Beauty, Glory, Thrift

by Alison Tam

  BEAUTY, GLORY, THRIFT

  By Alison Tam

  Book Smugglers Publishing

  Copyright Information

  Beauty, Glory, Thrift

  Published by Book Smugglers Publishing

  Copyright © 2017 Alison Tam

  Cover Illustration by Melanie Cook

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  978-1-942302-52-0 (Ebook)

  Book Design and Ebook Conversion by Thea James

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written prior permission of the copyright owners. If you would like to use material from the book, please inquire at contact@booksmugglerspub.com

  To all the English teachers I’ve ever had

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Beauty, Glory, Thrift

  Inspirations and Influences

  A Chat with Alison Tam

  About the Author

  About the Artist

  Book Smugglers Publishing

  BEAUTY, GLORY, THRIFT

  The lights, when they came on, woke my sister Glory first. We had been drowsing in that deep, dark familiar haze for I know not how long, but then she gave a cry, and we all awoke in turn.

  “Someone’s here,” she said, and the news spread among us with a murmur of anticipation. Confined to our altars as we were, our only entertainment the silly games we played amongst ourselves and the enticing lull of sleep, any visitor sent us into a flurry of speculation. It could be a princess, suggested my sister Beauty. Wisdom wanted an ancient scholar, and Innocence was holding out for a dog.

  “It could be a hero,” I said, “Clad in golden mail, with shining silver pauldrons and a plasma rifle encrusted with jewels, her spaceship slipping silver-bright through the stars. Couldn’t it, Glory?”

  “Nonsense,” she said, dismissing me without even a glance at my direction, so focused was she on trying to peer past the doorway. “She’s just a thief. I see her putting the good incense pot into her satchel.”

  If anything, our excitement rose. A thief! Romantic, dangerous, daring! Beauty threw back her hair and flexed her biceps. Artifice smoothed out her scarf, winding the long strands at the end into an elaborate knot. Even Glory stood a little taller, though she held herself above any of our obvious signs of preparation. When the thief finally walked in, her hands in her pockets and her gun worn low on her hip, all of us shone.

  “Come, traveler,” said Glory, as the thief stepped across the doorway, “And I shall give you a boon. Take me with you and your bullets will never miss their marks. You will never have cause to fear battle again, and the entire galaxy shall exult in the sound of your name.”

  “I’m good,” said the thief, and walked onwards. Beauty, shooting a triumphant look at Glory, stepped forward as the thief neared her altar.

  “Stranger, stranger,” she called. “Come, and you will receive a gift beyond measure. Take me with you, and you will never feel anything but perfect. You could have any lover you wish in the universe, and everyone you see shall meet your gaze with delight.”

  “No, thanks,” said the thief, and walked onwards. She denied Wit, and Mercy, and Toil besides. Wisdom didn’t even try. The thief passed through the whole hallway without ever sparing me a glance; by then, of course, she was sick of my sisters’ entreaties. I watched her walk by, the swing of her hair, the heavy thump of her boots on the floor, thinking that I would go the way of Wisdom. But as she left, I was struck with the thought of another hundred years of pointless existence, alternating between nonsensical chatter with my sisters and sleep, every bit of conversation worth having already said.

  “Wait!” I yelled, and, miraculously, the thief halted.

  “I am Thrift,” I told her. “I am Thrift and I want to leave this place, and see the far ends of the universe, and never spend another moment in stasis ever again. Take my hand and bring me with you. Please.”

  “What’re you going to give me, then?”

  I hadn’t the powers of my sisters: I could not make a bullet fly true, or curl a lock of hair just right, or fry an egg to perfection every time. If I had blood in my body, my face would have flushed at the thief’s question. I had always been the least of my sisters, lacking the confidence of Beauty, the quickness of Wit, and wholly without any of the grace, strength, or power that Glory claimed as her own. I grabbed at my altar, more for comfort than balance, and in so doing, my hands closed around the only offering I had to my name.

  Had the offering been anything else, I would not have made so bad a bargain. My whole being still burns with shame to think of it. But in a time of desperation, any deal was a good one, even if I was giving away the only possessions I had in the whole world.

  “Fifty creds!” I said, triumphantly, holding up two coins in my palm, and watched in dismay as the thief shook with laughter.

  “This is more than you think it is, thief. And I’ll prove it to you, if you give me the chance. Take my hand, and I will turn these fifty creds into a feast.”

  She laughed still louder, the sound bouncing off the narrow walls and low ceiling, my sisters leaning in, ready to mock me once I was denied. The thief wiped a tear from her eye. I was standing there in stupid silence, hoping beyond hope that either I or my sisters would perish in the next few moments, when she, still laughing, reached out and took my hand.

  I emerged from the cold, cramped, dark of the temple as if from the womb. Suddenly there was light once more, and the sudden pressure of the thief’s hand on mine when before I only knew sight and sound. I could feel the impact each time the thief took a step, foot against floor. Her clothes shifted on her body as she walked, and I could feel that, too, the rasp of cloth against flesh. And then there was smell, of stale air and metal and the headiness of incense, the one sense I barely even remembered.

