Chapter 10: The Eastward Road

The earth—that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women—I carry them
with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am filled with them, and I will fill them in
return.

Walt Whitman: "Poem of the Road"

As with her arrival, their departure from Pisces causes no disturbance. They leave out of the eastern gate, handing over their vendors' chits as they go. Ama Goose drives an impressive covered sledge drawn on tractor-treads. Ice is elegant beside her, high-stepping on the road to Ouernica, carrying Beauty on his back, while Ewen hauls her cart.

They are not alone on this road—there is actually a road, one made of gravel of glass heated from the sand and other, countless travelers. It seems several other mecha have caught the same heart-fever as Beauty, having laid eyes on Rapunzel. For a while their small caravan is accompanied by other mecha, other carts, all taking the ancient southeast road, all travelling to Ouernica. Beauty keeps her back stiff and her sword in plain sight, but no one molests them. There is subvox talk between the travelers, stories about the city, mecha to be met there, hopes to be realized there. Only she and Ama Goose are silent. At dawn, they pause, Beauty to disinfect her belongings with the ever-increasing amounts of radiation, and Ama pauses to unfurl an arching solar sail and plug it into the sledge's batteries—dexterously and easily. Her hands must still hurt, but she is nimble.

"Now," Beauty says, when the heat of the day has passed and the two of them have made their camp some distance off the road, and set Ewen to guard the desolate wasteland behind them. "Show me what it is you wanted from me."

Ama Goose beckons her through the airlock into her sledge, removing her mask and gloves as she enters. The interior is capacious, with her wares stacked in piles and stacks with a slim aisle between for walking, very much like one of the Beast's treasure-rooms full of the grave-goods of humanity. Ama Goose apparently trades mainly in paper: books, magazines, memo-slips slips, fragments of art, all sealed into slim laminate to preserve them whole. They slide through all of this to the old mecha's bed. Ama Goose removes the cushions for her bent back and a tattered bit of durable tarp that serves as a sheet from the thick opaque plastic oblong. She taps out a code of pressures against its receptive surface, and a seamless lid unseals with a hush of vacuum and a swirl of a night-lamp throwing soothing patterns of white rocket ships and green-ringed moons and yellow stars over the walls of the wagon.

"Come see," Ama Goose says, pulling Beauty forward. "My greatest, my only treasure."

Beauty's breath catches in her throat. Sleeping inside the cradle of this box, she sees a child of four or five years. His eyelids are blue shadows over his closed lids, and his eyelashes are so thick that they are like the fringes of a king's mantle: gold, heavy. He is the most beautiful thing Beauty has ever seen. "A boy!" she exclaims, but quietly, quietly, so as not to wake him. Is this a master, this child?

"Not a boy," his keeper tells her. "A Neverlander. A mecha built to be a substitute child for masters without one. A boy who will never grow up." She sits down on the lip of the plastic coffin and lovingly touches the boy's cheek. "His name is Henri."

"Henri," Beauty says dubiously. "What do you want me to do? Wake him? Is that what you want?" She is disgusted by the idea. To wake a mecha child up to a world in which his human parents have been dead for centuries, to wake him to desolation and ugliness, to wake him to be told he is now owned by the old crone who smiles down at him like both the loving Grandmama and the Big Bad Wolf? Better that he sleep forever than awake to all this.

"I don't need you to wake him," Ama says, surprising her. "I need you to repair him." She stands and takes the boy's pretty bedclothes up in her arms. "See?"

Beauty sees, and his horrified. The child's legs are swollen and grotesque. It looks as if someone had opened slits against his thighs and angrily stuffed quantities of sand and rocks under his skin. The knee of one leg has been almost completely devoured by a cluster of fat tumors. The other, lumpen, is beginning to curl up into itself like a dead spider's leg. She is overwhelmed by the idea of how much work it would take to remove every single tumor by hand, overwhelmed by the problem of how to splint and draw out a leg so wasted. This is not like anything she has faced before.

"This is an illness," Beauty says, horrified. "A disease. The sickness in your hands, you caught it from him, trying to repair him."

"Yes. We were in storage together. We woke up together. But then he caught this, and the pain of it is less when he sleeps. So he sleeps. I don't know when he'll wake up again."

"I don't know if he should," Beauty says doubtfully. "Why do you need me, Ama Goose? Aren't there better repairs to be had at Ouernica, if it's as rich as you say?"

