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"Mary?"
It's early in the morning, and Alice thought she heard someone walking around.
She peers into Mary's bedroom, bed made up, neat and empty. She knocks on the
bathroom door, no answer, pads barefoot to the end of the hall and the small
catch-all room. An old electronic sewing machine sits on a table in one corner
and stacks of cardboard boxes slump half-hidden behind a closet door.
The house monitor has been turned off. "Mary?" she calls with more concern as
she enters the living room. The front door is locked from the inside. She
feels a small puff of cold air. The glass door to the porch is open a crack,
but it is dark outside. Biting her lower lip, Alice slides the door open.
Mary stands on the balcony in the freezing cold wind, naked, shivering.
"My god, Mary, what are you doing?"
"I am so ugly," Mary says through chattering teeth. "I just want to be clean."
For a moment, Alice wonders if Mary's monitor recharge has somehow gone wrong,
and Mary is suffering a mental collapse. She doesn't think about this long,
however; she steps out in her nightgown and grabs Mary's shoulders and pulls
her back into the house. Mary is pliant as a doll. They sit in the living
room.
"How could they hate me so much?" Mary asks. "I was an ugly child. I
didn't want to be ugly."
"You weren't ugly," Alice says soothingly. "I've seen the pictures. You showed
them to me. Remember?"
"I wanted to be strong and useful and valuable. I wanted to look strong and be
beautiful."
"Yes, so?" Alice asks, feeling completely out of her depth. She has only just
approached her own threshold of stability in the last couple of days. She's
not sure she's strong enough to help her friend if things are as bad as they
seem.
"You've been beautiful all your life," Mary says, looking at Alice.
Alice shakes her head defensively. "Look what it's got me!"
"What's it like never to have to worry about whether someone will value you,
or want to look at you, or find you desirable?"
Alice looks at Mary squarely: at the face still marred by deep pocks and
blemishes, at the ridged breasts only now assuming their balance, at the
scarred legs. She wants to cry. Mary the uncrackable. Mary the enigma, all
dignity and perseverance, who does not judge me.
"What's it like to be beautiful inside?" Alice asks Mary sharply, as if in
retaliation for a slap. She stands, sees the robe discarded in the kitchen,
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GREG BEAR
"Oh, I am not that," Mary says emphatically. "I have so much anger and
resentment!" She raises her hands in clenched fists, shaking them at the
ceiling.
This seems to break the tension and she reverses the fists, opens them, stares
at the scarred palms and swollen fingers. Then she closes her eyes. "Why did
they want to make me ugly again?"
"I don't know," Alice says, biting off the words. "I don't understand anything
or anyone." She sits beside Mary and cradles the woman's head on her breasts.
"I know there are hateful people. People who hate us, you, me."
"But they never even knew us," Mary says.
Alice keeps stroking Mary's hair. Gradually, the tone comes back into
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Mary's muscles, the supple control that Alice has never seen relaxed and
withdrawn until now. Mary sits up slowly, composes herself.
"Out of nowhere," she says, swallowing back her emotions.
"I don't understand," Alice says.
"You never hear the bullet that's going to get you. It comes out of nowhere.
I never imagined this."
They sit beside each other in the warm shadows of the living room. The wind
makes small pushing noises against the windows and walls, blows past the
doors. Winter is heavy this January morning, and the temperatures are down to
the low teens.
Mary closes her eyes and leans back on Alice's shoulder. "I thought I was
helping you," Mary says.
Alice rests her arm lightly on Mary, pats her forearm. She has never in her
life felt protective or maternal, not even when she was being dutiful to such
perennial victims as Twist. Yet Mary makes her feel maternal.
"Worst Christmas we've ever had," Alice says. "Keeps everybody indoors, is
madness bit."
Mary laughs and lifts her head to look at Alice. She gives another laugh, a
small snort, half-concealed by her hand.
"Shopping down by seventy percent," Alice continues. "Old King Midas gets a
rest."
"Merchants disappointed," Mary says, a little hoarsely.
"Happy New Year," Alice says. Her tone shifts and her voice cracks. "Don't
ever envy beauty. It's like envying the rich. The rich reach out with their
scythes and cut you loose and bundle you up with the other beauties, the other
things they want, then they stack you in a row in their houses, and burn you
in great big bonfires."
It's Mary's turn to be puzzled. "What?" She rubs her eyes and then says, "Ow,"
having opened up a render ridge on her eyelid. Alice dabs at the wound lightly
with the sleeve of her nightgown.
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"Just something popped into my head," Alice says. "A lesson I've never
learned."
"You are beautiful, though," Mary says. "Really beautiful. That xhoa[d bring
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SLANT 343
They regard each other with somber faces again, and suddenly returns the
snorting laughter, the shared release, the collapsing into hugs and laughing
until tears come. They cry a little, and Mary says, "I feel better, I think."
"Good," Alice says.
"You look so strong now," Mary tells her.
Alice listens to her mind, hears only a distant cacophony of disapproval, of
uncertainty, and none of the imp of the perverse. "I'm not great, just okay,"
she says. "I suppose that's an improvement. What about you?"
"I'm finally beginning to grow up," Mary says. "Nobody can make little
machines to help me do that."
"Don't grow up too much," Alice says.
"Why not?"
"Don't become like them."
"Never like them," Mary agrees.
Mary's PD pad chimes. It's a direct, not through the house monitor. Mary
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instinctively reaches to the side of the couch for her pouch and the pad.
"XVait," Alice says, grabbing her shoulder. "You sure you're up to it?"
After due consideration, Mary says, "Yes. Thank you." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]