Sideshow (14 page)

That night Fringe trailed into the room, half-swathed in a blanket she had fetched from her module, a cocoon to wrap herself in, a second skin to keep the room from touching her. She lay down atop the bed she’d used as a child, the one
Aunty had slept in. She kept telling herself the room was empty, but she felt the usual occupants going about their customary business. No matter that Nada and Aunty were gone away, their ghosts still moved about the room. Not only their spirits, but Souile’s as well. From a veiled distance, they whispered together, about her, about Fringe, saying the things they had always said. She could hear the whispers and guess at the content. She did not fall asleep until almost dawn.
She went to the Pighouse the next day, to visit them. They sat in chairs, vacant-eyed; the air was thick with the scent of the stuff sprayed about to keep them quiet. When Fringe spoke to them, they nodded slowly, scarcely hearing.
“Is the food all right?” she whispered. “Nada, is the food all right? Are you getting enough to eat?”
“To eat,” murmured Nada. “To eat, Fringe girl.”
And, “Did you know Souile died?” Aunty asked.
That night, Fringe tried the room again, only to feel their eyes on her, the weight of presences, the force of personalities, the accusatory whispers, the weight of habitude. Their spirits were here, in this house, not there in the Pighouse where their bodies had been taken. Though she could have done nothing to save Souile, nothing to keep Nada and Aunty from the Pighouse, she felt guilty that she had not tried. Maybe she could have found Nada’s other daughter, Nada’s son. Why hadn’t she at least tried? Was she glad? Could she actually be glad?
She made a faltering attempt to talk about it with Pa. She might as well have talked to a rock. As usual, Pa didn’t talk about things. He merely became angry and told her to get her things out of the module.
“I’ve sold it,” he muttered, not meeting her eyes. “I’ve sold it. The man’s coming to take it apart and move it today. Besides, you’ll do better in your old room. Look at you, for heaven’s sake.” His voice oozed contempt. “Look at you.” He gestured at her, her chewed fingertips, her rat-tailed hair, her blotchy skin, her tear-stained face. “Look at you,” he repeated in disgust.
She opened her mouth to try once more, then shut it. There was no point in trying to explain how she felt. She wasn’t sure how she felt, except that with Souile and the old folks gone, she couldn’t stay in this place. Pa had something in mind, some role he wanted her to play, and she didn’t know what it was. No matter what it was, she couldn’t do it. The
time was past for that. She couldn’t be a daughter for Souile, so she sure as hell wasn’t going to be a daughter for Char! She could hardly be herself for herself. She could not be someone else for Pa.
Back in the shabby module, she totted up the credit chits she’d earned at the weapons shop, the old tattered ones she’d earned working for Ahl Dibai Bloom. They were all there, virtually untouched, enough to keep her for a time if she could find a cheap room near her job and the school. Other Wage-earner youths lived in such places. She spent the afternoon looking, settling for a place no smaller or shabbier than the module had been, with a bed no narrower or harder, a saniton no less functional. The next day she packed up her personal things and moved out, without telling Pa she was going.
That night she went home at suppertime, sat in her usual place, and waited for Pa or Bubba to ask her where she’d been. Bubba talked about the training program Grandma Gregoria was setting him up in. He was to be Professional class, architect caste. He was full of the thrill of it, the challenge, the newness. Neither of them mentioned her absence. She wondered if they even knew she had moved out. Perhaps where she was, was less important than the module being gone.
If they found it easier to pretend, she would pretend. She lived in her rented room but went home for dinner whenever she could bear to or was too hungry not to go. Occasionally she went to Grandma Gregoria’s. No one ever said anything about what she was doing, though both Pa and Grandma carped about things in general and Fringe’s many failings in particular.
When she couldn’t face going home and wasn’t too hungry, she spent her time using junk and discards from the weapons shop to make complicated little machines that spun and glittered and were company of a kind. She rather longed for a pet but could not afford to feed one. Though she knew herself to be unattractive (Zasper said that wasn’t true), male companionship was offered from time to time. Each encounter left her feeling more alone than before, and she told herself she was safer without. She was less likely to make idle comments that others took as commitments or insults, less likely to let her insecurity bubble up in teasing gibes that only made others angry. Alone, she didn’t make mistakes that came back
to haunt her. Except for her friendships with Zasper and Bloom, she hadn’t the hang of relationships. People always wanted her to be something else.
