Thorns

SIXTEEN: THE OWL, FOR ALL HIS FEATHERS, WAS A-COLD

They stood together by the hospital power plant, looking through the transparent wall. Within, something fibrous lashed and churned as it picked up energy from the nearest pylon and fed it to the transformer bank. Burris was explaining to her about how power was transmitted that way, without wires. Lona tried to listen, but she did not really care enough about finding out. It was hard to concentrate on something like that, so remote from her experience. Especially with him beside her.

“Quite a contrast from the old days,” he was saying. “I can still recall a time when the million-kv lines were strung across the countryside, and they were talking of stepping the voltage up to a million and a half—”

“You know so many things. How did you have time to learn all that about electricity if you had to be a starman, too?”

“I’m terribly old,” he said.

“I bet you aren’t even eighty yet.”

She was joking, but he didn’t seem to realize it. His face quirked in that funny way, the lips (were they still to be called lips?) pulling outward toward his cheeks. “I’m forty years old,” he said hollowly. “I suppose to you forty is most of the way to being eighty.”

“Not quite.”

“Let’s go look at the garden.”

“All those sharp pointed things!”

“You don’t like them,” he said.

“Oh, no, no, no,” Lona insisted, recovering quick—He likes the cacti, she told herself. I mustn’t criticize the things he likes. He needs someone to like the things he likes. Even if they aren’t very pretty.

They strolled toward the garden. It was noon, and the pale sun cut sharp shadows into the crisp, dry earth. Lona shivered. She had a coat on over her hospital gown, but even so, even here in the desert, it was a cold day. Burris, lightly dressed, didn’t seem to mind the chill. Lona wondered whether that new body of his had some way of adjusting to meet the temperature, like a snake’s. But she didn’t ask. She tried not to talk to him about his body. And the more she thought about it, the more it seemed to her that a snake’s way of adjusting to cold weather was to crawl off and go to sleep. She let the point pass.

He told her a great deal about cacti.

They paced the garden, up and down, through the avenues of bristling plants. Not a leaf, not even a bough. Nor a flower. Here are buds, though, he told her. This one will have a fine red apple-like fruit in June. They make candy from this one. Thorns and all? Oh, no, not the thorns. He laughed. She laughed, too. She wanted to reach out and take him by the hand. What would it be like, feeling that curling extra thing against her fingers?

She had expected to be afraid of him. It surprised her, but she felt no fear.

She wished he would take her inside, though.

He pointed to a blurred shape hovering over one of the nastiest-looking of the cactus plants. “Look there!”

“A big moth?”

“Hummingbird, silly! He must be lost.” Burris moved forward, obviously excited. Lona saw the things on his hands wriggle around, as they often did when he wasn’t paying attention to them. He was down on one knee, peering at the hummingbird. She looked at him in profile, observing the strong jaw, the flat drumhead of twanging skin where an ear should have been. Then, because he would want her to, she looked at the bird. She saw a tiny body and what could perhaps be a long, straight bill. A dark cloud hung about the bird. “Are those its wings?” she asked.

“Yes. Beating terribly fast. You can’t see them, can you?”

“Just a blur.”

“I see the individual wings. Lona, it’s incredible! I see the wings! With these eyes!”

“That’s wonderful, Minner.”

“The bird’s a stray; probably belongs in Mexico, probably wishes he were there now. He’ll die up here before he finds a flower. I wish I could do something.”

“Catch him? Have someone take him to Mexico?”

Burris looked at his hands as if weighing the possibility of seizing the hummingbird in a lightning swoop. Then he shook his head. “My hands couldn’t be fast enough, even now. Or I’d crush him if I caught him. I—there he goes!”

And there he went. Lona watched the brown blur vanish down the garden. At least he’s going south, she thought. She turned to Burris.

“It pleases you some of the time, doesn’t it?” she asked. “You like it … a little.”

“Like what?”

“Your new body.”

He quivered a little. She wished she hadn’t mentioned it.

He seemed to check a first rush of words. He said, “It has a few advantages, I admit.”

“Minner, I’m cold.”

“Shall we go inside?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Anything you say, Lona.”

They moved side by side toward the door. Their shadows dribbled off to their left at a sharp angle. He was much taller than she was, nearly a foot. And very strong. I wish. That he would take me. In his arms.

She was not at all put off by his appearance.

Of course, she had seen only his head and his hands. He might have a huge staring eye set in the middle of his chest. Or a mouth under each arm. A tail. Big purple spots. But as the fantasies welled through her mind, it struck her that even those inventions were not really frightening. If she could get used to his face and his hands, as she had so speedily, what would further differences matter? He had no ears, his nose was not a nose, his eyes and his lips were strange, his tongue and his teeth were like something out of a dream. And each hand had that extra thing. Yet quite rapidly she had stopped noticing. His voice was pleasant and normal, and he was so smart, so interesting. And he seemed to like her. Was he married, she wondered. How could she ask?

The hospital door bellied inward as they approached.

“My room?” he asked. “Or yours?”

“What will we do now?”

“Sit. Talk. Play cards.”

“Playing cards bored you.”

“Did I ever say it did?” he asked her.

“You were too polite. But I could tell. I could see you were hiding it. It was written all over your…” Her voice trailed off. “Face.”

It keeps coming back, she thought.

“Here’s my room,” she said.

Which room they went to hardly mattered. They were identical, one facing the rear garden where they had just been, one facing the courtyard. A bed, a desk, an array of medical equipment. He took the bedside chair. She sat on the bed. She wanted him to come over and touch her body, warm her chilled flesh, but of course she did not dare suggest it.

“Minner, how soon will you be leaving the hospital?”

“Soon. A few days. What about you, Lona?”

“I guess I could go out almost any time now. What will you do when you leave?”

“I’m not sure. I think I’ll travel. See the world, let the world see me.”

“I’ve always wanted to travel,” she said. Too obvious. “I’ve never really been anywhere.”

“Such as where?”

“Luna Tivoli,” she said. “Or the Crystal Planet. Or—well, anywhere. China. The Antarctic.”

“It’s not hard to get there. You get on the liner and go.” For an instant his face sealed itself, and she did not know what to think; the lips slid shut, the eyes clicked their lids into place. She thought of a turtle. Then Burris opened again and said, astonishing her, “What if we went to some of those places together?”