Thorns

by Robert Silverberg

  The little group hurried toward a brightly lit inner room. Lona sank to a divan. Burris, crackling now with delayed tension, felt pain shoot through his thighs, his wrists, his chest. Aoudad produced a pocket tray of relaxers, taking one himself and giving one to Lona. Burris shrugged the little tube away, knowing that the drug it contained would have no effect on him. In moments Lona was smiling again.

  He knew he had not been mistaken about the jealousy in her eyes. Elise had come up like a typhoon of flesh, threatening to sweep away all that Lona possessed, and Lona had fought back fiercely. Burris was both flattered and troubled. He could not deny that he enjoyed, as any man would, being the object of such a struggle. Yet that instant of revelation had shown him just how deeply Lona already was enmeshed with him. He felt no such depth of involvement himself. He liked the girl, yes, and was grateful to her for her company, but he was a long way from being in love with her. He doubted very much that he would ever love her, or anyone else. But she, without even the virtue of a physical bond linking them, had evidently constructed some inner fantasy of romance. The seeds of trouble lay in that, Burris knew.

  Drained of tensions by Aoudad’s relaxer, Lona quickly recovered from Elise’s attack. They rose, Aoudad beaming again despite his injury.

  “Will you go to dinner now?” he asked.

  “I’m feeling much better,” Lona said. “It was all so sudden—it shook me up.”

  “Five minutes in the Galactic Room and you’ll have forgotten the whole thing,” said Burris. He gave her his arm again. Aoudad conducted them toward the special liftshaft that led only to the Galactic Room. They mounted the gravity plate and sped upward. The restaurant was at the summit of the hotel, looking outward toward the heavens from its lofty spot like some private observatory, a sybaritic Uraniborg of food. Still trembling from the unexpected onslaught of Elise, Burris felt new anxiety as they reached the vestibule of the restaurant. He kept a calm front, but would he panic in the supernal glamour of the Galactic Room?

  He had been there once before, long ago. But that was in another body, and besides, the wench was dead.

  The liftshaft halted, and they stepped out into a bath of living light.

  Aoudad said portentously, “The Galactic Room! Your table is waiting. Enjoy yourselves.”

  He vanished. Burris smiled tensely at Lona, who looked drugged and dazed with happiness and terror. The crystal doors opened for them. They went within.

  NINETEEN

  LE JARDIN DES SUPPLICES

  ■

  ■ There had never been such a restaurant this side of Babylon. Tier upon tier of terraces rose toward the starry dome. Refraction was banished here, and the dining room seemed to be open to the heavens, but in fact the elegant diners were shielded from the elements at all times. A screen of black light framing the facade of the hotel cancelled out the effect of the city illumination, so that the stars always gleamed over the Galactic Room as they would above an untenanted forest.

  The far worlds of the universe thus lay only a short distance out of reach. The things of those worlds, the harvest of the stars, gave splendor to the room. The texture of its curving walls was due to an array of alien artifacts: bright-hued pebbles, potsherds, paintings, tinkling magic-trees of odd alloys, zigzagging constructions of living light, each embedded in its proper niche in the procession of tiers. The tables seemed to grow from the floor, which was carpeted with a not-quite-sentient organism found on one of the worlds of Aldebaran. The carpet was, to be blunt about it, not too different in structure and function from a Terran slime mold, but the management did not make too much ceremony over identifying it, and the effect it produced was one of extreme richness.

  Other things grew in select spots of the Galactic Room: potted shrubs, sweet-smelling blossoming plants, even dwarf trees, all (so it was said) imported from other worlds. The chandelier itself was the product of alien hands: a colossal efflorescence of golden teardrops, crafted from the amber-like secretion of a bulky sea-beast living along the gray shores of a Centaurine planet.

  It cost an incalculable sum to have dinner at the Galactic Room. Every table was occupied, every night. One made reservations weeks in advance. Those who had been lucky enough to choose this night were granted the unexpected treat of seeing the starman and the girl who had had the many babies, but the diners, most of them celebrities themselves, had only fleeting interest in the much-publicized pair. A quick look, and then back to the wonders on one’s plate.

