Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “How?” Bertran asked bluntly. “How? What will you offer us?”

  “What would you like? Riches? Your people enjoy riches. A long life? We can offer that.” “Could you separate us?”

  The creature before them shivered all over, as though stricken by cold. It made a gagging noise and bent awkwardly in the middle, shaking again, then composing itself with seeming difficulty. “No,” it gasped. “We would regard that as an obscenity. We came to you because you are, as we are, multiple. Would one of us willingly separate? Would we commit such an atrocity of isolation upon one of our kind? We cannot even discuss matters with separated persons!”

  Nela started to say something, but Bertran laid his hand over hers.

  “If you were attempting to discomfit me, you have succeeded,” the being muttered. “I should not be offended. Undoubtedly I discomfited you. Let us proceed gently.”

  Bertran asked, “Do we have to decide about the reward now? You’ve given us very little notice.”

  “No,” Celery said, pulling itself into rigidity once more. “No. We can grant your wish later on, even from a great distance. Be as quick about it as you comfortably can, but leave it for now.”

  This time it was Nela who spoke. “What do you want us to do?”

  The matter was simple enough. Celery repeated it several times, being sure they understood it completely. The thing would manifest itself at a time and place foreseen. The twins would be there when it happened. They would fasten upon it a device, and the door would demanifest. The world would be saved. No one would know. Later, when they decided, the twins could request their reward.

  “Discuss your reward,” suggested Celery. “State it in words, clearly, saying what you mean. Then speak it into the transmitter I will leave with you and smash the transmitter against some durable surface. We will get the message.”

  “One reward for both of us?” asked Bertran, wondering if, perhaps, he might achieve a personal desire that Nela did not share. Once. Just once.

  It was not to be.

  “One for both of you, when you agree,” the thing confirmed, with obvious distaste, as though asking the question had again transgressed a taboo. It fell silent, as though thinking. When it spoke again it was in a tone conveying both grief and pride. “This Boon will be the m#dk’clm*tbl [Muh-gurgle-duhk-click-cullum-rasp-tubble] memorial. m#dk’clm*tbl was not only a great friendship but a related aggregation. We have warm memories of them/it. This Boon will be suitable, in memory of very great camaraderie.”

  It gave them the device, a thing about the size of a lipstick. It told them how, when, and where to use it. It gave them another, slightly smaller device, the transmitter. It got up, bowed or nodded, went out the door, stumbled down the steps, strolled across the hard-packed earth of the parking area and around behind the Mangini trailer. It did not emerge from the other side. Bertran and Nela went out to look. There was no one behind the Mangini trailer. There was nothing there at all but the trampoline frame and the practice trapeze rig where the youngest Mangini daughter, Serafina, spent her mornings training to do multiple somersaults.

  “Do we believe this?” asked Nela wonderingly.

  “Does it matter?” asked Bertran in return. “Even if we don’t, should we take the chance on not doing it? Celery said he was sure the world would die….”

  “Remember Sister Jean Luc?” asked Nela suddenly.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Remember what she told us, about God needing us for something. The creature talked to us because we are as we are, Berty. If we’d been ordinary, he wouldn’t have talked to us at all. Perhaps …”

  “You think this is what God’s purpose is?” asked Bertran. He didn’t mean his question to sound ironic or cynical, and yet it did, a little.

  “Why not?” she demanded. “Good Lord, Berty, saving the world and all its people is a fairly big thing, wouldn’t you say. Reason enough….”

  He hugged her. “Reason enough,” he agreed, tears in his throat. Why didn’t he believe it?

  They went back into their wagon, shutting the door behind them, leaving the parking area untenanted except for a strolling cat who stared at the sign on the side of the wagon without interest or comprehension. “Bertran and Nela Zy-Czorsky, the Eighth Wonder of the World!”

  “You were here in the Swale all day yesterday,” Zasper said to Fringe, offering her half the fried berry pie he’d just bought from a passing cart. “Don’t you ever go home?”

