Thorns (9 page)

"It can't be done. I've already explored the idea with the doctors who examined me after my return. I'm a mess of strange antibodies, and I'll reject any graft."

"Do you think that's so? Or were they merely telling you a convenient lie?"

"I think it's so."

"Let me send you to a hospital," Chalk suggested. "We'll run a few tests to confirm the earlier verdict. If it's so, so. If not, we can make life a little easier for you. Yes?"

"Why are you doing this, Chalk? What's the quid pro quo?"

The fat man pivoted and swung ponderously forward until his eyes were only inches from Burris's face. Burris surveyed the oddly delicate lips, the fine nose, the immense cheeks and puffy eyelids. In a low voice Chalk murmured, "The price is a steep one. It'll sicken you to the core. You'll turn down the whole deal."

"What is it?"

"I'm a purveyor of popular amusement. I can't remotely get my investment back out of you, but I want to recover what I can."

"The price?"

"Full rights to commercial exploitation of your story," said Chalk. "Beginning with your seizure by the aliens, carrying through your return to Earth and your difficult adjustment to your altered condition, and continuing on through your forthcoming period of re-adaptation. The world already knows that three men came to a planet called Manipool, two were killed, and a third came back the victim of surgical experiments. That much was announced, and then you dropped from sight. I want to put you back in sight. I want to show you rediscovering your humanity, relating to other people again, groping upward out of hell, eventually triumphing over your catastrophic experience and coming out of it purged. It'll mean a frequent intrusion on your privacy, and I'm prepared to hear you refuse. After all, one would expect—"

"It's a new form of torture, is it?"

"Something of an ordeal, perhaps," Chalk admitted. His wide forehead was stippled with sweat. He looked flushed and strained, as though approaching some sort of inner emotional climax.

"Purged," Burris whispered. "You offer me purgatory."

"Call it that."

"I hide for weeks. Then I stand naked before the universe for five years. Eh?"

"Expenses paid."

"Expenses paid," said Burris. "Yes. Yes. I accept the torture. I'm your toy, Chalk. Only a human being would refuse the offer. But I accept. I accept!"

TEN

A POUND OF FLESH

"He's at the hospital," Aoudad said. "They've begun to study him." He plucked at the woman's clothes. "Take them off, Elise."

Elise Prolisse brushed the questing hand away. "Will Chalk really put him back in a human body?"

"I don't doubt it."

"Then if Marco had returned alive, he might have been put back, too."

Aoudad was noncommittal. "You're dealing in too many ifs now. Marco's dead. Open your robe, dear."

"Wait. Can I visit Burris in the hospital?"

"I suppose. What do you want with him?"

"Just to talk. He was the last man to see my husband alive, remember? He can tell me how Marco died."

"You would not want to know," said Aoudad softly. "Marco died as they tried to make him into the kind of creature Burris now is. If you saw Burris, you would realize that Marco is better off dead."

"All the same—"

"You would not want to know."

"I asked to see him," Elise said dreamily, "as soon as he returned. I wanted to talk to him about Marco. And the other, Malcondotto—he had a widow, too. But they would not let us near him. And afterward Burris disappeared. You could take me to him!"

"It's for your own good that you keep away," Aoudad told her. His hands crept up her body, lingering, seeking out the magnetic snaps and depolarizing them. The garment opened. The heavy breasts came into view, deathly white, tipped with circlets of deep red. He felt the inward stab of desire. She caught his hands as he reached for them.

"You will help me see Burris?" she asked.

"I—"

"You will help me see Burris." Not a question this time.

"Yes. Yes."

The hands blocking his path dropped away. Trembling, Aoudad peeled back the garments. She was a handsome woman, past her first youth, meaty, yet handsome. These Italians! White skin, dark hair.
Sensualissima!
Let her see Burris if she wished. Would Chalk object? Chalk had already indicated the kind of matchmaking he expected. Burris and the Kelvin girl. But perhaps Burris and the widow Prolisse first? Aoudad's mind churned.

Elise looked up at him in adoration as his lean, tough body poised above her.

Her last garment surrendered. He stared at acres of whiteness, islands of black and red.

"Tomorrow you will arrange it," she said.

"Yes. Tomorrow."

He fell upon her nakedness. Around the fleshy part of her left thigh she wore a black velvet band. A mourning band for Marco Prolisse, done to death incomprehensibly by incomprehensible beings on an incomprehensible world.
Pover'uomo!
Her flesh blazed. She was incandescent. A tropical valley beckoned to him. Aoudad entered. Almost at once came a strangled cry of ecstasy.

ELEVEN

TWO IF BY NIGHT

The hospital lay at the very edge of the desert. It was a U-shaped building, long and low, whose limbs pointed toward the east. Early sunlight, rising, crept along them until it splashed against the long horizontal bar linking the parallel vertical wings. The construction was of gray sandstone tinged with red. Just to the west of the building—that is, behind its main section—was a narrow garden strip, and beyond the garden began the zone of dry brownish desert.

The desert was not without life of its own. Somber tufts of sagebrush were common. Beneath the parched surface were the tunnels of rodents. Kangaroo mice could be seen by the lucky at night, grasshoppers during the day. Cacti and euphorbias and other succulents studded the earth.

