Duckling Ugly

by Нил Шустерман

  It was already dusk when we emerged from the caverns, and by the time we made it back down into the valley, the sun was long gone from the sky.

  There was a celebration at Abuelo's mansion when we got back. The entire population of De León was there. This time they weren't scattered around the mansion as I'd seen them before. Tonight, everyone was in that great room at the top of the stairs.

  Musicians played, and people danced. Harmony was the first to hurry to me, and she gave me a bone-crunching hug.

  "It's so good to finally see you," she said.

  "What do you mean?" I asked her. "I just saw you yesterday."

  "Let me take you to Abuelo," she said. "I know he'll want to see you right away."

  We weaved through the dancing couples. The band played a melody that was a strange cross between classical and swing. I had never heard that piece of music before, and wondered if it had been written by one of the citizens in the town.

  I looked around for Aaron, but he had already dissolved into the crowd behind me, and then, as we moved through the couples spinning one another to the music, there was Abuelo, on his settee.

  Next to him was an intravenous stand, and a plastic bag of clear fluid dripped down a narrow tube that went into the vein on his left arm.

  I had seen this before, on my own grandfather, when he was dying in the hospital. However, this old man seemed in the best of health. Truth be told, he seemed more radiant than any other time I'd seen him.

  "What's the matter, Abuelo?" I asked. "Are you sick?"

  He found this amusing, and turned to a woman beside him who was not quite as old as he. They shared a look and a chuckle. It irritated me that I couldn't be in on their little joke.

  "I am, as you say, fit as a fiddle. Even fitter, for a fiddle will break its strings, whereas I will not."

  He saw me looking at the intravenous bag.

  "Oh, this thing. It's just a little pick-me-up. My annual beauty treatment." He and everyone within listening distance laughed.

  He called to the musicians to stop playing, and they did al­most instantly. The dancing couples turned around to see what was happening, and as Abuelo stood, they cleared the floor.

  He went out to the center of the room, rolling his intravenous stand with him. "My dance partner is slender and graceful, no?" Then he turned to me and gestured with one hand. "Come."

  I didn't like being ordered around like a dog, and I didn't like being the center of attention. I felt the way I had beneath the lights at the spelling bee, but with the eyes of everyone in the room on me, I had no choice. I thought about the ritual of flow­ers when I first arrived, and wondered if some other ritual was in store for me today. Was today the day I would be cast out? Had they grown tired of looking at me?

  The old man put his hands onto my shoulders, like a real grandfather might, and looked into my eyes.

  "Ah, my ugly one, my ugly one. Do you have any idea at all who I am?"

  Although I had no idea, I was beginning to sense that the an­swer was not something I was prepared to hear. Not just because of the cunning twinkle in his eye, but because I chanced to look at the intravenous bag hanging beside him and noticed something I hadn't noticed before. The clear water inside wasn't entirely clear. It was swimming with faint colors like the northern lights.

  "My given name is Juan," Abuelo said. "My family name is Ponce de León."

  I rolled it over in my mind. Juan Ponce de León―one of the great Spanish explorers. "You're one of his descendants?"

  Abuelo slowly shook his head. "Think again."

  As I recalled, Juan Ponce de León had laid claim to Florida― but he was best known for his folly, which was searching all his life for something he never found.

  Or had he?

  I thought back to the mineral pool deep in the "Cauldron of Life."

  "The Fountain of Youth!" I said out loud.

  It made the old man smile.

  "You see," he said, to all those assembled, "every schoolchild knows of me."

  "But that's impossible! That would make you hundreds of years old ..."

  "Five hundred and forty-six―but who's counting?" He laughed heartily. "Alas, I found the fountain too late in life to be eternally young. Instead I am eternally old. It could not restore me, only sustain me, keeping me at the same age I was when I first partook of its waters. But I am not bitter―for I have learned that youth is overrated. It is the fountain's other gift― its true gift that I have come to value far more than youth."

  Now I was beginning to feel like the butt of an elaborate joke. "You expect me to believe this?"

