Thorns

by Robert Silverberg

  And yesterday—it had seemed so simple to go down the hall to the dissolver room, and carefully disregard the rules by opening the disposal sac, and thrust her head in, and take a deep breath of the acrid fumes—

  Throat and lungs and throbbing heart should have dissolved away. Given an hour’s time, as she lay twitching on the cold floor, and they would have. But within minutes Lona was in helpful hands. Forcing down her throat some neutralizing substance. Thrusting her into a car. The first-aid station. Then the hospital, a thousand miles from home.

  She was alive.

  She was injured, of course. She had burned her nasal passages, had damaged her throat, had lost a considerable chunk of lung tissue. They had repaired the minor damage last night, and already nose and throat were healing. In a few days her lungs would be whole again. Death had no dominion in this land any longer.

  Pale sunlight caressed her cheeks. It was late afternoon; the sun was behind the hospital, sinking toward the Pacific. Lona’s eyes fluttered open. White robes, white sheets, green walls. A few books, a few tapes. An array of medical equipment thoughtfully sealed behind a locked sheet of clear sprayon. A private room! Who was paying for that? The last time the government scientists had paid. But now?

  From her window she could see the twisted, tormented, thorny shapes of the cacti in the rear garden. Frowning, she made out two figures moving between the rows of rigid plants. One, quite a tall man, wore a buff-colored hospital gown. His shoulders were unusually broad. His hands and face were bandaged. He’s been in a fire, Lona thought. The poor man. Beside him was a shorter man in business clothes, lean, restless. The tall one was pointing out a cactus to the other. Telling him something, perhaps lecturing him on cactus botany. And now reaching out with a bandaged hand. Touching the long, sharp spines. Watch out! You’ll hurt yourself! He’s sticking his hand right on the spines! Turning to the little one now. Pointing. The little one shaking his head—no, he doesn’t want to stick himself on the spines.

  , The big one must be a little crazy, Lona decided.

  She watched as they came nearer her window. She saw the smaller man’s pointed ears and beady grey eyes. She could see nothing of the bigger man’s face at all. Only the tiniest of slits broke the white wall of his bandage. Lona’s mind quickly supplied the details of his mutilation: the corrugated skin, the flesh runneled and puddled by the flames, the lips drawn aside in a fixed sneer. But they could fix that. Surely they could give him a new face here. He would be all right.

  Lona felt a profound envy. Yes, this man had suffered pain, but soon the doctors would repair all that. His pain was only on the outside. They’d send him away, tall and strong and once more handsome, back to his wife, back to his…

  …children.

  The door opened. A nurse entered, a human one, not a robot. Though she might just as well have been. The smile was blank, impersonal.

  “So you’re up, dear? Did you sleep well? Don’t try to talk, just nod. That’s so good! I’ve come to get you ready. We’re going to fix your lungs up a bit. It won’t be any trouble at all for you—you’ll just close your eyes, and when you wake up, you’ll be breathing good as new!”

  It was merely the truth, as usual.

  When they brought her back to her room, it was morning, so Lona knew that they had worked her over for several hours and then stored her in the post-op room. Now she was swathed in bandages herself. They had opened her body, had given her new segments of lung, and had closed her again. She felt no pain, not yet. The throbbing would come later. Would there be a scar? Sometimes there were scars after surgery even now, though generally not. Lona saw a jagged red track running from the hollow of her throat down between her breasts. Please, no, no scar.

  She had hoped to die on the operating table. It had seemed like her last chance. Now she would have to go home, alive, unaltered.

  The tall man was walking in the garden again. This time he was alone. And now he was without his bandages. Though his back was to her, Lona saw the bare neck, the edge of jaw. Once more he was examining the cacti. What was it about those ugly plants that drew him so? Down on his knees now, prodding at the spines. Now standing up. Turning.

  Oh, the poor man!

  Lona stared in shock and wonder at his face. He was too far away for the details to be visible, but the wrongness of it was plain to her.

