Chapter 3: Enchantress's Curse
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of gesture or least action, overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought.
That space the Evil One abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge.
Paradise Lost, (9.459-466)
Beauty wants to scream. She wants to die. How can something so old be so terribly alive?
The Beast breathes against her naked wrist before kissing her hand, and she flinches from his breath, too. It isn't quite that his breath stinks, but he smells stale, like rain stagnating in gutters, like fever-sweat. He holds on to her hand, looking her in the face, seeing her fear and disgust, and relishing it. "Why do I repulse you so? You're a Caesura model, built for sex and submission. Your father the dwarf is uglier than I am, but you didn't hate him. Didn't you serve him?"
"Serve him?"
"Sexually. He brought you to me with a mouth and one good arm. A dutiful girl could do much more with much less." His grip on her wrist lessens, just in time for her to reclaim her hand with a quick jerk. The serpent at his throat spits him out, hissing, and runs down his body into the dark.
"Do not speak evil things about my father," Beauty says calmly, though she is angry with his words.
"Truth isn't evil. Your father is a pimp. He's brought me a pretty bouquet's worth of clockwork women over the years." He is precise in his retreat, moving back into the shadows until they just cover his face.
"Is it sex you want from me, then?" He is uncertain, Beauty thinks. As if he ought to know me, but doesn't.
"No. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Isn't that the euphemism? Well. Let's say also that my flesh is unable and my spirit is bored."
She wants to advance on him, to intimidate him as he intimidates her. But the protocols written into her essential nature forbid aggression toward an owner, a Master. She cannot act against him in anger. Instead, she stands there and flexes her hands helplessly. "Then what do you want me for?"
"Companionship," he says, as if it's a foul word. "Would you eat now? I can save my proposal until after dinner." He laughs dryly. "As is traditional to your story." He gestures to the darkness, and a single spotlight shines down on a stone chair at the edge of a round table in the center of this pit. The table is decked with glass fruit and living flowers and decanters of choice wines long since clotted to nothingness. Despite her disgust with his monstrousness, she is drawn to this feast in the dark, drawn to its beauty.
Here is a mecha feast: a thick cube of biotic gel, carefully molded into the shape of a peach, dyed to an orangish tinge and very lightly perfumed with the real fruit's scent. It sits perfectly in the center of a translucent white plate, and artistically surrounded with looping squiggles of darker biotic sauce, and a tiny perfect scattering of confetti garnish cut from fallen leaves. To drink, carbonated water, dyed the palest yellow to mimic champagne. There is a cloth napkin, and one delicate golden spoon.
She touches the back of the unyielding stone chair and looks at the sumptuously laid table instead of at him. There is only a place set for one. "Won't you be joining me?" Beauty asks.
"I have little need for food," the Beast comments, as she sits. His voice is so lovely; she could listen to him speak forever, even if what he said confounded and terrified and angered her. "But it would feed me to be in your presence. Truly, you are a veritable feast for the eyes." He attends to her chair, and even to her napkin, and stands so close behind her that she can feel his breath against her hair. "Do you know how lovely you are, Beauty?" Trapped between the stone table and the stone chair and his presence, she stifles her fear and picks up the golden spoon.
Beauty carves a dent in the body of the fake peach and eats. Her internal workings can break the basic materials of biotic gel into elements that can be used by her repair nanites to perform a variety of pseudoflesh functions. She is familiar with its tasteless rubbery texture, and has been grateful in the past to eat it when Father was able to provide it. It is what she anticipates from the peach. But though it is gel, the peach has the texture and savor of human food, with none of the difficulty and time and mess that eating such would entail.
She rolls her tongue and palate over this first bite, and closes her eyes with pleasure. The gel peach is sweet, and warm. She's never had anything so lovely, so simple, or so perfect.
"You like it?" he asks, and she remembers his presence.
"It's like a peach," she says, taking another spoonful. "Delicious."
