Rags & Bones Read online

  To this day, so many years later, Cabell’s implacable insistence that no one ever truly understands the will of their god(s) or the worlds that they have created, tempers my every thought as well as gifts me with a knowing, ironic smile, fully displayed at any of my grandiose ideas.

  —Charles Vess.

  When First We Were Gods

  RICK YANCEY

  Many lifetimes later, as he boarded the last ferry to Titan, Beneficent Page recalled the first and only time he fell in love.

  Beneficent was married at the time to a woman named Courteous Spool, of the New New York Spools, a very prominent and powerful family whose patriarch, Omniscient Spool, served as chairman of the Conduct Review Committee, the most powerful position in the Republic of North America, more powerful than the president herself, since this committee was responsible for reviewing lifetime accomplishments, transgressions, and applications for Transfer. To get on Omniscient’s bad side could literally cost you your life.

  So the marriage was, at least from the Page family’s perspective, an excellent match. Courteous was, by virtue of being the youngest, the favorite of Omniscient’s seventy-six daughters.

  Though it was Beneficent’s sixteenth marriage, it was Courteous’s first. She had been in love before, countless times, and had actually planned several weddings, always to call them off days—or sometimes minutes—before the ceremony. It became somewhat of a joke among the First and Foremost Families (the 3Fs): “So who is Courteous going to marry this year?” the 3Fs would snarkily ask each other. If Courteous had been the daughter of anyone else, this latest invitation would have been deleted with a roll of the eye and a cynical snicker. “Courteous actually saying ‘I do’? Riiiiiiiiight.”

  But Courteous Spool wasn’t the daughter of just anybody else. She was the daughter—the favorite daughter—of the chairman of the Conduct Review Committee. So when the invitation dropped into their cogboxes, trips and parties were canceled, schedules rearranged, Transfers postponed—or moved up, if possible—and even some labors induced or pregnancies terminated, because, though the odds were slim it would actually happen, you weren’t going to miss the wedding of three centuries over something as commonplace as giving birth.

  It would be a lavish affair, even by Spool standards. Omniscient’s goal was to make the celebration so over-the-top outrageous that his daughter would be too mortified to call it off: seven hundred guests; more than a hundred performers, including the world-famous Amarillo Gladiators from Waco, who staged fights to the death with a variety of archaic and unusual weapons, including, in one memorable performance, a handbag full of bricks and a bullwhip festooned with sewing needles (the handbag won); exotic dishes prepared by the finest chefs in the world; door prizes that included a free Transfer regardless of your Conduct Review (jokingly called “Omniscient’s Get Out of Jail Free card”); and all to take place at the most exclusive venue of all—the Gingrich Memorial Gardens on Moon Base Alpha. The lunar colony was only a few decades old in those days and most of the 3Fs looked at it as wildly exotic, the ultimate vacation spot, a nice place to visit but not somewhere you’d want to live.

  Three days before the Big Day, Courteous went shopping with her mother and her oldest sister, Genuine. It was her third visit to her favorite Transfer boutique in a week and a bad sign, in her mother’s opinion. Perfectionism in the age of immortality is a recipe for disaster, and Courteous was a perfectionist. Her look for the ceremony had to be just right, as the ceremony itself had to be just right, as every potential mate had had to be just right. Of course, nothing is ever just right, even when death is discarded.

  “What do you think about this one?” she asked her mother and sister, pausing before the display case.

  “Five nine and a half,” Genuine said, consulting the monitor beside the nude body suspended in the tank. “And ten pounds heavier. Your dress won’t fit.”

  “I’ll get a new dress,” Courteous said. “I’m not crazy about it anyway.”

  “Courteous,” her mother said. “You love that dress. It’s a Tiffanplouf original!”

  “It’s too old-fashioned. No one does translucent gowns anymore.”

  “I did last year,” Genuine pointed out.

  “Exactly,” Courteous said.

  “The wedding is in three days,” her mother put in. “It’s too late to design a new dress.”

  “Then we put it off for another week,” Courteous said with a casual shrug.