  “I told you before about how Ari’s sister came to visit. She’s a real old lady.”

  “Ah?”

  “I mean, she’s really old, Zasper. Everybody said it was just for a visit, but she’s not going anywhere else because she doesn’t have anywhere to go.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “One of the Seldom Isles, I think. Something dreadful happened there, and most everyone died.”

  Zasper nodded, his lips tight. Yes, indeed. Something horrible and inexplicable had happened there, quite recently, and no one had been able to find out how, or why. Enforcers had been sent and come back paler than usual. No one had figured it out.

  Not noticing his distraction, Fringe went on, “Yesterday, Ari got this old room module for her to live in and put it out behind the house.” She pursed her lips. “I mean, he stole it.”

  Zasper drew his mind back to the conversation and elicited the story. Everyone in the family knew the module was stolen. There had been a yelling match between Char and the Tromses, at the end of which Fringe, with a fine show of indifference, insisted on moving into the module herself, “So Aunty and Nada could be together.”

  The two old women had always hated one another (Ari had confided this to Fringe, laughing heartily over it), but angry as Char was, everyone was keeping quiet, so by the time Char and Souile had calmed down enough to pay attention, Fringe was already moved.

  “Nobody’s going to find the module there, behind our house,” Fringe said. “The local Enforcers aren’t going to find it. It’s so banged up, I’ll bet they aren’t even looking. I said I liked it, I told them all really, I like it.”

  “Do you like it?” asked Zasper when she finished her tale.

  She sighed. “Well, it’s real little. And it’s pretty drafty. And the saniton doesn’t always work.”

  “But?”

  “But what?”

  “But something, Fringe. Your voice had a but in it.”

  “But, it’s better to have a space of my own.” Far better than trying to hold on to her sense of herself in a room with one or both of the old women. Nada filled whatever space she was in, leaving no air for anyone else to breathe. Adding Aunty made a suffocation. Fringe felt herself smothering. The two old ones hawked and sniffed and got up and down all night long. Their bits and pieces littered every surface. They bickered with each other, and when they tired of picking at each other, they pecked at Fringe. Aren’t you finished with that schoolwork? Turn off the Files. Turn off the light. What’s that funny noise you’re making. Quit coughing. Quit chewing your fingers. Quit picking your nose. What are you doing under the covers? Your clothes are on the floor! You’d think you were a boy, the way you leave your stuff around for other people to pick up!

  Either that, or they talked about her as though she weren’t there. Look at that outfit. She looks like the pig’s dinner. Miss Professional, tryin’ to be like the Dorwalks; thinks she’s something, don’t she? Chaffer can’t change its shell; pig can’t change its smell; she’s in for a surprise.

  “It’s bad I don’t like them better, my own kinfolk,” Fringe confessed. “But they make me feel so … so gone.”

  “Don’t you like them at all?”

  Truth was, she did rather like them, in a large open space, one at a time. They had interesting things to say sometimes, when they forgot she was there and didn’t pick on her. It was just when one got closed in with them, with doors shut, with walls around, that they seemed to turn into other creatures, some kin
d of birds with pecky beaks and claws, looking speculatively at her with those beady dark eyes as they tore little pieces of her away. Among them, she felt herself dwindling, felt herself becoming tattered, pecked into raggedy lace, infinitely fragile and angry and lost.

  “They eat me,” she said to Zasper. “If I didn’t fight them, they’d quit, but I have to fight them because they get me so I don’t know who I am. Sometimes I think my whole life is just going to be eaten up by old women. Sometimes I think that’s all I’m for, for them to eat up. They don’t seem to have any other use for me!”

  There was something else. Something she hadn’t mentioned to Zasper. When she was alone, she had these visions, kind of. A light, beckoning. A voice saying words she could almost understand. She could lie there, half asleep, and almost see it, almost hear it! But when the old women were around, she couldn’t remember what it had been.

  She sighed, continuing, “When Aunty came, I saw her, and at first I thought she was that other one, the one who follows me around all the time.”

