Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Bill held me by one wrist. He gave me no time to see anything. I had an impression of grayness, of round things like lance shafts hung across a wall. All sounds echoed, dwindling away in reverberations, as though we were in a great stone hall. I remember a mighty clamor of voices. Some were ours and echoes, but there were others. One of the women said, “Get that animal out of sight. Hide her hair.”

  Choking down a curse, I put Grumpkin under my shirt and held him there, feeling his ragged breathing against my belly and his claws in my skin. Bill bundled up my hair and pushed my cap down on my head. He must have picked it up when it fell off.

  “Now! The guards are looking the other way! Get her out of here, hurry.”

  The little man pulled me along with amazing strength. He was not much larger than Papa’s fool, but he was very powerful. He dragged me up a flight of stairs that clanged under our feet like swords upon armor.

  The women were behind us. One of them said, “God, there’s a pop-patrol.” I heard it as one word, “popatrol.” I looked for it, thinking it must be some kind of dangerous animal, but saw nothing except heads and legs, people moving in all directions, up and down and across, all dressed alike, all looking alike. The surface we walked upon was full of tiny holes. Another such surface was above. There were feet above us, tramping down on us, thousands of feet. Below us were the heads of people, moving fast or slow, thousands of heads, arms swinging below them, feet at the bottom, and below them, more heads and arms and feet. There were people on all sides. I wanted to scream. I think there were beggars, for some of the people rattled canisters beneath our noses as they cried, “Fidipur, fidipur.”

  “Get off here,” the woman said from close behind.

  Bill jerked me to one side. We ran down a corridor that moved beneath our feet, weaving through clots of people moving more slowly. I stumbled when the corridor ended, only to be hauled up and dragged onto another one. There were several more corridors that moved slow or fast. People stared at me curiously. I lost my footing and fell down and was jerked upright by my panting escort. Suddenly we were standing on an unmoving surface in front of a door. Bill put his hand flat on a place at the side of it. The door opened, and we were inside somewhere with the door shut behind us and the noise mostly gone, though I could still feel it rumbling in my feet. I felt the scream bubbling in me.

  “Home-sweet-home,” said Bill. Much of what he said was unintelligible, and I’ve doubtless got a lot of it wrong, but I know he said “home-sweet-home,” because he always said it, whenever he came in.

  “And what’s your name again?” he asked me.

  I swallowed the scream and started to say, “Havoc.” No point in that. He knew I was a girl. “Beauty,” I said, in a kind of mumble, trying to see on all sides of me at once. I would not have called it home-sweet-home. It was tiny, half the size of my tower room, full of complicated surfaces, with more of those ropes on the walls, very straight, like lances. When we brushed them with our bodies, they clanged.

  “Mind the pipes,” said Bill. “You’ll knock off a steam valve, and then where’ll we be?”

  I shook my head at him, signifying I did not know either where we were or would be or what a pipe or a steam valve was. I must have looked frightened, for he became less cheerful and tried to soothe me. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “Just sit down and relax. Sit down. It’s all right.”

  Grumpkin heard him if I did not, for the cat came out from under my shirt all in one movement and crouched at my feet yowling.

  “He’s hungry,” I said. I knew he was, because I was. We had not eaten during all that grieving time at Westfaire. And now—I had the feeling much time had passed.

  “What do they eat?” he asked me, pointing to the cat.

  I could not imagine anyone not knowing what cats eat. “Milk,” I told him. “Meat. Eggs. What any animal eats.”

  “Milk,” he said, laughing. “Meat. Eggs. Ha, ha. Ha.”

  It was not amused laughter. It was bitter laughter, the kind Papa’s fool sometimes got up to when he remembered his wife who had run away with his children.

  “You don’t have any?” I asked.

  “Have none. Have never seen any. Would not know any if I saw them.”

  “What do you feed your animals? What do you eat?” I asked him in amazement.

