I suppose it was more practical for them. If there had been any beauty at all, people might have wanted that instead. As it was, they didn’t know there was any such thing, so the lack did not bother them. I knew, though. I hurt all the time with such a longing. My chest burned, as though I would die of it.
Grumpkin learned to make his mess on paper, which I threw down the disposal chute thing where my own waste went. Everything worn out or used up went down the chute, said Bill. His name was William, William Picte. “Pic-tee,” he said, spelling it for me. He was a writer of what he called scripts, which I learned were stories for the pictures I had watched on the machine. He was a man of mature years, thirty at least. He came up to my shoulder. His hair was the color of apricots, and his skin was very pale, covered over with freckles. The hair on his body was the same as the hair on his head. I saw it when he washed himself. He had nowhere else to go to wash himself. The room we were in was the only room he had. We slept together on the narrow bed, our heads at opposite ends. He did not try to do anything to me, and I was grateful for that.
“Take me with you,” I begged him one day when he was about to set out. “I want to see something else.”
“There isn’t anything else,” he told me. “It’s all like this. Except for Fidipur’s farms, but nobody can go there except the people who work there.”
“Let’s go to the ocean,” I suggested. “To the sea.” I had never seen the sea, but Papa had, many times.
“There isn’t any sea,” he said. “Except the farms for Fidipur.”
“A forest then,” I begged, growing frantic. Sometimes I thought if I had to spend one more day in this little closet I would die. “Take me to the forest.”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand. There isn’t any forest anymore. No forest, no prairie, no mountains, no jungle, no swamp, no animals, no birds, no fish. It all went to Fidipur. This is all there is. Rooms like this one. Full of people like me.”
“Where do you go when you go out?” I begged.
“To the area supply station to get the daily ration of food wafers,” he snarled at me. “I get the same as a full-size person, which is why there’s enough left over for you. Then I go to the area work station to check in each day so they will know I am still alive and my room occupied. Then to the area water station to punch in so they’ll know I’m still alive and using water. To the required school for continuing education, which is a laugh, because there’s nothing left to teach anyone that matters. There aren’t any books; they take up too much room. There aren’t any teachers. There’s one technical university, and only the people who run things get to send their children there, so they can keep on running things.”
“You do that every day?”
“Except the sabbath. On the sabbath I go to the required religious observance of my choice. We’re very religious, hadn’t you noticed. Ha. Ha. Ha.”
None of it was reasonable, so I thought he lied. One day I opened the door and stepped out. There were people everywhere, small people. I hadn’t noticed the first time, but almost all of the people were small. Still, they filled up the moving corridors and stairs. All of them wore much the same sort of clothes, and it was hard to tell men from women. Some of them saw me looking out, and stopped to stare, muttering, the noise level rising like a disturbed hive. I was afraid the noise would bring some official to see what was going on. I went back in, hastily, and stayed inside after that.
All this time the thing inside me kept flaming away as though it had to burn its way out. It wasn’t pain, it wasn’t that kind of burning, but there was such a dreadful urgency about it. I felt stretched thin. Like parchment stretched around a flame, trying to contain it, getting hotter and hotter all the time.
Even though he had said there was no wine, Bill came home another time acting giggly and happy, as though he had been drinking. If there wasn’t wine, there was something like it, because his face was flushed and the pupils of his eyes were tiny, like dots. He giggled at me, like a drunken baby, waving his finger, and took a box out of one of the hidden closets. The box had women’s clothes in it, and he put them on. There were stockings like cobwebs, but full of holes, a silky black blouse, a red and black striped skirt, a slim underbodice without sleeves. Around his shoulders he wrapped a fleece, a sheepskin, with the wool out, as though it had been fur, then he staggered around on high-heeled red shoes. All the things were old and stained, like the clothes the aunts had given me to wear.
I told him the things weren’t very nice.
“I know,” he said. “Oh, I know. Women don’t wear clothes like these anymore. We all dress alike. Men and women. Nothing silky anymore. Nothing lacy or soft. Just these,” and he pinched up a handful of the trousers he had discarded, the harsh wrinkled fabric of them pulling up in mountain peaks beneath his fingers. “I brought the silky clothes back from a time-trip, a long time ago. When we went to take pictures of whales.”
I thought he would have liked living at Westfaire. My father wore soft things, velvets and satins. “Please take me home,” I