"They drive out the diseased," Ama Goose says grimly, folding the blankets and sheet. "There is lots of sickness in Ouernica, coming from what gets uncovered in the pits. It's a dangerous place, but it can make your fortune for a century if you find the right salvage. Or a lifetime, if the Lady selects you at the Long Night festival. Beauty, if you could heal him, surely she would take Henri into the Tower of Joy. He would have a good life there, not this endless sadness of the world with me. Will you help us?"

Beauty stares Ama Goose in the face. The old mecha stares right back, as if she could see her eyes through her face-plate. "You're willing to give him up, even if it means being childless and alone?"

"Yes," Ama Goose says.

"And pay anything I ask?"

"Anything," Ama Goose says, not even haggling. "My wagon and everything in it, the suit off my back, even my head." The old mecha's eyes are fixed upon her secret treasure. "I'll pay everything, to give him his life back. Don't you understand, I love this boy?"

"I understand," Beauty says softly, and she does. Oh, she does. Ama is to this child what the Beast is to her, and she can give to him what the Beast gave to her. She can give this Neverlander more than a half-life, sleeping in a box until loneliness or hope compel his nanny to wake him. But she will have to use Caesura methods, and that means risking herself. More, she will have to risk trusting this old mecha with her secrets.

"Then here is my price," Beauty tells her. She takes Ama Goose's hand and squeezes it until she can tell it starts to hurt, and the old mecha is forced to look at her. "My price is your trust, absolute and complete, as if I were the Lady herself descended from her tower to bring you commands. You will keep my secrets and be my friend, for now and for all time. If you agree, I will heal your boy. Will you pay that?"

"Yes," Ama Goose answers in a gasp. "But if you kill him, I will kill you."

Beauty laughs harshly, shaking her loose. "I'm risking my life with him anyway, and you know it." She gives Ama a gentle push toward the airlock of her sledge. "I'll begin now. Go and fetch me my repair kit from the saddlebags. Then you will leave us alone together. Watch and wait outside. Protect us. And whatever you hear or don't hear, you must not come in until you're called. Even if it's a day. Even if it's a week."

"But—" Ama Goose says.

"Payment in advance," Beauty says implacably. "Or do I go on to Ouernica alone, and leave you and your trouble behind me?"

She is obeyed, gratifyingly. Beauty reaches down and lifts Henri out of his plastic sepulcher, cradles him in her arms. There is pain washed thinly over his mouth, as if agony can find him even in his dreams. But he is light, and he is warm, and he is innocent. She is bluffing his keeper. She would no more leave this child behind in sickness than she would leave Will or Ice to fend for themselves. When Ama Goose returns, lugging Beauty's repair kit, together they lay the boy on the sealed lid of her bed. Beauty waits until the old mecha has controlled her fears enough to leave. She kisses the boy on the forehead before she goes, and then the two of them are alone together.

Beauty stares down at the boy. She knows what she must do, but she is terribly afraid. She has never tried anything like this before. Failure means more than the boy's death or Ama Goose's wrath. It could mean her death, or worse—perpetual disfigurement from now to the end of her long, long days.

"Henri," Beauty says to the sleeping boy, as quietly as if to a newborn baby. "My name is Beauty, and I'm afraid. We must both be very brave. You are like all the earth, broken and hurting, and I made a promise to help. So I will try to heal you, and you must try to be healed. Dream of that, little boy. Dream of running on two strong legs. Dream that you are well. And when you wake up, your dreams will all come true."

With a trembling hand, she makes a short incision in his leg, where the tumors are most potent. She opens up his disease to the air. And then she removes her gauntlet, cuts open her own skin, and deliberately infects herself, trying not to hyperventilate, trying not to be afraid.

She listens to her flesh, and what it has to tell her about what kind of death her bravery has bought her.

As she thought, this particular sickness is caused by nanites. Her body wants to destroy it before she can properly perceive it. Her immune system floods the incision site with potent lymph, ready to make war on the invaders. She cuts off her circulatory system at the elbow. She asks her body to wait.

