Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Boarmus fights to keep his face calm and unresponsive, not to react to this outrageous statement. What do the dead men mean? And how will they kill anyone?

  He has to think about this. He has to get away from here and think about this. He licks his lips. “If that’s all,” he says again.

  No response. Then, a whisper. “I already killed two of them, Provost. Young ones. Sacrifices. To us.” A long pause. “To me.”

  Boarmus swallows, feeling the acid burning in his throat. What have the dead men done?

  He looks away for a moment, breathing deeply, gaining control of himself. When he looks back, he sees only the machine with most of its lights out, only a few flickering madly to show the Files are being accessed, the dead men are thinking. He rises from the chair and goes out into the twisting hallway, to the nearest cabinet where he searches frantically among the Files, removing several containers of material he has not bothered with before. No record, no sensory recording, is supposed to leave this place, but Boarmus cannot stay here long enough to look through them. Remaining here has become a physical impossibility.

  Thus burdened, he goes back the way he came, distracted only briefly as he approaches his suite by the sight of someone hiding behind a half-opened panel. There is not time to stop and challenge. Once in his own place he vomits and defecates all at once, just as Chadra Hume had said he did, like a sick dog. It has never happened to Boarmus before, and he is sickened at the indecency of it, at the frailty of his own response.

  He cleans up after himself, washes himself, rinses out his mouth, and flings himself on his bed to lie there taking deep breaths. “Two young ones,” the dead man said. Sacrifices to themselves, itself. Who would that be? And who had been hiding outside?

  He summons Files with an outthrust hand. “Personnel check,” he says. “First item: identity of young person hiding outside my quarters when I returned here moments ago. Second item: Are all Tolerance staff members or guests present or accounted for?”

  Files clicks and hums. Monitors throughout the enormous complex are alerted. Recent past-this-point traffic records are recalled and tabulated.

  “First item,” says Files. “Named Jacent Sturv. Male kin of Syrilla. Recent arrival from Heaven. Second item: two unaccounted for. Metty and Jum Duschiv, siblings, recent arrivals from Heaven.”

  “Find the two missing ones,” says Boarmus from a burning throat.

  Files blinks and chatters. Outlying monitors come awake, Frickian guards are roused and directed to patrol unused areas. Boarmus sits on the side of his bed, his jowly face sweating into his hands, waiting.

  The news comes at last. Metty Duschiv, found messily dead in the corridors several levels below the Rotunda. On the walls, words written in her blood. “Fool” is written there. And a word that looks like “adore.” Boarmus thinks it isn’t “adore.” Boarmus thinks he knows what it is.

  The girl’s brother Jum is nowhere to be found, though a door into the old barracks appears to have been forced.

  Have the dead men done this? And if so, how? And for the love of all humanity, why?

  • • •

  Outside Boarmus’s suite, behind a half-closed panel in a corridor alcove, Jacent stirred uncomfortably and decided that nothing else was likely to happen tonight. He had seen Boarmus go, accompanied by a certain weirdness, not unlike the weirdness in the old barracks. He had seen Boarmus return all alone. He had been close enough to see Boarmus’s face on the return trip, not a face that would encourage Jacent to follow in Boarmus’s footsteps. A terrified, sweaty, sick-looking face. There for a minute, he’d thought Boarmus had seen him too, but evidently not.

  And right after that, every monitor had awakened, Frickian patrols had gone bustling past, one of whom had eventually told Jacent about Metty when Jacent asked what was happening.

  After hearing that he went to his own place and crawled into bed, his mouth dry, watching his walls for that telltale shift, that shadowy sinuosity, listening for that glottal sound. There was something here in Tolerance he wanted to know about, but he preferred not to get dead finding out, particularly not the way Metty had gotten dead. Something very strange was happening, something interesting. Something Boarmus no doubt knew all about.

  Jacent, mouth still dry and limbs jumping nervously, lay on his bed, sickly fascinated by the thought of something—anything!—happening at Tolerance!

