Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “When did you die?” I asked.

  “Die. Die,” he screamed at me. “I’m not dead. I wish I were dead.”

  “You’re in hell,” I told him. “The hell you made. Did you believe in it, when you made it?”

  He turned his face into the corner of wherever we are and wept. I tried to find a way out, but I cannot get away from him. My pain and disgust are part of the teind. They amuse the Dark Lord who is disgusted at nothing, who feels no pain, but who relishes it in others.

  “Hold on,” the voices say, breathing cool, fresh air upon me. Offering me cool, fresh water.

  Later I saw Barry watching me. “You’re beautiful,” he said in wonder.

  “I am not beautiful,” I told him, stripping the glamour away so that he could see what I really am. He did not see. The Dark Lord will not let him see. Or perhaps he sees too well.

  “You glow. You shine. Don’t be afraid,” he whispered. “I won’t hurt you. I am a decent man.”

  I laughed. I laughed until I cried.

  The Dark Lord cannot create. Faery cannot create. The angels cannot create. Only God, and man. I told Barry this, carefully, making him pay attention to what I was saying. It was hard. The face glued to his own would not let him breathe, the false breasts fastened to his flesh pained him, the shoes he wore had somehow been made part of his feet so he could not take them off. One of the spike heels was broken, and a fractured end of bone protruded from it. He kept reaching down to feel the bone, trying to convince himself it was not there. It was there. I saw it.

  He had been playing a character from one of his own books, a woman who moves into a house occupied by a terrible thing from some other dimension of reality. It kills her children, one by one, in horrible ways, then her boyfriend, then comes after her. Barry had played the role well, so I assumed, for I had heard the Dark Lord’s bravos ringing through the substance of the cell. One of the added horrors of this place is that one hears everything.

  “The Dark Lord cannot create,” I told him again. “You have created everything here. You and the others. He has only borrowed it from you.”

  “It was only a story,” he cried. “Only a story!”

  I thought of Chinanga once more. That, too, had been only a story, and yet I remembered Constanzia’s face as she twirled slowly into nothingness. What are stories, after all, but reflections of a reality we make? Before Jaybee did anything, first he told himself a story about it. First I will go to her house, then I will break in her door, then I will knock her down and lie on top of her, watching her scream, then I will let my weapon out of my trousers and hurt her with it.

  “To those who read it, it was real,” I told him. “They lived it, while they read it. Perhaps afterward, they lived it. Some believed it. Perhaps one of those who believe it picked up a weapon and did to someone else what you did to a character. Or tried. There was enough belief to give it reality. Otherwise you would not be here.”

  He won’t believe that. He has stopped talking to me.

  The cell is open. I go out. Barry comes behind me.

  He is playing with us, of course.

  We walk, and I think words. Somewhere they are distilled onto a page. We … walk. My feet shuffle along. Barry tiptoes, screaming when he does not get high enough on his toes to avoid the broken bone at his heel. This is part of it, of course. Tempting him to walk, to escape, so that he will try this ungainly, ridiculous gait which hurts him so. I shuffle, he tiptoes. Time goes by. We are still surrounded by others. We can feel them on all sides.

  An opening. We separate. He goes one way, I another.

  I found a river. I came upon a place where space breaks through into something almost real. Like the door in the cavern, like the mirror, this connects to the world. Or to some other world. It is hard to tell. Mists hang heavily over the flow, which is turgid and silent. Nothing moves in the water. There is no shore I can walk along, but only this one space where hell waits on one side and the water on the other.

  Still, it is a change. I sit beside the flow, listening, hoping for a sound other than those I have heard for so long. At last it comes. A slow plopping. From somewhere to my right and behind me. Eons pass and the slow sounds are no closer. And then, at last, they are here, in front of me. A rowboat, a rower, a few other figures who are drawn up past me as though made of smoke, fleeing past me into the enormity of this place.

  The rower turns to face me, his dark hood shadowing his face.

  “Captain Karon,” I whisper.

