CINDERELLA’S SISTERS

Once upon a time there were two ugly sisters. They were twins, but they were not identical twins; the elder was brown-eyed and brown-haired, while the younger was blue-eyed and blonde-haired. For this reason their surname, which was Dark, fitted the elder, who was named Aurora, better than the younger, who was named Jeanne.

When they were born, they looked much like any other babies, and no one knew that they would grow up to be ugly sisters. Their parents were tolerably rich because their grandfather had made a fortune in the bioengineering business, and so they had the best of everything. Other children envied them for this, but the envy of others was nothing compared to the envy that existed between the sisters themselves.

How and why two people who always had the best of everything could contrive to be so bitterly jealous of one another, it is difficult to understand, but it was nevertheless the case that from the moment of their birth Aurora and Jeanne were rivals. The most probable explanation is that their competition began even before birth, when they struggled for the lion’s share of the limited resources available in their crowded womb. Their mother was fond of saying, with tired irony, that Jeanne had never forgiven Aurora for being born ahead of her, and never would be satisfied even if she beat her into the grave.

By the time they were five years old, it was obvious that each of the girls was, in her own distinctive way, very plain indeed. Despite their different coloring they were of similar build. They were big for their age, with wide shoulders and fat legs, with broad features and lumpy chins. Jeanne’s blue eyes were narrow, though, and gave the impression of sly shiftiness, while Aurora’s dark ones were round and slightly protruding, giving the impression of a permanent and hostile stare. If you looked at the two standing side by side from a distance, you could only tell which was which by the color of their hair, but when they looked you in the face at close quarters there was all the difference in the world.

It was, inevitably, the children at school who dubbed them “the ugly sisters”, forcing them to wear the collective nickname from infancy into adolescence. At first, the label was whispered behind their backs—they never could figure out exactly who had coined it—but it was soon invoked to taunt them openly, although usually from a distance; at five, each of them was bigger and stronger than almost any boy, and together they were a fearsome fighting force.

That taunting might have driven them together; it certainly gave them a common cause, which they often had to pursue with concerted violent action. In fact, though, it gave them another reason for mutual jealousy, because each girl became secretly convinced that she was the uglier of the two, and each one was determined to displace that burden on to the other.

Thus, while they would combine forces to punish any other child who called them both ugly, they would lose no opportunity in private to express scorn and disgust for one another’s appearance—particularly in respect of the eyes that were their main distinguishing feature. That cattiness did not really come naturally to them, and gave a false impression, because they were really fairly placid and by no means lacking in charity or a sense of humor. Sometimes it was hard work to be nasty to one another, and it was certainly a duty rather than a pleasure. The rivalry was so deep-rooted, though, that it could not be set aside by any mere surge of regret or sympathy.

Adolescence intensified their self-consciousness in respect of their attractiveness. Their mother had always told them that their bigness was “puppy fat” and that they would have elegant figures once they had “grown into themselves” but that proved to be reckless optimism. They both grew to be very tall, with massive shoulders, hardly any breasts, and thighs like wrestlers. To add insult to injury, they attained their full height at an unusually early age, so that they towered over their peers—male and female alike—throughout the miserable pubertal years.

They had no beautiful younger sister with whom to compare themselves. Indeed, had they had a real Cinderella to abuse they might have felt a lot better about things, and their rivalry might have ebbed away. Instead, they were forced constantly to compare themselves to a hypothetical Cinderella who was beyond the reach of their abuse: the image of perfect femininity that was enshrined in the mythology of the day, in the world of TV, advertising and romantic fiction. That phantom Cinderella was an ideal of perfection, who could not, by her very nature, ever be proven deficient or out-competed in any way.

As teenagers, Aurora and Jeanne desperately wanted boy-friends, to show the world that they were normal and desirable. They entered into one of the fiercest phases of their rivalry in the attempt to achieve some measure of romantic success, but their desperation only led them to further humiliation.

