Sideshow (6 page)

Zasper’s petition for retirement was granted routinely. The personnel Files found no reason not to do so. There were always more provincial Enforcers wanting Council status than there were open slots for them.
“But I don’t want you to go!” cried Danivon Luze, now seventeen. When Zasper had rescued the toddler Danivon from Molock, he had not foreseen that Danivon would grow up to attribute to Zasper many virtues and qualities Zasper himself was not at all sure of. Danivon had just enrolled in the Enforcer Academy at Tolerance, a prestigious institution that would prepare Danivon to be, so Danivon said, just like Zasper himself.
Zasper thought Danivon would be better trying to be like someone else. He had even considered dissuading Danivon from an Enforcer’s career, giving up the notion only after several days’ worrying about it. He had no right to influence the boy. Letting People Alone was more than mere slogan, or so Zasper had always believed, though he’d become less certain of it latterly. Just because Zasper himself had this sick feeling about Enforcement didn’t mean Danivon was going to. Besides—and this was the critical point—there weren’t all that many avenues open to a foundling in Tolerance. All the servants, guards, and technicians were Frickian and had always been Frickian. All the Supervisors were whatever they were, some hereditary class or race or group or tribe; Zasper didn’t know what and had sense enough not to ask. Information that wasn’t freely offered was better not asked for, at least in Zasper’s experience. It did a man no good to get a reputation as a prynose.
Whatever Danivon was, he wasn’t Frickian, and he wasn’t Supervisor blood, either, being a great deal taller than the former and a good deal handsomer than the latter. Though his mouth was a bit wider and his hair a bit curlier than Zasper’s idea of perfection, he was a handsome, articulate, well-built lad who should get on with life. Full of the juices of youth as he was, Danivon no doubt had a good deal of life to get on with!
Danivon didn’t see it that way, complaining that Zasper had no right to go off and leave him. “I like the Academy,” he explained. “I really do. I like the other students too, almost all of them. It’s just, I get lonesome sometimes. When some of
them talk about home it makes me wonder why I don’t have one.” He confessed this to Zasper in a whisper, as though it were shameful.
When this subject came up, Zasper always swallowed deeply and reminded himself there were excellent reasons not to tell Danivon what he knew about Danivon’s origins. Not least that telling the boy might get both of them killed.
“Nothing wrong with wondering where you come from,” Zasper said. “Anybody would.” Thank heavens the boy didn’t look Molockian. If he had looked Molockian, Zasper’s bit of playacting all that time ago might not have worked, and Danivon Luze could have ended up as one of the skulls on the top of that blasted temple. Zasper shook his head, driving away the thought, and repeated something he had said so often it had become rote: “We saw about twenty provinces on that journey; you don’t really resemble the people in any of them; I can’t be any help to you.” Though wholly false, taken phrase by phrase the statement was quite true.
Danivon merely stared, his nose twitching. When he did that, it made Zasper feel uncomfortable, as though the boy knew something he shouldn’t. Knew something he wasn’t saying. “Besides,” Zasper said hastily, attempting to divert that gaze, “from what I hear, you’re not that lonesome that often. Not so far as feminine companionship goes, at any rate.”
“Oh, that,” said Danivon Luze with a self-deprecating grin that admitted everything but specified nothing. “I didn’t mean
that
, Zas. But never mind. Even if you go back to Enarae, I’ll come visit you. They make real good guns in Enarae, so I’ve got a reason. I’m not going to let you just disappear. I just won’t.”
It was true, they did make real good guns in Enarae. Zasper’s home province was not remarkable in most regards—not to anyone who had seen Beanfields with its Mother-dears, or Derbeck with its Old Man Daddy, or City Fifteen, full to its walls with dinka-jins. However, Enarae did have an unusual preoccupation with personal weaponry, due to having been founded by weapons engineers descended from sea-girt Phansure, the legendary homeworld. Shrines to the Guntoter stood on every other street corner; citizens were accustomed to the chatter and blast of weapons, the hushed slump of falling bodies, the ritual (sometimes sincere) wailing of the bereaved. Five classes were recognized in Enarae: Executive, Professional, Wage-earner, Trasher. And, of course, Outcaste.
The lower one’s caste, the more one’s self-esteem could depend upon prowess with weapons. In acceptance of this fact, Zasper did not disarm himself before returning home.