"Delicious, she says." He rolls the word over his tongue. "Delicious. A sense of aesthetics. How rare you are, even for a Caesura. How would you even know what a peach tastes like?"
"I don't know," she says quietly, putting her spoon down. Her mouth is curling around a strange bitter aftertaste, dark as seeds. Not biotic gel, this taste, or an artificial perfume. There is something else here in the gel, a poison in the fruit. She is suddenly afraid again, terrified.
"Eat," he commands her, with terrifying gentleness.
"I will," she says. "But… could we speak more, first? I have so many questions."
"Ask," he commands her. "But for each answer from me, another bite of dinner for you."
Who are you, who are you, who are you? Her mind shrieks, but he has only ever given his name, his role. His answer will tell her nothing. So instead she asks, "What are you? You are not a man. You have told me so."
"A beast," he replies. "Something beyond mecha comprehension. Old before you were created, older before the last memory of my kind died. Some people called us demons. Others, fairies. And some only suspected us by the strange footsteps we left in reality, soon erased by their disbelieving minds. When I came here, a thousand years ago, entering this bald reality was difficult. I had to claw my way into the world, and the door behind me snapped down and rusted shut. I can never go back to the world I left and the power I once had. I am close enough to a man now to make little difference. Eat."
She takes just a tiny bite, only enough to obey him in fact but not in spirit. "Where are we now? What is this place?"
"I call it the Duat, after the Egyptian underworld," he replies comfortably. "It was built by men, once-upon-a-time, and they had another name for it, but now it is mine. This charming room is particularly mine. The cloaca of the world, where magic is still slightly fertile. Fertile like maggots twisting in a slow drain, but beggars can't be choosers. It comforts me to be buried here, with all of humanity's grave-goods. With you."
"I don't want to be buried," she says. The spoonful of ersatz fruit shakes to the tempo of her fear as she eats, but he doesn't notice.
"It matters very little what you want, Beauty," he replies, matter-of-factly. She dislikes this. How can she communicate with him? He is like a wall, and she is a breaking wave against that wall. He stands and stands and doesn't feel her crashing against him.
"Why doesn't it matter?"
"Because you have no will. When I insulted your father, you stood there and stared holes into my face, but couldn't strike me. When you offered me your sex, you were only doing as you were programmed to do, to submit to and serve your owner. Beauty, my mecha intacta, if I were to command you to spread your legs for me, wouldn't you obey? I could penetrate you with my fingers, at least, or perhaps a knife or the butt of a wine-bottle. Such congress would hurt. I am aware of the secret parts of your body, having reassembled them myself. If I told you to enjoy it, you would. And if I told you to resist me while I hurt you, and told you to beg me to stop hurting you, you would. Isn't it so?"
"Yes," Beauty replies, hating her default obedience, disturbed by his cruelty, so like the cruelty of the masters. But they were beasts too, and their cruelty less sophisticated.
She can feel the ambient heat of the Beast's hand as he raises it to touch the crown of her head, but he doesn't touch her, not yet. "If you have feelings of your own, and want to make choices of your own, but can only obey my orders, then your will is immaterial. As is your personhood. There is only a beautiful doll standing in front of me. A sophisticated doll, but a doll nonetheless. You aren't a person. You aren't real."
"No?" she asks. She is displeased by his assertion, but all of her words come out soft as the cooing of doves, dulcet, compliant.
"Eat," he commands her. Hatefully, gracefully, she does. The gel mixture has been tampered with, she is now certain. That bitterness is a diffused clot of microscopic programming-chains. Strange hallucinations flicker at the edges of her vision: fragments of her memory, seen and then gone. The invading poison is tunneling through her core memory function, digging toward some source.
"You have done something to me," Beauty says, stuttering slightly over her words. Now the tremor in her hand cannot be stilled. "Why?"