  “Lady Wellingford,” he smiles. “Fancy seeing you here.” His smile is a death’s-head grin, and yet there is something of the old captain there. “Back at my old trade, you see. Sometimes I miss the Stugos Queen.”

  “I thought,” I say, wondering what I thought. “I thought that you…”

  “Would vanish, with the rest? With my lovely Mrs. Gallimar? With Constanzia and the Viceroy? No. No, I was not part of that story only. I am part of many things.”

  “You’ve thought about who you are, then.”

  “I’ve had an eternity of time to think about little else,” he smiled. “Plying across the Acheron, the Styx, the Cocytus, the Lethe, the Dark Waters at the end of all things.”

  “Who made them, Captain?”

  “Men made them, Lady. Made them with magic their religions stole from Faery. Made them and named them and peopled them, too.”

  “Along with Acheron and Abaddon and all the rest.”

  “Surely.”

  “And this hell behind me, Captain? Did men make this one, too?”

  “Men and the Dark Lord, Lady. Each helping the other.” He sighed. “Is there anything else I can tell you, or do for you, Lady Wellingford?”

  “Would you row me away from here? For old time’s sake?”

  He laughed. “Where to, Lady Catherine?”

  “To the other side.”

  “What other side?” he smiled again, and pushed his boat away. I heard the quiet plops of the oars recede and was then drawn back into the place.

  “Never mind,” said the voices. “It may be a way out.”

  Giles. I have found I can almost escape this place by thinking of Giles. The voices give me silence, and I think of him.

  When one is young, one thinks of love in romantic or erotic terms. I did. When I was sixteen, I thought of Giles in romantic and erotic terms. Romance when we were in the dining hall. Eros when I was in bed alone in the night hours. There is no innocence so deep as to veil the urgencies of the flesh from one’s own youthful awareness. I wanted Giles, very specifically, to do to me what the stallions did to the mares, what the stable boys talked of doing to their sweethearts. I had no experience of it, but my flesh knew. And then, twenty years later, when we did at last what I had longed for, my flesh knew once again. It was the single thing needed, the one thing wanted, the savor and marvel of life.

  I could not imagine doing without it. Being without it.

  And yet, all those years in the twentieth, I had done without it, been without it. Seventeen, eighteen years old. At the peak of urgency and desire, and yet I had done without it. Because there had been no Giles. I had remembered him, lusted after him, pleasured myself in my bed pretending he was there. He had been necessary to my joy. It would have been nothing without him. So I had thought.

  And when we two had come together at last, we had been splendid, but it had been more than the splendor of the flesh. It was we who loved one another. We two. Old Giles laid his hand upon mine and looked sweetly into my eyes, and I loved him no less than I had loved him on the terrace outside the ballroom where Elly and her young prince moved in a dance of another kind.

  Our love, mine, was made of such little things. When we traveled to Marvella, he would rise in the morning and find something warm for me to drink. Broth, perhaps. Some herbal concoction. A cup of mulled wine. He would bring it to me, knowing I wake grumpily from the pains of sleep—since I was a child, my legs have bothered me. They pain me especially at night,
and many nights I spend half sleepless, turning over and over. So, he would bring me something and sit on the side of the bed while I drank it and call me Beauty, though I was an old, white-haired hag with pouches beneath my eyes and lines around my mouth even then.

  And the love would come up from inside me like water rising in a well. Not lust, not romance, but something kindlier than that. The feeling one has watching a sunrise sometimes. The feeling one has watching kittens at play. The feeling one has seeing a rose bloom beside the window. The Baskaronian feeling. A perfection of being.

  When we were on the way to Lourdes, each delightful thing that I saw I could not wait to turn to him to see if he saw it, to point it out, to make some jest, to evoke some wonder. Things I read that I wanted to read to him. How we laughed over Christine de Pisan together.

