Memory bids us follow its awful paths, knowing precisely what awaits us if we dare traverse them, and it does not permit us to heed those signposts driven so deeply in ourselves. Warning, the signs announce, as in a fairy tale. This is the way to sorrow.
But there are no other ways to take; not anymore.
Once he was fully recovered from my assault—and it pleases me to say that his recovery took some time—Gus compressed the remains of his human sympathy into a very small and convenient package, buckled and locked it against the scratching within, and walked with a decisive step down the alleys of Nautilus. He had determined that it was time to reclaim Margo’s charge—or rather the first of them; poor Margo tended many. She had fattened the little thing with teaching and affection, never knowing that she was preparing it for the slaughter.
Only the dregs of Nautilus’s society lived near Margo, those whose magic was so faint that they barely qualified for admission—the sort who, at home, might have been fortune tellers or mediums supplementing their bare abilities with deceit. Having no grand ambitions, or else no means to realize them, they seemed to spend most of their time sitting sullenly in the alleys near their rooms.
I imagine I wasn’t the only inhabitant of Nautilus who found the enchanted city galling in many respects, its concerns dully identical to those of quotidian society. Since the poor could not afford the petty expenditure needed to mask my screams, they simply clapped hands over their ears and glared as we passed.
We were still some distance away when we caught sight of them. Margo as well was sitting on the ground outside her tiny home, watching her beamer child play. The little Angus had somewhere collected a half-dozen creatures that might have been called mice, if only they had worn fur. Instead their bodies were clad in imbricated gold plates, jewel-specked and weighty. The beamer boy had arranged them in ranks and was prodding them to race, with nuggets of suet spread out as incentive at the course’s end.
Instead of scampering in a decently mouselike fashion, the poor animals heaved themselves along, crouching and gasping at every step. I cringed away from their burdened plodding. But the beamer only poked them with a ruler Gus had provided, then sat back on its heels and crowed. Margo smiled indulgently.
Then my scream advised them of our coming. They looked, their expressions unmistakably betraying ruptured happiness. Gus had slipped in Margo’s affections, that was plain.
The little beamer gathered his jeweled mice in his arms as if he feared Gus would trample them, then nestled under Margo’s shoulder. Did it suspect what was coming? Since it was after all a projection drawn from Gus’s own mind, did it understand him rather too well?
I believe it did. We were soon close enough to see its small face wadded with sullen loathing.
“Good afternoon, Aunt Margo,” Gus said, in rather formal tones, and bent to kiss her so peremptorily that it had more the character of a jab. “Young Angus. You ought to be studying.”
“He’s been hard at work all morning!” Margo interjected, too quickly, though morning was not something that existed in Nautilus. “We’ve been going over his sums—and he can very nearly recite ‘The Ancient Mariner’—we meant to keep it as a surprise for you, but since you’re here—”
“Angus can speak for himself,” Gus said—and the flatness, the deadness of his tone sounded a louder alarm than rage could have done. “Can’t he?”
Gus’s creature looked daggers at him. “Yes, Mr. Farrow.” It paused, but it might as well have spit. “Would you like me to recite? I can say the whole now, I think. All the credit is due to my dear instructress.”
What a simpering little hypocrite it was! But even I could not blame the beamer for fighting to survive. I had fought once myself.
“I’m afraid there’s no time for that,” Gus said—though in fact there was no particular hurry. He looked to Margo. “Angus must come with me.”
Margo’s arm tightened around the beamer’s fragile shoulders, though conscious fear had not yet caught up with instinct.
“Angus and I had planned to visit the Floating Lakes today. Won’t you come with us? A bit of gallivanting appeals far more than being cooped up in your grubby room, my dear. Why you sorcerers care so little for cleanliness, I’ll never understand.” Her skin was dreadfully pale, her smile like paper crushed in a fist. “Oh, I know. You’ll say that spending a few lit to tidy the place would be wasteful. Well, there are always your two good hands, and a broom. Or have you forgotten such things exist?”
I thought then that Margo was mimicking her old spirit, putting on a show to distract him, much as a bird will try to lure a snake away from its nest—though I don’t suppose she had the slightest awareness of her own maneuvering.
Gus’s lips pinched. “I haven’t come for an excursion. I’m here to collect Angus. It might be—some time before I can return him to you.”
The beamer’s pale green eyes went round as river stones and it bit its lower lip, just as Gus himself used to do. Oh, it did have some trace memory, even then, some scraps left over from its ripped and rendered predecessors.
“Auntie Margo must come with us!” it flustered. “I don’t want to go with you, Mr. Farrow. Not without—”
“I don’t recall consulting your preferences,” Gus sniped. He directed his gaze above both their heads.
