Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Fringe wasn’t sent away, which meant she was all right as she was. Either that or it meant she wasn’t all right, but Pa just didn’t care.

  “Do you suppose that could be it,” she whispered to Zasper. “He just doesn’t care?”

  “Do you think about that a lot?” Zasper wanted to know.

  She really didn’t. She tried not to think about it at all, or about the other stuff that went on. She found she could shut out the real world by pretending things inside her head. Sometimes she went for days not even noticing the real world. Except for some things.

  Like the old woman who’d taken to following her around. Fringe thought between Grandma Gregoria and Nada, she had enough old women already, but this old woman kept showing up, here and there, not doing anything much, but sort of always there, a white-haired old thing with keen black eyes that seemed a lot younger than her face.

  “Why do you always show up where I am?” Fringe asked her angrily, confronting her in the alley outside Bloom’s place.

  “Do I?” asked the old thing. Today she was with a man almost as old as she was, and she looked at him with her head cocked to one side. “Do I show up where this child is?”

  “I thought it was the other way ’round,” said the old man. “I thought this child was always appearing where we were.”

  “There you have it,” said the old woman. “Contiguity does not prove causation.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we’re not necessarily following each other around.”

  “I think she is, though,” said Fringe to Zasper. “Her name is Jory and I think she’s a spy.”

  “For whom?” Zasper wanted to know. “Or what?”

  Fringe couldn’t tell him. The only reason someone would spy on her was if she was special for some reason. But she didn’t want to talk about being special. If you talked about things you wanted, or things you hoped for, somehow that fixed things so you never got them.

  So, she changed the subject.

  “Ma’s sick all the time now,” Fringe said.

  “What kind of sick?” he asked, thinking he already knew.

  “Just sick,” said Fringe.

  These days Souile often lay abed with the horrors, glaring at the ceiling with wide, frantic eyes. The sickness came from near-lethal doses of mood-spray, but Souile never admitted that, not even to herself.

  “Before I married Char, I saw my children in my mind,” Souile said to Fringe when Nada sent her with a bowl of hot broth. “You were never babies. You were always grown-up, poised and perfect. You moved like dancers. You were successful. You didn’t need anything from me. I knew you would be beautiful, and healthy and clever. I knew you would be talented and everyone would admire you, and me, because I was your mother. I thought if you were born Professional class, that’s all you’d ever need….”

  “She said that, then she cried,” Fringe told Zasper, her eyes wide and ringed with shadows. “She threw the soup on the floor and cried, and she couldn’t get her breath, and I was afraid she was going to die.”

  “What did you think about that?”

  “I knew it was my fault.”

  Zasper gave her a horrified stare. “Why would you think that?”

  Fringe threw up her hands in a gesture learned at Grandma Gregoria’s knee. Why would she think that? Because she hadn’t done any of the things a good daughter should have done. She broke her dolls. She hadn’t learned to be classly. She hadn’t cared enough about style. She hadn’t learned to do conversation. She didn’t even know how to play the E&P games she was supposed to know.

  “I’ve decided to take all the classes I’m supposed to,” she told Zasper desperately. “I’m going to do better.”

  He didn’t say anything. He had never been a Professional-class child. He didn’t know what to say.

  Fringe signed up for classes in conversation and personal style. She studied her fellow students, desperately intent on doing and saying the acceptable things, exhausting herself in an effort to make sense of the seemingly pointless rituals. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t believe in them, she could not fit herself into the pattern. She tried to act the part, but she didn’t feel it. Some rebellious part of herself kept rearing itself up and sticking its tongue out, going nyah, nyah, nyah just when she had to concentrate!

  Despite all her resolutions, she didn’t fit. She knew it and the Exec-class, Prof-class girls she was with knew it.

  “Today one of the girls said I was crude,” she told Zasper in an expressionless voice. “She said I talk like a Trasher. She said I have no polish and my clothes don’t go together. She said I smell.”

  “What did you do?”

  What she had done had been without thought, without decision. It had just happened. “I hit her. Then I bit her.”

  Sharp language, and sharper teeth (a Trasher trait, anger and fighting, learned from Ari). She’d known what the girl said was true though she had had no idea what to do about it or whether, if she had known, it would have been worth doing. She didn’t smell nearly as bad as Ari did.

  “What classes are you good at?” Zasper asked gently.

  “General classes, like mathematics and systems technology and weapons.”

  “Those are important.”

  “Nah. Nobody cares about those. Not for Professional-class girls. Professional-class girls don’t use weapons or math much.”

  “What happened today when you fought with the other girl?”

  “They put me out of the E&P classes. They told me not to come back.” Her eyes were dry when she told him this. She’d finished crying over it, but the guilt was still with her, some guilt at having failed the classes but more—much more—at having felt glad when they’d thrown her out. How could she be a good E&P daughter for Souile if she was glad when they threw her out!

  After that, it was pointless to try very hard at school and too painful to try very hard at home. What was easiest was to be where nobody expected anything from her at all. She spent even more time at Bloom’s, with Zasper, or ricocheting around the Swale.

  “I like it better here,” she said. “I’m not always messing up when I’m here.”

