ARTISTIC LICENSE

By Carrie Richerson

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura …

—Dante, Inferno, Canto I

THE CLIFF FACE WAS GIVING me trouble. I teased out another curl of the stiff, brittle basalt — stretching, stretching … and winced in pain as it snapped back on me. Damn. I rubbed my aching head. Serves me right, my old art school professor would have said. Patience, Antonia, patience! he would chide. You must work with the material, not against it. Yeah, right.

My theory, on the other hand, has always been, If at first you don’t succeed, try a bigger hammer. I visualized a very large hammer. WHAM! Shocked grains aligned and surrendered themselves to pliability. That’s more like it, I thought as I pulled the rock, no more resistant than thick taffy now, into a tube shape.

Of course, this “taffy” was part of several hundred thousand tons of cliff, and any mistake on my part would bring it all thundering down around my sunburned ears. Or fuse my ganglia into lumpy porridge if I lost my focus. I slapped away a mosquito the size of a small hummingbird, pushed my sweat-spiked hair back out of my eyes, and worked my way with intense care along the row of basalt columns, hollowing some into tubes, leaving others in their natural state. When finished, if I did my job right, my olympian wind flute would be indistinguishable from the natural cliff face—until the wind blew. Then it would yield everything from soft whistling to organ thunder— and maybe the voice of the god herself, in a really big blow.

The prospect of that caliber of sound rattling my client from his bed some night was almost enough to make me cheerful. I had nothing against Lane Forrestal — except that he was rich, handsome, privileged, and had about as much aesthetic sensibility as the rock I was goosing. He’d hired me to transform a square mile of northwest Georgia hills into a pocket Tahiti— and he was giving me free rein to embellish the project any way I wanted. Fine. For as much money as I was charging him, he could have his ecological joke — and I’d indulge a little whimsy of my own. Forrestal had wanted the best landscape Artist in the world; he didn’t even flinch at my price or my stipulations. It didn’t help my opinion of him that he’d been so aristocratically nice about it.

I was halfway along the cliff when the back of my brain began to itch. I knew without turning around that my audience was back. Every day for the last week, she’d been watching me from the veranda of Forrestal’s mansion. She must have had more than a touch of Talent herself for me to be so sensitive to her presence, but she wasn’t trained and didn’t know how to shield herself. She probably wasn’t even aware she was leaking, but I couldn’t afford the distraction. I had hoped she would lose interest after a day or so, but it was clear now that I would have to have a talk with her, whoever she was.

I stabilized the cliff and shut down. I needed a break anyway. My back and knees ached and my sweat-soaked clothing was plastered to me and itched in all the most inconvenient places. Georgia in July was not as hot as my home in the west Texas desert, but the humidity was like a huge, wet, panting dog sitting on my shoulders and slobbering down the back of my neck. I’d been working on this project for three months now, I’d fallen into hyacinth bogs, been slapped in the face by rhododendron branches, stumbled through briars and poison ivy, been bitten by leeches, ticks, and coral snakes — and it was still the humidity that I hated the worst. I was starting to mildew in the thick terpene haze that smothered the forested hills every day.

One of the estate’s small army of gardeners was watering a coleus bed under a nearby oak, so I stepped into the shade to see if he would let me drink from the hose.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said politely, handing it over. I’ve been called many things in my life — bitch, monster, whoreticulturalist (that last was quite inventive, I thought) — but “ma’am” was a new one for me. While I rehydrated he mopped his streaming face with a bandana and tried not to let me catch him staring. Pity and curiosity warred in his face, and curiosity won. I was glad it wasn’t pity. I hate pity.

To distract him from his inventory of my physical defects, I jerked a thumb in the direction of my observer, not caring if she saw. “Who’s the old lady?”

He looked pained at my failure to show a hireling’s proper measure of respect. “That’s Mr. Forrestal’s great-aunt, ma’am. She visits him every summer, says it’s cooler here than in New York.” New York must be Hell, I thought. He continued, “Miz Holzman — Beatrice Holzman. Perhaps you’ve heard of her, ma’am ?” The mild sarcasm might have been his revenge for having to consort with a mutant, but he was richly compensated by the stunned look on my face. He took the hose back from me, chuckling, and moved off to water another bed, leaving me to contemplate my doom.

The Beatrice Holzman? No wonder Forrestal had money to burn. And the woman who had replaced Croesus as the standard by which the culturally illiterate measured wealth, had taken an interest in me. Oh my. It is complications like this that keep soaking the rich from being the painlessly profitable profession it should be.

