Thorns

“You’ll handle this well, Bart. I can rely on you. You know that. There’s a great deal at stake, but you’ll do your usually fine job.”

  Chalk smiled. Aoudad smiled. On one, the smile was a weapon. On the other a defense. Chalk sensed the emanations. Deep within him, ductless glands were triggered, and he responded to Aoudad’s uneasiness with a jolt of pleasure. Behind Aoudad’s cool gray eyes uncertainties revolved. Yet Chalk had spoken the truth: he did have faith in Aoudad’s skill in this matter. Only Aoudad himself did not have faith; and so Chalk’s reassurances twisted the blade a trifle. Chalk had learned such tactics early.

  Chalk said, “Where’s Nick?”

  “Out. I think he’s tracking that girl.”

  “He nearly blundered last night. The girl was in the Arcade and wasn’t properly protected. Some fool fingered her, Nick was lucky the girl resisted. I’m saving her.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Naturally, no one recognized her. She’s forgotten. Her year was last year, and today she’s nothing. Still,” Chalk said, “there’s a good story in her, properly handled. And if some ignorant grease gets his hands on her and stains her, it ruins the story. Nick should watch her more closely. I’ll tell him that. You see about Burris.”

  Aoudad quickly left the room. Chalk sat humming idly, enjoying himself. This thing would work. The public would love it when the romance flowered. There’d be money to reap. Of course, Chalk had little need for further money. It had motivated him once, but not now. Nor did the acquisition of greater power please him much. Despite the customary theories, Chalk had attained sufficient power so that he was willing to stop expanding if only he could be sure of holding what he had. No, it was something else, something inner, that governed his decisions now. When the love of money and the love of power are both sated, the love of love remains. Chalk did not find his love where others might find it, but he had his needs. Minner Burris and Lona Kelvin could fill those needs, perhaps. Catalysis. Synergy. Then he would see.

  He closed his eyes.

  He saw himself naked, afloat, gliding through the blue-green sea. Lofty waves buffeted his sleek white sides. His vast bulk moved easily, for it was weightless here, supported by the bosom of ocean, the bones for once not bowed by gravity’s pull. Chalk was swift here. He wheeled to and fro, displaying his agility in the water. About him played dolphins, squid, marlin. Alongside him moved the solemn, stupid upright mass of a sunfish, no midget itself but dwarfed by his shining immensity.

  Chalk saw boats on the horizon. Men coming toward him, upraised, grim-faced. He was quarry now. He laughed a thundering laugh. As the boats approached, he turned and swam toward them, teasing them, inviting them to do their worst. He was near the surface, gleaming whitely in the midday light. Sheets of water cascaded from his back.

  Now the boats were near. Chalk pivoted. Mighty flukes lashed the water; a boat sprang high, became matchsticks, dumped its flailing cargo of men in the brine. A surge of muscle carried him away from his pursuers. He blew a great spouting geyser to celebrate his triumph. Then he plunged, sounding joyously, seeking the depths, and in moments his whiteness vanished into a realm where light was not free to enter.

  SIX

  MODER, MERCI; LET ME DEYE

  ■

  ■ “You should go out of your room,” the visitation suggested gently. “Show yourself to the world. Meet it head on. There’s nothing to fear.”

  Burris groaned. “You again! Won’t you leave me alone?”

  “How can I ever leave you?” his other self asked.

  Burris stared through layers of gathering darkness. He had fed himself three times this day, so perhaps it was night, though he did not know and did not care. A gleaming slot provided him with any food he requested. The rearrangers of his body had improved his digestive system but had not made any fundamental changes in it. A small enough blessing, he felt; yet he still could cope with Earthside food. God knew where his enzymes now came from, but they were the same enzymes. Rennin, pepsin, the lipases, pancreatic amylase, trypsin, ptyalin, the whole diligent crew. What of the small intestine? What the fate of duodenum, jejunum, and ileum? What had replaced the mesentery and the peritoneum? Gone, gone, all gone, but rennin and pepsin somehow did their work. So the Earthside doctors who had examined him had said. Burris sensed that they would gladly dissect him to learn his secrets in more detail.