"Once upon a time there was a woman I loved, and she died," he says. And now he touches her. His hands clamp down on either side of her face and tilt her head up, up, to look at his face. The sight of him only makes her dizzy. She remembers that face, suddenly, staring down at her. Vertigo seizes her and her eyes flutter as memory and vision overlap.
"What has that to do with me?" Beauty asks. She grips the arms of her chair, but she cannot drop his gaze.
The Beasts tilts her head back and forth, as if he could see right through her. He stares through her eyes with his one good eye as if staring through a peephole, looking for someone living in her brain-case. "It has everything to do with you. Do you know where the sentient androids came from? They were made from human beings, from their dreams and memories and stories. And that is where you come from, Beauty. Your artificial body is only an elaboration of a human body, with biotic nanites, tiny machines, substituted for bacteria, neural cells, immunity cells, just as your mind is only an elaboration of someone else's mind. Eat."
She is helpless to resist; she takes the peach in one trembling hand and bites down deep until there is only one shard of it left on the decorated plate. Her hands smear over the juice, and her mouth dribbles curds of biotic gel down her chin. She is overwhelmed by a quick flash of memory that overlaps her own body, of feeling an infection run hot through her skull, burning her, wrecking her, deleting her, chewing her as she chews the peach.
"The woman I loved, Sarah. In her day, there were only crude prototypes of the tiny machines that swim in your own artificial body, and they could be used to make a dynamic recording of a human brain. But they didn't cooperate with human flesh. They destroyed the labyrinths they travelled. They cauterized a human brain in the process of recording it. But in Sarah's case, one of the rare cases, the nanites' dynamic map preserved dreams, and memories, and experiences. A person entire, frozen in time. Synthetic immortality. Souls in boxes. And centuries later, some amoral genius had the idea to decant these sleeping souls into mecha bodies, to build the first artificial brains to the first artificial people. Sentience. In a strange way, Sarah is your mother, Beauty, and the mother of all the Caesura. She is the seed that brought you to life."
She is trembling now, unable to stop. The strange memories she's had, the sense of already-been—she senses the nature of his proposal about to come now, and she is afraid. The bitter taste has spread from her tongue up into her eyes and her brain-case. The air sparkles with color. In the fragments of uneaten peach, she has a vision of a green worm turning.
His hand cradles her skull, and his fingers tighten in her scalp, as if he wished to uncup her like a dish and scoop out the edible fruit inside, handfuls crushing to his ancient mouth, gluttonous. "All the efforts of mankind to create in his own image culminate in you. In you, Beauty, the ultimate clockwork, the ultimate mecha bud. Sarah is inside you. You must bloom. You must open. You must give her back to me."
She hears a voice from the furthest, darkest corner of the room. A woman's voice, crying out once in anguish. But then there is silence. The Beast seems to have heard nothing. "No," Beauty says.
"No?" Her chair-back is at least fifteen centimeters thick, and yet she would swear she can still feel the heat of anger roiling up from him. She can feel his breath panting against her face. He is as thunderous as when he harangued her father, and as terrible.
"No!" she says. He releases her, and her head swims without the anchor of his touch. Somewhere, inside her mind, she hears another woman's voice, shouting for her. She feels her heart beat, the pump which circulates her biotic lymph and blood, the nutrient bath which sustains nanite cells, and the beat is a lurch. She steadies herself against her chair, but can't quite feel anything. She is a painting on an already-painted canvas, and strange memories peel her away, to find what's beneath. He wants consent; she gives refusal. She must obey; she must live. Paradox. It hurts, it hurts. She pounds one fist against her temple.
Somewhere in the darkness, a woman sighs in pity for her.
Half-falling, Beauty abandons her chair and clutches at the table. She looks up at him in his monstrousness, and is glad he is so ugly. She is happy to hate him. "Sarah is dead. She can't come back." The room spins around her, and she is weak. "You're as bad as the masters. You're worse. I'm real, and you want to kill me. You want to murder my soul. You can't kill me and find her. There is only me. I'm real. I'm real!"
