Driven Like the Snow by Trent Walters

 "Mirror, mirror, on the wall," Beauty asked the vanity while brushing her long luxuriant shiny soft flaxen mountain-fresh extra-body hair - it was, she thought in her own modest opinion, a most astounding hair, all seven feet of it; as was the rest of her body, all seven feet of it - the happy conqueror’s kind of hair and body that were well-kept for as long as she lived, which would prove to be longer than even her murderers could have anticipated, "who’s the most beauteous of them all?"

"You, O, Beauty," the wafer-thin, mercurial-reflection computer screen said in a musical monotone, which is to say a monotone intended to mimic the natural lilt of human speech but which sounded more like an unnatural monotone.

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall..."

"You, O, Beauty."

Beauty laid her brush down and told her reflection, "I have not finished."

"Pardon, O, Beauty."

"Who’s the most gorgeous of them all?"

"You, O, Beauty."

"How about foxy?"

"You, O, Beauty."

"How about sensually provocative?"

"You, O, Beauty."

"How about..."

Beauty’s parents had had insight into the future. Her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Yorkshire Puddings, knew that if they wanted to preserve the dukedom and gain a little piece of the kingdom pie, they would have to invest in the future apple of their collective eye -- that being Beauty. Even before Beauty was born, the family invested their entire fortune in tweaking Beauty’s forty-six chromosomes.

But even before tweaking, the entire living gene pool’s opinion on beauty had to be polled, tallied, and spat out into some kind of consensus. To alleviate any polling error, the consensus was matched against pictures of past and present "Beauties," mix-and-matching parts of one beauty for another. The peasants viewing these pictures were monitored for heart rate, breathing, saliva, sweat, and other glandular secretions. The most pulse-quickening eyes, ears, nose, throat, mouth, chest, legs, feet, toes, buttocks, and armpit hairs were combined to create Beauty. What their team of geneticists and psychologists discovered was that beauty wasn’t quite so much in the eye of the beholder anymore....

Oh, stop complaining. This is Science, with a capital "S." This is the wave of the future, the choice of a new generation. This is Progress, you old fuddy-dud.

Next, computer simulations had to be run on each parent’s contribution of twenty-three chromosomes, incubating the child from fertilized seed to adulthood, finding the gene-combo meal-deal that would most perfect the image of Beauty. Genetic defects and diseases, as per standard operating procedure for the privileged, were erased.

The risk for Beauty’s parents was two-fold. First, who was to say that the King and Queen’s child would be a boy (whose interest was in the opposite sex)? Second, who was to say that their daughter would live to the proper marrying age of seventy? Seventy years give assassins plenty of opportunity to devise their diabolic plans.

But Beauty’s parents thought it over carefully and decided that the King and Queen would most likely opt for an XY in order to keep the family name on the property deed. (Why not an XX to maintain the family name? Ah, that is a most secret and insidious plot that the narrator cannot reveal. Certainly, if the converse were true, the world would be filled with peace, love and understanding, no?)

In response to risk number two, Beauty would be injected with nano-reconstructors to immediately repair any damage caused by knives, bullets, blowtorch, and laser lacerations. Also, in the case of assassination by disintegration, if Beauty were thrust in front of television cameras from the moment she was born, the peasant audience would already have had their pulses quickened and their tear ducts flowing from resimulcasted footage of Beauty’s first step, first potty-training, first love, first kiss, first lay; so that the peasant audience would demand that taxes be levied against themselves in order to reconstruct their darling Beauty from the ashes. Yes, Beauty’s parents had it all figured out.

And so the Prince did marry Beauty, for how could one govern if one did not have the masses backing one? And, oh, did the masses ever love Beauty. In fact, they backed her to their deaths, which they demonstrated amply to her would-be quasi-murderous in-laws who, out of jealousy of (or more aptly "annoyance with") Beauty, had put her in a cryogenic chamber, so they wouldn’t have to listen to her whine about what a burden true beauty was.

The way the King and Queen figured it--once they were safely six feet under--Beauty could whine all she wanted. But, in an unprecedented uprising, the peasants refused to farm or pay taxes until Beauty was released (some silly analysts claim they just didn’t want to farm or pay taxes). Fully half of the peasants sacrificed their lives before the King and Queen decided that if they killed off the peasants, the King and Queen might have to farm and pay taxes themselves.

