Pygmalion
Seanan McGuire
When I was a kid, people used to ask me all the time. “What’s it like having one of the most amazing superheroes in the universe as your mother?” “What was it like when you were little, did you get Wonderland diamonds in your Christmas stocking, did you get roast wyvern for Thanksgiving?” “Are you sorry not to have powers of your own?”
They never asked the question I wanted them to ask, which was, “Do you ever resent your mother for setting an unattainable example for the young women of the world, guaranteeing you would never be enough in the eyes of anyone who knew you, or for that matter, in your own?”
Let’s be clear: Mom never treated me like I didn’t matter just because I couldn’t lift a car over my head, or fly, or turn myself to stone. She treated me like I was the most important thing in the world, the most important thing she had ever done or ever would do, and she did her best to shield me from the reality of her world. I had to put the real story together for myself.
Had to figure out that her friends who came around for stale cake and mediocre coffee sneered at me because of all the things she didn’t. Had to figure out that they came to my birthday parties under duress, badly wrapped presents that never exceeded my mother’s strict twenty-dollar limit in their hands.
Had to figure out that the man with the blond hair and the heroic jawline, the man whose eyes looked so much like my own, the man who would never look at me for more than a few seconds without clenching his hands into fists, the man who never once addressed me without being forced . . .
Had to figure out that he was Zenith, just without the cape and boots and heroic pose, and more, he was almost certainly my father. You’d think realizing the world’s greatest superhero was your father would come with dramatic music, or at least the feeling of finally falling into line with your destiny, but all I felt was tired. I was nine years old, and I knew no one would believe me if I told them. He was the world’s greatest superhero. He could do infinitely better than a middle-aged diner waitress whose house had peeling wallpaper and water spots on the ceilings, and if he did have a kid, they’d be a lot better than me. They’d have powers, they’d be amazing.
All this happened about a year before Mom’s secret identity got blown, which wasn’t my fault, no matter what the tabloids try to say. She did that all by herself.
But after I was sure that Mom’s friend Paul was actually Zenith in civilian drag, I’d started to look a little more closely at the rest of Mom’s friends. Some of them worked at the diner, or were regular patrons there, but others, the ones who came to my birthday party with pursed lips and the same general air as me when I was forced to do my homework on a bright spring day . . .
The others lined up, one to one, with the known members of the Association of Heroes. The bright-garbed men and women who soared the skies, righting wrongs, dispensing justice, and generally behaving in a heroic manner. It was the first secret I’d ever had, and it was a big one, big enough to break the world, or at least that’s what it felt like tucked away inside my nine-year-old heart, where I could keep it safe.
For one year, I was an impenetrable fortress, more secure than any bank—more secure than Fort Knox, even. Some people have tried to spin it since then, said I was the one who tipped off the papers as to Mom’s daytime occupation, said I was jealous of her. Jealous of what? I was nine. She hadn’t told me yet that she had powers, or that if I hadn’t developed them by the time I started puberty, I wasn’t going to. See again, nine. I thought I knew how the world worked, and how it was always going to work. Me and Mom, and occasional visits from her friends who thought of me as a particularly demanding and high-maintenance pet. They didn’t quite pat me on the head and tell me to sit and stay, but they came close sometimes. I guess by that point, they’d all been living gods for long enough that they didn’t understand how human kids worked anymore.
And then came that awful, terrible, life-changing, world-ending day when I was pulled out of Mrs. Harris’s advanced math class and moved to the office, where I’d been surrounded by strange, silent men in black suits who carried large guns and looked at the world around them as if it was inherently their enemy, not to be trusted under any circumstances. And no one had even tried to explain what was going on.
That’s the part that still gets to me today. I was ten on the day the news broke—by a matter of three whole weeks, I was ten. A child. An innocent, civilian child. The fact that my mother was a soldier in an unending war between the forces of good and evil didn’t matter to me. Whether or not I got invited to Missy Sinclair’s slumber party, now that mattered to me.
You may remember that slumber party. It was all over the news.
Missy and I were the only survivors.
Anyway, Mom showed up at the school three hours after the final bell, five hours after I’d been put on lockdown. Five hours of sitting in anxious silence, no one telling me what was going on or why I’d been taken out of class. I had spent that time spinning nightmare scenarios in my head, worlds where I’d been orphaned by a fire at the diner or something equally unlikely, worlds where I’d have to go and live with the father who had never acknowledged me as his own, leaving our familiar, dingy, but comfortable house behind. So when the door slammed open and Mom walked in, fully costumed, the marble mask covering her eyes and the marble sword in her hand, I was so relieved to see her that I was halfway across the room before her appearance registered.
