Thorns

NINETEEN: LE JARDIN DES SUPPLICES

There had never been such a restaurant this side of Babylon. Tier upon tier of terraces rose toward the starry dome. Refraction was banished here, and the dining room seemed to be open to the heavens, but in fact the elegant diners were shielded from the elements at all times. A screen of black light framing the facade of the hotel cancelled out the effect of the city illumination, so that the stars always gleamed over the Galactic Room as they would above an untenanted forest.

The far worlds of the universe thus lay only a short distance out of reach. The things of those worlds, the harvest of the stars, gave splendor to the room. The texture of its curving walls was due to an array of alien artifacts: bright-hued pebbles, potsherds, paintings, tinkling magic-trees of odd alloys, zigzagging constructions of living light, each embedded in its proper niche in the procession of tiers. The tables seemed to grow from the floor, which was carpeted with a not-quite-sentient organism found on one of the worlds of Aldebaran. The carpet was, to be blunt about it, not too different in structure and function from a Terran slime mold, but the management did not make too much ceremony over identifying it, and the effect it produced was one of extreme richness.

Other things grew in select spots of the Galactic Room: potted shrubs, sweet-smelling blossoming plants, even dwarf trees, all (so it was said) imported from other worlds. The chandelier itself was the product of alien hands: a colossal efflorescence of golden teardrops, crafted from the amber-like secretion of a bulky sea-beast living along the gray shores of a Centaurine planet.

It cost an incalculable sum to have dinner at the Galactic Room. Every table was occupied, every night. One made reservations weeks in advance. Those who had been lucky enough to choose this night were granted the unexpected treat of seeing the starman and the girl who had had the many babies, but the diners, most of them celebrities themselves, had only fleeting interest in the much-publicized pair. A quick look, and then back to the wonders on one’s plate.

Lona clung tightly to Burris’s arm as they passed between the thick, clear doors. Her small fingers dug so deeply that she knew she must be hurting him. She found herself standing on a narrow raised platform looking out onto an enormous expanse of emptiness, with the starry sky blazing overhead. The core of the restaurant-dome was hollow and many hundreds of feet across; the tiers of tables clung like scales to the outer shell, giving every diner a window seat.

She felt as though she were tipping forward, tumbling into the open well before her.

“Oh!” Sharply. Knees trembling, throat dry, she rocked on her heels and quickly closed and opened her eyes. Terror pierced her in a thousand places. She might fall and be lost in the abyss; or her sprayon gown might deliquesce and leave her naked before this fashionable horde; or that she-witch with the giant udders might reappear and attack them as they ate; or she might commit some horrible blunder at the table; or, suddenly and violently ill, she might spray the carpet with her vomit. Anything might happen. This restaurant had been conceived in a dream, but not necessarily a good dream.

A furry voice out of nowhere murmured, “Mr. Burris, Miss Kelvin, welcome to the Galactic Room. Please step forward.”

“We get on that gravity plate,” Burris prompted her.

The coppery plate was a disk an inch thick and two yards in diameter, protruding from the rim of their platform. Burris led her onto it, and at once it slipped free of its mooring and glided outward and upward. Lona did not look down. The floating plate took them to the far side of the great room and came to rest beside a vacant table perched precariously on a cantilevered ledge. Dismounting, Burris helped Lona to the ledge. Their carrier disk fluttered away, returning to its place. Lona saw it edge-on for a moment, wearing a gaudy corona of reflected light.

The table, on a single leg, appeared to sprout organically from the ledge. Lona gratefully planted herself on her chair, which molded itself instantly to the contours of her back and buttocks. There was something obscene about that confident grip, and yet it was reassuring; the chair, she thought, would not release her if she became dizzy and started to slide toward the steep drop to her left.

“How do you like it?” Burris asked, looking into her eyes.

“It’s incredible. I never imagined it was like this.” She did not tell him that she was nearly sick from the impact of it.

“We have a choice table. It’s probably the one Chalk himself uses when he eats here.”

“I never knew there were so many stars!”

They looked up. From where they sat they had an unimpeded view of almost a hundred and fifty degrees of arc. Burris told her the stars and planets.

