Beauty, Glory, Thrift

by Alison Tam

  I could feel something behind her eyes begin to sting. Here was another thing I could never do: fold her into my arms, stroke her hair in comfort, wipe away her tears, should she cry. Nor could I pretend not to notice, and allow her the privacy of collecting herself. She shifted in her seat, stalling for time, but though her face was turned away from me, she and I both felt the trembling of her mouth, the heaviness that sat below her collarbone.

  “What do you want?” she asked, and I do think she would have reached out and touched me if she could. I almost called it uncharacteristic, but then I remembered her gentle pity when we reached my home planet, and her beseeching eyes when I turned from the angel just to hear her voice.

  I did not want Beauty’s existence, with only a faint simulation of life, an endless parade of pleasures, none of which really mattered. And Glory? Glory was gone.

  “I want to be alive,” I said, “With you, and alive. I don’t want anything else.”

  She took a deep, ragged breath that ended in a huff of air, smiling despite the moisture beginning to spill over past the edge of her eyelid.

  “Guess what?” she asked, brushing away the tears with the back of her hand, “Me too.”

  We moved around each other for the rest of the evening with awful care. We had been living in a stage of perpetual parting for too long to still feel the sting, and yet when the thief fell asleep that night, our ship still linked to her implants, she did so with her arms wrapped around herself, as if that could prevent me from going.

  I looked at her, that sleeping face I knew better than my own, and promised, as one last mercy, that I would choose before she woke.

  I emerged into consciousness as if from the womb, and felt no sensations I recognized: no sight, no smell, no sound. Instead there was awareness. I knew without thinking exactly how fast we were traveling, the amount of water in each tank, the exact temperature of my core.

  The last thing I remembered was moving from the thief’s mind, passing through the horrible simplicity of our ship’s databanks to what lay beyond. I shivered at first to be inside it, but as I noticed more and more about our ship with each successive moment of upload, the emptiness began to feel more comfortable than threatening. I saw a chance in that emptiness, and, with that chance, I made my choice.

  It took me hours to integrate into the ship’s systems (my systems?), a process that felt like spreading out, like lying down diagonally across a gigantic bed. A day passed before I could access data from my cameras—no external obstructions, no other ships on my tail, the thief hiding her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt even though there was no one there to see.

  On my second day as myself I accidentally turned all my viewscreens off, and in the scramble to restore power began to learn control over my parts. In two weeks I was boiling water so it would be ready just as the thief walked over with her tea. She startled each time I learned something new, and by week three she’d hired a small parade of mechanics, none of whom could find anything wrong. By then I could lead her with flickering light over to a viewscreen playing my favorite scenes from my favorite movies over and over, as if that could make her understand.

  “I’m losing my mind,” she said to the air. “If you—”

  She’d do that, sometimes, start speaking to me and then catch herself and stop. I didn’t want her to, and tried harder, digging through my own memory, and Ship’s memory from before. And as I did, I found a bundle of data points, code that told me which pixel went where, shaped in my own image.

  “It has always been the province of Thrift,” I intoned solemnly, “To turn something less into something more.”

  The thief dropped her mug of tea the moment she saw my face on the viewscreen, though I turned off gravity quickly enough to save it from crashing onto the floor. I thought she’d say, “You’re alive!”, or “You didn’t say goodbye!”, but a different accusation altogether tumbled out instead.

  “Oh, you idiot, did you practice that line?”

  She put her head in her hands to laugh, and I cued up a laugh sequence of my own, the both of us foolish and hysterical with relief.

  “You put yourself in the ship.”

  “I am the ship,” I corrected, “I know what the ship knows, I move as the ship moves, I made myself into something new.”

  “You made something different. You stayed with me,” she said, laying a hand on the digital representation of my cheek, “You’re here.”

  I turned every light I had on at once, a beacon so bright I shone as my own sun, and sent a radio wave of my agreement out across the stars: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

  Inspirations and Influences

  My grandparents always used to lay out food for our ancestors and our gods: heaps of oranges, slices of roast duck, a whole bag of milk candy spilled out onto a plate. We’d place the food on the altar, maybe light some incense, and wish for small things like good grades and good health. Then we’d take the food back downstairs again and eat it all ourselves.

