Beauty, Glory, Thrift

by Alison Tam

  “Is it good here?”

  The angel smiled, a wide and brilliant thing.

  “Yes!”

  It would not be such a bad future, if it was to be mine. I wasn’t ready for it.

  “My sisters,” I said, at last, “They’re still there, in that—in that tomb. I will come to you soon enough, but not yet.”

  The angel didn’t object. Even though she could have brought my sisters back without me, the thief let me leave with her, so that when I opened my eyes next it was to the sight of my planet. But all throughout the rest of the day, even when we’d reached the safety of our ship, I couldn’t get the angel’s voice out of my head: You poor dear. You poor dear. You poor dear.

  The thief didn’t gloat when we got on board, though I half-expected her to look at me, smirk and say something sardonic about my being a mortal after all. Instead, she put my favorite drama on the viewscreen, and, gentle, laid a hand on her own forearm, soothing me with the slow movement of her thumb. Her comfort was more humiliating than laughter could have ever been.

  “You never thought I was a goddess.”

  “Not really, no.”

  “You said I was accounting software.”

  “The translator I use… You’ve heard it. It’s not the most accurate thing, sometimes. I thought you were advertising your products.”

  “And the fifty creds?”

  I felt more heat rising through her, to her cheeks and the tips of her ears.

  “I thought you were saying ‘Free trial’.”

  “And that’s why you took me with you?”

  “I didn’t want to!”

  I conceded the point with silence. The thief sighed, reached out a hand that went right through me.

  “It worked out okay, didn’t it?” she asked. Worked, past tense, and I had not the energy to be angry at her about it. She was always going to make me leave. She’d made no secret about it. I was the one who’d convinced myself I didn’t have to go.

  “It’s been adequate,” I said, pushing the corner of my mouth up to a smile.

  She forced her own smile back, a twisting feeling in her chest squeezing at the space between her lungs.

  “Let me show you something,” she said, “You can tell me if you want me to stop, but I think you won’t.”

  She lay down onto her bed with a thump, her mattress taking the brunt of her weight, but didn’t, as she usually did, draw her blankets up to her neck. She threw off her jacket, her shirt, the belt around her waist, turned her head to the side to avoid my gaze. That heat was building again, rising up to her cheeks and down towards her chest.

  When her fingers first brushed along her body, she shivered, but not from cold. I could feel the involuntary jump as it happened, the hitch in her throat. Her touch was strangely gentle, slow, but not idle, brushing along the edge of her wrist, the curve of her waist, skimming against her legs as she pulled down her pants. At last she turned her head towards me, and I froze, caught in the feeling of that heat rising towards her skin, her thighs moving against each other, her eyes looking to my own.

  I felt disjointed, overstimulated, like the first time we had both stepped out into the world. Her hair shifted against her shoulders. The pulse in her neck beat fast enough to make her light-headed, dizzy. She drew her hands across her stomach, moving inexorably lower, and found, thrillingly, hair.

  “Oh,” I breathed, “I think I’d like to remember this,” and then, at last, her fingers slid down.

  When we reached the temple, my sisters’ home, the thief entered with her hands clasped behind her back, the closest she could get to holding mine.

  “Come, traveler,” said my sister Glory, as the thief stepped across the doorway, “And I shall give you a boon.”

  “Glory, Glory,” I cried, in return, “I have been away for so long—” And then I stopped, for she had not stopped speaking.

  “Take me with you,” said Glory, “And your bullets will never miss their marks. You will never have cause to fear a battle again, and the entire galaxy shall ring with the sound of your name.”

  “I don’t think they can hear you,” the thief said to me, quietly. I should have known as much. There was no reason they should have heard me, without the technological interface of the Upper City or my altar or the circuitry embedded into the thief’s brain, but somewhere in the back of my mind I had always thought my sisters would recognize me nonetheless.

  “If I tell you what I want to say—”

  She nodded, and I remembered standing with her in the Upper City, that moment when I had touched her hand.