“Men don’t work out for me,” she told Zasper when he asked her about her love life. “I don’t have the right … oh, I don’t know, Zasper. It doesn’t feel right, that’s all.”
He shook his head, but he did not argue with her. Perhaps love didn’t work for her. There were people like that. Zasper thought he himself was probably one of them.
Besides, she told him, she got plenty of company at work, where they did approve of her.
Her job included the provision of target accuracy certificates for repaired arms. Most of the technicians used a firing stand, but Fringe preferred to shoot from the hand, becoming so skillful that her customers came to rely upon her work and her opinion. Even Zasper said, half in jest, that a girl with her target scores was wasted in a repair shop. To hide her pleasure at this, she remarked offhandedly she’d probably inherited the skill from some Guntoter forebear on Earth, thousands of years ago.
Then one afternoon she went to Grandma Gregoria’s and tried to be mannerly over a plate of grilled fish while Grandma snarled with more than usual vituperation about Fringe’s Trashish and unforgivable behavior and how beneath himself Char had married.
“If it hadn’t been for your ma,” said Grandma. “If it hadn’t been for those Tromses, you might have turned out to be something….”
Fringe had been much alone recently. The plate before her was the first food she had had in several days. She was still very young and often frightened. Day by day, she tried to keep bewilderment at bay, tried not to think about anything except the next minute, the next task, holding herself together with endlessly frayed and continually patched resolve. At the sound of the carping voice, something inside her tore. She felt it rip, felt the fabric of her life tear asunder, letting something molten and horrid show through.
“If I’m a Trasher,” she blurted, “it’s because Pa is so fucking arrogant he took on more than he could manage. Then even though he looked down his nose on the Tromses just like you did, he let them raise me! Then he despised me because I turned out to be just like them. Who else would I have been
like? Take your tongue off me and my ma, Grandma, because we both turned out just the way you and Pa made us!”
It had been then that Gregoria, eyes bulging and mouth spraying fragments of fish in all directions, told Fringe to get out of her sight and never come into it again.
Fringe went in a mood of cold desperation, not so much angry as chilled and shocked, as though she were bleeding inside. She couldn’t stop trembling. She couldn’t get warm. The only warm place she could think of was Bloom’s, so she went there, or near there, stopping in an alleyway nearby because her stomach cramped, bending her double, and she couldn’t move.
“Are you sick, Fringe?” asked a voice.
For a moment she thought it was Nada. The voice had some of that quality, though without any whine to it. The speaker was half-hidden in a doorway, wearing the kind of cloak and hood that tourists sometimes wore in the Swale, tourists who wanted to see without being seen.
“I’ ll be all right,” gasped Fringe, waving the nosy intruder away.
“Something happened,” said the hooded woman. “Something bad.”
“Something,” agreed Fringe, taking deep breaths, suddenly remembering that voice. It was Jory—the old woman who’d followed her around back … back when she was only a kid. “What are you doing here?”
The old woman put back her hood and came closer, ignoring the question. “You’ve been hurt,” she said. “By somebody who shouldn’t have hurt you, but did.”
Fringe’s mouth dropped open and for a moment she forgot to breathe.
“What’s your second name?” the old woman asked. “I don’t remember your second name.”
“Dorwalk. Fringe Dorwalk.”
The cramp surprised out of her, Fringe moved around, trying to get a good look at whatever it was behind the woman, something large and shadowy moving there, just out of sight. A mystery. That’s all she needed right now, another mystery intruding on her life.
The old woman reached out, lifted Fringe’s chin, dried her face with the backs of her old hands. “I’m going to give you a new name,” she said. “In my opinion, that’s what you need.
New names often help. New names create new people; new people can leave old habits behind and handle things better.”
Fringe merely stared stupidly. Who did this … this thing think she was?
“Owldark,” said Jory. “Your new name. The letters of your old name spell your new name: Fringe Owldark—a totally different person from Fringe Dorwalk, don’t you think? Say it.”
Fringe, too stupefied to argue, said it obediently, watching the shadowy something shift and move. “Fringe Owldark.”
The old woman nodded to herself. “Fringe Dorwalk had an uncertain future. Ways were closed to her. She was anxious. She chewed her fingers and cried herself to sleep. But Fringe Owldark is one of
my
people. I told you that long ago, didn’t I? One of my people, chosen by me to … to do wonderful things. To become something special. Yes, Owldark has a totally different future before her! All she needs to do is go find it.” The old woman patted her cheek, turned, and was dissolved into the shadow. Fringe took a step forward, but the doorway was empty.