  But not yet. Not just yet. He was coming toward that pass, but it would be a while.

  And the apparition of former felicity would not absent itself.

  “Look at your face,” Burris said. “Your eyelids move so stupidly, up, down, blink, blink. The eyes are so crude. Your nose admits garbage to your throat. I must admit I’m a considerable improvement over you.”

  “Of course. That’s why I say go out, let yourself be admired by humanity.”

  “When did humanity ever admire improved models of itself? Did Pithecanthropus fawn on the first Neanderthals? Did Neanderthal applaud the Aurignacians?”

  “The analogy isn’t proper. You didn’t evolve past them, Minner. You were changed by external means. They have no reason to hate you for what you are.”

  “They don’t need to hate. Only to stare. Besides, I’m in pain. It’s easier to remain here.”

  “Is the pain really so hard to bear?”

  “I grow accustomed to it,” Burris said. “Yet every motion stabs me. The Things were only experimenting. They made their little mistakes. This extra chamber of my heart: whenever it contracts, I feel it in my throat. This shiny and permeable gut of mine: it passes food and I ache. I should kill myself. It’s the best release.”

  “Seek your comfort in literature,” the apparition counseled. “Read. You once did. You were quite a well-read man, Minner. Three thousand years of literature at your command. Several languages. Homer. Chaucer. Shakespeare.”

  Burris looked at the serene face of the man he had been. He recited: “Moder, merci; let me deye.”

  “Finish it.”

  “The rest’s not applicable.”

  “Finish it anyway.”

  Burris said:

  “For Adam ut of helle beye

  And manken that is forloren.”

  “Die, then,” the visitation said mildly. “To buy Adam out of hell and mankind that is lost. Otherwise remain alive. Minner, do you think you’re Jesus?”

  “He suffered at the hands of strangers.”

  “To redeem them. Will you redeem the Things if you go back to Manipool and die on their doorstep?”

  Burris shrugged. “I’m no redeemer. I need redeeming myself. I’m in a bad way.”

  “Whining again!”

  “Sune, I se thi bodi swungin,

  thi brest, thin hond, thi fot thurch-stungen.”

  Burris scowled. His new face was well designed for scowling; the lips rippled outward, like a sphincter door irising, baring the subdivided palisade of imperishable teeth. “What do you want of me?” he asked.

  “What do you want, Minner?”

  “To put off this flesh. To have my old body back.”

  “A miracle, that is. And you want the miracle to happen to you within these four walls.”

  “As good a place as any. As likely as any.”

  “No. Go outside. Seek help.”

  “I’ve been outside. I’ve been prodded and poked. Not helped. What shall I do—sell myself to a museum? Go away, you damned ghost. Out! Out!”

  “Your redeemer liveth,” said the apparition.

  “Tell me his address.”

  No answer came. Burris found himself staring at cobwebbed shadows. The room purred with silence. Restlessness throbbed at him. His body now was designed to maintain tonus despite all idleness; it was a perfect spacefarer’s body, equipped to drift from star to star, enduring all the long silence.

  So had he drifted to Manipool. It lay on his route. Man was a newcomer among the stars, hardly having left his own planets behind. There was no telling what one would meet out there and what
would happen to one. Burris had been the unlucky one. He had survived. The others lay in cheerful graves under a speckled sun. The Italians, Malcondotto and Prolisse—they had not come out of surgery. They were trial runs for Manipool’s masterpiece, himself. Burris had seen Malcondotto, dead, after they had finished with him. He was at peace. He had looked so tranquil, if a monster can seem tranquil even in death. Prolisse had preceded him. Burris had not seen what they had done to Prolisse, and it had been just as well.

  He had gone to the stars as a civilized man, alert, flexible of mind. No tubemonkey, no deckswabber. An officer, the highest product of mankind, armed with the higher mathematics and the highest topology. Mind stuffed with literary nuggets. A man who had loved, who had learned. Burris was glad now that he had never married. It is awkward for a starman to take a wife, but it is far more awkward to return from the stars transformed and embrace a former darling.

  The ghost was back. “Consult Aoudad,” it advised. “He’ll lead you to help. He’ll make you a whole man again.”

  “Aoudad?”

