Sideshow (11 page)

“It’s bad I don’t like them better, my own kinfolk,” Fringe confessed. “But they make me feel so … so gone.”
“Don’t you like them at all?”
Truth was, she did rather like them, in a large open space, one at a time. They had interesting things to say sometimes, when they forgot she was there and didn’t pick on her. It was just when one got closed in with them, with doors shut, with walls around, that they seemed to turn into other creatures, some kind of birds with pecky beaks and claws, looking speculatively at her with those beady dark eyes as they tore little pieces of her away. Among them, she felt herself dwindling, felt herself becoming tattered, pecked into raggedy lace, infinitely fragile and angry and lost.
“They eat me,” she said to Zasper. “If I didn’t fight them,
they’d quit, but I have to fight them because they get me so I don’t know who I am. Sometimes I think my whole life is just going to be eaten up by old women. Sometimes I think that’s all I’m for, for them to eat up. They don’t seem to have any other use for me!”
There was something else. Something she hadn’t mentioned to Zasper. When she was alone, she had these visions, kind of. A light, beckoning. A voice saying words she could almost understand. She could lie there, half asleep, and almost see it, almost hear it! But when the old women were around, she couldn’t remember what it had been.
She sighed, continuing, “When Aunty came, I saw her, and at first I thought she was that other one, the one who follows me around all the time.”
Zasper nodded. “Is she still doing that? Following you around? What’s her name?”
“Jory. I still see her, if that’s what you mean. Sort of here and there. Sometimes she buys me a pie. Sometimes she talks to me about things.”
“What things?”
“You know. Just things. How I feel about things. About how I’m to go visit her one day. But she doesn’t really look like Aunty. Aunty just looks old and sort of ragged out and gone. That other woman, she looks really old too, but like she had a fire in her.”
Zasper shrugged. He had not yet succeeded in catching sight of Fringe’s follower. Sometimes he thought Fringe imagined her. Fringe imagined a good many things.
“So now you’re living in a module,” he said, returning to the former topic. “But you’re never there. You’re always here.”
“I like it better here.” This was said pleadingly, as though she feared he might force her back to a place that wasn’t where she wanted to be. She dwindled there. She vanished, even to herself. Except when she was with Zasper or sweeping the floor at Bloom’s she couldn’t keep in mind that perhaps she was meant to be odd, as she was, for some reason. It was important to have some reason. Otherwise … otherwise why exist at all? There had to be some reason for it, sometime, somewhere. Like her very own Great Question. What was she meant for?
• • •
Nela and Bertran had been told the manifestation was to occur on the seventeenth of May, some ten months after the Celerian—which is what Bertran and Nela called him—had visited them. The visit itself had come almost to occupy the realm of myth or shared dream. They would no longer have been sure it had happened, except that Celery had left them two small things. One was golden and featureless except for an oval lens set into one side. Since it had a ring at the top, Bertran put a chain through it and wore it around his neck. The other thing was wasp-waisted, about three inches long and as thick as a finger. This device was to go on the door when it manifested itself. They kept it in a kitchen drawer in the trailer. A few times, when they opened the drawer, they found it glowing. A few times they heard it make a sound, a remote clicking, like death-watch beetles in some other room.
The gate was to manifest itself late in the evening in the middle of an orange grove that lay only a few miles from the circus’s winter quarters. The twins went there under the guise of taking a little drive and eating out. Nela had learned to drive and did it quite well, though Bertran could not keep himself from telling her what to do next. She continually told him to buy a right-hand drive and do it himself, otherwise to keep quiet. He never did the one or the other. In truth, it was hard for him to put both arms in front of him. His left arm was almost always around Nela’s shoulders.
During the previous month they had scouted the grove several times, enough to know it well. Celery had been able to identify the exact place for them, within a few feet. Between the eleventh and twelfth rows of trees from a certain fence, between the fifteenth and eighteenth trees in the row. When the thing showed up, they were to place the device at the edge of it, at the bottom, fitting its concave sides between two protrusions.
By a quarter to eleven, they were in place. They had brought a couple of folding stools to sit on, and Bertran had the device in his shirt pocket. They wore their favorite leisure clothing: sneakers—Bertran’s made especially for him, with lifts, to raise his shoulder over Nela’s—and dark-colored sweat suits, the ample material Velcroed together to hide their mutual flesh.