  “None of the messing up was your fault,” said Zasper, turning away to hide his face. “I like you just as you are. Remember that.”

  Oddly enough, the old woman said the same thing. There Fringe was, just going down the alley to the Swale, and there the old woman was, sitting on the low wall that ran along Tyme Street, eating a meat pie.

  “You look a bit worn and raggedy today,” said the old woman.

  “Everybody hates me,” said Fringe in a nasty voice, thinking it was none of this old person’s business what she looked like.

  “I like you just as you are, child,” said the old woman, with a strangely penetrating glance. “Raggedy or not. Sit by me and I’ll buy you a meat pie.”

  “Rather have a sweet one,” said Fringe, glaring angrily from beneath gathered brows.

  “A sweet one then,” said the old woman, patting the wall beside her, so nothing would do but for Fringe to sit down there and have a hot fruit pie all to herself, fresh from the vendor’s kettle.

  “Your name’s Jory, isn’t it?” demanded Fringe. “I know your old man’s name too, he’s Asner.”

  “That’s right. What’s yours?”

  “Fringe. Are you Professional class?” Fringe asked, wondering who else would have time to sit about all day, eating pies.

  “Only in a manner of speaking,” said the old woman. “Actually, I’m not from Enarae at all.” “You’re here all the time.” “Vacationing. Seeing the sights.”

  “Not much to see,” snorted Fringe, who, as an habitué of the Swale, thought she had seen it all. “People from Denial and Sandylwaith. Globs once in a while. Dinks from City Fifteen.”

  “Dinks. You mean dinka-jins.”

  “People parts in boxes,” sneered Fringe. “Obs.”

  “They eschew the flesh,” sa
id Jory thoughtfully.

  “Hah,” barked Fringe. “Like I said, Obs and Uglies.”

  “But they’re still people,” said the old woman. “Interesting people. Some of them are very, very smart.”

  “Maybe in City Fifteen they are, but not the ones who come here,” Fringe snorted.

  “Possibly not. But still, I like people. Picking them out, you know.”

  Fringe didn’t know.

  “I picked you out,” said the old woman with a smile. “I really did, Fringe. Did you know that?”

  Fringe held her breath. “Why?” she asked.

  “Why?” The old woman cocked her head and considered this. “Because you obviously aren’t satisfied with yourself the way you are, that’s why. You keep popping out in all directions, playing at being other people. But then, don’t you get dreadfully tired of people who like themselves a lot? Just the way they are?”

  Fringe’s eyes stared wide in wonder. “How did you know that?”

  “Well, because we’re alike, I guess. Both special in our own way. And then, too, I’ve spent years and years picking out people, all over Elsewhere.”

  This came so close to her dream that Fringe didn’t dare listen, didn’t dare believe! “How can they be special if there’s a lot of them?” she sneered, sure it was all deception.

  “Not lots! I never said lots. I said all over Elsewhere. Someday you’ll come visit me, perhaps, and I’ll tell you all about them. Introduce you to them.”

  Though it was possible the old woman might actually be telling the truth, Fringe took the promise with a grain of salt. It would hurt to believe it and find out it wasn’t true. Grownups were always making promises they didn’t keep.

  3

  Great Question Day on Elsewhere. Carnivals and street dancing and solemnities. Processions with bands and clowns and red and gold banners. Music from the rooftops, and children going from door to door begging candy for the traditional give and take:

  “Where is the Great Question asked now, child?”

  “On Elsewhere, only on Elsewhere!”

  “Why only here, child?”

  “Because only on Elsewhere are there any humans left!”

  “Long ago, where did they ask the Great Question, child?”

  “At Brannigan Galaxity! They asked it there!”

  A rattle of candies into the proffered container. A whoop and a scamper, off to the next house.

  Brannigan Galaxity.

  Oh, say the name reverently. Say it with awe. Say it as you might utter the secret name of God.

  The center of the academic universe. The repository of all knowledge. The hub around which all reputable research had revolved. The quintessential fount of academe that was.

  “Brannigan,” the human teacher had said, in the remote village on the tiny world, laying her human hands upon the heads of her rose-lipped charges. “Study hard and maybe you’ll get to go to Brannigan.”

  “Apply effort diligently,” the docentdroids had cried on the eduscreens, to urb-pale students they would never touch, never see. “You may be selected for Brannigan.”

  Fat chance. One in ten million had been accepted at Brannigan. Unquestioned and prodigious genius might have gained an interview, if one had known the right people, if one’s parents and grandparents had gone there, if one had been on the AA list. Otherwise, dream on!

  Vast auditoria reverberating to words deathless as Scripture. Laboratories where ideas fell thick as pollen, packed with potentiality. Hallways vibrant with scuttering youth, with striding maturity, with ponderous age. Ramified structures, lofty towers, cloud-touched, star-noticed, sky-surrounded.

  Voices raised in song:

  Brannigan we sing to thee!

  A thousand colleges, each with its own history, its own traditions, its own glories to recount. A thousand colleges, each with its own feudally owned worlds to provide goods and services, each with its own recruiters at large in the star-whirl, moving among the lesser schools like sharks among the shoals, picking the little scholar fish who would grow into the intellectual leviathans of the future!

