Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (18 page)

“But there’s always a chance, isn’t there?” Georgiana asked.

“A chance for what?”

“That someday you
will
find
the one to spend eternity with.”

Courteous thought about that for a long moment.

“Oh, what do you know?” she said finally. “You’re mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love.”

Even as those harsh words came out, there was a part of her that rebelled at the thought. Endless life increased the probability of everything, including the most improbable
thing of all: a love that lasts longer than the stars. Perhaps Beneficent
was
the one of whom she would never tire, whose life she would share until the sun had burned all its fuel and died. How long would
their love endure? A billion years? Ten billion? Until the universe was black and cold, until the final flaring out of the last star?

Georgiana sat down beside her, stroked her silky auburn
hair, and said simply, “I believe in love.”

Blinking back tears, Courteous whispered, “In spite of life eternal?”

“In spite of life eternal,” her persist answered. “And because of it.”

Two days later, Courteous married Beneficent Page.

Looking back three billion years later, Beneficent could not say how he happened to fall in love for the first and only time, the
why
of it always eluded him,
but he could remember to the hour when it happened.

It was a little after seven o’clock on an early morning in May, four years into his marriage. He had risen at dawn, as was his habit, leaving Courteous to sleep in while he enjoyed a few moments of solitude on the balcony, where he could drink his coffee and stream the morning news into his cogbox with no distractions except the spectacular
sunrise over the river. The golden light sparkled on the dark water and shimmered in the smoke rising lazily from the cooking fires of the tenements that spread out for miles below him.

It was his favorite part of the day. Just his coffee, the pleasant banter of the announcers echoing inside his head, the glorious sunrise, and himself: Beneficent enjoyed being alone. His own company he found
perfectly agreeable. If the world had been a slightly different place and he slightly less ambitious, he might have never married, not Courteous and not the fifteen who came
before her. He didn’t love Courteous, any more than he had loved his former wives. He found her to be, like nearly every one of the 3Fs, shallow, vain, petty, and almost unbearably boring. But the world was what it was and
his ambition was what it was, and now he had arrived, if not at the pinnacle, then at least within striking distance of it: He was the husband of the favorite daughter of the most powerful man on the planet. All that remained was a child. A child would seal his place in Omniscient’s unofficial court, no matter what came of the marriage.

Sitting with his back to the door, he did not see her approach.
Her fragrance announced her presence, a delicate floral scent popular among the
finitissium
, one that would, over the coming millennia, remind him of that moment when he realized he was in love.

“I thought you might like some muffins. Fresh from the oven,” Georgiana said. She placed the platter beside his coffee.

The air smelled of smoke and perfume. The golden morning light caressed her lovely
young face, unmarred, as one day it surely would be, by the ravages of time.

“Hmmm, blueberry, my favorite. Thank you, Georgiana,” he murmured. He reached for a hot muffin, and the little finger of her right hand brushed against his left. With that accidental contact, that meaningless touch, something long dormant stirred inside him. Something larger than he, something even older than he, something
that had been since the foundations of the earth. Something that he had never experienced before and never would again, not in three billion years. He tried to push it down, brush it aside, but it was far more powerful than he. He tried to ignore it as he bit into the warm muffin, a strange and thrilling sense of vertigo, which he blamed on the strong coffee,
but it had already gripped him and
not even the passage of three billion years could loosen its hold.

“Would you like to join me?” he asked, casually waving toward the empty chair beside him. He shut down his cogbox to silence the morning program in his head. Suddenly, he found the announcers’ voices extremely irritating.

“Thank you, Mr. Page, but Mrs. Page will be rising soon and … ”

“She won’t be up for hours, we both know
that. I can’t remember a day when Courteous rose before noon. Please, Georgiana. I have no one to enjoy the sunrise with.”

