Thorns (20 page)

The tapes were very good. Aoudad, Nikolaides, both of them remaining surreptitiously close behind, picking up scattered gay images of the pair to relay to a waiting public. That snowball fight: a masterpiece. And the power-sled trip. Minner and Lona at the South Pole. The public was eating it up.

Chalk, in his own way, ate it up, too. He closed his eyes and opaqued his dome and drifted easily in the warm, fragrant tub. To him came splintered, fragmented sensations of disquiet.

... to have joints that did not behave as human joints should...

... to feel despised, rejected of mankind...

... childless motherhood...

... bright flashes of pain, bright as the thermoluminescent fungi casting their yellow glow on his office walls...

... the ache of the body and the ache of the soul...

... alone!

...unclean!

Chalk gasped as though a low current were running through his body. A finger flew up at an angle to his hand and remained there a moment. A hound with slavering jaws bounded through his forebrain. Beneath the sagging flesh of his chest the thick bands of muscle rhythmically contracted and let go.

... demon-visits in the sleep...

... a forest of watching eyes, stalked and shining...

... a world of dryness... thorns... thorns...

... the click and scratch of strange beasts moving in the walls... dry rot of the soul... all poetry turned to ash, all love to rust...

... stony eyes lifted toward the universe... and the universe peering back...

In ecstasy Chalk kicked at the water, sending up spewing cascades. He slapped its surface with the flat of his hand. Flukes! There go flukes! Ahoy, ahoy! Pleasure engulfed and consumed him. And this, he told himself cozily some minutes later, was merely the beginning.

TWENTY-FOUR

IN HEAVEN AS IT IS ON EARTH

On a day of flaming sunlight they left for Luna Tivoli, entering the next stage of their passage through Chalk's aeries of delight. The day was bright, but it was still winter; they were fleeing from the true winter of the north and the wintry summer of the south to the weatherless winter of the void. At the spaceport they received the full celebrity treatment: newsreel shots in the terminal, then the snub-snouted little car rushing them across the field while the common folk looked on in wonder, vaguely cheering the notables, whoever they might be.

Burris hated it. Every stray glance at him now seemed fresh surgery on his soul.

"Why did you let yourself in for it, then?" Lona wanted to know. "If you don't want people to see you like this, why did you ever let Chalk send you on this trip?"

"As a penance. As a deliberately chosen atonement for my withdrawal from the world. For the sake of discipline."

The string of abstractions failed to convince her. Perhaps they made no impact at all.

"But didn't you have a
reason
?"

"Those were my reasons."

"Just words."

"Never scoff at words, Lona."

Her nostrils flared momentarily. "You're making fun of me again!"

"Sorry." Genuinely. It was so easy to mock her.

She said, "I know what it's like to be stared at. I'm shy about it. But I had to do this, so Chalk would give me some of my babies."

"He promised me something, too."

"There! I knew you'd admit it!"

"A body transplant," Burris confessed. "He'll put me into a healthy, normal human body. All I have to do is let his cameras dissect me for a few months."

"Can they really do a thing like that?"

"Lona, if they can make a hundred babies from a girl who's never been touched by a man, they can do anything."

"But... to switch bodies..."

Wearily he said, "They haven't perfected the technique yet. It may be a few more years. I'll have to wait."

"Oh, Minner,. that would be wonderful! To put you in a real body!"

"This is my real body."

"
Another
body. That isn't so different. That doesn't hurt you so much. If they only could!"

"If they only could, yes."

She was more excited about it than he was. He had lived with the idea for weeks, long enough to doubt that it would ever be possible. And now he had dangled it before her, a gleaming new toy. But what did she care? They weren't married. She'd get her babies from Chalk as her reward for this antic and would disappear into obscurity once more, fulfilled after her fashion, glad to be rid of that irritating, chafing, sarcastic consort. He'd go his own way, too, perhaps condemned to this grotesque housing forever, perhaps transferred to a sleek standard model body.

The car scooted up a ramp, and they were within the ship. The vehicle's top sprang back. Bart Aoudad peered in at them.

"How are the lovebirds?"

A silent exit, unsmiling. Aoudad, worried, fluttered about them. "Everybody cheerful, relaxed? No spacesickness, eh, Minner? Not you! Hah-hah-hah!"

"Hah," said Burris.

Nikolaides, too, was there, with documents, booklets, expense vouchers. Dante had needed only Virgil to guide him through the circles of Hell, but I get two. We live in inflationary times. Burris gave Lona his arm, and they moved toward the innerness of the ship. Her fingers were rigid against his flesh. She was nervous about going to space, he thought, or else the unbroken tension of this grand tour was weighing too heavily on her.

It was a brief trip: eight hours under low but steady acceleration to cover the 240,000 miles. This same ship had once made it in two stops, pausing first at the pleasure-satellite orbiting 50,000 miles from Earth. But the pleasure-satellite had exploded ten years ago, in one of the rare miscalculations of a secure epoch. Thousands of lives lost; debris raining down on Earth for a month; bare girders of the shattered globe orbiting like bones of a giant nearly three years before the salvage operation was complete.

Someone Burris had loved had been aboard the Wheel when it died. She was there with someone else, though, savoring the game tables, the sensory shows, the haute cuisine, the atmosphere of never-come-tomorrow. Tomorrow had come unexpectedly.

He had thought, when she broke with him, that nothing worse could happen to him in the rest of his days. A young man's romantic fantasy, for very shortly she was dead, and that was far worse for him than when she had refused him. Dead, she was beyond hope of reclaiming, and for a while he was dead, too, though still walking about. And after that, curiously, the pain ebbed until it was all gone. The worst possible thing, to lose a girl to a rival, then to lose her to catastrophe? Hardly. Hardly. Ten years later Burris had lost himself. Now he thought he knew what the real worst might be.