Some of the desert's abundant life had invaded the hospital grounds themselves. The garden in the rear was a desert garden, thick with the thorned things of dryness. The courtyard between the two limbs of the U had been planted with cacti also. Here stood a saguaro six times the height of a man, with rugged central trunk and five skyward arms. There, framing it, were two specimens of the bizarre variant form, the cancer cactus, solid trunk, two small arms crying help, and a cluster of gnarled, twisted growths at the summit. Down the path, tree-high, the grotesque white cholla. Facing it, squat, sturdy, the thorn-girdled barrel of a water cactus. Spiny canes of an opuntia; flat grayish pads of the prickly pear; looping loveliness of a cereus. At other times of the year these formidable, bristling, stolid gargoyles bore tender blossoms, yellow and violet and pink, pale and delicate. But this was winter. The air was dry, the sky blue in a hard way and cloudless, though snow never fell here. This was a timeless place, the humidity close to zero. The winds could be chilling, free of weather, going through a fifty-degree shift of temperature from summer to winter but otherwise remaining unaltered

This was the place to which Lona Kelvin had been brought in summer, six months ago, after her attempt at suicide. Most of the cacti had already flowered by then. Now she was back, and she had missed the flowering season once more, coming three months too soon instead of three months too late. It would have been better for her to time her self-destructive impulses more precisely.

The doctors stood above her bed, speaking of her as though she were elsewhere.

"It'll be easier to repair her this time. No need to heal bones. Just a lung graft or so and she'll be all right."

"Until she tries again."

"That's not for me to worry about. Let them send her for psychotherapy. All I do is repair the shattered body."

"Not shattered just now, though. Just badly used."

"She'll get herself sooner or later. A really determined self-destroyer always succeeds. Let them step into nuclear converters, or something permanent like that. Jump from ninety floors up. We can't paste a smear of molecules together."

"Aren't you afraid you'll give her ideas?"

"If she's listening. But she could have thought of that herself if she wanted to."

"You've got something there. Maybe she's not a really determined self-destroyer. Maybe she's just a self-advertiser."

"I think I agree. Two suicide attempts in six months, both of them botched—when all she needed to do was open the window and jump—"

"What's the alveolar count?"

"Not bad."

"Her blood pressure?"

"Rising. Adrenocortical flow's down. Respiration up two points. She's coming along."

"We'll have her walking in the desert in three days."

"She'll need rest. Someone to talk to her. Why the hell does she want to be dead, anyway?"

"Who knows? I wouldn't think she was bright enough to want to kill herself."

"Fear and trembling. The sickness unto death."

"Anomie is supposedly reserved for more complex..."

They moved away from her bed, still talking. Lona did not open her eyes. She had not even been able to decide how many of them had been over her. Three, she guessed. More than two, less than four—so it had seemed. But their voices were so similar. And they didn't really argue with each other; they simply placed one slab of statement atop the next, gluing them carefully in place. Why had they saved her if they thought so little of her?

This time she had been certain she was going to die.

There are ways and ways of getting killed. Lona was shrewd enough to conceive of the most reliable ones, yet somehow had not permitted herself to try them, not out of fear of meeting death but out of fear of what she might encounter on the road. That other time she had hurled herself in front of a truck. Not on a highway, where vehicles hurtling toward her at a hundred and fifty miles an hour would swiftly and effectively mince her, but on a city street, where she was caught and tossed and slammed down, broken but not totally shattered, against the side of a building. So they had rebuilt her bones, and she had walked again in a month, and she was without outer scars.

And yesterday—it had seemed so simple to go down the hall to the dissolver room, and carefully disregard the rules by opening the disposal sac, and thrust her head in, and take a deep breath of the acrid fumes—

Throat and lungs and throbbing heart should have dissolved away. Given an hour's time, as she lay twitching on the cold floor, and they would have. But within minutes Lona was in helpful hands. Forcing down her throat some neutralizing substance. Thrusting her into a car. The first-aid station. Then the hospital, a thousand miles from home.

She was alive.

She was injured, of course. She had burned her nasal passages, had damaged her throat, had lost a considerable chunk of lung tissue. They had repaired the minor damage last night, and already nose and throat were healing. In a few days her lungs would be whole again. Death had no dominion in this land any longer.

Pale sunlight caressed her cheeks. It was late afternoon; the sun was behind the hospital, sinking toward the Pacific. Lona's eyes fluttered open. White robes, white sheets, green walls. A few books, a few tapes. An array of medical equipment thoughtfully sealed behind a locked sheet of clear sprayon. A private room! Who was paying for that? The last time the government scientists had paid. But now?

From her window she could see the twisted, tormented, thorny shapes of the cacti in the rear garden. Frowning, she made out two figures moving between the rows of rigid plants. One, quite a tall man, wore a buff-colored hospital gown. His shoulders were unusually broad. His hands and face were bandaged. He's been in a fire, Lona thought. The poor man. Beside him was a shorter man in business clothes, lean, restless. The tall one was pointing out a cactus to the other. Telling him something, perhaps lecturing him on cactus botany. And now reaching out with a bandaged hand. Touching the long, sharp spines. Watch out! You'll hurt yourself! He's sticking his hand right on the spines! Turning to the little one now. Pointing. The little one shaking his head—no, he doesn't want to stick himself on the spines.

, The big one must be a little crazy, Lona decided.

She watched as they came nearer her window. She saw the smaller man's pointed ears and beady grey eyes. She could see nothing of the bigger man's face at all. Only the tiniest of slits broke the white wall of his bandage. Lona's mind quickly supplied the details of his mutilation: the corrugated skin, the flesh runneled and puddled by the flames, the lips drawn aside in a fixed sneer. But they could fix that. Surely they could give him a new face here. He would be all right.

Lona felt a profound envy. Yes, this man had suffered pain, but soon the doctors would repair all that. His pain was only on the outside. They'd send him away, tall and strong and once more handsome, back to his wife, back to his...