At precisely eleven o’clock the fragrant air among the trees wavered with a coruscating oval. Irresolute, it glimmered for some time before solidifying into a lopsided plane of fire, a
slightly warped screen of light. The twins got up from their stools and walked around the thing. It was the same on both sides. Close up, they could see the twisted loop of dark metal that framed the fire, the whole upon a solid base of the same material. The protrusions they had been told to look for were duplicated on both sides. Simultaneously, they shrugged. Presumably, either side would do. They knelt at the base. Bertran handed Nela the device, Nela leaned forward and positioned it as they had been directed to do, hearing it click into place. She shut her eyes, murmured a few words of prayer remembered from childhood. If this was the reason for their existence, she wanted to accomplish it with some sense of divine purpose.
Bertran, however, was struggling to his feet, and she, perforce, came up with him, still leaning slightly forward. Nela put one foot out, off balance….
She felt something move under her foot and looked down to catch a glimpse of a dark ovoid. Bertran, also looking down, saw the same shape. It might have been Bertran’s arm that pushed Nela, for he had put out his right hand to catch himself and it had gone through the plane of fire into nothing. He fell forward with Nela inevitably beside him. They went on falling. A moment later the screen of fire disappeared, together with its frame and base, just as the Celerian had said it would. The Celerian had not said, of course, that the Zy-Czorsky twins would disappear with it, though the strong probability of that event had been foreseen.
Their car was found at the edge of the grove. Two parallel sets of footprints led partway into the grove and then vanished. Two canvas stools sat side by side. The only living animal creature found in the grove was a small tortoise, staggering laboriously along beneath the trees. The disappearance became, like the twins themselves, a purely temporary wonder.
The world had, in fact, been saved, though no Earthian knew it at the time. Afar, in other places, the Celerians conducted a chaste and tasteful celebration. The likelihood that the twins would fall through the gate had been accepted as an appropriate risk: the twins had, after all, been honored in the saving of their world. A shortened time upon that world was a small price to pay for such honor. In terms of total life loss, the Earthian Boon was at the extreme low end on the scale of
Celerian Boons. Other Boons had resulted in enormous, though always justifiable, death tolls.
Celery and his age and aggregation mates were proud of their prognostication. Even they admitted, however, that foretelling had its uncertainties. This seldom kept them from changing the immediate future, even though the Great Aggregations among them, who reviewed those changes, were occasionally moved to comment on what had been done.
So, following the departure of the twins, a Great Aggregation came before the assembled crew of the ship(?) and announced with comfortable asperity that the Earth Boon had shaken the very fabric of time! “Look here,” it/they said to the younger, smaller, and more facile aggregations, “look here! If the Boon had been provided in a different manner, none of this would have happened. Look here at the place called Grass. Look at this place called Hobbs Land. Look at this place called Elsewhere. Look at these humans, Danivon Luze and Zasper Ertigon. Look at this human girl called Fringe. Look at this old, old woman who calls herself Jory now, and this old, old man who calls himself Asner! See what they portend! See here, how our journey will be altered, our future interrupted as we are called away from our proper pursuits, all for naught? All to no point, for we will be able to do nothing!
“See how the great concession we have so lately earned, with what enormous effort, is threatened by the way in which you have granted this Boon!”

TWO

4

Tolerance on Elsewhere: the Great Rotunda, where, on the upper balcony, Boarmus the Provost sits thoughtful. His companion, Syrilla, is unaware of his thoughts. In Boarmus’s opinion, Syrilla may be unaware of any thoughts at all. Though a longtime member of the Inner Circle, she seems incapable of connecting cause and effect. Her forte is hysteria; her singularity to freight even the most irrelevant remarks with enormous import.
As now, when she dilates beaky nostrils and cries dramatically, “I cannot understand why Danivon Luze would have done such a thing.”
“You know why,” Boarmus says lazily, without stirring. His wide-bottomed form is well settled into its velvety chair like an old monument into turf, slightly tipped, but massively immovable. “If you’re speaking of Danivon Luze the Council Enforcer.”