Immediately after he arrived, he went to Old Town, the entertainment district, where he strolled Tyme Street from end to end, examining the displays outside every joy shop, relishing the menus recited outside every café savoring every familiar sight and smell. At the bottom of the street, where a rusted iron railing leaned above the sluggish river, he turned the steepish corner and looked down a slanted flight of stone steps into the Swale. Whenever he thought of himself as a youth, orphaned and lonely, he remembered himself doing exactly this: walking down Tyme Street, slowing his steps as the street narrowed above the river, almost stopping as he heard the clucking water at that final corner, wondering each time what marvel would be around the bend. Now, as he came around it once more, he knew no matter what else might have changed, the Swale had remained the same.
Now as always it seemed strangely empty for such a populous place. On one side the river crawled under ancient piers and around the hulls of silent boats. On the other, vast timbered structures pocked with blind niches leaned toward one another over narrow alleys. Every wall was pitted with doors, massive doors, iron-hinged doors, tightly shut or barely ajar. There were peepholes too, and windows where heavy curtains quivered continually, as at the touch of a restless hand. Behind the doors one could catch glimpses of tortuous corridors leading off into dimly lit interiors, and twisting stairs bending upward to tiny tilted landings that seemed built more for spiders than for people. Dank walls dripped with river sweat and stank of damp rot. Everything in the Swale suggested the disreputable and decadent, the presence of debauched and covert pleasures. The sound of the Swale was a muted growling, the murmur of a swarm in a hollow tree, not immediately visible or threatening, but ominously present, nonetheless.
A short way down the Swale was a gambling establishment run by Zasper’s oldest friend, Ahl Dibai Bloom. Zasper was no sooner in the door than he heard the greeting:
“So you’ve come home, eh, Ertigon?”
“Better late than never, Bloom.”
“Thought it’d be never, so I did.” Bloom scuttled across the room and zoomed his elevator legs, looking down on
Zasper from on high. “Thought I’d see you never again, Ertigon.”
That had been what Zasper had thought too, once.
Bloom tugged him to a table more or less secluded from the ruckus going on.
“So, what brings you back again, Old Man?”
Because Bloom had more sense than most people, Zasper tried to explain.
“Lately … lately, do you get the feeling something isn’t right?”
“You mean in addition to the normal everyday constant things that aren’t right. Like these phlupping taxes, and the number of babies getting knocked off in the street, and …”
“I mean,” said Zasper with a good deal of dignity, “something else, Bloom. A kind of feeling I’ve had lately.”
Pressed for details, he could offer only generalities. He said it was only a feeling, as though some hideous danger lurked just out of sight. Danger was an Enforcer’s constant companion, of course, and Zasper said he didn’t mean any ordinary danger, like maybe getting killed, but something worse than that, far worse than that.
Bloom listened without being impressed, but then it took a lot to impress Bloom. Still, he was a friend and Zasper hadn’t that many friends left alive. Whether Bloom understood or not, Zasper was still most comfortable in Bloom’s place or around the Swale.
He came there often in the evenings when the river mist rose thickly and the lamps made balloons of light in the soggy air. Sometimes he stood at a corner for an hour or more, listening, watching, soaking up the quality of anticipation he had always felt there, the expectancy that hovered, as though something remarkable were about to occur, some wonder were to creep down the nearest alley, emerging at any moment. If he turned his back, he would miss it. The opportunity of witness would be gone unless he waited, patiently, for whatever it might be.
One evening while engaged in this solitary occupation, his scanning eyes detected movement where no movement should have been. Turning his head slowly, focusing on the shape of a crouched shadow, he translated the image into a scarcely credible reality—a girl child. A girl child, moreover, full of nervous twitches, half-suppressed fits and starts and trembling shivers that betrayed her presence beside the bulky hinge post
of a tightly closed door. The door was carved in high relief with assorted pornographic scenes to advertise the establishment behind it, a brothel of a particularly unhealthy sort.
A girl this age had no business anywhere near there. Who was she? What child would dare these threatening alleys to hide herself in such a place? An older and more experienced person would be ill advised to do so. A girl child had no business in the Swale at all!
He moved silently, as Enforcers are taught to do, around and behind, coming up from a direction she would not expect. He did not speak until he had one iron-hard hand fastened firmly on her shoulder.
“What in hell are you doing here, girl?”