  When he grew sick, he did not want me to go back to the twentieth to get the medicine for him. He did not want to go on living if it meant he might outlive me. If one of us died, he wanted to die first. He knew I was mean enough and grumpy enough to get along, someway. He did not think he could live without me. And he knew I would remember him. Perhaps he wanted to be remembered.

  I wonder if he knew I would remember him in hell, and for that little time of recollection, hell could not exist for me.

  There are men here. Sometimes, between the howls and screams and grunts of pain, I hear marching feet and voices raised in song. Sometimes I hear laughter. Sometimes I hear whispers, too soft to understand the words, but full of sly meaning. Sometimes I hear a shouted name, and know it is a name of someone real, someone I have read about somewhere. Not only one name, but several, in a questioning voice, as though a teacher calls a roll.

  Often there is an answer. A voice raised, “I am here!”

  And sometimes almost a chorus singing, their voices full of a terrible urgency and a dreadful joy, “Down, down, down to happyland.”

  I have been down to see Captain Karon once again, though he tells me simply Charon would suffice.

  “Difficult to be captain of a rowboat,” he said, as the newest cargo of ghosts streamed past him into the place.

  “Charon,” I said, “if there were another side, would you take us there? Or an ocean, maybe, that the river empties into.”

  “Would I go to an end if I could?” He smiled his death’s-head smile at me. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Are they dead?” I gestured behind me. “Are they all dead?”

  “If not, they will be someday,” he said. “Who lives forever?”

  The Dark Lord, I started to say. Faery. But then I stayed silent, for he had given me the germ, the merest germ of an idea.

  “Yes,” said the voices in my ear. “Yes, try that. Those words are good words, as good as any.”

  “They are not magic words,” I say, objecting. “They are mortal words.”

  “Any words can be magic,” whisper the voices. “If they meet the need.”

  “Did you know that I am a fairy?” I asked Barrymore Gryme.

  He laughed, spitting pieces of teeth in all directions. I reached out and healed him. He still laughed.

  “How else could I heal you?” I asked him. “Fairies can travel through time. Fairies can be taken captive. Still, they are fairies, with powers of their own. I have magic, Barry.”

  “Much good it’s doing you,” he muttered through swollen lips, glaring through bruised eyes.

  “It’s because I’m alone,” I said. “I am outweighed by all you others.”

  “So, you’re stuck,” he said. “Like the rest of us.”

  “My point is, I could get some of you unstuck, if you’d help me. There is some magic in each of you, as well. Man has been stealing it from Faery for thousands of years.”

  A wily look, perhaps hopeful. “How?” he asked.

  “I’ll teach you some words,” I said. “When you see the others, teach them the words. Have them teach still others. When the gong rings the third time from now, everyone say them together and think of the shore of a river. The words are a magic spell. They’ll get us out of here. Think of a river shore and a boat, a big boat come to take us away from here.”

  He does not believe me. Still, he has learned the words I have given him.

  “I’ve heard this before,” he complained as I recited to him.

  “Spells do not have to be original to be efficacious,” I told him. “This one will work. It will draw upon the magic of Faery. If everyone says it at the same time, it will free us. A great skeptic wrote these words. They will work.” Perhaps they will. Though, actually, it is hope that will do the most. Optimism. The undying desire of most men to make things come out right!

  Time goes by. Eventually, the gong rings. Over its dying reverberations I hear a whisper, as though a thousand voices have said “One.”

  There is time here when nothing happens, when there are no voices, no sounds, My mind circles, like a dog, trying to find a place to lie down. It runs off in all directions, thoughts flying in and out like bats while I chase after them. I keep losing them, thinking, “What was the thing I was just thinking of,” trying to trace it, trying to remember. I become exhausted, unable to think at all. I start to panic!

  “Shhh,” say the voices. “Lie down. You are soft, in bed. You are comfortable. Your hands are folded on your chest. You do not hurt. What would you like to hear, or read, or watch?”

  One of Bill’s documentaries, I think. And suddenly, it is there before me. Bill’s documentary on the Last Radish.

  Fidipur’s farms.

