Beauty (51 page)

When we were on the way to Lourdes, each delightful thing that I saw I could not wait to turn to him to see if he saw it, to point it out, to make some jest, to evoke some wonder. Things I read that I wanted to read to him. How we laughed over Christine de Pisan together.

When he grew sick, he did not want me to go back to the twentieth to get the medicine for him. He did not want to go on living if it meant he might outlive me. If one of us died, he wanted to die first. He knew I was mean enough and grumpy enough to get along, someway. He did not think he could live without me. And he knew I would remember him. Perhaps he wanted to be remembered.

I wonder if he knew I would remember him in hell, and for that little time of recollection, hell could not exist for me.

There are men here. Sometimes, between the howls and screams and grunts of pain, I hear marching feet and voices raised in song. Sometimes I hear laughter. Sometimes I hear whispers, too soft to understand the words, but full of sly meaning. Sometimes I hear a shouted name, and know it is a name of someone real, someone I have read about somewhere. Not only one name, but several, in a questioning voice, as though a teacher calls a roll.

Often there is an answer. A voice raised, "I am here!" And sometimes almost a chorus singing, their voices full of a terrible urgency and a dreadful joy, "Down, down, down to happyland."

I have been down to see Captain Karon once again, though he tells me simply Charon would suffice.

"Difficult to be captain of a rowboat," he said, as the newest cargo of ghosts streamed past him into the place.

"Charon," I said, "if there were another side, would you take us there? Or an ocean, maybe, that the river empties into."

"Would I go to an end if I could?" He smiled his death's-head smile at me. "Wouldn't you?"

"Are they dead?" I gestured behind me. "Are they all dead?"

"If not, they will be someday," he said. "Who lives forever?"

The Dark Lord, I started to say. Faery. But then I stayed silent, for he had given me the germ, the merest germ of an idea.

"Yes," said the voices in my ear. "Yes, try that. Those words are good words, as good as any."

"They are not magic words," I say, objecting. "They are mortal words."

"Any words can be magic," whisper the voices. "If they meet the need."

"Did you know that I am a fairy?" I asked Barrymore Gryme.

He laughed, spitting pieces of teeth in all directions. I reached out and healed him. He still laughed.

"How else could I heal you?" I asked him. "Fairies can travel through time. Fairies can be taken captive. Still, they are fairies, with powers of their own. I have magic, Barry."

"Much good it's doing you," he muttered through swollen lips, glaring through bruised eyes.

"It's because I'm alone," I said. "I am outweighed by all you others."

"So, you're stuck," he said. "Like the rest of us."

"My point is, I could get some of you unstuck, if you'd help me. There is some magic in each of you, as well. Man has been stealing it from Faery for thousands of years."

A wily look, perhaps hopeful. "How?" he asked.

"I'll teach you some words," I said. "When you see the others, teach them the words. Have them teach still others. When the gong rings the third time from now, everyone say them together and think of the shore of a river. The words are a magic spell. They'll get us out of here. Think of a river shore and a boat, a big boat come to take us away from here."

He does not believe me. Still, he has learned the words I have given him.

"I've heard this before," he complained as I recited to him.

"Spells do not have to be original to be efficacious," I told him. "This one will work. It will draw upon the magic of Faery. If everyone says it at the same time, it will free us. A great skeptic wrote these words. They will work." Perhaps they will. Though, actually, it is hope that will do the most. Optimism. The undying desire of most men to make things come out right!

Time goes by. Eventually, the gong rings. Over its dying reverberations I hear a whisper, as though a thousand voices have said "One."

There is time here when nothing happens, when there are no voices, no sounds. My mind circles, like a dog, trying to find a place to lie down. It runs off in all directions, thoughts flying in and out like bats while I chase after them. I keep losing them, thinking, "What was the thing I was just thinking of," trying to trace it, trying to remember. I become exhausted, unable to think at all. I start to panic!

"Shhh," say the voices. "Lie down. You are soft, in bed. You are comfortable. Your hands are folded on your chest. You do not hurt. What would you like to hear, or read, or watch?"

