Thorns

TWENTY-SIX: FROST AT MIDNIGHT

On Titan she broke away and left him. Burris had seen it coming for days and was not at all surprised. It came as something of a relief.

Tension had been rising since the South Pole. He was not sure why, other than that they were unfit for each other. But they had been at each other’s throats steadily, first in a hidden way, then openly but figuratively and at the last literally. So she went away from him.

They spent six days at Luna Tivoli. The pattern of each day was the same. Late rising, a copious breakfast, some viewing of the Moon, and then to the park. The place was so big that there were always new discoveries to be made, yet by the third day Burris found that they were compulsively retracing their steps, and by the fifth he was enduringly sick of Tivoli. He tried to be tolerant, since Lona took such obvious pleasure in the place. But eventually his patience wore thin, and they quarreled. Each night’s quarrel exceeded in intensity the one of the night before. Sometimes they resolved the conflict in fierce, sweaty passion, sometimes in sleepless nights of sulking.

And always, during or just after the quarrel, came that feeling of fatigue, that sickening, destructive loss of stamina. Nothing like that had ever happened to Burris before. The fact that the fits came over the girl simultaneously made it doubly strange. They said nothing to Aoudad and Nikolaides, whom they occasionally saw on the fringes of the crowds.

Burris knew that the virulent arguments were driving an ever-wider wedge between them. In less stormy moments he regretted that, for Lona was tender and kind, and he valued her warmth. All that was forgotten in his moments of rage, though. Then she seemed empty and useless and maddening to him, a burden added to all his other burdens, a foolish and ignorant and hateful child. He told her all that, at first hiding his meaning behind blunting metaphors, later hurling the naked words.

A breakup had to come. They were exhausting themselves, depleting their vital substances in these battles. The moments of love were more widely spaced now. Bitterness broke in more often.

On the arbitrarily designated morning of their arbitrarily designated sixth day at Luna Tivoli, Lona said, “Let’s cancel and go on to Titan now.”

“We’re supposed to spend five more days here.”

“Do you really want to?”

“Well, frankly … no.”

He was afraid it would provoke another fountain of angry words, and it was too early in the day for them to begin that. But no, this was her morning for sacrificial gestures. She said, “I think I’ve had enough, and it’s no secret that you’ve had enough. So why should we stay? Titan’s probably much more exciting.”

“Probably.”

“And we’ve been so bad to each other here. A change of scenery ought to help.”

It certainly would. Any barbarian with a fat wallet could afford the price of a ticket to Luna Tivoli, and the place was full of boors, drunks, rowdies. It drew liberally on a potential audience that went far deeper than Earth’s managerial classes. But Titan was more select. Only wealthy sophisticates comprised its clientele, those to whom spending twice a workingman’s annual wage on a single short trip was trivial. Such people, at least, would have the courtesy to deal with him as though his deformities did not exist. Antarctica’s honeymooners, shutting their eyes to all that troubled them, had simply treated him as invisible. Luna Tivoli’s patrons had guffawed in his face and mocked his differentness. On Titan, though, innate good manners would decree a cool indifference to his appearance. Look upon the strange man, smile, chat gracefully, but never show by word or deed that you are aware he is strange: that was good breeding. Of the three cruelties, Burris thought he preferred that kind.

He cornered Aoudad by the glare of fireworks and said, “We’ve had enough here. Book us for Titan.”

“But you have—”

“—another five days. Well, we don’t want them. Get us out of here and to Titan.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Aoudad promised.

Aoudad had watched them quarrel. Burris felt unhappy about that, for reasons which he despised. Aoudad and Nikolaides had been Cupids to them, and Burris somehow held himself responsible for behaving at all times like an enthralled lover. Obscurely, he failed Aoudad whenever he snarled at Lona. Why do I give a damn about failing Aoudad? Aoudad isn’t complaining about the quarrels. He doesn’t offer to mediate. He doesn’t say a word.

As Burris expected, Aoudad got them tickets to Titan without any difficulty. He called ahead to notify the resort that they would be arriving ahead of schedule. And off they went.

A lunar blast-off was nothing like a departure from Earth. With only a sixth the gravity to deal with, it took just a gentle shove to send the ship into space. This was a bustling spaceport, with departures daily for Mars, Venus, Titan, Ganymede, and Earth, every third day for the outer planets, weekly for Mercury. No interstellar ships left from Luna; by law and custom, starships could depart only from Earth, monitored every step of the way until they made the leap into warp somewhere beyond Pluto’s orbit. Most of the Titan-bound ships stopped first at the important mining center on Ganymede, and their original itinerary had called for them to take one of those. But today’s ship was nonstop. Lona would miss Ganymede, but it was her own doing. She had suggested the early arrival, not he. Perhaps they could stop at Ganymede on the way back to Earth.