  Zasper nodded. “Is she still doing that? Following you around? What’s her name?”

  “Jory. I still see her, if that’s what you mean. Sort of here and there. Sometimes she buys me a pie. Sometimes she talks to me about things.”

  “What things?”

  “You know. Just things. How I feel about things. About how I’m to go visit her one day. But she doesn’t really look like Aunty. Aunty just looks old and sort of ragged out and gone. That other woman, she looks really old too, but like she had a fire in her.”

  Zasper shrugged. He had not yet succeeded in catching sight of Fringe’s follower. Sometimes he thought Fringe imagined her. Fringe imagined a good many things.

  “So now you’re living in a module,” he said, returning to the former topic. “But you’re never there. You’re always here.”

  “I like it better here.” This was said pleadingly, as though she feared he might force her back to a place that wasn’t where she wanted to be. She dwindled there. She vanished, even to herself. Except when she was with Zasper or sweeping the floor at Bloom’s she couldn’t keep in mind that perhaps she was meant to be odd, as she was, for some reason. It was important to have some reason. Otherwise … otherwise why exist at all? There had to be some reason for it, sometime, somewhere. Like her very own Great Question. What was she meant for?

  • • •

  Nela and Bertran had been told the manifestation was to occur on the seventeenth of May, some ten months after the Celerian—which is what Bertran and Nela called him—had visited them. The visit itself had come almost to occupy the realm of myth or shared dream. They would no longer have been sure it had happened, except that Celery had left them two small things. One was golden and featureless except for an oval lens set into one side. Since it had a ring at the top, Bertran put a chain through it and wore it around his neck. The other thing was wasp-waisted, about three inches long and as thick as a finger. This device was to go on the door when it manifested itself. They kept it in a kitchen drawer in the trailer. A few times, when they opened the drawer, they found it glowing. A few times they heard it make a sound, a remote clicking, like death-watch beetles in some other room.

  The gate was to manifest itself late in the evening in the middle of an orange grove that lay only a few miles from the circus’s winter quarters. The twins went there under the guise of taking a little drive and eating out. Nela had learned to drive and did it quite well, though Bertran could not keep himself from telling her what to do next. She continually told him to buy a right-hand drive and do it himself, otherwise to keep quiet. He never did the one or the other. In truth, it was hard for him to put both arms in front of him. His left arm was almost always around Nela’s shoulders.

  During the previous month they had scouted the grove several times, enough to know it well. Celery had been able to identify the exact place for them, within a few feet. Between the eleventh and twelfth rows of trees from a certain fence, between the fifteenth and eighteenth trees in the row. When the thing showed up, they were to place the device at the edge of it, at the bottom, fitting its concave sides between two protrusions.

  By a quarter to eleven, they were in place. They had brought a couple of folding stools to sit on, and Bertran had the device in his shirt pocket. They wore their favorite leisure clothing: sneakers—Bertran’s made especially for him, with lifts, to raise his shoulder over Nela’s—and dark-colored sweat suits, the ample material Velcroed together to hide their mutual flesh.

  At precisely eleven o’clock the fragrant air among the trees wavered with a coruscating oval. Irresolute, it glimmered for some time before solidifying into a lopsided plane of fire, a slightly warped screen of light. The twins got up from their stools and walked around the thing. It was the same on both sides. Close up, they could see the twisted loop of dark metal that framed the fire, the whole upon a solid base of the same material. The protrusions they had been told to look for were duplicated on both sides. Simultaneously, they shrugged. Presumably, either side would do. They knelt at the base. Bertran handed Nela the device, Nela leaned forward and positioned it as they had been directed to do, hearing it click into place. She shut her eyes, murmured a few words of prayer remembered from childhood. If this was the reason for their existence, she wanted to accomplish it with some sense of divine purpose.

  Bertran, however, was struggling to his feet, and she, perforce, came up with him, still leaning slightly forward. Nela put one foot out, off balance….