Syrilla gestures with an apparently boneless hand and raises her eyebrows to her hairline, miming astonishment. “Of course, Danivon Luze the Council Enforcer.” Danivon Luze, once a foundling child, the pet of Tolerance; then Zasper Ertigon’s youthful protégé; now a strikingly handsome though controversial officer. Who else?
Boarmus snorts, a muffled plopping, like boiling mud. How long has he come here in the afternoons to occupy this same table, this same chair? How long has he drunk one thing or another while looking down upon the uniformed guards, the two Doors, the ceremonial changing of the one about the
other? Whatever time it has been, nothing has happened in it. Well, very little. A few minor rebellions, relentlessly put down. A few new ideas, squelched. A few innovations, which always turned out to be reinventions of things forgotten centuries ago. And now, at last, something. Something happening, and though in the past he had thought he longed for something to happen, he now wonders if such longings had been at all wise.
“My dear Syrilla, Danivon did it because he’s been trained to do it. Enforcers are trained to report wickedness.” He brackets his speech with sips from a porcelain cup heavily crusted with gold. Members of Council Supervisory have recently reinvented (for the umpteenth time and under another name) both teatime and the Baroque.
“Did he have to be so public about it?” she asks in a high, affected voice, a little-girl voice belied by the ageless cynicism of her eyes.
Boarmus grunts impatiently, weary of the woman. She’s a stick: thin to the point of emaciation, a well-groomed, talkative, much ornamented stick. He is bored with her and others like her. He is tired of himself, of being who he is, where he is. He is a much put-upon man. He had never wanted to be Provost, so he now recollects, conveniently forgetting many of the evasions and contortions he had gone through to end up with the job. Besides, that was long ago, when he was young and inept—and ignorant!
He says: “The rule is that one must assert guilt in the Rotunda, loudly, so a great many people hear the charge and it can’t be hushed up. Danivon Luze was taught what we’re all taught, that we can be forgiven for being naughty, but never for being covert about it. We all learned that as children, back in Heaven.” He longs briefly for that island home of the Supervisory people, that sea-washed paradise of tropical foliage, breeze-cooled days and velvety, star-washed nights. Small enough payment, Heaven, for what they go through!
“Of course,” Boarmus continues in an ironic tone, “we of Council Supervisory
unlearn
it during our first tour of duty here at Tolerance. Not being one of us, Danivon never unlearned it, that’s all.”
“Poor old Paff.”
Boarmus slits his pouchy eyes and runs a pudgy hand over his bare and sloping skull, murmuring, “Poor old Paff has been raping and murdering children since he reached puberty. We preferred not to notice, that’s all.”
“But he was one of us, Boarmus! And they were only ordinary children. Molockians and that.”
“Quite frankly, I don’t think—”
“No. It’s no excuse. Of course not. The Diversity Law admits of no exceptions. He had no right to take any children, not even Molockians. He had to Let Them Alone. I know that, Boarmus, I was merely feeling sorry for him.”
“Damn his nose, nonetheless.”
“Paff’s nose?”
“Danivon Luze’s nose.”
“I haven’t heard anything about his nose. I know who he is, of course.”
Boarmus contradicts her. “No one knows who he is. We only know who he became after he got here.”
“What is it about his nose?”
Boarmus’s laughter bursts in a soggy spray, like a mud bubble. “He sniffs things out. Corruption. Or trouble. Or whatever.”
“How very odd.”
“Odd, perhaps. But useful,” he replies, nodding ponderously. “I have found Danivon to be quite irreplaceable.”
“Just by virtue of this smelling out? I mean, really….” She subsides into silent thought. Poor old Paff. A pedo-necro-phile, without question, but such a courtly man. Always so elegantly dressed. Paff would take advantage of the finalizer booth, of course—the only honorable thing to do. If he couldn’t bring that off, something would happen to him. The Frickians would manage it quietly and neatly. They always did in such cases.
Boarmus muses, stroking his massive chin, regretting he has mentioned Danivon’s usefulness. He hadn’t intended to discuss Danivon with Syrilla, whose discretion he trusts no farther than he can fart against a high wind. Danivon has recently committed a tactless act. One might almost say an indiscretion. Boarmus knows about it, but no one else does, yet, and Boarmus hopes to remedy the matter before anyone does. Danivon Luze must get out of Tolerance before he has opportunity to repeat his lapse. Not that Danivon has done anything purposefully wrong. He has erred out of mere curiosity, Boarmus is sure—though there are those who will assume worse motives for the act, if they find out.