  On Elsewhere’s technology scale of one to ten, in which category-one places were unsettled wilderness roamed by a few eremites or savages, and category ten were state-of-the-art technological habitat, a category-seven province like Enarae had sufficient technology for comfort while retaining enough nature to provide pleasantly parklike spaces for the inhabitants.

  Particularly parklike were the Seldom Isles, reached by swamp-river boat or by the farflung tentacles of Number Three Bridge, lofting upward from the western outskirts of the city and continuing in that direction all the way to the neighboring province of Denial. Fringe Owldark had spent holidays in the Isles and knew they were about as far as possible from the farm town of Fineen, which lay in the flat, sparsely settled agricultural lands across the city to the east. If putative Uncle and maybe-so Aunty came from Fineen, Fringe thought it very strange they’d be staying at Number Three Bridge House. If, on the other hand, they came from the Seldom Isles, as a good many gangers and vagrants did, their place of lodging made perfect sense.

  “Probably bogus,” Fringe advised herself as she asked for Zerka and Zenubi Troms and was given the location of their quarters, cheap ones, at the back of the complex, almost under the bridge itself. Fringe settled her Enforcer’s garb, brushed lint from her coat, and keyed the annunciator. The elderly woman who answered the summons resembled no one Fringe had ever known. She looked like neither Ari nor Nada, not like Aunty, not like Souile.

  “Yes?” she asked in an Islish drawl that made two syllables of the word.

  “Zenubi Troms? I’ve come on behalf of Yilland Dorwalk,” Fringe said. “To settle the matter of your death claim against her father.”

  “Our claim’s against her” said the woman. “He left nothing.”

  Fringe smiled her bloodletting smile. “Does enslaving one member of the family make up to you for the loss of another?”

  The woman snorted. “Not my family, she. His first wife, she was family.”

  “Let’s see, that would be Souile?”

  “My baby sister,” the woman sighed. “Sweet Souile.”

  Fringe pretended to refer to her pocket caster. “Whom you abandoned, leaving her to provide total support for your aged parents.”

  The woman looked startled. “She married well,” she snapped. “We knew she would.”

  “And now that she is dead, and he is dead, you want money to soothe your grief at having abandoned your parents,” said Fringe, snapping the caster closed.

  A man came from another room and stood in the doorway, glowering at her. “Who’s she?” he demanded of his kinswoman.

  “I am here on behalf of Yilland,” Fringe repeated.

  The man scowled and took a threatening step forward, only to find himself staring at the business end of a rather large aitchem weapon, so-called from the initials HM, for hurt and maim.

  Fringe smiled at the woman once more, and intoned, as though it were formula: “I am here to inform you that Fringe and Bubba Dorwalk, Souile’s natural children, are filing blood claim against you for two thirds the total cost of providing housing and sustenance to Ari, Nada, and Aunty Troms for varying periods of years, plus accrued interest, which expenditures increased their father’s indebtedness and led him to unwarranted and arbitrary actions deleterious to their interests, depriving them of status and comfort. Since this falls within the category of a long-standing and outrageous indebtedness, as defined by the Executive Council of Enarae City, it is being filed in life court for immediate dispensation.”

  She was surprised to find that she actually felt angry, not against these pretenders
but against Souile’s real siblings, wherever they were. Even if they’d been only Trashers themselves, they could have helped!

  “We are not residents of Enarae City!” the woman cried, both outraged and frightened.

  Fringe yawned ostentatiously. “Notices of the suit have been sent to all wards, including Fineen, which you have given as your place of residence. I am an Enforcer retained to pursue the indebtedness should you attempt to leave Enarae before it is adjudicated. As an Enforcer, I must inform you that Fringe Dorwalk is outraged by your claim and has agreed to accept vengeance in lieu of settlement.” She held up her caster. “I have recorded the fact that you were both warned. Is it necessary to inform any other member of your family?”

  It was all bluff and fluff, but her two victims obviously didn’t know that. The man had gone pale and seemed to be having trouble breathing.

  “Yes. No! No. I’ll tell them,” the woman screamed at her.

