Thorns (21 page)

The ramp was down. She rushed from the ship into the waiting dome, and he followed her, having only a little trouble coordinating his legs.

TWENTY-FIVE

TEARS OF THE MOON

Lona watched breathlessly as the cannon recoiled and the cartridge of fireworks went sliding up, up the shaft, through the aperture in the dome, and out into the blackness. She held her breath. The cartridge exploded.

Color stained the night.

There was no air out there, nothing to cushion the particles of powder as they drifted down. They did not drift, even, but remained more or less where they were. The pattern was brilliant. They were doing animals now. The strange figures of extraterrestrial figures. Beside her, Burris stared upward as intently as anyone else.

"Have you ever seen one of those?" she asked.

It was a creature with ropy tendrils, an infinite neck, flattened paddles for feet. Some swampy world had spawned it.

"Never."

A second cartridge shot aloft. But this was only the obliterator, cleansing away the paddle-footed one and leaving the heavenly blackboard blank for the next image.

Another shot.

Another.

Another.

"It's so different from fireworks on Earth," she said. "No boom. No blast. And then everything just stays there. If they didn't blot it out, how long would it stay, Minner?"

"A few minutes. There's gravity here, too. The particles would get pulled down. And disarranged by cosmic debris. All sorts of garbage comes peppering in from space."

He was always ready for any question, always had an answer. At first that quality had awed her. Now it was an irritant. She wished she could stump him. She kept on trying. Her questions, she knew, annoyed
him just about as much as his answers annoyed her.

A fine pair we are. Not even honeymooners yet, and already setting little traps for each other!

They watched the silent fireworks for half an hour. Then she grew restless, and they moved away.

"Where to now?" he asked.

"Let's just wander."

He was tense and jittery. She felt it, sensed him ready to leap for her throat if she blundered. How he must hate being here in this silly amusement park! They were staring at him a lot. At her, too, but she was interesting for what had been done with her, not for the way she looked, and the eyes did not linger long.

They moved on, down one corridor of booths and up the next.

It was a carnival of the traditional sort, following a pattern set centuries ago. The technology had changed, but not the essence. Here were games of skill and Kewpie dolls; cheap restaurants selling dished-up dross; whirling rides to suit any dervish; sideshows of easy horror; dance halls; gambling pavilions; darkened theaters (adults only!) in which to reveal the sagging mysteries of the flesh; the flea circus and the talking dog; fireworks, however mutated; blaring music; blazing stanchions of light A thousand acres of damp delight, done up in the latest trickery. The most significant difference between Chalk's Luna Tivoli and a thousand tivolis of the past was its location, in the broad bosom of Copernicus Crater, looking toward the eastern arc of the ringwall. One breathed pure air here, but one danced in fractional gravity. This was Luna.

"Whirlpool?" a sinuous voice asked. "Take the Whirlpool, mister, miss?"

Lona pressed forward, smiling. Burris slapped coins onto the counter and they were admitted. A dozen aluminum shells gaped like the remains of giant clams, floating on a quicksilver lake. A squat, bare-chested man with coppery skin said, "Shell for two? This way, this way!"

Burris helped her into one of the shells. He sat beside her. The top was sealed in place. It was dark, warm, oppressively close inside. There was just room for the two of them.

"Happy womb fantasies," he said.

She took his hand and held it grimly. Through the quicksilver lake came a spark of motivating power. Away they went, skimming on the unknown. Down what black tunnels, through what hidden gorges? The shell rocked in a maelstrom. Lona screamed, again, again, again.

"Are you afraid?" he asked.

"I don't know. It moves so fast!"

"We can't get hurt."

It was like floating, like flying. Virtually no gravity, and no friction to impede their squirting motion as they slid hither and yon down the byways and cloacae of the ride. Secret petcocks opened, and scent filtered in.

"What do you smell?" she asked him.

"The desert. The smell of heat. And you?"

"The woods on a rainy day. Rotting leaves, Minner. How can that be?"

Maybe his senses don't pick up things the way mine do, the way a human's do. How can he smell the desert? That ripe, rich odor of mold and dampness! She could see red toadstools bursting from the ground. Small things with many legs scuttering and burrowing. A shining worm. And he: the desert?

The shell seemed to flip over, strike its supporting medium flat on, and right itself. The scent had changed by the time Lona noticed it again.

"Now it's the Arcade at night," she said. "Popcorn... sweat... laughter. What does laughter smell like, Minner? What does it seem like to you?"

"The fuel-room of a ship at core-changing time. Something was burning a few hours ago. Frying fat where the rods leaked. It hits you like a nail rammed up the nostril."

"How can it be that we don't smell the same things?"

"Olfactory psychovariation. We smell the things that our minds trigger for us. They aren't giving us any particular scent, just the raw material. We shape the patterns."

"I don't understand, Minner."

He was silent. More odors came: hospital-smell, moonlight-smell, steel-smell, snow-smell. She did not ask him about his own responses to this generalized stimulation. Once he gasped; once he winced and dug fingertips into her thigh.

The barrage of odors ceased.

Still the sleek shell slipped on, minute after minute. Now came sounds: tiny pinging bursts, great organ throbs, hammer blows, rhythmic scraping of rasp on rasp. They missed no sense here. The interior of the shell grew cool, and then warm again; the humidity varied in a complex cycle. Now the shell zigged, now it zagged. It whirled dizzyingly, a final frenzy of motion, and abruptly they were safe at harbor. His hand engulfed hers as he pulled her forth.

"Fun?" he asked unsmilingly.

