Sideshow (27 page)

“A good argument for a benevolent despotism.”
“Oh, give me that every time, so long as I can be the despot.” She laughs, then sobers, reflecting. “No, this new horror has no limits on its brutality. When empowered ones sink into the barbarism of torture and indiscriminate death, then not only they themselves but also the society that empowers them are evil, root and branch, twig and leaf. This alone would tell me the horror doesn’t come from Tolerance, for Tolerance still sets itself certain standards of behavior. Besides,
the source can’t be anything Danivon has been close to, or he’d have smelled it out.”
“A strange one, this Danivon Luze. Also this Fringe Owldark. Odd ones for you to have picked!”
“I didn’t pick Danivon. I picked his parents, and Danivon sort of happened along. I did pick Fringe, and I hold by my choice, old friend. I look at her and I see myself all over again. Oh, she was differently reared and has different ways of reacting. I was reared on words and she on silences, I on a system of philosophy and she on none at all, but inside…. Well.” She is silent for a long moment, before saying, “She will be the right one, I think. When—”
“We will not speak of that.”
“Not out loud, no. But
we
must. Eventually.”
“We will not speak of that.”
She sighs. “Danivon’s in love with her, of course. She could be with him, but she refuses to be. She prefers not to be in love with anyone.” Jory laughs with wry amusement. “She prefers not.”
“You felt so once. A familiar response.”
“Oh, hush!”
“And the twins?”
“Also very strange. They have decided opinions, though they aren’t quite sure what they are from moment to moment! I confess that I’m enjoying them, quite selfishly. Hearing them talk of Earth is almost like having my girlhood back again.”
“Do you want it back again?”
She considers this, staring into the black where the rim of the wheel of stars made a vast snowy road across the sky, as though to see some other world, some distant sun. “Not really. I was such a prig. So driven to do good, to fix things, that I didn’t allow myself many enjoyments.”
“You haven’t changed.”
She laughs. “I guess not. Here I am, come to this world totally by chance, trying to save it. I have a perfectly nice rocking chair at home. I could be sitting there with my cat, watching the horses in the meadow, instead of trying to cure all ills, making a swan song of pushing my nose in….”
The voice in her mind sounds offended.
“Not just your nose. There are several of us.”
“Well, three. You, me, and Asner.” She sighs. “I’m guilty of hubris. Having come at last to the peace of Panubi—quite by accident, of course—having met
them
, upriver, I should
have let it go at that. For any normal person, meeting
them
would have made a good finish, wouldn’t it? Despite their turning out to be quite different from what I might have expected. Better and worse, one might say. Still, a nice dramatic conclusion for anyone’s existence. Any sensible autobiographer would have stopped right there. But no. I wanted one more good thing, one more achievement to my credit. I never thought it would be simple. But I didn’t think it was impossible, either.”
“Humans are often impossible.”
“Look who’s talking,” she mutters. “Still, I did think this was worth a simple try, a few little nudges that might do some good without much upsetting
them.
I thought we could stimulate discussion, pique curiosity, get a little dissension and rebellion started….”
“Preach the gospel of freedom!”
“One might say that. Given a little time, it might have worked! But now, suddenly, there’s this new thing. This malice. This evil. Something dreadful’s going to happen, I can feel it!”
“Yes.”
“We’re both too old for this,” she says sadly. “Someone younger should be doing this.”
“Asner’s younger. By a few thousand years.”
“He was already an old man when we found him on my former home planet, staring at that ancient statue of you and me.”
“You flirted with him.”
“Pah! I simply asked him if he saw any resemblance between me and the statue, and he said he did! You and I looked very brave and beautiful in our prime. Did I tell you it was sculptured by a man I knew?”
“Several hundred times.”
“Well, we old people forget what stories we’ve told. Life changes around us so much we turn to comfortable things. Old events, old memories. Things we’ve worn smooth with retelling.” She fingers the medallion around her neck. “Sometimes I need to remember what I was like, when I was young. Copying my friend’s work on a pendant means I can look at it and be reminded. I won’t forget him … or us, as we were.”
“Vanity. All is vanity,”
he says in an amused voice.
“Your scriptural citations are always correct, old friend.
All is vanity. When I stop being vain, I’ll be dead. Vanity is its own resurrection. It gives one hope!”