When Beauty had returned once more, an impromptu parade of peasants, dwarves, fairies, and the Prince showered their love in ticker tape.

All peasants wanted children like Beauty. Since Beauty’s parents had already paid the major expenses of the initial research, the technology could now be spread among the masses at a fraction of the cost. Ninety percent of all newborn girls were named Beauty. Seventy-five percent of all newborn boys were named Beau. The significance of all this was not lost on Beauty because, as she gradually learned in the seventy years before marriage and mastered in the millennial Reich thereafter, Beauty is Power.

"Mirror, Mirror," Beauty asked, filing her nails, "has my worthless husband told his lame duck parents to step down?"

"No, O, Beauty, your worthless husband has not."

Beauty tsked-tsked. "Really, they might as well. You’d think that by now they’d have figured out who wears the purple pants in the family."

The Mirror gave an affirmative hmmm.

Do not be too quick to place Beauty among such high moral criminals as Narcissus. Although Beauty may have fallen in love with her own reflection, she would not be so vulgar as to spurn the love of others. She welcomed it. She wished everyone -- without regard to race, creed, or color -- could love her as much as she loved herself.

Beauty admired the smooth curve of her fingernails against the flickering candlelight of the bedroom chandeliers. She said, "Last year I might have said: "Oh, let the old farts have a few more years of fun torturing the peasant class and waging war with the neighbors;" but what if I were to have a baby? It would be too awkward: the daughter of a lifetime-heir-apparent would simply be unacceptable. I mean, how embarrassing. Of course, becoming queen wouldn’t be too shabby either, but that’s beside the point." Women’s intuition rarely failed her, so she twirled the file with sudden menace and said "Carpe diem!" She proceeded past the barometers and psychrometers, down the great hall of pastoral tapestries (pastoral to remind one of what one is not if one is not or what one is not if one is royalty, but then royalty is not one but we, oui?) and the royal, gee-whiz urinometers -- that is, the measure of gravity in this specific situation -- into the throne room. She had left in such a tizzy that she plain forgot to polish her nails. But, as an oyster beautifies a grain of sand, so her oversight served only to beautify her beauty in the eyes of those who beheld her.

So she killed them -- the King and Queen of the Kingdom -- we won’t go into the gruesome details (let’s just say that thankfully she didn’t polish her nails), but don’t get upset with Beauty. Really, the King and Queen were almost as nasty. Why, they invited twelve fairies to their son’s wedding party, which doesn’t sound so bad on the face of it (after all, nobody can party like a fairy), but there were thirteen who presided over the Kingdom, and it just so happened that the uninvited thirteenth happened to be especially big on parties and especially short on temper. Number Thirteen called on the King and Queen.

"Know?!" The King and Queen told him, together because everything they said they said together because everything they did they did together because they were inseparable because they were pious and took the phrase "one flesh" quite literally (the operation had been difficult -- separation of Siamese twins is Patty Cake in comparison. What the doctors finally settled on was a variation of mother and womb through which a placenta filtered out white cells and antibodies though not the endorphins and other neurotransmitters, which thoughtfully signaled the partner so they may feel each other’s pain (and pleasure), which explains why they were so nasty, sensing the excitement the other felt from the presence of Beauty or any other rose which smelled so sweet. They suggested Beauty and their son to undergo the same procedure, but Beauty demurred, which explains why they neglected to invite Number Thirteen). "Did we know?" the King and Queen said to the livid Number Thirteen via the 3V. "Why of course we knew you weren’t invited. We tried to talk her out of it, but once Beauty left the order, our hands were tied."

Beauty had left explicit orders on who could and could not attend but, as a matter of fact, had neglected the fairies entirely. In fact, the son had to threaten not to marry unless she invited the King and Queen themself -- not that threats held much weight since she could whip the peasants into revolution at any moment. But she (and her stomach) loathed the sight of blood and acquiesced.