  "Believe what you like," Abuelo said. "Believe that the moon is cheese, the world is flat, and that I am just a crazy old man." Then he smiled, cupping my face in his hands. I wanted to back away, but I was transfixed by his eyes. "And now, my little mud hen, time for the unveiling."

  He turned and shouted, "Uncover them!"

  Then people all around the room, standing close to the walls, turned and tore off the white satiny cloths that covered the mir­rors. Suddenly light zigzagged in paths across the room from one mirror to another. Those mirrors were everywhere. There was nowhere I could look without seeing one. I closed my eyes and knelt on the floor, covering my face.

  "Please don't do this," I said, my voice not much more than a whimper. "Don't you know what will happen?"

  But the old man gently helped me up and moved me toward the mirrors. I still couldn't look at them.

  "Come now, Cara," he said. "These mirrors will not hate you. They want to love you. Every one of them. Look at yourself."

  I lifted my eyes to see my reflection, still believing that the mirror would shatter.

  And the person I saw looking back was not me at all.

  This face in the mirror―it could have been a relative: a sister I never had. The opposite of me. This reflection had my mother's graceful cheekbones, my father's soft eyes. A face with all the good genes that had been denied me was now peering at me through eyes that were perfectly shaped.

  I reached up to touch my face. My skin was clear. No rashes, no pimples, no boils. Smooth and soft as the skin of a peach.

  "You see?" said Abuelo. "The fire of beauty now burns within you."

  I looked around for an explanation, but all I could see was everyone smiling at me. Happy for me. And most of all, Aaron.

  Abuelo, still holding my shoulders, stood behind me as we gazed into the mirror together.

  "The fountain's greatest gift is the gift of eternal beauty. There is a legend that the Angel of Death is beautiful, and she will never take the life of anyone more beautifid than she. This, I believe, is why we here in De León live forever. Not because the fountain makes us eternal, but because true beauty never dies."

  I couldn't take my eyes off of myself. It was the first time I could truly look at my reflection. How could I be this beautiful creature?

  Then I heard a gentle voice behind me. "I have something for you." It was Harmony. I turned to see her unfolding a dress. Sim­ple, clean, and, like all of their clothes, made from swan gossamer.

  The old man stepped back, the women surrounded me, and there, within the cocoon of the women of De León, they took off my cotton dress and clothed me in the velvety white garments of the eternally beautiful. I felt like a bride.

  Soon the band started up again, the room so much brighter now with all the mirrors. It seemed to be filled with a thousand people instead of just a hundred. Everyone danced in circles, catching their own gazes in the mirrors that had been covered since the day I arrived.

  I danced with everyone who came for my hand, but mostly I danced with Aaron.

  When the celebration was over, I walked back with him, arm in arm, down the winding path to my little cottage on the oppo­site end of the valley. Perhaps it was still the effect of the water, but I felt like I was hovering over the ground in a daze. I was my­self, yet I was not myself, and it felt wonderful.

  He left me at my do
or with a kiss. This was nothing like that awful kiss I had stolen from Marshall Astor on homecoming night. Aaron's kiss was as perfect as he was. As we both were.

  "You're truly one of us now," he said. "You always have been, you just didn't know it."

  After he left, I closed the door, took off my beautiful dress, and slipped beneath the covers, for the first time feeling sheets against skin that wasn't pocked like the surface of the moon―a moon that, for all I knew, really was made of cheese, because all the rules that had made up the world I knew were now in serious question. Life was suddenly magical and full of wonder.

  Right here, right now is my "happily ever after" moment, I thought. I would have been perfectly happy for time to stop and the uni­verse to come to a satisfied end.

  But, of course, it didn't.

  17

  Postmortality

  I won't try to explain what it's like to go from hideous to gor­geous. There are no words to describe the feeling―at least not in any language I knew... or at least any language I knew yet. Let's just say Miss Leticia had been right all along. I did have a destiny.