Galatea. Greatest superwoman in the world, second only to Zenith for most powerful superhuman. The woman of every civilian’s dreams and every villain’s nightmares. I had her action figure. And even as I remembered that fact, I remembered how reluctant Mom had been to buy it for me, even after weeks of begging and pleading. It hadn’t been until I told the mall Santa that I wanted my own Galatea doll more than anything else in the world, even a puppy, that she’d been willing to break down and bring me one.
I’d wondered how she’d been able to afford the deluxe battle-ready Galatea with real sword-swinging action when she could barely afford to pay the power bill. Looking at her in full armor, with threads of stone running through her hair and the famous sword in her hand, my first nonsensical thought was that she could damn well have gotten me the Battle Cruiser playset at the same time.
And then I passed out, unconscious on the floor of the principal’s office.
Everyone knows the story from there: some nosy tabloid reporter had put together that Zenith was seen near our little suburban town too often for anything other than a civilian life, and had decided to win a Pulitzer by unmasking the world’s greatest superhuman. Real nice guy, that reporter. He’s tried to get a private interview with me every year for the last fifteen, saying that only he can truly tell my story. Asshole. He’s the one who ruined my life as a side effect of his ill-considered bid for fame, and he thinks he could somehow be fair to me?
He didn’t get his Pulitzer. He didn’t find Zenith, either . . . not directly. What he found was Mom, who had never previously been photographed without her mask, but whose lips had been carried in picture form to a thousand plastic surgeons, and whose chin had been on the cover of Time magazine so many times that it was sort of a miracle it had taken as long as it did for someone to look at Mom’s profile and go “huh, doesn’t she look like . . . ”
Finding Mom led him inexorably to finding Mom’s secret identity, and finding Mom’s hospital records, which listed “Jack Smith” as my father. “Paul Smith” was Zenith’s only publicly known alias at the time, having been the name he worked under during his brief time as a judicial assistant. When a woman who looks like Galatea and a man with Zenith’s alias have a daughter in a town that sees more than its fair share of superhero activity relative to its size? And that girl is named Hope Anesidora? He might have worked for a tabloid, but he knew how to connect the dots, and while I’d been sitting happily in math class, unaware that the world was about to change forever, he’d been releasing his magnum opus, an expose on Galatea’s civilian activities. Including my name, and the name of my school. He basically drew a map for any supervillain who wanted to get back at my mom to follow, and then he released it into the world with no concern for my safety.
My parents’ trying to sue him for violating the laws that protect child superheroes made the news, of course, and that was the first time most of the world saw my face. Serious Streisand Effect, since most people had seen me as a forgettable footnote until I mattered enough to go to court over, where the judge had found that although the reporter was guilty of bad judgment and possible child endangerment, he hadn’t violated any laws surrounding secret identities. Why?
Because I didn’t have any powers.
So now I was in the paper not only for being the daughter of the world’s two greatest superhumans, who had never even been rumored to be in a relationship before. Zenith was supposedly in a long-term relationship with a civilian district attorney, whose public repudiation of him as both man and lawyer was one of the only things to distract the public’s attention from Mom and me while all this was going down, and Mom had always said justice had to come before she was willing to even consider seeking love for love’s own sake—but I was in the paper for being completely defenseless without my parents.
All Mom’s friends started coming around again, in costume this time, finally willing to look directly at me. They couldn’t pull me out of school and send me to the school their own children attended, because it was one of those special schools for kids who could bend rebar or see through walls, and the faculty wouldn’t know what to do with me. Even if the teachers could figure me out, the rest of the student body would eat me alive. I was relieved when they said I wasn’t going to be changing schools, even if I had to walk to class escorted by Association security forces, who had identified me with unforgiving accuracy as a possible kidnapping risk.
They didn’t scare the other kids away. In fact, they did exactly the opposite; for the six weeks after the news broke, I was the most popular kid in school, enjoying a level of social acceptance that I could only have dreamed of before. I was still pudgy and uncoordinated, with frizzy hair and a tendency to drift off into daydreams when I was supposed to be filling out worksheets or participating in class, but my parents were superheroes, and that made me amazing.