So Number Thirteen gatecrashed. Squeezing a few sturdy hams (strictly boars, sows bored him) enroute to the pavilion where the cutting of cake and bestowing of blessings were being held, he cursed that she sleep eternally. Rumor ran amok among the peasants -- a rumor she perpetuated for the sympathy vote -- that she had slept a hundred years inside a tomb of briar rose. But, really, Number Thirteen was a lucky and unlucky fellow. He was lucky in that he had been one of the lead scientists in designing Beauty’s nano-reconstructors and knew the curse-command that sent Beauty into a cold, deep cryogenic sleep.

But unlucky in that, nano-sleeping curses in the Kingdom only last until a lover has touched the sleeper and the sleeper awoke. The only reason the curse lasted a hundred days was because she was awfully cold, and the Prince balked at touching what looked like a corpse. Plus, the King and Queen had pointed out how much more peaceful the kingdom was now that she slept peacefully. And it was true. But without the much-anticipated honeymoon, it is unnecessary to mention how anxious he was.

So she killed them -- the King and Queen of the Kingdom -- and went on a second honeymoon with her husband to celebrate. After an acquaintance period and a few missed periods thereafter, she discovered she held an extra passenger: an unexpected, unwanted extra passenger She visited the geneticists who, seventy-two years before, had simulated her own growth. She ordered that they use their computers to grow her child from fertilized seed to adulthood. The results were faxed to her, which she immediately compared against her own reflection in the mirror. She sighed. Really, what had she been worried about? She was the one who had been programmed to be beautiful. Then the mirror said, "O, Beauty, who’s that most gorgeous, beauteous, foxy, sensually-provocative babe in the picture?" She ripped the fax to shreds. She called the geneticists and ordered that they enlarge the nose. Beauty didn’t want a child better than her, but neither did she want an ugly child. She would have to face it three meals a day.

The babe arrived, and it was a she. Her nose was indeed big. Beauty and the former-Prince (now the King) bickered over the name. Beauty immediately said, "Big Nose" because her nose was indeed big. The husband said, "No, Blood Red," because her lips were as red as blood. Beauty winced (you know how blood upsets her stomach). Since the babe’s skin was as white as snow and the hair as black as ebony (she certainly didn’t want a child with a name as enchanting as Ebony Black), Beauty said, "All right. How about Snow White?" She thought it incredibly dull, and since her husband was incredibly dull himself, she knew he’d go for it. He did.

When Beauty and the King presented Snow White from their balcony to the peasant assembly, the peasants oohed and aahed, by which Beauty proudly took to mean shock at the immensity of the nose, and by which the King proudly took to mean awe at the aptly named beautiful snow white skin, but by which the peasants meant nothing since that was how they had been trained to respond from any number of game and talk shows (one being indistinguishable from the other).

Ten years later, it became increasingly apparent that Beauty’s mirror needed a new microprocessor.

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most beauteous of them all?" Beauty asked, dabbing mascara on her long lashes.

The gears behind the mirror clinked, chinked, and ground. The gears were useless, but it let its operator know it was evaluating data.

"Mirror, mirror..." Beauty began, a little louder.

"Hold your horses, O, Beauty. Can’t you hear the clink, chink, grind of my gears?"

"Yes, I can," Beauty said, "but I can also hear the repairman’s call for outdated computers."

"You, O, Beauty, are the most beauteous of them all."

"Well, what took so long?"

"There are a number of children who have benefited from your technology; albeit, their genes are inferior, producing a fair number of stale beauties who may not rival but, nonetheless, come close."

"So even if they do come close, they’re not real rivals, right?"

"Right."

"So what’s the problem?"

The gear clinked, chinked, and ground.

"I said, what’s the problem!"

"I’m thinking of a tactful way--"

"I’ll show you where you can put your tact! Tell me now."

"Have you heard of Michelangelo becoming so angry with the perfection of his ‘David’ that he tossed a hammer at it and that the resulting blemish made it only the more perfect?"

"Yes."

"Have you heard of Cyrano de Bergerac? W.C. Fields? Barbara Streisand?"

"Yes, YES, and NO!"

"They were all sex symbols in their time."

"Get to the point."

"They all had above average nose sizes. Snow White’s nose is fast drawing the same attention. By the time she passes puberty, the answers to your daily questions will be Snow White."

