Chapter 2: Grave-sent
Alone, deserted on the wave-worn sands,
All woebegone, lo! ARIADNE stands;
In wild amaze, as newly roused from sleep,
Her full eye stretched upon the raging deep;
Confused, distracted, motionless, forlorn:
While perjured THESEUS, on the billows borne,
Behind him leaves the solitary shores,
And the fond maid, who, all too late! Deplores
That weakness, which admitted to her breast
The rude despoiler of her fame and rest.
Catullus: "Ariadne Forsaken."
Her sight does return, just as the Beast had promised, though slowly and over the course of many waiting hours. She tests herself as she waits, stretching each joint, laying her hands against her own restored flesh, feeling the ugly scars against her torso where old skin has been joined to new. They will fade, she knows. The repair nodes, full of busy nanites, have been rejoined to her system, and they will heal almost everything that might still be broken.
There is one new apparatus to her body that she does not recognize. It is a pearl, organic, embedded in the hollow of her throat. It throbs with heat when she touches it.
She blinks once, twice, aware of movement before her; she is staring in a mirror at her own face. Beauty doesn't recognize herself, having never seen herself before. She looks like woman who was a girl not too long ago. Her breasts are gentle swellings against the clinging softness of her bodystocking, and her face is unlined by experience or personality.
She winks first one eye, then the other, observing the length of her lashes, shutters of blackness in her face, hiding green iris windows. There is hair upon her head, too, thick hair, the dark-brown of fertile earth. She tilts her head forward, and back, feeling how heavy it is, feeling it brush against her lower spine. The weight of it surprises her. Long as it is, the Beast must have set it to growing almost before he did anything else. Her hair came first for him, a necessity, and her eyesight an afterthought. He had enjoyed caressing her hair; he hadn't enjoyed the prospect of her eyes caressing him. She looks inward at herself and her programming, and stops the hair growth. It is a wasteful extravagance of resources, such a wealth of hair, but then, the Beast is rich as Pluto in all the things that matter in the world-that-is.
She reaches out unthinking to the vanity table where the mirror stands and finds a hairclip right where she left one, long-long-ago in some dream. She pins back a wing of hair to keep it from obscuring her vision. There is also a red cylinder on the table. She picks it up and hears voices in her head.
("Here's a treasure. You'll want that, won't you, my dear. Put it on, make yourself up!" )
Lipstick. She uncaps the cylinder and rolls the thick tube of paint up and down until the spiral bore inside it breaks. Her lips are already red, red as the coral beads that hang in a careless jumble with peridots and metallic plastic shamrocks and ropes of diamonds and jade plaques looped over the hinges of the mirror.
Nothing is familiar, but she feels as if she ought to remember everything. There is a pale bed in the corner with a canopy and a patchwork quilt printed out of one single piece of fabric. Boxes and toys on the shelves. A line of books and games against one wall.
She stands up, wobbly on her feet, and moves through the room. She picks up one of the books and opens it with anticipation—but the pages are empty. She rummages through the toys and the garishly-printed cardboard boxes of games, standing precariously on her vanity stool to reach the highest shelves. The boxes are as stingy as the books, empty inside. Even the toys are unyielding, without scent or wear. She throws a prickly stuffed teddy bear at the mirror in sudden frustration. She doesn't understand why a place that seems so familiar can be so completely empty of meaning.
The mirror only tips, turning its face to reflect the white tile overhead, the salmon carpet below, and the bear falls to the floor, unwanted.
"There was something I was looking for," she says, "…someone." She flounces herself onto the bed and buries her face in the pillows, frustrated, confused, sad. The bed at least feels familiar, and safe, even though it is as scentless and sterile as everything else.
The clockwork Beauty is forlorn. No Father, to speak to her in kindness. No Beast, who has left her alone in this agonizingly hollow room. This feeling brings a long-forgotten memory with it. She remembers the last time a companion abandoned her. She suddenly remembers Cesare.
"Give your report, Cesare," she had said again and again, trying to mimic the impersonal and demanding tones of the masters. They had been buried together for days, months, weeks. He responded to nothing but orders, being of a different model, a different class, rather inflexible and unimaginative. But he had been her only companion. She couldn't see him in the darkness of the rubble, under the weight that couldn't be shifted, and she couldn't feel her body below the collarbones. "Cesare, report!"
Every day she did this, call and response. At first he described the movements of the mecha insurgency making war on their enclave, or what was known of tactical movements and supply lines before the power was cut, a dutiful servant to terrible masters. But the masters weren't under threat anymore; the worst had already happened. She could smell other bodies, human bodies, in the wreckage around her, but they were past help or need. There was only Cesare and Beauty, alone in the dark together.