And then came the one thing I had been hoping for since the start of the year, the one thing I thought would make my life truly complete: an invitation to Missy Sinclair’s slumber party. Mom didn’t want to let me go. It would be my first night spent away from her since the news went wide, and while they could station security on the street, they couldn’t put them inside without permission from Missy’s parents, which seemed unlikely, since Missy’s parents had already complained about my security—who they described as “strange, unrelated adults”—being on campus. They were willing to let me into their home. The people who kept me alive would have to wait outside.
What people don’t necessarily seem to understand was that up until the slumber party, the security had been nothing more than a precaution as far as I could tell. I’d been locked down as soon as the world learned that I existed, and the security had only increased after it had come out that I didn’t have any powers. That didn’t mean anyone had tried anything.
People had, actually. Several people, several times. Bad people. The kind of people who looked at a ten-year-old girl and saw an opportunity to hurt her parents. The kind of people for whom the words “collateral damage” had never cost them so much as a moment’s peace. The kind of people like the Sinclairs didn’t believe would come to our sleepy little suburb for the sake of one brown-haired little girl without powers.
But they came. I went to the party, which started promptly at seven. I knew I was only there because Missy wanted to get a glimpse of Mom when I was dropped off; she didn’t like me, had never liked me in the first place, and I wasn’t foolish enough to think she’d suddenly changed her mind about inducting me into the hallowed ranks of the popular and the perfect. None of that mattered. I was there, I was an attendee at the fourth-grade social event of the year, and as long as I didn’t throw up during pizza time or wet my sleeping bag from excitement, no one was going to make me leave. I could stay until morning and partake of Ms. Sinclair’s famously delicious waffle bar, which Missy bragged about every time she had the opportunity, and feel as normal as anyone else, not like the freak with the superhero parents.
The pizzas showed up at eight. The supervillains showed up at eight-thirty. If the order had been reversed, there might not have been any survivors, but Missy and I had found a strange point of camaraderie in our mutual aversion to bell peppers—I’m allergic; she just thought they were disgusting—and so the two of us were the only ones at the coffee table, splitting a ham-and-pineapple pizza, when the footsoldiers burst in through the picture window.
I’ll never forget the sound of a sheet of broken glass slicing through Ms. Sinclair’s neck, or the way her head bounced twice before it rolled to a stop. Missy screamed. I panicked, and as I have always done, when I panicked, I froze. Fortunately for Missy, I froze in the act of reaching for another slice, so that my body halfway blocked hers from the footsoldiers in insectile armor now occupied with the messy but apparently essential task of slaughtering party guests.
Kids I’d known since preschool came apart into messy piles of tissue and bone, filling the air with a smell that was horribly reminiscent of summer barbeque, only bloodier and somehow more unforgettably primal. People ask me why I’m a vegetarian. That moment, that horrifying handful of seconds, that’s the real reason why. Animal welfare has never been a major concern of mine. The day when I inhaled the aerosolized bodies of my classmates, that’s a major concern of mine, and will be every time I close my eyes from now until the day I die. It’s not their fault that I see them every time I even think about eating a hamburger.
One of the black-armored figures pointed at me, snapping something in a buzzing, insectile language that made my skin try to crawl right off of my body. Two more surged forward and grabbed my arms, pulling me away from Missy, who had keeled over in a dead faint during the pause between their appearance and my abduction.
They didn’t see her on the floor. They didn’t realize they were leaving a survivor behind. They were too busy hauling me out through the hole that used to be the window, their fingers digging into the soft, untested flesh of my arms, the blood of my classmates soaking into my skin.
Their ship was outside, hovering ten feet above the lawn. The first of them stepped into the beam of light emanating from its belly and were pulled away, vanishing. For some reason, that was the step too far. Murder made sense. People were made of meat, no matter how much I didn’t like to think about it. A flying saucer hanging over the Sinclair’s front lawn? That didn’t make sense. That was something that happened to superheroes, not to ordinary people.
I screamed. High and shrill and hysterical. The footsoldiers who were holding me turned to look in my direction, one of them snarling a command that I had to assume meant “stop.” I didn’t stop. The dam was broken, and all the screams that had been building up behind it were finally free to pour out of me, going where they would.
None of the security people who were supposed to be keeping an eye on the house appeared to save me. I did my best to dig my heels into the lawn, to no avail; the footsoldiers continued to drag me inexorably forward, toward the waiting beam of light. They were going to take me. They were going to take me away, with the blood of my classmates still drying all over me, and I was never going to get to taste Ms. Sinclair’s waffles, and somehow that felt like the greatest tragedy of all.