  “We have no animals. We couldn’t have both animals and Fidipur. We eat orange one and two. Green one through four. Red one through five, though I don’t much care for three. The original white series, all ten of them.” He turned to open a door in the wall and take from it a bowl of things. Wafers. Little flat cakes. Orange ones, and dead green, and pottery red, and white, with numbers stamped upon them. He waved the bowl at me, offering. “It doesn’t take much to feed me, so I’ve got more than I need. ‘Balanced protein and fiber with all necessary vitamins and minerals.’”

  I didn’t know what he meant, but I took a green thing and nibbled at it. It did not taste like anything, and yet I could not honestly say it tasted nasty. I would not have thought it was food, yet I could tell it would stifle hunger. I gave a piece of it to Grumpkin. He sniffed at it, crunched a bit of it, then yowled again.

  “They go better,” Bill said, “if you have a bit of water along with them. White one and two actually have taste.”

  “I would prefer beer or wine to water,” I said.

  “Ha,” he muttered. “Ha, ha. Ha.”

  “You have no beer or wine?” I guessed. Only fools drank water. One could grow ill, drinking water.

  “No wine. No beer. Nothing that takes food to make. The food must go directly to Fidipur.”

  A god, I thought. Some kind of religious being? Perhaps an ogre or dragon that demanded sacrifice? Had I fallen among the heathen? Or were they Christians still? I felt it might be dangerous to ask that question.

  “And you have no meat or milk?”

  “That would take grain, also, which must go directly to Fidipur.” He gazed at me. “How old are you.”

  “Sixteen,” I replied, honestly enough. As of today, I was sixteen. Only, of course, it wasn’t today.

  “Oh, God,” he sighed. “A minor.”

  “No,” I told him. “I am a miller’s son.” I wasn’t, but Havoc was, so to speak.

  “I mean you’re not yet eighteen,” he explained. “In our society, you’re not considered a full citizen until you’re eighteen.”

  “What am I then?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “A person we don’t want to come to the attention of the pop-patrol, that much I know. If they find you, they’ll find you don’t have an implant. Then they’ll wonder how anybody could get here without an implant. Then they’ll question you with the truth machines and find out how you got here, and then it will be my neck. Mine and the rest of the team. They’ll claim Janice did sloppy research, or one of us fouled up on the trip, and it’ll be the disposal chutes for all of us. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone around while we were filming. We can’t be seen, not that far back, or we risk upsetting history, changing it! No one was supposed to see us.”

  If I had not subverted the curse, there would not have been anyone around. His trouble was my fault, if anyone’s. “Tell me again why no one was supposed to see you?” I asked.

  He explained at great length, waving his arms and striding to and fro across the tiny room. It had to do with history, with changing things that had already happened, which might change other things in the now. He used words I didn’t know. Permutations of the possible. Linked events. Making a closed loop that would pinch off. I didn’t understand much of it. He glared at me and shouted, “I don’t know what to do with you. Jaybee and Martin expect me to put you down the disposal chute, but I don’t want to do that. We’ll have to talk about it and decide.”

  “I think you should put me back where I was,” I said, trying to keep calm. “I don’t like it here.”

  “Ha,” he muttered. “Ha, ha.” He went on striding, talking, muttering, waving his arms. Aft
er a time, I grew weary and my eyes closed. It had been long since we had slept, Grumpkin and I. I heard the little man talking, through a veil, as though he were far away.

  Then his hands were on me, gently enough, pulling off my shoes, taking off my cap, feeling my chest.

  I sat up, my hair spilling down my back.

  “You’re a very pretty girl,” he accused me, putting his hand back on my chest to make sure I was a girl. “We have very little prettiness anymore, and that makes you noticeable, which makes things difficult.”

  I drew away, offended. “Actually,” I told him through a fog of weariness, “I’m a duke’s daughter.” I don’t know why I told him this. Perhaps it was because I had just been wakened. Perhaps it was to reassure myself that I Was really myself.

