Beauty (40 page)

"Oh?"

"He's blind. Blind and crazy. He can't see anything, but he thinks he does."

I shook my head at her, saying nothing. Janice drew her face into the expression I call her holy martyr look.

"At least we can take this opportunity to cleanse ourselves of hate," she said, staring me straight in the eye. "We are being given a chance to forgive. We must figure out some way to take care of him."

"We? Take care of him!"

"We comebacks must care for him. He is one of us and we can't afford to have him talking about us."

"Talking about what?" I laughed, a little hysterically, certainly not amused. "If he's crazy, surely no one is going to believe him."

"We'd rather he doesn't talk about us at all," she said. She gave me a sidelong look, that judging, weighing look. "When they called this afternoon, I told them we'll take him in for the time being."

I couldn't believe her. "He killed Bill! He raped Dorothy. You can't be serious!"

She pursed her mouth and folded her hands. That pious, martyred, holier-than-anybody pose. "It's just for the time being. We have Bill's room downstairs that he can stay in. You'll be working evenings and I'm working days. The network will pay you to look after him while I'm at work. If you're going to pay your share of the expenses here, you'll need more pay than the part-time work the library will give you."

"I can't be party to this," I said. "I saw what he did, and I can't be party to it."

Janice wrung her hands, rolled her eyes, became St. Janice facing the lions. "Either someone has to take charge of him or we have to get rid of him. I can't even consider that! I'm a religious woman. I couldn't kill him. We have to forgive him. If he was crazy, he wasn't really responsible for what he did."

"What makes you think I could control him," I said. "He's a hell of a lot bigger than I am."

"They have him on drugs," she admitted. "Enough to keep him quiet. He can take care of himself. It won't be like nursing him, or anything like that."

"I see," I said, sickened. I couldn't stay in this place if Jaybee were here. I'd end up killing him. Maybe that's what she wanted. I gave her a look, almost understanding her in that instant. Did she know what she was doing? "Give me a few days to think about it."

"No time," she commented. "I think they just drove up outside."

They had, indeed, just driven up outside, two men I had met when I was young Beauty, friends of Janice's and Bill's, with Jaybee between them, being dragged along. I was reminded of the way he had hauled Bill's body away, carelessly, dumping it in his car, driving off. I had been huddled on the floor, my clothes in shreds around me, blood on my face, blood on my hands, blood leaking between my legs, still able to see him out of the corner of the window. So I saw him now, out of the corner of the window, being dragged along. There was a bandage over his eyes.

I went to my room and got my robe on. I put Grumpkin in the pocket. Poor old cat. He was almost used to it. I put my things in the other pocket, the ones I needed. I put the boots on my feet. I heard Janice open the front door, heard her speaking in her pious, all-forgiving voice. "Poor man. Bring him in."

He came in. I went out.

Puck found me in the hotel where I had taken a room. He was panting, and he looked pale.

I asked him what was the matter.

He rubbed his face with his hands. "It's getting harder to get here. Harder every time. When are you coming home? Carabosse wants to know, Beauty. This is getting serious."

"Does she think I'm in danger here?" I asked. I couldn't get interested in Carabosse, for some reason. "Can I still get back from here?"

"You're not in danger. Not immediately. And you can still get back, for a little while."

"Tell her soon."

APRIL 1993

It is easy to get on a board of directors. All one has to do is give money. Of course, getting the money out of a warrant over six hundred years old is another matter.

The House of Levi still exists, strangely enough, though under quite another name, and it still exists where I found it first, in London. Getting there from here was my first overseas flight in a plane. I chose to do it that way, remembering how thin the magic is in current time. Using the boots to go back, it gets stronger as I go. Going from place to place in the twentieth, the boots might work, but they might drop me off in mid-ocean, as well. I didn't want to risk it.