My mood grew fouler as I stumped up the terraces to confront her. Steps are not easy on my twisted, four-and-a-half-foot frame. Holzman watched my approach with an effortless stillness. It was obvious she was used to waiting for people to come to her. It must have been only a question of how long it would be before I took the bait.

She didn’t flinch away from my appearance, and her face didn’t take on that frozen look of a person trying not to betray disgust or horror. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her dark glasses, but the tiny movements of her head told me she was studying me from top to bottom. My father used to say that my face was a map of his Italian birthplace: the Tuscan Apennines of ropy tissue curving across my left temple, the wine-dark stain spreading across my right cheek the Ligurian Sea, the Arno splitting my face like a scar, and Florence, beloved Firenze, in the middle. He liked my nose. I let Beatrice Holzman explore the map of my face while I studied her in turn.

Before age had stooped her, she had owned the raw-boned height and sturdiness of her sharecropper’s heritage. Her frizzy white hair was gathered under a floppy sun hat, and she wore long sleeves, even in this heat, to cover the pale blotches on her arms. Large, gnarled hands, showing a tracery of blue veins against the faded mahogany skin, clasped one another quietly in her lap. Her face, like mine, was a life-map. Deep wrinkles creased the drooping cheeks, and her nose, as hooked as a harriet’s beak, was crooked by some old injury. That chin had never retreated, that jaw had never known surrender. There was nothing beautiful about the face that had graced the covers of dozens of financial and news magazines, but no picture could convey the sense of power that radiated from her.

Then she took off her sunglasses, and I was ambushed. A web of fine wrinkles, as delicate as the crazing in dark, old porcelain, netted twin chunks of improbable frost-shot blue, edged with green — like one of the icebergs Frederick Church so loved to paint. The effect was one of simultaneous clarity and depth, something I’d like to capture in a landscape someday. Maybe a great sculpted glacier… .

I never had a chance. I think I fell in love on the spot.

A lifetime’s practice in reading people, augmented by her trace of Talent, must have told her of the effect she was having on me. The crow’s feet around her eyes crinkled; it was the only sign of her amusement, but it was enough to break the spell. I snapped back into myself and felt my face grow hot with anger and embarrassment. She wasn’t the only control freak on that veranda; I hate feeling that vulnerable. I glared my resentment at her and turned to leave.

She stopped me with two words: “I apologize.” She didn’t sound like she had much practice at apologizing. “Please forgive my bad manners, Miss Ligeri. I sometimes forget there are ways to deal with people other than manipulation.” What did she want so badly that she was willing to be so humble? Or was the humility just part of the manipulation ? I turned around, curious and wary. “I have a business proposition to discuss with you. Will you sit?”

Someone had thoughtfully provided a footstool to help me into the adjacent chair. I sat. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe that was Holzman’s Talent: to convince people that her ideas were their ideas. Simple. Effective. I summoned all my defenses and sat there as prickly as a hedgehog.

She didn’t waste time offering me a mint julep or iced tea, or asking my opinion of the weather or her great-nephew. With the same calm assurance with which she had conquered Wall Street and the Bourse, she got right to the point.

“I wish to commission you to do my Portrait, Miss Ligeri. I am prepared to pay you ten million dollars.”

I smiled and relaxed. Forrestal was only paying me five. Ten rail is a lot of pocket change to kiss off, but all I felt was relief. My tone was positively cheerful as I replied, “Sorry, Ms. Holzman. You have me confused with some other Artist. I don’t do Portraits — just Landscapes …”

“I have done my homework on you, Miss Ligeri. We would not be having this conversation otherwise.” She sounded disappointed that I would think her such a novice. “Years ago you did Portraits that were world-famous. Then you stopped. I want you to do one more.”

One more or a dozen — it didn’t matter. The great thing about the past is that it is past. I stood up. “Not interested, Ms. Holzman. In your money or your commission. Good day.” Outraged dignity is difficult to telegraph with legs as short as mine, but I gave it my best shot as I turned my back on the icebergs and stalked back to the tropics.

A BLUE-GREEN LAGOON and sandy beach to reinforce the tropical island illusion. Twin hundred-foot waterfalls splashing down one end of my basalt cliff, creating a perpetual rainbow in their combined sprays. Behind one waterfall, a grotto spiraling in upon itself like a stone nautilus, to end in a slender chimney that climbed through the rock into the bowl of an ancient cinder cone, which formed the “island’s” backbone.

