Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper

seemed to have forgotten whatever had bothered him before, and I did not ask him what the trouble had been.
    In the days that followed, I grew to know the untaste of the biscuits and the boundaries of the tiny room all too well. It had many folding places in it: a folding place to wash, a folding place to relieve oneself, folding places to store things. The bed slid into a pocket, the table slid into another pocket, each thing became something else. Bill went away each day, telling me to stay out of sight. He locked the door behind him and unlocked it when he returned. There was no window. I complained of this, and he told me the room was deep inside a great redoubt; windows would merely have looked into other rooms. There were no windows anywhere, he said, for there was nothing for them to see but more rooms and more rooms. He taught me to use the screen, instead, and gave me a great pile of "documentaries" he had helped make. They made my head hurt, but I watched them nonetheless. It was something to do. I learned to understand the language of the place that way, watching the images on the screen as they flowed and danced. It was my own language, more or less, though strangely changed. Often it was easier to understand the printed words that surged across the picture than the spoken ones.
    There were other films, as well. I could watch some of the "porno-mance" ones, but the "horro-porn" ones I could not watch. Jaybee had filmed some of them. I threw them down the disposal chute, but every few days more were delivered from the supply chute. There was no end to them, each one full of pain and blood. I learned very soon there was nothing beautiful in that place. Even the things they watched were not beautiful. There was no contrast between beauty and ugliness. There was only ugliness.
    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