Chapter 1
Beauty's head was in his hands as he looked over the ugliest cover mockup he had ever seen. No, it was the ugliest thing he'd ever seen. Ever. Thirteen billion years of ugly things, and this took the crown.
How did this happen? How did this pretentious garbage—a group of poorly lit, bored-looking models with swords and shields recreating some Rubens painting—come out of the design department of the most successful fashion magazine in the world? Print was dying, and Beauty knew full well that if he weren't a god, Z Magazine would be bleeding out with the rest of its competitors. Instead, Z was adding subscribers every day, raking in advertising dollars, and drawing New York's top design talent to beg at its doors for part-time work. And this was how they thanked him for it: with a puerile treatment of the sort of real art these clowns wouldn't recognize if it walked up and yanked off their earrings. Although he'd never understood what people saw in Rubens anyway. The guy was just another Counter-Reformationist hack, and he'd had the worst breath of anyone Beauty had ever met.
He stood up. Taking a deep breath, he let his eyes draw slowly away from the mockup, across his polished onyx desk, and over the length of his office. This room, at least, looked good, and it calmed him down immediately. It stretched just far enough from the tall obsidian doors to the single enormous window to be impressive, but not ostentatious. It was spare—off-white walls with subtly blue recessed lights, no furniture apart from his desk and chair—but not sterile, thanks to the small frameless canvases on the wall that provided punchy bursts of hot colors. Aside from the mockup, his desk contained nothing but an angular glass teardrop on a squat base that read "Z Magazine, 2011 Winner for Excellence in Fashion Journalism." The award was only one of dozens that Z had received over the years, of course, but it would be gauche to display more than one. And they were all more than six months old anyway.
As Beauty watched the sunlight gleam on the award's pointed tip, he felt a sudden, ominous shudder of unease.
He shook his head angrily. Stupid sudden ominous shudders of unease. They'd been bothering him all week. What was going on with him, anyway? He hadn't lost any sleep from them—not that he ever actually slept—but they were really starting to get on his nerves. Up until Monday he'd been totally fine, right up until his first meeting with that journalist girl...
A low hum came from his desk. He groaned. Yet another spot of ugliness to mar his office. No matter how much he called back the engineers to make the intercom buzz more soothing, it only seemed to get more annoying each time. Sighing, he touched his fingers lightly to the side of the desk. "Yes, Rosalyn?"
"Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Bonda, but your nine o' clock is here." Rosalyn's voice was affectless, like always, Beauty noted with annoyance. Everything sounded irritating to him right now.
"Thank you," he said, and pulled his hands up to his temples. He took another deep breath and sat back down in his chair. He allowed his eyes to fall on the terrible, terrible mockup again, but didn't actually look at it. Instead he pictured that wonderful globular cluster he'd put together a few billion years earlier. Good memories.
Five minutes later—Rosalyn made sure to always keep visitors waiting at least five minutes—the obsidian doors opened. Cool light streamed in from the austere white waiting room. He didn't look up from the mockup, but watched from the corner of his eye as Rosalyn supported the door with her thin frame, keeping it open just far enough to let the journalist girl pass while making her feel too wide to do so. When the girl did squeeze through, Rosalyn wordlessly marched back out. Beauty could see her snap back into her seat behind that huge stainless steel desk of hers before the door shut and left him alone with his guest.
Thirty seconds later—Beauty made sure to always wait at least thirty seconds before looking up—he looked up. The journalist girl was standing there with a polite smile, already holding her little notepad expectantly, just like the last time she'd been there. He still couldn't remember her name, but he knew her face right away. Rounded edges, light brown skin, indistinct cheekbones, and a somewhat flat nose, all framed by curly dark hair. It was the kind of face that no one else would remember for an instant; it blended into crowds and didn't stick out long enough to be memorable. But Beauty did remember it, because it looked like his own. Not as good as his, of course, but similar enough, in that it made it impossible to pin down her race. She might have been black, Hispanic, Southeast Asian, or a combination of all three, with some Caucasian blood thrown in just for further confusion.