I melted the bones of the hills and made them flow from here to there, straightened a crooked valley, rerouted drainages. Day after day I slogged through the heat and the sucking red clay to realize Forrestal’s tropical vision and nail solid a reputation for myself that should keep me in commissions for a long time. Forrestal might have more money than sense, but I had a local monopoly on hubris.

It took a lot of hubris. Also patience, sweat, the occasional blood and tears, and a singularity of concentration that left me limp at the end of each day. If Forrestal’s kitchen staff hadn’t sent dinner to my cabin every night (I’d refused a suite in the plantation-style mansion), I might have starved to death.

One July night I sat on the porch of my cabin, too tired to eat my moussaka, too tired to get out of the chair and go to bed. Heat lightning flickered to the west, but overhead a full moon blazed down on Forrestal’s estate, silvering the lawns and terraces. Moths battered themselves against the screen door, avid for the light I’d left on inside. The dizzying sweetness of the honeysuckle and gardenia clotted the damp air, and a raucous choir of cicadas almost drowned out the surf of conversations and laughter from the Big House. Forrestal was throwing a party. Make that a Party. I’d been invited, of course. I’d declined with what I thought was an admirable amount of civility, considering that I was sure I was only invited so Forrestal could show off his resident Artist.

I drowsed and watched lightning glittering in the distant clouds, and the earthly glitterati — the rich, the powerful, the celebrated—circulating from ballroom and dining room to terrace and veranda. They clumped, twined, separated, recombined — the dance of the social genome to the silent but compelling strains of power, wealth, and sex. And Forrestal would have thrown me into that septic stew, to see what mutations I would catalyze.

A soft knock on the porch rail roused me. “May I join you, Miss Ligeri?” Beatrice Holzman stood at the foot of the steps. “I brought you something.” She waved two glasses and a decanter half-full of something palely golden.

I laughed, charmed in spite of myself. “Come on up.” I moved my unfinished dinner from the small table at my elbow and brought another chair from inside. If I drank I wouldn’t be able to work the next day. “I’ll drink with you, but don’t think you can bribe me with single-malt scotch.”

Beatrice nodded approvingly. “Don’t worry — I only offer bribes when I know they will work. My nephew has excellent taste in liquor, if not his guest list. I was bored. I hoped you might still be awake.”

My sleepiness had vanished. She poured, we clicked glasses. “Your health, Ms. Holzman.”

She was dressed in something quietly elegant and very expensive, and I blinked when she flipped off her shoes and put her feet up on the porch railing. “If we are going to drink together, you must call me Beatrice. And how shall I address you? Antonia?”

“Tonia.”

“Then, Tonia, you should know that at my age— I am ninety— health is relative. But thank you for the thought.”

It was more than a thought. I’d taken a peek as soon as she sat down -it’s a reflex. She was in very good condition, the result no doubt of being able to afford the best medical care money could buy. But diagnostic imagers have their limitations: I had already spotted two incipient malignancies in her upper colon. With the same reflex I started to reach in to destroy them, then stopped myself. Too dangerous in my exhausted state. Anyway, they were unlikely to cause her trouble anytime soon.

We listened to the cicadas and whip-poor-wills without speaking for a time. The liquor was smooth, heat without fire, and I felt more relaxed than I had in a long time. Beatrice wasn’t trying to bribe me; she was using her Talent to disarm me, to break down my defenses.

As if at the thought, she refilled our glasses. “What is it like, Tonia -having that power?” They always ask, eventually. They can’t help it.

“You should know. There is nothing I can tell you about power. You’ve bought the power to make more change in the world than I’ll ever accomplish. But that’s not the question you really meant to ask.”

“It isn’t ?”

“No. What you really want to know is what is it like to be me. To be a freak.” My control techniques aren’t as subtle as Beatrice’s, but they work.

Except on her. She was silent for a moment, but when she spoke there was neither pity nor shame in her voice. “Is that how you think of yourself — as a freak?”

I felt an attack of mulishness coming on. “No, sometimes I think I’m the only normal person in a world of unTalented, obscenely attractive giants!” Bitter, bitter. Who died and left my heart so bitter?

The genuine amusement in her laughter banished serf-pity from the map. I should not play poker with someone better at it than I am. The cost of losing could be too high: my wary independence, my fragile dignity. My heart. I did not want to lose my heart to someone just because she treated me as an equal.

It was part of her strategy, I reassured myself. And with the thought came another, blooming through the alcohol’s glow. “You arranged all this, didn’t you?” I waved at the dim bulk of my creation, crouched like an immense beast at the foot of the lawn. “An audition, dammit!”