When I showed the investment house the warrant, they looked at it in disbelief. They admitted that the money had been with them all those years. One of their young men sat down and figured what it was worth, millions and millions of dollars. I had to prove my right to it, as the direct descendent of the daughter of the Duke of Monfort and Westfaire, which, thanks to the seven-league boots and enough gold to oil palms here and there, I was able to do. Puck and Fenoderee helped, rather reluctantly, and only in past time. They didn't have to come here to do it. I'm not sure they could have. But in former centuries they were able to forge parish registry entries and put false birth records among ancient files. Marriages which had never occurred were recorded. Baptisms were entered in faded ink in ancient books. Confirmation records were put there as well. And, above all, wills, passing the warrant down from generation to generation, seventeen generations in all, to the present day. To Catherine Monfort. I am an heiress. The people of the House of Levi have been considerably astonished, but they are standing behind their document, six centuries old or not.

I called Janice and offered to hire someone to look after Jaybee. Janice was so angry I could hear her voice shaking, which confirmed my suspicion that she wanted to make me responsible for Jaybee. She had transferred her dislike of Beauty-Dorothy-to this new person, me. In Janice's world, there must always be a sinner who is paying for her sin while Janice watches and judges. Since she could no longer get at Dorothy, she wanted to get at me. I was Dorothy's friend and therefore probably guilty of something. In the last analysis, it is probably her own sin she is forever expiating. I don't know what sin that was. Perhaps neither does she.

It turned out, I didn't need to hire someone to care for him. Within hours of the time I left the house on Wisdom Street, she had found another place for Jaybee.

I found an apartment in New York, and I am now on the board of directors of the International Environmental Crisis Committee, a group of very powerful persons dedicated to saving the world. They feel it is going to hell in a handbasket, and I know they're right, though I can't tell them how I know. Many of them have given millions of dollars to this effort, and so have I. I am privy to everything they are doing. They are attempting to put together a coalition of all environmental bodies, all the so-called liberal religious bodies who are more concerned with life than money, all people everywhere concerned with life on earth. We spend endless hours in meetings, trying to build coalitions, networks, trying to agree on lobbying strategies. We argue which candidates to support. I go to bed every night weary and yet unable to sleep. Grumpkin lies beside me and purrs, and eventually the sound of him lulls me into unconsciousness. Then I dream of the child named Elaine, and her mother, and the knife, and the sound of a mad voice singing "Down, down, down," and I wake up again.

JANUARY 1994

Almost three hundred species of flora and fauna have gone extinct since I gave my first dollar to IECC. On the front page of the newspaper tonight is the announcement of a Mother of the Year Award, given to a mother of eleven children. I wonder what Father Raymond would say? Her eleven children can eat hamburger made from cows who were fed the ephemeral grass that comes after rainforest is cut and burned. They can breathe the already polluted air. They can look forward to growing up and having spaces of their own in the new prefabricated apartment houses now being built in Japan which give each renter one hundred fifty square feet. The article about the apartments says all the conveniences are built in. Bill's apartment in the hive in the twenty-first had one hundred square feet. There isn't far to go.

MARCH 1994

Puck has been back several times, begging me to come home, each time more frantically. I might as well have gone. There is no point in my staying here. There was never any point. Carabosse must have known that. She knew it was too late. I felt I had to try.

We have been thwarted at every turn by god. Not the real God. A false one which has been set up by man to expedite his destruction of the earth. He is the gobble-god who bids fair to swallow everything in the name of a totally selfish humanity. His ten commandments are me first (let me live as I please), humans first (let all other living things die for my benefit), sperm first (no birth control), birth first (no abortions), males first (no women's rights), my culture/tribe/language/religion first (separatism/terrorism), my race first (no human rights), my politics first (lousy liberals/rotten reactionaries), my country first (wave the flag, the flag, the flag), and, above all, profit first.

We worship the gobble-god. We burn forests in his name. We kill whales and dolphins in his name. We pave prairies in his name. We have retarded babies in his name. We sell drugs in his name. We set bombs in his name. We worship him everywhere. We call him by different titles and commit blasphemies in the name of worship.

We were given magic to use in creating wonder, and the gobble-god has sucked it dry. His followers reject mystery and madness and marvel. They cannot tolerate questions. They can believe any answer, no matter how false, so long as it is a certainty nailed firmly onto the cross of money. They yearn for the rapture to come, without knowing they have killed rapture forever. Fidipur is what is to come, and the Holy One, Blessed be He, will not forgive mankind for that.