  In those first days after the unveiling, I soaked in my new self, just as my skin had soaked in the water of the fountain. It was amazing how many mirrors there really were in De León, once they had all been uncovered―and I must have caught my reflec­tion in every one, preening like a model for the camera. I know it sounds awful, but I just couldn't help it. It's like I needed to see that beautiful reflection over and over again to make myself believe it was real. Hair like mocha silk; soulful caramel eyes; skin as smooth as my swan-gossamer gown; and a figure with all the right curves from whatever angle you looked.

  I posed for Giancarlo, the portrait painter. "Venus herself would be jealous," he said, and Abuelo promised to hang the portrait in his mansion once it dried.

  I visited everyone, spoke with everyone in De León those first few days, and if I had questions before, I had even more now. This time, though, everyone was much freer with their answers . . . although they all acted as if the answers should be obvious.

  "If it's the Fountain of Youth and Beauty, why isn't everyone young?" I asked Aaron as I helped him prepare for a treasure hunt that would take the citizens of De León most of Sunday to complete.

  "Nearest I can figure is that the water doesn't move time backward, it just stops it where it is. Whatever state you were when you drank, that's where you stay."

  "So I'll always be sixteen?" I asked.

  He laughed. "It doesn't stop you from growing, silly―just from growing old."

  I didn't quite get it, until I remembered something I had learned in science―that there's a point for everyone where they stop growing up, and start growing old. "I think girls are sup­posed to keep growing until they're about eighteen," I said. "But boys grow until they're about twenty."

  "So there you go," said Aaron. "We'll be eighteen and twenty forever. Once we get there, of course."

  I laughed. Even the sound of my laugh had changed, filtered through a much more shapely mouth. Aaron looked at me and shook his head. "What is it?" I asked.

  "Nothing. It's just that for all those weeks, I tried to imagine what you'd look like after visiting the fountain. I never even came close to imagining you the way you look now."

  "What if it hadn't worked?" I asked him. "What if I had stayed ugly?"

  "Why would you want to think about something like that?"

  He grabbed me and tickled me in the ribs until I laughed, and forgot the question.

  During one of my weaving sessions with Harmony and her friends, I asked about children again. I wanted to find out for myself whether the women of De León truly didn't mind being barren.

  "Nature gives life in many ways," she said. "There can't be birth without death."

  Gertrude nodded. "It would be unnatural."

  It seemed strange to me that she would say something like that―after all, there was nothing natural about eternal life, was there? But then, if the fountain was a natural place, perhaps it was. Perhaps it was just a hidden side of nature.

  "There are times I wish I could trade postmortality for the chance to have children," said one of the younger women. "But that's not a choice we have anymore. Postmortality is forever."

  "Don't you mean immortality?" I said.

  Harmony strung a fresh thread of gossamer into her loom be­fore answering. "Abuelo might talk of immortality, but none of us is truly immortal, Cara. We can live forever, but that doesn't nec­essarily mean that we will."

  "I... don't understand."

  "Flesh is still flesh," she explained. "We do not wither, but we do wear. We bruise, we bleed, we break, and if it's bad enough, we die."

  "That's why we have to be careful," Gertrude said, and then went into the long tale of poor Virgil Meeks, who was gored by a mountain goat and died at the untimely age of 137.

  I thought about this. "It's actually a blessing that the fountain doesn't make us truly immortal," I pointed out. "I mean, what's the value of life if you can't die? How could you ever appreciate anything? This way life is still precious."

  "Postmortality", like everything else in De León, was per­fect―but there was still something about it that bothered me. "Postmortality is such an ugly word for such a wonderful thing," I told them. "Shouldn't it be called something better . . . like . . . oh, I don't know . . . Eternessence."

  They all chuckled and repeated the word, trying it on for size. They liked it. They liked me. Now I had not only their accep­tance, but their approval as well.

  I had finally stepped into that great destiny Miss Leticia had spoken of―and my destiny was perfection. But what happens once you've arrived at that final destination? What then?