  Her mother and Genuine exchanged knowing looks. They had witnessed this nearly a dozen times before: the piling up of excuses as the Big Day approached until the Big Day simply never came.

  They continued down the row of display cases. “What about this one?” Genuine said, stopping before a fetching seventeen-year-old inanimate. “Look how delicate her features are! And that little nose is to die for.”

  “She’s the right height, too,” Mother Spool noted. “And weight. The Tiffanplouf would fit perfectly.”

  “Unless it doesn’t,” said Courteous. “And if it doesn’t, then we will have to postpone it.”

  “Well, there’s only one way to make certain it fits,” Genuine snapped. “Don’t Transfer before the wedding! Who does that?” She turned to Courteous’s mother for support. “I mean, who Transfers three days before their wedding?”

  “I never did. Not in twenty-six marriages.”

  “She has a good point, Courteous,” her sister said. “Maybe you’re stuck in perpetual engagements because you’re thinking your first will be the only wedding you’ll ever have.”

  “Maybe it will be,” Courteous shot back defiantly. “Maybe if I get this one just right, I’ll never have to go through it again!”

  “Well, I hope you don’t, because after going through this seventeen times with you, I can’t take any more.”

  After viewing another six rows of options and debating the merits of dozens of different looks (this one’s face was “too long. I want to go with something heart-shaped and pixyish,” that one’s proportions were off, waist too long, legs too short, or vice versa), Courteous returned to her first choice, the tall one with the striking green eyes. Green, she explained, was Beneficent’s favorite color.

  “That’s a good point,” her flustered mother said, thinking what the designer at Tiffanplouf’s was going to say when they informed him the dress would have to be totally redesigned in less than twenty-four hours. “Beneficent is expecting this,” pointing at Courteous’s present body, “not that,” pointing at the tall, green-eyed inanimate floating behind the glass. “What if he doesn’t like it?”

  “It’s my wedding,” Courteous replied testily. “I suppose I can wear whatever look I want. If Beneficent doesn’t like it, I can always change into something more to his fancy afterward, but I will never pick a look simply to please a man!”

  Her mother sighed. Her strategy had completely backfired. Courteous’s mind was made up: she was switching from a five-foot-six-inch body into one four inches taller and ten pounds heavier. Her mother linked up with the designer while Courteous completed her order and the Transfer agent prepped her new look. She was still televersing when Courteous was taken into the private room for the final upload to her master file. The designer’s curses and threats of quitting thundered inside Mrs. Spool’s head—thank goodness only she could hear them!—as Courteous handed the agent her psyche-card. Mrs. Spool would have missed the switchover entirely if Genuine hadn’t found her at the last second, huddled in a corner of the boutique, pressing her hands over her ears in a futile attempt to muffle the outraged roars of the couturier.

  “I have to go,” she whispered. “She’s about to switch.”

  She will not switch! the designer screeched inside her head. And then, remembering whose wife he was televersing with: All right, but I make no promises. No promises! She may have to settle for something off-the-rack !

  “We’re going to miss it,” Genuine worried as they hurried to the Transfer room.

  “
Oh, they know we’re here. They’ll wait for us.”

  She was right, of course. Rarely was even the most routine Transfer done without some family member present—there was always the chance, no matter how remote, that something might go wrong in the switchover—and rarer still was any member of the Spool clan switched without a loved one there to murmur the obligatory, conditional good-bye.

  Which Courteous’s mother did, ending with the quote spoken at all proper Transfers:

  “May you wake safely upon that far shore

  When night is through

  May you find no everlasting sleep

  When breaks the Eternal Dawn!”

  A final kiss. A final upload from Courteous’s psyche-card to the master file. And then the first shot to put her to sleep. Her latest purchase rolled into the room, dressed now, hair carefully arranged, beautiful green eyes blank and staring sightlessly at the ceiling, the mind empty, a cup waiting to be filled with the trillion bits of data that was Courteous Spool. The download into her new look lasted a little over a minute. The pupils dilated, the body spasmed as circuits came alive, and the tall girl was whisked out of the room for full cognitive testing, but not before she looked up into her mother’s face—a face not much older than her own—and smiled.