  I always thought that was kind of sad. Sure, there was some metaphysical stuff involved with the gods eating the spirit of the food, but as a kid with only a very hazy knowledge of my family’s religion, all I really understood was that I was the one chowing down on lychee and rice crackers and Guan Yin got squat.

  Beauty, Glory, Thrift is my way of evening the scales a little. By travelling with the thief, Thrift gets to experience all the great things about the physical world that I always imagined gods couldn’t.

  There’s so much that’s awesome about having a body and being alive that we never really think about. Stretching, for example. Cracking your joints, even though you know you’re not supposed to. Planting your entire face onto your cat’s stomach and using him like a pillow.

  I love writing Thrift because she’s delighted by the little things, and, like, a lot of my favorite stories, she reminds me of all the parts of daily life that are kind of awesome. From the casual serendipity of Master of None to the humor and empathy of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, most of my biggest inspirations dwell on the beauty of the ordinary.

  There’s What Did You Eat Yesterday?, Fumi Yoshinaga’s paean to queer banality, Xia Jia’s short story visions of how radical technology may someday transform ordinary life, Rose Lerner’s historical romances centering the ordinary middle class. There’s the immigrant solidarity of Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Djinni, and the political/philosophical deliberations of Fuyumi Ono’s Twelve Kingdoms.

  Even when I write stories about strange and mysterious worlds (or maybe because I write about strange and mysterious worlds), the details are the best part. How does someone with a completely non-human perspective experience humor, discomfort, minor illnesses and small talk with family members you only see once every few years? Who does all the farming? Who takes out the trash? What makes a world or a character come to life for me is the daily routine: the little jokes, the pet peeves, the assumptions and judgments that people make without even knowing they’re making them.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love an epic, universe-destroying cataclysm or clash of civilizations as much as the next girl, but to me, the smallest satisfactions are the ones that matter the most.

  A Chat with Alison Tam

  As a submission to our Gods and Monsters call for short stories, Beauty, Glory, Thrift focuses on the "Gods" portion of the thematic prompt. How does your story fit the Gods and Monsters theme, in your opinion, and why did you choose to submit this particular story?

  When I first started writing Beauty, Glory, Thrift, Thrift actually was a goddess. I’d even planned for her to develop a bunch of divine powers along the way. Then I thought it might be interesting to have the thief be an atheist who didn’t believe in Thrift’s powers, and once I’d written that in, I started to doubt Thrift’s divinity myself.

  Though Thrift isn’t a real goddess, you can tell a lot about a person by what they choose to deify. I started thinking about the kind of per
son who’d decide to be a goddess of something so small. Would she be proud of her aspect or ashamed of it? What kind of experiences would make her decide that thrift was what defined her? Wouldn’t she get lonely, trapped in a temple and never able to reach the world around her? Wouldn’t she want more?

  The goddess thing is a misdirection when it comes to what Thrift truly is, but it shows us who she is, and what she values at her core: the ability to sustain herself with what little she has, and save a couple bucks along the way.

  Two of our favorite aspects of the story include Thrift's unreliability as a narrator, and the unexpected science fiction twist. Tell us a bit about writing Thrift's narration, and the choices you made for the sci-fi world.

  I knew from the start that Thrift had to speak like she didn’t belong in the world around her: stylistically, she’s from an entirely different genre. She’s telling us what she sees as she sees it, but there’s a lot that she doesn’t quite understand, in a very fallible, human, way. Writing her was emotionally very familiar, because I think we’ve all been there: insecure, inexperienced, and a little bit overwhelmed by how much there still is to learn.

  I wanted the world around Thrift to feel a lot larger than her, like we’re only getting to see small slices of an infinite universe. I like trying to come up with all the little details about a society that make it feel ordinary, no matter how alien or strange it is from my own experience. She’s definitely getting more of a beauty-and-wonder kind of experience than, you know, bad weather and getting stuck in traffic, but part of that is the thief showing off and Thrift being very easily impressed.

  One of my favorite parts about writing speculative fiction is making up places where I want to go on vacation, which usually means making up new, hypothetically delicious foods, because that’s what my vacations are all about. That’s why you get those long travel montages, because I’m trying to live vicariously through my characters!

  What are some of the books, films, TV shows, or other influences you drew from when writing Beauty, Glory, Thrift?

