself
so unexpectedly being viewed by a stranger. Then he recovered and reversed the flow of the sensation, staring back. The short man was worth staring at, too. Without the benefit of malevolent surgeons, he was nonetheless strikingly ugly. Virtually neckless; thick matted dark hair descending into his collar; large jug ears; a narrow-bridged nose; incredible long, thin lips that just now were puckered in a repellent pout of fascination. No beauty.

  Aoudad said: “Minner Burris. Leontes d’Amore. Of the Chalk staff.”

  “Chalk’s awake. He’s waiting,” said d’Amore. Even his voice was ugly.

  Yet he faces the world every day, Burris reflected.

  Hooded once more, he let himself be swept along a network of pneumatic tubes until he found himself gliding into an immense cavernous room studded with various levels of activity-points. Just now there was little activity; the desks were empty, the screens were silent. A gentle glow of thermoluminescent fungi lit the place. Turning slowly, Burris panned his gaze across the room and up a series of crystal rungs until he observed, seated thronewise near the ceiling on the far side, a vast individual.

  Chalk. Obviously.

  Burris stood absorbed in the sight, forgetting for a moment the million tiny pricking pains that were his constant companions. So big? So enfleshed? The man had devoured a legion of cattle to gain that bulk.

  Beside him, Aoudad gently urged him forward, not quite daring to touch Burris’s elbow.

  “Let me see you,” Chalk said. His voice was light, amiable. “Up here. Up to me, Burris.”

  A moment more. Face to face.

  Burris shrugged off the hood and then the cloak. Let him have his look. Before this mound of flesh I need feel no shame.

  Chalk’s placid expression did not change.

  He studied Burris carefully, with deep interest and no hint of revulsion. At a wave of his pudgy hand, Aoudad and d’Amore vanished. Burris and Chalk remained alone in the huge, dim room.