Sideshow (3 page)

He wanted to see if what he’d heard described was really
there, and it was, not ten paces from the top of the stairs. Centered upon the paved square was an iron rack made up of wavy spikes, ten wide, ten deep, ten high. On each spike rested a skull, a thousand skulls, all little ones, all from children possibly four or five years old.
The ten skulls from the back row of the top layer had been removed to the stained altar and lay there lined up beside two stone mauls. Twice each year the ten oldest skulls were beaten into powder and distributed to the worshipers as a guarantee of fertility for the fields, the flocks, the men and women of Molock. To the dreadful pounding of drums and the shriek of flutes, all the other skulls were moved up a notch, and twelve little boys were hung upon the sides of the rack to die slowly of thirst and hunger before the eyes of their parents who, during all that long dying, were carefully restrained and fed and given water to drink before the eyes of their sons. The first ten who died were used on the rack. The last two left alive were given back to their parents and sometimes they survived. Seasonally, ten skulls were removed and replaced with ten new ones.
Zasper counted the skulls, as though the act of enumeration might change the total number. He had heard about the rite when it first began, marking it down as another delightful thing about Molock to make him avoid the place. He had refused to consider details then, but now they confronted him in a way he couldn’t simply pretend not to see. In order to have accumulated a thousand skulls in the short time since the rite began, the number of children sacrificed at first must have been many times the current number, which was quite bad enough. Obviously there was only one likely reason for someone having put the child in the cargo compartment: to save that child from ending up here.
He peered into the eyes of the skulls, which seemed to stare back at him. Some of them near the bottom bore shreds of skin and hair. Among them something squirmed and dropped with a sickening plop to the stones.
Molock. Category four. Barbarian. And its temple. Which Zasper was sworn to protect, or at least sworn not to allow any interference with whatsoever. He was a Council Enforcer. His oath and the oaths of those like him were all that stood between the diversity that defines humanity and the loss of humanity itself. Cultural relativism. The necessity of maintaining a nonjudgmental attitude. Diverse but not therefore perverse.
Those were a few of the phrases he was accustomed to. Still, he looked at the skulls and didn’t move, feeling sickness clench deep in his bowels.
Abruptly, without thinking about it, he went back to the ship, raised it, and returned to his former course. With a little judicious stage setting, he could make it look as though the child had been in there for days. He could scatter some wrappings about. He could empty some food and water containers. After all that beer with the watchman, he could even manage a few convincing puddles.
As he went about planting evidence, he thought about the new rite instituted at Molock and all the implications of it: the new cruelty, the new fury, the new pain. Had it anything to do with the increasing persecutions at Derbeck? The higher death rate in Enarae? He called to mind other changes observed here and there and more or less everywhere, none of them for the better and all of them to do with the worship of this god or that god, the persecution of this or that heresy, the requirement of this or that conformity.
As though the provinces had all of a sudden gotten hungry for blood and suffering, he told himself. Not that some of them hadn’t been like that before, but lately they had been more so. Getting still worse all the time. As though something … something were changing, yet what could be changing? The status quo was a sacred trust! He and some thousands like him enforced it, preserved it, protected it. What could be changing?
When the flier arrived at Tolerance, Zasper let the technicians disembark and go about their business while he fiddled and fidgeted, unnecessarily computing fuel consumption for the third time. At last he took his inventory sheets and with ostentatious clamor opened the cargo hold.
Everyone in the vehicle bay heard the shout of surprise when he found the child. Members of the maintenance crew heard him cursing and found him holding a little boy against his shoulder as he pointed with an outraged finger into the hold.
The crew chief demanded to know when he got in there.
No way of telling, said Zasper. The trip had included over twenty stops. They hadn’t had to get anything out of the cargo bay since the third or fourth stop. The boy could have been in there for days. Look at all the food wrappers, Zasper urged.
Smell the urine where the kid had piddled behind boxes, against the sides of the compartment. And look there. Shit!
Both piddle and shit were added artistry, his own, but he didn’t think anyone would bother with an analysis. To keep them off balance, he fulminated, counterfeiting outrage.