There was a forced cheeriness about Lona’s chatter as they slid into the gulf of darkness. She wanted to know all about Titan, just as she had wanted to know all about the South Pole, the change of seasons, the workings of a cactus, and many other things; but those questions she had asked out of naive curiosity, and these were asked in the hope of rebuilding contact, any contact, between herself and him.

It would not work, Burris knew.

“It’s the biggest moon in the system. It’s bigger even than Mercury, and Mercury’s a planet.”

“But Mercury goes around the sun, and Titan goes around Saturn.”

“That’s right. Titan’s much larger than our own moon. It’s about seven hundred and fifty thousand miles from Saturn. You’ll have a good view of the rings. It has an atmosphere: methane, ammonia, not very good for the lungs. Frozen. They say it’s picturesque. I’ve never been there.”

“How come?”

“When I was young, I couldn’t afford to go. Later I was too busy in other parts of the universe.”

The ship slipped on through space. Lona stared, wide-eyed, as they hopped over the plane of the asteroid belt, got a decent view of Jupiter not too far down its orbit from them, and sped outward. Saturn was in view.

To Titan then they came.

A dome again, of course. A bleak landing pad on a bleak plateau. This was a world of ice, but far different from deathly Antarctica. Every inch of Titan was alien and strange, while in Antarctica everything quickly became grindingly familiar. This was no simple place of cold and wind and whiteness.

There was Saturn to consider. The ringed planet hung low in the heavens, considerably larger than Earth appeared from Luna. There was just enough methane-ammonia atmosphere to give Titan’s sky a bluish tinge, creating a handsome backdrop for glowing, golden Saturn with his thick, dark atmospheric stripe and his Midgard serpent of tiny stone particles.

“The ring is so thin,” Lona complained. “Edge-on like this, I can hardly see it!”

“It’s thin because Saturn’s so big. We’ll have a better view of it tomorrow. You’ll see that it isn’t one ring but several. The inner rings move faster than the outer ones.”

So long as he kept conversation on that sober level, all went well. But he hesitated to deviate from the impersonal, and so did she. Their nerves were too raw. They stood too close to the edge of the abyss after their recent quarrels.

They occupied one of the finest rooms in the glistening hotel. All about them were the moneyed ones, Earth’s highest caste, those who had made fortunes in planetary development or warp-transport or power systems. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. The women, whatever their ages, were slim, agile, alert. The men were often beefy, but they moved with strength and vigor. No one made rude remarks about Burris or about Lona. No one stared. They were all friendly, in their distant way.

At dinner, the first night, they were joined at table by an industrialist with large holdings on Mars. He was far into his seventies, with a tanned, seamed face and narrow dark eyes. His wife could not have been more than thirty. They talked mostly of the commercial exploitation of extrasolar planets.

Lona, afterward: “She has her eye on you!”

“She didn’t let me know about that.”

“It was awfully obvious. I bet she was touching your foot under the table.”

He sensed a struggle coming on. Hastily he led Lona to a viewport in the dome. “I tell you what,” he said. “If she seduces me, you have my permission to seduce her husband.”

“Very amusing.”

“What’s wrong? He has money.”

“I haven’t been in this place half a day and I hate it already.”

“Stop it, Lona. You’re pushing your imagination too hard. That woman wouldn’t touch me. The thought would give her the shudders for a month, believe me. Look, look out there.”

A storm was blowing up. Harsh winds ripped against the dome. Saturn was nearly in the full phase tonight, and his reflected light made a glittering track across the snow, meeting and melding with the white glare of the dome’s illuminated ports. The precise needle-tips of stars were strewn across the vault of sky, looking nearly as hard as they would appear from space itself.

It was starting to snow.

They watched the wind whipping the snow about for a while. Then they heard music and followed it. Most of the guests were moving along the same track.

“Do you want to dance?” Lona asked.

An orchestra in evening clothes had appeared from somewhere. The tinkling, swirling sounds rose in volume. Strings, winds, a bit of percussion, a sprinkling of the alien instruments so popular in big-band music nowadays. The elegant guests moved in graceful rhythms over a shining floor.

Stiffly Burris took Lona in his arms and they joined the dancers.

He had never danced much before, and not at all since his return to Earth from Manipool. The mere thought of dancing in a place like this would have seemed grotesque to him only a few months ago. But he was surprised how well his redesigned body caught the rhythms of it. He was learning grace in these elaborate new bones. Around, around, around…

Lona’s eyes held firm on his. She was not smiling. She seemed afraid of something.