  Fringe left quietly, pausing just long enough to stick an ear on the door before finding her way to a quiet table in a corner tavern where she sipped at a mug of ale while eavesdropping through the receiver behind her ear. Even over the chatter of the tavern, she heard the flurry of hysteria and imminent departure. So much for the imposter kin, who were making a hasty return to the Seldom Isles. Fringe detached the receiver from its bone socket, dropped it into her belt kit, and turned her full attention to the remaining ale. It was good. Better than she had tasted lately. She noted the name of the tavern: somewhat out of the way, but worth the visit.

  “Nicely done,” said a voice at her shoulder.

  She sat very still, without moving anything except one finger that moved slowly toward her weapons belt.

  “No threat,” said the voice casually.

  She stopped moving the finger and turned. He was a sand-colored, black-haired man with curly lips, a fine beak of a nose, and a wide, firm jaw. When she looked at him, something inside her lurched, and she swallowed her errant innards down, holding them still by not breathing for a time. A man to move one’s blood around, her own blood told her, while her mind did a careful assessment, weighing and measuring. His clothes were ordinary enough in style, though fine in quality, and he wore them superbly, a trait Fringe always noticed. Now who was he? Or what? She breathed gently, testing to see if her stomach would stay where it belonged.

  He gestured at the seat across from her, and she nodded, a mere jerk of the head. She couldn’t stop him joining her. Or maybe didn’t want to.

  “Nicely done,” he said again, seating himself and raising dramatically curved eyebrows at her. “That business with the kinfolk who weren’t kinfolk.”

  “You were spying on me?” she asked, more surprised than offended.

  “Been observing you,” he said comfortably. “Enough to overhear your little show. They aren’t even related to you, are they?” He gave her a steamy look, saying, They couldn’t be related to you, woman, not that kind.

  She couldn’t quite ignore the look, but she breathed deeply and let her quickened pulse slow of itself. One thing she had learned. Usually the body followed where the mind went. One had only to take firm control of where that was!

  “I think not, though I did quit listening,” she said, concentrating on the tile pattern of the tabletop.

  “My bet is they’re part of a gully tribe.” He fingered the medallion at his throat, his long fingers tugging at it, turning it.

  Fringe grunted. She’d already decided that. Such scavengers were common enough in mid-category places.

  “Somebody dies in some province or other,” the man mused, as though talking to himself. “The nearest tribe sends a couple gullies along to act the part of wronged kinfolk or people owed a debt. Seldom it’s anything that will hold up to examination by the powers that be, but most people don’t risk that. Instead, they settle, just to be rid of the chaffers.” He mimed stripping one such bloodsucker from his exposed arm, making a face.

  “Char Dorwalk’s adopted daughter had nothing to settle with,” she said crisply.

  “Well, no,” admitted the man. “My name’s Danivon Luze, by the way.”

  “Fringe Owldark,” she said, giving him her hand somewhat reluctantly, noticing that her fingers didn’t go up in flames, though she’d felt they might. She swallowed before saying in a carefully neutral voice, “What’s your classification, Danivon?”

  “Outcaste,” he said. “Like you. When I’m here.”

  Which meant he moved around and could be almost anything. “Where?” she asked.

  He gestured expansively, ending with a snapped finger at the youth serving drinkables. When he’d been provided with a tankard and had thirstily dipped his nose, he sat back with a sigh, singing the first line of a well-known vagabond song in a pleasant baritone: “‘On this world of Elsewhere, else-where’s where I go.’”

  “Do not try to hold me, dear. Tomorrow I’ll be far from here,” her mind continued the verse as he fished a border pass out of his pocket and opened it on the table between them. From the pass, his face stared up at her beside the patterns coding his essential being, physical and mental. She wished she had decoder eyes and could read them, give herself that advantage, at least. At the bottom were the words “Danivon Luze. Universal Pass.”

  “Aren’t you something,” she said, half enviously. There were reputed to be fewer than one thousand Universal Passes on all of Elsewhere, and most of them were held by Council Enforcers. He hadn’t said he was an Enforcer, but he hadn’t said he wasn’t. He wasn’t wearing a badge, but then he wasn’t required to unless he was Attending a Situation. “Now that makes me mightily curious,” she said.

