The Clockwork Beauty
A lonely Beast rediscovers a love he lost in an android named Beauty. She must preserve her fragile clockwork soul against his darker passions… for the Beast is mad, and cruel…and perhaps beyond saving.
Written as part of the Fairy-Tale Challenge: Retell "Beauty and the Beast" in the Labyverse using randomly chosen genres. For the sister tales that accompany this one, please direct your attention to TheRealEatsShootsandLeaves ("True Git"), and Jalen Strix ("The Beast Within").
Author's note updated 8/30/16: After extensive revisions, I'm reposting the first five chapters of this story under original title and reviews. Some of the changes I've made are small, and some are large, but I'm trying to tell a much longer story than I first anticipated. My apologies and thanks to reviewers whose positive commentary has been deleted. You've helped me.
I began writing this story with the secret, childish notion that it was a sequel to Labyrinth where David Bowie could reprise his role as the Goblin King, just as he was, in the reality of his aged body and his dazzling laser-sharp talent. With his death in January 2016, I had to re-evaluate the Beast's character and motives, especially in the wake of "Blackstar" and the devastating and powerful music videos Bowie was determined to create in his last days. It's a much more serious story than some others I've tried to write, but it's also become a much kinder one than what I'd originally intended. Please enjoy.
Chapter 1: The Broken Rose
Apparently with no surprise
To any happy flower,
The frost beheads it at its play
In accidental power.
The blond assassin passes on,
The sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another day
For an approving God.
Emily Dickinson: "Death and Life."
Twilight is coming hard on the phosphorescent edges of sunset, as a dwarf steals into a forbidden garden.
Behind him, or more properly, them—the dwarf and what he carries—there is the world. Ruined cities collapse under their own weight, crusts of suburbs hedging them about, long-long-ago abandoned. Every so often, far away from these sad and empty places, there will be a more modern enclave more recently abandoned. In these places, designed like the encounter suits that all living beings must wear to protect themselves from the harm that is the world, there is almost always a garden. Their protective fields are shattered or stuttering on, hoarding their bounty for nobody.
The dwarf, like these gardens, is an anomaly in this dead world. He is a living creature, a beast of the flesh, whose body must be shielded from radiation, poison, plague, and the thousand other forms of slow death that linger in the inimical world-that-is. He carries heavy burdens. Twined about his body are thongs and parcels and pockets and pouches to hold the loot he has amassed from the broken world, things that can be repaired, polished, and bartered to amass what passes for wealth in this day and age. He holds one item carefully to his breast, one perfect salvage that he has never yet sold.
This most prized possession is the ruined head and torso—not even all the torso, for she is missing a shoulder and arm—of a beautiful android. The hair is gone, and the eyes are dull, and if not for the wreck of gears and skeletal tail of her metallic spine peeping from beneath the edge of too-perfect skin, she could pass for the sad remnants of a human being. But no. Her remaining arm grasps the dwarf's shoulder, and a strong cord is knotted so that the dwarf can carry her, sling-fashion, in a close embrace. When she speaks—for she can speak if she chooses to—she calls the dwarf "Father."
"Father," she says, in a reedy child's voice, having no belly to give her resonance, "Story?"
In her dilapidated and dried-out state, she must hoard articulations like gold until such time as Father can pilfer more biotic gel to lubricate her leaky innards. She wants to know if there will be time to rest, time to speak, time to tell Father a story out of her trivial skull-shaped library. When she recites these stories, in basic pieces, she fills in the gaps in her own mind, gaps of words, of color, the memories of another life even further back than the once-upon-a-time, like a dream of a remembered dream.
"Later, Beauty," her father says gruffly. This is not the clockwork girl's name—she does not remember her name. She has very little personal memory of the once-upon-a-time— but it is the name the dwarf calls her, when he does not call her 'Daughter.' "Once we're rested, you can chatter me something." His voice is muffled by the mask of his encounter suit, and she twists her head over one perfect pale shoulder to watch him insert the scrambler-key into the nearly invisible protective field that borders this garden. A conical hole opens in the field, just enough for a hobbling dwarf and his unlikely burden to fit through.
"How's the air, Beauty?" he asks her, and she tastes the air with her lips and soft palate, finding it smooth and mellow, rich in moisture, chemically uncomplicated. It is a more thin and rarefied air than it could be, but it is breathable, and unpoisoned. She is happy to be of use. "Safe, Father."
The dwarf rips off his mask and breathes in the clean air with pleasure and gratitude. He turns his head and brushes his wizened cheek against her smooth one.