  This must have been the way they fixed him up, she thought. After the fire. But why couldn’t they have given him an ordinary face? Why did they do that to him?

  She could not take her eyes away. The sight of those artificial features fascinated her. He sauntered toward the building, moving slowly, confidently. A powerful man. A man who could suffer and bear it. I feel so sorry for him. I wish I could do something to help him.

  She told herself she was being silly. He had a family. He’d get along.

  TWELVE

  HELL HATH NO FURY

  ■

  ■ Burris got the bad news on his fifth day at the hospital.

  He was in the garden, as usual. Aoudad came to him.

  “There can’t be any skin grafts. The doctors say no. You’re full of crazy antibodies.”

  “I knew that already.” Calmly.

  “Even your own skin rejects your skin.”

  “I scarcely blame it,” Burris said.

  They walked past the saguaro. “You could wear some kind of mask. It would be a little uncomfortable, but they do a good job these days. The mask practically breathes. Porous plastic, right over your head. You’d get used to it in a week.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Burris promised. He knelt beside a small barrel cactus. Convex rows of spines took a great-circle route toward the pole. Flower buds seemed to be forming. The small glowing label in the earth said Echinocactus grusonii. Burris read it aloud.

  “These cacti fascinate you so much,” said Aoudad. “Why? What do they have for you?”

  “Beauty.”

  “These? They’re all thorns!”

  “I love cacti. I wish I could live forever in a garden of cacti.” A fingertip touched a spine. “Do you know, on Manipool they have almost nothing but thorny succulents? I wouldn’t call them cacti, of course, but the general effect is the same. It’s a dry world. Pluvial belts about the poles, then mounting dryness approaching the Equator. It rains about every billion years at the Equator and somewhat more frequently in the temperate zones.”

  “Homesick?”

  “Hardly. But I learned the beauty of thorns there.”

  “Thorns? They stick you.”

  “That’s part of their beauty.”

  “You sound like Chalk now,” Aoudad muttered. “Pam is instructive, he says. Pain is gain. And thorns are beautiful. Give me a rose.”

  “Rose bushes are thorny, too,” Burris remarked quietly.

  Aoudad looked distressed. “Tulips, then. Tulips!”

  Burris said, “The thorn is merely a highly evolved form of leaf. An adaptation to a harsh environment. Cacti can’t afford to transpire the way leafy plants do. So they adapt. I’m sorry you regard such an elegant adaptation as ugly.”

  “I guess I’ve never thought about it much. Look, Burris, Chalk would like you to stay here another week or two. There are some more tests.”

  “But if facial surgery is impossible—”

  “They want to check you out generally. With an eye toward the eventual body transplant.”

  “I see.” Burris nodded briefly. He turned to the sun, letting the feeble winter beams strike his altered face. “How good it is to stand in the sunlight again! I’m grateful to you, Bart, do you know that? You dragged me out of that room. That dark night of the soul. I feel everything thawing in me now, breaking loose, moving about. Am I mixing my metaphors? You see how less rigid I am already.”

  “Are you flexible enough to entertain a visitor?”

  “Who?” Instantly suspicious.

  “Marco Prolisse’s widow.”

  “Elise? I thought she was in Rome!�
�

  “Rome’s an hour from here. She wants very badly to see you. She says you’ve been kept from her by the authorities. I won’t force you, but I think you ought to let her see you. You could put the bandages on again, maybe.”

  “No. No bandages, ever again. When will she be here?”

  “She’s already here. You just say the word and I’ll produce her.”

  “Bring her down, then. I’ll see her in the garden. It’s so much like Manipool here.”

  Aoudad was strangely silent. At length he said, “See her in your room.”

  Burris shrugged. “As you say.” He caressed the spines.

  Nurses, orderlies, doctors, technicians, wheelchaired patients, all stared at him as he entered the building. Even two work-robots scanned him oddly, trying to match him against their programmed knowledge of human bodily configurations. Burris did not mind. His self-consciousness was eroding swiftly, day by day. The bandages he had worn on his first day here now seemed an absurd device. It was like going naked in public, he thought: first it seemed unthinkable, then, in time, it became tolerable, and at length customary. One had to accustom one’s self.