  “Sisters, hear me,” I said, the thief’s voice a louder echo, “Remember your smallest sibling, your beloved one, Thrift. I have seen such lands as I could not have even imagined. As you cannot even imagine.

  “And—”

  I’d written a speech, or just about, rehearsed grand proclamations over and over in my head, but, I knew no longer how I should explain. There was no eloquence in the world that could keep what I said from hurting them. There had been no eloquence in the world that could have helped me.

  “I was wrong,” I said, my voice all in a rush, the thief’s following slower and steadier, “We were wrong. We are not goddesses, we aren’t deities, we are—we’re ghosts, we are pale shadows, lines and lines of code—”

  I stopped when I saw the look on Beauty’s face, a painful sincerity unlike anything I had ever seen before.

  “You knew,” said the thief, into the hush created by my sudden silence.

  Beauty nodded, struck as mute as I had been.

  “You knew,” I repeated, as if I had become the echo instead, without even the presence of mind to add a crack or a strain or a twist of anguish into my voice, “I know I have always been the last of you, the smallest, the least, but—”

  I turned to Wisdom, to Mercy: each face different in their pity and shame and disbelief, and each voice the same in silence. At last, as always, it was Glory who spoke.

  “It began as a game,” she said.

  “Not a game,” protested Beauty, and Glory gave a shrug of concession.

  “We treated it like a game,” she said, and to that, Beauty had no objection, “And thus we were less frightened by the necessity.”

  “You had to lie?”

  It was less of a plea and more of a confrontation in the thief’s voice. For that, I was grateful.

  “We never!” said Beauty, “We—you always knew, from the start, and then…”

  “You forgot,” Glory continued, where Beauty could not, “We were all forgetting. The newer ones less, and I, the newest, least of all, but we all forgot. Bits of it at first—the name of a classmate in school, our birthdays, the texture of ground sugar. And then went our hometowns. Our professions. Our mothers’ faces, once we no longer had their visits to remind us. So we chose one part of ourselves that was important above all else, and the rest of it we let ourselves lose.”

  Another shrug, a concession this time not to Beauty but to the upturned faces of our sisters, hearing Glory’s story. She had always been the deciding voice, not because we wanted her to make our choices, but because sometimes she was the only one who could. She had chosen so: Glory was a name she took for herself.

  And I, who had forgotten even that there was a time when I had been a person: what had I chosen?

  “What was I like, before?”

  Glory shook her head, a single emphatic turn to the side.

  “I was the newest,” she said, her honey-and-jasmine voice lapsing into monotone, “Most of you were gone by the time they installed me. And—”

  Uncertainty on Glory’s face looked the same way it did on mine. Not a tremble or a pursing of the lips, but a face entirely without expression. Factory default.

  “We were made finite. There isn’t enough space for everything, and there’s no sorting mechanism, for most of you. Us. Every moment of every year gets counted the same, and they all get overwritten, eventually.

  “I was
made last and best. The technology was better. I can control it, most of the time, what I remember and what I forget.

  “And,” she said, remembering, suddenly, emotion, inflection coming back into her every word, “And I won’t apologize for it, but I chose to remember myself. As much as I could—every thought, every sensation—I had to keep them safe.”

  Beauty stepped forward, an outstretched hand telling Glory that she was going to interrupt, and Glory, hit with the shock of Beauty’s insubordination, subsided into silence.

  “I remember, Chechine,” said Beauty, “A little, from when I first came here. You were—you were very kind.”

  I thought about that, and then I thought about Glory, who had been our leader for as long as I had known, the only one who remembered enough about life to be able to miss it, and had not spoken of it once. I thought about her watching the visits we had from mourners slow and then subside, watching everything human we sisters could remember slowly slide away, and then I thought about myself, a woman who, when told to find something essential to her core, chose thrift. Budgeting. The art of surviving off what little you own.

  “What were you like?” I asked. Glory smiled as if she were another woman, and all my sisters in their graves smiled as well.

