Thorns

by Robert Silverberg

  Dishes began to appear. Each was a specialty of some distant world, either imported authentically or else duplicated here with the greatest of craft. Swiftly the table was filled with strangeness. Plates, bowls, cups of oddities, served in stunning opulence. Burris called off the names to her and tried to explain the foods to her, but she was dizzied now and scarcely able to comprehend. What was this flaky white meat? These golden berries steeped in honey? This soup, pale and sprinkled with aromatic cheese? Earth alone produced so many cuisines; to have a galaxy to choose from was so dazzling a thought that it numbed the appetite.

  Lona nibbled. She grew confused. A bite of this, a sip of that. She kept expecting the next goblet to contain some other little living creature. Long before the main course had arrived, she was full. Two kinds of wine had been brought. Burris mixed them and they changed color, turquoise and ruby blending to form an unexpected opal shade. “Catalytic response,” he said. “They calculate the esthetics of sight as well as of taste. Here.” But she could drink only a tiny bit.

  Were the stars moving in ragged circles now?

  She heard the hum of conversation all about her. For more than an hour she had been able to pretend that she and Burris had been isolated within a pocket of privacy, but now the presence of the other diners was breaking through. They were looking. Commenting. Moving about, drifting from table to table on their gravitron plates. Have you seen? What do you think of? How charming! How strange! How grotesque!

  “Minner, let’s get out of here.”

  “But we haven’t had our dessert yet.”

  “I know. I don’t care.”

  “Liqueur from the Procyon group. Coffee Galactique.”

  “Minner, no.” She saw his eyes open to the full shutter-width and knew that some expression on her face must have scored him deeply. She was very close to getting ill. Perhaps it was obvious to him.

  “We’ll go,” he told her. “We’ll come back for dessert some other time.”

  “I’m so sorry, Minner,” she murmured. “I didn’t want to spoil the dinner. But this place…I just don’t feel right in a place like this. It scares me. All these strange foods. The staring eyes. They’re all looking at us, aren’t they? If we could go back to the room, it would be so much better.”

  He was summoning the carrier disk now. Her chair released her from its intimate grip. Her legs were wobbly when she stood up. She did not know how she could take a step without toppling. A strange tunnel-like clarity of vision brought her isolated views as she hesitated. The fat jeweled woman with a host of chins. The gilded girl clad in transparency, not much older than herself but infinitely surer of herself. The garden of little forked trees two levels below. The ropes of living light festooned in the air. A tray slicing across the open space bearing three mugs of dark, shining unknownness. Lona swayed. Burris anchored her and virtually lifted her onto the disk, though to a watcher it would not seem that he held her in so supportive a way.

  She stared fixedly forward as they crossed the gulf to the entrance platform.

  Her face was flushed and beaded with sweat. Within her stomach, it seemed to her, the alien creatures had come to life and were swimming patiently in the digestive sauces. Somehow she and Burris passed through the crystal doors. Down to the lobby via quick dropshaft; then up again, another shaft, to their suite. She caught sight of Aoudad lurking in the corridor, disappearing quickly behind a broad pilaster.

  Burris palmed the door. It opened for them.

  “Are you sick?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m glad to be out of there. It’s so much calmer here. Did you lock the door?”

  “Of course. Can I do anything for you, Lona?”

  “Let me rest. A few minutes, by myself.”

  He took her to her bedroom and eased her down on the round bed. Then he went out. Lona was surprised how quickly equilibrium returned, away from the restaurant. It had seemed to her, at the very end, that the sky itself had become a huge prying eye.

  Calmer now, Lona rose, determined to shed the rest of her false glamour. She stepped under the vibraspray. Instantly her sumptuous gown vanished. She felt smaller, younger, at once. Naked, she made herself ready for bed.

  She turned on a dim lamp, deactivated the rest of the room glow, and slipped between the sheets. They were cool and agreeable against her skin. A control console governed the movements and form of the bed, but Lona ignored it. She said softly into an intercom beside her pillow, “Minner, will you come in now?”