Beauty didn't like that. Until recently he and the rest of the gods were the only humanoids on the planet, pretty much, who enjoyed such ethnic ambiguity. Knowledge had said it was best for her little study if they took on the widest possible mix of human attributes, but to Beauty, all that mattered was that it kept them apart from the human rabble. But that was before steam engines and plane travel and the sudden onset of a global culture. Now these apes could jet around the world and mix their ethnicities into a great big human soup, and if left to their own devices, they'd all look like this girl in a few hundred years. That wouldn't do at all. What they needed was a big plague or nuclear war or something, just enough to kick them back technologically by a millennium and keep their cultures separated for a while. He'd have to propose that to the other gods at some point. Ideally when Compassion wasn't around.
Beauty smiled. "Good morning..." What was her name again?
"Adriana," she said, still smiling back at him. "Thank you for meeting with me again."
"It's my pleasure, Adriana." He stood up slowly. "I have to confess, though, I'm not sure what more we have to cover." He smiled the tight smile he loved; it was neither warm nor cold, and no one could ever tell if it was genuine, which gave people around him that nice little edge of nervousness he enjoyed. Then he took his first real look at the girl, and he nearly dropped it.
What the hell was she wearing? Those patterned white pants with that fitted red top and pointed black heels—did she think that was what people wore in offices like this? Sure, it wasn't awful, but he almost would have preferred awful to something so bland and safe. The clothes didn't even fit her properly; she'd clearly been the gym a good deal, probably hoping to lose some weight, but she was building muscle instead and didn't seem to realize it. Well, the outfit did. Even worse, it was nearly identical to an ensemble they'd featured in their February issue. Of the previous year. This mousy journalist was playing dress-up using an ancient relic of his magazine. Was she trying to impress him? It was almost insulting.
Beauty had already paused too long, and was doubly annoyed that she had made him lose his rhythm. He kept the smile on his face and pressed on. "I think we really ran the gamut of my childhood, my education, the beginnings of the magazine; pretty much my whole history. I'm worried that I've run out of things to say about myself."
"All your material so far has been really helpful," she said, grinning. There was no sign she was picking up on Beauty's annoyance, although something was odd about her grin. There was a sort of sharpness to it. "But like you've said, we've only really covered your history. It's the future that I'm really here to write about."
Beauty nodded, turning away from the offending outfit and fixing his gaze on the wall. "I think we did go over some of my plans for the fall issues..."
"I know that, sir," she said, cutting him off. Beauty almost flinched. "But I think there's a whole story behind your plans, and it goes way beyond your fall issues. Those plans have to come from a vision—I mean your whole unique way of seeing the world. I don't think Z Magazine would be the institution that it is if it wasn't driven by that. That vision of yours," she tapped her pen against the notepad, "that's what I still can't quite put into words."
Beauty strolled around the edge of his desk, smirking. Sure, little girl, I'd be happy to distill my eons of experience into a few tidy quotes for your article. Would you like any more ancient divine wisdom with that? "Well, Adriana, it wouldn't be good business sense for me to go giving my secrets away, would it?"
"Mr. Bonda, no one's going to steal your gift just by reading about it. All I want is a little hint of what it's like to see through your eyes. Just a glimmer. That's all I'd need."
"Well, if you're looking for a hook..."
"Not just a hook. If this article is going to really capture you, it needs something deeper. Something...well, at the risk of sounding cheesy, a soul."
Beauty laughed. Risk indeed. He continued his stroll along the perimeter of the room, taking in the nice things, avoiding looking at her.
"I told you how much I used to read Z when I was in college, right? There was just a...sense I got when I opened those pages, that it was nothing like anything else on the shelves. I never realized fashion could mean so much. More than just looking pretty, you know. There was almost a virtue to it, the way you presented it. That feeling is what I want the readers to feel when they read this. If I can just put that into words..."
Beauty glanced at her again, in spite of himself. Her outfit had not improved with the last thirty seconds of age, and only now did he notice her hair...ugh, what beastly array of shampoos and conditioners and gels had she scavenged together to create that display? How could it look so curly and so limp at the same time? She'd pulled it back into a ponytail, but a lot of hair had resisted the move, and stuck out haphazardly in all directions.