The persist had little choice but to join him. She sat with her knees pressed together, not looking at him, but across the water at the smoky glow of the tenement fires. She had extended family down there, though she had not seen them in several years. She was afraid to visit.
She was young and pretty and well fed. She might be targeted by a gang for her nice clothes, robbed, beaten, perhaps raped.

“Have a muffin,” Beneficent said.

“I had one already,” she confessed.

“I know. I see a bit of crumb on your lip. May I?”

He reached toward her—she was very careful not to pull back or flinch—and gently brushed the crumb away with his thumb. The first touch was accidental;
this second touch was not.

“Tell me something, Georgiana. How long has your family been with Courteous?”

“Almost two hundred years,” Georgiana answered.

“And what do you think of her?”

“I care for Mrs. Page very much.”

“No doubt, but I wonder if there might be some, for lack of a better word,
resentment
, too?”

“Oh no. Why would I resent her?”

“I would think resentment would be quite common
for your people.”

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Page, sometimes I … ” She took a deep breath. It was a very dangerous thing to say. “Sometimes I actually feel sorry for her.”

“Really? And why should someone like you feel pity for someone like her?”

She did not answer right away. Watching the smoke and the light that lit up the smoke, knees pressed together, refusing to look at him, she finally
said, “When I was very small my mother told me a very old story, about a covetous man who wanted everything he saw, so when he died he was cursed with eternal hunger and thirst and imprisoned in a pool of water with a handful of delicious fruit hanging above him. Every time he bent to drink, the water receded, and every time he reached for the fruit, the fruit was pulled away.”

“And that story
reminds you of Courteous?”

“It reminds me of … many people.”

“But we all drink to our fill,” he argued. “We all eat till we can eat no more. Well, actually, ours is the feast that never ends.” He popped the remainder of the warm muffin into his mouth, delighting in its rich, moist texture. “For example, tomorrow I am off to hunt great whites off the coast of Australia, armed with nothing but
a bowie knife. The odds are extremely likely that I will be eaten alive. Yet I will wake the next day as whole and healthy as I am right now.”

“In a different body,” she pointed out. “And with no memory of what happened.”

“Well,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t think being eaten alive is something I’d
want
to remember.”

“I don’t see the thrill in doing something dangerous if there is nothing
to lose.”

“Funny you should say that. I’ve often thought the same about love.”

There was an awkward silence. Now why did I bring up love? he wondered. It was an odd transition, from being eaten alive by sharks to love. As the millennia passed, however, it seemed less odd and more prescient.

“Love or sharks, does it matter?” she asked. “Isn’t all of it pointless if … ”

“Yes, Georgiana? If …
what?”

She lowered her eyes. “If you cannot fail.”

He might have told her that he
had
failed. That he was a dismal failure when it came to love, if never having loved meant failure. For a shocking instant, he felt as if he might cry. He had not cried in … what? Five hundred years or more? When was the last time he had cried? He had no memory of it, but that did not mean much. The memory could
belong to a lost day, like the one that would be sacrificed if he lost his duel with the sharks, for example. Your memory was only as complete as the latest download to your psyche-card.

“Have you ever been in love, Georgiana?” he asked.

She shook her head. Refusing to look at him. It was that refusal, he realized after many centuries of introspection, that had done him in. If she had looked
at him in that pivotal moment, the spell her touch had cast might have been broken. It might have satisfied his curiosity, convinced him that she was nothing more than an ordinary girl, a
finitissium
unworthy of his notice.

But she
did
refuse to look at him, and, even more than that first touch, it was the look withheld that doomed him.

“What a pity,” he sighed. “I was hoping you could tell
me what it feels like.”

“But you love Mrs. Page,” the girl protested, looking at him finally, but he did not see it; he had turned away.