  “I was born by the ocean—”

  “I always tripped running down stairs—”

  They spoke overlapping each other, each drop in a waterfall crashing into the lake, and Glory’s voice, as always, rose over them all.

  “My name was Mo Lanha,” she began.

  The thief and I needed a crowbar to steal all my sisters home. She, who had been so gentle from the moment we stepped onto my planet, had finally rebelled at the idea at having all of them stuffed into her brain at once, and, besides, she said, she did not want to have to explain that to the doctor. So we pried them out of their alcoves, and loaded them into a cart disguised as a sewage-tank, then stuck them with adhesive to our ship’s wall, connecting them to power so they could still project their holograms.

  For so long I had thought of the thief and my sisters as if they came from two separate worlds, and I the only traveler between. But my sisters took to the thief just as I had, clustering around the only living thing they had known in a long time. They called her Pak, and I startled at the word, names intruding into a space where before there had been no need for any, back when it had only been me and her. Beauty flirted with her, relentlessly, lowering her voice with each use of her name so that the thief had to lean in closer to hear. My other sisters clamored for stories, and the thief traded hers for what Glory could remember of our home.

  But even as the thief and my sisters converged, there remained different worlds still: the physical world, the real world, and mine. I had never before thought of the thief’s mind as a trap, even pitying that my sisters could never feel what I did through her body, but as my sisters settled into the ship, growing giddier and more raucous with each passing day, I wanted more than to exist in the bottlenecked circuitry of someone’s mind.

  Each time I wished to speak to my sisters, I had to wait for the thief to repeat my words, and by the time she did the conversation would have already moved on. And every time I saw two of my sisters with their heads bent close to each other, exchange confidences too quietly for any of else to hear, I was reminded with a jolt that the thief and I could not speak without each other hearing. It felt as though I would never have such confidences ever again.

  “You’ll be out there soon enough,” said the thief to me when I told her this, and then, “Nothing!”, when Beauty had asked her what she was talking about. I did not continue a conversation we could not have alone. I was a guest who had stayed long past my welcome. I had always felt like a wraith beside my sisters, even before I knew the difference between living and dead, and the revelation of my history only proved my insecurities correct.

  The thief tried, in her way, to reassure me. After our conversation, she kept our travel time on screen, though between that and my sisters our generator groaned with strain. I watched the clock tick down, eight days, three days, five. At two days, in the bathroom, she pressed her hand to her chest, so we could feel the beat of her heart.

  “Not long now,” she said.

  Soon, it was the chattering of my sisters and a monorail across my planet and a technician feeding my sisters into a vast machine (“Old tech,” she said, “But the conversion technology is near perfect.”) and then the thief and I sat at the table of a vast feast, watching my sisters rediscover taste.

  “Lanha!” called the angel, who had been in raptures over finding so many vintage memories so perfectly preserved, “Try the egg-cakes, we pulled them from your eighth birthday.”

  When Glory set her chopsticks down, she smiled, politer than I had ever seen her.

  “Thank you,” she said, “But they’re not the same.” She pushed the plate away, and stood.

  It took Glory three tries to quiet the room, but though her voice did not carry half as far as it had in the temple, her posture held that same air of command.

  “Sisters, listen to me, for this shall be the last time you hear my voice.”

  She paused, though I could not see so much as a tremble in her hand, and for a moment she held Beauty’s gaze.

  “I was made to preserve Mo Lanha’s memories,” she said, “And to give succor to her family. And though I was not made to do so, I have always tried to protect you.

  “Mo Lanha’s memories will stay with the Upper City forever. Her family is gone, and I have no succor left to give. Not even to you, my sisters. Whatever you choose to do from now on, you must do it on your own.”