Overhead was another clear dome. The Duncan Chalk school of architecture: show ‘em the stars, but keep ‘em warm. Gusts of wind sent snowflakes skidding across the top of the dome and drove them just as swiftly away. Lena’s hand was cold in his. The tempo of the dance increased. The thermal regulators within him that had replaced his sweat glands were working overtime. Could he keep to such a giddy pace? Would he stumble?

The music stopped.

The dinnertime couple came over. The woman smiled. Lona glared.

The woman said, with the assurance of the very rich, “May we have the next dance?”

He had tried to avoid it. Now there was no tactful way to refuse, and Lona’s jealousies would get another helping of fuel. The thin, reedy sound of the oboe summoned the dancers to the floor. Burris took the woman, leaving Lona, frozen-faced, with the aging industrial baron.

The woman was a dancer. She seemed to fly over the floor. She spurred Burris to demonic exertions, and they moved around the outside of the hall, virtually floating. At that speed even his split-perception eyes failed him, and he could not find Lona. The music deafened him. The woman’s smile was too bright.

“You make a wonderful partner,” she told him. “There’s a strength about you … a feeling for the rhythm…”

“I was never much of a dancer before Manipool.”

“Manipool?”

“The planet where I … where they…”

She didn’t know. He had assumed everyone here was familiar with his story. But perhaps these rich ones paid no heed to current vid-program sensations. They had not followed his misfortunes. Very likely she had taken his appearance so thoroughly for granted that it had not occurred to her to wonder how he had come to look that way. Tact could be overdone; she was less interested in him than he had thought.

“Never mind,” he said.

As they made another circuit of the floor, he caught sight of Lona at last: leaving the room. The industrialist stood by himself, seemingly baffled. Instantly Burris came to a halt. His partner looked a question at him.

“Excuse me. Perhaps she’s ill.”

Not ill: just sulking. He found her in the room, face down on the bed. When he put his hand on her bare back, she shivered and rolled away from him. He could not say anything to her. They slept far apart, and when his dream of Manipool came to him, he managed to choke off his screams before they began, and sat up, rigid, until the terror passed.

Neither of them mentioned the episode in the morning.

They went sight-seeing, via power-sled. Titan’s hotel-and-spaceport complex lay near the center of a smallish plateau bordered by immense mountains. Here, as on Luna, peaks that dwarfed Everest were plentiful. It seemed incongruous that such small worlds would have such great ranges, but so it was. A hundred miles or so to the west of the hotel was Martinelli Glacier, a vast creeping river of ice coiling for hundreds of miles down out of the heart of the local Himalayas. The glacier terminated, improbably enough, in the galaxy-famed Frozen Waterfall. Which every visitor to Titan was obliged to visit, and which Burris and Lona visited, too.

There were lesser sights en route that Burris found more deeply stirring. The swirling methane clouds and tufts of frozen ammonia ornamenting the naked mountains, for example, giving them the look of mountains in a Sung scroll. Or the dark lake of methane half an hour’s drive from the dome. In its waxen depths dwelled the small, durable living things of Titan, creatures that were more or less mollusks and arthropods, but rather less than more. They were equipped for breathing and drinking methane. With life of any sort as scarce as it was in this solar system, Burris found it fascinating to view these rarities in their native habitat. Around the rim of the lake he saw their food: Titanweeds, ropy greasy plants, dead white in color, capable of enduring this hellish climate in perfect comfort.

The sled rolled on toward the Frozen Waterfall.

There it was: blue-white, glinting in Saturnlight, suspended over an enormous void. The beholders made the obligatory sighs and gasps. No one left the sled, for the winds were savage out there, and the breathing-suits could not be entirely trusted to protect one against the corrosive atmosphere.

They circled the waterfall, viewing the sparkling arch of ice from three sides. Then came the bad news from their cicerone: “Storm coming up. We’re heading back.”

The storm came, long before they reached the comfort of the dome. First there was rain, a sleety downpour of precipitated ammonia that rattled on the roof of their sled, and then clouds of ammonia-crystal snow, driven by the wind. The sled pushed on with difficulty. Burris had never seen snow come down so heavily or so fast. The wind churned and uprooted it, piling it into cathedrals and forests. Straining a little, the power-sled avoided new dunes and nosed around sudden barricades. Most of the passengers looked imperturbable. They exclaimed on the beauty of the storm. Burris, who knew how close they all were to entombment, sat moodily in silence. Death might bring peace at last, but if he could choose his death he did not mean to choose being buried alive. Already he could taste the acrid foulness as the air began to give out and the whining motors fed their exhaust back into the passenger compartment. Imagination, nothing more. He tried to enjoy the beauty of the storm.

