Beauty (11 page)

"Ask Alice to run it," I demanded. "You said I'm dangerous to you here. So, I'm dangerous to her, too. Ask her to run it and put me back where I belong."

Some days I thought if I had to eat one more of those wafers or spend another day shut up in this cell called home-sweet-home I'd die. I burned and sweated and tried to keep from screaming. One morning, after I'd been restless and nightmare-ridden half the night, I woke up with an idea. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before. As soon as Bill left, I found the sheepskin thing he had worn around his neck and some scissors he used to cut his scripts and piece them together and I cut the fleece to make a pair of boots.

I knew how to do it. I had watched the shoemaker in the village many times. I knew how to cut the sole and make the upper part and sew the two parts together. It would have been better if I'd had some stiff leather, but on the other hand, stiff leather would have been hard to sew without the right tools. The sheepskin was very soft. I put the wool part inside. I used the thick needle and the heavy brown thread from the box my mama had left. It had come to me in the night what the thread was for. It was shoemaker's thread, so it had to be for seven-league boots. It had to be. Seven-league boots which would take me back to my own time!

When they were done I put them on, and my cloak, with my things in one pocket and Grumpkin in the other, and I opened the door and went out into the hall. "Take me to my mother," I said, closing my eyes and waiting for the boots to work.

When I opened my eyes, there were people standing all around me, staring at me. The boots hadn't worked. The cloak didn't work! They could see me!

I got back inside and fell down on the hard, narrow bed and cried. I was still there, still crying, when Bill got home.

He made me tell him what I'd tried to do.

"You little fool," he sneered at me. "There's no magic left today. The fairies are all gone, and there's no magic left. Put those things away, and don't do anything so foolish again. If someone official had seen you, you'd be down the chutes by now!"

We lay on the bed, head to toe, and I listened to the sound of the world. A clangor, a constant sound of metal, distant and yet all around me. It was like being inside a gong, gently struck by an erratic wind, the reverberations coming and going without rhythm or predictability. Over that the sound of voices, a buzz, a hum, like some great hive. Over that the sound of feet, shuffling, stepping, never together, never marching, but moving endlessly up and down the corridors of the world. One listened and listened, waiting always for something significant in that sound. Some voice one knew. Some sound one recognized. There was never anything but the constant roar of everyone, everything, closing in and closing in. I put the blanket around my ears and wept while Grumpkin licked my eyes.

I cried so hard and so long that Bill said he would bring Alice to talk with me. Next time he went out, I waited for a long time walking back and forth, back and forth, like the lion one of Papa's friends had brought back from the Holy Land with him, to and fro in my cage as he had gone to and fro in his, action that his body demanded even when his mind was hopeless, to and fro until he died at last, his feet stretched out and worn through to the blood beneath, as though he had walked himself to death, trying to get home.

At last voices spoke outside the door. I hid myself in the disposal closet until I was sure it was Bill. The woman Alice was with him. So was Jaybee Veolante. He stared at me. I realized almost at once that my hair was down and my singlet was tighter than the shirt I had worn when he saw me. He grunted, and I thought again of a boar pig.

"So," he said as his eyes devoured me, "what've you been up to with her, Billy-boy?"

I found my shirt and put it on. The way he looked at me was frightening. As though he wanted to swallow me. Which was not unlike the way the woman was looking at me.

"You remember Alice," Bill said to me. "Alice Fremont?"

She was a little older than he, I thought. Her face was pale and thin, like the carved face of a saint sanctified through many stringencies, but alive and hungry withal. She was looking at me hungrily, too, and I shifted uncomfortably.

"I told Alice what you suggested," Bill said to me. "About her taking you back. Us, back."

"Us," sneered Jaybee. "All or none."

"Jaybee, uh, overheard us," Bill explained. "He wants to be included." He shifted nervously, watching Jaybee from the corners of his eyes.

"Included, right." Jaybee's jaw moved as though he were chewing something. His teeth made an audible gnashing.