  He buried his head in his hands. “That butcher, Jaybee. He’s sick. The things he does, the way he thinks! Not that Alice is that different. She’s the only one who can handle him. They both ought to be put down the chutes, but he’s a genius, so they don’t, they haven’t, and now he’s dragged you along, they’ll put us all down the chutes. What am I going to do?”

  “Put me back,” I suggested again. “I won’t tell anyone. No one would believe me, anyhow.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I don’t have an authorization code. We can’t use the machine without an authorization code. Even if I could use it, I couldn’t put you back at the same time. The tolerances aren’t close enough. If we make a closed loop, it will pinch off and everything will collapse!”

  He wrung his hands for a while, then told me, “Go on, go to sleep. I’ve got to think. I’ve really got to think.”

  I lay sidewise on the bed I was sitting on, a narrow bed to be sure but no harder than the one I slept upon in Westfaire. Grumpkin lay beside me, munching on the strange biscuit with an expression of remote disdain upon his face. I took a fragment of the biscuit and put it in my mouth, letting it dissolve there. It had sustenance in it but no pleasure. I could live on it, but if it were all there was to eat, I thought living might not much be worth it.

  13

  The day after my arrival, Bill went away, returning sometime later very strange in his manner. “All for nothing,” he cried at me, as though something had been my fault. “Why wouldn’t you let us finish it?” He slammed around the tiny place for a while and then went out again, giving me an intense, wondering look as he left. When he returned, he was giggling and staggering a little, happier, for some reason. He seemed to have forgotten whatever had bothered him before, and I did not ask him what the trouble had been.

  In the days that followed, I grew to know the untaste of the biscuits and the boundaries of the tiny room all too well. It had many folding places in it: a folding place to wash, a folding place to relieve one-self, folding places to store things. The bed slid into a pocket, the table slid into another pocket, each thing became something else. Bill went away each day, telling me to stay out of sight. He locked the door behind him and unlocked it when he returned. There was no window. I complained of this, and he told me the room was deep inside a great redoubt; windows would merely have looked into other rooms. There were no windows anywhere, he said, for there was nothing for them to see but more rooms and more rooms. He taught me to use the screen, instead, and gave me a great pile of “documentaries” he had helped make. They made my head hurt, but I watched them nonetheless. It was something to do. I learned to understand the language of the place that way, watching the images on the screen as they flowed and danced. It was my own language, more or less, though strangely changed. Often it was easier to understand the printed words that surged across the picture than the spoken ones.

  There were other films, as well. I could watch some of the “porno-mance” ones, but the “horro-porn” ones I could not watch. Jaybee had filmed some of them. I threw them down the disposal chute, but every few days more were delivered from the supply chute. There was no end to them, each one full of pain and blood. I learned very soon there was nothing beautiful in that place. Even the things they watched were not beautiful. There was no contrast between beauty and ugliness. There was only ugliness.

  I suppose it was more practical for them. If there had been any beauty at all, people might have wanted that instead. As it was, they didn’t know there was any such thing, so the lack did not bother them. I knew, though. I hurt all the time with such a longing. My chest burned, as though I would die of it.

  Grumpkin learned to make his mess on paper, which I threw down the disposal chute thing where my own waste went. Everything worn out or used up went down the chute, said Bill. His name was William, William Picte. “Pic-tee,” he said, spelling it for me. He was a writer of what he called scripts, which I learned were stories for the pictures I had watched on the machine. He was a man of mature years, thirty at least. He came up to my shoulder. His hair was the color of apricots, and his skin was very pale, covered over with freckles. The hair on his body was the same as the hair on his head. I saw it when he washed himself. He had nowhere else to go to wash himself. The room we were in was the only room he had. We slept together on the narrow bed, our heads at opposite ends. He did not try to do anything to me, and I was grateful for that.

  ‘Take me with you,” I begged him one day when he was about to set out. “I want to see something else.”

  “There isn’t anything else,” he told me. “It’s all like this. Except for Fidipur’s farms, but nobody can go there except the people who work there.”

