Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  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. S
omebody’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?”

  The surgeons attempted to reason with the parents, in the presence of their priest.

  “He’s a boy,” said Lek stubbornly. “His name is Bertran.”

  “A daughter,” insisted Marla, who was angry with Leksy for getting her into this. Also, she knew in her heart she would never have another child and it was this time or never. “My little Nela.”

  “We pray God will bless your knowledge and skill,” said Father Jabowsky, who was convinced that whatever the doctors did was irrelevant, that sexual organs could be dispensed with entirely for they would make no conceivable difference in the next world, which was the only one that mattered.

  The surgeons, who thought they would probably be sued if they did and would undoubtedly be sued if they didn’t, bowed to the inevitable, called their attorneys, and had five pounds of waivers generated to be signed by both parents, their parents, and all the relatives they could find. The surgeons who had been recruited to do the work itself were professors emeritus at the medical school, reconstructive surgeons called out of retirement on the theory that by the time the babies themselves got old enough to sue, the doctors would be dead. So far, no one had mentioned malpractice out loud, but no one was taking any chances.

  The operations, several of them, were performed. Tissue healed, several times. Time went by. On a fine spring day at St. Seraph’s, the twins were christened Bertran and Nela Korsyzczy, children of Mother Church, inheritors of the faith. Bertran wore a little blue velvet suit with a white lace collar. Nela wore a pink satin dress with an embroidered ruffle at the bottom. Marla held them, beaming with determined cheerfulness. Lek stood at one side, little Bertran’s right hand curled around one of his big red fingers. Marla kept her mind on all the pretty little dresses she would get to make when Nela started school. Lek was wondering how old his son would have to be before he could start teaching him baseball. He was also resolutely not looking at the image of the Virgin standing in the little chapel, just behind the baptistry. Recently Lek had the feeling the Virgin had somehow let him down.

  Neither Lek nor Marla were being realistic about the situation, but then, it was a peculiar situation to be realistic about. Both fully expected the day would come when the children would be separated—“As techniques improve,” the doctor had said repeatedly in his most emollient voice—and until then (surely not long! Not more than a year or so!) it was merely a matter of prayer and patience.

  But no more sex. Lek couldn’t bring himself to do it anymore, at least, not with Marla. Not seeing where it had led before. He blamed himself, keeping after her that way. He’d told her it was his moral duty, but hell, he’d liked it. Every time. He’d lusted after her, and lust was one of the seven deadly sins, and maybe he was responsible for this having happened.

  Lek didn’t know about the medication, of course. Marla had never told him. Somehow, she felt it was better not to. Maybe she was responsible for what had happened. She considered telling Lek she couldn’t have any more children, which both she and the doctor thought to be true, because during the cesarean he had spotted certain anomalies that hadn’t shown up on tests, but what if something miraculous happened and she got pregnant again? She couldn’t make sure she wouldn’t, by using birth control, because Lek would find out somehow. Even though the doctor offered to put up pills in a bottle with a different label, like for anemia or something, she’d have to confess it to the priest. And somehow Lek would find out. So, she didn’t, he didn’t, they didn’t.

  Which meant, since both of them were normal, with normal appetites, that they became more than a little snappish with each other. Whenever things were difficult, however, throughout all their trials, Lek reminded himself of Marla’s words on their wedding morning, when she had said to him four times was too much. Like a keepsake gem, that remembered moment gained importance as time went by, losing its own content and context to become an abstraction freighted with other, deeper meanings. As other enjoyments failed, it was the memory of how he had felt at that moment, the great gush of pride and wonder and fulfilled manhood, uncorrupted by actual memories, that enabled him to be unfailingly loving to the twins. Marla did not share that memory, but she had other myths that served a similar purpose.

  Marla made clothes for both the twins until Bertran got to the age where little boys stopped being babies, and then she bought him jeans and checked shirts and tiny boots. Nela always wore dresses, wee pinafores with blouses and skirts with suspenders, and shorty white socks and black Mary Janes. The flesh between them was always kept decently covered by a dark length of stockinette that wrapped around the join in a kind of sleeve and had Velcro tabs to fasten it securely to itself and to the matching holes in the twins’ clothing.

  Lek built a double-width swing in the backyard, and a teeter-totter with a forked end, and a double-width slide. When they got to the right age, Marla tried to enroll them in nursery school, but there weren’t any willing to take the twins except one for exceptional children, all the way over in Peaks Hill. They tried it for a week, but the twins were miserable among all the retardeds and autistics. One thing, something Marla didn’t know if she was grateful for or not, the twins had excellent minds. By the time they were four and a half, they were learning to read and asking questions she sometimes had a very hard time answering.

  Lek tried a few times to teach Bertran to play catch, but the child couldn’t really manage it, connected to Nela the way he was, even though he wore lifts in his shoes to get his shoulder above hers. Lek also tried taking them fishing (Nela got seasick), and to a football game (Nela was afraid of crowds). Lek told Marla it was all her fault, she was the one who filled Nela’s ears with how sick she, Marla, got in boats and how she, Marla, hated mobs.

  “She’s like her mommy, is all,” said Marla. “You couldn’t expect her not to be like her mommy.”

  “She should be exactly like her brother,” Lek said. He
had been discussing his problems with a counselor at work, one hired by the management to keep the production line functioning, despite the employees’ personal problems. The counselor, up to his ear holes with drugs and sex and alcoholism, had welcomed Lek’s situation as a taster might relish a rare vintage found among a clutter of vins ordinaires.

  Lek went on, “The psychologist says they have to be geneic … genetic … the same. He says it’s a law of nature. They started out as one egg and one sperm, and they’re exactly alike!”

  Lek had come to this understanding too late. It was no longer true. Biology had been bypassed. Reality had left genetics gasping. Gender had been imposed. Nela looked up at her daddy through her eyelashes and smiled at him flirtatiously, her delicate hands picking at the smocking on her muslin dress.

  “Have you got me a present, Daddy,” begged Nela, winsomely.

  Bertran scowled manfully, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jeans.

  “Hi, Dad,” said Bertran. “Whudja bring me?”

  “How can you say they’re alike?” Marla demanded in a shrill, angry voice. “How can you say such a thing, Leksy. Why, they’re nothing alike. Nothing at all.”

  2

  Tolerance on Elsewhere: the Great Rotunda. There, on what is still called the Arrival Floor, brightly uniformed guards stand in imperturbable immobility around the Doors. The big Door, the one all the refugees arrived through long ago, is thought to require guards. Persons could still come or go through it, theoretically at least, and the guards are needed to make sure no one does. The other Door, the twisted, corroded loop of metal, is an Arbai Door, not unlike many other such Doors that the enigmatic Arbai left scattered around the galaxy. Despite the seeming dormancy of this one, there is always the possibility it might be functional, so it too is surrounded by a complement of Frickian armsmen. Besides, in the opinion of Council Supervisory, it makes a pleasant symmetry to have uniformed men around both Doors during the ceremonial changing of the guard.