Then he looked at her eyes, and their barely contained adoration brought him back to what she had just been saying. He thought about this for a moment. Maybe he ought to feel sorry for the girl. She'd been reading his magazine for years, and had learned just enough to be dangerous, to make all the wrong decisions because she had glimpsed someone else's brilliance and believed she could imitate it. And now here she was, trying to take some piece of his glory and shape it into a little shining work of her own, and deep down she had to know what a sham it was. For a moment he felt bad. But then, wasn't it greedy of her to imitate him in the first place? Wasn't there something wrong about this whole species trying to be like the gods? Sure, they didn't know he was a god, but they must have sensed it on some deeper level.
"I certainly can't fault you for a lack of ambition," said Beauty evenly. He'd let her down gently; he was feeling nicer now. "But my vision, as you call it...if I could put it into words, I'd be a poet. If I could put it into music, I'd be a composer. I could be those things, but I'd need to start with a different vision altogether. My vision, this vision, is all right there on the page; turn it into words, and part of it is going to die."
The girl nodded eagerly. She probably thought what he was saying was his vision. Well, good, let her think she got a scoop.
"When I look at the world, I see it as it is, by which I mean, I see what it could be." Beauty glanced around the room, his eyes tracing over the floor and coming to rest on the narrow strip of carpet that ran the length of its center. Hmm. It didn't really work, so he blinked it out of existence, leaving bare wood in its place. "In a sense, the future is the true present, because the true present is potential."
In the corner of his eye, he saw the girl shift. She had no idea that there had ever been a carpet in the room. Somehow he never got tired of that effect, and he chuckled quietly. Between that little moment of fun, the fact that the room now looked much better, and the surprisingly eloquent words he was dishing out, Beauty's mood had greatly improved.
"Potential is life. Stasis is death. But that's just the beginning, Adriana. The vision can't be just potential, because potential has to become something real, something solid."
The girl scratched something onto her notepad. Beauty was really on a roll; he was actually glad someone was writing it down. He found himself walking faster now, turning and crossing the room diagonally as the girl followed. "But the solid is the flawed. What begins as a perfect idea can't hold on to its perfection in the physical. That's because the idea is all potential, all present, and the solid is all stasis, all past."
It was crazy to think he'd been in such a foul mood earlier. He knew exactly what he was talking about; it was miles over this poor human's head, but it still felt good to say it. "The only way, then, is to embrace the flaw. Flaws can be fixed, improved. They are potential. Thus as an editor my hand must be delicate. I cannot guide my staff, my photographers, or the designers themselves with something as vulgar as instructions. Instructions are solid, and they're flawed. I don't guide like a tour guide, walking backwards, blabbering pointlessly. 'This is this thing. This is what you are looking at.' No. I guide like a star guides a ship at sea."
Beauty spun around and walked back toward his desk. The teardrop-shaped award seemed to gleam even brighter now—like the star, like him. The girl was still following behind him, but he barely noticed her at this point. "The magazine is that ship, the world is that sea. They work by my light, and they see by my light."
He stopped before the window, his hands folded behind his back. Outside, the shadow of a cloud crept over the Manhattan skyline.
The girl spoke quietly behind him, a strange terseness in her voice. "So...only you can truly see that light reflected back? Because it's your light?"
"Well, it's my light..."
At that moment the cloud covered the sun completely and its light fell away. The recessed lighting above the window was visible now, cascading down on Beauty like a halo. His reflection gleamed back at him from the window. Now that was a face—strong and angular at the edges but wonderfully smooth at the cheeks and forehead. That was an outfit—a vibrant green shirt, pinstriped grey vest, and matching slacks, the perfect counterpoint of classic and daring. That was the vast gulf between him and the poor hapless journalist behind him. It was an image of absolute perfection. This simple girl would never understand that, but those were the breaks.
His voice seemed very far away to him; it was light, almost weightless. "Yes. I think that sums it up."
He felt the beginnings of another shudder of unease.
Then the girl's reflection appeared alongside his. It could not have been more different: her jaw was set in a tight grimace, her teeth bared, the adoration in her eyes replaced by a savage anger. The teardrop award was clutched tightly in her hand. Beauty's mouth dropped open in shock. Then he was dragged backward with a gasp, and the window showed nothing.