The grass was wet—I didn’t want to think about with what—and my heels slipped, bare feet sliding through muddy green. Nothing changed. We were still moving. At least Missy would get to be famous, like she’d always wanted; with me gone, she was going to be the only survivor, and she could spin the story however she wanted to. She could be a hero, if I was gone. That wouldn’t be enough to make up for the fact that she’d only invited me to her party because she was hoping she’d get to meet my parents, the heroes, and instead she’d managed to arrange an introduction of her parents, the civilians, to the kind of villains girls like us should only have to hear about on the news. So maybe losing me would give her the chance to make a few headlines of her own.
Then two lines of brilliant white light, bright as the sun itself, shot through the air and through the head of the footsoldier holding my right arm, blasting it clean off. This blast didn’t smell like barbeque. It smelled like char and oil and something unidentifiable, like grasshoppers being fried with a magnifying glass. It hurt my nose. The body remained upright for a long moment before it crumpled, losing its grip on my arm in the process.
The remaining footsoldier said something in that terrible, unfamiliar language, and even though I couldn’t understand it, I knew it was swearing. Then it did the truly unbelievable, under the circumstances:
It let me go.
I stumbled away, watching in horror as the remaining footsoldiers turned to run. More of those blasts of searing light shot across the yard, vaporizing the soldiers where they stood. I recognized it now, even though it still made no sense at all: it was something that belonged on television, safely distanced by the magic of film, not here, where I could smell the charred flesh and the plasma burning through the evening air. This was a thing for stories, not real life.
Zenith’s laser vision. A moment after the realization, the man himself appeared, blazing down the street with one hand stretched out in front of him, fingers balled into a fist. He hit the saucer like a wrecking ball, punching right through the steel plating. The whole thing shook and trembled, nearly falling out of the sky. He blasted two more of the fleeing footsoldiers with his lasers, and then another figure appeared, soaring high, but already descending, feet pointed toward the ground to ease her landing. Mom.
“Mom?” I whispered. She’d shown me the costume, of course, after the news broke; she’d explained how sorry she was that she’d always had to keep the truth about her career from me, and the even bigger truth of who my father was. By that point, I knew that what was being said about her was true; she was Galatea, the most powerful woman in the world, and my father was Zenith, and I was their useless, defenseless, powerless daughter. But knowing a thing isn’t the same as seeing a thing, never has been, and this was the first time I’d seen her in all her glory.
She was spectacular. She was impossibly beautiful, so beautiful that it hurt my eyes to look at her, that I felt like I wasn’t worthy to be in the presence of my own mother, and then she was landing on the lawn, amidst the gore and shattered pieces of footsoldier. One of the few who was still standing drew a complicated sidearm and fired it at her, sending a bolt of blue lightning streaking at her, faster than I could yell to warn her.
She raised a hand, almost lazily, and batted it away. Then she strode toward the footsoldier, grabbing it by the throat and lifting it over her head before she flung it brutally and bodily away. The sound it made when it hit the side of the building was one more thing I’d remember for the rest of my life. I was racking up quite a number of them, and it wasn’t even midnight yet. Who knew what wonders tomorrow would hold?
What terrible, unbearable wonders. But Mom saw me on the lawn and ran to me, wailing, “Hope! My baby, what have they done to you?” as she gathered me into her strong, familiar arms and crushed me to a bosom that smelled of ozone and acceleration rather than diner coffee, and I buried my face against her shoulder and cried and cried and cried, and in that moment, I was sure everything was going to be okay. She was here, I was here, my father was ripping a spaceship apart, and we were going to be okay.
Then Missy screamed from inside the house, and I remembered that nothing was ever going to be okay again.
That was the night we moved to the Association of Heroes housing complex. I couldn’t go back to school, not with half my classmates dead and the other half understandably afraid of me. I couldn’t go anywhere for a while, not without having panic attacks so bad that I blacked out, or wetting myself, or screaming and screaming until I ran out of air. Therapy was the word of the day, and then the word of the year, and meanwhile Mom and Zenith were working out how to live together as a couple, and with me as a family.