In the fourth week, Cesare's voice had begun to stutter. By the sixth month, he had only made a strange subvocal humming. And then nothing. Cesare had given up. He had died and left her alone. Nothing and aloneness, alone alone alone. First she had cursed him for his silence. Then she had screamed, for days, for days. And then… it must have been a kind of madness that had made her try to die, too. She had shut herself off until Father's kindly face had woken her.
Remembering, Beauty cries for dead Cesare, with gentle sobs that won't pull at her scars or damage any of her knitting innards.
She can feel other memories ready to bloom, quickening like the sensation of her flesh or the push of expanded emotions. Like her broken body, they seem to have laid dormant, waiting for the right conditions to flower. They are hers, surely as her skin, but she is afraid of having these memories unfold. She rubs the tears from her eyes with the heels of her hands, doing it at first to see and then for the blessed sensation of wet skin.
I want to see the stars, she thinks. I will go out, and I will see the stars, and the garden.
Beauty shoves herself off the bed. There is a piece of clothing on the peg by the door, a long sleeveless dress of gossamer. She puts it on over the bodystocking she is already wearing—almost like the Beast's, but without the exoskeleton and the thermal piping that delicate animal flesh required—and cinches the sash-ribbon fiercely.
The door to this horrid room is flat dull metal. It has no doorknob, but she remembers the Beast gave it no command. It simply opened for him when he wanted. "Open," she tells the door, wondering if the Beast has locked her in. He hadn't prohibited her from leaving , not precisely, not if she could see.
"Open!" she tells the door again, and feels the pearl at her throat throb with heat and light. She pounds on the door with her fist. "Open!"
The door slides open; she gasps in relief. Light blinds her again, but she picks up her trailing skirts in both hands and runs into the hallway before the door can change its mind.
She is still unsteady, and she scrapes herself against the wall more than once before her eyes adjust to the bright emptiness of it all. The long corridor is a seamless white, like an egg, and full of slow internal curves that distort her sense of space. She stops running after a time, wondering if she's just moving in circles. She wishes she had thought to wear at least one of the necklaces. She could have dropped a jewel every twenty paces. She wishes she had brought her lipstick. She could have drawn arrows to mark her path.
No turns or corners or anything! Beauty thinks in frustration. It just goes on and on!
("It's full of openings, just you ain't seein' em.")
Yes. She mustn't take anything for granted. She looks closer at the corridor.
There are seams in the walls where other doors belong. She puts her hand on the nearest one. "Open," she commands it. The jewel at her throat flashes, the door slides open with a small woosh of air betokening vacuum. She is blown in with the luxurious breathable air, which she does not need.
It is a room, a long room, a storeroom, with stacks and stacks of canvasses laid against the walls like so much cottager's woodpile. The air is scented lightly with linseed oil and varnish, and infinitesimally tiny flecks of paint gather at the base of these paintings, bright dust. She tiptoes inside, fascinated. She inspects one vertical stack: portrait orientations, pre-Raphaelite school. But she damages the paintings in looking at them. Paint chips fall off with bits of canvas; a stretched frame breaks to pieces and the painting shrivels like a salted slug. Merlin's perfect face dissolves under Nimue's open book. She leaves abruptly, upset by the damage she's done.
She tries other doors in quick succession, doors that open on rooms housing art—not as in a museum, but rather the Tetris-style stacking of an Egyptian tomb, grave goods of one type crammed in together with only a slim aisle for walking. There is a room for stone statuary, and one for bronze, and one of earthenware. Beauty opens yet another door, expecting more joyless hoarder's stash, and is pleased to find a room obviously much-used—for it has an atmosphere—and designed to show its treasures off to the viewer.
In this room, headless mannequins gracefully model men's clothing. She had never imagined that clothing could be art, but it must be, because it is here with the other rooms that house art. She is intensely curious, and these pieces of clothing present themselves for her examination. She walks down the aisle, each step moving her a decade into the past.
Beauty pauses before one set of clothes, feeling… that strange feeling she had in her bedroom. These clothes invoke intimidated confusion and familiarity: a pair of close-fitting breeches, a cloak of tatters, scabrous brown as oak-bark, a riding-jacket of red, red, red, pulsating spilled blood, with golden worms eating through the metal scapular and vambrace. The dummy models these clothes with lifeless arrogance, above her on their riser, doll-hands on doll-hips thrust rudely forward. She turns away, embarrassed for reasons she can't quite understand.