In the mere matter of timing, Aurora won again, as she usually did, and although she made as much as she could out of her victory in the race, she felt privately that she had only succeeded in lowering herself more quickly to a despicable level of shame. It was easy enough to find boys willing to accept sexual favors from any girl prepared to grant them, but they treated her with such appalling contempt before, during and after the event that she felt horribly humiliated by the whole business. Jeanne reacted rather cleverly to the fact of having lost the race to give away her virginity by trying to make a virtue of having retained it. Although she was privately anguished by the thought of the joy which, she imagined, her sister derived from her frequent sexual activity, she put on a convincing show of contempt. Aurora never let her know it, but Jeanne’s scornful attitude added greatly to her feelings of disgust and self-hatred.

By the time they were eighteen years old Aurora and Jeanne were as miserable as two people could be. The only thing that had held them back from suicide attempts was the bitter suspicion that if they killed themselves they would somehow be conceding defeat in their private war. On their eighteenth birthday, though, their whole situation was transformed. Ugly they might be, but in their infancy they had been the apples of their grandfather’s eye, and he had established a trust fund for them, into which the royalties from some of his most successful ventures in genetic technology had been paid. It was a boom time in the bioengineering business, when mankind stood on the threshold of a vast wonderland of new opportunity, and those trusts had benefitted enormously from the boom. When Aurora and Jeanne were told how much they had each become worth, on attaining their majority, they realized that they were richer by a considerable margin than their parents, whom they had previously thought of as being very rich indeed. They could buy anything they wanted, and what they wanted more than anything else in the world was beauty.

The bioengineering boom that had made their fortunes for them had also transformed the business of cosmetic surgery. Biotechnologists had learned how to take control of the processes by which the body’s tissues were built and shaped. Work that was done with the scalpel could now be refined with subtler biochemical tools. The operations were delicate and expensive, but for those who had the money, fat could be stripped from the body, and the metabolism retuned so that the fat could never reappear. Big bones could be whittled down, and what remained made perfect so that the tendons and ligaments and muscles knitted around them. Breast-tissue could be induced to grow, to create a bosom of any size, shape and firmness that might be required. The texture, color and sheen of skin could be selected from a chart. Every man who had the money could be remade in the image of Apollo; every woman who had the money could be an avatar of Aphrodite.

Aurora and Jeanne went to rival cosmetic engineers; they gave liberal grants to their clinics, financed the training of their staff, and backed their research. In return they demanded to be recreated as rival Helens of Troy. Their physicians did a marvelous job. Although Aurora and Jeanne kept their plans secret from one another, they found that, when the job was finished, the situation was much as it had been before. From a distance, you could only tell one from another by the color of their hair. Close up, they were very different.

They had each elected to be five foot six in height, with slender waists, well-contoured hips, slim shoulders and modest, well-rounded breasts. From the neck down, there was simply nothing to choose between them—but their faces were not at all alike.

Aurora had gone into her operation thinking that Jeanne might have an advantage because of her blonde hair—which Aurora had always considered to be her sister’s best feature, although no torture would have forced her to admit it. She had briefly considered making her own hair golden, but this would have been tantamount to an admission of the inferiority of her own darkness, so she had set any such notion aside. Instead, she had decided to make her own hair and eyes even darker, so that they would be almost, but not quite, jet black. To benefit from contrast, she had her skin tone lightened, so that it became almost but not quite pure white. Her lips, which had always been rather thick, she redesigned to be slimmer, but very red and with a delicate Cupid’s bow effect. She chose a relatively thin, straight nose. She acquired long, soft eyelashes, and allowed her eyes to be set a little too far back (in contrast to their previous protrusion) so that they could be artfully shadowed. She had her carriage altered slightly, so that she could look slightly upwards from beneath her neatly-chiseled eyebrows.

Jeanne was determined to make the most of her blue eyes, which she privately considered to have been badly let down by her awful lank hair, although wild horses could not have dragged such an admission out of her. She had the irises slightly enlarged, and the color made perfectly even. She had her hair lightened and given a silvery metallic sheen. For her skin color, by way of contrast, she chose a tanned look—a golden brown that was, in its own fashion, equally metallic. She abolished the narrowness of her eyes completely, allowing herself to open them wide in an expression of astonished wonder, which, she thought, truly reflected the contented innocence of her cultivated image. She was content to let her lips be soft and relatively full, hardly reddened at all but very gentle. Her adopted nose was just a little bit upturned at the end.