"Let's get you settled," he says. Her father tenderly unwraps her from his body and lays her down under a tree in this forbidden garden. She digs herself into the yielding turf, microfilaments of her spinal ducts probing out slowly, into the moist earth, drinking up water and nitrogen and carbon. It feels good to stretch. When Father takes her to cobblin markets and mecha fairs, bartering his pilfered goods or trading for repairs, she is hidden, folded up in a sack. Sometimes he will surreptitiously ask her questions about the repair of ancient technology, and she will assist him. Dutiful daughter that she is, she is proud and glad to help her father. But here, nothing is required of her, only to look and to see, and so she looks up.
In the nighttime wilderness of the broken world, the only constant beauty is the stars. In the dark, they are visible. They are bright enough for a mecha girl to see, even if her eyesight is failing. People might live up there on those points of light, many of them, perhaps almost all of them. Perhaps some of them are looking down at the Earth and at her, but it is more likely that they are indifferent to the world left behind, indifferent to the very few people who remain to eke out their lives here. The meek have inherited the Earth, truly. The mecha people, clockwork people like Beauty, or clockwork animals, humanity's abandoned toys, are almost all that is left of humanity on the Earth. Beauty blinks rapidly, clearing the lenses of her psuedoflesh eyes with precious, precious water.
She looks around with serenity and without fear.
The clockwork Beauty is innocent of the knowledge of good and evil.
She finds it strange that Father should have come so directly to this garden, the most perfect yet, when discovering others has been a matter of luck or careful and cautious work, but she does not question him. She watches him make himself busy. This garden is a rich place. Roses grow in tangled profusion, and trees heavy with a burden of fruit. She cannot remember a time when she saw so much green and growing.
The dwarf is quick, very quick, in his plundering. Samples he takes of all the edible fruits, and digs up a few flowers, wraps them root-bundled in cloth, stows the booty in one of his innumerable satchels. She has seen him do this before.
Father pauses underneath one overhanging lip of bramble, where a peach-colored rose grows, all the colors of sunset in its petals. It bobs under the weight of the dwarf's tread on the tangled vines below, as if smiling, as if offering itself.
"Pretty," Beauty says, with longing.
"Can't last," the dwarf says, with repressed anger. She is untroubled; she knows the anger is not meant for her. "Nothin' beautiful lasts. 'Cept maybe you, Beauty."
She sorrows for the rose. She wants to comfort it, to understand it. "I want it," she says. She is not asking, exactly. Either her father will give it to her or he will not, and she will not complain or remonstrate if he refuses. Still, she wants it. "Please," she says.
He looks over at her, and his paper-crumpled wrinkled face eases from its perpetual expression of anxious irritation into a loving smile. He plucks the rose, and there is a whispered snap as the tangle of rose-briar releases its prize. He brings it to her, and holds it under her nose. "Smell," he instructs her, and she does. Her eyes are no longer keen, but her nose is. She can smell the flower, or analyze it at least. Leaving behind dry chemical formulae, she is aware that it is sweet, and slightly acrid, and carries the scent of clean water. It is beautiful.
"Mine," she says, smiling. He leaves the rose in her hand as he turns to amass more loot.
Beauty sings a soft song to the rose, stroking its soft, soft petals with her fingertips. Her voice is so quiet that even the dwarf's sharp ears never hear. Teach me love, she sings to the rose. Teach me about death, for you are most beautiful now that you've been plucked, now that you have begun to die, now that you are mine, rose.
She decides on the story she will tell Father. It is a story of a poor father who takes hospitality in a magic place, and steals a rose for his most precious daughter. There is a beast in the story, and she feels the longing to see him, even though she knows she never will.
Therefore, when the Beast appears, it is as if she has summoned him herself, with the repressed force of her own longings. She is dumbstruck by her own power.
He comes in a gust of wind and ferocious thunder, blazing with fury. He is a beast, a King of Beasts indeed. Pale as mammal's milk, his encounter suit's convex heart-shaped masks mimics an owl's head, with deep pits of smoked glass for his eyes. Wings of air translators poke up over his back like feathers.
"You dare!" he roars, and the dwarf cowers. "How dare you steal my rose?" An accusing finger, gloved and plated in white talons, points at the bare space on the branch, the broken place bright as stigmata on the dark vine. "You come here empty-handed and raid my garden like it was your private pantry, and breathe my air, and then you break my best rose, before it could even seed." The Beast's voice is as lovely as music, though angry. "You useless menace. Why have you done this?"
Yes, thinks the clockwork Beauty. I know who he is. I know this story.
"I didn't think you were still around," the dwarf admits, defiant but cowering. "Been about a half-century. It was just a rose, goin' to waste by the looks of things. What's the harm?"
"Oh?" The Beast reaches forward and grabs Father by the ear. "You have two ears, and one is going to waste. Suppose I take this ear? Or one of your eyes? You sniveling thing!"