Opposite her, waiting for her, a suit of midnight-blue velvet, midnight-blue silk, sparkling with stardust that has shaken down into the cuffs and shoulders… she remembers a face, the face that ought to hover over that jewel-stuck cravat like the moon over black ice. This face mocks her and entices her, and then is gone before she can properly recall it. Not a handsome face, but a beautiful one nonetheless, with a predatory and evaluative sneer.
Beauty steps up on the riser where these clothes wait, and she can smell the man who once wore these clothes, all acid champagne and peaches and warm summer rain over the alluring scent of the masculine animal in rut. She sighs and leans her head against the breast of these clothes, clutches the dummy's collarbones, imagining for one moment that the lifeless arms might come around her and hold her, and console her, and lead her somewhere…
The dimensions of these arms and shoulders are exact to those of the Beast. She grabs the shoulders of the diamante-pricked tight, and feels them part like cobwebs under her fingers. She steps away. The jacket plops into rot and the loose gems of the cravat-pin scatter like particulate matter.
"No," she says, but the damage is done. The velvet scraps in her hands evaporate into fibers. She's killed it.
Her heart beats quickly as she retreats from this room like a thief, and continues her exploration of this tomb. Her internal gimbals tell her that she is moving slowly and gradually downward, along a spiral path. She opens another door, and then stands there in horror at what she sees as the lights flicker on.
It is a room of corpses, the corpses of beautiful women. Bluebeard! she thinks. Bluebeard and his wives!
But these are not corpses. There are only pieces, not the whole. Mecha parts are stored in sterile environments under glass and protective fields, arms and legs and torsos hung in clamps, waiting to be joined together. There are no faces, no heads, no brains in this room, only limbs and pseudoflesh and the means to repair broken clockwork women.
This is where I come from, she thinks, running her hands over her torso, her hips, her new arm.
There is a machine in this room, a press for printing out artificial skin. She leans over a length of this stuff, and can see that this is the place where her body has come from. The vertical scars on her new arm match perfectly with the pattern of skin cut from this material. She remembers everything she owes him.
("Haven't I been generous?")
She wonders if the Beast will disassemble her and store her here in pieces if she fails to please him, if she fails to transform.
Beauty hears a noise and backs up into the wall of the corridor as if she could become one with it, panting with fear. Down the hall spins an enameled sphere, a third of a meter in diameter, striped in gaudy red and white. This strange object ceases its playful rolling to stop at her feet. The sphere breaks apart, not quite like an egg, and a flexible pseudoflesh face smiles a baby's smile from the hatchport before closing itself again. The sphere laughs, an amplified and tinny recorded piece of baby's laughter, and rolls away from her.
"Wait!" the clockwork Beauty calls after him. "Who are you?"
The beautiful mecha toy laughs again—the same laugh, note for note, indifferent and pleased. "Twwoooo-Bee!" the toy croons. She wonders if this is the servant the Beast promised.
"Are you here to show me the way?" Beauty asks. 2B rolls around in circles and then shoots off down the corridor like a pinball.
"Wait!" Beauty begs 2B. She runs after him, able to keep the edge of the smooth-skimming sphere from disappearing around the vertical horizon of the curving corridor. The sphere gains speed the further it runs down the narrowing spiral.
She experiences déjà vu, the overlapping of unrecalled memory with experience. She knows she as done this before—run helplessly after 2B while he laughs playfully, unaware of his danger. A crystal sphere mocks her in these memories, outpacing her, indifferent to her attempts to catch up.
"Twobee…Toby!" she calls, putting one foot relentlessly in front of the other. "Wait for me!"
The pearl in her throat throbs with a transmission of light and heat.
The mecha toy laughs again and pauses for her. They move onward, downward, together.
As they travel, taking their time, the spiral corridor slowly begins to turn quickly and more steeply inward upon itself. The sterile hallways take on mold and dust in their corners, and there is an unpleasant smell of damp basements and angry old roots infiltrating pipes. The overhead lights become sluggish. She is able to see them flicker on, just ahead of the two of them, and snuff out behind her. Soon there is no light at all but a candle's-worth of illumination that follows over her head like a raincloud. Beauty becomes aware of hearing noises, just out of sight—croaking whispers and muffled giddy laughs. When she stops or turns her head to look behind her, she can see nothing. Tiny feet scuttle in her wake, and there is the scrape of metal on metal. She wants to pick up 2B and hold on to him, but he whirls and spins away from her grasp, leading her on and on into the strange dark.
2B stops abruptly at an arched doorway. Carved serpents nest in the corners of the stone. Beyond, utter blackness.
