Beauty, Glory, Thrift

by Alison Tam

  I was bound to the thief, only seeing what she saw and hearing what she heard, but still I spent every moment we were on-station dazed with overstimulation. So many signs to stare at, and people to bump into! Twice I pointed out a pickpocket inching too close to the thief’s loot, and every time we entered a negotiation my focus would reluctantly narrow to the transaction, blocking out all the interesting sights and smells around us to whisper in the thief’s ear:

  “Get two of the smaller cans instead of one large one: you’ll have more fuel that way.”

  “She’s got a picture behind her desk. Ask her if she’d like to buy the necklace for her wife.”

  “She’s willing to go lower. I can feel it. Pretend like you’re giving up on the deal.”

  When a deal went well, the thief would let me choose our last meal of the day, a show of generosity or of thanks. This is how I discovered tree-worms, which wriggled for escape even halfway down her throat, and the large fibrous leaves served at one particular station that tasted sour and had no name, and sugar-flies, spun from sucrose, delicate enough to melt the minute they touched her tongue.

  “I used to have these, when I was a child,” I said, bidding her to lick the melted imprint of sugar off her palm. “Or something like, at least. The ones I had tasted like fruit.”

  “Are goddesses ever children?” she asked, her gaze sidelong, considering. I paused, stuttering, the phantom imprint of her tongue still moving over her hand.

  “I must have been if I remember it.”

  She made a low noise at the back of her throat, a final hum, and gave her hand one final lick. I tasted sugar, and salt.

  Just like that, we settled into a routine: ambling through crowded stations, conversing idly as she brought her ship into port. We saw space stations, asteroid mining belts, gardens and amusement parks built onto the far sides of moons. The first time she brought me onto a planet, I could have wept. Everything was so large outside, the gravity weighing heavy on her spine. Even the quality of air was different, a new and interesting smell presenting itself with every inhale. Each day, we would go off to the markets—selling this thing, stealing that-and each night, backlit by the faint orange of her computer monitor, she would search for the place I should have called home.

  The thief took… I didn’t quite dare call it joy, but she took a certain satisfaction in telling me the tips of her trade, and could be sent on a storytelling tangent with almost ludicrous ease. She established an uplink to the ship’s computer while she slept so I could access any media files I wished.

  “It creeps me out, thinking that you’re just floating there all night, feeling me sleep.”

  “I do not,” I said (even though I did) and she laughed like she didn’t believe me. I liked her laughter, the way it rumbled up through her throat, the lightness in her chest.

  We went to the androids’ opera, supposedly to steal pocketwatches and cufflinks, but she let us sit through the whole performance, as twenty-seven metal prima donnas sang in alternating harmony. We spent an hour in a planet’s atmosphere, doing barrel rolls. We went to see a waterfall, finally, and I had her place her whole body beneath the falling water just so I could feel it pounding against her frame.

  There was a vendor at the edge selling suits that would let us ride over the edge of the waterfall and yet survive: something to do with large amounts of padding, air bubbles and peculiar design. Each was printed with the logo of a different company, bright-colored nonsense and mascots with bulbous eyes and thin membranous wings.

  “Let’s go do that,” I said, wishing that I was my sister Beauty, who would have taken a hold of her wrist and pulled her along, or placed a guiding hand along the curve of her spine. Even intangible, Beauty would have found a way. Instead I floated, an awkward ghost tethered to the thief’s vision.

  “You’re getting greedy,” she told me, but bought one anyway, and we sailed into the vast mass of churning water as one.

  Slowly, I began to forget about ingratiating myself to her, stopped trying to anticipate what the thief would want me to do or say. We argued sometimes, became sick of seeing each other’s face other times. But always after those first few resentful hours, I would drift back into her line of sight, or she would ask me what I wanted for lunch.

  I only wished I could avoid her when she had to communicate with the ship, a long process that involved plugging a cable into her neural implants. I could feel the information and commands passed between the thief’s mind and the slow, ponderous automation of the ship’s systems. There was something disquieting about those signals. They felt so much like my sisters’ conversations, but without the wit, the pettiness, the play, as if someone had taken Glory or Beauty and drained them of everything that made them themselves. Intelligence without personality, calculation without interest or meaning.

  Was that what the thief thought I was? Was that what I felt like to her? Sometimes, in my most nervous hours, as the thief slept, I wondered about her hypothesis that I was only software. Perhaps I was not much different from our ship’s meticulous, automatic processes of action and reaction, query and response. On those nights, as the thief dreamed with her connection to our ship still live, I drifted in a sympathetic state of half-consciousness, not sure whether any idle thought had come over the wire or was one of my own.

  “You should take me dancing,” I suggested one night as she flicked through the ship’s logs.

  “Take yourself dancing,” she grumbled, and I laughed in protest. My laugh was but a pale imitation, mimicking her motions in mirth without being able to feel her chest convulse with joy, but I found that if we laughed at the same time, and I matched my every movement to hers, it was almost the same.

  But this time my thief wasn’t laughing. Drifting further into her line of sight, I froze at the expression on her face. Perhaps I could’ve borne it better if she kept her expression blank or even menacing, as she had in the early days of our acquaintance, but there was nothing in her gaze but a soft pity I trembled to see.