  Lona clung tightly to Burris’s arm as they passed between the thick, dear doors. Her small fingers dug so deeply that she knew she must be hurting him. She found herself standing on a narrow raised platform looking out onto an enormous expanse of emptiness, with the starry sky blazing overhead. The core of the restaurant-dome was hollow and many hundreds of feet across; the tiers of tables clung like scales to the outer shell, giving every diner a window seat.

  She felt as though she were tipping forward, tumbling into the open well before her.

  “Oh!” Sharply. Knees trembling, throat dry, she rocked on her heels and quickly closed and opened her eyes. Terror pierced her in a thousand places. She might fall and be lost in the abyss; or her sprayon gown might deliquesce and leave her naked before this fashionable horde; or that she-witch with the giant udders might reappear and attack them as they ate; or she might commit some horrible blunder at the table; or, suddenly and violently ill, she might spray the carpet with her vomit. Anything might happen. This restaurant had been conceived in a dream, but not necessarily a good dream.

  A furry voice out of nowhere murmured, “Mr. Burris, Miss Kelvin, welcome to the Galactic Room. Please step forward.”

  “We get on that gravity plate,” Burris prompted her.

  The coppery plate was a disk an inch thick and two yards in diameter, protruding from the rim of their platform. Burris led her onto it, and at once it slipped free of its mooring and glided outward and upward. Lona did not look down. The floating plate took them to the far side of the great room and came to rest beside a vacant table perched precariously on a cantilevered ledge. Dismounting, Burris helped Lona to the ledge. Their carrier disk fluttered away, returning to its place. Lona saw it edge-on for a moment, wearing a gaudy corona of reflected light.

  The table, on a single leg, appeared to sprout organically from the ledge. Lona gratefully planted herself on her chair, which molded itself instantly to the contours of her back and buttocks. There was something obscene about that confident grip, and yet it was reassuring; the chair, she thought, would not release her if she became dizzy and started to slide toward the steep drop to her left.

  “How do you like it?” Burris asked, looking into her eyes.

  “It’s incredible. I never imagined it was like this.” She did not tell him that she was nearly sick from the impact of it.

  “We have a choice table. It’s probably the one Chalk himself uses when he eats here.”

  “I never knew there were so many stars!”

  They looked up. From where they sat they had an unimpeded view of almost a hundred and fifty degrees of arc. Burris told her the stars and planets.

  “Mars,” he said. “That’s easy: the big orange one. But can you see Saturn? The rings aren’t visible, of course, but…” He took her hand, aimed it, and described the lay of the heavens until she thought she saw what he meant. “We’ll be out there soon, Lona. Titan’s not visible from here, not with naked eye, but we’ll be on it ourselves before long. And then we’ll see those rings! Look, look there: Orion. And Pegasus.” He called off the constellations for her. He named stars with a sensuous pleasure in uttering the sounds of them: Sirius, Arcturus, Polaris, Bellatrix, Rigel, Algol, Antares, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Procyon, Markab, Deneb, Vega, Alphecca. “Each of them a sun,” he said. “Most have worlds. And there they all are spread out before us!”

  “Have you visited many other suns?”

  “Eleven. Nine with planets.”

  “Including any of the
ones you just named? I like those names.”

  He shook his head. “The suns I went to had numbers, not names. At least, not names Earthmen had given. Most of them had other names. Some I learned.” She saw the corners of his mouth pulling open and rapidly drawing closed again: a sign of tension in him, Lona had learned. Should I talk about the stars to him? Perhaps he doesn’t want to be reminded.

  Under this bright canopy, though, she could not leave the theme alone.

  “Will you ever go back out there?” she asked.

  “Out of this system? I doubt it. I’m retired from the service now. And we don’t have tourist flights to neighboring stars. But I’ll be off Earth again, of course. With you: the planetary tour. Not quite the same. But safer.”

  “Can you—can you—” she debated and rushed onward—“show me the planet where you were—captured?”