Beauty threw the mascara at the computer and shattered her reflection. The computer didn’t feel a thing, but she sure felt better, oblivious to seven years of impending doom.

Beauty had had several lovers in and out of the Kingdom. Her favorite and, she supposed, most manly was a fellow she had stumbled upon at the furthest edge of the parade field where most of the serious hunts began. She had been circling the field on her stallion Appaloosa when she had spotted the hunk holding the reins to a horse and leashes to a dozen yelping hounds. Both hands full, he’d tried to hide his unshaved face behind his shoulder.

"See here," Beauty had said. "Are you a big game hunter?" He’d nodded. "Have you killed any wild boar?" He’d mumbled, "Yes, ma’am." "Antelope? Elephants? Lions? Tigers? Bears?" He’d nodded again with a still faint but louder: "Of course." "Oh my," she’d said, admiring the outline of his physique. "Yes. I am in dire need of a hunter. I have some annoying... rats in my bedroom you must hunt down. Can you be at my palace around eight tonight?" He’d nodded "Good. You will find I pay very well indeed." And she’d rode off.

Actually, he was a squire who had never shot so much as a squirrel or a rusty tin can. If she ever found out, she never let on, but he did such a fine job in her bedroom that she continued to invite him over. The afternoon her mirror shattered, she had come up with a different sort of hunt. If she knew about his true nature, it seems unlikely that she would have asked him what she did. Nor, if he knew she knew, it seems unlikely that he would have accepted.

She asked him to murder Snow White, which, knowing her aversion for blood, you probably already knew. But what you hadn’t known was that the squire fell in love with her daughter’s nose. It was, to be sure, initially irritating: every time he glanced her way. Finally, he’d had to prod her ahead with the shotgun barrel.

Apart from the crunch of dead leaves, silence blanketed the forest. The foliage overhead was so dense that they felt themselves instinctively draw together for warmth and company. And then Snow White fell back in step with him. Either her legs weren’t quite so long as his or maybe he was trying catch up, to view that nose once more, to see what it was that made him want to fondle it, to squeeze it gently between his thumb and index finger and say, "Honk!"

Gradually, he grew used to the irritation and found himself staring at its lustrous pearly white. It was then that he discovered he was in love. The age difference was a slight problem, but in eight years, well... He couldn’t kill her. He’d known that before he had tempted her from the castle on the pretext of visiting the most wondrous spearmint chewing gum tree of the Kingdom (what the gun was for, he never could explain), but he had prayed a wild boar would come consume her and deliver him from his dilemma. When the wild boar refused to appear, he said, "Run along now. The spearmint tree’s just up ahead."

Snow White looked at the gun and bawled. "You’re gonna kill it!"

He thought, my god, this kid’s supposed to be ten years old. He said, "What? Me? No. Not me. I wouldn’t kill the chewing gum tree. I was... saving it, for... a wild boar!"

Her bawling raised an octave. "You’re gonna kill the chewing gum tree! You’re gonna kill the most wondrous spearmint chewing gum tree of the Kingdom!" The racket managed to attract the attention of a wild boar. It snorted. It snarled. It growled in the back of its throat. It pawed the ground and charged. "Shoot it! Shoot it!" she shrieked. But he just stood there. The boar’s tusks slashed at the air before it. She jerked the gun from his limp hand and fired, point blank. The boar went down with a grunt. She handed the gun back and continued to sob.

Finally, he regained his senses and bent over the boar. He cut open its gut, fished for a moment and pulled out the desired organ. "Look, there’s no wondrous spearmint chewing gum tree. I made it up. I was sent out here by your mother to kill you. I can’t because I love you. I hope in sixty years you will remember my kindness to you this day and marry me. I’ll come back for you then. In the meantime, I’ll show this heart to your mother and tell her it was yours."

"Liar!" She resumed bawling. "There is, too, a wondrous spearmint chewing gum tree! Liar, liar, liar!"

With that, he turned toward the castle, madly in love (of course, poor Beauty didn’t hear of this tale until after Beauty’s death -- when her luck really turned around). Snow White didn’t know what to do. She was just a shiftless bum. You know kids, nowadays. So she searched the forest: in search of what she was searching for.