  I should have stayed content to be one of the beautiful people of De León, but each night, it wasn't the sense of belonging that filled me as I drifted off to sleep. More and more, my mind was filled with the faces of the people back home in Flock's Rest.

  "It's natural to think about them at first," Aaron said. "Don't worry, it'll pass."

  I believed him, but I had my doubts.

  Abuelo called for me two weeks after my "unveiling." We met in his great ballroom. His throne room, now filled with a hundred mirrors: a grand reflectorium. Those mirrors would stay uncovered until the next poor unnaturally ugly soul found his or her way un­der Abuelo's wings―and I would probably be the one to lead the new arrival down the gauntlet of flowers, as Aaron had led me.

  Abuelo rose from his golden sofa and gave me a powerful hug. Then he walked around me, looking me over like I was a sculp­ture and he was Michelangelo.

  "Harmony does good work, no? That gossamer gown is the finest she's made yet."

  "It's beautiful," I said.

  "Much love went into it. She has a special place in her heart for you, I think. Like a mother."

  That made me think of Momma. Was Harmony taking her place? Was it okay to let that happen? One thought led to an­other, and in an instant my head was flooded with Flock's Rest.

  "You are restless," Abuelo said. "I see this. And I also know why."

  "You do?"

  "It is because you have not found your place here. You have not yet found a task that fits you. Am I right in thinking this?"

  I nodded, because he was half-right. I still hadn't found a pur­pose among the people here. It seemed to me all the good jobs were taken.

  "I think I know something you can do for us. Something that will fill the coming years of your splendid eternessence."

  I looked at him at the sound of my made-up word, a little em­barrassed. He laughed when he saw my reaction, then he opened his arms as if to hug me, but instead spun around, and in the mir­rors, his many reflections spun with him. "All this," he said. "All you see in the valley, it is a world unto itself. Do you not think so?"

  I nodded.

  "Well," he said, "a world needs a language, don't you agree? The people here come from all over the world. We speak English
now because we are here in America, but we may not always be here. What we need is a language of our own. The most beautiful language in the world, like diamonds rolling off the tips of our tongues. I would like you to create this language for us."

  My breath was taken away by the request. Create an entire language? Spelling was one thing, but this? "I can't do something like that!"

  "You can," Abuelo said, with absolute certainty. "Because everything about you is beauty now. Your face, your voice, and the works of your hands. You will build us this language, and then you will teach us all to speak it... and to write it." Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a fresh bottle of ink, which he put into my hand. He had asked me to leave one wall of my cottage blank―now I understood why. But even so, creating a language was more than just inventing symbols and painting them on a wall. There was grammar and structure―languages grew over eons. No one person ever created an entire language.

  "But... it'll take years."

  "Indeed," he said. "Hundreds, perhaps. And now that you have been cleansed by the waters of the fountain, you have all the time you need."

  And I realized he was right. Any task could be completed if there was enough time! "Thank you, Abuelo," I said, genuinely grateful, and excited about the task.

  Then he kissed me on the forehead and turned me loose to begin.

  I could have left Abuelo's right then. I should have―I was inspired―I was ennobled by this monumental task... but I hesitated. Abuelo had always treated me with kindness and wis­dom. If there was anyone I could ask about things, it was him.

  I turned back to him. "Abuelo, I've been thinking more and more about the people back home."

  His face lost a bit of its eternescent glow. Immediately I was sorry I had said anything. "You have only one home," he said. "Your true home. The place you came from―that is nothing more than the broken shell out of which you were born. A worthless thing to be ground into the earth and forgotten. Do you understand?"

  "Yes, Abuelo." I left, vowing never to bring it up to him again.

  I spent the rest of the day in my cottage, beginning to lay ink on the white wall. I wasn't bound by the seven strokes of Chinese writing, or even the twenty-six letters of English―I could do anything. I tapped into my inner self and began to experiment with shapes and swirls of a brand-new alphabet―and it was beautiful! It was true when Abuelo had said everything about me was beauty now, right down to my brushstrokes. I created sweeping patterns of motion, carving up the white wall.