“Mars,” he said. “That’s easy: the big orange one. But can you see Saturn? The rings aren’t visible, of course, but…” He took her hand, aimed it, and described the lay of the heavens until she thought she saw what he meant. “We’ll be out there soon, Lona. Titan’s not visible from here, not with naked eye, but we’ll be on it ourselves before long. And then we’ll see those rings! Look, look there: Orion. And Pegasus.” He called off the constellations for her. He named stars with a sensuous pleasure in uttering the sounds of them: Sinus, Arcturus, Polaris, Bellatrix, Rigel, Algol, Antares, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Procyon, Markab, Deneb, Vega, Alphecca. “Each of them a sun,” he said. “Most have worlds. And there they all are spread out before us!”

“Have you visited many other suns?”

“Eleven. Nine with planets.”

“Including any of the ones you just named? I like those names.”

He shook his head. “The suns I went to had numbers, not names. At least, not names Earthmen had given. Most of them had other names. Some I learned.” She saw the corners of his mouth pulling open and rapidly drawing closed again: a sign of tension in him, Lona had learned. Should I talk about the stars to him? Perhaps he doesn’t want to be reminded.

Under this bright canopy, though, she could not leave the theme alone.

“Will you ever go back out there?” she asked.

“Out of this system? I doubt it. I’m retired from the service now. And we don’t have tourist flights to neighboring stars. But I’ll be off Earth again, of course. With you: the planetary tour. Not quite the same. But safer.”

“Can you—can you—” she debated and rushed onward—“show me the planet where you were—captured?”

Three quick contortions of his mouth. “It’s a bluish sun. You can’t see it from this hemisphere. You can’t see it with naked eye even down below. Six planets. Manipool’s the fourth. When we were orbiting it, coming around ready to go down, I felt a strange excitement. As though my destiny drew me to this place. Maybe there’s a little tinge of the pre-cog in me, eh, Lona? Surely Manipool had its large place in my destiny. But I can tell I’m no pre-cog. From time to time I’m hit with this powerful conviction that I’m marked for a return trip. And that’s absurd. To go back there … to confront Them again…” His fist closed suddenly, tightening with a convulsive snap that pulled his entire arm inward. A vase of thick-petaled blue flowers nearly went flying into the void. Lona caught it. She noticed that when he closed his hand, the little outer tentacle neatly wrapped itself across the backs of his fingers. Putting both of her hands over his, she held him by the knuckles until the tension ebbed and his fingers opened.

“Let’s not talk of Manipool,” she suggested. “The stars are beautiful, though.”

“Yes. I never really thought of them that way until I came back to Earth after my first voyage. We see them only as dots of light, from down here. But when you’re out there caught in the crisscross of starlight, bouncing this way and that as the stars buffet you, it’s different. They leave a mark on you. Do you know, Lona, that you get a view of the stars from this room that’s almost as piercing as what you see from the port of a starship?”

“How do they do it? I’ve never seen anything like that.”

He tried to explain about the curtain of black light. Lona was lost after the third sentence, but she stared intently into his strange eyes, pretending to listen and knowing that she must not be deceiving him. He knew so much! And yet he was frightened in this room of delights, just as she was frightened. So long as they kept talking, it created a barrier against the fear. But in the silences Lona was awkwardly aware of the hundreds of rich, sophisticated people all about her, and of the overwhelming luxury of the room, and of the abyss beside her, and of her own ignorance and inexperience. She felt naked beneath that blaze of stars. In the interstices of the conversation even Burris again became strange to her; his surgical distortions, which she had nearly ceased to notice, abruptly took on a fiery conspicuousness.

“Something to drink?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes, please. You order. I don’t know what to have.”

No waiter, human or robot, was in sight, nor did Lona see any attending at the other tables. Burris gave the order simply by uttering it into a golden grillwork at his left elbow. His cool knowledgeableness awed her, as she half suspected it was meant to do. She said, “Have you eaten here often? You seem to know what to do.”

“I was here once. More than a decade ago. It’s not a place you forget easily.”

“Were you a starman already, then?”

“Oh, yes. I’d made a couple of trips. I was on furlough. There was this girl I wanted to impress—”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t impress her. She married someone else. They were killed when the Wheel collapsed, on their honeymoon.”

Ten years and more ago, Lona thought. She had been less than seven years old. She felt shriveled with her youthfulness beside him. She was glad when the drinks arrived.