  Glass houses as far as I can see. The camera plunges down through the glass, and shows shallow tanks, full of green slime, constantly agitated by mechanical fingers and bubbles from perforated hoses. The camera dwells upon these things, tenderly, sensuously. Between the tanks walk robed acolytes, examining the soup, bending to a thermometer with a motion like a genuflection, adjusting a valve with the tips of sanctified, gloved fingers. There is soft, holy music in the background, a choir singing.

  Bill’s voice: not his regular voice, but his awed voice. “This is one of Fidipur’s farms. Here, isolated from any organism which might conceivably interfere with a maximized harvest, the soup is grown from which our food is made. It is here, in this particular section, that green one and two are manufactured.”

  The voice guides the camera as it follows the green soup. It spills down transparent pipes to the great cookers and emerges as a flaccid mush onto a conveyor belt. Knives divide and texture it. The belt moves into drying ovens, emerges once more, goes through a machine which injects other substances.

  “Here essential vitamins and minerals are added,” Bill says. “Before the mixture goes on into the molding section and the ovens.” He does not mention flavor.

  The camera follows the belt as it dumps its half-dried goo into a hopper, from which plops of green-gray gum are extruded into depressions in a great steel band. Heated plates come down at the end of stems. There is a sizzle of steam, then the tops rise and the band curves over to dump its cargo of baked biscuits onto another conveyor beneath.

  “Food for the billions,” Bill says in a proud tone. “But in the past there have still been those who believe they are too special to eat what the billions eat. Until now there have been the elite, who ate old-style, natural growth foods, because of the status it conferred.” Montage shots of fat people at tables, toasting each other, eating with knives and forks. Close-up shot of a jaw, chewing. “In the past,” Bill says, “some people have robbed Fidipur, but the robbery is at an end. The new managers, elected by you, Fidipur’s billions, are harvesting the last of the old-style foods. Tomorrow, one of Fidipur’s farms will rise where they have grown.”

  Camera flies over the glass houses, flits across the multiple towers of a hive, darts downward into an open space where narrow rows of greenery show against brown earth. The camera turns to the side of the field where Martin, the director, stands beside a stout, wrinkle-faced man dressed as everyone dresses in the twent
y-first.

  Martin says, “It did not seem right that the managerial class be allowed to consume this last vegetable, and there are not enough such vegetables for all of Fidipur’s billions to share. So a worldwide lottery was held to find one of Fidipur’s billions to have this privilege.” Martin turns, beams at the man next to him. “This is Mr. Walford Tupp. What words do you have for us on this occasion, Mr. Tupp?”

  The man gapes, smiles, giggles. “Well, gee, I don’t know. I mean, it’s such a privlige to be here on this momous casion, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it certainly is a privilege on such a momentous occasion, Mr. Tupp. Are you ready to harvest the last radish?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I mean, sure. I mean, that’s what I come for, isn’t it? Right?”

  “Remember, Mr. Tupp. Slowly. We want to be able to catch every nuance of this historic event.” Martin smiles his professional smile and pats Mr. Tupp on the shoulder.

  Camera on the Tupp feet, walking over brown earth. He is pigeon-toed. The soles of his shoes are worn more on one side than the other. The earth gives under each footfall, little cracks run away around the edges of his soles, leaving prints behind. There is an ant on the ground. He steps on it. Behind him, the ant struggles out of the compressed soil. Now the camera runs ahead of him, finds the radish, brings it up until it fills the screen….

  Green leaves, as large as sails. Slightly crinkled, textured, glossy hillocks separated by darker-veined valleys, the veins running like brooks to join larger veins, these wandering toward the center to join the strong central rib of the leaf. It is like a rib in the vault of a cathedral, curving gently, its size diminishing toward the leaf-tip, growing larger as it plunges down toward the stem, the whole rounded on one side, cupped on the other, the proportions perfectly designed. Light fractures off the leaf. Light falls through the leaf. The rib is darker, becoming wine colored at its base.