One of Bill's documentaries, I think. And suddenly, it is there before me. Bill's documentary on the Last Radish.

Fidipur's farms.

Glass houses as far as I can see. The camera plunges down through the glass, and shows shallow tanks, full of green slime, constantly agitated by mechanical fingers and bubbles from perforated hoses. The camera dwells upon these things, tenderly, sensuously. Between the tanks walk robed acolytes, examining the soup, bending to a thermometer with a motion like a genuflection, adjusting a valve with the tips of sanctified, gloved fingers. There is soft, holy music in the background, a choir singing.

Bill's voice: not his regular voice, but his awed voice. "This is one of Fidipur's farms. Here, isolated from any organism which might conceivably interfere with a maximized harvest, the soup is grown from which our food is made. It is here, in this particular section, that green one and two are manufactured."

The voice guides the camera as it follows the green soup. It spills down transparent pipes to the great cookers and emerges as a flaccid mush onto a conveyor belt. Knives divide and texture it. The belt moves into drying ovens, emerges once more, goes through a machine which injects other substances.

"Here essential vitamins and minerals are added," Bill says. "Before the mixture goes on into the molding section and the ovens." He does not mention flavor.

The camera follows the belt as it dumps its half-dried goo into a hopper, from which plops of green-gray gum are extruded into depressions in a great steel band. Heated plates come down at the end of stems. There is a sizzle of steam, then the tops rise and the band curves over to dump its cargo of baked biscuits onto another conveyor beneath.

"Food for the billions," Bill says in a proud tone. "But in the past there have still been those who believe they are too special to eat what the billions eat. Until now there have been the elite, who ate old-style, natural growth foods, because of the status it conferred." Montage shots of fat people at tables, toasting each other, eating with knives and forks. Close-up shot of a jaw, chewing. "In the past," Bill says, "some people have robbed Fidipur, but the robbery is at an end. The new managers, elected by you, Fidipur's billions, are harvesting the last of the old-style foods. Tomorrow, one of Fidipur's farms will rise where they have grown."

Camera flies over the glass houses, flits across the multiple towers of a hive, darts downward into an open space where narrow rows of greenery show against brown earth. The camera turns to the side of the field where Martin, the director, stands beside a stout, wrinkle-faced man dressed as everyone dresses in the twenty-first.

Martin says, "It did not seem right that the managerial class be allowed to consume this last vegetable, and there are not enough such vegetables for all of Fidipur's billions to share. So a worldwide lottery was held to find one of Fidipur's billions to have this privilege." Martin turns, beams at the man next to him. "This is Mr. Walford Tupp. What words do you have for us on this occasion, Mr. Tupp?"

The man gapes, smiles, giggles. "Well, gee, I don't know. I mean, it's such a privlige to be here on this momous casion, isn't it?"

"Yes, it certainly is a privilege on such a momentous occasion, Mr. Tupp. Are you ready to harvest the last radish?"

"Well, I don't know. I mean, sure. I mean, that's what I come for, isn't it? Right?"

"Remember, Mr. Tupp. Slowly. We want to be able to catch every nuance of this historic event." Martin smiles his professional smile and pats Mr. Tupp on the shoulder.

Camera on the Tupp feet, walking over brown earth. He is pigeon-toed. The soles of his shoes are worn more on one side than the other. The earth gives under each footfall, little cracks run away around the edges of his soles, leaving prints behind. There is an ant on the ground. He steps on it. Behind him, the ant struggles out of the compressed soil. Now the camera runs ahead of him, finds the radish, brings it up until it fills the screen ...

Green leaves, as large as sails. Slightly crinkled, textured, glossy hillocks separated by darker-veined valleys, the veins running like brooks to join larger veins, these wandering toward the center to join the strong central rib of the leaf. It is like a rib in the vault of a cathedral, curving gently, its size diminishing toward the leaf-tip, growing larger as it plunges down toward the stem, the whole rounded on one side, cupped on the other, the proportions perfectly designed. Light fractures off the leaf. Light falls through the leaf. The rib is darker, becoming wine colored at its base.