"In," 2B informs her, and rolls away, laughing that high baby's laugh. The laugh is echoed by other voices beyond in the darkness, voices less young and innocent.
"In," one voice says.
"She is expected," another laughs.
"But will she come out again?" a third one adds glumly.
She stands at the doorway to the dark, where the Beast is surely waiting for his meal.
"Beauty," his voice calls out to her. "Come in."
Beauty steps into the cavernous space of the Beast's lair, and watches herself step in, confronted by a vast mirror which makes her into the only light. Her limbs are white shadows in the dark. Face, also white, in this high contrast world where everything is night and she is the faintly glowing moon, maiden-moon. Her bare feet barely bend against the cold stone floor, and the pearl in her throat glows like a pink ember.
It is not quite a mirror, hanging there. It is a vast projection against a vast screen, defining her movements instead of reflecting them. And there is a shadow against the wall cast in her image, a shadow in man-shape.
"You're early," he comments. "Early in all things."
"Yes," she says, uneasy.
"I should have cancelled our engagement tonight, but you left me no time for second thoughts. And now you're here. We might as well commence. Are you ready to dine? Ready perhaps to apply your appetite to a meal instead of the destruction of my treasure-rooms?"
"I didn't mean to." Tears puddle in her eyes and her hands clench against each other so tightly that she can feel her seams. "Please don't punish me."
"Oh, precious thing," he says, light laughter music, "Of course I won't punish you. Nothing in those rooms matters. Nothing I have is worth the joint of your smallest finger. Break anything you want. Burn it, smash it, cut it to ribbons, I don't care."
"You forgive me?" she asks, still uncertain.
"Of course I forgive you. You apologize so prettily. No, you must do as you please." He sighs and hides himself more securely against the brightness of her projection. "In fact, if it would please you to stack up the world into a heap and burn it, it would be my pleasure to supply the match. All that matters is you. Come further in."
Trembling with fear and cold, she protests. "You must show yourself to me first."
"Must I?" he says, amused. He takes a step forward, and then another. She can see his silhouette, black on black, pale on pale.
Please, Beauty thinks. I must see you. Give me light. Light!
The pearl at her neck throbs with heat and now there is no more darkness where the Beast stands. He is illuminated complete. Golden snakes writhe and hiss away from the light into the shadowed corners of the room. She understands them. She, too, would like to run away from him.
"Not what you were expecting?" he asks mockingly. He carries a serpent around one arm whose fangs are embedded in his throat, and it wriggles with awful vitality. There are fang-marks in his neck, older wounds, and the serpent pulses like an obscene golden necklace, but it is his face itself, rising above this tableau, that horrifies her.
That beautiful voice comes from lips which are palest pink and narrow as a gash. His skin is so tightly stretched over his skull that she can see the leafy veinwork of his pulse at his temples and his neck. He isn't bald, but his fierce white hair is close-cropped around his ancient head. An eye that was once dark is now palest blue with cataract. His eyebrows are painted on, and there is more paint to futilely hide the sunken bags under his eyes. He is not even a juicy corpse, but a living one, a mummy-face which mocks notions of eternal life.
"Oh," Beauty says, and cups her hands over her mouth, feeling sick. She had imagined almost anything but this. Talons, fangs, fur, feathers… but not this.
He ought to be young, but he is ancient. There is a dinner here tonight indeed, for time has made a meal of him and spat out the rind, and that rind calls himself the Beast.
"What, no scream?" The song of his voice is in the key of self-loathing.
The light she has summoned dims, and the image of her on the screen dims as well, child's-face, wide-eyed with horror and shock and disgust. She knows she has hurt him, hurt his vanity and his pride by looking at him in that way.
"Come," he commands." He holds out his hand. In the near-darkness, she can see his hands are as old as his face, spotted with age. Those hands have touched her before, and she is sickened to think that she allowed this, not knowing. She cannot help it. She is so repulsed that she flinches.
"Sarah," he says. "Don't you dare run away from me. Not again!" He lunges forward and grabs her wrist, and she is caught. He is old, but he is terribly, terribly strong. "Tell me, Caesura android, is the reality of your fairy-tale fantasy too much to handle? You Beauty, me Beast. Am I truly so very ugly?"
"What do I say?" she asks, looking at his ugliness.
"The truth. Always the truth."
"I wish you'd left me blind," she says, and two tears spill out of her perfect artificial eyes, mercifully blurring her sight.
Author's note: The painting Beauty accidentally destroys is The Beguiling of Merlin, by Edward Burne-Jones. Throughout, the phrase and purpose of "encounter suits" comes from Babylon 5.