  “We don’t have the time today,” she said. “I found your home.”

  I didn’t speak to her the whole way there. Not in the way Beauty had of being silent; with one haughty lift of her chin, you knew you had disappointed her terribly and could never again regain her good opinion. Mine was a small, sad, shaken quietness, of subdued posture and reflexive smiles. The thief, to her credit, did not try to make me speak. She pretended to fiddle with the ship’s navigation, head bowed, as I huddled just out of sight, transfixed all of the possible ways I had gone wrong.

  The journey, she let the ship tell me, would only take a little more than a day—nothing compared to the weeks we usually took to traverse the emptiness of space. Hearing that sent me further down the spiral of spite and self-recrimination. Had she been planning this? Had she plotted us out a course that would take us ever-closer to separation, never telling me, never even considering that I should be told? I wondered how long she’d known, if it had been weeks or months, or even longer, of my blithe ignorance, if all this time—

  I made my hands tighten into fists, but even this reminded me of my own insignificance. It was a purely visual gesture, nothing without the strain of the muscles in the thief’s forearms, the half-moons of her nails digging into her hands. Glory would have said that the gesture was unbefitting of a goddess, petty and resentful, as if we were not all those things and less. She would have said something about the dignity of our station, as if siphoning my only sensations off the thief did not make me feel like a lesser shade, as if my being a goddess had ever been of any use. Glory was one thing, and Beauty another, as were Wisdom and Wit and Mercy—but they all thought of me as the smallest one, the lesser to all of their greater gifts, as if I did not even deserve a name.

  Surprised that I could think so bitterly and feeling terribly sorry for myself, I stayed out of the thief’s sight and floated by the window for longer than I would like to admit. My mind filled with impossible scenarios: a sudden
arrest, a change of heart, an engine failure that I alone could fix. Only curiosity when we finally made port could pull me out of my thoughts and back to the thief’s side.

  We had come up to the planet—my planet, I supposed—and the ship’s external cameras rendered it faithfully on screen, overlaid with orbiting stations like shining jewels, circled by a single moon.

  “It’s pretty,” said the thief. I felt her chest flutter, and did not know what it meant. Silent, I was vaguely satisfied that the sight of that small reddish globe had not given me any sudden swell of sentiment for the Motherland to my diaspora, the primordial center from whence I came.

  On the ship, I’d had more than enough time to conjure up fantastical imaginings of my home planet—my sisters waiting to greet me with open arms, a statue of myself tall enough to blot out the sun—but I had never allowed myself to linger on those ideas, shying away before I could summon up the exact details of Beauty’s face, or the color of my planet’s sky. Stepping onto the surface, I could feel the thief’s emotions better than my own, a cold, curious stillness to her body belied by the quickness of her pulse. She watched me, steadily, as I looked around. And though I was no stranger to her eyes on me (she had a habit of glancing over to catch my reaction, of drinking my wonder in), I had never before felt observed with such intent.

  I didn’t know how she wanted me to react. Recognition? Joy? Grief? Whatever it was, I decided to rob her of it, and kept myself impassive as we walked through what she had decided was my home. My fantasies of planetary devotion were disappointingly unfounded, and there were no golden statues in sight. I had not expected my planet to be so ordinary, the same sort of tall buildings and neon-lit shops we had seen in countless other cities since, nor so secular.

  Everything we saw, I divided into familiar and unfamiliar. Familiar was a woman we passed, who looked so much like Glory that I almost called out my sister’s name. Familiar was the cadence in a street vendor’s voice as she called out the prices of the day, and immigrants from planets we had already visited, cooking up food that the thief had eaten on our travels. Some blurred from familiar to unfamiliar to familiar again: a many-headed woman (familiar, like the doctor the thief had brought me to the first day we met) climbing into a cart that moved along a set of silver rails (unfamiliar) who raised a hand, like Beauty would, to wave at a distant admirer.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, finally. We had boarded a gondola-train, almost half as high as the skyscrapers around us, and the thief had given no indication as to how long we would travel.

  “So now you stop sulking,” she said, but, perhaps because my expression threatened another long, furious silence, relented and answered, “We’re headed to a library.”

  She’d undersold our destination. The library she brought us to was one of the largest buildings on the planet yet, built of red metal that shone bright in the afternoon sun, flanked by golden statues of curious beasts. It was cool when we stepped in, lit by high windows, a fountain spanning the length of the entire room.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  I had ignored the thief’s long nights of research when we were both on the ship, preferring to watch period dramas or flip through comics as she slowly pored through whatever text she was reading, and now that I had no choice but to witness the search process, I wished heartily that I was back on the ship with Passion’s Demise on the viewscreen. The library was digital, as fragile paper books were reserved for legitimate academics, so I had not even tactile sensation to mollify me as she browsed.

  Her first search: religion. I couldn’t help but perk up. Most likely I was only a footnote beside my sisters, but perhaps there’d be an unflattering sentence about Beauty’s long-windedness, or some old forgotten scandal that I could read in delight. Yet as the thief scrolled and scrolled, she found only entries about chicken-headed somebodies and ladies with snake-tails for legs. Not Beauty. Not Glory. Not any of us at all.