“No. That might work with another Artist, but not with you.” She was calm in the face of my anger. “Lane’s Landscape was a convenient coincidence. I merely made sure he knew that you were the best Artist to be had. His ego did the rest.” She looked toward the mansion, her face unreadable. “I haven’t told him about the Portrait yet.”

She turned back to me. “I’ll admit that I’ve enjoyed the chance to watch you work, but not because I needed any assurance of your competence. From the moment I decided to have my Portrait done, I knew who I wanted to do it. I’ve met many of your subjects— Sabrina Herzog the young du Pont, the Baroness Kreusze. You are the best.”

She said it as though she thought she was entitled to the best, but I’ve seen money do that to people. Was the best, you mean. There are a half-dozen hotshot Portrait Artists out there now who might be better than I ever was. They’d love your commission. And your money.” This time I refilled the glasses.

“Why did you stop?”

“I thought you said you’d done your homework.”

“I know that one of your clients died. A daughter of some minor European nobility. The inquest ruled death from natural causes — a heart attack. Why did you blame yourself?”

I’d spent years trying to put it behind me. Now it felt like something that had happened to someone else. But if it happened to someone else, why did it still hurt me so much? “Marthe Gault-Sauvage. Her family wanted to pretty her up, marry her off to some prince charming. No one bothered to tell me about her congenital heart condition.” They didn’t have to; I’d spotted it on her first visit.

I must have been drunk by then; I’d never talked about it before. “A Portrait puts a lot of stress on the body.” True. “Her heart couldn’t take it. She arrested and there was nothing I could do but call an ambulance.” Not exactly true. “I was responsible for her death, no matter what the coroner said.”

Now that was the truth. God help me, I’d been trying to fix that very congenital condition when she started to fibrillate. I’d worked frantically, but everything I did just made that twitchy muscle spasm harder. Of course, I didn’t tell the coroner that. A little ventricular fib; a big dead lie.

Marthe might have been homely in her parents’ and her own eyes, but to me her face was full of kindness and laughter. I’d liked her. And then I’d killed her, whoring my Talent out to the quest for cosmetic perfection. And I, of all people, should know better.

I had forgotten Beatrice was there, until she spoke. “So. A tragic accident, yes, Antonia Ligeri.” Her tone was as dry and pitiless as my desert home at high noon. “And for that accident you have turned your back on the best part of your Art. You have trusted neither yourself nor your Talent. Now you play with mud pies. It is safe enough, I suppose. But you can do better.”

You shall know the truth by how much it hurts. And by how angry you get when you hear it. I stood up, fast, the alcohol burning a blue “TILT” in my brain, and slammed my glass down on the table. “Leave. Now.”

Beatrice didn’t move. She held my gaze with those incredible eyes for a long moment. I looked away first. “Do you want me to call a doctor?” she asked calmly.

I looked down. My glass had shattered; a long shard jutted all the way through my palm, and blood and spilt whiskey covered the table top. Only when I saw it did it begin to hurt.

“No.” I took a deep breath and reached for focus through the liquor and my roiled emotions. In just a few minutes I had blocked the pain, stopped the bleeding, and started the flesh healing itself. The glass backed its way out, the cut closing behind it.

I tossed the bloody splinter onto the table. God knew what the kitchen help would think when they came for my tray and saw that mess. I refused to care.

Beatrice had watched it all without comment. I tried for a little more dignified exit. “Thank you for the whiskey, Ms. Holzman, but I think I’ve had enough. Good night.” I let the screen door slam behind me and fell across the bed. I didn’t hear her leave.

The next day I was too hung over to work, but what the hell — even the gods took a day off once in a while. I could follow their example. I slept in.

A complete replacement of the local vegetation; rhododendrons transformed into hibiscus, Carolina jessamine and poison ivy coaxed to adopt the genetics of bougainvillaea and orchids, tall pines persuaded to stoop to adopt their new crowns of palm fronds. A vegetable excitement swept the area as more and more plants got into the spirit of the game. DNA strands unraveled and reknit themselves. Overnight an entire hillside of mixed temperate scrub would convert with religious fervor to jungleism.