It doesn't take long. There is pain, pain, pain as she allows the sickness to take hold. Already the infectious mites are chewing at her synthetic musculature and dissolving capillaries, drinking deep at the fountain of her. Already they are replicating, having found such a bounteous food source. The disease will eat her, is eating her. She closes her eyes and watches them feast and dance and breed in her mind's eye, sees them making nests in her flesh and bone and especially her biotic nerve centers. Their love-song is an agony. But they are not designed to kill, only to cripple, to deform and hurt, to fill up the mind of the mecha with sorrow and pain until there is no room left for anything but sorrow and pain. No wonder Ama Goose was looking for new legs for the boy. No wonder she wanted repair nodes. The pain makes her want to scream. If she allowed it to go on, her arm would soon be in worse shape than Henri's legs, and her own immune system powerless to do anything but maintain a ceasefire. Such genius, this disease, a veritable work of weaponized art. But she will not let it go on. She will stop it like she stopped the masters. It is their doing, this, no doubt, one of many plague-vials they released upon their insubordinate creations.

"I am the story of your death," she tells the evil inside her. "I killed the ones who created you, and you have no power over me."

She tells the story a thousand thousand times, to all the hungry invading nanites inside her arm. And slowly, they begin to heed her. Many-many of them obediently die. She tells the remainder what they must now be, in all the particulars. They will reverse themselves and be balm where they once were poison. They will propagate, but only according to her desires. In effect, she has made the disease into its own cure, a serpent eating its own tail.

Eventually, when millions of nanites have all gotten caught up in her narrative, have all learned enough of the story to tell it to others, have all been taught how to die, she sends them back to their own country, a slim inoculation kissed into a mecha boy's knee. His own body will carry out the work, as it is already struggling to do. His body will have to be closely monitored to avert any mistakes or mutations, as will her infected arm, but Beauty believes she's succeeded. An hour after she delivers the cure, the tumors around his knee have already begun to shrink.

Beauty slumps to the floor, exhausted. Hunger gnaws her, demanding that she replenish the stores of materiel spent in this healing, but hunger calls less loudly than sleep, and dreams to loosen the tension this healing has created in her mind. The moments in which she blinks deliver strange visions, and tempt her to close her eyes.

She is having conversations with glowing spirits of nanites in flashes of pure light, pure alien difference. They are so pleased with her. They sing seduction as they deck her with flowers of biotic gel. They sing of love. They have called her to their foreign country, to be crowned as queen.

"Lady?" A gentle voice wakes her. She imagines it is Sarah, ancient and venerable, calling her awake with a mother's touch. Of course, Beauty thinks, full of joy. It is my wedding-day, and so my mother is here.

"Lady?"

Beauty jerks back and sits up. It isn't Sarah. It is Ama Goose. "Lady," she murmurs again, and her gaze drops as soon as Beauty can see the tears in her eyes. She is bowing on hands and knees so low that her chin scrapes the floor of the sledge. "Lady, forgive me for ever doubting or dishonoring you. Bless you."

Beauty shakes her head and hisses a breath as she stands. There is her face-plate and her gauntlet, lying on the bed beside an Henri who is no longer there, but beside the old mecha, kneeling on the floor, looking up at Beauty with curiosity. Their faces are all naked but for one expression of innocence, one of fear, and her own confusion. "I'm not the Lady," Beauty says.

She looks over at the boy. Henri's open eyes are wide and brown, trusting as the earth. He gets off his knees, clearly perplexed by his nanny's injunction to kneel, stands up on two lamb-wobbly bent legs, and approaches close to her.

"Hallo, Beauty," he pipes in a child's voice, smiling with a wide and puckish mouth. He takes her hand and gives it a polite shake. "Ama, Mama, why don't you stand up? Are you sick?"

"I'm afraid," the old mecha moans. Her face is crumpled with some terrible, overwhelming feeling.

"Don't be afraid," Beauty tells her, as she reaches out to touch the boy's cheek. It is warm and soft, but he squirms away from her caress so he can tug Ama upright.

"Ama, Mama, I dreamed about her. I dreamed she came. She said she was come to help us." He wraps his child's arms around his nanny's waist and cuddles against her hip. Those golden eyes stay fixed on Beauty, though, and he looks at her as though he knows her complete, and is glad to know her. "She's our friend."

"Ama Goose, look to your child." Beauty commands her. "He knows who I am."

It might have taken months of careful conversations—time that Beauty is certain she doesn't have—for the two mecha women to come to a working accord with each other, if it weren't for Henri.