He grabs her by the shoulders, lifting her to her feet, and the expression on his face is one of uncertainty, instead of the triumph she expected. And she, she feels the protocols of the infected peach beginning to take her mind apart, looking for memories that she's certain won't be there.
She is going to die.
"Goblin King," she said to him. He looked magnificent to her. She was thirteen days past her ninety-third birthday, and he didn't look a day past the first time she saw him, appearing in a flash of lightning and glitter, arising black and brilliant out of the body of a white owl. Damn him for his beauty. She hadn't quite expected that he would come back for one last temptation game, and yet here he was.
"I've brought you a gift," he said, delivering his present in the way a psychotic delivers a bomb, tossing it carelessly from a crystal. It bounced on the afghan on her lap which concealed the pipes and tubes and wires that connected her body to subtle medical machinery. It was a ring, a perfect pink pearl on a band of gold. Or perhaps it was a tiny crystal—her sight wasn't as good as it used to be. He intended it as a wedding-ring but Sarah saw it for exactly what it was: a slave-collar.
"You should take it." He moved to brood Byronically in the light from the window. "Who else would make you this kind of offer?"
Sarah had to acknowledge that this was true. She wasn't getting many marriage proposals these days. She was old, and she smelled, and her hands shook, and the skin on them was as thin as paper and stained with age. But one of the beautiful things that had come with her old age was the ability to be fully indifferent to his sneering, and so she only laughed at him, her hard-won crone's laugh.
"Why are you proposing to me now, Goblin King? Since we're on the subject."
"I've been given permission to have you, and I will have you, even in this state, foul as you are."
"Given permission? By who? No, never mind. I don't care." She clucked to herself cheerfully. "You couldn't win me when I was young and juicy, and you can't win me now that I'm old and cunning." She bounced the ring off her lap by fluffing the afghan, not trusting him enough to touch it. It landed at his feet. "My answer is still no."
"This time," the Goblin King had replied darkly, picking up the unwanted ring. "Next time I'll—" he had bitten down on his lip.
"Aha," Sarah said. "Now we get down to the bones, Goblin King. You're not talking about you coming back tomorrow. There won't be a tomorrow for me. You're talking about another lifetime. We've played before, haven't we? Sarah leaned back into her comfy pillows and sighed with pleasure. "I wonder how long we've been playing? Not precisely fair, is it, that you get to keep revising your methods, and I have to start from scratch every time."
"It's not my fault I'm immortal," he said. "Anyway, I need the advantage. So far, you've always said no."
"Maybe I kept saying no because your wooing sucks." He looked insulted, which was what she'd intended. He also looked hurt, which made her feel bad. She found it easy to resist his threatening anger; resisting his unfeigned pain took a bit more doing. She did pity him, just a little. "Come here, your highness," she said, patting the bed by her thigh. "Let me pet you. Give an old lady a pleasant memory to round out a lifetime with. It might make you feel better."
He came to her then, reluctantly but inevitably, and laid his head against the edge of the bed. She stroked his fine, clinging hair down and down and down over his pointed ear, and even at ninety-three years, she was surprised that she still could feel desire for him. "You're worried I won't come back, aren't you?"
"You're doing the equivalent of putting your soul in an iron box, Sarah. Yes, I'm worried you won't come back again. Or that you'll be away from me for a long time. And I'll be so lonely without you." He took her hand and pressed her wrinkles against his smooth, sweet-smelling face. She was chilled through by the idea of what 'a long time' might mean to an immortal creature.
He was crying, and his tears were surprisingly cold. She felt her resolve weakening.
"You need to go now," Sarah told him, taking her hand back. "I won't make any promises regarding commitment, Goblin King, because I may be human, but I'm not weak and I'm hardly stupid. But if what you say is true… about mortal souls returning… we'll see each other again, and my answer might be different."