And through it all, the threads of my whimsy, private jokes on Forrestal and his “art as something to hang over the couch” mentality. The black and white sands on the beach looked random, but from the air the pattern resolved into the kanji character for “mysterious island.” The ever-smaller rooms of the spiral grotto were baffled with polished plates of stone that turned the thunder of the waterfalls into a conversation that was always just on the verge of making sense; in the chimney room, a madwoman whispered to herself. A lake of scarlet bird-of-paradise in the extinct volcano’s caldera. Fanciful bird houses extruded from the living limbs of trees, saplings laced into lovers’ bowers, tiny crenelated castles built for ants.

Daily my hunger for home thickened like a taste on the back of my tongue. Finally, on the last day of August, I regarded my work and lo, it was good. On the highest point of my wind flute cliff, I smoothed a patch of rock and signed my creation: “A.E. Ligeri,”in deep, angularstrokes. Time to quit.

I collected my last payment from Forrestal and picked up my gear. Beatrice came to see me off. “The answer is still No,” I said before she could ask. She didn’t try to argue, just smiled and wished me good traveling. A face like black velvet, a voice as slow and soft as the hyacinth bogs. I didn’t want to admit, even to myself, that I was going to miss her.

Home. Mutie go home.

THE COMMERCIAL flights were the usual humiliation; attendants who patronized me with soulless courtesy, passengers who stared, or worse, made a point of not staring. The damned, disgusting pity in their eyes. I pulled a blanket over my head and pretended to sleep between flight changes.

My parents were honeymooning on Cyprus the summer that Israel finally lost all patience with the guerrillas of the Bekaa Valley and started the Six-Hour War. The wind was from the southeast. My parents were doubly lucky: they got out fast and the doctors told them their exposure had been minimal. It should have been okay for them to have children.

If I had been born in my mother’s native Greece, I might have been left on some hillside as an offering to the gods. In America my parents weren’t allowed that option. Neither was I. Some days I am not properly grateful for the miracle of my existence.

But it could have been worse. Nature, that most mischievous of gods, indulged her ironic whimsy in linking the physical malformations to psychokinetic Talent. The more severe the deformities, the stronger the Talent. So those of us who have been born with some variation of this mutation, who owe our origins to Damascus and Chernobyl and Comanche Peak, to ozone depletion and heavy metal contamination— we are compensated. And, in the end, we will have the last laugh: It’s a dominant mutation. We breed true, and there are more of us every year.

In El Paso I picked up my plane from long-term storage and headed east. Only when I had climbed above the mutagenic goo that E1 Paso-Juarez calls air did I begin to relax. I could feel the bone-dry, superheated air shriveling the Georgia mold in my pores.

I hadn’t filed an accurate flight plan, and I turned off my plane’s transponder before I banked south at Balmorhea. Every time I do that the FAA threatens to ground my ass, but I grease enough palms to keep my file relatively clean. The same passion for privacy makes sure that my mountain home appears on no map, my access codes are unlisted, and the old-fashioned mailbox down at the unpaved country road carries my mother’s name, “Eleutheria.” No one has gotten the joke yet.

A last tight turn among the weathered limestone reefs of this ancient sea, and I was home. Home to my desert, patient and forgiving of my absences, like an indulgent lover. Here I have found refuge from the casual wounds of a careless public. And here I have found the source and inspiration for all my art.

This is the ultimate Art: an utter commitment to the senses. Colors of a subtlety and range not to be believed. Silence that sings in the midnight ear. Bitter waters and sweet rocks, brimstone soil and aggressive plants. A scented night as seductive as the secrets between a woman’s thighs, followed by a sun that can pound one into the ground like the hammerstroke of doom. Above it all, the bowl of that vast, engulfing, crushing, weightless sky.

Better to bum with passion in this inferno, than to rot away in any paradise. And I never, ever, do a landscape of the desert. I am capable of recognizing perfection when I see it.

Under a sky the color of radioactive milk, I shook the dust of Forrestal and all his kin from my feet and walked through my front door. Then I slammed it behind me and told the world to go to hell.

I’d been home three weeks and was suffering through my third rainstorm. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way; I paid the NOAA meteorological Talent in Midland enough to keep me clear of this kind of climate tinkering. At least I thought so. I could see that my hard-earned Forrestal money was going to have to fund some bigger payoffs.

My mood was so foul that I ignored the doorchime when it first rang, but the prospect of getting to bite off the head of some lost tourist was cheering enough to send me raging down the hallway from my studio. I grabbed my shotgun, a requisite door-prop at every ranch west of the Pecos, to enliven the effect and flung the door open ready to commit murder.

“The desert is very beautiful. I can understand why you choose to live here.” Beatrice Holzman stood on the step, under an umbrella held by -could I believe my eyes? — Lane Forrestal. His eyebrows went up at the sight of the shotgun, but he wisely refrained from saying anything.

