Thorns

THREE: SUBTERRANEAN RUMBLES

Aoudad said, “What if we traded? You monitor Burris, I’ll watch the girl. Eh?”

“Nix.” Nikolaides drew the final consonant out luxuriously. “Chalk gave her to me, him to you. She’s a bore, anyway. Why switch?”

“I’m tired of him.”

“Put up with him,” Nikolaides advised. “Unpleasantness is upbuilding to character.”

“You’ve been listening to Chalk too long.”

“Haven’t we all?”

They smiled. There would be no trade of responsibilities. Aoudad jabbed at the switch, and the car in which they were riding cut sharply from one mastercom network to the other. It began rocketing northward at a hundred and fifty miles an hour.

Aoudad had designed the car himself, for Chalk’s own use. It was a womb, more or less, lined with soft warm pink spongy fibers and equipped with every sort of comfort short of gravitrons. Chalk had wearied of it lately and was willing to let underlings make use of it. Aoudad and Nikolaides rode it often. Each man considered himself Chalk’s closest associate; each quietly considered the other a flunky. It was a useful mutual delusion.

The trick was to establish some sort of existence for yourself independent of Duncan Chalk. Chalk demanded most of your waking hours and was not above using you in your sleep when he could. Yet there was always some fragment of your life in which you stood apart from the fat man and regarded yourself as a rounded, self-guiding human being. For Nikolaides the answer lay in physical exertion: skimming lakes, hiking to the rim of a boiling sulfurous volcano, sky-paddling, desert-drilling. Aoudad had chosen exertion, too, but of a softer kind; legs spread and toe touching toe, his women would form a trestle stretching across several continents. D’Amore and the others had their own individual escapes. Chalk devoured those who did not.

Snow was falling again. The delicate flakes perished almost as soon as they landed, but the car-track was slippery. Servo-mechanisms quickly adjusted the tracking equipment to keep the car upright. Its occupants reacted in different ways; Nikolaides quickened at the thought of the potential danger, minute though it was, while Aoudad thought gloomily of the eager thighs that awaited him if he survived the journey.

Nikolaides said, “About this trade—”

“Forget it. If the answer’s no, the answer’s no.”

“I just want to find out. Tell me this, Bart: are you interested in the girl’s body?”

Aoudad recoiled in excessive innocence. “What the hell do you think I am?”

“I know what you are, and so does everyone else. But I’m just fishing around. Do you have some odd idea that if we switch assignments and you get Lona, you’ll be able to have her?”

Sputtering, Aoudad said, “I draw the line at some women. I’d never meddle with her. For Christ’s sake, Nick! The girl is too dangerous. A seventeen-year-old virgin with a hundred kids—I wouldn’t touch her! Did you really think I would?”

“Not really.”

“Why’d you ask, then?”

Nikolaides shrugged and stared at the snow.

Aoudad said, “Chalk asked you to find out, is that it? He’s afraid I’ll molest her, is that it? Is it? Is it?” Nikolaides did not answer, and suddenly Aoudad began to tremble. If Chalk could suspect him of such desires, Chalk must have lost all faith in him. The compartments were separate: work here, women there. Aoudad had never straddled those compartments yet, and Chalk knew it. What was wrong? Where had he failed the fat man? Why had faith been withdrawn this way?

Aoudad said hollowly, “Nick, I swear to you I had no such intentions in proposing a switch. The girl doesn’t interest me sexually at all. Not at all. You think I want a goddam grotesque kid like that? All I had in mind was I was tired of looking at Burris’s mixed-up body. I wanted variety in my assignment. And you—”

“Cut it out, Bart.”

“—read all sorts of sinister and perverse—”

“I didn’t.”

“Chalk did, then. And you went along with him. Is this a plot? Who’s out to get me?”

Nikolaides nudged his left thumb into the dispenser button, and a tray of relaxers popped out. Quietly he handed one to Aoudad, who took the slender ivory-colored tube and pressed it to his forearm. An instant later the tension ebbed. Aoudad tugged at the pointed tip of his left ear. That had been a bad one, that surge of tension and suspicion. They were coming more frequently now. He feared that something nasty was happening to him and that Duncan Chalk was tapping in on his emotions, drinking in the sensations as he passed on a predestined course through paranoia and schizophrenia to catatonic suspension.

I will not let it happen to me, Aoudad resolved. He can have his pleasures, but he won’t get his fangs into my throat.

“We’ll remain on our assignments until Chalk says otherwise, yes?” he said aloud.

“Yes,” Nikolaides replied.

“Shall we monitor them as we ride along?”

“No objections.”

The car was passing the Appalachia Tunnel now. High blank walls hemmed them in. The highway was steeply banked here, and as the car barreled along at a high-G acceleration, a gleam of sensual appreciation came into Nikolaides’s eyes. He sat back in the huge seat meant for Chalk. Aoudad, beside him, opened the communication channels. The screens lit.

“Yours,” he said. “Mine.”

He looked at his. Aoudad no longer shivered when he saw Minner Burris, but the sight was a spooky one even now. Burris stood before his mirror, thereby providing Aoudad with the sight of two of him.

“There but for the grace of something-or-other go we,” Aoudad murmured. “How’d you like to have that done to you?”

“I’d kill myself instantly,” said Nikolaides. “But somehow I think the girl’s in a worse mess. Can you see her from where you’re sitting?”

“What is she doing? She’s naked?”

“Bathing,” said Nikolaides. “A hundred children! Never been had by a man! The things we take for granted, Bart. Look.”

Aoudad looked. The squat bright screen showed him a nude girl standing under a vibraspray. He hoped that Chalk was fastened to his emotional stream right now, for as he looked at Lona Kelvin’s bare body he felt nothing. Not a thing. No shred of sensuality.

She could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Her shoulders sloped, her face was wan, her eyes lacked sparkle. She had small breasts, a slender waist, narrow boyish hips. As Aoudad watched, she turned around, showing him flat, scarcely feminine buttocks, and switched off the vibraspray. She began to dress. Her motions were slow, her expression sullen.

“Maybe I’m prejudiced because I’ve been working with Burris,” Aoudad said, “but it seems to me that he’s very much more complicated than she is. She’s just a dumb kid who’s had a hard time. What will he see in her?”

“Hell see a human being,” said Nikolaides. “That may be enough. Perhaps. Perhaps. It’s worth a try, bringing them together.”

“You sound like a humanitarian,” Aoudad said in wonder.

“I don’t like to see people hurting.”

“Who does, aside from Chalk? But how can you possibly get involved with these two? Where’s the handle? They’re too remote from us. They’re grotesques. They’re baroques. I don’t see how Chalk can sell them to the public.”

Nikolaides said patiently, “Individually they’re baroques. Put them together and they’re Romeo and Juliet. Chalk has a certain genius for things like that.”

Aoudad eyed the girl’s empty face and then the eerie, distorted mask that was the face of Minner Burris. He shook his head. The car rocketed forward, a needle penetrating the black fabric of the night. He switched off the screens and shut his eyes. Women danced through his brain: real women, adults, with soft, rounded bodies.

The snow became thicker in the air about them. Even in the shielded snout of the womb-like car, Bart Aoudad felt a certain chill.