Alice sat down on the bed. Bill pulled a seat out of the wall and sat confronting her. Jaybee lounged against the door, as though to prevent anyone escaping. I stayed where I was, with Grumpkin behind my legs, his head against my ankle.

"Before we technicians do a trip with a team," Alice explained, "we always do a check-trip, to be sure the machine's working right. The check-trip is always a hundred years, give or take a few. The tech is supposed to be the only one aboard during the check-trip. That's part of the reason we only go a hundred years, so if something's wrong with the machine, only the tech gets abandoned, and the time is recent enough a person could probably get along."

Bill slumped on his chair. "What are you saying, Alice? Tell me what you're saying."

"I'm saying, any tech can get into the complex anytime to make a check-trip. If I could get you in there with me, I could take you back with me."

"A hundred years?" I asked. "That's no good! I want to go home! That's what? Seven hundred at least, isn't it?"

"Seven hundred forty-two," she said. "There's no way to do that. The machine is energized for trips over a hundred only on receipt of a trip-authorization number from the powers that be, but it's always on ready power, that is, energized for a hundred years-roughly. Zero to one day takes a lot of power. That's what they call the Present Horizon. It takes enormous energy to get into that time because nothing is settled yet. People don't know what the hell is happening in the present. Some things that happen are inconsequential and get forgotten almost immediately. Some things that don't happen are thought to have happened; they get recorded or have consequences, and then people think they remember them. The present is fluid. It has to settle before you can travel in it.

"From one day to ninety-eight point something-or-other-years takes almost no power, so they keep the machine hot. That's the Recent Past, and we don't fool with it, either, because we'd be in the lifetimes of living people. Still, it's cheaper keeping the machine powered for the Recent Past than shutting it down between trips and having to power it over the Present Horizon again."

"So you're saying we could go back to the 1900s?" Jaybee asked.

"Talk to Janice about it," Alice suggested. "There are rumors that a lot of people have gone back. We know some have because we've talked to them ourselves when we've been there."

"I met one once," Bill said. "When we did the first shots on the whales. She told me she had come back."

Alice nodded. "I've heard some researchers say it's the last good time. The last years before Fidipur."

Bill stared at me intently. "It would be better than here."

"Yeah," Jaybee muttered. "If we end up there. But we could end up dead. There's guards on the travel-complex. Alice may have a permit, but they won't give me one."

"I said it would work
if
I could get you in," Alice said. "I'm not talking anybody into anything. Bill asked me, I didn't ask him."

"You'd stay?" I asked her. "You'd stay there?"

"Damn right," she said, glaring into my eyes as though determined to find something I didn't know was there.
"If I
can figure out a way to sneak us down there."

"Janice finds things out," I said. "Bill told me so. Ask her to find out who goes where the machine is."

"Janice?" Alice wondered.

Bill looked up alertly. "She might want to go along."

"She'd drag Martin in."

"No," said Bill. "That's why she might go. They broke up not long ago. He said she was getting weird and filed for separate quarters. Haven't you noticed how they've acted? She's become very strange and religious."

"Then she might want to go." Alice shook her head, ran her fingers through her short hair. "She might. Who's going to ask her?"

"I will," said Bill.

The others said a few more words, then left. As he was going out, Jaybee turned around and gave me one more stare, a long, swallowing look, as though he'd like to hit me. Or eat me.

Bill brought Janice to the home-sweet-home later on. I was asleep when they came. They talked in whispers, and I never really woke up. I was dreaming about Westfaire, and I didn't want to wake up because in the dream I knew if I wakened Westfaire would vanish forever. So I let Bill and Janice talk without letting go of the vision, knowing when Janice left they had come to some kind of agreement. When I woke up, I remembered this very clearly, but there was no one to tell it to but Grumpkin. Grumpkin looked sick. His fur was dull. His eyes looked bleary. He needed outdoors. He needed it no more than I. My legs were jumpy. My skin was breaking out in spots. I dreamed of trees. The burning in me was getting so bad I thought I'd turn to coals and die.

