Thorns

TWENTY-TWO: HENCE, LOATHED MELANCHOLY

He woke screaming again that night.

Lona had been expecting it. For most of the night she had been awake herself, lying beside him in the dark, waiting for the inevitable demons to take possession of him. He had been brooding, on and off, much of the evening.

The day had been pleasant enough—barring that nasty moment right at the outset. Lona wished she could call back the admission she had made: that it was Chalk who had put her up to approaching him in the first place. At least she had withheld the most damning part of all: that Nikolaides had thought of presenting the cactus, that Nikolaides had even dictated her little note. She knew now what effect such knowledge would have on Burris. But it had been stupid even to mention Chalk’s promise of restoring the babies. Lona saw that clearly now. But now was too late to unspeak the words.

He had recovered from that taut moment, and they had gone off to have fun. A snowball fight, a hike in the trackless wilderness of ice. Lona had been scared when suddenly she realized that the hotel was no longer in sight. She saw flat whiteness everywhere. No trees to cast shadows, no movements of the sun to indicate directions, and no compass. They had walked miles through an unchanging landscape. “Can we get back?” she asked, and he nodded. “I’m tired. I’d like to go back now.” Actually she was not all that tired, but it frightened her to think of getting lost here. They turned back, or so Burris said they had done. This new direction looked just the same as the old. There was a darkness several feet long just below the snow in one place. A dead penguin, Burris told her, and she shuddered, but then the hotel miraculously appeared. If the world was flat here, she wondered, why had the hotel vanished? And Burris explained, as he had explained so many things to her (but in a more patient tone now) that the world was not really flat here, but actually nearly as curved as at any other place, so that they need walk only a very few miles for familiar landmarks to drop below the horizon. As the hotel had done.

But the hotel had returned, and their appetites were huge, and they had hearty lunches, washed down with flagon after flagon of beer. Here no one drank green cocktails with live things swimming in them. Beer, cheese, meat—that was fit food for this land of eternal winter.

They took power-sled tours that afternoon. First they went to the South Pole.

“It looks like everything else around,” Lona said.

“What did you expect?” he asked. “A striped pole sticking out of the snow?”

So he was being sarcastic again. She saw the sorrow in his eyes that followed his crackling comment, and told herself that he had not meant to hurt her. It was natural to him, that was all. Maybe he was in such pain himself—real pain—that he had to keep lashing out that way.

But actually the Pole was different from the surrounding blankness of the polar plateau. There were buildings there. A circular zone around the world’s bottom some twenty yards in diameter was sacrosanct, untouched. Near it was the restored or reproduced tent of the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, who had come by dogsled to this place a century or two ago. A striped flag fluttered over the dark tent. They peered inside: nothing.

Nearby was a small building of logs. “Why logs?” Lona asked. “There aren’t any trees in Antarctica?” For once her question was a shrewd one. Burris laughed.

The building was sacred to the memory of Robert Falcon Scott, who had followed Amundsen to the Pole and who, unlike the Norwegian, had died on the way back. Within were diaries, sleeping-bags, the odds and ends of explorers. Lona read the plaque. Scott and his men had not died here, but rather many miles away, trapped by weariness and winter gales as they plodded toward their base. All this was strictly for show. The phoniness of it bothered Lona, and she thought it bothered Burris, too.

But it was impressive to stand right at the South Pole.

“The whole world is north of us right now,” Burris told her. “We’re hanging off the bottom edge. Everything’s above us from here. But we won’t fall off.”

She laughed. Nevertheless, the world did not look at all unusual to her at that moment. The surrounding land stretched away to the sides, and not up and down. She tried to picture the world as it would look from a space ferry, a ball hanging in the sky, and herself, smaller than an ant, standing at the bottom with her feet toward the center and her head pointed to the stars. Somehow it made no sense to her.

There was a refreshment stand near the Pole. They kept it covered with snow to make it inconspicuous. Burris and Lona had steaming mugs of hot chocolate.

They did not visit the underground scientific base a few hundred yards away. Visitors were welcome; scientists in thick beards lived there the year round, studying magnetism and weather and such. But Lona did not care to enter a laboratory again. She exchanged glances with Burris, and he nodded, and the guide took them back on the power-sled.

It was too late in the day to go all the way to the Ross Ice Shelf. But they traveled for more than an hour northwest from the Pole, toward a chain of mountains that never got any closer, and came to a mysterious warm spot where there was no snow, only bare brown earth stained red by a crust of algae, and rocks covered with a thin coating of yellow-green lichens. Lona asked to see penguins then, and was told that at this time of the year there were no penguins in the interior except strays. “They’re water birds,” the guide said. “They stay close to the coast and come inland only when it’s time to lay their eggs.”

“But it’s summer here. They ought to be nesting now.”

“They make their nests in midwinter. The baby penguins are hatched in June and July. The darkest, coldest time of the year. You want to see penguins, you sign up for the Adelie Land tour. You’ll see penguins.”