“And you think this one little world is worth …”
“You are not the only student of ancient human Scripture. Even long dead religions have had truths written in their names. Think of the ninety and nine in the fold and the shepherd abroad in the windy night, seeking the lost sheep on the lonely hills….”
Together they consider the lost sheep: Elsewhere.

8

Boarmus was wakened again in the middle of the night. This time he did not bother with the trip down the hall, the tube, the secret doors, and access routes to the Core. This time he didn’t have to go anywhere, for they came to him, not as mere wraiths but as actualities, as separate presences.
“Your Enforcers are asking the question again,” one cried, waving its hideous arms. “Those with them too, they are breaking our commandments! We can see them. We can hear them!”
Others began to shriek, the sounds making a beast howl in his ears, and Boarmus fought the thrashing sickness in his belly. Only keeping the appearance of calm would save him from them. “What are you talking about?” he demanded. “I can’t hear with you all talking at once.”
One voice said, “Your Enforcers should not ask questions.”
“Ask whom?” Boarmus shouted. Silence.
“Asking,” said the voice. “Talking. We heard them saying things. In Shallow! In Panubi!”
Boarmus thought a moment, cursing silently. “You mean, the people we sent to Panubi have been talking with one another? Telling the people from the past about Elsewhere? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
“Forbidden,” the voices gibbered.
How many voices were there? He couldn’t tell. Not as many as there should be. A thousand persons had gone into
the Core, but there were only a few voices. Since the last time, he had been through the biography book a dozen times. There was that one voice, that one gulping voice, that one name written over and over in blood; there was the female voice that had introduced herself to him; he thought he knew at least two others.
“Why is it forbidden?” demanded Boarmus, forcing the words out against mounting panic.
Silence again.
Boarmus swallowed bile and pressed the point. “Does it really matter if they talk of history or ask questions about Elsewhere? They know about Brannigan. They know the committee members came here. That’s public knowledge, discussed on every Great Question Day. But people don’t know the Core exists, and they won’t find out about the Core because I’m the only one who knows about the Core and I won’t tell them. Let them ask all they like. Let them make up stories. It won’t matter!”
“Forbidden,” cried a horrid voice, joined by echoes, resonances. Perhaps that’s all the other nine hundred and some odd were by now, mere echoes, mere resonances. And yet they were dreadful, horrid, turning his insides to churning liquid, making him feel like a bag of loose guts. How? Why this absolute terror, with him powerless to control it?
“Why?” demanded Boarmus again, struggling to keep his voice calm and reasonable, reaching deep into memory for what he’d read in the corridors below, what Chadra Hume had told him. “I can understand your desire for secrecy at first. Your coming here was secret. You believed the people at Brannigan who weren’t members of your committee might have resented your coming here. You thought they might regard it as a kind of … desertion. You worried that they might be so angry they’d come after you. But that was then!”
He clenched his teeth together and swallowed. “That was then. There’s no danger now! There’s no threat now. Nobody knows about you anymore. Except for a few rhymes and songs, you’ve all been forgotten!”
He knew the words were a mistake as soon as they left his lips. Faces faded into the walls. Luminous, flapping forms succeeded them, turned to show faces once more, then faded again and reappeared, each face contorted so greatly it took Boarmus a moment to realize that the emotion they expressed was rage.
“Forgotten,” they shrieked at him, deafening him.
“What right have they to forget?”
Choruses of voices. How many? He couldn’t tell. Outside his fear, some cool part of himself listened and noted. There were at least four of them, plus echoes. Were they the ones Zasper had mentioned, so long ago?
“But you
wanted
to be forgotten,” Boarmus whispered, barely able to get the words out. “It’s in the log, back during the early years. You decided you liked it that way. It was your decision.”
“We created this world. If it were not for us …”
Boarmus made a placating gesture. Useless. The voices did not pause.
“What I we am are cannot be forgotten! We are … we are more than we were, Boarmus. Nobody forgets us anymore, Boarmus. We are … we are a new thing, Boarmus. We can do as we will, Boarmus.”
He stood slack-jawed, spit flowing up under his tongue as from a well.
“Kneel down, Boarmus. Show reverence,” said the gulper, a scream of fury in the voice. “You kneel down!”
“Yes, Boarmus,” another voice. This was definitely a female voice, he knew it! “Kneel down. Pray to us, Boarmus. Show us the respect a loving son owes us.”