“Cute kid,” said a female crew member, reaching for him.
The boy put his arms around her and laid a weary little head on her shoulder. She smelled rather like his mother.
“Who are you, little boy?” she asked.
“My name is Danivon Luze,” he said clearly, gazing at her from under his incredible lashes, like a fringe of reeds around little sky-colored lakes. “I’m four years old.”
“Danivon. That’s a nice name. Do you know where you live?”
“Duffy danty boddle bock,” he said clearly and very seriously. “That’s where I live.”
The crew laughed at that, some of them, making the child look first doubtful, then tearful, while Zasper gave thanks that someone had been reasonably clever.
“That’s all right,” said the woman, wiping the child’s tears. “They weren’t laughing at you, Danny.”
“I suppose we ought to report this,” said the crew chief doubtfully.
“Oh, no,” cried the female crew member. “No, Jerrod. Hey, don’t. You do that, no telling where they’d send him. Let’s keep him. He’s a cute little kid.”
Zasper, fading purposefully into the background, looked back to find the boy’s eyes fixed upon him. The little boy’s nose twitched as he settled into the curve of the woman’s shoulder, never for an instant taking his eyes from Zasper’s face.
And what’re you going to grow up to be, Danivon Luze
, Zasper asked himself, without an instant’s suspicion of how very important the answer to that question could be.
In the other time and place, on Earth, the first small cloud on the sky of Marla Korsyzczy’s contentment appeared during the fifth month of her pregnancy when ultrasound revealed two babies. A bit of a surprise, yes, though twins could not be considered a disaster. If one wanted lots of children anyway, which Marla and Leksy did because they couldn’t hold their heads up in the family otherwise, twins were an efficient way
of getting there after what Leksy’s family insisted on calling a slow start. The doctor said he had a little trouble distinguishing between the two heartbeats, but everything appeared normal.
“I’d like to do an amniocentesis,” he told Marla.
“Why?” she asked. “What are you looking for?”
“Don’t you want to know what they are?” he asked. “Boys, girls, boy-girl?”
Marla thought about it. If there was a boy in there, no problem. If there was no boy in there, she might very well have a problem, but it would be the same problem later as now. Maybe it would be better simply not to know just yet. Leksy had already picked out a boy’s name and painted the nursery blue. He had already thanked the Virgin with numerous candles and by referring to her several friends of his who had only girl children.
Marla said she thought she’d just go along with uncertainty, which, after all, had been the usual way of things until recently. The doctor went along with that. Still, when he ran the scanner over her bulging belly and looked at the ultrasound screen, he looked a little puzzled.
“What’s the matter?” Marla asked, alert to any nuance.
He shrugged. “They’re just in a rather odd position,” he said. “Relative to each other. We’ll take another look in a month or so.”
Another look disclosed no change. The babies were lined up as though on parade. The doctor bit the bullet and told Lek and Marla that the babies might be joined.
“Siamese twins!” blurted Leksy, horrified.
“Joined babies,” corrected the physician in his calmest and most professional tone. “Almost all joined babies can be successfully surgically separated. Let’s not borrow trouble. Let’s just wait and see.” He did not remind Marla that he had told her the medicine caused a slightly higher incidence of twins. He didn’t want to remember that himself.
Marla leaned forward and fastened the doctor with a scalpel eye. “What about natural childbirth,” she asked. Marla had been attending classes since the third month.
“If the babies are joined, you’ll have to deliver by cesarean,” the physician said, glad to change the subject, if only slightly. The word “cesarean” got them off on a discussion of scars, how big and where they would be. Leksy wasn’t great shakes on innovative lovemaking, but he did like to look
at her nude, which Father Jabowsky had told him was all right if it served to get him in the mood to do what the books on Moral Theology said was all right to do.
The doctor discussed scars at some length because he did not want her to think about this Siamese-twin business. Ovitalibon had never, never been known to produce
Siamese
twins, but still. It could be argued. In court. That he should have known. Or shouldn’t have recommended. Or should have let God’s will be done in not letting Marla get pregnant at all, because when she didn’t maybe that was God saying no. The doctor could imagine what the woman’s husband would say on the stand. In this church-ridden town they would probably call in the priest as a witness! Either that or subpoena God Himself.