  He entered at once. He was still wearing his flamboyant dinner costume, cape and all. The flaring rib-like projections were so strange that they nearly canceled out the other strangeness that was his body.

  Dinner had been a disaster, she thought. The restaurant, so glittering, had been like a torture chamber for her. But the evening might be salvaged.

  “Hold me,” she said in a thin voice. “I’m still a little shaky, Minner.”

  Burris came to her. He sat beside her, and she rose a little, letting the sheet slip down to reveal her breasts. He reached for her, but the ribs of his costume formed an unbending barrier, thwarting contact.

  “I’d better get out of this rig,” he said.

  “The vibraspray’s over there.”

  “Shall I turn off the light?”

  “No. No.”

  Her eyes did not leave him as he crossed the room.

  He mounted the platform of the vibraspray and turned it on. It was designed to cleanse the skin of any adhering matter, and a spray on garment would naturally be the first to go. Burris’s outlandish costume disappeared.

  Lona had never seen his body before.

  Unflinchingly, ready for any catastrophic revelation, she watched the naked man turn to face her. Her face was rigidly set, as was his, for this was a double test, showing if she could bear the shock of facing the unknown, showing if he could bear the shock of facing her response.

  She had dreaded this moment for days. But now it was here, and in spreading wonder she discovered that she had lived through and past the dreaded moment without harm.

  He was not nearly so terrible to behold as she had anticipated.

  Of course, he was strange. His skin, like the skin of his face and arms, was glossy and unreal, a seamless container like none ever worn by man before. He was hairless. He had neither breasts nor navel, a fact that Lona realized slowly after searching for the cause of the wrongness.

  His arms and legs were attached to his body in an unfamiliar manner, and by several inches in unfamiliar places. His chest seemed too deep in proportion to the width of his hips. His knees did not stand out from his legs as knees should do. When he moved, the muscles of his body rippled in a curious way.

  But these were minor things, and they were not true deformities. He bore no hideous scars, no hidden extra limbs, no unexpected eyes or mouths on his body. The real changes were within, and on his face.

  And the one aspect of all that had concerned Lona was anticlimactic. Against probability, he seemed normally male. So far as she could tell, at least.

  Burris came toward the bed. She lifted her arms. An instant later and he was beside her, his skin against hers. The texture was strange but not unpleasant. He seemed oddly shy just now. Lona drew him closer. Her eyes closed. She did not want to see his altered face in this moment and in any case her eyes seemed suddenly sensitive even to the faint light of the lamp. Her hand moved out to him. Her lips met his.

  She had not been kissed often. But she had never been kissed like this. Those who had redesigned his lips had not intended them for kissing, and he was forced to make contact in an unwieldy way, mouth to mouth. But, again, it was not unpleasant. And then Lona felt his fingers on her flesh, six digits to each hand. His skin had a sweet, pungent odor. The light went out.

  A spring within her body was coiling tighter…tighter…tighter…

  A spring that had been coiling ever tighter for seventeen years…and now its force was unleashed in a single mom
ent of tumult.

  She pulled her mouth from his. Her jaws wrenched themselves apart, and a sheath of muscle quaked in her throat. A blistering image seared her: herself on an operating table, anesthetized, her body open to the probe of the men in white. She struck the image with a bolt of lightning, and it shattered and tumbled away.

  She clutched at him.

  At last. At last!

  He would not give her babies. She sensed that, and it did not trouble her.

  “Lona,” he said, his face against her clavicle, his voice coming out smothered and thick. “Lona, Lona, Lona…”

  There was brightness, as of an exploding sun. Her hand ran up and down his back, and just before joining the thought came to her that his skin was dry, that he did not sweat at all. Then she gasped, felt pain and pleasure in one convulsive unity, and listened in amazement to the ferocious ringing cries of lust that were fleeing of their own accord from her frenzied throat.