“A loving … man owes us,” snickered another, also female.
Did he hear laughter?
Do it
, his mind said.
No matter what, just do it. Do it, so they’ll be satisfied and get out of here.
He fell to his knees, shivering with a terror so complete he could not have opposed them even if he had thought of it.
His mind still worked, however. Some chilly part of him sat off and asked questions. “Tell me your names so I can be respectful,” he murmured. “Please.”
“Magna Mater,” tittered a voice.
“Most Gracious and Wondrous Lady,” said another.
“Almighty and Marvelous,” gulped a third.
He didn’t ask for further introductions. “Don’t kill me, please,” he whispered. “Please, almighty ones.”
Something like a chuckle, something like a sigh of satisfaction, something like a wailing scream. All at once, from separate beings.
“We don’t care what you say,” came a fading voice, the
male voice. “We will punish … if we decide to. Curious people. Blasphemous people. Punish them….”
All right, they were doing it. Now how were they doing it? Not supernatural. He didn’t believe in the supernatural. It had to be mechanical or electronic. A combination, perhaps. Sonics to cause apprehension. Combined with holography to create terror. Perhaps focused electromagnetic fields. Could one stop a heart with focused fields? The question was irrelevant. The dead girl they’d found down below the monitoring section hadn’t had her heart stopped. She’d been torn apart. Had they done that?
Of course they had. He didn’t even need to know why. Why didn’t matter. The only question that mattered was how.
He walked to the monitoring station, to the blinking lights and beeping signals and the scurry of persons keeping track of the thousand provinces.
Assume
, he told himself, fighting to appear relaxed and calm,
oh, assume that if they can see what is going on in Panubi, they can also follow you if you leave Tolerance—can and will! Assume they can go anywhere on the surface of Elsewhere. Probably not in the air. Not if they’re using sonics and holography and focused fields. Not high in the air, at any rate. Whatever mechanism they use to propagate themselves on the surface, surely it cannot extend through open air. And probably not through or across water. Not yet, at any rate.
So … so, they must be stopped. Of course they must be stopped. The former Provost, Chadra Hume, had known that. He’d told Boarmus that! They had to be stopped before … Too late to stop them before. Now they had to be stopped while. Stopped while they were doing these horrible things. And the only minds capable of stopping them were the dinks in City Fifteen. Not just any dink would do. Some of them were ridiculous mechanisms worth no more than a dead chaffer, but some of them were brilliant, geniuses, Chadra Hume had told him once, certainly as bright as those ancient ones who’d gone into the Core, dinka-jins who’d chosen to be only brains because that’s what they mostly were to start with. Those … those were the ones he needed, those were the ones Chadra Hume had told him about.
But how could he get there without the Core knowing? The Core knew everything!
He wandered through the monitoring rooms, nodding, smiling, feeling the skin around his lips crack, trying to ignore the sickness in the back of his throat, the cramps in his belly as
he stopped to greet a worker, to peer into a monitor that reflected the abyssal trenches of Deep.
Find an excuse to go somewhere else
, he thought,
but don’t go there…. No. No, for if they expect you to turn up somewhere and you don’t, then they’ll become suspicious. So, you must go where you say you will go. But then, on the way back, stop off at City Fifteen. And in the meantime, send a message to City Fifteen, telling them what has happened….
How could he send a message. What mechanism could he use? There was no point in using a code. Down there was an enormous brain full of hundreds of minds, some of them, no doubt, quite competent. A few, perhaps, brilliant. Well, so maybe there were only a few left, they would be the smartest ones, wouldn’t they? The fact that they were insane (all? or only some?) didn’t necessarily limit their intelligence. Couple that with the fact the thing was located behind an impervious barrier, and it had its own power source and its own workshops and its own warehouse full of everything imaginable (Boarmus had been through the specifications a dozen times) and though it was originally set up to communicate with the outside world only through the Files and the Provost—only symbolically, only verbally—somehow it had found a way to get around those limitations and now it was out!
A code message would be deciphered in the instant.
So, how to send a message to the dinka-jins?
Boarmus peered into a monitor that watched the moon rise over New Athens. He joined an intent group watching a scene in Derbeck, the images flashing up on the array, only to be succeeded by others, then others still.