  Yet he was uneasy as he waited for Elise Prolisse.

  He was at the window, watching the courtyard garden, when the knock came. Some last-minute impulse (tact or fear?) caused him to keep his back turned as she entered. The door closed timidly. He had not seen her in five years, but he remembered her as lush, somewhat overblown, a handsome woman. His enhanced hearing told him that she had come in alone, Without Aoudad. Her breathing was ragged and hoarse. He heard her lock the door.

  “Minner?” she said softly. “Minner, turn around and look at me. It’s all right. I can take it.”

  This was different from showing himself to nameless hospital personnel. To his surprise, Burris found the seemingly solid serenity of the past few days dissolving swiftly. Panic clutched him. He longed to hide. But out of dismay came cruelty, an icy willingness to inflict pain. He pivoted on his heel and swung around to hurl his image into Elise Prolisse’s large dark eyes.

  Give her credit: she had resilience.

  “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, Minner, it’s”—a smooth shift of gears—“not so awful. I heard it was much worse.”

  “Do you think I’m handsome?”

  “You don’t frighten me. I thought it might be frightening.” She came toward him. She was wearing a clinging black tunic that probably had been sprayed on. High breasts were back in vogue, and that was where Elise wore hers, sprouting almost from her collar-bones, and deeply separated. Pectoral surgery was the secret. The deep mounds of flesh were wholly concealed by the tunic, and yet what kind of concealment could a micron of spray provide? Her hips flared; her thighs were pillars. But she had lost some weight. In the recent months of stress, no doubt, sleeplessness had shaved an inch or two from those continental buttocks. She was quite close to him now. Some dizzying perfume assailed him, and with no conscious effort at all Burris desensitized himself to it.

  His hand slipped between hers.

  His eyes met hers. When she flinched, it was only for the briefest instant.

  “Did Marco die bravely?” she asked.

  “He died like a man. Like the man he was.”

  “Did you see?”

  “Not the last moments, no. I saw them take him away. While we waited our turns.”

  “You thought you would die, too?”

  “I was sure of it. I said the last words for Malcondotto. He said them for me. But I came back.”

  “Minner, Minner, Minner, how terrible it must have been!” She still clasped his hand. She was stroking the fingers…stroking even that tiny prehensile worm of flesh next to his littlest finger. Burris felt the wrench of amazement as she touched the loathsome thing. Her eyes were wide, solemn, tearless. She has two children, or is it three? But still young. Still vital. He wished she would release his hand. Her nearness was disturbing. He sensed radiations of warmth from her thighs, low enough on the electromagnetic spectrum, yet detectable. He would have bit his lip to choke back tension if his lip still could fall between his teeth.

  “When did you get the news about us?” he asked.

  “When it came from the pickup station on Ganymede. They broke it to me very well. But I thought horrible things. I have to confess them to you. I wanted to know from God why it was that Marco had died and you had lived. I’m sorry, Minner.”

  “Don’t be. If I had my choice, I’d be the dead one and he’d be alive. Marco and Malcondotto both. Believe me. I’m not simply making words, Elise. I’d trade.”

  He felt like a hypocrite. Better dead than mutilated, of course! But that was not the way she would understand his words. She’d see only the noble part, the unmarried survivor wishing he could lay down his life to spare the dead husbands and fathers. What could he tell her? He had sworn off whining.

  “Tell me how it was,” she said, still holding his hand, tugging him down with her to sit on the edge of the bed. “How they caught you. How they treated you. What it was like. I have to know!”

  “An ordinary landing,” Burris told her. “Standard landing and contact procedures. Not a bad world; dry; give it time and it’ll be like Mars. Another two million years. Right now it’s Arizona shading into Sonora, with a good solid slash of Sahara. We met them. They met us.”