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard
Aristarchus IV.
On behalf of Captain Villeparisis, I want to offer our best wishes for a pleasant trip. We must ask you to remain in your cradles until the period of maximum acceleration is over. Once we've escaped from Earth, you'll be free to stretch your legs a bit and enjoy a view of space."

The ship held four hundred passengers, freight, mail. There were twenty private cabins along its haunches, and one had been assigned to Burris and Lona. The others sat side by side in a vast congregation, wriggling for a view of the nearest port.

"Here we go," Burris said softly.

He felt the jets flail and kick at the earth, felt the rockets cut in, felt the ship lift effortlessly. A triple bank of gravitrons shielded the passengers from the worst effects of the blast-off, but it was impossible to delete gravity altogether on so huge a vessel, as Chalk had been able to do on his little pleasure-craft.

The shrinking Earth dangled like a green plum just outside the viewport. Burris realized that Lona was not looking at it, but solicitously was studying him.

"How do you feel?" she asked.

"Fine. Fine."

"You don't look relaxed."

"It's the gravity drag. Do you think I'm nervous about going into space?"

A shrug. "It's your first time up since—since Manipool, isn't it?"

"I took that ride in Chalk's ship, remember?"

"That was different That was sub-atmospheric."

"You think I'm going to congeal in terror just because I'm taking a space journey?" he asked. "Do you suppose that I imagine this ferry is a nonstop express back to Manipool?"

"You're twisting my words."

"Am I, now? I said I felt fine. And you began to construct a great elaborate fantasy of malaise for me. You—"

"Stop it, Minner."

Her eyes were bleak. Her words were sharply accented, brittle, keen-edged. He forced his shoulders back against the cradle and tried to compel his hand-tentacles to uncoil. Now she had done it: he had been relaxed, but she had made him tense. Why did she have to mother him this way? He was no cripple. He didn't need to be calmed in a blast-off. He had been blasting off years before she was born. Then what frightened him now? How could her words have undermined his confidence so easily?

They halted the quarrel as though slicing a tape, but ragged edges remained. He said, as gently as he could, "Don't miss the view, Lona. You've never seen Earth from up here before, have you?"

The planet was far from them now. Its complete outline could be discerned. The Western Hemisphere faced them in a blaze of sunlight. Of Antarctica, whore they had been only hours ago, nothing was visible except the long jutting finger of the Peninsula, thumbing itself at Cape Horn.

With an effort not to sound didactic, Burris showed her how the sunlight struck the planet athwart, warming the south at this time of year, barely brightening the north. He spoke of the ecliptic and its plane, of the rotation and the revolution of the planet, of the procession of the seasons. Lona listened gravely, nodding often, making polite sounds of agreement whenever he paused to await them. He suspected that she still did not understand. But at this point he was willing to settle for the shadow of comprehension, if he could not have the substance, and she gave him the shadow.

They left their cabin and toured the ship. They saw the Earth from various angles. They bought drinks. They were fed. Aoudad, from his seat in the tourist section, smiled at them. They were stared at considerably.

In the cabin once more, they dozed.

They slept through the mystic moment of turnover, when they passed from Earth's grasp at last into Luna's. Burris woke joltingly, staring across the sleeping girl and blinking at the blackness. It seemed to him that he saw the charred girders of the shattered Wheel drifting out there. No, no; impossible. But he
had
seen them, on a journey a decade ago. Some of the bodies that had spilled from the Wheel as it split open were said still to be in orbit, moving in vast parabolas about the sun. To Burris's knowledge, no one had actually seen such a wanderer in years; most of the corpses, perhaps nearly all, had been decently collected by torch-ships and carried off, and the rest, he would like to believe, had by this time made their way to the sun for the finest of all funerals. It was an old private terror of his to see her contorted face come drifting up within view as she passed through this zone.

The ship heeled and pivoted gently, and the beloved white pocked countenance of the Moon came into view.

Burris touched Lona's arm. She stirred, blinked, looked at him, then outward. Watching her, he detected the spreading wonder on her face even with her back to him.

Half a dozen shining domes now could be seen on Lima's surface.

"Tivoli!" she cried.

Burris doubted that any of the domes really was the amusement park. Luna was infested with domed buildings, built over the decades for a variety of warlike, commercial, or scientific reasons, and none of these matched his own mental picture of Tivoli. He did not correct her, though. He was learning.

The ferry, decelerating, spiraled down to its landing pad.

This was an age of domes, many of them the work of Duncan Chalk. On Earth they tended to be trussed geodesic domes, but not always; here, under lessened gravity, they usually were the simpler, less rigid extruded domes of one-piece construction. Chalk's empire of pleasure was bounded and delimited by domes, beginning with the one over his private pool, and then on to the cupola of the Galactic Room, the Antarctic hostelry, the Tivoli dome, and outward, outward to the stars.

The landing was smooth.

"Let's have a good time here, Minner! I've always dreamed of coming here!"

"We'll enjoy ourselves," he promised.

Her eyes glittered. A child—no more than that—she was. Innocent, enthusiastic, simple—he ticked off her qualities. But she was warm. She cherished and nourished and mothered him, to a fault. He knew he was underestimating her. Her life had known so little pleasure that she had not grown jaded with small thrills. She could respond openly and wholeheartedly to Chalk's parks. She was young. But not hollow, Burris tried to persuade himself. She had suffered. She bore scars, even as he did.