  “As it would anybody,” he said, still comfortably.

  “You’ve been observing me, you say?”

  “We have.”

  “We?”

  “A friend and I.”

  He was being too smug for her. “Am I to winkle words out of you one at a time?” she demanded, working at being annoyed. “If that’s so, I’ve no time for the exercise. No time and no appetite. You approached me, colleague. If you have something to say, say it!” Or get out of here and let her temperature settle to normal, which she devoutly wished for.

  He seemed not one whit upset at her impatience. “I’m what you might call recruiting. I’ve been asked to mount an expedition. I came here to consult an old friend, and he mentioned your name. When he did, my nose twinked. So, I took the trouble to see what you’re like, how you work.” He tugged at his medallion again, a nervous habit. The thing was shiny from the touch of his fingers, the design on it blurred by long touching.

  “Indeed,” she remarked, laconic in her turn. “Your nose twinked.” Damned if she’d ask him who had mentioned her name. She looked at the tabletop once more in order not to look at his nose. Not to look at him at all. Here she’d been working at making herself man-proof, and this creature had to come along to test her resolve. Well, test away, damn him!

  “Well, my nose does that,” he muttered. “From time to time.”

  “Have you found what I’m like?”

  “We give you high marks for self-control, and for thinking on your feet. We’re not looking for any ganger-caste mavericks, out for slaughter.”

  Fringe lifted a nostril at him. In truth, she felt a grudging empathy with gangers. Old Ari had often spoken of gangers knowingly and with nostalgia, though Fringe had been in her twenties before she’d admitted to herself that he knew so much about them because he’d been one.

  “They do have a tendency to kill first and identify later,” she remarked. “I’ve met a few.”

  Danivon smiled at her. “I know you have,” he said.

  “You know too much. How much?”

  “Everything. I’ve been through your Book.” He looked up and smiled at someone approaching the table. The newcomer sat down beside them without invitation.

  Fringe found herself glaring at the huge, bald-headed man who had called himself Curvis. This time she was truly
angry, and she snarled at both of them: “Spies, the two of you. Blood Books are private. Until I’m dead, you’ve no right!”

  Curvis merely grinned. Danivon tapped the Universal Pass. “He has one of these too. They’re good for more than just getting across closed borders.”

  She subsided, growling, curiosity getting the better of her. “So, what’s my balance?”

  He tipped his hand to and fro, like a scale, wavering. No big debts. No big credits. In balance. Almost.

  “What’s the job?” she asked.

  Curvis grunted. On his chest, his pocket moved, and he unfastened it to let something tiny and furry peep out with shiny purple eyes. Danivon scratched his head and made a comical face. “Fringe Owldark, answer me a question first, will you?”

  “If I can,” she said indifferently, watching the sleek little animal move out of Curvis’s pocket onto his shoulder.

  “How is Elsewhere different from Everywhere?”

  “You’re playing at riddles, man. I’ve no thirst for nonsense.”

  “No nonsense. I’m serious. How?”

  She stared at him, one finger tapping the tabletop. “Luze, everywhere else there are Hobbs Land Gods, but not here.”

  “And if I said there’s a possibility the Hobbs Land Gods have come to Elsewhere? Then what, Fringe Owldark?”

  She felt her pulse slow, then race, her face pale, then flush. He might as well have stuck a knife in her side, or told her she’d just been poisoned. She knew nothing about the Gods except what she’d been taught to know, taught to think, taught to feel, which was simple terror.

  Those taken over by the Hobbs Land Gods were no longer men, no longer children of God (by whatever title), no longer the concern of heaven (of whatever type). Though the people who had fled to Elsewhere disagreed about virtually everything, about this one thing they agreed: To be taken over by the Hobbs Land Gods was to lose one’s soul, one’s chance at salvation, one’s hope of eternal blessedness—or the equivalent. So said those who ought to know! The Gods were the bogeyman, the thing with teeth, the monster in the dark.