Thorns (22 page)

From a thousand loudspeakers came a paean of praise for the girl, for the park, for the visitors. All sound converged toward a single shapeless roar. Burris moved closer to the pillar. Lona followed him. The girl was dancing now, kicking up her heels, capering wildly. Her bare body gleamed. The swollen flesh quivered and shook. She was all carnality in a single vessel.

"It's not Elise," said Burris suddenly, and the spell broke.

He turned away, his face darkening, and halted. All about them, fair-goers were streaming toward the pillar, the focal point of the park now, but Lona and Burris did not move. Their backs were to the dancer. Burris jerked as if struck, and folded his arms across his chest. He sank to a bench, head down.

This was no snobbery of boredom. He was sick, she realized.

"I feel so tired," he said huskily. "Drained of strength. I feel a thousand years old, Lona!"

Reaching for him, she coughed. Quite suddenly tears were streaming from her eyes. She dropped down beside him on the bench, struggling for breath.

"I feel the same way. Worn out."

"What's happening?"

"Something we breathed on that ride? Something we ate, Minner?"

"No. Look at my hands."

They were shaking. The little tentacles were hanging limp. His face was gray.

And she: it was as though she had run a hundred miles tonight. Or been delivered of a hundred babies.

This time, when he suggested that they leave the amusement park, she did not quarrel with him.

TWENTY-SIX

FROST AT MIDNIGHT

On Titan she broke away and left him. Burris had seen it coming for days and was not at all surprised. It came as something of a relief.

Tension had been rising since the South Pole. He was not sure why, other than that they were unfit for each other. But they had bee a at each other's throats steadily, first in a hidden way, then openly but figuratively and at the last literally. So she went away from him.

They spent six days at Luna Tivoli. The pattern of each day was the same. Late rising, a copious breakfast, some viewing of the Moon, and then to the park. The place was so big that there were always new discoveries to be made, yet by the third day Burris found that they were compulsively retracing their steps, and by the fifth he was enduringly sick of Tivoli. He tried to be tolerant, since Lona took such obvious pleasure in the place. But eventually his patience wore thin, and they quarreled. Each night's quarrel exceeded in intensity the one of the night before. Sometimes they resolved the conflict in fierce, sweaty passion, sometimes in sleepless nights of sulking.

And always, during or just after the quarrel, came that feeling of fatigue, that sickening, destructive loss of stamina. Nothing like that had ever happened to Burris before. The fact that the fits came over the girl simultaneously made it doubly strange. They said nothing to Aoudad and Nikolaides, whom they occasionally saw on the fringes of the crowds.

Burris knew that the virulent arguments were driving an ever-wider wedge between them. In less stormy moments he regretted that, for Lona was tender and kind, and he valued her warmth. All that was forgotten in his moments of rage, though. Then she seemed empty and useless and maddening to him, a burden added to all his other burdens, a foolish and ignorant and hateful child. He told her all that, at first hiding his meaning behind blunting metaphors, later hurling the naked words.

A breakup had to come. They were exhausting themselves, depleting their vital substances in these battles. The moments of love were more widely spaced now. Bitterness broke in more often.

On the arbitrarily designated morning of their arbitrarily designated sixth day at Luna Tivoli, Lona said, "Let's cancel and go on to Titan now."

"We're supposed to spend five more days here."

"Do you really want to?"

"Well, frankly... no."

He was afraid it would provoke another fountain of angry words, and it was too early in the day for them to begin that. But no, this was her morning for sacrificial gestures. She said, "I think I've had enough, and it's no secret that you've had enough. So why should we stay? Titan's probably much more exciting."

"Probably."

"And we've been so bad to each other here. A change of scenery ought to help."

It certainly would. Any barbarian with a fat wallet could afford the price of a ticket to Luna Tivoli, and the place was full of boors, drunks, rowdies. It drew liberally on a potential audience that went far deeper than Earth's managerial classes. But Titan was more select. Only wealthy sophisticates comprised its clientele, those to whom spending twice a workingman's annual wage on a single short trip was trivial. Such people, at least, would have the courtesy to deal with him as though his deformities did not exist. Antarctica's honeymooners, shutting their eyes to all that troubled them, had simply treated him as invisible. Luna Tivoli's patrons had guffawed in his face and mocked his differentness. On Titan, though, innate good manners would decree a cool indifference to his appearance. Look upon the strange man, smile, chat gracefully, but never show by word or deed that you are aware he is strange: that was good breeding. Of the three cruelties, Burris thought he preferred that kind.

He cornered Aoudad by the glare of fireworks and said, "We've had enough here. Book us for Titan."

"But you have—"

"—another five days. Well, We don't want them. Get us out of here and to Titan."

"I'll see what I can do," Aoudad promised.

Aoudad had watched them quarrel/ Burris felt unhappy about that, for reasons which he despised. Aoudad and Nikolaides had been Cupids to them, and Burris somehow held himself responsible for behaving at all times like an enthralled lover. Obscurely, he failed Aoudad whenever he snarled at Lona. Why do I give a damn about failing Aoudad? Aoudad isn't complaining about the quarrels. He doesn't offer to mediate. He doesn't say a word.

As Burris expected, Aoudad got them tickets to Titan without any difficulty. He called ahead to notify the resort that they would be arriving ahead of schedule. And off they went.

A lunar blast-off was nothing like a departure from Earth. With only a sixth the gravity to deal with, it took just a gentle shove to send the ship into space. This was a bustling spaceport, with departures daily for Mars, Venus, Titan, Ganymede, and Earth, every third day for the outer planets, weekly for Mercury. No interstellar ships left from Luna; by law and custom, starships could depart only from Earth, monitored every step of the way until they made the leap into warp somewhere beyond Pluto's orbit. Most of the Titan-bound ships stopped first at the important mining center on Ganymede, and their original itinerary had called for them to take one of those. But today's ship was nonstop. Lona would miss Ganymede, but it was her own doing. She had suggested the early arrival, not he. Perhaps they could stop at Ganymede on the way back to Earth.