They came skimming across the abyss on a small gravitron tray. It seemed amazing to Lona that none of the serving trays, which now she noticed were quite numerous, ever collided as they soared to their tables. But, of course, it was no great task to program non-intersecting orbits.

Her drink came in a bowl of polished black stone, thick to the hand but smooth and gracile to the lip. She scooped up the bowl and automatically took it toward her mouth; then, halting an instant before the sip, she realized her error. Burris waited, smiling, his own glass still before him.

He seems so damned schoolmasterish when he smiles like that, she thought. Scolding me without saying a word. I know what he’s thinking: that I’m an ignorant little tramp who doesn’t know her manners.

She let the anger subside. It was really anger directed at herself, not him, she realized after a moment. Sensing that made it easier to grow calm.

She looked at his drink.

There was something swimming in it.

The glass was translucent quartz. It was three-fifths filled with a richly viscous green fluid. Moving idly back and forth was a tiny animal, teardrop-shaped, whose violet skin left a faint glow behind as it swam.

“Is that supposed to be there?”

Burris laughed. “I have a Deneb martini, so-called. It’s a preposterous name. Specialty of the house.”

“And in it?”

“A tadpole, essentially. Amphibious life-form from one of the Aldebaran worlds.”

“Which you drink?”

“Yes. Live.”

“Live.” Lona shuddered. “Why? Does it taste that good?”

“It has no taste at all, as a matter of fact. It’s pure decoration. Sophistication come full circle, back to barbarism. One gulp, and down it goes.”

“But it’s alive! How can you kill it?”

“Have you ever eaten an oyster, Lona?”

“No. What’s an oyster?”

“A mollusk. Once quite popular, served in its shell. Live. You sprinkle it with lemon juice—citric acid, you know—and it writhes. Then you eat it. It tastes of the sea. I’m sorry, Lona. That’s how it is. Oysters don’t know what’s happening to them. They don’t have hopes and fears and dreams. Neither does this creature here.”

“But to kill—”

“We kill to eat. A true morality of food would allow us to eat only synthetics.” Burris smiled kindly. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have ordered it if I’d known it would offend you. Shall I have them take it away?”

“No. Someone else would drink it, I guess. I didn’t mean to say all that. I was just a little upset, Minner. But it’s your drink. Enjoy it.”

“I’ll send it back.”

“Please.” She touched the left-hand tentacle. “You know why I object? Because it’s like making yourself a god, to swallow a live living thing. I mean, here you are, gigantic, and you just destroy something, and it never knows why. The way—” She stopped.

“The way alien Things can pick up an inferior organism and put it through surgery, without troubling to explain themselves?” he asked. “The way doctors can perform an intricate experiment on a girl’s ovaries, without considering later psychological effects? God, Lona, we’ve got to sidestep those thoughts, not keep coming back to them!”

“What did you order for me?” she asked.

“Gaudax. An aperitif from a Centaurine world. It’s mild and sweet. You’ll like it. Cheers, Lona.”

“Cheers.”

He moved his glass in orbit around her black stone bowl, saluting it and her. Then they drank. The Centaurine aperitif tickled her tongue; it was faintly oily stuff, yet delicate, delightful. She shivered with the pleasure. After three quick sips she put the bowl down.

The small swimming creature was gone from Burris’s glass.

“Would you like to taste mine?” he asked.

“Please. No.”

He nodded. “Let’s order dinner, then. Will you forgive me for my thoughtlessness?”

Two dark green cubes, four inches on each face, sat side by side in the middle of the table. Lona had thought they were purely ornamental, but now, as Burris nudged one toward her, she realized that they were menus. As she handled it, warm light flushed through the depths of the cube and illuminated letters appeared, seemingly an inch below the sleek surface. She turned the cube over and over. Soups, meats, appetizers, sweets…

She recognized nothing on the menu.

“I shouldn’t be in here, Minner. I just eat ordinary things. This is so weird I don’t know where to begin.”

“Shall I order for you?”

“You’d better. Except they won’t have the things I really want. Like a chopped protein steak and a glass of milk.”

“Forget the chopped protein steak. Sample some of the rarer delicacies.”

“It’s so false, though. Me pretending to be a gourmet.”

“Don’t pretend anything. Eat and enjoy. Chopped protein steak isn’t the only food in the universe.”