A day or two later, Bill came home with two suits of stiff green clothing that went over everything and closed up the front with fuzzy stuff. He had me put one on. Then he told me Grumpkin was too likely to attract attention, so I'd have to put Grumpkin down the chute. I told him I'd kill him if he ever said such a thing again. We ended up putting Grumpkin in the sack, along with my cloak and things. Bill didn't want to leave his woman clothes behind, but I told him he could buy all the woman clothes he wanted where we were going and I'd even buy him a new fur to make up for the sheepskin I'd cut to pieces. I still had the emeralds, so buying a sheepskin shouldn't be that difficult. I cut a hole in the sack for Grumpkin's nose. The cat growled, but he stayed put. I think he knew I was trying to get us home.

When we went out, there weren't as many people as usual. Bill said it was between shifts. Somewhere along the way, Jaybee joined us. We went down stairs and around corners. I didn't recognize anything or anyone from before, but then everyone looked alike. Almost everyone was the same size, their hair was cut alike, they wore the same clothes, they had the same dead, no-expression blanks for faces. We came to a gate with two men outside who were dressed a little differently, in high-buttoned jackets and hats with metal trim on them.

"Cleaning crew," Jaybee said in the bored voice everyone used.

"You're early," one of the metal-hats complained.

"We're late," said Bill. "Should have been here last shift. There's a stalled walkway down toward the nine-hundreds and everybody's jammed up."

The man nodded without paying any attention and let us through. Inside were more corridors and stairs, and then Alice came out of a room and walked along with us. She was carrying a little bag.

"Janice is already down in the control room," she said.

She was there when we arrived, dressed as we were. She nodded at us, then we all moved out into the huge, high room where the machine was. I hadn't really looked at it from the outside before. It looked like it was made out of rock, like a great tub carved from stone. The door of it clanged behind us. Alice pushed some buttons. My insides came out through my nose, and then back in again.

"Quick," said Alice. "We've only got seconds."

Bill opened the door and we all fell out. When we turned to look behind us, the machine was shimmering, then it was gone. In its place was a signpost pointing ten miles to a place I had never heard of.

"Nineteen ninety something or other," Janice murmured. "In what used to be the States of America. And God help us."

[We found her! We feared she had gone forever, except we could feel what was inside her, pulsing a little, like a faraway heart still beating. We knew she was still alive, for I could feel her life, just as I could feel that life dwindling. All we could do was lurk along the borders of that time and hope she would come out. Oh, the pain of living where there is no magic at all. Even humans need a little of it. The Holy One, Blessed be He, knew that. Perhaps it is why he put both our races here to begin with.

Never mind. We've found her. We know where she is. She is in a time of little magic, but there may be enough. We can reach her, slowly, slowly, setting our lures, readying our hooks. We will draw her back to us!]

14

JULY 1991

We joined the homeless, many of whom are from the twenty-first and slightly later times. Janice said it was odd the authorities of the 1980s never caught on to the fact that the homeless sprouted rather suddenly. Time-travel was perfected in 2080, and the hundred-year limit means that the homeless began showing up in the 1980s, many of them with limited communications skills, covering up by pretending to be crazy. There's a secret finger sign we travelers use among ourselves to tell each other that we're what we call "comebacks," and there are enough real 1980s homeless that we comebacks can hide among them without difficulty.

Evidently the people in this time decided to knock down all the poor people's hovels because they weren't nice enough and close all the asylums for crazy people because they weren't perfect either, but the people who had lived in the hovels and the asylums didn't have any other place to go, so now they live under bridges and places like that. I think we did it better back in the fourteenth. At least we didn't knock down hovels just because they were substandard. It seems to me substandard is better than nothing.

Anyhow, Bill and the rest of us took advantage of the situation by seeking shelter in an almshouse run by the Church, which did not surprise me at all, though the first time I attended Mass I was considerably astonished. The priest did the whole thing facing us and speaking English, which is what the language is now called. Evidently no one uses Latin anymore. I thought of all those sessions with Father Raymond and could have cried.