When Beauty greeted him at the castle doorstep, she tacitly accepted the heart as Snow White’s and his mad love as hers -- even woman’s intuition has its streak of bad luck now and again. Unfortunately, her streak lasted seven years. At the end of six years, Beauty’s latest model mirror informed her that she was no longer the most gorgeous, beauteous, foxy, sensually-provocative in the Kingdom. She knew immediately what had happened or, rather, what hadn’t happened. She could have ordered an execution of the Hunter, but she realized the futility of such an act. Besides, she had tortured him well enough by not allowing him to hunt any more of those pesky rats in her bedroom. This was easy to carry out since he had been moping around the Kingdom for the past six years. Who wants a moping man in her bedroom?

On the mirror’s infrared, Kingdom-wide tracking device, she found what appeared to match the castle’s records for the distinctive heat radiation pattern of Snow White as a ten-year-old girl, projected six years into the future. The suspect was located in a relatively unpopulated mining district of the forest. She printed out a zoning map for the province and discovered only one house within a three mile radius of the area. The cottage had a thatched roof and a garden of cantaloupe, squash, asparagus, sassafras, and a fine, bushy tree of spearmint chewing gum. The deed named seven men as proprietors. The file photos showed an ugly lot of lonely, squat men -- the type that might appreciate a lovely, young lady with a large bulbous nose, Beauty thought.

Beauty, thanks to her parents’ training, was prepared for disaster. In case of maimed limb, she had one grown in a vat. In case of severe burns, cloned skin shivered patiently to clothe its future body. In case of damaged eyes, ears, nose, throat or whatever else needed replacing, she had one at the ready. In her days as beloved queen, Beauty being type AB squeezed every drop of blood she could out of those peasant turnips. Why, it was conceivable to assemble an entire Beauty, including the backed-up copies of Beauty’s memories on a mainframe in a tiny room a mile below the castle, in case of nuclear holocaust.

With some of the emergency rations of skin, she ordered the insta-presto-plasta-surgeomatic to render her a kindly grandmother. And presto! She was a grandmother, not that her daughter had had any children to her knowledge, but a lot can happen during six lonely years. She examined the result. She still looked pretty good, considering, except now her upper lip sneered, overcastting her kindlier features. Not what she wanted, but there was no time to call a surgeon to fix the damn thing. She shrugged and picked up a poisoned apple passing through the pantry on her way out of the castle.

She found Snow White at the cottage, standing with the refrigerator door open, asking herself, "What should I eat? What should I eat?"

The moment was tenuous. Beauty didn’t want to wait around for Snow White’s stomach to growl in four or five hours, so she thrust the apple through the open window. "Here," she cawed. "Have an apple."

Snow White flinched at the surprise and at the hideous sneer but recovered quickly, considering her own nose. "No thanks."

"Ah, but--" she polished the apple upon her breast "--see how red and pretty it shines? Can’t you imagine how the juice will burst into your mouth as you sink your teeth into its skin?"

"I hate apples."

Without her current disguise, Beauty could have disguised her disgust. The upper lip, however, raised another unconscious fraction. "But my dear, apples are wonderful for you. Why it’s got fiber to keep you regular, carbohydrates to give you energy, and about ten percent of the recommended daily allowance for vitamin C and potassium which, respectively, help your body fight infection and insures proper function of the all important Sodium/Potassium pump, plus traces of other vital vitamins and minerals. An apple a day keeps the doctor away!"

"How do I know you didn’t poison it or something?"

The lip trembled and raised yet another fraction. "Silly girl, why would a kindly grandmother like myself do such a hideous thing to a pretty girl like you."

"I don’t know...." Snow White turned to the open refrigerator, hand on a jar of pickles.

Beauty got a good look at the nose profile and shuddered. She smiled. "You’re running up the electricity bill leaving that door open."

"Oh, give me the damn apple." And Snow White bit into it. She choked. She flailed her arms. She ripped off her shoes and clothes and stood rigid, spread-eagled and arms stretched up as if she were an antenna receiving an alien signal from Mars. She didn’t budge. Her lungs ceased to inflate. Beauty thought it an awfully strange poison to react so quickly and strangely. She shrugged and hobbled back to the castle so she could ask that self-important mirror, who was the real beauty now.