  “What’s that you’re doing, with your ribs and your nose and the thing moving inside your body?” I asked. The thief gave me a strange look, letting go of my hand.

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “You’re doing it right now, it’s—” I moved my hand, mimicking a rise and fall.

  “You mean breathing?”

  Breathing. I had forgotten about that.

  “I promised to show you my skills,” I said, changing the subject. “Follow me.”

  I did not know how long I had been asleep, insulated from contact with the world outside, as ignorant as a chick in a shell, but it only took a touch to the Oracle’s network to tell me how things were now. That, even more than the sensations of the physical, was at once new and familiar, something that I knew intimately and yet did not remember. Information rushed over me like water through a mill, every single point of data another drop.

  We steered towards the shipyards, where unofficial vendors had set up their stalls. I couldn’t speak to them directly, kept non-corporeal, only able to manifest through the thief’s consciousness, but she let me guide her through our purchases with good grace.

  It would be a simple meal. Ten creds for water, ten for rice, five and five again for the most unattractive vegetables and fish bones cleaned of everything but the head and the tail. Ten creds went to an engine core diffuser, and the last ten were spent on chopsticks and two bowls.

  The diffuser was made of three parts, stacked atop
each other. In the first, I poured the water and placed the fish bones. In the second went the rice and what little water we had left. The third was where I put the vegetables, which would cook in the rice’s steam.

  “And now we need only heat,” I said, already thinking of how to sneak into the station’s thermal generators when the thief began walking in the opposite direction. Try as I might, I couldn’t help but be pulled along.

  “I have a place,” she said, and led me to—just as I had imagined!—a ship, elegant in its sloping lines, silver shining where the light hit the scuffs in its dark blue paint. Inside it was silver, too, and hearth-warm, three shining screens flickering to life the moment we walked in. I gaped, then looked at the thief to be sure that she had not caught me gaping. She connected the engine diffuser to a port in the wall.

  “See? Heat.”

  I kept asking her questions about the ship (where it had been made, and where she had got it, and did she know how it worked), to which the thief hadn’t any sort of satisfactory answers. Eventually she deigned to tell me about the largest ship she had ever seen—Generation-class, meant to bridge the gap between galaxies, and that story lasted us until our meal was done.

  “Not bad,” was the thief’s verdict. I did not reply. The heat of the broth against her tongue, the taste of fish, the texture of the rice against her teeth—I could not speak, and barely managed to hear her next words.

  “But if it’s all the same to you, I don’t think I need your services for any longer,” she said, barely even sparing me a glance, “End program.”

  She’d left the diffuser on the floor. What a waste! I could not pick it up, and as she walked away I was pulled uncontrollably with her. She didn’t notice me for a good few seconds, and started with a little jump when she realized I was still drifting along beside her.

  “I said, end program. Computer, delete—what are you again?”

  “I am Thrift,” I said, “Though my sisters call me Chechine, which means ‘smallest one’, and—”

  “Computer, delete Chechine. Delete Thrift. End Chechine.”

  The timbre of her voice lowered with each word, and I could feel the strain in her voicebox as she ended her last sentence with a hiss.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? Thrift, Chechine, whatever, how the hell am I supposed to make you go away?”

  “Away?” I echoed, witless as ever. Had I not shown her how useful I could be? Had I not proved my worth?

  “Away. Back to the… wherever you were. Terminate user license.”

  “Our bargain—”

  “It’s done, isn’t it? You showed me. And now I’d like you to go back. How do I make that happen?”

  I couldn’t go back. That room, in the darkness and the quiet, no smelling or hearing or touching, had been like death in its absence. I couldn’t go back there, now that I had felt again, and tasted. Even emotion was only real as long as I was attached to the thief: I was facing the despair of return, yes, but that paled in comparison to the physicality of her anger. Her muscles tensed, her shoulders squared, her lips pulled back in a snarl…

  Besides, I did not know how to go back, and I told her as such. I didn’t think (despite even Glory’s greatest efforts) we’d ever had anyone leave.

  She stared at me with disbelief. Had she been able to hit me, in that moment, I think she would have, but she didn’t waste her time on a blow that would never connect.

  “All right. Whatever. If you can’t do it, I’ll just go see a doctor.”

  The thief’s doctor was off-Station (off-Station!) and though I was rather occupied with the dizziness of space, of having escaped not only my altar but my whole world in one fell swoop, I still had enough presence of mind to make some ingratiating conversation. Perhaps if she liked me enough, I could stay, and to that purpose I tried to talk to her about her name (she wouldn’t tell me), her profession (she didn’t respond to any of my flattery, though I even went so far as to name her the best of all burglars), the stars (beautiful), her appearance (more beautiful, I insisted) and any other small thing I could think of, all of which she soon began to ignore.

