Thorns (19 page)

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Who said anything was wrong?"

"Would you like to have a drink?"

They went to the cocktail lounge. It was a big room, paneled in wood, with a real fireplace to give it that twentieth-century look. Two dozen people, more or less, sat at the heavy oaken tables, talking and drinking. All of them couples, Lona noticed. This was almost entirely a honeymoon resort. Young married people came here to begin their lives in icy Antarctic purity. The skiing was said to be excellent in the mountains of Marie Byrd Land.

Heads turned their way as Burris and Lona entered. And just as quickly turned away again in a quick reflex of aversion. Oh, so sorry. Didn't mean to stare. A man with a face like yours, he probably doesn't like to be stared at. We were just looking to see if our friends the Smiths had come down for drinks.

"The demon at the wedding feast," Burris muttered.

Lona wasn't sure she had heard it correctly. She didn't ask him to repeat.

A robot servitor took their order. She drank beer, he a filtered rum. They sat alone at a table near the edge of the room. Suddenly they had nothing to say to each other. All about them conversation seemed unnaturally loud. Talk of future holidays, of sports, of the many available tours the resort offered.

No one came over to join them.

Burris sat rigidly, his shoulders forced upright in a posture that Lona knew must hurt him. He finished his drink quickly and did not order another. Outside, the pale sun refused to set.

"It would be so pretty here if we got a romantic sunset," Lona said. "Streaks of blue and gold on the ice. But we won't get it, will we?"

Burris smiled. He did not answer.

There was a flow of people in and out of the room constantly. The flow swept wide around their table. They were boulders in the stream. Hands were shaken, kisses exchanged. Lona heard people making introductions. It was the sort of place where one couple could come freely up to another, strangers, and find a warm response.

No one freely came to them.

"They know who we are," Lona said to Burris. "They think we're celebrities, so very important that we don't want to be bothered. So they leave us alone. They don't want to seem to be intruding."

"All right."

"Why don't we go over to someone? Break the ice, show them that we're not stand-offish."

"Let's not. Let's just sit here."

She thought she knew what was eating at him. He was convinced they were avoiding this table because he was ugly, or at least strange. No one wanted to have to look him full in the face. And one could not very well hold a conversation while staring off to one side. So the others stayed away. Was that what was troubling him? His self-consciousness returning? She did not ask. She thought she might be able to do something about that.

An hour or so before dinner they returned to their room. It was a single large enclosure with a false harshness about it. The walls were made of split logs, rough and coarse, but the atmosphere was carefully regulated and there were all the modern conveniences. He sat quietly. After a while he stood up and began to examine his legs, swinging them back and forth. His mood was so dark now that it frightened her.

She said, "Excuse me. I'll be back in five minutes."

"Where are you going?"

"To check on the tours they're offering for tomorrow."

He let her go. She went down the curving corridor toward the main lobby. Midway, a giant screen was producing an aurora australis for a group of the guests. Patterns of green and red and purple shot dramatically across a neutral gray background. It looked like a scene from the end of the world.

In the lobby Lona gathered a fistful of brochures on the tours. Then she returned to the screen-room. She saw a couple who had been in the cocktail lounge. The woman was in her early twenties, blonde, with artful green streaks rising from her hairline. Her eyes were cool. Her husband, if husband he was, was an older man, near forty, wearing a costly looking tunic. A perpetual-motion ring from one of the outworlds writhed on his left hand.

Tensely Lona approached them. She smiled.

"Hello. I'm Lona Kelvin. Perhaps you noticed us in the lounge."

She drew tight smiles, nervous ones. They were thinking, she knew,
what does she want from us?

They gave their names. Lona did not catch them, but that did not matter.

She said, "I thought perhaps it would be nice if the four of us sat together at dinner tonight. I think you'd find Minner very interesting. He's been to so many planets..."

They looked trapped. Blonde wife was nearly panicky. Suave husband deftly came to rescue.

"We'd love to.... other arrangements... friends from back home... perhaps another night..."

The tables were not limited to four or even six. There was always room for a congenial addition. Lona, rebuffed, knew now what Burris had sensed hours before. They were not wanted. He was the man of the evil eye, raining blight on their festivities. Clutching her brochures, Lona hurried back to the room. Burris was by the window, looking out over the snow.

"Come go through these with me, Minner." Her voice was pitched too high, too sharp.

"Do any of them look interesting?"

"They all do. I don't really know what's best You do the picking."

They sat on the bed and sorted through the glossy sheaf. There was the Adélie Land tour, half a day, to see penguins. A full day tour to the Ross Shelf Ice, including a visit to Little America and to the other explorer bases at McMurdo Sound. Special stop to see the active volcano, Mount Erebus. Or a longer tour up to the Antarctic Peninsula to see seals and sea leopards. The skiing trip to Marie Byrd Land. The coastal mountain trip through Victoria Land to Mertz Glacial Tongue. And a dozen others. They picked the penguin tour, and when they went down for dinner later, they put their names on the list.

At dinner they sat alone.

Burris said, "Tell me about your children, Lona. Have you ever seen them?"

"Not really. Not so I could touch, except only once. Just on screens."

"And Chalk will really get you some to raise?"

"He said he would."

"Do you believe him?"

"What else can I do?" she asked. Her hand covered his. "Do your legs hurt you?"

"Not really."