“The sign on the gate says ‘No Trespassing.’ How did you find me?” A copter, bearing the emblem of a Midland-Odessa rental agency, sat beside my plane at the foot of the hill. I leaned the shotgun back into the comer before I could do something silly with it, but I didn’t invite my visitors in. Being in love has never stopped me from behaving like a bitch.

Beatrice turned from regarding the view down a catenary valley that stretched blue to the end of the world. “I bribed the sheriff.”

Arliss Coupland was a wily old coot, even for a west Texas country sheriff. He had been on my payroll. He was probably halfway to the Mexican border by now; he knew if I ever caught him, I’d kill him. I remembered what Beatrice had said about offering bribes. She had enough money to bribe the entire state of Texas — to find me, to pressure me, or just to make my life miserable.

But it wasn’t the money that made me shiver with the knowledge that I was going to give in. It was the shadow of desperation marring the crystalline depths of those eyes. It was realizing that next she was going to beg, and I didn’t want to see her lower herself to that. It was understanding that I wanted to give her what she wanted. Did it matter if it was Talent or love that compelled me? Was there a difference?

Sitting in a chair in my studio, in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that pan the entire valley, she looked small, diminished by age, for the first time. “Lane, dear, why don’t you wait outside?” she said.

He crossed to her chair and knelt in front of her, gathering her ropy hands in his own manicured ones. “Please, Aunt Beatrice — don’t do this.” It had the sound of an argument he had already lost a dozen times.

She freed her hands gently and gave him a fond hug. “It will be all right, Lane. Nothing will change between us.”

He stood, shaking his head. “You’ll change,” he said sadly. When he turned to go, I saw tears in his eyes. Maybe I had been wrong about Lane Forrestal. Maybe I had been wrong about many things.

I waited until he had closed the door behind him before I spoke. “I have a price. In addition to the ten million. I want you to tell me why. Why you want this. Why now.”

She watched raindrops track down the windows as though they were the traces of old regrets. “I’m ninety years old, Tonia. I don’t anticipate having much time left in this world. I want to be beautiful for the first time in my life.” She turned and impaled me with those eyes. “Is that so hard for you to understand?”

That was a low blow. And a lie. This wasn’t really about vanity. She could have bought beauty cosmetic, surgical, or sculptural years ago. I knew what she was running from, even if she didn’t, or didn’t want to admit it. She had seen to the heart of my secret fear, but she was blind to her own. You can’t tell someone that stubborn anything. I should know. I tried anyway.

“I will do this, old woman, but we will both regret it.”

She spread her blue-veined hands in her lap, looked at them as though they were suddenly repulsive. “What do I have to lose?” she whispered.

Your nephew’s love, I thought. And my respect. But I knew at this point she wouldn’t — couldn’t — care.

I took the stills and holos I would need for planning — dressed, nude, moving, close-ups, three-sixty pan. Her body had the standard problems one would expect at her age: dowager’s hump, loose skin, sagging breast. Left only; there was an old mastectomy scar on the right. I could feel the osteoarthritis pulling at all her joints, the background level of pain she lived with day in and day out.

When she was dressed again I handed her a copy of my standard contract. “Read it. All of it. Especially the informed consent form. I guarantee nothing, I am liable for nothing. I’ll call you when I’m ready. Have your doctor book a suite at your favorite hospital. We’ll do it there.”

She looked up from studying the contract. “I want it done here.”

“No! The nearest hospital is two hundred miles from here! If you have a heart attack or stroke out on me… !”

“It seems a risk worth taking,” was all she would say. I thought of my Macedonian grandmother: a totally different physical type, but the same sense of iron will under the fragility. The sense that even the gods on Olympus couldn’t move her once her mind was made up.

I gave in finally, as she knew I would. Lane was silent, his dark face shiny with misery, as they left, and I knew I would not see him again. The rain had stopped; as Lane helped Beatrice down the steep path to the landing strip, the sun broke through the clouds and turned the entire valley to gold. By the next day it would be wall-to-mountain-wall wildflowers. A last spendthrift fling of beauty before winter’s cold and the dark.

I lay awake for hours that night, second-guessing myself. Whenever I closed my eyes I saw unraveling double helices, snarled and knotted. We are such complex organisms to have evolved from a handful of self-assembling bipolar molecules. Cells, tissues, organs, entities, environments. System within system within system — incorporated, precise, interdependent. And we just can’t stop rearranging the furniture. Look at me. (No, don’t.) I, of all people, should know better.