It wasn’t so much a question as an exclamation, and though his voice was purposefully harsh, his prey did not seem frightened by it as she hung almost limp in his grip. He thought she drooped there like some little animal, too shocked to struggle, maybe playing dead the way they do, waiting for him to drop her so she could scurry off.
Instead, he drew her into a half-lighted doorway to get a good look at her, a pale-skinned child, thin as a scabbard, topped by a tangled mop of flaming hair. He noticed her gnawed and bleeding fingers when she pushed the hair away from a tear-runneled face, away from stone-green eyes not so much scared as watchful, the skin around them dark as a bruise. He’d seen eyes like that before, also in a child’s face, but it took him a minute to remember where. A dozen years before. In Tolerance. A little boy, peering over a shoulder. Those eyes, Danivon’s eyes, had been watchful in this same way.
“Child,” he said, shaking her gently, made mild by memory, “what are you doing? It’s damned dangerous here.”
“I come here all the time,” she said, staring into his face. She saw a stocky man with a gray braid over one shoulder and an Enforcer’s badge on the other. Enforcers were mysterious, almost legendary creatures. She had no answer for the question he had asked. She didn’t know what she was doing in the Swale. She came there, that was all. She sometimes thought she came here to get away from … whatever she wanted to get away from. Other times she thought she came here because of what was here. Though she lacked sufficient vocabulary to define the place, she could feel its essential nature. It suited her because it was like herself.
“Not a good place to come ever, much less all the time,” he said.
She was moved to attempt explanation. “It’s … it’s like sort of secret,” she said. “Or like the shrines. Sort of like me too.” Struggling to understand the nature of the Swale, she had come up with amorphous concepts of taboo and sacred things.
“What’d you mean, like you?”
She shrugged. What she meant was, special. What she meant was, holy, but she didn’t even have that word. What had occurred to her was that perhaps the reason she was here alone and not with other people was that she was different. Destined for something extraordinary. The idea had come from nowhere, sneaking into her mind bit by bit, like a little warm breeze, thawing her chilly heart. Being different would explain a lot of things, like why nothing worked out for her like it did for other people. She wasn’t sure she really believed the idea, even though it was comforting. Comforting ideas didn’t always—or even very often—work out, either, so she hadn’t dwelt on it much. Still, she didn’t
disbelieve
it, not yet. She could be destined for some particular purpose, maybe, and if so, she wouldn’t be harmed by haunting the Swale as ordinary people might be. Coming here—it was almost a test!
“My name is Zasper Ertigon,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Fringe,” she said. “Fringe Dorwalk.”
“There are better places than this, Fringe,” he told her.
“Where?” she asked him, intrigued. She had been looking for better places as long as she could remember.
Their friendship began with that question. Remembering his own youth, he did not waste time in admonitory lectures. Instead, he showed her some better places, safer at least, like the way to get into Ahl Dibai Bloom’s gambling house from Tyme Street, without going through the Swale. Ahl Dibai Bloom, bobbing up and down on his elevator legs as he did when he was amused, said he could use a young person to sweep the gambling rooms and stack the bottles, winking at Zasper over her head as he hired her for this duty.
After that, Fringe spent a lot of time at Bloom’s, often when Zasper was there, mostly listening as they talked. Zasper told her a censored version of his life as an Enforcer, and she talked artlessly about herself, as though about a stranger. Little by little, he came to know who and what she
was, though there was little enough he could do about that. Enforcers who had left off being Council Enforcers to become provincial Enforcers were just that. They had no great status, except among old colleagues. Still, they had a certain reputation and were not often interfered with. Habitués of the Swale, at least, soon learned that Fringe was Zasper’s bit of harmless amusement and better left alone.
Freak shows were still current on Earth toward the end of the twentieth century, though less fascinating than in some former times. Television had made freakishness a commonplace; the
National Enquirer
and its ilk had made aberration a matter of mere momentary titillation, of no more duration than a headline. The world’s fattest woman was only a person with a glandular disorder. Human skeletons were merely anorexic. The seal woman was a thalidomide baby. Bearded ladies and giants were no longer fantasy but matters of endocrine malfunction. A child born with an extra leg, the result of an incomplete twinning, would have had his supernumerary appendage amputated at birth. Elephant men had been reen-acted on Broadway and in the movies. Dwarfs and midgets were merely little people who could take the roles of Munchkins or Time Bandits or small furry spear-carrying Ewoks in