tessagratton: hanginggardenstories: IT DOESN’T WORK ON HUMAN GIRLS by Tessa Gratton They
tessagratton:hanginggardenstories:IT DOESN’T WORK ON HUMAN GIRLS by Tessa GrattonThey say if one bathes in the cave spring of the smallest moon in the System of Illumination’s Wealth, one’s inner beauty will be revealed. Nothing else about the system suggests beauty: it has a dull sun, as suns go, and only two planets, but each of them has seventeen moons. The tiniest orbits the inner planet: a delicate white and greenish marble hanging against the stars. Folk come from across the galaxy to dive beneath the misty surface, and while there have been times only the most spectacularly rich could afford the bath, a recent decree from the holy council of the current galactic heptarchy forbade putting any price on inner beauty beyond a simple iron penny. (Or so the Attendant has been taught, and beyond that understands she is not to worry herself over politics or money. She has food, she has her lightsilk robes, she has the tender music of honeycomb winds, and she has a never-ending parade of company.)“They choose human girls to tend the spring because the waters don’t work on your kind,” Mar the Sly told her five years ago, as they tucked themselves against the cool cavern walls while the party he’d guided here wailed laments in a seething language (the person who’d submerged themself reappeared with boils of putrid violet instead of lips when they climbed dripping free of the spring).She’d studied the alien Mar, rather entranced by the opalescent sheen of his large eyes, and said, “And you’re not brave enough to try,” for she did not like the look of the rest of him. Prehensile whiskers rippled away from sharp red cheeks and though the ropes of pale pink slicked away from his face looked like hair, they were not. Mar laughed, a lilting whisper, and said, “I like you, little girl.”The Attendant had not complained: she’d been only eleven at the time. And when there were no pilgrims, she dipped her toes into the spring. It was warm and clear, sweet smelling. Everyone murmured when they arrived that it smelled like roses or peaches or arliphs or to the Flischers of Rams Moon, like the dampest grains of rootfood. (“That’s mud,” Mar teased her when she asked.)The Attendant did not know the smell of roses or peaches or arliphs, but mud she had aplenty, and so she realized that beauty is different to different people. It was not only human girls who could not discern the tastes and flavors of alien beauty. And so what is beauty? she would think to herself, alone, her toes swirling waves into the warm water. She leaned back and stared up through the pock-marked roof of the cave, a honeycomb of stone, through which she could see stars. (Thermals from the spring had lifted columns of steam for millennia, chewing up at the cavern ceiling, finally venting free. Fans drew most of the mist away now, gathering it in wide glass bulbs to condense and be sold across the galaxy in lotions and creams.)Nothing happened to her toes, even when they grew so heavy with springwater her skin softened and wrinkled. So Mar the Sly probably was correct: the waters did not work on human girls. Every day pilgrims arrived, and every day they transformed. Folk who appeared lovely to the attendant’s eyes emerged cracked or scarred, but laughing and joyous. Folk who frightened her by the knives of their teeth or extra-jointed legs or spindly eye-stalks that never gazed away from her, as if they would devour her if she were not the Attendant; these might dip into the pool and be reborn too pretty for her to ignore. Less often, there was no discernible change, for the person to swim already matched their hearts in how they appeared.(Philosophers and scholars argued about what beauty is and what the spring means, often in tones meant to challenge each other to leap deep into the spring. Is beauty visually quantifiable? Atomic? Detectable by radiation-sensors or is it the presence of divinity? Can it be all of these things, only defined by time and culture and power? How does the springwater draw so quickly this essential nature from within beings who themselves cannot comprehend? The scholars and learned folk do not think the Attendant understands the nuance of their arguments, but when she knows their language she does. She understands most of what those older or stranger than her discuss, but because she’s the Attendant she never disabuses them of their underestimation. She knows smatterings of most languages, fluent in only the Tongue of Sharing, Celiok, and a traders’ dialect of the Crown Speech of the Galactic Navy that Mar said she should learn. That one slips around her teeth strangely, and when she speaks it to Mar, he makes his lilting laugh and insists that in three hundred Martian years he’s never heard a more delightful accent.)The Attendant didn’t realize she’d begun to make up her mind about beauty until two sleek-skinned Orkanese gentlemen battled each other over which did not need the springwater—they’d come to face it, to face themselves, to prove they were not so conceited as to seek further beauty. It was an Orkanese rite to face one’s greatest weakness before earning adult status on their home world, and these two gentlemen in their lightsilk gowns and elaborate braids and sparkling powder on lips and lashes and the palms of their hands knew in their hearts they were that conceited. When one sliced open the other’s throat with the blade of a lacewing fan, blood arced in a sheer scarlet burst. It seemed to hang in the air, red stars, and some landed on the back of the Attendant’s hand. She made no expression, but stared at the blood fallen into the spring: instead of bursting, diffusing, it clung together in globules of dark red, and the surface of the spring shivered. One of the gentlemen collapsed; the other fell to their knees and gripped the smooth stone edge of the spring, staring as the Attendant stared. The spring-swallowed blood rose, bubbling to the surface again, and when it reached air, broke open to spill like a puddle: silver and red and glittering. “Look at the beauty of your sibling’s blood,” the Attendant murmured, and the living gentlemen sobbed. They scrambled forward and fell head first into the spring. Breathless, she waited until the gentlemen stood again out of the water. They had not changed at all, but took their fan and cut their own sleek skin open: everywhere their blood dripped into the spring, it became red starlight. The Attendant brought towels and fresh tea, cleaned what she could, and for the first time in her life considered what beauty was inside her. If she cut her hand, would her blood be just as beautiful?