His calmness reached forth to her, containing but not quite transferring to her. He ordered for both of them. Lona was proud of his skill. It was a small thing, knowing your way around a menu in such a place; yet he knew so much. He was awesome. She found herself thinking, if only I had met him before they … and cut the thought off. No imaginable set of circumstances would have brought her into contact with the premutilated Minner Burris. He would not have noticed her; he must have been busy then with women like that jiggly old Elise. Who still coveted him, but now could not have him. He’s mine, Lona thought fiercely. He’s mine! They tossed me a broken thing, and I’m helping to fix it, and no one will take it from me.

“Would you care for soup as well as an appetizer?” he asked.

“I’m not really terribly hungry.”

“Try a little anyway.”

“I’d only waste it.”

“No one worries about waste here. And we’re not paying for this. Try.”

Dishes began to appear. Each was a specialty of some distant world, either imported authentically or else duplicated here with the greatest of craft. Swiftly the table was filled with strangeness. Plates, bowls, cups of oddities, served in stunning opulence. Burris called off the names to her and tried to explain the foods to her, but she was dizzied now and scarcely able to comprehend. What was this flaky white meat? These golden berries steeped in honey? This soup, pale and sprinkled with aromatic cheese? Earth alone produced so many cuisines; to have a galaxy to choose from was so dazzling a thought that it numbed the appetite.

Lona nibbled. She grew confused. A bite of this, a sip of that. She kept expecting the next goblet to contain some other little living creature. Long before the main course had arrived, she was full. Two kinds of wine had been brought. Burris mixed them and they changed color, turquoise and ruby blending to form an unexpected opal shade. “Catalytic response,” he said. “They calculate the esthetics of sight as well as of taste. Here.” But she could drink only a tiny bit.

Were the stars moving in ragged circles now?

She heard the hum of conversation all about her. For more than an hour she had been able to pretend that she and Burris had been isolated within a pocket of privacy, but now the presence of the other diners was breaking through. They were looking. Commenting. Moving about, drifting from table to table on their gravitron plates. Have you seen? What do you think of? How charming! How strange! How grotesque!

“Minner, let’s get out of here.”

“But we haven’t had our dessert yet.”

“I know. I don’t care.”

“Liqueur from the Procyon group. Coffee Galactique.”

“Minner, no.” She saw his eyes open to the full shutter-width and knew that some expression on her face must have scored him deeply. She was very close to getting ill. Perhaps it was obvious to him.

“We’ll go,” he told her. “We’ll come back for dessert some other time.”

“I’m so sorry, Minner,” she murmured. “I didn’t want to spoil the dinner. But this place … I just don’t feel right in a place like this. It scares me. All these strange foods. The staring eyes. They’re all looking at us, aren’t they? If we could go back to the room, it would be so much better.”

He was summoning the carrier disk now. Her chair released her from its intimate grip. Her legs were wobbly when she stood up. She did not know how she could take a step without toppling. A strange tunnel-like clarity of vision brought her isolated views as she hesitated. The fat jeweled woman with a host of chins. The gilded girl clad in transparency, not much older than herself but infinitely surer of herself. The garden of little forked trees two levels below. The ropes of living light festooned in the air. A tray slicing across the open space bearing three mugs of dark, shining unknownness. Lona swayed. Burris anchored her and virtually lifted her onto the disk, though to a watcher it would not seem that he held her in so supportive a way.

She stared fixedly forward as they crossed the gulf to the entrance platform.

Her face was flushed and beaded with sweat. Within her stomach, it seemed to her, the alien creatures had come to life and were swimming patiently in the digestive sauces. Somehow she and Burris passed through the crystal doors. Down to the lobby via quick dropshaft; then up again, another shaft, to their suite. She caught sight of Aoudad lurking in the corridor, disappearing quickly behind a broad pilaster.

Burris palmed the door. It opened for them.

“Are you sick?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’m glad to be out of there. It’s so much calmer here. Did you lock the door?”

“Of course. Can I do anything for you, Lona?”

“Let me rest. A few minutes, by myself.”

He took her to her bedroom and eased her down on the round bed. Then he went out. Lona was surprised how quickly equilibrium returned, away from the restaurant. It had seemed to her, at the very end, that the sky itself had become a huge prying eye.