He left for Australia the following morning, without Courteous—she was absurdly, when you think about it, afraid of the ocean—and bagged four sharks on the first day, but on the next his luck ran out. A twenty-foot monster rocketed up from the deep, taking
him by surprise, ripping his body to shreds before dragging the mangled corpse into the lightless depths. His persist returned home with his psyche-card, backed up the night before his last ill-fated dive, and within an hour of touching down, Beneficent had been downloaded into the new body he had reserved on the morning of his departure. He remembered nothing of his demise, of course. That distasteful
memory had perished with the body that was slowly digesting in the guts of a dozen sea creatures, from the shark that had shredded him to the tiny bottom-feeders that scuttle across the floors of silent seas.

On the morning following his return, he was sitting on the balcony with his coffee, his cogbox on silent because just the thought of the announcers’ voices was enough to set his teeth on
edge, when he heard the door slide open behind him. He turned, smiling expectantly, certain that it was Georgiana with another plateful of muffins. It seemed more than just a few days since he had seen her.

“What?” Courteous asked. “Why do you look so surprised to see me?”

“I thought you were asleep,” he answered easily.

His wife slid into the seat beside him. She was naked. The newborn light
of day caressed her luminous flesh, her flawless skin. Beneficent sipped his coffee and looked away.

“You were smiling and now you’re not,” Courteous pointed out. “Do you find me hideous?”

“What an absurd thing to say.”

“Tell me what kind of body you’d like and I’ll switch.”

“No, no. There is no need to switch, dear. I would love you no matter what look you wore.”

“I don’t like your teeth,”
she said.

“My teeth?”

“They’re too long. Big as a horse’s. Why did you choose something with such big teeth?”

He forced himself to laugh. “The better to eat you with, my dear!”

She wrinkled her nose. “It smells out here.”

“It’s the fires. I rather like it.”

“I don’t know how those people stand it.”

“I suppose they have no choice.”

“No, but
we
do.” She stretched her bare arms over her head.
“Let’s go inside, and you can make love to me with those big teeth.”

“Of course. Do you mind if I finish my coffee first?”

“We haven’t made love since you came back from Australia. Is there something wrong?”

His coffee had gone ice cold. He sipped it anyway. A tiny sip.

“No.”

“I’m curious to see if your teeth are the only things overly large.”

She rose from the chair. She was glorious, perfect,
and he did not look at her. The door slid shut behind her. Beneficent turned up the volume of his cogbox to drown out his own thoughts. Several minutes later, the door opened again, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was Georgiana, dressed in
the drab gray uniform of a persist. He broke into a smile, though a small one. He was self-conscious now about the size of his new teeth.

“Georgiana! But where are my muffins?”

“Mrs. Page sent me to find you, sir.”

“Why would she do that?” he wondered. “She knows where I am.”

“She said you’ve either fallen off the balcony or got lost on your way to the bedroom.”

Looking at her, he was struck by the contrast between her face and his wife’s. Courteous was stunningly beautiful, possessing features only the daughter of a Spool could
afford, a face that put Helen’s to shame, and Georgiana’s, though pretty, was so ordinary as to be homely next to hers. Why, then, did something bright and wonderful bloom inside him at the sight of that ordinary face?

“What shall I tell her, Mr. Page?”

“Georgiana, we’ve known one another nearly five years now. Please, call me Beneficent.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied with a slight stammer, lowering
her eyes. He could see the fires down below reflecting in them. “Beneficent.”

“Only when we’re alone,” he cautioned. “Never in Courteous’s presence.”

He handed her his empty cup. Trailed the tip of his finger along the back of her hand. She kept herself very still, eyes downcast, holding his empty cup.

“I’ve been thinking of you,” he said softly.

“Of me?” She seemed shocked.

“Since the morning
you brought me those delicious muffins.
In all my lifetimes, Georgiana, I swear to you I have never tasted anything more sumptuous, more … decadent than your muffins. Will you make them again for me? Tomorrow?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. … ”

“Ah, ah.”

“Beneficent.”

“That’s a good girl.” He sighed. “Well, I suppose I must go see my wife now. Tell me something, Georgiana: What do you think of my new teeth?”

“Your teeth?”

“Do you think they’re too large?”