  Fountain of diversity!

  Libraries sprawling in wandering tunnels of stone across continents of lawn. Mile-long stacks, loaded with volumes numerous as stars, copies of copies of copies from originals long ago turned to dust. Automatic retrieval ladders disappearing into the retreating distance of painted ceilings where figures out of forgotten legend disported themselves. Was that Wisdom teaching the multitude? Or the Queen of Denacia, issuing writs of attainder to her bailiffs? Was that Agriculture with the garden springing up at his feet? Or was it the Winter God Hembadom, readying himself to trample the fertile worlds of Borx? One time the docents had known, had pointed upward while lecturing to legions of tourists and hopeful candidates.

  Here twisting stairs clattering beneath niagaras of pounding feet. There dim corridors, endless as roads, running into vaulted passages that grew silent as they left the tenanted areas. And there, at the end, corroded doors opened upon cavernous spaces shrouded in cobwebs, home to the beetle and the fly, where bindings were only templates of green mold and pages had turned to inscrutable powder. No matter. All that was here was also in Files, incorruptible.

  May thy golden towers rise …

  Brannigan: glorious with the names of former scholars who had risen to untold heights: the Chairman of the Council of worlds; the Emperor of Eltein; the Goddess-elect of Vamie; the Virgin Inheritor of Rham….

  As a beacon for the wise….

  Brannigan: whose emeriti had stood in glittering rows along the Halls of Tomorrow, preserved in impenetrable vitreon, awaiting the day the Great Question would be answered. They were to have been raised then, from senescence into eternal youth.

  Immortal may thy children be….

  Lost. All lost except the Great Question itself. Gone, Brannigan. Gone the towers, the libraries, the teachers, the students. Gone the hope, the pride. Gone as all the galaxy is gone, down the gullets of the Hobbs Land Gods, leaving only …

  The Great Question, the Only Question, still to be answered by this remnant at the end of the star-wheel, this tiny spark against the long-dark:

  WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE DESTINY OF MAN?

  On Earth, success followed success for Mulhollan’s Marvelous Circus. Despite Sizzy’s adjurations of modesty and humility, Nela and Bertran sometimes felt they were indeed the main event. Sometimes they were sure the whole circus focused on the freaks in the sideshow tent where the attraction was the people themselves. Other attractions were only tricks, as when a monkey pedaled a bicycle or a bear juggled a barrel or someone did three somersaults between the trapezes. But in the sideshow, no matter how professional their act, it wasn’t the tricks or the sparkle that mattered. It was they, the sideshow artists, who were the show, what they were and suffered. It was their oddity that brought people in.

  “Turtledove writes that he is terribly proud of us,” said Nela. “We have been reviewed in The New York Times.”

  “It isn’t easy, being a jackplane,” Bertran admitted with a wry grin. “But we’re getting good at it!”

  Even so, oddity alone would not satisfy the audience once it had seen. Once the spectators had sated their curiosity about whatever peculiarity had piqued them, many of them lingered, looking for something more. Nela learned to recognize that searching stare fixed on her, on Bertran, that perusing eye that caught her own and asked recognition of it. And when she nodded or smiled, acknowledging the unspoken question, the viewer nodded too, as though saying to himself, herself, Why, she’s like me, he’s like me, no matter what they look like, they’re like me after all. It was the oddity that brought them in, but it was the humanity that let them go again.

  “If they wanted only difference,” Nela explained her thought to Bertran, “they’d go to an aquarium. Or to a museum, to see a collection of fossils. They’d seek out spiny creatures, things with many legs, aliens, weirdnesses, but they don’t go there, they come here, where
the strangeness is people, because it isn’t the strangeness they’re really looking for, but the fact we’re people, no matter how we look. It’s the identity under our skins they want to assure themselves of. Now, I wonder why that is?”

  It seemed to Nela there had to be a reason. Something beyond mere curiosity. Something, as she sometimes thought, intended.

  Bertran agreed it was the humanity behind the freakiness the audience wanted to see. However, he said, though most of them went away afterward chattering and relieved, some of them were strangely silent, as though the humanity behind the barker’s chatter had not been enough. “They’re looking for something they don’t find,” he said, wondering what they were looking for. Something more meaningful or knowing. Some definition, perhaps, of what humanity was, a definition that had to be sought in sideshows because the answer could not, never would be found among ordinary, everyday mankind.

  “Turtledove believes that people are seeking an oracle,” Nela said. She often quoted Turtledove as saying things she herself felt or thought but, for some reason, did not want to have to defend as her own opinion. “People want a seer.” Though she wasn’t sure, she thought this might be true. People wanted someone to drop key words in their ears, the revelation they needed right then; help, surcease, pity, forgiveness, hope—the secret of existence. They were looking for all those things in a sideshow because they hadn’t found them anywhere else.

  The audience didn’t get any of that. Not help nor hope. All it got was a moment’s wonder, a wink of complicity, plus magical rings, disappearing scarves, and patter. “Which is all we’ve got to give, Nelly,” said Bertran. When he said it, he believed he spoke the truth.