Thorns (15 page)

When they reached the lobby, Burris heard the quick sighs of the onlookers. Pleasure? Awe? The
frisson
of delighted revulsion? He could not read their motives from their hissing uptake of air. Yet they were looking, and responding, to the strange pair who had emerged from the dropshaft.

Burris, Lona on his arm, kept his face taut. Get a good look at us, he thought sharply. The couple of the century, we are. The mutilated starman and the hundred-baby virgin mother. The show of the epoch.

They were looking, all right. Burris felt the eyetracks crossing his earless jaw, passing over his click-click eyelids and his rearranged mouth. He astounded himself by his own lack of response to their vulgar curiosity. They were looking at Lona, too, but she had less to offer them, since her scars were inward ones.

Suddenly there was commotion to Burris's left.

An instant later Elise Prolisse burst from the crowd and hurtled toward him, crying harshly, "Minner! Minner!"

She looked like a she-berserker. Her face was bizarrely painted in a wild and monstrous parody of adornment: blue cheekstripes, red flanges over her eyes. She had shunned sprayon and wore a gown of some rustling, seductive natural fabric, cut low to reveal the milk-white globes of her breasts. Hands tipped with shining claws were outstretched.

"I've tried to get to you," she panted. "They wouldn't let me near you. They—"

Aoudad cut toward them.
"
Elise—
"

She slashed his cheek with her nails. Aoudad reeled back, cursing, and Elise turned to Burris. She looked venom at Lona. She tugged at Burris's arm and said, "Come away with me. Now that I've found you again I won't let go."

"
Get your hand off him!
" From Lona. The syllables tipped with whirling blades.

The older woman glared at the girl. Burris, baffled, thought they would fight. Elise weighed at least forty pounds more than Lona, and, as Burris had good reason to know, she was fiercely strong. But Lona had unsuspected strengths, too.

A scene in the lobby, he thought with curious clarity. Nothing will be spared us.

"I love him, you little bitch!" Elise cried hoarsely.

Lona did not answer. But her hand moved out in a quick chopping gesture toward Elise's outstretched arm. Edge of hand collided with fleshy forearm in a quick crack. Elise hissed. She pulled back her arm. The hands formed claws again. Lona, squaring away, flexed her knees and was ready to leap.

All this had taken only seconds. Now the startled bystanders moved. Burris himself, after early paralysis, Stepped in the way and shielded Lona from Elise's fury. Aoudad seized one of Elise's arms. She tried to pull it free, and her bare breasts quivered in the effort. Nikolaides moved in on the other side. Elise screamed, kicked, pulled. A circle of robot bellhops had formed. Burris watched as they dragged Elise away.

Lona leaned against an onyx pillar. Her face was deeply flushed, but otherwise not even her makeup was disarranged. She looked more startled than frightened.

"Who was that?" she asked.

"Elise Prolisse. The widow of one of my shipmates."

"What did she want?"

"Who knows?" Burris lied.

Lona was not fooled. "She said she loved you."

"It's her privilege. I guess she's been under great stress."

"I saw her in the hospital. She visited you." Green flames of jealousy flickered across Lona's face. "What does she want from you? Why did she make that scene?"

Aoudad came to his rescue. Holding a cloth to his bloodied cheek, he said, "We've given her a sedative. She won't bother you again. I'm terribly sorry about this. A silly, hysterical fool of a woman—"

"Let's go back upstairs," said Lona. "I don't feel like eating in the Galactic Room now."

"Oh, no," Aoudad said. "Don't cancel out. I'll give you a relaxer and you'll feel better in no time. You mustn't let a stupid episode like that spoil a wonderful evening."

"At least let's get out of the lobby," Burris said shortly.

The little group hurried toward a brightly lit inner room. Lona sank to a divan. Burris, crackling now with delayed tension, felt pain shoot through his thighs, his wrists, his chest. Aoudad produced a pocket tray of relaxers, taking one himself and giving one to Lona. Burris shrugged the little tube away, knowing that the drug it contained would have no effect on him. In moments Lona was smiling again.

He knew he had not been mistaken about the jealousy in her eyes. Elise had come up like a typhoon of flesh, threatening to sweep away all that Lona possessed, and Lona had fought back fiercely. Burris was both flattered and troubled. He could not deny that he enjoyed, as any man would, being the object of such a struggle. Yet that instant of revelation had shown him just how deeply Lona already was enmeshed with him. He felt no such depth of involvement himself. He liked the girl, yes, and was grateful to her for her company, but he was a long way from being in love with her. He doubted very much that he would ever love her, or anyone else. But she, without even the virtue of a physical bond linking them, had evidently constructed some inner fantasy of romance. The seeds of trouble lay in that, Burris knew.

Drained of tensions by Aoudad's relaxer, Lona quickly recovered from Elise's attack. They rose, Aoudad beaming again despite his injury.

"Will you go to dinner now?" he asked.

"I'm feeling much better," Lona said. "It was all so sudden—it shook me up."

"Five minutes in the Galactic Room and you'll have forgotten the whole thing," said Burris. He gave her his arm again. Aoudad conducted them toward the special liftshaft that led only to the Galactic Room. They mounted the gravity plate and sped upward. The restaurant was at the summit of the hotel, looking outward toward the heavens from its lofty spot like some private observatory, a sybaritic Uraniborg of food. Still trembling from the unexpected onslaught of Elise, Burris felt new anxiety as they reached the vestibule of the restaurant. He kept a calm front, but would he panic in the supernal glamour of the Galactic Room?

He had been there once before, long ago. But that was in another body, and besides, the wench was dead.

The liftshaft halted, and they stepped out into a bath of living light

Aoudad said portentously, "The Galactic Room! Your table is waiting. Enjoy yourselves."

He vanished. Burris smiled tensely at Lona, who looked drugged and dazed with happiness and terror. The crystal doors opened for them. They went within.

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, dear 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 well 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: Sirius, 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.