“Well, consult mine, then,” Margo said. She was now all hackles and brambles, as if some sorcerer had crossed wolf and sea urchin. “Angus goes nowhere without me.”
That brought Gus up short. “I must remind you that I made him, and at very great cost to myself. The beamer is my property.” Then his voice dipped into a deceptive softness. “I will return him to you, Margo. Only I mean to make certain improvements, and he may not seem exactly as he does now. But—”
Margo was not reassured. “Improvements? Such a sweet, quick, tractable child—improvements? All he requires is time to grow up! What a fine man he’ll be, Gus, if only—”
But Margo could not say what she did not permit herself to know.
“He cannot grow up. He isn’t made for it.” Knowing Gus as I did, I could nearly hear the creaking of the mental hinges as his cold composure swung back to loose rage. “I meant to spare you, Margo! I meant to protect you from seeing—the process—I must employ. As idiotic, as misplaced as your feelings are for this doll!” I would have liked to point out to Gus that he intended his beamers to elicit precisely such sentiments, and ought to regard Margo’s love for the thing as a marvelous success. Logic was not always among Gus’s strengths. “You love the projection so much that it makes you forget the original, and everything you owe to me!”
Margo stiffened at this. No doubt she caught, as I did, the tread of a threat coming nearer. Gus could consign Margo to unending torment simply by declining to pay for the periodic removal of her pain.
The beamer now was cowering against Margo’s side, trembling and furious. And all at once its careful falsity gave way. What projection of Gus’s inmost self could tolerate anyone disputing its entitlement to love?
“Of course she loves me more than you! You’re sour and wicked and not half as clever as you think you are! Auntie Margo’s told me all about Catherine, you know, and how you killed her for saying she wouldn’t marry you—only Auntie Margo thinks she would have if only you hadn’t turned so nasty!” In this supposition Margo was thoroughly mistaken. “I won’t ruin everything the way you do, and that’s why you hate me!”
For a moment Gus was utterly silent, rigid as the dead. Then softly, “You wouldn’t like your Auntie Margo to see anything that would distress her. Would you?”
Oh, it knew. A whine as thin as thread pulled through its clenched teeth.
“Well, then,” Gus pursued. “Quit your pitiful clinging and come along. Now.”
“What do you mean to do to him?” Margo barked, binding the beamer tight in her wasted arms. “What don’t you want me to see, pray tell? If Angus is ever in need of discipline, I’m quite capable of administering it myself!”
But neither Gus nor his creature had any attention to spare for her now. They were fixed on each other, and the dark prickling of their mutual hatred charged the air. The beamer scowled and lowered its moppish blond head like a bull about to charge.
“I dare you,” it said at last, as brutally decisive as Gus himself could have been. “I dare you to do it, Mr. Farrow. But if you do, she’ll never love you again—and she was the only one who ever did, really.”
In this challenge the thing betrayed its parentage again: it was quite willing to make Margo suffer, if in that way it could strike a blow against its enemy.
“You’re mistaken,” Gus informed the beamer, his voice so stifled by rage that it was hardly more than a soughing in our ears. “Margo will love me as long as she lives—and that will be forever. What choice does she have?”
He reached, seized a handful of its faintly glassy hair. Margo cried out and tried to make of her body a refuge, engulfing the creature, smothering it as best she could in her sparse flesh. She had never seen what I had seen, did not know how Gus disposed of his beamers. She could not understand the futility of her gesture; there was no saving this little Angus, or indeed any of the ones that followed.
But she presently learned. Gus spread his long fingers wide as a spiderweb over the beamer’s crown, and then—
The golden mice clanked on the ground.
Margo looked down to see its cherished little face collapsing inward along deep vertical pleats, like a paper balloon with all its sustaining air abruptly withdrawn. Its protesting whine, now, sounded more like the whistle of deflation. Two pale green eyes showed between the crush of Gus’s fingers, their vitreous jelly gleaming even as they wrinkled and folded back on themselves—and though it was too proud to weep they still leaked despair and anger thick as ichor.
Margo’s scream grew loud enough to drown out mine.
Gus shook his head, bit his lower lip, his posture plainly expressing that he thought this scene had gone on quite long enough. He stretched his left hand down and caught hold of a small hip where it jutted from the protection of Margo’s embrace. His two hands then compressed.
The beamer mashed into a crinkling ball. For half a moment Margo still clung to two kicking little legs, her wet face pressed against them. Gus yanked up, gathered in those twitching appendages.
I told myself that Margo deserved this suffering. I told myself that she had earned none of my sympathy. She had never once turned on my wraith a single compassionate glance, but instead avoided looking at me so studiously that even I almost forgot my existence in her company. And had she not played her part in the events that led to my murder?
I told myself I should glory in the long cry that ran through Margo like a blade, that pierced her and pinned her to the ground with her own steel.