"I'm not sure. Unusual, anyway."

He bought her cotton candy. They passed a booth where one flipped little glass globes at golden targets on a moving screen. Hit the target three out of four, win a prize. Men with Earthside muscles struggled to cope with the low gravity and failed, while pouting girls stood by. Lona pointed at the prizes: subtle alien designs, abstract rippling forms executed in furry cloth. "Win me one, Minner!" she begged.

He paused and watched the men making their hapless looping tosses. Most far overshot the target; some, compensating, flipped feebly and saw their marbles droop slowly short of the goal. The crowd at the booth was closely packed as he moved among them, but the onlookers gave way for him, uneasily edging away. Lona noticed it and hoped he did not. Burris put down money and picked up his marbles. His first shot was off the mark by six inches.

"Nice try, buddy! Give him room! Here's one who's got the range!" The huckster behind the booth-front peered disbelievingly at Burris's face. Lona reddened. Why do they have to stare? Does he look that strange?

He tossed again.
Clang.
Then:
clang. Clang.

"Three in a row! Give the little lady her prize!"

Lona clutched something warm, furry, almost alive. They moved away from the booth, escaping a buzz of talk. Burris said, "There are things to respect about this hateful body, Lona."

Some time later she put the prize down, and when she turned for it, it had disappeared. He offered to win her another, but she told him not to worry about it.

They did not enter the building of the flesh shows.

When they came to the freak house, Lona hesitated, wanting to go inside but uncertain about suggesting it. The hesitation was fatal. Three beer-blurred faces emerged, looked at Burris, guffawed.

"Hey! There's one that escaped!"

Lona recognized the fiery blotches of fury on his cheeks. She steered him quickly away, but the wound had been made. How many weeks of self-repair undone in a moment?

The night pivoted around that point. Up till then he had been tolerant, faintly amused, only slightly bored. Now he became hostile. She saw his eye-shutters pull back to their full opening, and the cold glare of those revealed eyes would have eaten like acid into this playland if it could. He walked stiffly. He grudged every new moment here.

"I'm tired, Lona. I want to go to the room."

"A little while longer."

"We can come back tomorrow night."

"But it's still early, Minner!"

His lips did odd things. "Stay here by yourself, then."

"No! I'm afraid! I mean—what fun would it be without you?"

"I'm not having fun."

"You seemed to be... before."

"That was before. This is now." He plucked at her sleeve. "Lona—"

"No," she said. "You aren't taking me away so fast. There's nothing to do in the room but sleep and have sex and look at the stars. This is Tivoli, Minner.
Tivoli!
I want to drink up every minute of it."

He said something she could not make out and they moved on to a new section of the park. But his restlessness mastered him. In a few minutes he was asking again that they go.

"Try to enjoy yourself, Minner."

"This place is making me sick. The noise... the smell...
the eyes
."

"No one's looking at you."

"Very funny! Did you hear what they said when—"

"They were drunk." He was begging for sympathy, and for once she was tired of giving it to him. "Oh, I know, your feelings are hurt. Your feelings get hurt so easily. Well, for once stop feeling so sorry for yourself! I'm here to have a good time, and you're not going to spoil it!"

"Viciousness!"

"No worse than selfishness!" she snapped at him.

Overhead the fireworks went off. A garish serpent with seven tails sprawled across the heavens.

"How much longer do you want to stay?" Steely now.

"I don't know. Half an hour. An hour."

"Fifteen minutes?"

"Let's not bargain over it We haven't seen a tenth of what's here yet."

"There are other nights."

"Back to that again. Minner, stop it! I don't want to quarrel with you, but I'm not giving in. I'm just not giving in."

He made a courtly bow, dipping lower than anyone with human skeletal structure could possibly have done. "At your service, milady." The words were venomous. Lona chose to ignore the venom and took him onward down the cluttered path. It was the worst quarrel they had had so far. In past frictions they had been cool, snippy, sarcastic, withdrawn. But never had they stood nose to nose, barking at each other. They had even drawn a small audience: Punch and Judy hollering it up for the benefit of interested onlookers. What was happening? Why were they bickering? Why, she wondered, did it sometimes seem as though he hated her? Why did she feel at those times that it could be quite easy to hate him?

They should be giving each other support. That was how it had been at the beginning. A bond of shared sympathy had linked them, for they both had suffered. What had happened to that? So much bitterness had crept into things now. Accusations, recriminations, tensions.

Before them, three intersecting yellow wheels performed an intricate dance of flame. Pulsating lights bobbed and flickered. High on a pillar a nude girl appeared, draped in living glow. She waved, beckoned, a muezzin calling the faithful to the house of lust. Her body was improbably feminine; her breasts were jutting shelves, her buttocks were giant globes. No one was born like that. She must have been changed by doctors....

A member of our club, thought Lona. Yet she doesn't mind. She's up there in front of everybody and happy to draw her pay. What's it like at four in the morning for her? Does she mind?

Burris was staring fixedly at the girl.

"It's just meat," Lona said. "Why are you so fascinated?"

"That's Elise up there!"

"You're mistaken, Minner. She wouldn't be here. Certainly not up there."

"I tell you it's Elise. My eyes are sharper than yours. You hardly know what she looks like. They've done something to her body, they've padded her somehow, but I know it's Elise!"

"Go to her, then."

He stood frozen. "I didn't say I wanted to."

"You just thought it."

"Now you're jealous of a naked girl on a pillar?"

"You loved her before you ever knew me."

"I never loved her," he shouted, and the lie emblazoned itself on his forehead.