  TWENTY

  AFTER US, THE SAVAGE GOD

  ■

  ■ It was a post-apocalyptic era. The doom of which the prophets had chanted had never come; or, if it had, the world had lived through it into a quieter time. They had predicted the worst, a Fimbulwinter of universal discontent. An ax-age, a sword-age, a wind-age, a wolf-age, ere the world totters. But shields were not cloven, and darkness did not fall. What had happened, and why? Duncan Chalk, one of the chief beneficiaries of the new era, often pondered that pleasant question.

  The swords now were plowshares.

  Hunger was abolished.

  Population was controlled.

  Man no longer fouled his own environment in every daily act. The skies were relatively pure. The rivers ran clear. There were lakes of blue crystal, parks of bright green. Of course, the millennium had not quite arrived; there was crime, disease, hunger, even now. But that was in the dark places. For most, it was an age of ease. Those who looked for crisis looked for it in that.

  Communication in the world was instantaneous. Transportation was measurably slower than that, but still fast. The planets of the local solar system, unpeopled, were being plundered of their metals, their minerals, even their gaseous blankets. The nearer stairs had been reached. Earth prospered. The ideologies of poverty wither embarrassingly in a time of plenty.

  Yet plenty is relative. Needs and envies remained—the materialistic urges. The deeper, darker hungers were not always gratified by thick paychecks alone, either. An era determines for itself its characteristic forms of entertainment. Chalk had been one of the shapers of those forms.

  His empire of amusement stretched halfway across the system. It brought him wealth, power, the satisfaction of the ego, and—to the measure he desired it—fame. It led him indirectly to the fulfillment of his inner needs, which were generated from his own physical and psychological makeup, and which would have pressed upon him had he lived in any other era. Now, conveniently, he was in a position to take the steps that would bring him to the position he required.

  He needed to be fed frequently. And his food was only partly flesh and vegetables.

  From the center of his empire Chalk followed the doings of his star-crossed pair of lovers. They were en route to Antarctica now. He received regular reports from Aoudad and Nikolaides, those hoverers over the bed of love. But by this time Chalk no longer needed his flunkies to tell him what was happening. He had achieved contact and drew his own species of information from the two splintered ones he had brought together.

  Just now what he drew from them was a bland wash of happiness. Useless, for Chalk. But he played his game patiently. Mutual sympathy had drawn them close, but was sympathy the proper foundation for undying love? Chalk thought not. He was willing to gamble a fortune to prove his point. They would change toward each other. And Chalk would turn his profit, so to speak.

  Aoudad was on the circuit now. “We’re just arriving, sir. They’re being taken to the hotel.”

  “Good. Good. See that they’re given every comfort.”

  “Naturally.”

  “But don’t spend much time near them. They want to be with each other, not chivied about by chaperones. Do you follow me, Aoudad?”

  “They’ll have the whole Pole to themselves.”

  Chalk smiled. Their tour would be a lovers’ dream. It was an elegant era, and those with the right key could open door after door of pleasures. Burris and Lona would enjoy themselves.

  The apocalypse could come later.

  TWENTY-ONE

  AND SOUTHWARD AYE WE FLED

  ■

  ■ “I don’t understand,” Lona said. “How can it be summer here? When we left, it was winter!”

  “In the Northern Hemisphere, yes.” Burris sighed. “But now we’re below the Equator. As far below as it’s possible to get. The seasons are reversed here. When we get summer, they have winter. And now it’s their summer here.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  “It has to do with the way the Earth is tipped on its axis. As it goes around the sun, part of the planet is in a good position to get warmed by sunlight, and part isn’t. If I had a globe here, I could show you.”

  “If it’s summer here, though, why is there so much ice?”

  The thin, whining tone of her questions annoyed him even more than the questions themselves. Burris whirled suddenly. There was a spasm within his diaphragm as mysterious organs spurted their secretions of anger into his blood.

  “Damn it, Lona, didn’t you ever go to school?” he blazed at her.

  She shrank away from him. “Don’t shout at me, Minner. Please don’t shout.”

  “Didn’t they teach you anything?”