Each sister, when she saw her twin remade, felt uneasy about the striking contrast. Each had confidence in her own decisions, but each was agonized by the worry that the other might prove herself more attractive to men. They were both well qualified to make conquests now, being very wealthy as well as very beautiful. Their remodeling, although fearfully expensive, had hardly dented their fortunes, which grew apace, seemingly of their own accord, thanks to the miracles wrought by their investment managers.

Aurora began instantly to shop around for lovers among the wealthy and the wise, the famous and the notorious, but choosing from those categories only the most handsome of candidates. She threw herself into a life of hectic seduction and multiple orgasms, keeping score of the men who visited her bed with obsessive accuracy.

Jeanne adopted a different strategy, feeling that it would be a kind of concession to begin now what she had disdained before, and that Aurora must never be given the satisfaction of thinking that she might be trying to catch up. Instead, she set out to collect admirers and break hearts. She flirted with everyone and slept with no one, casually accepting the adoration of all but reserving her favors for some indefinitely-deferred perfect relationship, which would be the ultimate in true love stories. By this means she cultivated a kind of moral superiority over her rival, who was made to seem vulgarly hedonistic by comparison.

Aurora secretly cursed the fact that her sister’s frustrated lovers seemed to adore her more extravagantly than her own sated ones, but in public she simply made the most of her appetite for ecstasy, and accused Jeanne of hypocritical frigidity. Jeanne, although coolly contemptuous as far as appearances were concerned, was secretly terrified that that might be the truth of the matter.

The sisters’ investment managers were drawn into the conflict, just as their cosmetic engineers had been. They began to compete in business, trying to pull off market coups and commodity corners, taking over companies and putting venture capital on the line. They both found that a thoroughly boring and rather too impersonal mode of competition, though, and began to invest more effort in their activities in the world of the arts. They began their own collections, and frequently tried to outbid one another in the auction rooms, although this occasionally resulted in such wildly expensive purchases that the loser had more reason to be content than the winner.

Buying things was, however, almost meaningless as an exercise of rivalry, given their vast financial resources, and it gave them much more satisfaction to be given things by their admirers, particularly non-material things, which were all the more valuable for having no price-tag. They both sat for portraits by the leading artists of the day. Anton Szulikowski’s oil-painting of Aurora was said to be as great a work as anything by Titian, and to have brought a touch of Renaissance Classicism to the twenty-first century. Ojima Okira’s coded image of Jeanne, designed to take advantage of all the marvelous sophistication of the new Masterlaser printer, was hailed as the first masterpiece of Post-Utramodernism, and sold six million copies on disc.

They cultivated writers as well as artists, and Richard Shelmerdine’s “Aurora Cycle” was generally held to be the work that allowed him to become the British Poet Laureate, while Charles Toussaint’s integrated production of text, music and computer-graphics, The Spanish Armada, ushered in a new era of video-womb drama.

It was soon insufficient for Aurora and Jeanne to inspire works or to patronize artists. They both decided at about the same time to star in films. Aurora chose to take a leading role in one of the holographic epics which were then playing in stadia to audiences of a hundred thousand, and was Cleopatra in The Rise of the Roman Empire, directed by Jan van Walwyk. Jeanne was the only real person on camera in the otherwise computer-generated version of She, based on H. Rider Haggard’s famous novel, by the aptly-named producer/programmer Elaine Quartermaine. The strain of these appearances was considerable; each sister worried incessantly about the quality of her performance, and dreaded utterly the prospect of her rival gloating over an unkind review.

This mode of competition was more satisfying than commercial competition because it was so very public. It was competition in celebrity, which was for both of them the real heart of the matter. It was also a hazardous mode of competition, however, because the risk of humiliating failure was so much greater.