Burris seemed to be in good spirits on the long sled ride back to the hotel. He teased Lona in a lighthearted way, and at one point had the guide stop the sled so they could go sliding down a glassy-smooth embankment of snow. But as they neared the lodge, Lona detected the change coming over him. It was like the onset of twilight, but this was a season of no twilight at the Pole. Burris darkened. His face grew rigid, and he stopped laughing and joking. By the time they were passing through the double doors of the lodge, he seemed like something hewn from ice.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Who said anything was wrong?”

“Would you like to have a drink?”

They went to the cocktail lounge. It was a big room, paneled in wood, with a real fireplace to give it that twentieth-century look. Two dozen people, more or less, sat at the heavy oaken tables, talking and drinking. All of them couples, Lona noticed. This was almost entirely a honeymoon resort. Young married people came here to begin their lives in icy Antarctic purity. The skiing was said to be excellent in the mountains of Marie Byrd Land.

Heads turned their way as Burris and Lona entered. And just as quickly turned away again in a quick reflex of aversion. Oh, so sorry. Didn’t mean to stare. A man with a face like yours, he probably doesn’t like to be stared at. We were just looking to see if our friends the Smiths had come down for drinks.

“The demon at the wedding feast,” Burris muttered.

Lona wasn’t sure she had heard it correctly. She didn’t ask him to repeat.

A robot servitor took their order. She drank beer, he a filtered rum. They sat alone at a table near the edge of the room. Suddenly they had nothing to say to each other. All about them conversation seemed unnaturally loud. Talk of future holidays, of sports, of the many available tours the resort offered.

No one came over to join them.

Burris sat rigidly, his shoulders forced upright in a posture that Lona knew must hurt him. He finished his drink quickly and did not order another. Outside, the pale sun refused to set.

“It would be so pretty here if we got a romantic sunset,” Lona said. “Streaks of blue and gold on the ice. But we won’t get it, will we?”

Burris smiled. He did not answer.

There was a flow of people in and out of the room constantly. The flow swept wide around their table. They were boulders in the stream. Hands were shaken, kisses exchanged. Lona heard people making introductions. It was the sort of place where one couple could come freely up to another, strangers, and find a warm response.

No one freely came to them.

“They know who we are,” Lona said to Burris. “They think we’re celebrities, so very important that we don’t want to be bothered. So they leave us alone. They don’t want to seem to be intruding.”

“All right.”

“Why don’t we go over to someone? Break the ice, show them that we’re not stand-offish.”

“Let’s not. Let’s just sit here.”

She thought she knew what was eating at him. He was convinced they were avoiding this table because he was ugly, or at least strange. No one wanted to have to look him full in the face. And one could not very well hold a conversation while staring off to one side. So the others stayed away. Was that what was troubling him? His self-consciousness returning? She did not ask. She thought she might be able to do something about that.

An hour or so before dinner they returned to their room. It was a single large enclosure with a false harshness about it. The walls were made of split logs, rough and coarse, but the atmosphere was carefully regulated and there were all the modern conveniences. He sat quietly. After a while he stood up and began to examine his legs, swinging them back and forth. His mood was so dark now that it frightened her.

She said, “Excuse me. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

“Where are you going?”

“To check on the tours they’re offering for tomorrow.”

He let her go. She went down the curving corridor toward the main lobby. Midway, a giant screen was producing an aurora australis for a group of the guests. Patterns of green and red and purple shot dramatically across a neutral gray background. It looked like a scene from the end of the world.

In the lobby Lona gathered a fistful of brochures on the tours. Then she returned to the screen-room. She saw a couple who had been in the cocktail lounge. The woman was in her early twenties, blonde, with artful green streaks rising from her hairline. Her eyes were cool. Her husband, if husband he was, was an older man, near forty, wearing a costly looking tunic. A perpetual-motion ring from one of the outworlds writhed on his left hand.

Tensely Lona approached them. She smiled.

“Hello. I’m Lona Kelvin. Perhaps you noticed us in the lounge.”

She drew tight smiles, nervous ones. They were thinking, she knew, what does she want from us?

They gave their names. Lona did not catch them, but that did not matter.

She said, “I thought perhaps it would be nice if the four of us sat together at dinner tonight. I think you’d find Minner very interesting. He’s been to so many planets…”

They looked trapped. Blonde wife was nearly panicky. Suave husband deftly came to rescue.

“We’d love to … other arrangements … friends from back home … perhaps another night…”

The tables were not limited to four or even six. There was always room for a congenial addition. Lona, rebuffed, knew now what Burris had sensed hours before. They were not wanted. He was the man of the evil eye, raining blight on their festivities. Clutching her brochures, Lona hurried back to the room. Burris was by the window, looking out over the snow.

“Come go through these with me, Minner.” Her voice was pitched too high, too sharp.

“Do any of them look interesting?”

“They all do. I don’t really know what’s best. You do the picking.”

They sat on the bed and sorted through the glossy sheaf. There was the Adelie Land tour, half a day, to see penguins. A full day tour to the Ross Shelf Ice, including a visit to Little America and to the other explorer bases at McMurdo Sound. Special stop to see the active volcano, Mount Erebus. Or a longer tour up to the Antarctic Peninsula to see seals and sea leopards. The skiing trip to Marie Byrd Land. The coastal mountain trip through Victoria Land to Mertz Glacial Tongue. And a dozen others. They picked the penguin tour, and when they went down for dinner later, they put their names on the list.