“Stop it there,” said the Charge Monitor for Derbeck, with a bow of deference toward Boarmus. “Right there! Provost, I’m glad you’re here to see this. That deity of theirs has actually been showing up on visual recently!”
They watched together as Chimi-ahm, the tripartite deity of Derbeck, strode through the streets of Houmfon.
“Take that eye down,” demanded the Charge Monitor, her voice shaking. “I want to see its feet!”
The eye extended its distant lens and focused upon the great crushing feet that broke the cobbles to leave imprints there, feet that crushed the herbage as they crossed a verge, that shattered structures as they smashed through walls.
“It’s leaving footprints,” cried an observer. “And destruction,
real destruction! It can’t do that! It’s not a material thing!”
“How long has this been going on?” demanded Boarmus, the sickness inside him surging as he watched the striding image. “Am I correct in recalling that the Derbecki god has always been hallucinatory!”
“Has been,” said the Charge Monitor tersely. “But
is
something else now, Provost. The damned thing’s real.”
“Sort of,” said another Monitor, bending over a flickering instrument panel. “Not entirely. Almost.”
“Make up your mind,” the Provost snarled. “Which is it?”
“It varies,” the Monitor muttered. “It sometimes is and sometimes isn’t. See for yourself.”
And they did, watching as the needles flickered and rose and fell. The thing was real, sometimes, for moments. And not real too. Unquestionably, however, real or unreal, the thing
was.
Not quite synchronized, yet, but it was, nonetheless.
Boarmus swallowed. The monitors were looking at him, waiting for him to tell them what to do. They would expect him to investigate this, at once. Perhaps they were expecting him to do it himself, but Derbeck was nowhere near City Fifteen and just now it was absolutely essential for him to get to City Fifteen.
He kept his voice firm and decisive. “We have a team near Derbeck. Danivon Luze’s group. Send instructions from me saying they’re to make an investigation of this manifestation in Derbeck, as soon as possible.” His voice sounded right: concerned but not panicky. Those working as monitors nodded, accepting that he had done the proper thing.
He thought:
New Athens is near City Fifteen. Denial is near City Fifteen. Enarae is near City Fifteen. Zasper Ertigon is in Enarae. I would have legitimate reason to inquire from Zasper Ertigon about Danivon Luze, about Fringe Owldark.
“I’m going to Enarae,” he loudly informed an underling. “I want to talk to former Council Enforcer Zasper Ertigon about two of his Enforcer protégés. Arrange quick transport and be sure Ertigon will be available when I get there.” Let the dead men listen, let them hear. What he was doing was appropriate. They could not fault what he was doing.
The underling scurried and returned. “Transport, sir. Down in the garage momentarily. Zasper Ertigon located and holding himself in readiness, sir.”
Boarmus made no thanks for this efficiency. Though originality
and innovation were rare or totally absent in Tolerance, efficiency was the usual thing.
“Does the Provost wish his travel things packed? Does the Provost wish to take a secretary?” A flunky is what the underling meant. Did Boarmus want somebody along to do the running and fetching. But of course he did.
“Have my travel things packed, yes. And that cousin of Syrilla’s. That young man. What’s his name?” Boarmus knew what his name was, the one who’d been standing about, spying on him, watching him. The one he’d seen hiding in the corridor last time he’d returned from the Core. Jacent.
“Jacent, sir.” Jacent of the lambent eye, the laughing mouth, Jacent the manic, the madcap, the servant-hall comedian. The underling smiled, thinking of Jacent.
“That’s him. Get him.” Youths of that age had been well educated and well trained and were still fresh enough to have some gumption. Five years from now he would have substituted opinion for fact, pose for reaction, and would be useless—as useless as the rest of Council Supervisory—but just now, Jacent would do. Besides, the boy had been hanging about, obviously curious, and he had a certain daredevil air to him, as though he might be capable of more than mere duty. Boarmus would need more than mere duty.
And in very little time they were aloft, two of them and the pilot.
“We’re going to Enarae,” Boarmus told Jacent, keeping it to a whisper, his mouth a finger’s width from the boy’s ear. Even if there was some spying little ear on the flier, likely they couldn’t hear him over the whine of the gravitics. “I have reason to think we will be overheard once we are on the ground, so once we are on the ground, you won’t say one word about this. You will accompany me to the hotel. You will go with me to the Swale. That’s a—”
“I know about the Swale,” said Jacent, preening himself in his excitement.