In the meantime, Aurora and Jeanne were dedicated followers of fashion. Aurora dressed for preference in black, and Jeanne in white, but each was prepared to attempt daring experiments in color for special occasions. They each hired private detectives to spy on one another’s gowns, perfumes and jewelry, because neither could stand the thought that they might one day appear together wearing the same item of embellishment, which might be thought by some innocent observer to suit the other better. When the fashion world began to absorb the techniques of the cosmetic engineers, so that its leaders began to change their skins as often as their coats, Aurora and Jeanne were of course in the vanguard. Aurora was the great pioneer of artificial bioluminescence, while Jeanne became the trend-setter of integral ivory.

The sisters’ cosmetic engineers had once again to begin pushing back the limits of what could be done in remodeling the human body. Nor were they long content with changes of superficial appearance. They had been made beautiful, and they had been made exotic—now they asked to be made talented. Their engineers were ready and willing to rise to the challenge, being just as determined not to be bested by nature as they were determined not to be bested by one another. Aurora decided to extend her passion for bioluminescence into the art of dancing, and had her muscles and limbs carefully sculpted and trained. Her solo balletic performances, enhanced by the effect of light reflected and radiated from the many facets of her artificial skin, were quite breathtaking. Jeanne had her vocal cords completely reconstructed and augmented in order to give her voice phenomenal range and flexibility, and quickly became known as “the human nightingale.”

Aurora eventually married, not so much because she wanted a husband as because she wanted a wedding—the most sumptuous ever known, with a guest-list such as had never before been assembled. The preparations lasted for nearly a year, and the worry wore her ragged; she took over an entire Mediterranean island for the ceremony and the reception. Her husband, Matthew Roemer, was a theoretical physicist who was rumored to have the highest IQ in the world.

Jeanne waited for the fuss to die down completely before playing her own hand in that particular game, but any disadvantage she suffered from taking her turn later was offset by the fact of her carefully-conserved maidenly honor, which could be convincingly inserted into a great romance. Jeanne did not simply get married: she fell in love, and her courtship was lovingly tracked by the world’s media for nearly a year. She disdained to take any part in making the arrangements; all that had to be done according to tradition anyhow, because she married the heir to the Spanish throne.

The next phase in the competition should, logically speaking, have been their children—but there, without even formally negotiating a truce, Aurora and Jeanne finally drew the line. To give themselves up entirely to flamboyant warfare was one thing, and their other pawns—investment managers, worshippers, cosmetic engineers and husbands—were all volunteers, but to give birth to new persons simply in order to use them as weapons was something else. They each remembered the agonies of their own childhood, and the extent to which it had been spoiled by their bitter jealousies. They did not want to see babies born to such spoliation. They were, after all, basically kind and loving people despite appearances. For all their posturing, they never did hurt anyone—at least, not deliberately. Aurora left her trail of disappointed lovers, and Jeanne her caravan of frustrated ones, but they never lied to any of them, or led them to expect anything more than they got, and both secretly shed more than a few tears for the miseries they engendered.

While they pursued their spectacular careers, further steady progress was made in techniques of genetic engineering. This helped them grow richer still, but it also wrought changes in the world around them. Disease was slowly banished as medical applications of the new technology became cheaper. The development of artificial photosynthesis, coupled with biological desalination, made an exploitable asset out of the tropical sun and sea, and allowed the Third World to escape from the ecological poverty trap. The first techniques of rejuvenation were pioneered by Toshiko Hiroshita and her co-workers.

It was the last development, of course, which quickly attracted the attention of Aurora and Jeanne Dark. Once the techniques of rejuvenation by stimulated tissue-replacement had proven their worth, they became a focus of intense interest for everyone over the age of forty. The operations were at this point in time still very expensive, but those for whom money was no problem had every reason to invest all they could in prolonging the time in which they might enjoy their wealth. The older they were, the more they were convinced that youth was absolutely wasted on the young, and the more they believed they stood to benefit from a renewal of vigor.

When the techniques first became available to the very rich Aurora and Jeanne were only forty-three years old, and neither showed any immediate interest. For several years they confined their rivalry to the conventional channels, which were by now well-worn. On her forty-eighth birthday, though, Aurora looked at her face in her mirror, and decided that it was beginning to show distinct signs of having been thoroughly worked over, time and time again, by her favorite cosmetic engineer. It was time to consult him about a return to square one. What he told her, though, came as a frightful shock.