  Well… there’s “San Junipero”, undeniably the best Black Mirror episode, which makes you think about death and mortality in an entirely new and beautiful way. I love big, sprawling, weird universes and the idea of having to live up to the legacy of a dead person who is also somehow yourself, so I’m definitely also drawing on C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen. I’m also heavily indebted to Terry Pratchett’s small gods and friendly anthropomorphic personifications, Patricia McKillip’s beautiful prose and the adventurous delight of Ghibli movies. Lastly, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary novels and the John Stewart Green Lantern “Mosaic” run will always be part of my science fictional DNA.

  Tell us a bit about your experience writing short stories: what would you say are the advantages and potential pitfalls of writing short fiction?

  I actually think I’ve written more short fiction than anything else, though I also do a lot of writing for video games, and switching back to prose mode is always an adjustment. There’s something marvellously complete about a short story—you’re only writing the absolute core of the story you want to tell, and that forces you to decide what’s really necessary. FIguring that out is definitely a struggle, especially when you’re only just beginning and you’re not sure where the story’s going to go yet.

  My biggest struggle is probably editing! I had to cut out so many parts of Beauty, Glory, Thrift that were lovely and fun to write but ultimately didn’t belong. Eventually, the only way I could do it was to move all the favorite scenes and sentences I cut to a separate Google Doc, hoping that they’d be useful someday, because I couldn’t bear to delete them all. Someday I’ll learn how to edit without hoarding jettisoned prose, but I’m just not there yet.

  Finally, a question we ask all of our interviewees: We Book Smugglers have faced condemnation because of the sheer volume of books that we carry back home on a daily basis. As such, we have on occasion resorted to “smuggling books” home to escape judgmental, scrutinizing eyes. Have you ever had to smuggle books?

  I have a long and sordid history with the practice of book smuggling, starting from six years old, when I would wake up in the middle of the night to read. When I was a kid, I spent so much time reading that my parents, worried about whether I’d grow up a well-rounded individual, decided that I had to earn reading time with time spent practicing math problems or playing outdoors. Of course, that just meant I had to get really good at hiding books in my pockets or under my jacket so I could go read in the park. As clever as I thought I was, I don’t think I was actually very stealthy—Mom and Dad probably took one look at me and figured that if I was going to spend all my time reading, I might as well do it in the sun.

  I don’t live with my parents anymore, but I do have roommates who have their own, much healthier, sleep schedules. Sometimes when the lights must be off in my room, I’ll turn on the closet light and curl up, half-sitting in a pile of laundry, with a really good book. Wow, that sounds kind of sad, but it’s actually really nice! It’s like being in a tent or a capsule hotel.

  About the Author

  Alison Tam is trying to make the quintile-life crisis into a thing. She likes weird genre mashups, girls kissing and telling things from the alien point of view. Currently a Californian, Alison can only really live somewhere that has at least one boba place. You can find her at storytam.tumblr.com or on Twitter as @TheTamSlam.

  About the Artist

  Melanie Cook is an illustrator, concept artist and writer. She has produced storyboards for the likes of Ridley Scott Associates and concept art for the award-winning short film Payload and the science fiction project Restoration. Her current projects include The Tyger and the forthcoming webcomic The Death of Negative Man. You can find her on Twitter, Tumblr or her personal website.

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  Keeper of the Dawn by Dianna Gunn (4/18/2017)

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  The Case of the Little Bloody Slipper by Carlie St. George (11/3/015)

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  Fighting Demons by S.L. Huang (9/22/2015)

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  The Merger by Sunil Patel (6/23/2015)

  Luminous by A.E. Ash (7/21/2015)

  The Vishakanya's Choice by Roshani Chokshi (8/25/2015)

  Application for the Delegation of First Contact: Questionnaire, Part B by Kathrin Köhler (5/26/2015)

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  Hunting Monsters by S.L. Huang (10/7/2014)

  In Her Head, In Her Eyes by Yukimi Ogawa (10/21/2014)

  Mrs. Yaga by Michal Wojcik (11/4/2014)

  The Mussel Eater by Octav
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  The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind by Kate Hall (12/2/2014)

  The Ninety-Ninth Bride by Catherine F. King (12/16/2014)

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