So he sweated and prayed that God, assuming there was one, could still be merciful to poor doctors who were trying their best. First, let the babies be born healthy. Second, let the separation be easy and let both babies live!
He got only part of what he prayed for. Marla went into labor, the obstetrician did a cesarean and delivered her of two bouncing, screaming somethings, nobody was quite sure what.
“Boys,” said the delivery-room charge nurse in a gloomy voice. “Without a doubt. Listen to them complain!”
“They don’t have penises,” whispered a younger nurse.
“One sort of does. Besides, they have scrotums,” the charge nurse answered.
“One of them does. Sort of.”
“Well, they don’t have vaginas,” muttered the charge nurse.
“I think one of them does. Sort of.”
After a quick analysis of the twins’ chromosomes, the doctor attempted to explain to Leksy what the problem was. They were both XXY, and though the doctor did his best, Leksy either wasn’t able or willing to understand the implications.
“The one born first is a boy,” said Leksy, who was still visualizing the babies being born as kittens and puppies are born, one at a time in a slimy sack, not being lifted from the open abdomen in one very much connected and already yelling bloody chunk. “First born is a boy. I know that. If you have to do some surgery, I understand that. God gives us these things to try our faith, but it’s a boy because the Virgin said it was going to be a boy.”
“I’ve always wanted a daughter,” sobbed Marla from the
depths of an extreme postpartum depression. She wasn’t thinking at all. She had resolved to give up thinking. Look where thinking and worrying had got her! Now she only cried and said exactly what she felt, no matter how silly it was. “Look at her, so sweet.” She was looking at the left-hand twin, who was, in fact, slightly smaller and sweeter-looking than the right-hand twin. Not that there was anything wrong with the looks of either of them. They were pretty babies. All there, except for the sexual anomalies. Five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot. Two little umbilici. Lots of dark hair and cute little curly ears and squinched-up eyes. Just like any two normal children, except for the broad pink tube of flesh that joined them from between right-hand baby’s left armpit to slightly behind left-hand baby’s right shoulder and extended downward almost to their hipbones. The flesh was full of throbbing, heaving movement. It wasn’t just skin and muscle. It was obviously full of innards. Somebody’s.
Preliminary reports revealed that separation was a vain hope. The babies shared one heart that was hooked up in a very unusual and complicated way. They seemed to share a liver and part of one lung. Besides, they were born in a Catholic hospital that had a medical ethicist on staff. At one time there had been a priest who had said yes or no, but now there was a medical ethicist who said the same things. The surgeons emerged from their conference with the ethicist with no joy whatsoever. One child could not be sacrificed for the other. Both lived, or neither, and there was no question that there were two separate children. They had, for example, two quite separate brains. The priest who, just to be safe, baptized them immediately after birth did it twice. There was no question in anyone’s mind that there were two babies there.
By this time there were several physicians involved, all of them aware that a great many people who, believing they were men or women and living acceptable lives as men and women, were actually, genetically speaking, something else again. The deciding factor in cases like these had to be how the parents intended to rear them. The surgeons consulted again. The baby on the right did have sort of a penis, though the urethra opened at the bottom of it, next to his body. Well, that could be fixed. Also, right-hand baby had either testicles that were undescended or ovaries where they belonged, but whichever they were could be moved down and out, as it were, into a scrotum constructed from this and that. This would give righthand
baby a set of masculine-appearing sex organs. With the baby on the left, they could leave the gonads where they were, in the abdomen, and then modify the external complications into an acceptable vulva. There was already a sort of vagina, though it didn’t go anywhere, and an isolated scrap that, from the quantity of nerve tissue, would serve as a clitoris.
“Look,” said Surgeon A to Surgeon B, running his trembling hands across his bald head, “granted, we can come out with some reasonable-looking sex organs, male and female. But, we do this, these persons are going to have a hell of a life. Where’re they going to go to the bathroom, for God’s sake. Whose locker room do they use at school?”