  “Aoudad.”

  “I will not see him.”

  Burris was in solitude once more.

  He looked at his hands. Delicate, tapering fingers, essentially unchanged except for the prehensile tentacle they had grafted to the outer phalanx on each side. Another of their little amusements. They might have put a pair of such tentacles below his arms, for that would have been useful. Or given him a prehensile tail, making him at least as efficient a brachiator as a Brazilian monkey. But these two muscular ropy things, pencil-thick and three inches long, what good were they? They had broadened his hand, he noticed for the first time, so that it would accommodate the new digit without disturbing the proportions. Considerate of them. Burris discovered some new facet of his newness every day. He thought of the dead Malcondotto. He thought of the dead Prolisse. He thought of Aoudad. Aoudad? How could Aoudad help him in any conceivable way?

  They had stretched him on a table, or the Manipool equivalent of a table, something dipping and uncertain. They had measured him. What had they checked? Temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure, peristalsis, pupil dilation, iodine uptake, capillary function, and how much else? They had put calipers to the salty film over his eyeballs. They had computed the volume of cell content in the seminal duct. They had searched out the pathways of neural excitation, so that they could be blocked.

  Anesthesia. Successful!

  Surgery.

  Peel back the rind. Seek for pituitary, hypothalamus, thyroid. Calm the fluttering ventricles. Descend with tiny intangible scalpels to enter the passages. The body, Galen had suspected, was merely a bag of blood. Was there a circulatory system? Was there a circulation? On Manipool they had discovered the secrets of human construction in three easy lessons. Malcondotto, Prolisse, Burris. Two they had wasted. The third endured.

  They had tied off blood vessels. They had exposed the gray silkiness of the brain. Here was the node of Chaucer. Here Piers Plowman. Aggression here. Vindictiveness. Sensory perception. Charity. Faith. In this shining bulge dwelled Proust, Hemingway, Mozart, Beethoven. Rembrandt here.

  See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!

  He had waited for it to begin, knowing that Malcondotto had perished under their ministrations and that Prolisse, flayed and diced, was gone. Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, that time may cease and midnight never come. Midnight came. The slithering knives dug at his brain. It would not hurt, he was sure of that, and yet he feared the pain. His only body, his irreplaceable self. He had not harmed them. He had come in innocence.

  Once, in boyhood, he had cut his leg while playing, a deep cut, gaping wide to reveal raw meat within. A gash, he thought, I have a gash. Blood had spouted over his feet. They had healed it, not so swiftly as such things were done today, but as he watched the red slash knit, he had meditated on the change that had worked. His leg would never be the same again, for now it bore the cicatrix of injury. That had moved him profoundly, at twelve—so fundamental a change in his body, so permanent. He thought of that in the final moments before the Things began work on him. Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me, and hide me from the heavy wrath of God! No, no! Then will I headlong run into the earth: earth, gape!

  An idle command.

  O, no, it will not harbour me!

  The silent knives whirled. The nuclei of the medulla, receiving impulses from the vestibular mechanism of the ear—gone. The basal ganglia. The sulci and the gyri. The bronchi with their cartilaginous rings. The alveoli, the wondrous sponges. Epiglottis. Vas deferens. Lymphatic vessels. Dendrites and axons. The doctors were quite curious: how does this marvelous creature work? What composes him?

  They unstrung him until he was spread out etherized on a table, extending an infinite distance. Was he still alive at that point? Bundles of nerves, bushels of intestine. Now, body, turn to air, or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell! O soul, be changed into little water-drops, and fall into the ocean, ne’er be found!

  Patiently they had restored him. Tediously did they reconstruct him, improving where minded on the original model. And then, no doubt in great pride, they of Manipool had returned him to his people.

  Come not, Lucifer!

  “Consult Aoudad,” the apparition advised.

  Aoudad? Aoudad?

  SEVEN

  HERE’S DEATH, TWITCHING MY EAR

  ■

  ■ The room stank. Its stink was vile. Wondering if the man ever troubled to ventilate, Bart Aoudad subtly introduced an olfactory depressant into his system. The brain would function as keenly as ever; it had better. But the nostrils would cease for the moment to report all that they might.