  “Let’s go to the ocean,” I suggested. “To the sea.” I had never seen the sea, but Papa had, many times.

  “There isn’t any sea,” he said. “Except the farms for Fidipur.”

  “A forest then,” I begged, growing frantic. Sometimes I thought if I had to spend one more day in this little closet I would die. “Take me to the forest.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t understand. There isn’t any forest anymore. No forest, no prairie, no mountains, no jungle, no swamp, no animals, no birds, no fish. It all went to Fidipur. This is all there is. Rooms like this one. Full of people like me.”

  “Where do you go when you go out?” I begged.

  “To the area supply station to get the daily ration of food wafers,” he snarled at me. “I get the same as a full-size person, which is why there’s enough left over for you. Then I go to the area work station to check in each day so they will know I am still alive and my room occupied. Then to the area water station to punch in so they’ll know I’m still alive and using water. To the required school for continuing education, which is a laugh, because there’s nothing left to teach anyone that matters. There aren’t any books; they take up too much room. There aren’t any teachers. There’s one technical university, and only the people who run things get to send their children there, so they can keep on running things.”

  “You do that every day?”

  “Except the sabbath. On the sabbath I go to the required religious observance of my choice. We’re very religious, hadn’t you noticed. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

  None of it was reasonable, so I thought he lied. One day I opened the door and stepped out. There were people everywhere, small people. I hadn’t noticed the first time, but almost all of the people were small. Still, they filled up the moving corridors and stairs. All of them wore much the same sort of clothes, and it was hard to tell men from women. Some of them saw me looking out, and Stopped to stare, muttering, the noise level rising like a disturbed hive. I was afraid the noise would bring some official to see what was going on. I went back in, hastily, and stayed inside after that.

  All this time the thing inside me kept flaming away as though it had to burn its way out. It wasn’t pain, it wasn’t that kind of burning, but there was such a dreadful urgency about it. I felt stretched thin. Like parchment stretched around a flame, trying to contain it, getting hotter and hotter all the time.

  Even though he had said there was no wine, Bill came home another time acting giggly and happy, as though he had been
drinking. If there wasn’t wine, there was something like it, because his face was flushed and the pupils of his eyes were tiny, like dots. He giggled at me, like a drunken baby, waving his finger, and took a box out of one of the hidden closets. The box had women’s clothes in it, and he put them on. There were stockings like cobwebs, but full of holes, a silky black blouse, a red and black striped skirt, a slim underbodice without sleeves. Around his shoulders he wrapped a fleece, a sheepskin, with the wool out, as though it had been fur, then he staggered around on high-heeled red shoes. All the things were old and stained, like the clothes the aunts had given me to wear.

  I told him the things weren’t very nice.

  “I know,” he said. “Oh, I know. Women don’t wear clothes like these anymore. We all dress alike. Men and women. Nothing silky anymore. Nothing lacy or soft. Just these,” and he pinched up a handful of the trousers he had discarded, the harsh wrinkled fabric of them pulling up in mountain peaks beneath his fingers. “I brought the silky clothes back from a time-trip, a long time ago. When we went to take pictures of whales.”

  I thought he would have liked living at Westfaire. My father wore soft things, velvets and satins. “Please take me home,” I begged him. “You can go with me. There are many nice fabrics at home. You would love the gowns.”

  “Beauty,” he said to me, pushing me down on the couch and squatting on the floor in front of me like some great lady frog, the soiled silk lying in loose folds on his flat chest. “Listen to me. I am a member of a work crew. The work crew is assigned to make certain kinds of films, like the ones you’ve been watching. There are five of us. Alice Fremont is the travel technician. She takes us places to film things. Martin Duboise is the director. He tells the cameraman—Jaybee Veolante—what pictures to get. He usually talks to me about that also, because I write the scripts, the words, you know?”

  I knew he did. I had seen him at work, at a fold down place with a screen to show words and a thing to print paper.