Nevertheless, it was a source of great relief to enter the warmth and safety of the dome once again.

He and Lona quarreled again soon after their return. There was even less reason for this quarrel than for any of the others. But very swiftly it reached a level of real malevolence.

“You didn’t look at me the whole trip, Minner!”

“I looked at the scenery. That’s why we’re here.”

“You could take my hand. You could smile.”

“I—”

“Am I that boring?”

He was weary of retreating. “As a matter of fact, you are! You’re a dull, dreary, ignorant little girl! All this is wasted on you! Everything! You can’t appreciate food, clothing, sex, travel…”

“And what are you? Just a hideous freak!”

“That makes two of us.”

“Am I a freak?” she shrilled. “It doesn’t show. I’m a human being, at least. What are you?”

That was when he sprang at her.

His smooth fingers closed around her throat. She battered at him, pounded him with her fists, clawed his cheeks with raking nails. But she could not break his skin, and that roused her to smoldering fury. He gripped her firmly, shaking her, making her head roll wildly on its mooring, and all the while she kicked and punched. Through his arteries surged all the byproducts of rage.

I could kill her so easily, he thought.

But the very act of pausing to let a coherent concept roll through his mind calmed him. He released her. He stared at his hands, she at him. There were mottled marks on her throat that nearly matched the blotches newly sprung out on his face. Gasping, she stepped away from him. She did not speak. Her hand, shaking, pointed at him.

Fatigue clubbed him to his knees.

All his strength vanished at once. His joints gave way, and he slipped, melting, unable even to brace himself with his hands. He lay prone, calling her name. He had never felt this weak before, not even while he had been recuperating from what had been done to him on Manipool.

This is what it’s like to be bled white, he told himself. The leeches have been at me! God, will I ever be able to stand again? “Help!” he cried soundlessly. “Lona, where are you?”

When he was strong enough to lift his head, he discovered that she was gone. He did not know how much time had passed. Weakly he pulled himself up inch by inch and sat on the edge of the bed until the worst of the feebleness was over. Was it a judgment upon him for striking her? Each time they had quarreled he had felt this sickness come upon him.

“Lona?”

He went into the hall, staying close to the side partition. Probably he looked drunk to the well-groomed women who sailed past him. They smiled. He tried to return the smiles.

He did not find her.

Somehow, hours later, he discovered Aoudad. The little man looked apprehensive.

“Have you seen her?” Burris croaked.

“Halfway to Ganymede by now. She left on the dinner flight.”

“Left?”

Aoudad nodded. “Nick went with her. They’re going back to Earth. What did you do—slam her around some?”

“You let her go?” Burris muttered. “You permitted her to walk out? What’s Chalk going to say about that?”

“Chalk knows. Don’t you think we checked with him first? He said, sure, if she wants to come home, let her come home. Put her on the next ship out. So we did. Hey, you look pale, Burris. I thought with your skin you couldn’t get pale!”

“When does the next ship after hers leave?”

“Tomorrow night. You aren’t going to go chasing her, are you?”

“What else?”

Grinning, Aoudad said, “You’ll never get anywhere that way. Let her go. This place is full of women who’d be glad to take her place. You’d be amazed how many. Some of them know I’m with you, and they come up to me, wanting me to fix you up with them. It’s the face, Minner. The face fascinates them.”

Burris turned away from him.

Aoudad said, “You’re shaken up. Listen, let’s go have a drink!”

Without looking back, Burris replied, “I’m tired. I want to rest.”

“Should I send one of the women to you after a while?”

“Is that your idea of rest?”

“Well, matter of fact, yes.” He laughed pleasantly. “I don’t mind taking care of them myself, you understand, but it’s you they want. You.”

“Can I call Ganymede? Maybe I can talk to her while her ship’s refueling.”

Aoudad caught up with him. “She’s gone, Burris. You ought to forget her now. What did she have besides problems? Just a skinny little kid! You didn’t even get along well with her. I know. I saw. All you did was shout at each other. What do you need her for? Now, let me tell you about—”

“Are you carrying any relaxers?”

“You know they won’t do you any good.”

Burris held out his hand anyway. Aoudad shrugged and put a relaxer into it. Burris touched the tube to his skin. The illusion of tranquillity might be worth nearly as much as the genuine article now. He thanked Aoudad and walked sharply toward his room, alone.

On the way he passed a woman whose hair was spun pink glass and whose eyes were amethysts. Her costume was chastely immodest. Her voice, feathersoft, brushed his earless cheeks. He rushed past her, trembling, and entered his room.