Perhaps she had dreamed it. Likely she had dreamed it. Hunger dreams. Visions. Sometimes she had those.
“Fringe Owldark,” she said aloud, no longer crying, suddenly wanting to tell Zasper all about it.
She went to him full of the story, but when she got there he greeted her by thrusting a plate full of food at her and quoting a remark some friend of his had made, touting Fringe’s skills at weapons repair. He said yet again that she was wasted in the repair shop, a remark at which Fringe Dorwalk had always flushed and bridled, not sure how to react.
Fringe Owldark, however, her mouth full of succulent roast meat and the juices running down her throat, knew with absolute certainty she had indeed been wasted up until now. She was not going to be hungry again!
“I want you to sponsor me to the Enforcer Academy,” she said firmly, surprising herself as much as Zasper.
“Ah, Fringe,” he said with a pang, the expression in her eyes reminding him suddenly of Danivon Luze, “nah, nah, you don’t want to do that.”
Fringe Dorwalk might have equivocated, but Fringe Owldark did not. The request had come from a spewing well of desperation that could not now be capped and ignored. “I
have to do something, Zasper. I can’t go back home and I’m barely making it on my own. I’m tired of being hungry.”
“You can always come here to me! Never a day I’d let you go from this place hungry!”
“I don’t want to have to go to anybody, don’t you understand! I don’t want to go to anybody for anything. I don’t want to have to depend on anyone. I want to be on my own. I want a place, food, clothes I don’t have to ask for. I’m tired of people feeding me and clothing me and all the time resenting me because I’m not what they had in mind.”
“I’d never—”
“I know that! But it would still be you, Zasper, not me! What I want is your sponsorship. Help me. Sometime I’ll pay you back.”
He sat her down, gave her a glass of black ale, and begged her to listen to him. “Fringe girl, I’ll help you any way I can, but listen. There’s something … something changing on Elsewhere. Was a time when everything was clear and plain, even for Enforcers. These days, things are cloudy. It’s like, like something …”
“You’re not saying anything, Zasper,” she cried. “I need help and you’re not saying anything!”
“All right, all right, listen! Pretend I’m a flea living on a dog, all right?”
“You’re a flea, Zasper. I can believe that.” She choked with hysterical laughter, tears running down her cheeks.
He pounded her, forcing her to listen. “Right. And I begin to think something’s wrong. And all the other fleas laugh at me, because there’s nothing different. The sun comes up, the sun goes down. The dog eats his breakfast and shits on the grass. Then, one day, the dog falls down dead, and I suddenly realize: That was it! The dog was sick!”
“So?”
“So there’s something sick happening to Elsewhere, Fringe. Something sick and dangerous.”
She stared at him, shaking her head.
“Life
is sick and dangerous, Zasper. You try and tell me different!”
That wasn’t what he meant, but he couldn’t make it any clearer. “Being an Enforcer, it’s hard, Fringe.”
“I don’t care how hard it is.”
Sometimes Enforcers failed of their duty, he said. He himself had sometimes not come up to the mark. He had never learned to operate a flier well. And there was a little boy he
had once saved from certain torture and death, against the rules. And he had opinions all the time. “You will either break your oath or you will hate yourself sometimes,” he said.
“I hate myself all the time now,” she replied. “Hating me just some of the time would be an improvement.”
She insisted, overriding his warnings, his confessions of what he said were his failings, wondering at his telling her, telling anyone, for if someone reported him, he’d be in trouble. Not that she would. Never. Not Zasper. She came close to him, put her hand on his arm (something she seldom did or allowed), told him she knew it wouldn’t be easy, she knew some of the work was hard and unpleasant, but no matter how hard or unpleasant, it was better than where she was now.
Zasper shook his head at her, opened his mouth, then shut it. He had no more arguments and nothing to offer her instead, any more than he had had anything else to offer Danivon Luze. Zasper had been an Enforcer for decades. He knew what being an Enforcer had done to him. After years of doing it by the book, he’d asked himself what he was, what was this Zasper Ertigon? A man with ugly feelings hidden away, emotions he couldn’t express, judgments he couldn’t make. He’d been raised with certain ideas of right or wrong, but over the decades he’d felt a certain moral atrophy, an inability to decide what was right. Now he laughed at the thought. As a child here in Enarae, yes, there had been right things and wrong things, but what did an Enforcer want with such puzzles? That isn’t what Enforcers were for! They were for doing the will of the Council, which meant enforcing right