Calmer now, Lona rose, determined to shed the rest of her false glamour. She stepped under the vibraspray. Instantly her sumptuous gown vanished. She felt smaller, younger, at once. Naked, she made herself ready for bed.

She turned on a dim lamp, deactivated the rest of the room glow, and slipped between the sheets. They were cool and agreeable against her skin. A control console governed the movements and form of the bed, but Lona ignored it. She said softly into an intercom beside her pillow, “Minner, will you come in now?”

He entered at once. He was still wearing his flamboyant dinner costume, cape and all. The flaring rib-like projections were so strange that they nearly canceled out the other strangeness that was his body.

Dinner had been a disaster, she thought. The restaurant, so glittering, had been like a torture chamber for her. But the evening might be salvaged.

“Hold me,” she said in a thin voice. “I’m still a little shaky, Minner.”

Burris came to her. He sat beside her, and she rose a little, letting the sheet slip down to reveal her breasts. He reached for her, but the ribs of his costume formed an unbending barrier, thwarting contact.

“I’d better get out of this rig,” he said.

“The vibraspray’s over there.”

“Shall I turn off the light?”

“No. No.”

Her eyes did not leave him as he crossed the room.

He mounted the platform of the vibraspray and turned it on. It was designed to cleanse the skin of any adhering matter, and a sprayon garment would naturally be the first to go. Burris’s outlandish costume disappeared.

Lona had never seen his body before.

Unflinchingly, ready for any catastrophic revelation, she watched the naked man turn to face her. Her face was rigidly set, as was his, for this was a double test, showing if she could bear the shock of facing the unknown, showing if he could bear the shock of facing her response.

She had dreaded this moment for days. But now it was here, and in spreading wonder she discovered that she had lived through and past the dreaded moment without harm.

He was not nearly so terrible to behold as she had anticipated.

Of course, he was strange. His skin, like the skin of his face and arms, was glossy and unreal, a seamless container like none ever worn by man before. He was hairless. He had neither breasts nor navel, a fact that Lona realized slowly after searching for the cause of the wrongness.

His arms and legs were attached to his body in an unfamiliar manner, and by several inches in unfamiliar places. His chest seemed too deep in proportion to the width of his hips. His knees did not stand out from his legs as knees should do. When he moved, the muscles of his body rippled in a curious way.

But these were minor things, and they were not true deformities. He bore no hideous scars, no hidden extra limbs, no unexpected eyes or mouths on his body. The real changes were within, and on his face.

And the one aspect of all that had concerned Lona was anticlimactic. Against probability, he seemed normally male. So far as she could tell, at least.

Burris came toward the bed. She lifted her arms. An instant later and he was beside her, his skin against hers. The texture was strange but not unpleasant. He seemed oddly shy just now. Lona drew him closer. Her eyes closed. She did not want to see his altered face in this moment, and in any case her eyes seemed suddenly sensitive even to the faint light of the lamp. Her hand moved out to him. Her lips met his.

She had not been kissed often. But she had never been kissed like this. Those who had redesigned his lips had not intended them for kissing, and he was forced to make contact in an unwieldy way, mouth to mouth. But, again, it was not unpleasant. And then Lona felt his fingers on her flesh, six digits to each hand. His skin had a sweet, pungent odor. The light went out.

A spring within her body was coiling tighter … tighter … tighter…

A spring that had been coiling ever tighter for seventeen years … and now its force was unleased in a single moment of tumult.

She pulled her mouth from his. Her jaws wrenched themselves apart, and a sheath of muscle quaked in her throat. A blistering image seared her: herself on an operating table, anesthetized, her body open to the probe of the men in white. She struck the image with a bolt of lightning, and it shattered and tumbled away.

She clutched at him.

At last. At last!

He would not give her babies. She sensed that, and it did not trouble her.

“Lona,” he said, his face against her clavicle, his voice coming out smothered and thick. “Lona, Lona, Lona…”

There was brightness, as of an exploding sun. Her hand ran up and down his back, and just before joining the thought came to her that his skin was dry, that he did not sweat at all. Then she gasped, felt pain and pleasure in one convulsive unity, and listened in amazement to the ferocious ringing cries of lust that were fleeing of their own accord from her frenzied throat.