  “So slow!” I said, at first, thinking that she was looking through the wrong database.

  “I’m beginning to doubt your ability to read,” I said, next, but as the minutes passed without a sign of any of my sisters, I quieted and drew closer, my head beside the thief’s shoulder. When I spoke next, it was without mirth.

  “Look for the station where you found me.”

  “Always so helpful,” she said sarcastically, but she followed my advice. Soon we were reading such things as demographic information and patterns of settlement, which neither of us understood.

  “Computer,” she said, “Bring up clothing trends for the past twenty years on the outer stations of the Tsishe region. We’re going to scroll through these damn pictures until I find someone wearing the same awful clothes as you are.” I looked down at my body. What was wrong with my clothes?

  Slowly we pored through pictures and pictures of women in different fashions, going back further in time. One had a blouse collar, that, like mine, dipped lower at the front, but her pants flared out in a way that seemed to me perfectly silly. Another had a skirt about the same length as mine, though it ended in an incongruous froth of spikes and lace. Finally we came upon a woman draped in a robe almost exactly like Beauty’s, and though none of the other models from her era precisely matched my own gown, the thief decided it was good enough.

  “Computer, bring up search results for information about this decade,” she said, and I raised a hand to stay her.

  “We’re wasting time,” I said, “Ask her this: Computer, how should we find information about this decade?”

  I felt a muscle in her jaw set, but she repeated my question, anyway, and the computer replied:

  “For detailed historical queries, please consult the angels.”

  “There,” I said. “We will go to the angels, and ask for succor, and then—and then let us be done with it, however this story ends.”

  We overpaid for our ticket.

  I could see it in the technicians’ eyes as they charged us: tourists and foreigners, we could be relied upon to pay a little extra. I didn’t argue, though I thought about pointing it out to the thief: see what you’ll be missing when I’m gone. They laid her body down on a reclining chair, lowered a contraption of wire and steel onto her head, and, as low, soothing music filled the room, she closed her eyes.

  She opened them, and we were underwater. Only smooth glass, blown in an arc above our heads, protected us from the elements, distant sunlight, refracted through the water and the glass, dim and dappled at our feet. The thief’s senses were muted, the edges of her eyesight escaping into a blur. Even when she walked, I could register far less the impact of her foot on the floor.

  Against the furthest wall sat a woman in a sumptuous gown of blue, its train so long it almost seemed as much a part of the carpet as part of her garb.

  “Angel,” I said, and she turned to us with a smile.

  “Hi, I’m Shenny, your guide to the Upper City today. How can I help you?”

  She glanced at the thief, quick and professional, sizing her up like the thief would when calculating the price of someone’s wrist-watch.

  “Are you here for a historical re-enactment? Tour? Or, let me guess—” and she looked right towards me, leaned forward, held my eye—“visiting an ancestor?”

  I felt a sudden dizziness, a lightness everywhere from forehead to ribs. It was only when I stumbled forward, catching myself with a hand on the thief’s shoulder, that I realized I was not feeling the thief’s emotion, but my own.

  The angel saw me. She knew me.

  I registered touch, muted but direct, the indent of flesh beneath my fingers when my hand on the thief’s shoulder tightened in its grasp. She turned toward me, and I felt at once both her shock and my own. It was my hand on her shoulder, my breath escaping in heavy bursts from my lungs.

  She raised her hand up towards me. I grasped it in my own, let her steady me, leaned heavily against her side.

  “Wait
a second,” said the angel. Suddenly she was next to us, her dress pooling around our feet. She took my face between both hands. And I, still reeling, could only cling desperately on to the thief’s hand.

  “You’re one of us, aren’t you?” she said, tilting my head upward. “You poor dear. Nobody ever uploaded you.”

  “We were going to ask a religious question,” the thief said. I barely heard. In that moment, I, like my planet, had been divided into familiar and unfamiliar. Familiar was: You are a goddess. You have power beyond mortal knowledge, beyond even your own. And you are small and silly and ignorant sometimes, but you are a goddess still. Unfamiliar was: You are wrong.

  “I hope you weren’t going to ask about the light and the tunnel,” the angel said, “We get quite enough of that from the Lower City. And—oh, you poor dear, what am I saying? You must be so traumatized, of course it can’t be helped. But you’re here now, and you’ll forget about it all soon enough now that you’re where you belong.”

  As she spoke, the world around us collapsed and reformed, becoming a great metropolis carved into the side of a mountain.

  “A city of the dead,” said the thief, when I did not speak at all.

  “A city of the immortal,” the angel corrected, “A city of eternity. We have over a billion memories stored here, everywhere any of us has ever been.”

  We were in a nightclub now, the music pounding so loudly I could feel sound vibrating through my bones.

  “I found her in a station. Middle of nowhere. Why wasn’t she here?”

  “Don’t know,” yelled the angel in reply, “The city’s new. It took us a hundred years to make sense of the technology. There’s always a beta period.”

  And finally we were in a kitchen, redolent with the smell of chicken cooking on the stove. It was among the sound of laughing women’s voices that I found mine.