“I can do it,” he told her. “But there are some things you must realize. What the rejuvenation technique involves, fundamentally, is restoring tissue-cells to a primitive, undifferentiated state, when they can divide rapidly; and then allowing these rejuvenated cells to colonize the working tissues, destroying and replacing older cells. It’s basically a kind of carefully-controlled cancer. It isn’t perfect: it means that the damaged structural proteins in your body can be replaced, and that all kinds of junk in your mature cells can be flushed out. But it doesn’t set aside all the aspects of aging. There will still be copying errors in the DNA of the rejuvenated cells. The techniques can restore a man or woman of sixty to the effective age of about twenty, but that renewed youth won’t last as long as real youth—after a further twenty-five years the body will appear to be sixty again. A second rejuvenation might restore the appearance of twenty, but isn’t likely to last more than ten years. A third treatment would be useless—probably fatal.

“Those figures, though, suppose normal wear and tear. You’re in a rather different position. Your cells have been worked over very thoroughly by all the transformation-techniques at our disposal. They simply don’t have the same scope as the cells of people who’ve aged naturally. I can rejuvenate you once, I think—but only once. I can make you seem twenty again, but I think you’d lose that appearance relatively quickly. Say fifteen years instead of twenty-five to get back to real old age, and then—the end of the road.”

Aurora was not particularly surprised by this; she had been warned often about the fact that she was inflicting unfair wear and tear on her body, and that there might one day be a bill to pay for it all.

“It’s all right,” she told the engineer. “I’ll take what I can get.”

“There’s more,” he told her. “You do understand, I suppose, that what your rejuvenated tissues will produce is what’s programmed into your genes. You won’t look like a twenty-year-old version of your present self—you’ll look the way you would have looked without all the cosmetic remodeling.”

That was an unwelcome shock, and Aurora’s heart sank as she realized what it meant. To be rejuvenated was one thing; to be rejuvenated six feet tall with thighs like tree-trunks and protruding eyes was another.”

But you could do what you did before, all over again,” she protested.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “As I said, the cells wouldn’t have been completely rejuvenated. In some ways—in terms of the DNA—they’d still be aged cells. I’ve told you often enough that you couldn’t keep transforming them indefinitely. I can give you a second lease of life, Aurora, but I can’t give you a second lease of the life you lead now. You’d have to live it on nature’s own terms.”

This news placed Aurora in something of a dilemma. She had naïvely thought that being the first to be rejuvenated would score a point in her ongoing battle with her sister; now it seemed like a kind of surrender. She decided that for the time being, at least, she would forego the pleasure.

When Jeanne, in her own time, made a similar approach to her own cosmetic engineer, she received the same news and she also put aside the idea indefinitely. But this could only be a postponement of the moment of decision, because from that day on there was an anxiety about the way that the two sisters glanced at mirrors, and as years went by the anxiety deepened into real fear. They knew that they were not aging as gracefully as they would have wished, and that the extravagant way in which they had used the rewards of biotechnology was now taking its toll. They were beginning to look haggard, although they were only in their early fifties.

It was then, for the first time in their lives, that they took very different paths. Previously, they had always moved along different but parallel tracks. Now, they veered in opposite directions. When Aurora was fifty-three, she decided that it could not go on. She was aging more rapidly than was natural, and her doctor told her that if she did not take the rejuvenation treatment, she might not have long to live; even her natural span of threescore years and ten would be denied her. She decided that she would take the advice, if only on strictly medical grounds. She dearly wanted another fifteen years of youth, feeling that she might make less wasteful use of it this time. She felt that she could face ugliness bravely now, having reaped all the rewards that beauty could bring.

For Jeanne, it was different. Having grown used to beauty, she felt that nothing ought to be allowed to force her back to mediocrity. If death were to be the price of retaining her current identity, she decided, then she would pay it. She demanded that her cosmetic engineers use the methods they had already used so profusely, no matter what the risk, to repair her appearance for such time as was left to her. They pleaded with her not to take that route, stressing its awful dangers, but she was not to be persuaded.