  We docked at another station, though it was large enough as we neared it that I thought we had come across a planet in its own right. If I had attention enough to speak earlier, I’d lost it. There were so many people at this station, so many different species, clad in all sorts of strange garb, chattering as they cooked their peculiar foods. Since none could see me, it would not be rude to stare. I swiveled to examine an octopus’s dinner, which did rather look like ours had, with eels instead of rice, then to gawk at the brightly-flashing holographic signs by a storefront (COFFEE AND TATTOOS), then turned again at the sound of an eagle’s shriek.

  “Is it really that interesting to you?” asked the thief, pulling me away from inspecting at the delicate feathers on the eagle’s nape as she navigated the crowd.

  “Isn’t it interesting to you?”

  She shrugged, deftly squeezing through the gap between a pink-robed priest and a woman with a whole jungle’s worth of vines twining through her hair.

  “I’ve seen better. The crystal towers of Luoxia. The markets of Marrakite. Waterfalls on Undine IV.”

  “What’s a waterfall?”

  She couldn’t keep herself from an incredulous glance at me, though she had avoided looking ever since we left Station, unwilling to acknowledge, perhaps, a vision of a woman only she could see.

  “What’s a—Jeez. Maybe you’ll get to see one someday.”

  “You could take me,” I suggested, with my most charming yet pitiful smile.

  “Not likely.”

  Eventually she led me towards one of the less-neon hallways, through a kind of back alley, ending up at a dingy room with a paper sign that read PRACTICAL MEDICINE. It did not seem like an especially sterile environment, unidentified stains in every corner, and I shrank closer to the thief, hiding from the many-headed woman sitting at the front desk, each one of her heads bent towards a different stack of papers.

  “Doc?”

  One head emerged, squinting at the thief.

  “Here again, Pak?” said the head (all the others were still focused on their reading, though on one of them I could have sworn the lips moved), “What the hell did you fuck this time?”

  “I didn’t fuck anything,” protested the thief (Pak, I suppose, though the name felt awkward in my thoughts), “I... found some software. On my last run.”

  “And, let me guess, you decided to put it in your brain.”

  “Hey, I just need you to tell me how to uninstall it, okay? I thought it was safe. I mean, hell, it’s just accounting software, shouldn’t be that hard, right? Search for it, she says people call her Chechine.”

  I gasped in indignation and floated in front of the thief so she’d have to look me in the face.

  “Accounting software? You think I’m accounting software?”

  “What else would you be?” asked the thief, and, to the doctor, “Sorry, not you, the, uh. The software’s talking to me.”

  “I am the goddess of Thrift, radiant and undying, the blasphemer’s bane. I’m—I’m—”

  Glory could have said more. I was incoherent with anger, never the most eloquent of my sisters even at the best of times, and, besides, I had always been a little hazy on the details of my existence.

  “She says she’s a goddess,” said the thief, and the doctor, sighing, brought another one of her heads up.

  “I’ll take a look.”

  Her eyes glowed (all of them, not just the ones scrutinizing the thief) as she scanned, and I twisted to see, not sure if I could distract her and not sure if I should. In the end, she blinked, once, twice, and clapped the thief on the shoulder.

  “No idea.”

  “You kidding me?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s your own fault, anyway, for downloading alien malware onto yourself. What were you thinking?”

  “What was I thinking, coming to you fo
r help,” grumbled the thief, and glared at me. I did my best to keep the triumph off my face, but sometimes even I cannot help myself.

  “Maybe you just like seeing my faces,” said the doctor, and then, taking pity on the thief, “Look, your best bet is finding the manufacturer. I can’t help you here.”

  The thief returned to her ship (what I had begun, presumptuously, thinking of as our ship), stripping off her jacket and throwing it into a corner, then picking it up and throwing it against the wall for good measure.

  She stared at that wall for a good long while. Wisely, I decided not to speak, hovering around the edges of her awareness but never quite daring to enter her line of sight.

  I could feel everything she felt, after all, every last bit of an emotion that I could not decipher. I drummed my fingers to the staccato beat of her heart. I counted the seconds between each raggedy inhale and exhale. I clenched my fists and pretended that the blood coursing through her veins was my own.

  Eventually, she turned towards me.

  “I don’t suppose you’d know where you came from?” she asked, an ironic twist to her mouth. I shook my head. She snorted and once again turned her head away, this time to the ceiling.

  “Great. I just had to download the defective one.”

  “I’m not—”

  I don’t know how, but she pinned me with a glance. I quieted, voice subsiding. She sighed, sighed again and stood, picking up the satchel full of pilfered items from my temple.

  “Well. We better sell these off first.”

  I kept my face impassive, no small feat when I had but two days’ practice controlling my features. We, she had said. We.

  Determined to be useful, I bent all my talents towards helping the thief hawk her ill-gotten gains. I am the goddess of Thrift, after all, and if nothing else I knew how to drive a bargain. We visited the various scrappy outposts of the forgotten outer edges of civilization, where looking at your fence the wrong way was liable to get you shot. Every time we stepped foot on those bases, the thief’s heart rate shot up in an adrenaline response.