I told myself these things viciously, vengefully, in a grand and passionate oratory. But my heart, or whatever I had that passed for one, declined persuasion.
Margo huddled on the ground, looking nearly as reduced as the beamer now balled in Gus’s hands. No one could have noticed any change in the tenor of my scream—I admit it was rather monotonous—but I myself was sensible of a shift in it, a turning of the tide.
For this was the first occasion since my murder that my scream was not for myself. I screamed instead for Margo. Long after her own screams failed her and her voice expired in heaving sobs, I picked up her cries like a burden, I carried them in place of my own. Even now—for of course I am still screaming in my tiny corner of Nautilus, though I write these words at some remove from my ghostly person—Margo’s scream mingles in mine, tributary to a terrible river.
Gus, meanwhile, stood looking down at her. Rather put out, if anything, by her flooding grief.
“I did tell you that I’ll return him to you,” Gus at last said, his voice precarious on some ill-defined edge between soothing and resentful. He tucked away the crushed sphere of his beamer in his pocket. “In due course. When he’s ready. You have nothing whatever to be upset about, I assure you.”
Margo lifted her chin and looked up at him. He flinched back.
My own murder Margo had found pliant in her mind, soft enough to shape into something forgivable. She had figured it in comfortable terms; it was a pity, or a shadow, or a mistake. Perhaps, at a stretch, it was a tragedy, though primarily for Gus and not for me. It was indeed anything and everything but the merciless subtraction of my all from the earth.
But this was the murder of her own heart. It was not so malleable. Not then or ever, through all the timeless time to come.
“Return him to me,” Margo said. “Do you mean, just as he was? Can you return him unharmed?”
Did Gus not hear her voice lowered, dragged like a silk scarf through choking depths?
“Well. Not exactly as he was, no. One of my aims is to instill a more robust memory—to see what sort of fictive autobiography a beamer can support. And obviously I must purge his memories of living with you here, of all his learning. To do otherwise would prejudice the experiment.”
“Experiment? Experiment? No. As he was! You will restore him to me just as he was! Do you hear?” The low sibilance was gone, her voice peaked, stabbing. “You must bring my Angus back to me!”
Gus backed away sharply, then glanced over his shoulder to be sure his escape was clear.
“I’ll visit you again when you are in a more reasonable frame of mind. Try—try to think clearly.” And with that Gus turned and fled.
Margo could not but hear the refusal in these words. Her pursuing cry was pain so purely distilled, so refined, that Gus cringed and ducked as if the wind itself could slice him into ribbons.
And I? I tried again to school myself in hatred of her. I railed inwardly against my own pity. It was no use, for her scream now lived inextricably in mine. It had become the issue of my own poor spirit. If Gus had not hesitated to waste my life out of sheer mulish vanity, surely this waste of Margo’s love should have brought him back to some semblance of sense or conscience?
No. He turned away and walked with snappish steps for quite a while. At last he came to rest where a fountain played. He sat on the brink, one crossed leg knocking irritably at the pearly stone. The fountain’s winged waters were not spray at all, I saw, but jets of birds, folded and faceted as if cut from living diamond. They launched in glittering arcs and then dove into the basin where they dissolved into a fluid brilliance, only to rise again in long-feathered forms.
Little as I cared for magic, even I could not suppress a shiver at such beauty. Script blazed before our eyes in a sort of floating placard: Madame Laudine, Avian Fountain. Of course Anura moved in artistic circles.
And I would never sit beside her, never have a chance to earn my acceptance by her friends, never catch her proud smile if I managed a flash of wit. I pictured it nonetheless: their laughter and grace, and myself acknowledged as belonging there. With her. In my dream it felt as if the words Catherine and Anura swam like an aurora above our heads.
The shining placard seemed to nod, then dissolved into wet stars.
Gus did not spare the lapidary birds a single glance. His shoulders were tight and knots of muscle slid along his jaw, and he looked up at me instead.
“Oh, shut up, can’t you?” he snarled, though whose fault was it that I could not? He rose again and paced back to his room.
No sooner were we inside than he began to scream.
At me.
I was given to understand that it was all my fault. Every unspecified grief, every nebulous crime, past, present, and future, all were laid at my feet like roses flung at an actress. Gus waved his hands, his cheeks blazing; the vague glow of Nautilus flashed silver in his streaking tears. It put me in mind of the shining slime left by slugs.
“You have left me no choice, Catherine,” he howled. “No choice, don’t you see? Whatever I do is your doing, always and only yours. You, who were so bright with promise—but there must have always been some fatal flaw in you, a crack in the diamond. Evil will enter through that crack, through your incapacity for love. Not through mine. Oh, but you think you can make me bear the weight of your sins!”
He drank. He railed. I screamed. It made for a certain harmony.