Neither of them ate much. After dinner films were shown: vivid tridims of an Antarctic winter. The darkness was the darkness of death, and a death-wind scoured across the plateau, lifting the top layer of snow like a million knives. Lona saw the penguins standing on their eggs, warming them. And then she saw ragged penguins driven before the gale, marching overland while a cosmic drum throbbed in the heavens and invisible hellhounds leaped on silent pads from peak to peak. The film ended with sunrise; the ice stained blood-red with the dawn of a six-month night; the frozen ocean breaking up, giant floes clashing and shattering. Most of the hotel guests went from the screening-room to the lounge. Lona and Burris went to bed. They did not make love. Lona sensed the storm building within him, and knew that it would burst forth before morning came.

They lay cradled in darkness; the window had to be opaqued to shut out the tireless sun. Lona rested on her back beside him, breathing slowly, her flank touching his. Somehow she dozed, and a poor, shallow sleep came to her. Her own phantoms visited her after a while. She awoke, sweating, to find herself naked in a strange room with a strange man next to her. Her heart was fluttering. She pressed her hands to her breasts and remembered where she was.

Burris stirred and groaned.

Gusts of wind battered the building. This was summer, Lona reminded herself. The chill seeped to her bones. She heard a distant sound of laughter. But she did not leave his side, nor did she try to sleep again.

Her eyes, dark-adjusted, watched his face. The mouth was expressive in its hinged way, sliding open, shutting, sliding again. Once his eyes did the same, but even when the lids were pulled back he saw nothing. He's back on Manipool, Lona realized. They've just landed, he and... and the ones with Italian names. And in a little while the Things will come for him.

Lona tried to see Manipool. The parched and reddened soil, the twisted, thorny plants. What were the cities like? Did they have roads, cars, vid-sets? Burris had never told her. All she knew was that it was a dry world, an old world, a world where the surgeons had great skill.

And now Burris screamed.

The sound began deep in his throat, a gargled, incoherent cry, and moved higher in pitch and volume as it progressed. Turning, Lona clung to him, pressing tight. Was his skin soaked with perspiration? No; impossible; it must be her own. He thrashed and kicked, sending the coverlet to the floor. She felt his muscles coiling and bulging beneath his sleek skin. He could snap me in half with a quick move, she thought

"It's all right, Minner. I'm here. I'm here. It's all right!"

"The knives... Prolisse... good God, the knives!"

"Minner!"

She did not let go of him. His left arm was dangling limply now, seemingly bending the wrong way at the elbow. He was calming. His hoarse breath was as loud as hoofbeats. Lona reached across him and turned on the light.

His face was blotched and mottled again. He blinked in that awful sidewise way of his three or four times and put his hand to his lips. Releasing him, she sat back, trembling a little. Tonight's explosion had been more violent than the one the night before.

"A drink of water?" she asked.

He nodded. He was gripping the mattress so hard she thought he would tear it.

He gulped. She said, "Was it that bad tonight? Were they hurting you?"

"I dreamed I was watching them operate. First Prolisse, and he died. Then they carved up Malcondotto. He died. And then..."

"Your turn?"

"No," he said in wonder. "No, they put Elise on the table. They carved her open, right between the—the breasts. And lifted up part of her chest, and I saw the ribs and her heart. And they reached inside."

"Poor Minner." She had to interrupt him before he spilled all that filthiness over her. Why had he dreamed of Elise? Was it a good sign, that he should see her being mutilated? Or would it have been better, she thought, if I was the one he dreamed about... I, being turned into something like him?

She took his hand and let it rest on the warmth of her body. There was only one method she could think of for easing his pain, and she employed it. He responded, rising, covering her. They moved urgently and harmoniously.

He appeared to sleep after that. Lona, edgier, pulled away from him and waited until a light slumber once more enveloped her. It was stained by sour dreams. It seemed that a returning starman had brought a pestilent creature with him, some kind of plump vampire, and it was affixed to her body, draining her... depleting her. It was a nasty dream, though not nasty enough to awaken her, and in time she passed into a deeper repose.

When they woke, there were dark circlets under her eyes, and her face looked pinched and hollow. Burris showed no effects of his broken night; his skin was not capable of reacting that graphically to short-range catabolic effects. He seemed almost cheerful as he got himself ready for the new day.

"Looking forward to the penguins?" he asked her.

Had he forgotten his bleak depression of the evening and his screaming terrors of the night? Or was he just trying to sweep them from view?

Just how human is he, anyway, Lona wondered?

"Yes," she said coolly. "We'll have a grand time, Minner. I can't wait to see them."

TWENTY-THREE

THE MUSIC OFTHE SPHERES

"They're beginning to hate each other already," Chalk said pleasantly.

He was alone, but to him that was no reason for not voicing his thoughts. He often talked to himself. A doctor once had told him that there were positive neuropsychic benefits to be had from vocalizing, even in solitude.

He floated in a bath of aromatic salts. The tub was ten feet deep, twenty feet long, a dozen feet wide: ample room even for the bulk of a Duncan Chalk. Its marble sides were flanked by alabaster rims and a surrounding tilework of shimmering oxblood porcelain, and the whole bathing enclosure was covered by a thick, clear dome that gave Chalk a full view of the sky. There was no reciprocal view of Chalk for an outsider; an ingenious optical engineer had seen to that. From without, the dome presented a milky surface-streaked with whorls of light pink.

Chalk drifted idly, gravity-free, thinking of his suffering
amanti.
Night had fallen but there were no stars tonight, only the reddish haze of unseen clouds. It was snowing once more. The flakes performed intricate arabesques as they spiraled toward the surface of the dome.

"He is bored with her," Chalk said. "She is afraid of him. She lacks intensity, to his taste. For hers, his voltage is too high. But they travel together. They eat together. They sleep together. And soon they'll quarrel bitterly."