  “I left school early. I wasn’t a good student.”

  “And now I’m your teacher?”

  “You don’t have to be,” Lona said quietly. Her eyes were too bright now. “You don’t have to be anything for me if you don’t want to be.”

  He was suddenly on the defensive. “I didn’t mean to shout at you.”

  “But you shouted.”

  “I lost patience. All those questions—”

  “All those silly questions—isn’t that what you wanted to say?”

  “Let’s stop it right here, Lona. I’m sorry I blew up at you. I didn’t get much sleep last night, and my nerves are frayed. Let’s go for a walk. I’ll try to explain the seasons to you.”

  “I’m not all that interested in the seasons, Minner.”

  “Forget the seasons, then. But let’s walk. Let’s try to calm ourselves down.”

  “Do you think I got much sleep last night, either?”

  He thought it might be time to smile. “I guess you didn’t, not really.”

  “But am I shouting and complaining?”

  “As a matter of fact, you are. So let’s quit it right here and take a relaxing walk. Yes?”

  “All right,” she said sullenly. “A summertime stroll.”

  “A summertime stroll, yes.”

  They slipped on light thermal wraps, hoods, gloves. The temperature was mild for this part of the world: several degrees above freezing. The Antarctic was having a heat wave. Chalk’s polar hotel was only a few dozen miles from the Pole itself, lying “north” of the Pole, as all things must, and placed out toward the direction of the Ross Shelf Ice. It was a sprawling geodesic dome, solid enough to withstand the rigors of the polar night, airy enough to admit the texture of the Antarctic.

  A double exit chamber was their gateway to the ice-realm outside. The dome was surrounded by a belt of brown bare soil ten feet wide, laid down by the builders as an insulating zone, and beyond it was the white plateau. Instantly, as Burris and the girl emerged, a burly guide rushed up to them, grinning.

  “Power-sled trip, folks? Take you to the Pole in fifteen minutes! Amundsen’s camp, reconstructed. The Scott Museum. Or we could go out for a look at the glaciers back the other way. You say the word, and—”

  “No.”

  “I understand. Your first morning here, you’d
just like to stroll around a little. Can’t blame you at all. Well, you just stroll all you like. And when you decide that you’re ready for a longer trip—”

  “Please,” Burris said. “Can we get by?”

  The guide gave him a queer look and stepped aside. Lona slipped her arm through Burris’s and they walked out onto the ice. Looking back, Burris saw a figure step from the dome and call the guide aside. Aoudad. They were having an earnest conference.

  “It’s so beautiful here!” Lona cried.

  “In a sterile way, yes. The last frontier. Almost untouched, except for a museum here and there.”

  “And hotels.”

  “This is the only one. Chalk has a monopoly.”

  The sun was high overhead, looking bright but small. This close to the Pole, the summer day would seem never to end; two months of unbroken sunlight lay ahead before the long dip into darkness began. The light glittered brilliantly over the icy plateau. Everything was flat here, a mile-high sheet of whiteness burying mountains and valleys alike. The ice was firm underfoot. In ten minutes they had left the hotel far behind.

  “Which way is the South Pole?” Lona asked.

  “That way. Straight ahead. We’ll go over there later.”

  “And behind us?”

  “The Queen Maud Mountains. They drop off down to the Ross Shelf. It’s a big slab of ice, seven hundred feet thick, bigger than California. The early explorers made their camps on it. We’ll visit Little America in a couple of days.”

  “It’s so flat here. The reflection of the sun is so bright” Lona bent, scooped a handful of snow, and scattered it gaily. “I’d love to see some penguins. Minner, do I ask too many questions? Do I chatter?”

  “Should I be honest or should I be tactful?”

  “Never mind. Let’s just walk.”

  They walked. He found the slick footing of ice peculiarly comfortable. It gave ever so slightly with each step he took, accommodating itself nicely to the modified joints of his legs. Concrete pavements were not so friendly. Burris, who had had a tense and pain-filled night, welcomed the change.