While Aurora reverted to plainness, therefore, Jeanne continued steadfastly to live life as she always had. Within two years, she was on her death-bed.

Jeanne made of her dying a great tragedy, keeping herself fully in the public eye, and built it into a story to compare with the story of her fabulous love affair. If anything, she was more in the limelight now than at the height of her flamboyance, and her beauticians worked around the clock to keep her face fit for the cameras.

When the end was very near, her ugly sister came to visit her.

There was no rivalry left now. They were no longer competing. For the first time in their lives, they could meet one another honestly, with no need to conceal their true feelings. When Jeanne, in a voice so weak and harsh that it was impossible to imagine that she had once been a human nightingale, albeit one made by artifice, said to Aurora: “I won, didn’t I?” Aurora simply said: “Yes, you won.”

Jeanne was astonished to find that the admission gave her no pleasure at all, and Aurora was equally amazed to find that making it caused her no pain. They hugged one another then, and wept for all the wasted years.

“Are you well?” asked Jeanne, anxiously. “You do look well.”

Aurora touched her jutting jaw and puffy cheeks. “Yes,” she said. “I am well. Better, I suppose, than I expected.”

Jeanne looked hard at her sister, and saw that the eyes did not protrude so much after all, and that the big shoulders really did not look too awkward. She tried to imagine the hair blonde and the eyes narrow and blue, but when she did, the picture that emerged was the image of a stranger.”

“Mother said I wouldn’t be content even if I beat you into the grave,” said Jeanne. “But in a way, I am content. I hope you don’t mind that...it’s not because you’ve done wrong—in fact, I know now that you’re the one who’s done it right. You’ve chosen to live, and that’s always right. No one should be so utterly stupid as to die for vanity. I’m content, I think, because you haven’t been so stupid. It would be awful, I think, if we’d both done this. I’m glad you didn’t...glad for the right reasons, I think.”

“I know,” said Aurora, softly. “I don’t mind your being content, though I’d rather you could be content with life than with death. We both know what we did, and we both know what it’s cost us. I think we’ve both been martyred, in our different ways. Like Cinderella’s ugly sisters mutilating their feet to try to fit that stupid glass slipper. How is Prince Charming, by the way?”

Jeanne managed a weak smile. “A tower of strength,” she said. “We had a bad patch when the relatives became distressed at the lack of an heir, but that’s all past now. Now, they don’t really want one. The poor lamb will have to wait for another fifty years or more to be king now his father’s been rejuvenated. I think, on the whole, I’ve done him more good than harm, and he’s been very good for me. I was very tired of being unsullied. How’s yours?”

“Pretty good,” Aurora confirmed. “I was terrified he’d leave me, you know, when I reverted. I wouldn’t have blamed him, either—it wasn’t the real me he married, when all said and done. But it’s okay so far, and I’m beginning to hope that it really is me he loves and not just the image. It wasn’t in the early days, of course, but we’ve grown used to one another over the years. It was nice to settle into, I suppose, after all those years of making a fetish out of finding a new lover every week. It’s not that they were all the same, you understand, just that there wasn’t that much difference. Anyway, I like Matthew; he gets a bit abstracted but he’s very kind.”

“I’m glad,” said Jeanne. “You won’t waste it, will you? Your new youth, I mean.”

Aurora shook her head. “I’ll try not to.”

Jeanne lay back on her pillow, exhausted by the conversation. “I’m sorry,” she said, very faintly. “I think it’s close to midnight, you know.”

“You don’t have to worry about midnight,” Aurora assured her, with tears in her eyes. “I’m the one who had to turn back into a pumpkin. You married the prince, remember?”

Jeanne smiled, and in that smile was crystallized all the perfection of her carefully-conserved beauty. It was a tragic smile, heartbreak through and through. It made Aurora cry.

“But you know,” said Jeanne, in the faintest of whispers, “that damned glass slipper never did fit. Not really.”

“I know,” Aurora assured her, taking her by the hand for the very last time. “I know it, now.”

Aurora didn’t have the option of living happily ever after, but she lived as well and as happily as she could, for as long as she had. It wasn’t enough to score a point off Jeanne, but it was certainly one in the eye for Cinderella.