“I’m not sure I’ ve ever actually seen him. Danivon, I mean,” says Syrilla, still following her own thoughts.
“As a matter of fact, he should be here momentarily,” Boarmus announces. “I’ve decided to send him to Panubi.”
“You’re sending him to find out about the dragons!” squeals Syrilla in pretended surprise.
Boarmus glooms at her from beneath his heavy brows. Why does the fool woman insist upon this girlish posturing! All the fashion just now, posturing. Every social occasion given over to giggles and squeals and standing about with one’s hands flapping like some wide-winged wader bird about to take off! Well, no amount of squealing and chattering can make a surprise out of the matter. When people on Panubi report seeing dragons where there have never been dragons heretofore, certainly someone has to be sent to look into it.
“And that must be him coming now,” cries Syrilla, clapping her hands and gesturing awkwardly toward the stairs up which an erect, brightly costumed figure is approaching. “All done up in ceremonials too.”
“As is proper,” Boarmus mutters. “Though damned conspicuous.” No one on the lower balcony can miss those nodding purple plumes, that swirling, wide-sleeved purple coat, those scarlet trousers and shirt, the tap-tap of those lustrously polished gaver-hide boots.
Danivon Luze, striding up the stairs as though on parade, knows he is showy. Considering how rumor runs floodtide in Tolerance, he’d planned it that way, wanting no appearance of connivance or conspiracy when summoned to a meeting with Boarmus. Danivon doesn’t really trust Boarmus, doesn’t think he likes Boarmus, though he’s not really sure. Sometimes Boarmus smells like old sin itself, and other times like Uncle offering cookies. No telling in advance whether today’s summons is for naughty Luze or neffy-with-a-sweet-tooth Luze. So, Danivon comes as though on parade, which makes him conspicuous, yes, but also anonymous, his individuality subsumed into the regalia, so to speak, into a uniform formality of manner and stance: not Danivon Luze at all, but merely a Council Enforcer, Tolerance Post.
Danivon stops the requisite number of paces from the tea drinkers, executes a stylish salute that ends in a bow, the appropriate depth of which has been calculated to the last finger’s width. Straightening, he assays an appropriately deferential manner. “Sir,” he says, sweeping bonnet into hand. “Ma’am,” standing easy, relaxed.
Boarmus doesn’t ask him to sit down, but then Danivon hadn’t expected he would.
“You’ve heard about the messages from Panubi,” Boarmus says. “This business about the dragons.”
“Only in passing, sir. Nothing definite.” Actually, Danivon probably knows more about the so-called dragons than Boarmus does. Dragons, certainly, but also sightings of other, indescribable things, plus screams in the night and people gone (or mostly gone) in the morning, an unusual roster of horrid happenings, even for Elsewhere. All this has been served up for Danivon’s delectation in the Frickian servants’ quarters, far below this exalted level. Boarmus doesn’t spend time as Danivon does, down with the flunkies, hobnobbing with messengers from the provinces or with recently returned maintenance techs and supply vehicle drivers.
Boarmus purses his full lips and pontificates, mostly for Syrilla’s benefit: “So far as we know, no animals resembling dragons exist on Elsewhere, though there’s nothing to prevent persons from low-category places from costuming themselves as dragons, or persons from high-category places from manufacturing bi-oids to resemble dragons.” He sips his tea, noting with satisfaction that his voice has betrayed no urgency, no overtones of panic.
Settling the cup into its saucer, he goes on: “There is an additional matter. Some years ago, while you were still a youth, I received a message from Panubi. Not from one of the provinces, but from some other entity, centrally located on the continent. It was one of a series of such messages that seemed unimportant and equivocal at the time, not to say enigmatic. Now, however, inasmuch as this dragon business has come up …” He sips, watching Danivon’s eyes. Was Danivon, possibly, smelling something useful?
“Might one ask what the message said, sir?”
“Um,” says Boarmus, “a petition is how I took it. To the people of Elsewhere. To … ah … leave Elsewhere, perhaps.”