LATER

I called Fenoderee or Puck. I sat on the side of my bed and called them. Neither of them came. After a long, long time, I heard a faint, far voice calling my name. "Not enough," it said. "Not enough magic."

I may have trapped myself. If I am to try and get back, it must be now. There is nothing I can do to stop things. I've spent the last few days turning money into gold and gems-gems mostly, they're lighter-and what antique coins of the period the dealers have on hand. I made up a story about a costume party and had a couple of outfits made, plain, wool, fourteenth-century style, wimple, veils, shoes. It took me an hour to find this book and Mama's box and my cloak and boots where I'd hidden them when I moved into this apartment. I've sewn the gems into the seams of the cloak. I keep thinking I'm hearing things, someone here with me. Grumpkin is in my pocket with the coins. We're going to try.

24

EARLIER: LATER

I didn't think the first jump moved me at all. I was looking at my watch, thinking the date would have moved significantly. After a moment, I realized the first jump had only taken me back two minutes. I didn't look around. I was standing next to the desk where a previous me was sitting, writing, and I knew the other me was there, at the desk. I didn't dare look. I fixed my eyes on the floor and walked into the next room before I tried again. The second jump moved me four minutes, the third a little over eight. I hadn't been in the kitchen all evening, so I went in there in order not to run into myself. The fourth jump took me back half an hour. The fifth a little over two hours. I lost count of how many it took to get me to the sixteen hundreds where the magic was strong enough to bring me back all the way. The huge mound of Westfaire looms against the stars. The smell of magic is strong. The smell of trees is like wine. I'm going to lie down wrapped in my cloak and sleep. I'm very tired, very sore. I feel very old.

LATER: SHORTLY AFTER DAWN

I look very old, at least my hands and arms do. Luckily, I had a good haircut shortly before I left, and that seems to have stayed with me. So did my manicure, nail sealer, no polish. My new clothes fit. I haven't lost any more weight, at least. I'm just a nicely groomed, quite-old woman, miles from anywhere. I have no idea what year it is. Grumpkin was hungry so he caught a mouse or mole, something small and gray, and ate it. He didn't offer to share it. It's all right. I have protein crackers in my pocket, enough to last several days. Someone is bound to come along, sooner or later.

["She's back, " I said inadequately.

"So I see, " said Israfel. He was as weary as I. "Do you think she'll go back there again?"

"No. She's done everything she can do. You were right. It's grown into her. The two of them have become one thing, and she when she fought for it, she was fighting for her own life. I can't
blame her. I'd have done the same. "

"What do we do now?"

"Let her alone for a while. While we try to see what's going to happen next."

"She looks very frail. I could send a cart, at least."

"Do that. Send a cart."]

ST. CYRIL'S DAY, MAY, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1417

A cart came by midmorning, driven by a tinkerish sort of man, with a blowsy woman and several snot-nosed children along. I begged a ride, offering him a halfpenny, which he respected. I was glad of that, not wanting to use magic unless it was absolutely necessary. It was he, the tinker, who told me the year. Fifty years have passed since I was last here. Seventy since the curse fell on Westfaire. By the count of elapsed years, I am eighty-six. There must be some kind of rule in travel of this sort. It doesn't seem to be the lived time that counts, but some other chronological measure. I don't feel eighty-six. Or as I imagine eighty-six should feel!

Elly's daughter, my granddaughter, will be a middle-aged woman, possibly with children of her own. I will introduce myself as an elderly aunt. A wealthy, elderly aunt. Wealthy relatives are always easier to take. That is, if I can find her. If the little kingdom is still there. The tinker says there has been no plague for a considerable time. Still, there may have been a war. Indeed, there is a war. The war that was going on when I was a girl is still going on. The English against the French. Our King trying to take lands there, or reclaim lands there, or hold onto lands there. Their King trying to drive us out, or keep us out. One would think someone could put an end to it, though as I recall from references I picked up in the twentieth, it is to go on for decades yet.