  His eye-shutters clicked shut. He felt the blasting heat of the wind of Manipool. He saw the cactus shapes, snaky grayish plants twisting spikily along the sand for hundreds of yards. The vehicles of the natives came for him again.

  “They were polite to us. They had been visited before, knew the whole contact routine. No spaceflight themselves, but only because they weren’t interested. They spoke a few languages. Malcondotto could talk with them. The gift of tongues; he spoke a Sirian dialect, and they followed. They were cordial, distant…alien. They took us away.”

  A roof over his head with creatures growing in it. Not simple low-phylum things, either. No thermoluminescent fungi. These were backboned creatures sprouting from the arched roof.

  Tubs of fermenting mash with other living things growing in them. Tiny pink bifurcated things with thrashing legs. Burris said, “Strange place. But not hostile. They poked us a bit, prodded us. We talked. We carried out observations. After a while it dawned on us that we were in confinement.”

  Elise’s eyes were very glossy. They pursued his lips as the words tumbled from him.

  “An advanced scientific culture, beyond doubt. Almost post-scientific. Certainly post-industrial. Malcondotto thought they were using fusion power, but we were never quite sure. After the third or fourth day we had no chance to check.”

  She was not interested at all, he realized suddenly. She was barely listening. Then why had she come? Why had she asked? The story that was at the core of his being should be of concern to her, and yet there she stood, frowning, big-eyeing him, unlistening. He glowered at her. The door was locked. She cannot choose but hear. And thus spake on that ancient man, the bright-eyed Mariner.

  “On the sixth day they came and took Marco away.”

  A ripple of alertness. A fissure in that sleek surface of sensual blandness.

  “We never saw him again alive. But we sensed that they were going to do something bad to him. Marco sensed it first. He always was a bit of a pre-cog.”

  “Yes. Yes, he was. A little.”

  “He left. Malcondotto and I speculated. Some days passed, and they came for Malcondotto, too. Marco hadn’t returned. Malcondotto talked with them before they took him. He learned that they had performed some sort of…experiment on Marco. A failure. They buried him without showing him to us. Then they went to work on Malcondotto.”

  I’ve lost her again, he realized. She just doesn’t care. A flicker of interest when I told her how Prolisse died. And then…nulla.

  She cannot choose but hear.

  “Days. They came for me. They showed me Malcondotto, dead. He looked…somewhat as I look now. Different. W
orse. I couldn’t understand what they were saying to me. A droning buzz, a chattering rasping sound. What sound would cacti make if they could talk? They put me back and let me stew awhile. I suppose they were reviewing their first two experiments, trying to see where they had gone wrong, which organs couldn’t be fiddled with. I spent a million years waiting for them to come again. They came. They put me on a table, Elise. The rest you can see.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “?”

  “I want you, Minner. I’m burning.”

  “It was a lonely trip home. They put me in my ship. I could still operate it, after a fashion. They rehabilitated me. I got going toward this system. The voyage was a bad one.”

  “But you made it to Earth.”

  How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

  Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

  He said, “I made it, yes. I would have seen you when I landed, Elise, but you have to understand I wasn’t a free agent. First they had me by the throat. Then they let go and I ran. You must forgive.”

  “I forgive you. I love you.”

  “Elise—”

  She touched something at her throat. The polymerized chains of her garment gave up the ghost. Black shards of fabric lay at her ankles, and she stood bare before him.

  So much flesh. Bursting with vitality. The heat of her was overpowering.

  “Elise—”

  “Come and touch me. With that strange body of yours. With those hands. I want to feel that curling thing you have on each hand. Stroking me.”

  Her shoulders were wide. Her breasts were well anchored by those strong piers and taut cables. The hips of the Earth-mother, the thighs of a courtesan. She was terribly close to him, and he shivered in the blaze, and then she stood back to let him see her in full.

  “This isn’t right, Elise.”

  “But I love you! Don’t you feel the force of it?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “You’re all I have. Marco’s gone. You saw him last. You’re my link to him. And you’re so—”