"I was three nights waiting, and then Henri came out to get me," the old mecha says, pinching the boy's nose so he giggles. "All in a bother, naked as a jaybird, telling me your name and that I should go see you. So I did. There's gel there, if you're hungry." Beauty takes up a lozenge in her hand and devours it. She watches as Ama Goose dresses the boy, first in a bright red bodystocking and then in a translucent red encounter suit. Henri is patient with this, though his eyes look around in bright interest at the wagon, until the teddy-bear-eared helmet goes over his head. "Now you may go outside and play," she tells the Neverlander, and the boy needs no further permission. He skips, limping on his crooked leg, whooping for joy and freedom.

"Ama!" he shouts, once outside the airlock. "There is a bird and a horse and a droid here!"

"I know!" Ama yells back. "Play with them! With your permission, of course, Lady," she adds.

"It's fine," Beauty says. Her stomach twists at the sight of the plate of biotic gel, taking a second, and then a third, and then re-sealing herself into her suit. She glances down at Ama Goose's hands. There are already tiny lumps reforming between the scars where Beauty skinned her. She will also need to be inoculated against the disease. "Give me your hands," Beauty tells her, and when the old mecha obeys, Beauty injects her with the cure with two wrist-darts from her gauntlets.

"That hurt!" Ama Goose says.

"I know," Beauty said. "But this is more certain than other methods. You'll need both hands to manage that child."

"Are you truly not the Lady?" Ama Goose asks dubiously, rubbing the injection sites in her palms.

"I'm just a grass-green woman from the west," Beauty says curtly. "Like you said. Ignorant and in need of friends. You'll need to disinfect this wagon and Henri's bed before we meet any other mecha. That disease is still contagious outside our bodies, and I don't want anyone else to catch it." She piles up the biotic gel in her arms and exits the airlock. She will eat in the privacy of her own tent. The exterior of her suit will also need disinfecting.

"Lady?" Ama Goose pleads.

Beauty ignores her.

It is Henri who makes a way for them out of mutual suspicion. He adores Ama Goose with a child's absolute and unquestioning dependence, and she for her part is less chilly when she sees the familiarity with which he treats Beauty. Moreover, Ama Goose is used to being the most knowledgeable person in their family of two, and when Beauty asks the types of questions that Henri might ask—"Who are those people there?" "What is Ouernica like?" "That cloud is shaped like a dog!"—she is reassured of her place and even treats Beauty with a measure of her old impatient condescension. It is like chess played with living roles, and Beauty has had time to become very good at this game, thanks to the Beast. She wins without letting the old mecha see her winning. Or perhaps it is a draw—Beauty can sometimes feel Ama Goose's slim certainty of her godhead under her cover of familiarity.

Henri's legs become longer as they straighten out, and every day he is able to move with more strength. He is a cricket of a child, despite his red teddy-bear encounter suit, springing here and there and everywhere atop the covered sledge as they travel. He is full of chirping questions and soft chatter to himself and to Ewen and Ice while they are encamped. Even Will is eventually seduced into play, inviting the child to join their night-time games of tag in the increasingly irradiated wilderness. "He's a wonderful boy," Beauty remarks one evening at camp.

"Oh yes," Ama Goose says contentedly, warmed to her favorite subject. She speaks of what she knows of Neverlanders, some of whom were built to look like children, and some others to look partly like children and partly like fantastic animal hybrids, pets and substitute children all in one. She speaks of a sister, Nanny Goose, who lived in her enclave who tended a nursery full of these chimerical creatures until they were sold, one by one, to another city and never heard from again.

"But they were all mecha?" Beauty asks. "All biotic?"

"Oh yes," Ama Goose replies. "Clockwork, self-aware." She and Ama Goose share an identical grimace at this thought, though Beauty's face is hidden. This is a terrible thing, almost as bad as the cows with the burst udders. Somewhere inside Henri's artificial brain is the imprint of a human personality which gave him sentience and life, and Beauty does not doubt that the masters had made some cruel circumcision of that soul to create a perpetual and perfect child, always dependent, always vulnerable, never able grow up either physically or spiritually. It is a terrible thing, and only Ama Goose's devotion to her child, and Henri's obvious affection for her, and their finding of each other, make it in any way something other than a monstrous wrong.

As the days of travel pass, the small clusters of road travelers have become a much larger crowd in the past few days, though each group preserves a bubble of space around itself, as courtesy and carefulness. Their party is a much slower group than all the others, even those on foot, for the others do not tarry and camp. They move mindlessly onward, as with the migration of birds, ever onward to the east. There is no violence, but there is a tension in the air that grows stronger with every hour, just as the radiation does, a fell wind crackling with warning and hate.

