Thorns (4 page)

"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 Why had faith been withdrawn this way?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?"

"He'll 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.

FOUR

CHILD OF STORM

Lona Kelvin donned her clothes. Two undergarments, two overgarments, gray on gray, and she was dressed. She walked to the window of her little room and looked out. Snowfall. White swirls in the night. They could get rid of the snow fast enough once it hit ground, but they couldn't keep it from falling. Not yet

A walk in the Arcade, Lona decided. Then sleep and another day put to rest.

She drew her jacket on. Shivered in anticipation. Looked about her.

Pasted neatly to the walls of the room were photographs of babies. Not a hundred babies; more like sixty or seventy. And not her babies. But sixty baby photographs might just as well be a hundred. And to a mother like Lona, any babies might be her babies.

They looked as babies look. Rounded, unshaped faces with button noses and glossy, drooling lips and unseeing eyes. Tiny ears, painfully perfect. Clutching little hands with improbably splendid fingernails. Soft skin. Lona reached out and touched the photograph nearest the door and imagined that she was touching baby-velvet. Then she put her hand to her own body. Touched the flat belly. Touched a small, hard breast. Touched the loins from which a legion of infants had and had not sprung. She shook her head in what might have been thought a self-pitying gesture, but most of the self-pity had been drained away by now, leaving only a gritty residual sediment of confusion and emptiness.

Lona went out. The door quietly sealed itself behind her.

The dropshaft took her swiftly to ground level. Wind whipped down the narrow passage between the tall buildings. Overhead, the artificial glow of night pressed back the darkness; colored globes moved silently to and fro. Snowflakes danced against them. The pavement was warm. The buildings" that flanked her were brightly lit. To the Arcade, Lona's feet told her. To the Arcade to walk awhile in the brightness and the warmth of this snowy night.

Nobody recognized her.

Only a girl out by herself for the evening. Mouse-colored hair flipping about her ears. A thin-naped neck, slumping shoulders, an insufficient body. How old? Seventeen. Could be fourteen, though. No one asked. A mousy girl.

Mousy.

Dr. Teh Ping Lin, San Francisco, 1966:

"At the scheduled time of hormonally induced ovulation, female mice of the black-agouti C3H/HeJ strain were caged with fertile males of an albino strain, either BALB/c or Cal A (originally A/Crgi/2). Nine to twelve hours after the expected mating, eggs were flushed from the oviducts, and fertilized eggs were identified by the presence of the second polar body or by observation of pronuclei."

It was a taxing experiment for the doctor. Microinjection of living cells was nothing new even then, but work with mammalian cells had been flawed. The experimenters had not been able to safeguard the structural or functional integrity of the whole ovum.

No one had ever informed Lona Kelvin that:

"The mammalian egg is apparently more difficult to inject than other cells because of the thick zona pellucida and the vitelline membrane, both of which are highly elastic and resistant to the penetration of a microinstrument, especially at the unfertilized stage."

Crowds of boys were gathered, as usual, in the vestibule that led to the Arcade. With some of them were girls. Lona eyed them shyly. Winter did not extend to this vestibule; the girls had shucked their thermal wraps and stood proudly on display. This one had given her nipples a phosphorescence. That one had shaved her skull to exhibit the fine bony structure. There, voluptuous in the final weeks of pregnancy, a redhead linked her arms with two tall young men and laughingly roared obscenities.

Lona viewed her, edge-on. Big belly, bulky burden. Can she see her toes? Her breasts are swollen. Do they hurt? The child was conceived in the old way. Lona blinked. Gasp and thrust and shudder in the loins and a baby made.
One
baby. Possibly two. Lona drew her narrow shoulders back, filled her pinched lungs with air. The gesture raised her breasts and thrust them outward, and color came to her angular cheeks.

"Going to the Arcade? Go with me."

"Hey, robin! Let's chirp!"

"Need a friend, friend?"

Eddies of talk. Buzzing basso invitations. Not for her. Never for her.

I am a mother.

I am
the
mother.

"These fertilized eggs were then placed in a medium consisting of three parts modified Locke's solution, one part 2.9 percent sodium citrate dihydrate, and 25 mg of bovine gamma globulin (BGG, Armour) per milliliter of the citrate-Locke's solution. Penicillin (100 unit/ml) and streptomycin (50/
μ
g/ml) were added to the medium. Viscosity of the medium at 22° C was 1.1-591 cp and its
p
H 7.2. Eggs were retained for micromanipulation and injection within a drop of the bovine gamma globuline-citrate-Locke's solution (GCL) which was covered with mineral oil in a Vaseline well on a microscope slide."

Tonight there was a small surprise for Lona. One of the loungers at the vestibule approached her. Was he drunk? So sexually deprived that she was attractive to him? Moved by pity for the waif? Or did he know who she was and wish to share her glory? That was the least probable of all. He did not know, would not wish. Of glory there was none.

He was no beauty, but not conspicuously repulsive. Of medium height; black hair slicked straight forward almost to his eyebrows; eyebrows themselves slightly distorted surgically to arch in a skeptical inverted V; eyes gray, and bright with shallow craftiness; chin weak; nose sharp, prominent. About nineteen years old. Sallow skin marked with underlying striations, sun-sensitive patterns that would blaze in glory at noon. He looked hungry. On his breath a mixture of things: cheap wine, spiced bread, a hint of (splurge!) filtered rum.

"Hello, lovely. Let's match. I'm Tom Piper, Tom Piper's son. You?"

"Please—no," Lona murmured. She tried to move away. He blocked her, exhaling.

"Matched already? Meeting someone inside?''

"No."

"Why not me, then? You could do worse."

"Let me be." A faint whimper.

He leered. Small eyes boring into her own. "Starman," he said. "Just in from the outer worlds. We'll get a table and I'll tell you all about them. Mustn't turn a starman down."

Lona's forehead furrowed. Starman? Outer worlds? Saturn dancing within its rings, green suns beyond the night, pale creatures with many arms? He was no starman. Space marks the soul. Tom Piper's son was unmarked, Even Lona could tell that. Even Lona.

"You aren't,'' she said.

"Am. I'll tell you the stars. Ophiuchus. Rigel. Aldebaran. I've been out there. Come on, flower. Come with Tom."

He was lying. Glamorizing himself to enhance his magnetism. Lona shivered. Past his thick shoulder she saw the lights of the Arcade. He leaned close. His hand descended, found her hip, curled lasciviously over the fiat haunch, the lean flank.

"Who knows?" he whispered huskily. "The night could go anywhere. Maybe I'll give you a baby. I bet you'd like that. You ever had a baby?"

Her nails raked his cheek. He reeled back, surprised, bloodied, and for a moment the banded ornaments beneath his skin glowed brightly even in the artificial light. His eyes were wild. Lona swung around and sidestepped him, losing herself in the throng surging through the vestibule.

Elbows busy, she sliced a path into the Arcade.

Tom, Tom, the piper's son, give you a baby before he's done....

"Three hundred and one newly fertilized eggs were maintained in Vaseline well preparations and each received one of the following experimental treatments: (i) no pipette puncture and no injection; (ii) puncture of egg but no injection; (iii) injection of 180
μ
³
of the solution containing about 5 pg of BGG; (iv) injection of 770
μ
³
of the solution containing 20 pg of BGG; or (v) injection of 2730
μ
³
of the solution containing 68 pg of BGG."