And this is only one leaf. The camera pulls back to let me see two, then three, then four. Each a triumph of architecture. Each a wonder, a marvel. The camera pulls back, back, and suddenly the fingers come down. Grasp the leaves. Crunch them together. The microphone picks up that crunch as cells explode, as their tender juices run out onto those fingers. The fingers pull.

Soil shatters. Crumbs of moist soil rain down the sides of a growing cone. There is a volcano of disturbed soil. Out of its top emerges a flame-red, spherical shape, slowly rising, like a great balloon, like the sun, a gleaming ruby, a vast carbuncle brighter than blood, up, slowly, the long, white root trailing behind, tiny hairs on it broken from their home within the earth. It quivers. It almost screams.

The camera follows the fingers, up, and up, and up.

The camera sees a mouth. Opening. The radish is inserted, halfway. Yellowed teeth champ down. Saliva perks at the corners of the lips. The mouth opens again.

"Shit," says Mr. Tupp, spitting. "That's awful." The camera follows the radish as it falls, a bite out of one side, the other still glowing like martyr's blood, wet and miraculous.

The camera sees Martin walking away with Mr. Tupp, his arm around Mr. Tupp's shoulders in comradely fashion. For a moment the camera follows them. Then it turns downward, down to the last radish.

Jaybee always knew what made a good picture. As the camera draws away, and turns, and draws away, the radish becomes a sun on the horizon, an arc eaten out of it by a low brown hill; the leaves around it are a forest, and behind that forest the glowing ruby sun is setting. Forever setting.

The gong rings. Stronger this time, I hear a murmur, as maybe many voices whispering, "Two."

I am alone in my place. Barry is being tortured somewhere else. I am thinking of my mama. And of myself.

I was Elly's mother. Unwillingly. Without intention. Mama was my mother. If not unwillingly, at least without intention. She left me, left me to Westfaire and the Curse, a short span in her life, telling me to come to her when it was over. I left Elly, only for a few years, I thought, intending to return when they were over. So, perhaps, mothers leave children every day, intending to return, only to find they are too late, returning. The thing has happened. The hour has struck. The time has passed when it would have mattered.

So, are they to blame? Am I to blame, for Elly? Is Mama to blame for me?

And if the mother hovers, settles like a hen upon the nest, clucks to her chick beneath her wings and does not let it go; if the mother says, "No, the hour may strike, the thing may happen, and I will not leave you alone"; if the mother does that? What?

The chick struggles, and runs, and hides, wanting to feel the sun on its feathers, the air beneath its wings. And if it runs away and the hawk gets it, whose fault is that?

Is Mama to blame I am in hell? Was I to blame that Elly was in hell from the day of her birth?

The third gong. I wasn't expecting it. The sound came in a great wave. It left in slow vibration, and after it the almost hysterical gabble of thousands of voices moving from a whisper to a grunt to a shout: "Three, three, three."

Then the voices, saying the words I had taught them, words my favorite poet had made long ago, in some other place:

"From too much love of living.
From hope and fear set free,"

The words were ragged. I joined them, shouting, hearing Barry's voice rise up next to mine.

"We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be"

The words came more strongly, more surely.

"That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;"

A shriek from the Dark Lord. He had heard us. Was he too late to stop us? Did all the victims believe it enough?

"That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea."

We were on the river shore! I heard the shriek, the cry, the bellow of the whistle of the
Stugos Queen.
We were standing on the riverbank in Chinanga, watching it come around the bend. From the high deck, Captain Karon waved at me. Around me lay the bodies of some dead, including Barry, who would rise up never, and some living, who now knew they would surely die. And before them was their transportation on their journey toward that final sea, the one the captain had long wished to find.

I heard a cooing voice and looked up to see Mrs. Gallimar clinging to Captain Karon's arm. She looked like Bill. She was Bill.