  For a few minutes, there were two Courteous Spools in the world, the shorter, brown-eyed one and the taller, green-eyed one. Then, after the neurological and physical tests were completed to confirm the Transfer was a success, a second shot was administered to the first Courteous, or the redundancy, as it was called. This second shot stopped her heart.

  She was dead.

  And alive. In a body picked out just for her wedding. A body whose eyes were Beneficent’s favorite color. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the original, the one her mother had given birth to several lifetimes ago, but still Courteous.

  “I don’t know,” she mused the next morning, examining her newest self in the mirror. “The faces always look a little different inside the display case. This nose didn’t look so narrow and the cheekbones are a little too prominent, I think. Should I try to find another?”

  She was leaving for the moon in less than an hour. There was no time to find another look and, at any rate, you were allowed only one Transfer every five years—it’s time-consuming and expensive to grow inanimate human beings. But that particular rule just happened to be enforced by the Conduct Review Committee, which just happened to be chaired by one Omniscient Spool, who just happened to be the father of the green-eyed beauty standing in front of the mirror, who just happened to be his favorite daughter. If she wanted another look, she would get one.

  Courteous turned to her personal assistant—her persist, in the parlance of the 3Fs—a pretty young girl named Georgiana, whose family had faithfully served Courteous for ten generations, and asked her opinion.

  “I think it’s beautiful,” Georgiana said. “Much better than the last look.”

  “I’m not comparing it to the last look,” Courteous said impatiently. She paused as a message from her mother dropped into her cogbox. The shrill voice rang annoyingly inside her head: Forty-five minutes to takeoff, dear! Tick-tock, tick-tock! “What would be the point of that? Tell me the truth; you won’t hurt my feelings.”

  “No new look is perfect,” Georgiana said carefully. “Those eyes are the perfect shade of green, though. They’ll go wonderfully with your gown.”

  “Oh, Georgiana,” Courteous sighed, pinching her new nose and then pushing on the tip to flare the nostrils. “I envy you finitissium sometimes, I really do. You get just one body, and you never have to go through this agony.”

  “One body … and one lifetime,” Georgiana murmured. Only 3Fs could spit on death’s grave. The vast majority of people still lived finite lives—hence the slightly condescending and contemptuous name for them: finitissium, the finite ones. The day would come when Georgiana would be too old and feeble to properly care for Courteous. She would be sent off to live out the remainder of her days at the Retired Persists’ Home and replaced with someone younger—hopefully someone from her own family, a granddaughter, perhaps, if she was lucky enough to have one. Being a persist was a choice job, if you could get it. Private quarters in the high-security family compound, not some shack in the sprawling slums that ringed the city, surrounded by open sewers and reeking garbage, preyed upon by the vicious gangs that ruled the ghetto. The job came with free health care, including vision and dental. And an education, if you wanted one. Georgiana was very proud of the fact that she was the first in her family to read and write. She also spoke a bit of Courtesian, much to her mistress’s delight and the only reason she spoke it—to delight her: As long as she kept Courteous happy, her job was safe.

  “Why am I going through it, Georgiana?” Courteous asked. “To please my father? To shut up those idiots who laugh at me? To save my family the embarrassment of yet another aborted wedding? I’m only four hundred and ninety-eight years old.” Staring at her eighteen-year-old face in the mirror. “Maybe I’m too young to get married.”

  “Do you love him?” Georgiana asked quietly.

  “Love who? Oh, Beneficent. Well, of course I do. As much as I loved the others I thought I was going to marry.”

  “Then that’s why you’re going through it.”

  “It all just seems so pointless. Do you know how many times my father has been married? Forty-four. Forty-four times, Georgiana! People change spouses more often than they clean out their closets. And every time they say, ‘This is the one. This is the person I’m going to spend eternity with.’ Then forty or fifty years go by and you’re just sick of each other, utterly sick, and it’s on to the next ‘true love.’ My question is what good is eternity if you are eternally falling in and out of love? Joy. Despair. Desire. Revulsion. Excitement. Boredom. They should do away with marriage altogether, in my opinion. It makes you only more dissatisfied and lonely.”

  “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 s
unrise, 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.