Thorns

TWENTY-THREE: THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

“They’re beginning to hate each other already,” Chalk said pleasantly.

He was alone, but to him that was no reason for not voicing his thoughts. He often talked to himself. A doctor once had told him that there were positive neuropsychic benefits to be had from vocalizing, even in solitude.

He floated in a bath of aromatic salts. The tub was ten feet deep, twenty feet long, a dozen feet wide: ample room even for the bulk of a Duncan Chalk. Its marble sides were flanked by alabaster rims and a surrounding tilework of shimmering oxblood porcelain, and the whole bathing enclosure was covered by a thick, clear dome that gave Chalk a full view of the sky. There was no reciprocal view of Chalk for an outsider; an ingenious optical engineer had seen to that. From without, the dome presented a milky surface streaked with whorls of light pink.

Chalk drifted idly, gravity-free, thinking of his suffering amanti. Night had fallen, but there were no stars tonight, only the reddish haze of unseen clouds. It was snowing once more. The flakes performed intricate arabesques as they spiraled toward the surface of the dome.

“He is bored with her,” Chalk said. “She is afraid of him. She lacks intensity, to his taste. For hers, his voltage is too high. But they travel together. They eat together. They sleep together. And soon they’ll quarrel bitterly.”

The tapes were very good. Aoudad, Nikolaides, both of them remaining surreptitiously close behind, picking up scattered gay images of the pair to relay to a waiting public. That snowball fight: a masterpiece. And the power-sled trip. Minner and Lona at the South Pole. The public was eating it up.

Chalk, in his own way, ate it up, too.

He closed his eyes and opaqued his dome and drifted easily in the warm, fragrant tub. To him came splintered, fragmented sensations of disquiet.

…to have joints that did not behave as human joints should…

…to feel despised, rejected of mankind…

…childless motherhood…

…bright flashes of pain, bright as the thermoluminescent fungi casting their yellow glow on his office walls…

…the ache of the body and the ache of the soul…

…alone!

…unclean!

Chalk gasped as though a low current were running through his body. A finger flew up at an angle to his hand and remained there a moment. A hound with slavering jaws bounded through his forebrain. Beneath the sagging flesh of his chest the thick bands of muscle rhythmically contracted and let go.

…demon-visits in the sleep…

…a forest of watching eyes, stalked and shining…

…a world of dryness … thorns … thorns…

…the click and scratch of strange beasts moving in the walls … dry rot of the soul … all poetry turned to ash, all love to rust…

…stony eyes lifted toward the universe … and the universe peering back…

In ecstasy Chalk kicked at the water, sending up spewing cascades. He slapped its surface with the flat of his hand. Flukes! There go flukes! Ahoy, ahoy!

Pleasure engulfed and consumed him.

And this, he told himself cozily some minutes later, was merely the beginning.