Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Council Supervisory had made the rules to start with, and they had not changed since.

  No province would be allowed to cross its own borders to infringe upon another or to make common cause with another to infringe upon a third; evangelism across borders was forbidden along with treaties and alliances; travel and trade were allowed, within limits; and any and all groups would be welcome so long as they let one another alone!

  If provinces did not leave one another alone, if a Situation arose, Council Enforcers would be sent to Attend the Situation. Enforcers might go winging or striding or riding some ancient, patient animal; they might go singly or in groups of hundreds; they might carry simple weapons or a complex armamentarium. However they went, the Situation was always Attended to. Provinces on Elsewhere really did Let One Another Alone. If they would not do it on their own, the Council Enforcers made sure they did it anyhow.

  One such Council Enforcer was Zasper Ertigon, who at a certain point in his career found himself in the city of Molock. The city was the capital of a province also called Molock, on the continent of Panubi, which was well settled around the edges but otherwise largely unexplored. Zasper had been in the city for a few days on routine Council business that was almost concluded. After checking out his vehicle and while waiting for his colleagues, he’d given in to thirst if not to the pleasure of the company, and now occupied a tottery stool in a ramshackle shelter near the vehicle park, drinking what passed locally for ale in company with a local guard officer.

  “Goin’ home now?” the sweating guard asked him, belching voluminously.

  Zasper nodded, holding his breath against the noxious emanation and fingering the thick braid of slightly graying hair that signified his rank and status. “Back to Tolerance,” he acknowledged, meaning the quasi-city on the polar plateau that was headquarters to Council Supervisory and all its works. “We’ll leave as soon as my colleagues arrive.” Actually, the persons he had conveyed to Molock were not colleagues, that is, not Council Enforcers. They were Council technicians charged with maintaining the ubiquitous monitors that speckled every province like seeds on a bun, but it was Council policy that all technicians be escorted by and treated as Enforcers when on duty out in the field. Zasper wasn’t Else-where’s greatest pilot and he found escort duty dull; but when ordered to do it, he did it.

  “Tol’rance your home?” the guard persisted.

  Zasper shook his head. “No,” he admitted. “I’m from Enarae originally.”

  “What category’s that?” the officer wanted to know.

  “Category seven,” Zasper replied. Category one was untouched wilderness and category ten was quintessential tech, so a rating of seven meant only a little better than halfway civilized, which was a comedown for people who originated in sea-girt Phansure, once home for the galaxy’s preeminent engineers. Or so Zasper had been taught as a boy in school. Molock was only category four. Molock was primitive and, in Zasper’s privately held opinion, barbaric. Enforcers weren’t supposed to have private opinions about provinces, but many of them did.

  “What’s it like in Tol’rance?” the guard officer asked.

  Zasper drank deeply and stared toward the fireglow of Molock city, ruddy against the overhanging cloud, trying to come up with something that would be both permissible and inoffensive. When he thought of Tolerance, he thought of the Great Rotunda, where Council Supervisory policed and protected the varied remnants of humanity, where the monitors clicked and chuffed and whirred and now and then beeped, as they had been designed to do, bringing scurrying minions to see what each and every beep portended. When Zasper thought of Tolerance, he thought of obsessive attention given to cleanliness, no escape from boredom, and an excess of piddly little customs that didn’t mean anything. He also thought of comfort, marvelous food, and quite outstanding drinkables.

  But he couldn’t talk about that. So, he fell back on geographical details, told in dull generalities, while he swallowed more of the tasteless ale and wished he were either drinking back in Tolerance or out Attending to something urgent.

  Though Zasper didn’t know it, the something urgent was present, just across the landing field where two persons and a child huddled in the darkness outside the circling fence. The child’s name was Danivon Luze. The two adults were his parents, Cafferty and Latibor. They had given Danivon something to make him quiet and a little sleepy.

  “It’s there,” Danivon’s mother said, staring through the fence at the bulky Council vehicle, parked not far from the gate. “But so are the guards.”

  “Wait,” whispered Danivon’s father. “They just finished a circuit. In a minute they’ll go in the hut. They always do. They spend most of the night in there gambling and drinking with their officer. Every night I’ve watched them it’s been the same….”

  “Yes, but the Enforcer’s in there!”

  He raised his head and sniffed the air, like an animal testing for predators. “It won’t matter. They won’t let that bother them.”

  “It has to be tonight,” Danivon’s mother murmured, the softness of her voice barely holding the hysteria that bubbled just below the surface. “It has to be tonight.”

  “Cafferty, I know,” he said, shaking her gently by one shoulder. They both knew. When they glanced over their shoulders toward the town they could see the looming bulk of the temple pyramid silhouetted against the glow of a thousand cookfires. The shadowy bulk of the temple had a watchfulness about it, a living presence, like some great crouching beast that might rise up on its legs and come hunting them. On that temple height within the next few days certain rites were expected to take place, rites in which the child, Danivon Luze, had been chosen to feature prominently and painfully. His parents weren’t supposed to know about it, but they had sniffed it out. The danger was real and imminent.

  “I keep wondering if anyone here in Molock has any idea who we are,” Latibor mused.

  “No,” she reassured him, more out of habit than conviction. “You know they don’t. We’d smell suspicion in a moment. This business has nothing to do with who we are. Danny’s being chosen for this new rite of theirs was pure chance. When he got to be three, his name went in the pot with all the other three-to five-year-olds. We had no business being here, that’s all. We had no right to risk a child in a place like this.”

  “It wasn’t that bad until recently. And you wanted a child,” he murmured, nostrils flaring as he watched the guard move slowly away. “You wanted a child.”

  “We wanted a child,” she corrected him gently. He liked to think he was more reasonable about it than she. “Oh, Latibor, we talked about it, remember, when we came here. We thought we’d find out everything there was to find out and get out. We thought we’d be out of here by a year ago. Statistically, we thought we could risk it.”