  She felt something move under her foot and looked down to catch a glimpse of a dark ovoid. Bertran, also looking down, saw the same shape. It might have been Bertran’s arm that pushed Nela, for he had put out his right hand to catch himself and it had gone through the plane of fire into nothing. He fell forward with Nela inevitably beside him. They went on falling. A moment later the screen of fire disappeared, together with its frame and base, just as the Celerian had said it would. The Celerian had not said, of course, that the Zy-Czorsky twins would disappear with it, though the strong probability of that event had been foreseen.

  Their car was found at the edge of the grove. Two parallel sets of footprints led partway into the grove and then vanished. Two canvas stools sat side by side. The only living animal creature found in the grove was a small tortoise, staggering laboriously along beneath the trees. The disappearance became, like the twins themselves, a purely temporary wonder.

  The world had, in fact, been saved, though no Earthian knew it at the time. Afar, in other places, the Celerians conducted a chaste and tasteful celebration. The likelihood that the twins would fall through the gate had been accepted as an appropriate risk: the twins had, after all, been honored in the saving of their world. A shortened time upon that world was a small price to pay for such honor. In terms of total life loss, the Earthian Boon was at the extreme low end on the scale of Celerian Boons. Other Boons had resulted in enormous, though always justifiable, death tolls.

  Celery and his age and aggregation mates were proud of their prognostication. Even they admitted, however, that foretelling had its uncertainties. This seldom kept them from changing the immediate future, even though the Great Aggregations among them, who reviewed those changes, were occasionally moved to comment on what had been done.

  So, following the departure of the twins, a Great Aggregation came before the assembled crew of the ship(?) and announced with comfortable asperity that the Earth Boon had shaken the very fabric of time! “Look here,” it/they said to the younger, smaller, and more facile aggregations, “look here! If the Boon had been provided in a different manner, none of this would have happened. Look here at the place called Grass. Look at this place called Hobbs Land. Look at this place called Elsewhere. Look at these humans, Danivon Luze and Zasper Ertigon. Look at this human girl called Fringe. Look at this old, old woman who calls herself Jory now, and this old, old man who calls himself Asner! See what they portend! See here, how our journey will be altered, o
ur future interrupted as we are called away from our proper pursuits, all for naught? All to no point, for we will be able to do nothing!

  “See how the great concession we have so lately earned, with what enormous effort, is threatened by the way in which you have granted this Boon!”

  TWO

  4

  Tolerance on Elsewhere: the Great Rotunda, where, on the upper balcony, Boarmus the Provost sits thoughtful. His companion, Syrilla, is unaware of his thoughts. In Boarmus’s opinion, Syrilla may be unaware of any thoughts at all. Though a longtime member of the Inner Circle, she seems incapable of connecting cause and effect. Her forte is hysteria; her singularity to freight even the most irrelevant remarks with enormous import.

  As now, when she dilates beaky nostrils and cries dramatically, “I cannot understand why Danivon Luze would have done such a thing.”

  “You know why,” Boarmus says lazily, without stirring. His wide-bottomed form is well settled into its velvety chair like an old monument into turf, slightly tipped, but massively immovable. “If you’re speaking of Danivon Luze the Council Enforcer.”

  Syrilla gestures with an apparently boneless hand and raises her eyebrows to her hairline, miming astonishment. “Of course, Danivon Luze the Council Enforcer.” Danivon Luze, once a foundling child, the pet of Tolerance; then Zasper Ertigon’s youthful protégé; now a strikingly handsome though controversial officer. Who else?

  Boarmus snorts, a muffled plopping, like boiling mud. How long has he come here in the afternoons to occupy this same table, this same chair? How long has he drunk one thing or another while looking down upon the uniformed guards, the two Doors, the ceremonial changing of the one about the other? Whatever time it has been, nothing has happened in it. Well, very little. A few minor rebellions, relentlessly put down. A few new ideas, squelched. A few innovations, which always turned out to be reinventions of things forgotten centuries ago. And now, at last, something. Something happening, and though in the past he had thought he longed for something to happen, he now wonders if such longings had been at all wise.