“What is beauty?” she asked the next pilgrim to arrive, blocking the entrance. The Send’le priest said, “Perfect balance.”She allowed him to enter, and asked the next pilgrim, and the next, growing more desperate every day. “Hair like fire and black teeth,” said one, and another answered, “a sunrise over the storm cliffs.” “Love.” “No, only love between parent and child.” “It is not emotion, it is truth.” “Purity!”They all were answers she’d heard before. What is beauty? she asked herself at night, panting and unable to sleep, holding up her skinny hand as if she could see through it to the blood and bones. (Her toes skimmed the water.)“Do I look the same as I always did?” she asked Mar the Sly. “Your eyes are darker and your hair knotted and you have breasts but did not before. Only two of them, a pity. Humans must reproduce in small batches.”The Attendant narrowed her eyes at him. “But I’m ugly.”“Everything is ugly here,” he said, slyly. She huffed a sigh and shoved him away. And she did not stop asking. “What is beauty?” What is beauty? She studied the ones who dove in, before and after, the ones who needed cajoling and those who never hesitated. She wished they all would bleed, or laugh, or be tender. Surprise her. That is when she felt nearest to an answer. “What is beauty?” she demanded. “Inner or outer?” asked a female Amon and her genderless sib. The Attendant feel silent, wondering if there was a difference. If the springs could draw inner beauty to the surface, transform it into outer, at least there had to be a relationship between the two. She stood aside to allow the siblings to pass. Across moon-phases, the Attendant became lethargic. Beauty’s attendant, but unable to grasp the fundamental nature of her purpose. The dull sun glowed silvery light through the honeycomb cavern, playing against the still surface of the spring, and the Attendant did not hear the approach of this dawn pilgrim. “What is beauty?” she asked herself aloud, touching her mouth, touching her tangled hair. Was she beautiful? Hands grasped her shoulders and gently turned her. A human stood before her, broad and flat-chested, with a hard jaw and delicate nose, waving black hair like her own (but combed and oiled). “Let’s find out,” they said. They kissed her, and she tasted smoke and a bitter spice, but warmth, too, and her skin tingled in delicate places. She was surprised, and surprise balanced her on a precipice of understanding. The human lifted her onto her toes. Let’s find out, they’d said. They tossed her into the spring. The splash crushed her ears, and warm-sweet water enveloped her. She floated. Her eyes opened, burning with the touch of the spring. Her vision sparkled, her heartbeat overwhelmed her, beating hard and loud and ecstatic. The Attendant’s mind reeled. Was this beauty? This feeling? Overwhelming and awful and bliss? Could anything be beautiful if you shifted your perspective, if you looked differently, felt differently? Slide close enough and beauty is splitting atoms; draw far, far, far enough away and even a planet is a pearl?When she slipped to the surface, when she flowed to the edge, the Attendant lifted herself onto the stone lip. Water streamed off her, and she held out her hands. She could see through the flesh to bones; she blinked and it was skin again. The human waited, shoulders hunched, but head tilted in curiosity. She thought of a glittering arc of blood, and knew that was their only beauty. They were nothing to her. Out through the corridors of rock she went, ignoring a few willowy pine folk and a trio of billowing women in heptarch colors. Ignoring, too, her few belongings. She stepped out into the dull afternoon, where the plain sun shone in simple rays of silver and cream against a landing strip. There was a flat, spiky red ship and lounging under a tarp Mar the Sly. The Attendant walked to him, dripping a trail of water. He lifted his hairless eyebrow and one of his whiskers plucked a toothpick out of his lips, holding it aside for him to say, “Attendant.”“Are there beautiful things out there?” she fluttered a hand in a vague gesture at the entire galaxy. Mar clomped his grav-stabilizing boots onto the plast of the landing strip. Leaning toward her, he peered into her face, and then raised a hand to pinch a tendril of dripping dark hair off her shoulder. He released it and it slapped back against her. “Beautiful things everywhere, but in three hundred years I’ve not seen anything quite like this.”“It wasn’t the waters that changed me,” she whispered. “I told you,” he said, always sly. “The waters don’t work on human girls.”Tessa Gratton is the author of the Blood Journals Series and Gods of New Asgard Series, co-author of YA writing books The Curiosities and The Anatomy of Curiosity, as well as dozens of short stories available in anthologies and on merryfates.com. Though she’s lived all over the world, she’s finally returned to her prairie roots in Kansas with her wife. Her current projects include Tremontaine at Serial Box Publishing, her 2018 YA fantasy Strange Grace from McElderry, and her adult fantasy debut, The Queens of Innis Lear, coming in 2018 from Tor. She is the associate director of Madcap Retreats. Visit her online: Website | Twitter | Tumblr| InstagramPRE-ORDER your copy today: Amazon | B&N | IndieboundJust a little weird story I wrote for @dhonielleclayton about beauty in an alien bathhouse. You DEFINITELY want to pre-order her book, coming out next week! -- source link