Zenith had a hard time adjusting to the fact that I was a person, not just an idea, and an even harder time with the fact that I refused to call him “Dad.” Couldn’t even think about him that way for the first year. And then the interviews began, and didn’t stop until I turned eighteen, changed my name to something a little bit less on-the-nose, and snuck away to go to college like a normal person.
And I never looked back, and I never developed superpowers, and I didn’t think anyone knew where I was until yesterday, when the box appeared on my doorstep.
“My beloved Anesidora, my hope in these dark times, if you are reading this, then I have fallen in the endless fight against the forces of evil, and the mantle of our family has fallen upon your shoulders. I have done my best to protect you, as is a mother’s duty to her child, but alas, I cannot protect you from beyond the veil.”
My mother’s handwriting was as familiar as it had ever been, as was the subtle smell of her perfume, permeating the paper. It would have been more reassuring if it hadn’t been eight years since the last time we’d spoken, and if the news hadn’t been playing behind me, reporting on the deaths of Zenith and Galatea, along with half the Association, all of them fallen protecting the Earth from one more alien threat.
Tears stung my eyes. My parents couldn’t be dead. Denial is always a stage of grief, but I think there’s something reasonable, realistic even, about denying the death of your parents when they’re the most powerful people on the planet. We hadn’t spoken in years, but they were still superheroes, untouchable and above us all. I turned my attention back to the letter.
“I would have told you this long ago, my dearest, if you had stayed with us; I would have found the right words, the right ways to give you the secret truth of our family, which is of necessity concealed from all around us. I am sorry that I cannot give you this in person, but listen to the memory of my voice and believe that what I never said is true:
“I never for a moment regretted the fact that you were born without the power of flight, or your father’s burning vision, or my own super strength. I knew you when you rode inside me, sole passenger of a heavenly chariot, and I knew you would be as I had been, mortal clay, meant to carry your jar and walk the world until your mother fell, as mothers must inevitably do. That is the secret of our line: we are never born with powers, and even when we seek out husbands who carry the fire of Prometheus in their veins, our blood wins out. We are born as cold and common clay. The power we wield is our burden, not our gift. I would take it with me to the grave, were it so allowed, but now the choice is fallen unto you. Now the decision is yours.”
Under the letter, a mask. The famous marble mask of Galatea, licensed by every Halloween costume company in the world, unlicensed by a million cosplayers. But the shape of it was subtly wrong, no longer quite my mother’s forehead, my mother’s brow. It looked more like my own.
I stood in silence, looking from the mask to the letter and back again. Galatea’s marble sword wasn’t in the box, but somehow that didn’t matter. I didn’t need it. If I put the mask on, I knew, the sword would come to me, or something else would, a spear, or a vase filled with potions and poisons, ready to heal or harm at my desire. I would be as great as my mother had been, and as unbeatable, until the day something bigger than I was slapped me out of the sky.
My life—the life I had worked so hard to build for myself in the years since I’d slipped away, since I’d put Hope to the side and become Dora, whose name had never graced a tabloid cover and never would—would end. Immediately, and with no going back. The diner where Mom worked had never fired her, being smart enough to fear the optics of dropping a superhuman from their payroll, but she had never worked another day there after her identity was revealed to the world. She hadn’t even tried to live a civilian life until she was pregnant with me, preferring the comfort of the Association, the nearness of the world in need of protection.
If I put on the mask, Dora Green would die. Hope Anesidora Smith would rise in her place, and take to the sky, to defend a world that had been all too happy to devour her. I looked, hopelessly, back to the letter.
“I am sorry, my daughter. I am sorry for the years we lost, for the cost of defending this world, and for the need that will come upon you if you take up my mantle. Aphrodite is a jealous goddess even now, and we the descendants of her masterpiece. She will ensure the mask is passed to your daughter, even as I pass it now to my own, even as your grandmother passed it to me. But she cannot make you claim it. All she can do is guarantee that the next child of our line will exist to be offered the choice, to stand where all of us have been. Will you choose stone, as all of us who came before you have done? Or will you allow one more god to fade from the world, and choose clay? Whatever your decision, I love you, my daughter. I died loving you, and losing you remains my sole regret.”
Slowly, I lowered the letter, staring at the closed door of my apartment and the great wide world beyond, and I couldn’t have told you, in that moment, which I was going to choose.
The mask, silent as stone, did not rise to aid in my decision.
Seanan McGuire lives in an idiosyncratically designed labyrinth in the Pacific Northwest, which she shares with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly-held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life. Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013, she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.