At dinner they sat alone.

Burris said, “Tell me about your children, Lona. Have you ever seen them?”

“Not really. Not so I could touch, except only once. Just on screens.”

“And Chalk will really get you some to raise?”

“He said he would.”

“Do you believe him?”

“What else can I do?” she asked. Her hand covered his. “Do your legs hurt you?”

“Not really.”

Neither of them ate much. After dinner films were shown: vivid tridims of an Antarctic winter. The darkness was the darkness of death, and a death-wind scoured across the plateau, lifting the top layer of snow like a million knives. Lona saw the penguins standing on their eggs, warming them. And then she saw ragged penguins driven before the gale, marching overland while a cosmic drum throbbed in the heavens and invisible hellhounds leaped on silent pads from peak to peak. The film ended with sunrise; the ice stained blood-red with the dawn of a six-month night; the frozen ocean breaking up, giant floes clashing and shattering. Most of the hotel guests went from the screening-room to the lounge. Lona and Burris went to bed. They did not make love. Lona sensed the storm building within him, and knew that it would burst forth before morning came.

They lay cradled in darkness; the window had to be opaqued to shut out the tireless sun. Lona rested on her back beside him, breathing slowly, her flank touching his. Somehow she dozed, and a poor, shallow sleep came to her. Her own phantoms visited her after a while. She awoke, sweating, to find herself naked in a strange room with a strange man next to her. Her heart was fluttering. She pressed her hands to her breasts and remembered where she was.

Burris stirred and groaned.

Gusts of wind battered the building. This was summer, Lona reminded herself. The chill seeped to her bones. She heard a distant sound of laughter. But she did not leave his side, nor did she try to sleep again.

Her eyes, dark-adjusted, watched his face. The mouth was expressive in its hinged way, sliding open, shutting, sliding again. Once his eyes did the same, but even when the lids were pulled back he saw nothing. He’s back on Manipool, Lona realized. They’ve just landed, he and … and the ones with Italian names. And in a little while the Things will come for him.

Lona tried to see Manipool. The parched and reddened soil, the twisted, thorny plants. What were the cities like? Did they have roads, cars, vid-sets? Burris had never told her. All she knew was that it was a dry world, an old world, a world where the surgeons had great skill.

And now Burris screamed.

The sound began deep in his throat, a gargled, incoherent cry, and moved higher in pitch and volume as it progressed. Turning, Lona clung to him, pressing tight. Was his skin soaked with perspiration? No; impossible; it must be her own. He thrashed and kicked, sending the coverlet to the floor. She felt his muscles coiling and bulging beneath his sleek skin. He could snap me in half with a quick move, she thought.

“It’s all right, Minner. I’m here. I’m here. It’s all right!”

“The knives … Prolisse … good God, the knives!”

“Minner!”

She did not let go of him. His left arm was dangling limply now, seemingly bending the wrong way at the elbow. He was calming. His hoarse breath was as loud as hoofbeats. Lona reached across him and turned on the light.

His face was blotched and mottled again. He blinked in that awful sidewise way of his three or four times and put his hand to his lips. Releasing him, she sat back, trembling a little. Tonight’s explosion had been more violent than the one the night before.

“A drink of water?” she asked.

He nodded. He was gripping the mattress so hard she thought he would tear it.

He gulped. She said, “Was it that bad tonight? Were they hurting you?”

“I dreamed I was watching them operate. First Prolisse, and he died. Then they carved up Malcondotto. He died. And then…”

“Your turn?”

“No,” he said in wonder. “No, they put Elise on the table. They carved her open, right between the—the breasts. And lifted up part of her chest, and I saw the ribs and her heart. And they reached inside.”

“Poor Minner.” She had to interrupt him before he spilled all that filthiness over her. Why had he dreamed of Elise? Was it a good sign, that he should see her being mutilated? Or would it have been better, she thought, if I was the one he dreamed about … I, being turned into something like him?

She took his hand and let it rest on the warmth of her body. There was only one method she could think of for easing his pain, and she employed it. He responded, rising, covering her. They moved urgently and harmoniously.

He appeared to sleep after that. Lona, edgier, pulled away from him and waited until a light slumber once more enveloped her. It was stained by sour dreams. It seemed that a returning starman had brought a pestilent creature with him, some kind of plump vampire, and it was affixed to her body, draining her … depleting her. It was a nasty dream, though not nasty enough to awaken her, and in time she passed into a deeper repose.

When they woke, there were dark circlets under her eyes, and her face looked pinched and hollow. Burris showed no effects of his broken night; his skin was not capable of reacting that graphically to short-range catabolic effects. He seemed almost cheerful as he got himself ready for the new day.

“Looking forward to the penguins?” he asked her.

Had he forgotten his bleak depression of the evening and his screaming terrors of the night? Or was he just trying to sweep them from view?

Just how human is he, anyway, Lona wondered?

“Yes,” she said coolly. “We’ll have a grand time, Minner. I can’t wait to see them.”