"And my wooing might be different as well," he had replied with cold anger, withdrawing from her, as clear-eyed as if he had never shed a tear in his life. "I'll make you pay for this, Sarah. I will make you suffer exquisitely for rejecting me."
Ah, and then she had found the anger that had always made her strong. She loved him, but he'd been a good tutor in hate. She gave him her hate now. "You can try what you like, Jareth. But when we meet again, if there's any god who keeps the scales in balance, let it be like this. Let me be beautiful, innocent, and compliant, just the way you like your prey. And you can be as old and foul as I am now, and as wise. Frighten and overmaster me, make me fear you and love you and do as you say, and I'll still resist you. I'll know you for exactly what you are. Fairy. Demon. Beast."
He had looked stricken through the heart; he had even clutched the amulet at his breast for fear.
"Au revoir, Jareth," Sarah said. "You have no power over me, et cetera et cetera. Leave me now to contemplate my death."
He went in a scattering of glitter. That night, the very last night in her own body, she dreamed about the Labyrinth entire. She saw it omnisciently, as if it were a movie. Jareth's influence, no doubt. Well… she would take that memory with her to the grave. Hopefully someday someone would make use of it.
"Sarah?" he asks her, in hope and fear.
She is flailing in his arms; she has no control over her limbs. She feels psuedoflesh tear under her skin, and her perfect enamel teeth gnash as she undergoes a seizure. The memories are too much. There is a fire unleashed in her mind that wants to burn her all away. Is she Sarah? Is she his Sarah? Who is she? She tries to speak and can only babble nonsense syllables. "Jeh!" the clockwork Beauty repeats. "Jeh! Reh! Heh!"
She can feel her artificial brain going into cascade failure, providing waking dreams and hallucinations to provide a levee against the dataflow.
She is tilting a dolly's head, the kind with eyes that open and shut, making it wake and sleep. The doll's painted face is smiling, but one eye won't close, and the plastic is brittle between her hands. "Close your eyes," the Beast commands, but one eye rolls, winking. The tears that trickle out of the blank socket are the grubs of beetles, yellow like dust, each with a sigil on their tiny backs.
"There is a bug," Beauty says. "In my head." The fragile mouth smiles benignly. The broken eye drops into her skull helpfully, and yes, there is a scarab nesting in her brain-case, in a nest of silken threads, shivering out offspring. "No::yes. Paradox::failure."
She is the head, and he is forcing her into water, to wash the beetle out. "Don't drown me," Beauty begs. "I am real. I am. I am. I."
He cradles the egg of her skull in the palm of her hand. She twists and writhes and breaks her body, unable to find a way back to herself.
"Shh, Beauty," he says, and she can hear the tears in his voice. They land on her arm. Unlike in Sarah's memory, they are not cold. They burn her. "Beauty, you can say no. Remember your story. You can say no." He curls her up against him like a parent with an exhausted child. "Say no if you have to. Don't break. Please don't break, Beauty. You're all I have left."
She remembers that in her story, the one where she now belongs, Beauty is allowed to refuse the Beast. This knowledge, and his permission to refuse him, helps her find a place inside herself to house Sarah's personality, a place away and apart from herself to contain her. But the damage that's already been done cannot be undone. All these memories are waiting for her, outside the wall her refusal has made. She can feel and see and think things that never occurred to her before. She hurts, inside and out. She hurts badly. And she hurts because of him. She stares at him until he hides his face from her with his hand, but tenderly, as if he doesn't want his ugliness in body or soul to trouble her.
She wants to say something else to him, but she chokes on the words. He helps her turn her head so she can weakly spit out biotic blood and lymph onto the floor. A golden serpent comes to lap it up like a milk libation in pagan temples. The sight is soothing. She watches the golden scales, sees the golden jewelry lids close over its ruby eyes.
"I want to go home," Beauty says sadly. She has no idea what she means.