"Beauty," Henri asks one morning as they are preparing to leave another campsite, and Beauty is wondering if it is indeed the sea she can smell in the crisp air, filtered carefully through her air-exchangers, "Can I ride with you today? On the horse?"

Behind their masks, Beauty and Ama Goose exchange a tense look, and Beauty gives a slight nod.

"It's fine with me if it's fine with Beauty," Ama Goose finally answers. "But Henri, it's harder to ride on a chevalchine than it is to sit here on the wagon-seat. And you can't pester Beauty like you do me. You'll have to obey her. If she says yes."

"Of course," Beauty says, looking down at the boy. How could she say no? Even if it slows them, even if she is eager for Ouernica, the Neverlander is so pert and sweet that his request is almost impossible to resist. Beauty remodulates the cant of the saddle so it is a pillion, and the boy can rest his legs atop the saddlebags. After hitching up Ewen to the cart, she lifts Henri up before her, and he puts his hands confidently on the new pommel.

It is most certainly the sea, Beauty thinks with a thrill, as the light of the late day reveals a glint of silver and grey against the horizon.

"Beauty," Henri asks behind her, seeing what she sees, and pointing. "What is that?"

"That is the ocean," Beauty replies. "Or perhaps a vast lake."

"Oh. Like the flood, and Noah's ark?"

"Did Ama Goose tell you about Noah's ark?" Beauty asks, intrigued.

"Yes," Henri replies. He kicks his legs against Ice's flanks. "Giddyap!"

"Stop that," Beauty tells him firmly. "Ice is going as fast as he should. Tell me, Henri, what other stories do you know?"

"Mm.. Hannibal and Scipio at Zama, Il Principe, The Boy Who Didn't Know How to Shiver, Richard Third Crookback, The Three Billy-Goats-Gruff. Lots more. Ama told me."

"Impressive," Beauty said, though she is contemptuous of what this repertoire would mold in a child meant to be a master. "Which is your favorite?"

"I don't know," he replies, with a boy's obstinate boredom.

Beauty wonders if knowing stories is what makes the three of them so different from the others on the road, the others in the mecha fair now two weeks to the northwest. All of the others are literal, and she only ever overhears them speaking about things-that-are, things known, using subvox almost all the time. There is intense longing from them, certainly feeling, certainly self-awareness, but no ability to create, no ability to think beyond what is to what-might-be.

"Ama Goose," Beauty asks, above the soft tread of the sledge, "Was there ever a Neverlander uprising?"

Ama Goose doesn't reply, and Beauty is preparing to ask again until she sees her nod her head. "They went with the Goose," she says shortly. "Those that went."

"All the mecha come from stories," Beauty muses to herself. "Stories of dead lives. And those of us who fought back… we were the ones who could tell new stories, or change the old ones. Narrative. Imagination. Possibility."

"You know stories?" Henri asks, clearly feeling that he's not being given the attention he's due. "What stories do you know, Beauty?"

"Once upon a time," Beauty says automatically, and then stops. She is overcome with feeling. No one has asked her for a story since Father. Not even the Beast ever asked her to tell him a story. What story will she tell this child, this kin to rebel slaves, who is as able as she to use it as fuel for a destiny?

She hugs Henri briefly, as long as he will allow. "Once upon a time, far far away to the west, there was a little droid named Twobee who lived in the castle of a fairy king," Beauty begins.

She will use this story to take the boy far, far away from the dangers of Ouernica. She will teach him to desire the west, and the Duat, and to long to meet his counterpart. He will take Ama Goose with him, or rather, Ama Goose will be persuaded to follow if his desire is strong enough. After all, someone must go to warn the Beast that she might be late. And Beauty has already seen enough of her sisters to never want Henri in their clutches.

As she works and pats the story of the little machine servant into shape, giving him a mischievous character far more like Henri's than his own, twilight begins to sink over the eastern edge of the world. She can see the silver shining of a broad inlet of the sea, and a heavy pink mist over it, smelling so sharply of roses that it cuts through the amniotic salt of the water. And below that further still, there is the glow of immense fissures in the earth, lit so brightly and so deep that they are like a false electric dawn in the darkness.

"Ouernica," Beauty breathes.