  Three quick contortions of his mouth. “It’s a bluish sun. You can’t see it from this hemisphere. You can’t see it with naked eye even down below. Six planets. Manipool’s the fourth. When we were orbiting it, coming around ready to go down, I felt a strange excitement. As though my destiny drew me to this place. Maybe there’s a little tinge of the pre-cog in me, eh, Lona? Surely Manipool had its large place in my destiny. But I can tell I’m no pre-cog. From time to time I’m hit with this powerful conviction that I’m marked for a return trip. And that’s absurd. To go back there…to confront Them again…” His fist closed suddenly, tightening with a convulsive snap that pulled his entire arm inward. A vase of thick-petaled blue flowers nearly went flying into the void. Lona caught it. She noticed that when he closed his hand, the little outer tentacle neatly wrapped itself across the backs of his fingers. Putting both of her hands over his, she held him by the knuckles until the tension ebbed and his fingers opened.

  “Let’s not talk of Manipool,” she suggested. “The stars are beautiful, though.”

  “Yes. I never really thought of them that way until I came back to Earth after my first voyage. We see them only as dots of light, from down here. But when you’re out there caught in the crisscross of starlight, bouncing this way and that as the stars buffet you, it’s different. They leave a mark on you. Do you know, Lona, that you get a view of the stars from this room that’s almost as piercing as what you see from the port of a starship?”

  “How do they do it? I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  He tried to explain about the curtain of black light. Lona was lost after the third sentence, but she stared intently into his strange eyes, pretending to listen and knowing that she must not be deceiving him. He knew so much! And yet he was frightened in this room of delights, just as she was frightened. So long as they kept talking, it created a barrier against the fear. But in the silences Lona was awkwardly aware of the hundreds of rich, sophisticated people all about her, and of the overwhelming luxury of the room, and of the abyss beside her, and of her own ignorance and inexperience. She felt naked beneath that blaze of stars. In the interstices of the conversation even Burris again became strange to her; his surgical distortions, which she had nearly ceased to notice, abruptly took on a fiery conspicuousness.

  “Something to drink?” he asked.

  “Yes. Yes, please. You order. I don’t know what to have.”

  No waiter, human or robot, was in sight, nor did Lona see any attending at the other tables. Burris gave the order simply by uttering it into a golden grillwork at his left elbow. His cool knowledgeableness awed her, as she half suspected it was meant to do. She said, “Have you eaten here often? You seem to know what to do.”

  “I was here once. More than a decade ago. It’s not a place you forget easily.”

  “Were you a starman already, then?”

  “Oh, yes, I’d made a couple of trips. I was on furlough. There was this girl I wanted to impress—”

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t impress her. She married someone else. They were killed when the Wheel collapsed, on their honeymoon.”

  Ten years and more ago, Lona thought. She had been less than seven years old. She felt shriveled with her youthfulness beside him. She was glad when the drinks arrived.

  They came skimming across the abyss on a small gravitron tray. It seemed amazing to Lona that none of the serving trays, which now she noticed were quite numerous, ever collided as they soared to their tables. But, of course, it was no great task to program non-intersecting orbits.

  Her drink came in a bowl of polished black stone, thick to the hand but smooth and gracile to the lip. She scooped up the bowl and automatically took it toward her mouth; then, halting an instant before the sip, she realized her error. Burris waited, smiling, his own glass still before him.

  He seems so damned schoolmasterish when he smiles like that, she thought. Scolding me without saying a word. I know what he’s thinking: that I’m an ignorant little tramp who doesn’t know her manners.

  She let the anger subside. It was really anger directed at herself, not him, she realized after a moment. Sensing that made it easier to grow calm.

  She looked at his drink.

  There was something swimming in it.

  The glass was translucent quartz. It was three-fifths filled with a richly viscous green fluid. Moving idly back and forth was a tiny animal, teardrop-shaped, whose violet skin left a faint glow behind as it swam.

  “Is that supposed to be there?”

  Burris laughed. “I have a Deneb martini, so-called. It’s a preposterous name. Specialty of the house.”