Beauty does not like this. No, she thinks, aghast, as Father yelps in pain.
"Don't hurt him!" Beauty cries, more loudly than she imagined she could.
Everything is silent now, in the garden as the two asymptotes of masculine attention convene upon her.
"Beauty, be quiet!" the dwarf admonishes, but it is too late. She's been seen and named.
"Don't hurt my father," she repeats.
The Beast stares hard at Beauty through his mask, and then at the dwarf. When he speaks again, his voice is softer.
"Is that a Caesura model?" he asks the dwarf, pinching his ear for emphasis.
"Yes!" the dwarf squeals, batting his hands against his captor. "I think so. But she's broken. Never thought you'd want her!"
"You never thought. Of course you didn't." The Beast let the dwarf go and gives him a kick for motivation. "You were a fool to bring her with you. Or were you wise? You always had an eye for a good bargain." He comes to where Beauty had planted herself and goes down on one knee before her.
When he speaks to her, his voice is gently coaxing, as if there were no violence in him at all. But she knows better. Ah yes, she knows.
"You look as though you are wearing my garden as a dress, Beauty." He caresses the rose in her hand with gloved fingertips. "I have a proposition for you. Will you trade your life for your father's? Be Beauty to my Beast, bought for the price of a perfect rose?"
A beast, she thinks. He is a beast of the flesh, alive. He is a man. For reasons she can't explain, this thought sinks her non-existent heart within her. He is one of the masters. But, she thinks… he knows stories. He knows the stories I know. She answers him by reaching out for him with her one good arm, putting herself into his care.
He plucks her up more easily than Father had plucked the rose.
"Please," the dwarf weeps, and Beauty is comforted to know that even if he has ultimately sold her, Father does at least love her and regret the selling. "Be kind to her," Father says. "She's not like the others. She's like a child. Please. Be kind to her."
"You must pay him," she instructs the Beast. "More than his life. My worth to you." The Beast looks down at her. He traces the arc of her orbital sockets gently, gently.
"Very well," says the Beast. His ugly mask turns to the dwarf. "Payment, then. Keep what you've stolen, and take an hour longer to take anything else you fancy. Steal more plants, take as much water as you can carry. It's all potable here. Then begone. Go out into those wastelands you love so much and see if you can find more of her kind—or if she isn't the last." He holds her against his ribs with a grip of steel. "But if you come back here again, empty-handed and thieving… it will go badly for you, dwarf."
The Beast carries her off then, and she realizes she might never see Father again. She struggles to catch one last glimpse of him. The Beast helps her, lets her head peep out over his shoulder. "Goodbye," she calls out to him. "Father, goodbye!" Tears seep out from under her lids as she is borne away, because there is no answer.
"Don't cry," the Beast admonishes her kindly, his strides taking them both deeper into the lush overgrowth and bounty of his mysterious kingdom. "Not for him. I will give you so much more than he ever could. "
"No," she says, quietly fierce. "I will cry."
His relentless stride pauses, as if she has surprised him. She feels his ribcage shudder, and realizes he is laughing at her. "Precious thing," he says, laughter amplified beneath his owl's mask. "Rose with defiant thorns. You will do as I tell you." The gloves on his encounter suit rudely probe the fused circuits of her exposed spine, and not gently.
"I will cry. I am sad," she says simply. His arm keeps her confined, and she sighs and holds on to him, closing her eyes.
"Yes, well, if you're sad you must cry," he replies. "Beauty, if that's to be your name, your kind have the ability to feel, which is not always an advantage. You may feel more sorrow yet, and fear being here with me, but making you unhappy isn't my aim." He holds her out in front of him and she can see her own reflection in the black glass hiding his eyes. "Remember your promise. You belong to me, now and forever. Before the dwarf found you, you were mine. Before the stars fell up and people were thick upon the earth, you were mine."
His clever fingers find the connection he had been looking for. She ceases to cry, ceases to question, and enters unconsciousness as he turns her off.
For the first time since Father had rescued her from beneath the rubble of a demolished building, she is having a dream. It is a strange dream, one in which she is instructing a technician, or perhaps a lover, in her diagnostic and repair schematics. At the same time, she is also in a park, reciting psychosexual prose to a bored-looking owl. "Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, connect the fifth thoracic vertebra to the columnar nanite node. For my will is as strong as titanium alloy, though not as brittle…" The clockwork Beauty gasps, and falls into nothingness again.
Later, words. Questions, answers. "Do you feel this?" her interlocutor asks, and she can feel the pin prick on the skin of her inner arm, making her hand twitch reflexively, and she says, sleepily, "Yes."
She has the feeling of having been asked and having answered this question many, many times in the past several hours, several days. Time has passed in twilight sleep.