The desert, at least, is content to be what it is.

When I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, a scorpion stung me on the foot. I crushed it. So much for interdependence.

It was late October before Beatrice satin my studio again. I had been right about Lane; a chauffeur had brought her and her physician this time. I had the doctor waiting next door. I wanted him within earshot, but I couldn’t afford the distraction of a third party in the room.

I made Beatrice comfortable in a chair in the middle of the room and warned her that some of what I did would hurt. “Tell me if you’re in a lot of pain or if you feel something going wrong. Otherwise, don’t chat— I have to concentrate.” She nodded. I began.

I permitted myself the invasion of a delicate touch into her subcortex to release a wash of natural endorphins and sedatives. It would blunt most of her discomfort. Then I went to work on the skull and facial structure. A bone spicule stolen here, a plate shaved there, a tendon nudged to a new insertion. Sinus drainages reworked, the nose straightened, cheekbones heightened, jaw softened. A goose to slumbering collagen synthesis and hair follicles. Slack skin started to pull tight and glossy, dark hair sprang in tight curls from the scalp.

I took a break and asked Beatrice how she was holding up. “My teeth ache and my nose is running. Do you have a tissue?” she asked. A real trouper.

I had prepared a cold lunch in advance, knowing I’d need the energy but would be too tired to fix anything. While we ate, a bemused doctor examined his patient and shot me sideways looks of resentment and wonder. Beatrice ate slowly, getting used to the subtle differences in the way her tongue and jaw moved. No one seemed inclined to talk. That suited me just fine.

After the remains of lunch were cleared away, Beatrice and I settled down for a long hard afternoon. I worked my way down the spine, repairing discs and vertebrae, reversing the ravages of years of osteoporosis. At some point I looked up to see tears rolling silently down Beatrice’s cheeks. She must have been in great pain, but she had said nothing. I hesitated, then placed a sensory block high in the cervical cord. She sighed with relief as the numbness washed over her. I handed her a handkerchief and kept on working.

Muscle fibers replaced to restore tone, arthritic joints cleaned and rebuilt with new synovial fluid, slack skin thickened and pulled tight, uniform melanin levels restored, the left breast lifted and a new right one extruded to match it. I took another break and let Beatrice rest.

I wasn’t resting I was wrestling with my conscience and my memories. Everything I had done so far was part of a standard Portrait, though the client was not usually so elderly or the work so extensive. A little fine tuning and I would be done, the contract provisions fulfilled. So far as the world knew.

But I knew how much more I could do, and how much more Beatrice could benefit from. No one need know the extent of my powers, even Beatrice. The desperate would not beat a path to my door, seeking miracles, and I would be able to live with myself again. If … if I had the courage.

And the will. And the skill. If I didn’t kill her on the spot, like poor Marthe Gault-Sauvage.

I told Beatrice she could lie down on the chaise while I did a last few adjustments. When she was comfortable, I reached in and flooded her system with sedatives. She was deeply asleep in just a few minutes.

First the heart. I might as well get the hardest part over with first. I held my breath while I reamed plaque out of each of the coronary arteries, but the contracting muscle kept up a steady, reassuring rhythm. Other things were easier: flushing the liver, repairing the kidneys, vacuuming those malignant polyps from the velvety, twisting tunnels of her intestines. I converted a few normal pancreas cells to insulin-secretors to make up for the normal loss of Langerhans tissue due to age, then spent some time making delicate adjustments to the immune system. When I woke Beatrice, she thought she had just dozed off while I put the finishing touches on her Portrait.

I collapsed with exhaustion while Beatrice stood awestruck before the mirrors. A woman a third of her chronological age, poised on the cusp between dewy youth and regal maturity, gazed back at her. A blue-eyed Queen of Sheba perhaps, after her conquest of Solomon. Many Solomons would be willing to throw themselves at the new Beatrice’s feet.

She was giddy with triumph and the tinkering I’d done with her neurotransmitters. It rasped on my raw nerves. I herded all of them out of my house as fast as possible. At the door Beatrice bent and kissed me lightly on the cheek. I felt nothing. Even the imperious eyes seemed to have lost their ability to command me.

She all but skipped down the path; no need now for a steadying arm. The doctor paused at the foot of the path and shot me a look of rebuke. I felt something then, something familiar — shame.

I wiped grit and water from my eyes as the copter took off, then stumbled inside.