  He was lucky to be in here, stink or not. He had won the privilege through diligent courtship.

  Burris said, “Can you look at me?”

  “Easily. You fascinate me, honestly. Did you expect me to be repelled?”

  “Most people so far have been.”

  “Most people are fools,” said Aoudad.

  He did not reveal that he had monitored Burris for many weeks now, long enough to steel himself against the strangenesses of the man. Strange he was, and repellent enough; yet the configurations grew on one. Aoudad was not yet ready to apply for the same sort of beauty treatment, but he was numb to Burris’s deformities.

  “Can you help me?” Burris asked.

  “I believe I can.”

  “Provided I want help.”

  “I assume that you do.”

  Burris shrugged. “I’m not certain of that. You might say I’m growing accustomed to my present appearance. In another few days I might start going outdoors again.”

  It was a lie, Aoudad knew. Which one of them Burris was trying to delude, Aoudad could not positively say. But, however blandly Burris hid his bitterness at the moment, the visitor had ample knowledge that it still festered within him. Burris wanted out of this body.

  Aoudad said, “I am in the employ of Duncan Chalk. Do you know the name?”

  “No.”

  “But—” Aoudad swallowed his surprise. “Of course. You haven’t spent much time on Earth. Chalk brings amusement to the world. Perhaps you’ve visited the Arcade, or maybe you’ve been to Luna Tivoli.”

  “I know of them.”

  “They are Chalk’s enterprises. Among many others. He keeps billions of people happy in this system. He is even planning to expand to other systems shortly.” That was a bit of imaginative hyperbole on Aoudad’s part, but Burris did not need to know it.

  Burris said, “So?”

  “Chalk is wealthy, you see. Chalk is humanitarian. The combination is a good one. It holds possibilities that may benefit you.”

  “I see them already,” said Burris smoothly, leaning forward and entwining the outer tentacles that squirmed on his hands. “You hire me as an exhibit in Chalk’s circuses. You pay me eight million a year. Every curiosity-seeker in the system comes to have his look. Chalk gets rich
er, I become a millionaire and die happy, and the petty curiosities of the multitudes are gratified. Yes?”

  “No,” Aoudad said, alarmed by the nearness of Burris’s guess. “I’m sure you’re merely joking. You must realize that Mr. Chalk could not conceivably exploit your—ah—misfortune in such a way.”

  “Do you think it’s such a misfortune?” asked Burris. “I’m quite efficient this way. Of course, there’s pain, but I can stay underwater for fifteen minutes. Can you do that? Do you feel so sorry for me?”

  I must not let him lead me astray, Aoudad resolved. He’s devilish. He’d get along well with Chalk.

  Aoudad said, “Certainly I’m happy to know that you find your present situation reasonably satisfactory. Yet—let me be frank—I suspect you’d be glad to return to normal human form.”

  “You think so, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a remarkably perceptive man, Mr. Aoudad. Have you brought your magic wand?”

  “There’s no magic involved. But if you’re willing to supply a quid for our quo, it’s possible that Chalk can arrange to have you transferred to a more conventional body.”

  The effect on Burris was immediate and electric.

  He dropped the pose of casual indifference. He cast aside the mocking detachment behind which, Aoudad realized, he hid his agony. His body trembled like a glass flower strummed by the breeze. There was momentary loss of muscular control: the mouth convulsively flashed sidewise smiles, a flapping gate, and the shuttered eyes clicked a dozen times.

  “How can this be done?” Burris demanded.

  “Let Chalk explain it to you.”

  Burris’s hand dug into Aoudad’s thigh. Aoudad did not shrink at the metallic touch.

  Burris said hoarsely: “Is it possible?”

  “It may be. The technique is not perfected yet.”

  “Am I to be the guinea pig this time, too?”

  “Please. Chalk would not expose you to further distress. There will be additional research before the process can be applied to you. Will you talk to him?”

  Hesitation. Once more eyes and mouth acted seemingly without Burris’s volition. Then the starman regained command of himself. He straightened, twining his hands together, crossing his legs. How many knee-joints does he have, Aoudad wondered? Burris was silent. Calculating. Electrons surging down the pathways of that tormented brain.