What Beauty hadn’t realize until after she died (ending the seven-year streak) was that while carrying Snow White in her womb, a number of nano-reconstructors flowed from her blood across the placenta into the child. The reconstructors, recognizing the poison in the apple, froze the esophagus. Without a fresh supply of oxygen, they converted sweat glands into alveoli (see Converted Amphibian Respiration, Appendix Seven). The reconstructors commanded the body to strip and spread out in the most oxygen-friendly position (see Da Vincini’s feminized human anatomy, Appendix Eight), and set in rigor mortis to steady the body. Next, they rerouted the blood from the stomach and other less essential organs to more vital organs, slowing the heart to hypothermic conditions. Finally, they used the apple fiber to enshroud the poison molecules, so that it would pass through harmlessly. Without enough energy and oxygen to dislodge the apple, the reconstructors waited. Snow White herself wouldn’t have known what to do. She was just a shiftless bum. You know kids, nowadays.

The seven proprietors were a little unsure themselves of what to do. At first she was a nuisance crowding the kitchen. Eventually one of them discovered her arms could double as a towel rack, another hung ladles and strainers from her outstretched fingers. After six years of tolerating her presence, they finally became accustomed to her -- now that she was quiet about that damned chewing gum tree and had some real use around the house.

As the peasants tell it, a handsome boy-prince from the Kingdom Next-Door happened by. He spotted the most beauteous woman in the Kingdom and leaped through the open window, knocking over a pile of dirty dishes. When the seven proprietors ran to see what all the commotion was about, the Prince embraced Snow White with a force that dislodged the apple from her throat. Ladles and strainers crashed to the floor. Snow White breathed again.

One of the seven yelled, "Buddy, you’re not only picking that stuff up and cleaning it, you’re paying for the broken dishes!"

After the Prince shelled out a few gold coins, everyone was happy. Except Snow White. She knew who had done this to her and wanted to pay her mother back in kind. But that, according to Beauty, was the peasant revenge-fantasy: good triumphs over evil. In Beauty’s estimation, Snow White was too apathetic to care one way or another. What seems likely is that the Prince, being the arrogant fool he was in not sending a scout to do the dirty work, was checking out the unrest of the Kingdom. He’d decided that if he could turn the peasants against the Kingdom, conquering it would be in the bag. Happening upon the Kingdom’s own princess was just dumb luck. When Snow White was presented to the peasants, they immediately fell in love. After all, she was the only woman left in the Kingdom who wasn’t a perfect beauty. Beauty, frankly, bored them. Instead, she had this huge nose to die for. And the Prince rallied them (because Snow White couldn’t have cared less) around Snow White’s case for inheriting the Kingdom.

So with the peasants of the Kingdom and the Prince’s own knights, the Kingdom fell (along with the forgotten King who was a lame duck anyway, so nobody cared. I bet you’d forgotten him too. Don’t feel bad. He’d forgotten himself). The Prince shackled Beauty’s feet in iron shoes and let her dance until she fell as dead. They buried her with a stake through her heart, just to be sure -- capping off Beauty’s seven-year bad-luck streak.

And they lived happily ever after until they died (at which point they were no longer happy).

The end.

But that (sort of) happily-ever-after business is the peasant revenge-fantasy. Peasants are suckers for happy endings. What really happened was that Beauty awoke in a rose-briar tomb. Beauty’s memories ended right after poisoning Snow White and arriving safely at home, uploaded at the high point of her career. Three days after her death, the insta-presto-plasta-surgeomatic had resurrected her. She sent the machine off among the peasants as a gift, wheeling around the village, enlarging noses at no cost.

Meanwhile, Beauty’s passion flared strong within her. She ranged near and far for a kingdom that loathed big noses. She found one, seduced the king (which was simple enough), killed the queen, and led his army against the Kingdom, slaughtering all the big noses. The Kingdom fell easily because the rulers were just kids, and you know kids, nowadays.

The end

Trent has worked on a ship, in a nursing home, a pizza parlor, a potato factory, and as a New Orleans distributor of fermented beverages. He began medical school in the Fall of 2000. Three cheers for Clarion West.