  He made an apologetic grimace. She was right. He’d wanted a child as much as she had. They hadn’t thought about having children when they’d offered to come to Molock. The old woman, Jory, had said she needed information, and as without Jory there’d have been no Cafferty, no Latibor, they owed her. But once they were here, settled into the joyless life of the place—they had wanted a child.

  “Funny,” he said in an unamused voice. “Other people’s risks are statistical. When it’s your risk, your own child, it isn’t statistical anymore.”

  “We should have been out of here by now,” she said hopelessly, telling him what he knew. “If we’d been able to reach Jory … If we’d …”

  “Unfortunately, Jory isn’t answering our messages just now.” This worried him too. When he couldn’t reach the old ones, he always felt less secure.

  “Quick,” she whispered. “The guards are going into the hut. Help me over the gate.”

  Her face swaddled in a dark scarf to keep it from showing in the faint light from the guardpost, Cafferty climbed over the gate and reached up to accept the sleepy child, sliding him into the sling on her back before she half scuttled, half crawled across the expanse
of bare gravel, taking advantage of the shadows thrown by parked vehicles. Latibor stayed at the gate, checking his belt for the knife, for the short, heavy club. The guards wouldn’t come this way, but if they did …

  With their customary arrogance, the people from Tolerance had left the vehicle unguarded, never dreaming anyone might take advantage of that. Cafferty hoped they’d been careless enough to leave the cargo door unlocked, as well, and that it would make no noise when opened.

  Hope was fulfilled. The cargo door slid noiselessly. She crept in, found a small crevice behind a pile of boxes, and pointed it out to the drowsy child, who crawled in with his little mattress pad while she piled the packaged food and drink behind him. In anticipation of this moment, they’d been playing this hidey-hole game for days. So far as Danivon knew, he was merely playing the game again. He knew how to curl up in his blanket and go to sleep, how much of the food to eat each day (drugged food, so he would be placid and quiet), how much to drink, how to find a hidden place to go potty. He knew not to cry out loud, and that he mustn’t be found for some time. That was the purpose of the game, not to be found. If he played well, he would win something extra special.

  Danivon knew numbers and colors and his name and the names of many ordinary things, but no words or names to connect him to Molock, not the name of the place or the names his parents used. He’d been kept away from other children. He’d been told the name of the place was Duffy danty boddle bock, for if he knew the real name of this place, he’d be brought back.

  Cafferty kissed him, her face wet with tears. She took the medallion from around her neck and placed it around his, whispering that he must keep it always. She slipped out of the cargo hold and shut the door, then crawled away, unable to stop sobbing. When she came to the dark gate, Latibor helped her over, and they stumbled off down the road toward the place they’d most recently called home. From there they would head for the river, leaving a clear trail the first part of the way. If they were followed, they’d be followed there. No one would think of looking here until it was too late.

  They were halfway down the road toward the city when they heard raised voices and the slam and heave of metal. The inspection vehicle rose with a whoosh of air and moved away into the night. They didn’t stop to watch it go. They’d done all they could.

  Inside the ship, Zasper set the controls to return the ship to Tolerance. The technicians muttered and yawned and retired to a sleeping compartment, gabbling incomprehensibly to one another in a jargon Zasper neither understood nor cared about. Left alone, he did some yawning and muttering of his own. The powers that be had chosen to rearrange his customary travel schedule. Molock, normally a midway point on the maintenance loop, had been the last stop on this occasion. Normally after a last stop, he would sleep on the way back and do all the inventory checks after arriving in Tolerance. But since he never slept well after visiting Molock because of feelings about Molock being or having recently become an abomination—feelings an Enforcer had no business having—he thought he might as well do the checks first, thus reducing the time spent in arrival formalities on the morrow.

  Cafferty’s stratagem had depended upon the cargo hold being empty for some little time. Zasper, all unaware that his decision was not merely a distraction but a matter of life and death, took the inventory cube, inserted it into a File reader, and got on with the duty. He was standing in the cargo compartment beside a pile of monomol-packed replacement parts when he heard the sigh. A tiny sigh. The merest breath, meaning nothing except that it occurred in a place where nothing was supposed to be breathing but himself.

  It took no time to find the child, asleep behind the pile of cartons, small packages of food and drink stacked near him, a little pad beneath him to speak of concern for his comfort, concern for his life. None of the food had been eaten, none of the water drunk. All the evidence indicated he’d been put aboard in Molock.

  Duty required that Zasper Ertigon return the vehicle to Molock and turn the child over to the guards. Nonetheless, he stood for a time, looking at the rise and fall of the little chest, hearing the soft breaths, again, again. The child was a good-looking little rascal, dark-haired, with skin the color of sand. His eyelashes were unbelievably long, the way some children’s were, giving his eyes that fringy, vulnerable look. Zasper made an impatient gesture, went back to the control compartment, and turned the ship.

  Shortly the glow of the city came up beneath him, the light of cookfires reflected from a suspended layer of smoke and cloud that formed a level ceiling slightly above the flier. Directly in his path, looming out of the glare, the temple pyramid thrust a wide ceremonial platform toward him, like a rudely outthrust tongue. This time of night the temple complex was empty. Zasper lowered the ship upon the platform, a little awkwardly (flying had never been one of his talents), and got out to stare over the smoky city.

  Enforcer duty brought him to Molock from time to time. He’d seen the Molockian temple, though never before close up, and what he hadn’t seen, he’d heard about. After a moment of indecision, he climbed the short flight of stairs leading to the top, where the level rock-paved summit seemed to hang only a few feet below a layer of flame-colored smoke and cloud, the space between suffused with a bloody glow.

  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.