They lay cradled in darkness; the window had to be opaqued to shut out the tireless sun. Lona rested on her back beside him, breathing slowly, her flank touching his. Somehow she dozed, and a poor, shallow sleep came to her. Her own phantoms visited her after a while. She awoke, sweating, to find herself naked in a strange room with a strange man next to her. Her heart was fluttering. She pressed her hands to her breasts and remembered where she was.
Burris stirred and groaned.
Gusts of wind battered the building. This was summer, Lona reminded herself. The chill seeped to her bones. She heard a distant sound of laughter. But she did not leave his side, nor did she try to sleep again.
Her eyes, dark-adjusted, watched his face. The mouth was expressive in its hinged way, sliding open, shutting, sliding again. Once his eyes did the same, but even when the lids were pulled back he saw nothing. He’s back on Manipool, Lona realized. They’ve just landed, he and … and the ones with Italian names. And in a little while the Things will come for him.
Lona tried to see Manipool. The parched and reddened soil, the twisted, thorny plants. What were the cities like? Did they have roads, cars, vid-sets? Burris had never told her. All she knew was that it was a dry world, an old world, a world where the surgeons had great skill.
And now Burris screamed.
The sound began deep in his throat, a gargled, incoherent cry, and moved higher in pitch and volume as it progressed. Turning, Lona clung to him, pressing tight. Was his skin soaked with perspiration? No; impossible; it must be her own. He thrashed and kicked, sending the coverlet to the floor. She felt his muscles coiling and bulging beneath his sleek skin. He could snap me in half with a quick move, she thought.
“It’s all right, Minner. I’m here. I’m here. It’s all right!”
“The knives … Prolisse … good God, the knives!”
“Minner!”
She did not let go of him. His left arm was dangling limply now, seemingly bending the wrong way at the elbow. He was calming. His hoarse breath was as loud as hoofbeats. Lona reached across him and turned on the light.
His face was blotched and mottled again. He blinked in that awful sidewise way of his three or four times and put his hand to his lips. Releasing him, she sat back, trembling a little. Tonight’s explosion had been more violent than the one the night before.
“A drink of water?” she asked.
He nodded. He was gripping the mattress so hard she thought he would tear it.
He gulped. She said, “Was it that bad tonight? Were they hurting you?”
“I dreamed I was watching them operate. First Prolisse, and he died. Then they carved up Malcondotto. He died. And then…”
“Your turn?”
“No,” he said in wonder. “No, they put Elise on the table. They carved her open, right between the—the breasts. And lifted up part of her chest, and I saw the ribs and her heart. And they reached inside.”
“Poor Minner.” She had to interrupt him before he spilled all that filthiness over her. Why had he dreamed of Elise? Was it a good sign, that he should see her being mutilated? Or would it have been better, she thought, if I was the one he dreamed about … I, being turned into something like him?
She took his hand and let it rest on the warmth of her body. There was only one method she could think of for easing his pain, and she employed it. He responded, rising, covering her. They moved urgently and harmoniously.
He appeared to sleep after that. Lona, edgier, pulled away from him and waited until a light slumber once more enveloped her. It was stained by sour dreams. It seemed that a returning starman had brought a pestilent creature with him, some kind of plump vampire, and it was affixed to her body, draining her … depleting her. It was a nasty dream, though not nasty enough to awaken her, and in time she passed into a deeper repose.
When they woke, there were dark circlets under her eyes, and her face looked pinched and hollow. Burris showed no effects of his broken night; his skin was not capable of reacting that graphically to short-range catabolic effects. He seemed almost cheerful as he got himself ready for the new day.
“Looking forward to the penguins?” he asked her.
Had he forgotten his bleak depression of the evening and his screaming terrors of the night? Or was he just trying to sweep them from view?
Just how human is he, anyway, Lona wondered?
“Yes,” she said coolly. “We’ll have a grand time, Minner. I can’t wait to see them.”
TWENTY-THREE: THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
“They’re beginning to hate each other already,” Chalk said pleasantly.
He was alone, but to him that was no reason for not voicing his thoughts. He often talked to himself. A doctor once had told him that there were positive neuropsychic benefits to be had from vocalizing, even in solitude.
He floated in a bath of aromatic salts. The tub was ten feet deep, twenty feet long, a dozen feet wide: ample room even for the bulk of a Duncan Chalk. Its marble sides were flanked by alabaster rims and a surrounding tilework of shimmering oxblood porcelain, and the whole bathing enclosure was covered by a thick, clear dome that gave Chalk a full view of the sky. There was no reciprocal view of Chalk for an outsider; an ingenious optical engineer had seen to that. From without, the dome presented a milky surface streaked with whorls of light pink.
Chalk drifted idly, gravity-free, thinking of his suffering amanti. Night had fallen, but there were no stars tonight, only the reddish haze of unseen clouds. It was snowing once more. The flakes performed intricate arabesques as they spiraled toward the surface of the dome.
“He is bored with her,” Chalk said. “She is afraid of him. She lacks intensity, to his taste. For hers, his voltage is too high. But they travel together. They eat together. They sleep together. And soon they’ll quarrel bitterly.”
The tapes were very good. Aoudad, Nikolaides, both of them remaining surreptitiously close behind, picking up scattered gay images of the pair to relay to a waiting public. That snowball fight: a masterpiece. And the power-sled trip. Minner and Lona at the South Pole. The public was eating it up.
Chalk, in his own way, ate it up, too.
He closed his eyes and opaqued his dome and drifted easily in the warm, fragrant tub. To him came splintered, fragmented sensations of disquiet.
…to have joints that did not behave as human joints should…
…to feel despised, rejected of mankind…
…childless motherhood…
…bright flashes of pain, bright as the thermoluminescent fungi casting their yellow glow on his office walls…
…the ache of the body and the ache of the soul…
…alone!
…unclean!
Chalk gasped as though a low current were running through his body. A finger flew up at an angle to his hand and remained there a moment. A hound with slavering jaws bounded through his forebrain. Beneath the sagging flesh of his chest the thick bands of muscle rhythmically contracted and let go.
…demon-visits in the sleep…
…a forest of watching eyes, stalked and shining…