  “And in it?”

  “A tadpole, essentially. Amphibious life-form from one of the Aldebaran worlds.”

  “Which you drink?”

  “Yes. Live.”

  “Live.” Lona shuddered. “Why? Does it taste that good?”

  “It has no taste at all, as a matter of fact. It’s pure decoration. Sophistication come full circle, back to barbarism. One gulp, and down it goes.”

  “But it’s alive! How can you kill it?”

  “Have you ever eaten an oyster, Lona?”

  “No. What’s an oyster?”

  “A mollusk. Once quite popular, served in its shell. Live. You sprinkle it with lemon juice—citric acid, you know—and it writhes. Then you eat it. It tastes of the sea. I’m sorry, Lona. That’s how it is. Oysters don’t know what’s happening to them. They don’t have hopes and fears and dreams. Neither does this creature here.”

  “But to kill—”

  “We kill to eat. A true morality of food would allow us to eat only synthetics.” Burris smiled kindly. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have ordered it if I’d known it would offend you. Shall I have them take it away?”

  “No. Someone else would drink it, I guess. I didn’t mean to say all that. I was just a little upset, Minner. But it’s your drink. Enjoy it.”

  “I’ll send it back.”

  “Please.” She touched the left-hand tentacle. “You know why I object? Because it’s like making yourself a god, to swallow a live living thing. I mean, here you are, gigantic, and you just destroy something, and it never knows why. The way—” She stopped.

  “The way alien Things can pick up an inferior organism and put it through surgery, without troubling to explain themselves?” he asked. “The way doctors can perform an intricate experiment on a girl’s ovaries, without considering later psychological effects? God, Lona, we’ve got to sidestep those thoughts, not keep coming back to them!”

  “What did you order for me?” she asked.

  “Gaudax. An aperitif from a Centaurine world. It’s mild and sweet. You’ll like it. Cheers, Lona.”

  “Cheers.”

  He moved his glass in orbit around her black stone bowl, saluting it and her. Then they drank. The Centaurine aperitif tickled her tongue; it was faintly oily stuff, yet delicate, delightful. She shivered with the pleasure. After three quick sips she put the bowl down.

  The small swimming creature was gone from Burris’s glass.

  “Would you like to taste
mine?” he asked.

  “Please. No.”

  He nodded. “Let’s order dinner, then. Will you forgive me for my thoughtlessness?”

  Two dark green cubes, four inches on each face, sat side by side in the middle of the table. Lona had thought they were purely ornamental, but now, as Burris nudged one toward her, she realized that they were menus. As she handled it, warm light flushed through the depths of the cube and illuminated letters appeared, seemingly an inch below the sleek surface. She turned the cube over and over. Soups, meats, appetizers, sweets…

  She recognized nothing on the menu.

  “I shouldn’t be in here, Minner. I just eat ordinary things. This is so weird I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Shall I order for you?”

  “You’d better. Except they won’t have the things I really want. Like a chopped protein steak and a glass of milk.”

  “Forget the chopped protein steak. Sample some of the rarer delicacies.”

  “It’s so false, though. Me pretending to be a gourmet.”

  “Don’t pretend anything. Eat and enjoy. Chopped protein steak isn’t the only food in the universe.”

  His calmness reached forth to her, containing but not quite transferring to her. He ordered for both of them. Lona was proud of his skill. It was a small thing, knowing your way around a menu in such a place; yet he knew so much. He was awesome. She found herself thinking, if only I had met him before they…and cut the thought off. No imaginable set of circumstances would have brought her into contact with the pre-mutilated Minner Burris. He would not have noticed her; he must have been busy then with women like that jiggly old Elise. Who still coveted him, but now could not have him. He’s mine, Lona thought fiercely. He’s mine! They tossed me a broken thing, and I’m helping to fix it, and no one will take it from me.

  “Would you care for soup as well as an appetizer?” he asked.

  “I’m not really terribly hungry.”

  “Try a little anyway.”

  “I’d only waste it.”

  “No one worries about waste here. And we’re not paying for this. Try.”