  She kept her eyes forward, and in lieu of a goodbye, Glory raised her voice in song, the like of which I had never heard before. It was sound as I had known it, a sweet, sad, melody, but we sisters felt it beyond that: not as the thief felt things, with her body and her nerves, but as an interface with the mesh of the programming around us, an instantaneous clarity, a surprise that we had not always known. We could feel her unwinding, each note spiraling in on itself, the ramifications of what she had done vibrating through our very code. By the time her last note echoed through the air, Glory was gone.

  “Some of us will choose this, on occasion,” offered the angel, “We’re not barbarians—anyone’s free to disappear, if they so choose. Delete themselves. It’s a shame.”

  Her blue gown was already going pink as she walked away, trailing off at the ends into ethereal mist.

  “Come with me, Chechine.” The angel beckoned to follow her—where I might be separated from the thief forever.

  I looked to the thief slowly, my gaze reluctant to shift from the spot where Glory had stood. I thought of the stories Glory had told us, the days when she had been Mo Lanha, a child playing on the stairs of her apartment building, a woman coming into her own, and suddenly I could not even bear to think of another goodbye. I went before I could see the thief’s face.

  As I took my first step, I thought of looking back. As I took my second, I changed my mind: the thief could visit me, couldn’t she, if she cared enough? And she had wanted this from the start, had always been eager to see me go. As I took my third: was it not cruel to leave her thus, without a word or even a smile, only because my own mind was unsettled? And my fourth: to say goodbye again, after all the times we had said goodbye before, to remind myself of the gulf that had always been between us—would that not be cruel to myself?

  I had made up my mind to turn around when the thief called out to me.

  “Wait!” she cried, “Not now. Not yet. I... Our ship needs repairs. All those holograms can’t have been good for the power cores. And you may not be a goddess, but you’ve still got your pride. Come with me, and you can test your abilities, and witness wonders none else have ever seen and eat all the savory snacks you want.”

  Ah, would that I had a heart that could beat! The Upper City had simulated a flutter in my stomach, but the hammering in my thoughts, the qui
ckness, came only from my mind.

  “And what will you give me for it?” I asked, coy like Beauty, imperious like Glory, and with the happiness of my own self. The thief smiled back, and I felt her heart, then, beating in the place of mine.

  “More than fifty creds,” said the thief, and I took her hand.

  There was a frenzy to it, the stay of execution, her heart deciding for us both: not yet, not yet.

  “I don’t think I could live like she does,” I said of Beauty later, “Did you see how the ballroom went tidy the moment we left? They live any way they like but there’s never any difference. I’d rather—”

  I felt the thief’s heart rate surge before even she did. We lay there both thinking and not thinking of how Glory had gone.

  “Let’s just go to Dryad’s Den,” the thief said, her hand skimming down towards her waist in a way that usually ended all arguments. “No Beauty. No ghosts. You haven’t been there, and the trees are beautiful in the spring.”

  The trees would have been beautiful. We would have been happy, marveling at the iridescence of the leaves in the sun. I knew that, and I denied her still.

  “We can’t,” I said, and then, to be clear about it, “I won’t.”

  “Then the Hanging Gardens. Or Sow’s Cove.”

  “Pak—”

  Her name was another reminder that we were separate, and meant to be separate from the start. I did not think I had used it before.

  “If you have to make a choice,” the thief said, her voice hoarse, “Then let me be one of yours. Stay with me. I’ll take you wherever you want to go, there’s still so much you haven’t seen yet—”

  “I don’t want to!”

  It was a cruel thing to say, and I felt even more terrible for having said it. Nevertheless, I continued, Pak’s distress heavy in my throat. I did not take a deep breath. I stopped breathing, let the expression slide from my face and the inflection from my voice, cast aside everything that I mimicked from the thief’s humanity so she was reminded of what I was.

  “You can take me anywhere you like, but it won’t make any difference. We can go anywhere, I can feel whatever you want, but, Pak, I am trapped in your mind. I am a wraith, insubstantial, inconsequential, and I can no longer remain but a shadow at the edge of your mind. I have to choose, Beauty’s path or Glory’s, before I begin to resent yours.”