There was a forced cheeriness about Lona's chatter as they slid into the gulf of darkness. She wanted to know all about Titan, just as she had wanted to know all about the South Pole, the change of seasons, the workings of a cactus, and many other things; but those questions she had asked out of naïve curiosity, and these were asked in the hope of rebuilding contact, any contact, between herself and him.

It would not work, Burris knew.

"It's the biggest moon in the system. It's bigger even than Mercury, and Mercury's a planet."

"But Mercury goes around the sun, and Titan goes around Saturn."

"That's right. Titan's much larger than our own moon. It's about seven hundred and fifty thousand miles from Saturn. You'll have a good view of the rings. It has an atmosphere: methane, ammonia, not very good for the lungs. Frozen. They say it's picturesque. I've never been there."

"How come?"

"When I was young, I couldn't afford to go. Later I was too busy in other parts of the universe."

The ship slipped on through space. Lona stared, wide-eyed, as they hopped over the plane of the asteroid belt, got a decent view of Jupiter not too far down its orbit from them, and sped outward. Saturn was in view.

To Titan then they came.

A dome again, of course. A bleak landing pad on a bleak plateau. This was a world of ice, but far different from deathly Antarctica. Every inch of Titan was alien and strange, while in Antarctica everything quickly became grindingly familiar. This was no simple place of cold and wind and whiteness.

There was Saturn to consider. The ringed planet hung low in the heavens, considerably larger than Earth appeared from Luna. There was just enough methane-ammonia atmosphere to give Titan's sky a bluish tinge, creating a handsome backdrop for glowing, golden Saturn with his thick, dark atmospheric stripe and his Midgard serpent of tiny stone particles.

"The ring is so thin," Lona complained. "Edge-on like this, I can hardly see it!"

"It's thin because Saturn's so big. Well have a better view of it tomorrow. You'll see that it isn't one ring but several. The inner rings move faster than the outer ones."

So long as he kept conversation on that sober level, all went well. But he hesitated to deviate from the impersonal, and so did she. Their nerves were too raw. They stood too close to the edge of the abyss after their recent quarrels.

They occupied one of the finest rooms in the glistening hotel. All about them were the moneyed ones, Earth's highest caste, those who had made fortunes in planetary development or warp-transport or power systems. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. The women, whatever their ages, were slim, agile, alert. The men were often beefy, but they moved with strength and vigor. No one made rude remarks about Burris or about Lona. No one stared. They were all friendly, in their distant way.

At dinner, the first night, they were joined at table by an industrialist with large holdings on Mars. He was far into his seventies, with a tanned, seamed face and narrow dark eyes. His wife could not have been more than thirty. They talked mostly of the commercial exploitation of extrasolar planets.

Lona, afterward: "She has her eye on you!"

"She didn't let me know about that."

"It was awfully obvious. I bet she was touching your foot under the table."

He sensed a struggle coming on. Hastily he led Lona to a viewport in the dome. "I tell you what," he said. "If she seduces me, you have my permission to seduce her husband."

"Very amusing."

"What's wrong? He has money."

"I haven't been in this place half a day and I hate it already."

"Stop it, Lona. You're pushing your imagination too hard. That woman wouldn't touch me. The thought would give her the shudders for a month, believe me. Look, look out there."

A storm was blowing up. Harsh winds ripped against the dome. Saturn was nearly in the full phase tonight, and his reflected light made a glittering track across the snow, meeting and melding with the white glare of the dome's illuminated ports. The precise needle-tips of stars were strewn across the vault of sky, looking nearly as hard as they would appear from space itself.

It was starting to snow.

They watched the wind whipping the snow about for a while. Then they heard music and followed it. Most of the guests were moving along the same track.

"Do you want to dance?" Lona asked.

An orchestra in evening clothes had appeared from somewhere. The tinkling, swirling sounds rose in volume. Strings, winds, a bit of percussion, a sprinkling of the alien instruments so popular in big-band music nowadays. The elegant guests moved in graceful rhythms over a shining floor.

Stiffly Burris took Lona in his arms and they joined the dancers.

He had never danced much before, and not at all since his return to Earth from Manipool. The mere thought of dancing in a place like this would have seemed grotesque to him only a few months ago. But he was surprised how well his redesigned body caught the rhythms of it. He was learning grace in these elaborate new bones. Around, around, around...

Lona's eyes held firm on his. She was not smiling. She seemed afraid of something.

Overhead was another clear dome. The Duncan Chalk school of architecture: show 'em the stars, but keep 'em warm. Gusts of wind sent snowflakes skidding across the top of the dome and drove them just as swiftly away. Lona's hand was cold in his. The tempo of the dance increased. The thermal regulators within him that had replaced his sweat glands were working overtime. Could he keep to such a giddy pace? Would he stumble?

The music stopped.

The dinnertime couple came over. The woman smiled. Lona glared.

The woman said, with the assurance of the very rich, "May we have the next dance?"

He had tried to avoid it. Now there was no tactful way to refuse, and Lona's jealousies would get another helping of fuel. The thin, reedy sound of the oboe summoned the dancers to the floor. Burris took the woman, leaving Lona, frozen-faced, with the aging industrial baron.

The woman was a dancer. She seemed to fly over the floor. She spurred Burris to demonic exertions, and they moved around the outside of the hall, virtually floating. At that speed even his split-perception eyes foiled him, and he could not find Lona. The music deafened him. The woman's smile was too bright