“Ah,” says Danivon, unenlightened. “Ah?” says Syrilla eagerly. “You never told me that, Boarmie.”
“There was nothing to tell. Someone or something located in Central Panubi sent a message. It could have been a joke. It could have been the work of a madman.” Boarmus shrugs, elaborately casual, and turns to Danivon once more. “The
message concluded with these words: ‘R.S.V.P. Noplace, Central Panubi.’ I talked to your friend Zasper about it at the time, as a matter of fact. Twelve or thirteen years ago, it was.”
“Ah,” says Danivon again, considerably confused.
“Zasper felt it didn’t warrant an answer. Now, however …” His voice trails off, as he considers. He doesn’t intend to mention that a fifth petition has arrived. Syrilla doesn’t need to know that. Neither does Danivon. Particularly not the undignified details. He does not often take a woman to bed these days, and when he does, he does not expect her to go into hysterics at the sight of words suddenly printing themselves in large purple letters across the skin of his buttocks and belly! “Rethink their position,” indeed! Luckily she had the good sense to keep quiet about it.
Boarmus sets the humiliating memory aside and perseveres. “Your talents are unique, Luze. You’re well equipped for the task. I suggest you begin by consulting with Zasper Ertigon. He may have had some further thoughts in recent years.”
It isn’t quite what Danivon had expected. He had sniffed something in the air, but not this. Even now, here, with Boarmus not two paces away, he sniffs something other than this. Old, cold Boarmus, lizard-eyed Boarmus, greedy Boarmus, is lying to him. No, that doesn’t smell right either. Maybe not exactly lying. Just not telling the whole truth. Just not telling something … something very important.
“Sir.” Danivon nods, concentrating. His nose twitches sharply, and he suddenly knows some of what is in Boarmus’s mind. “You have wondered whether these so-called dragons might actually be enslaved persons?”
Even knowing Danivon’s ability as he does, it is hard for Boarmus not to show surprise. In light of the strange invitation, the idea of enslaved persons had indeed crossed his mind, but it isn’t a thought he intended to mention in Syrilla’s hearing. Well, too late. He shrugs, yawns. “I suppose anything is possible, my boy.”
“How would enslaved of the Hobbs Land Gods get here?” demands Syrilla in an apprehensive tone. “Our defenses are proof against the Hobbs Land Gods. Our Door is guarded; our force-net would report any incursion from space!”
“You’re perfectly right, Syrilla,” Boarmus murmurs.
She substitutes melodrama for apprehension, laying a
twiggy hand on her chest to cry breathily, “Just think! Enslaved ones!”
“Well, all these matters can be examined simultaneously,” Boarmus says smoothly. “Dragons and enslavement and invitations and ‘noplace,’ wherever that is, plus whatever routine Enforcer duties may pop up on the way.”
“Sir,” says Danivon mildly, trying to digest this all at once. “Am I to go alone.”
Boarmus doesn’t care whether he goes alone or in a company of hundreds, not so long as he
goes
, but saying so would trivialize the matter. For Boarmus’s purposes, this mission must look quite important indeed! Not an
emergency
, which might frighten Council Supervisory into fatal spasms, but important, nonetheless.
Boarmus frowns to show he is considering the matter. “Not if you think it best to take others with you. I’ll leave the details to you, Luze. I have every confidence in your abilities.”
“Sir,” says Danivon again.
Boarmus nods weightily. “Offer what inducements you think appropriate. Requisition whatever equipment you consider necessary. Before you leave, check with the Complaint and Disposition schedule: there will undoubtedly be some routine business to take care of on your way.” He waves a negligent hand, illustrating the trust he places in Danivon Luze. “Besides, it’s time Central Panubi was explored.”
He said this to Zasper years ago. He has said it to others since. After twenty or so generations of human occupation on Elsewhere, the center of the continent is still labeled “Panubi Incognita,” one of those places on maps where the lines trail off into emptiness and cartographers traditionally print “Here be dragons.” Considering that some pixieish conceit led the original cartographers on Elsewhere to do just that, perhaps no one should be surprised now that the dragons have actually shown up.
Allegedly shown up, Boarmus reminds himself. Allegedly. Though whether allegedly or actually, Panubi Incognita serves as a good excuse to get Danivon gone before … someone finds out what he’s done.