"Do you feel this?" Again, the light pricking, not quite pain, and she can feel it, she can feel it exquisitely! Sensation, flesh, so real, and the clockwork Beauty says "Yes!" with a flush of warmth in her voice as she realizes she's receiving information from a limb she thought she had long since lost.
She reaches out with her hand, quick as a flash, and grabs the wrist of the technician, the one who has repaired her. His wrist is warm, naked. It beats with blood. She can feel the cuff of a plastic glove that covers his hand, feel the delicate carpal bones grinding together under the strength of her grasp.
He makes a quiet sound of pain. It is him. It is the Beast. Without the mask of his encounter suit, his voice is even more exquisitely beautiful.
"You're awake," he says. "I didn't mean for you to wake so soon. " She squeezes his wrist again, the only response she can think of. "Beauty," the Beast said chidingly. "I am not a machine or a mutation or mechanically enhanced. I'm delicate. Is it your desire to hurt me?"
She lets him go. "No, Master." Her voice is dulcet, lubricated with gel. She touches her face, smooths her hands along her torso, down her legs… she exists. She is whole. "You fixed me, Master?"
"I'm not your master, Beauty," he says. She hears him grunt with effort as he stands.
"But you must be, if you own me." she says. "Why am I blind?"
"You've been tended in extremely neglectful fashion." His voice is curt with unsaid recriminations against Father. "You woke earlier than your eyes. They were so damaged that I had to replace them. Your internal repair systems need time to create new cortical links. When they do, your sight will return, I promise. Everything will be right with you, now that you're here with me."
She can feel the warmth of his physical presence, the scent of his breath as he speaks, and she knows he is somehow exposed, or undressed, undone from his armor. His thumb caresses her face.
"How soon? I would like to see you," she says. She presses her cheek against his hand, consciously responding to his unconscious commands.
"No, you wouldn't," he says. His touch leaves her, and she is lonely for it. She sways forward, standing upright, able to carry herself for the first time in she doesn't know how long. There is a rug under her bare feet. ("Come on, feet.") She takes a step, and stumbles into his saving arms.
She clings to him, bending to him the way that the vine submits to the trellis. His heartbeat under her ear is quick with surprise. With her body, she can feel the soft skin of his bodystocking, the pipettes running like veins under the cloth to regulate temperatures to sustain life, the snaps and contact points that provide fastening and interface to the discarded pieces of his encounter suit. There are also parts of a metallic exoskeleton worn over this inner layer, making hard plated ridges against her arms.
"Thank you," she says. She can feel how alive he is, how perfect his form. Nothing in him feels monstrous. ""Thank you, Master!" She slides her hands over his shoulders, wanting to touch his face, but he eases her away from him, back into her chair.
He is afraid of me, she thinks, and is wondrously alarmed.
"Beauty," he says. "Delightful as your humility is, I have told you, I'm not your master, nor will I ever be. It is you who are mistress here. It is I who must obey you. I'm just the Beast."
"As in the story," she says, but she is doubtful.
"Beauty, you must go softly, you must go gently, or you'll undo all my hard work. You are the last Caesura android. Your price is above rubies, above water. You mustn't be broken, in body or mind, or you won't be able to do what I need you to do."
"To break your enchantment," she says, suddenly certain. "Are we to dine together tonight, Beast?"
"If you like," he says, and she hears the uncertainty in him. Afraid of me? she wonders. Afraid for me?
"Yes. At dinner, you will propose to me. I will say yes. I will transform you. I will break the spell. I will break it now, if you like." She turns over her shoulder, blind, and smiles out at where he stands. "I will help you." She is overjoyed at the prospect of cutting through the difficult interstices of words and forms and relationships and moving directly to the answer he needs. She knows this story; she is certain.
"You would do that?" She can hear that she has upset him, somehow. "After I bought you from your father, and took your freedom, and made you cry? You'd chain yourself to me for your life? Why would you ever do that?"
"Because I am grateful," she says. "I am grateful to you. I am in one piece because of you." And now she can smell his anger, like a stink in the air. "Why are you angry? What wrong thing have I said?" she asks.
"Your gratitude is surprising. You are surprising, Beauty. You're so… You unnerve me." He draws half a breath, as if to say more, but doesn't.
She hears the faint sound of a door opening. He is cold now, commanding. "You mustn't venture outside your room alone, not until your sight returns. A servant will guide you to me when it's time. But Beauty, prepare yourself. I will propose to you tonight, but it won't be the proposal you remember from your fairy-tale story. It's I who'll break the spell, and you who will transform."
"Wait—" she begs, but the door closes on her words. He is behind the door now, and she is alone, alone for the first time she cares to remember. She is not sure what the feeling is, leaping from the pit of her belly and cracking her shoulderblades together.
Is it fear?