It was a while before I could bring myself to touch the money, but I got over that. Eventually I put part of it to good use: a hefty under-the-table sum persuaded the regional EPA administrator to list my area as an “endangered climatic zone.” I could hear frustrated Meteorologists gnashing their teeth all the way from Midland.

One of the art world’s hautest journals received permission from Lane Forrestal to do a midwinter spread on my Landscape. As soon as it hit the media, my agent’s phone started to ring, and kept ringing. Much to his surprise, and a little to mine, I turned down every offer. Instead, I took myself to Juneau and spent a month watching the glaciers topple into the bay. I didn’t sculpt a single one.

I went home. Waited. Moped.

The desert woke from winter’s stillness to a brief spring and an early summer. Still I waited, hope almost gone. And on an April day when heat shimmer boiled off the valley floor in rainbow waves, I received a call from Beatrice Holzman. Would I see her? Of course.

The improbably blue eyes were red-rimmed. They hadn’t done much sleeping lately; maybe a lot of crying. “I made a mistake,” was all she said. Well. At least one of us had the courage to admit it.

It took me almost as long to restore her to her previous appearance as it had to create the new one. I cheated, of course: I didn’t stoop her as much as the file holos showed, or age-spot her skin as much. But I scrupulously recreated the original shape of her head, restored her white hair and wrinkles, re-crooked her nose.

She didn’t even want to keep her new right breast, but I argued with her over that. “Dammit, Beatrice, don’t be stupid. It’s no different from having an implant.” For once she let me win a point.

When I had finished, she surveyed herself in the mirrors and sighed. “That was silly of me, wasn’t it? Maybe I’m growing senile.”

“No,” I said. “Just old. And afraid of the dark. Just like everyone else. How bad did it get?”

“Bad enough to bring me to my senses. But only after I’d alienated a number of good friends. Lane and I haven’t spoken in months.” She studied the face in the mirror again, then me. “You knew. You knew the price I would pay was my self-respect. You knew because you’ve done this yourself. And that’s the real reason you stopped doing Portraits.”

The moment stretched out. Her eyes left me no place to hide. Sure, I could make myself look “normal.” I did, once. And it improved the way people treated me a thousandfold. But I didn’t like what that said about them. Or me. So I changed back. And I deal with it.

But you know something? It never gets any easier.

A thousand humiliations condensed. Evolution hurts, dammit. I could have kicked myself when I felt my eyes start to water. I should never play poker with someone better at it than I am.

She crossed the room and went down on one knee in front of me. Ninety years old, and she was kneeling to put her eyes on a level with mine. A gentle finger traced one of my more violent facial features. She seemed more beautiful now than she ever had when she looked younger, and her eyes had all their old sorcery back. Somewhere in the room a heart was beating, very fast.

“I did do my homework on you, Antonia Eleutheria Ligeri. Let us celebrate that ideal of freedom for which you were named. Have dinner with me this Friday. Eight o’clock, my townhouse.”

“In New York!” I was incredulous. “It seems a little far to go just for dinner.”

“Then stay a while, as long as you like. I’m a very good cook. And I know some people you ought to meet.”

A dozen excuses flitted through my mind. All of them were irrelevant. She wasn’t. I hoped my desert would forgive the infidelity. “Okay.” I felt faint, queasy. And something else, something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

She climbed stiffly to her feet and held out a hand to me, waited while I found the courage to take it. She seemed pleased with herself, and me. I walked her to the door. The chauffeur was solicitous, but I found myself missing Lane.

Beatrice paused a few steps down the path and looked back up at me. “I have enjoyed a long life, Tonia. I would like to spend my few remaining years with people who interest me. Eight o’clock. Do not be late.”

“I’ll be there,” I promised. I didn’t tell her how wrong she was about the time she had left. I hadn’t reversed any of the internal repairs I’d made. I’m not that kind of monster. She’d have plenty of years — to win back her old friends, discover interesting new ones, make things right with Lane. Maybe even to cook for houseguests from Texas.

The copter wheeled away. I was still feeling shell-shocked. She was old enough to be my grandmother. Hell, my great-grandmother. It was wildly improbable. It was ludicrous.

It was fantastic.

For the first time in forever, I was whistling as I walked back inside.

Carrie Richerson’s previous appearances in F&SF have earned her Campbell nominations for the Best New Writer of the year. Since then, Amazing Stories, Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine, and The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXI have also published her short fiction. Although she is known for her dark fantasy offerings, Carrie has a deft hand with science fiction. She proves that with “Artistic License.”