Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  … on the day the Great Question is answered …

  The Great Question, the only question so far as Brannigan is concerned. The Question upon which it was founded, which it has translated and reframed and to which it has devotedly sought the answer. The Great Question, which has plagued humanity since it first came down from the primordial trees …

  … passion fulfilled …

  … down from the primordial trees …

  WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE DESTINY OF MAN?

  “Enough,” said Sepel794DZ. “We know him well enough. There is nothing there to help us. He was no technician, no engineer. He thought nothing about Elsewhere or the Core.”

  The other dinks acquiesced. Brain dinks as a class were not deeply into feelings. They had understood only a little of what they had felt in Orimar Breaze. None of them knew why this particular memory had been kept for later reference. They withdrew from Orimar Breaze, all of them eager to find something they understood better.

  On his bed, Boarmus shifted.

  “Let us try this one,” said Sepel794DZ. “This one labeled Clore.”

  The first sensation they encountered felt roadlike. The road was not, however, a surface of durable substance making up a continuous and more or less cohesive pathway, which is what even residents of City Fifteen usually meant when they thought “road.” In the Core, “road” was a less-concrete concept than that. Its parts emitted roadness though they were only remotely and occasionally contiguous. Its nature was of a resilient discreteness, an unwillingness to connect. Sepel and his colleagues were conscious of moving (seeming to move) from rubbery chunk to rubbery chunk, all of which were changing position relative to one another and bouncing apart if they happened actually to touch. There was little indication of distance and “direction” was a matter of arbitrary decision.

  “What is this?” a dink asked.

  “A dream,” said Sepel. “Clore is dreaming, and he has recorded his dream.”

  “Why would he do this?”

  “Perhaps he wishes to review his dreams in all their details, and he chooses this way of doing it. Persevere! Even a dream may tell us something useful.”

  They persevered. They saw an eruption from the underlying stratum, an exudation of words in several languages, both archaic and current, indicating that they were approaching the lair/kingdom/residence of Great Lord Something. The words could be both seen and heard. They sprouted along the way like mushrooms, then deliquesced, running off in inky utterances among structures that stood here and there, more or less adjacent.

  These might have been buildings or chimneys or mountains or trees. As the dream went forward, items became more certainly either thin or flat, finally becoming almost definable. They were proceeding through a dimensionless and arid wilderness that might have been painted by an untalented child of eight or nine on dirty paper with a limited number of colors: ochre, dun, bile-green, dung-brown—those left in the box when all the brighter and more favored colors had been used up.

  The farther they went, the more solid things became. More words popped up indicating the approach of the Great God Something. The quality of the surrounding area changed, becoming less sketchy in character and more susceptible to perspective. They came upon definite growths, with perceivable thorns, and at last the dinks felt themselves mounting a ridge of rusty iron where they gazed down upon a fully realized landscape.

  The valley echoed with muted howls, the thwack of slack drums and the clash of dissonant cymbals. A vaporous procession wound its way down the ridge beside them toward a vaguely circular chasm of black smoke. Across that chasm and to either side were other ridges, other processions, and through the sullen air came the dirgelike mourning of the mist-veiled marchers.

  Within the chasm a stone mesa seemed to float upon the haze, a rock scarcely large enough to hold the hideously ramified bulk of the building upon it. Joining this isolated structure to the deeply creviced lands around it were bridges of black iron, spiderwebs of cable and strut leaping outward from the central plateau in flat trajectories to bury themselves at the ends of the squirming ridges. The building lay like a monstrous iron spider at the center of this web of ways, and like a spider it twitched its extended legs in great annexial spasms, seeming to shiver in constant motion, as mirages seem to shiver, an effect possibly caused by the haze of smoke that rose between the observers and the edifice itself.

  Occasionally the chasm belched red fire that oppressively illuminated the narrow ledge between the building and the chasm, and there strode a monstrous six-legged being, insectlike, whose three great mouths grazed bloodily upon the processions attempting to cross the ledge to enter the great building.

  And they were the creature upon the ledge, ravaging the marching hordes.

  “Out,” murmured Sepel794DZ. “This isn’t helping us.” His colleagues did not argue. They withdrew from the recording.

  “This tells us nothing,” murmured a dink. “People dream all kinds of things. Even we do. This was a nightmare. What good can we get from that?”

  “The fact that he saved it,” murmured Sepel794DZ. “Only that.”

  “Shall we try Thob?” asked another wearily.

  They tried Thob and came upon a landscape; a shore, rocks, sky in flat primary colors: shore a line of brown, sea a plane of green, rock shapes of black, the sky a plane of blue. Was this what the Thob person saw? Or imagined? Was this her vision of life?

  This passed, giving way to:

  Clashing spheres, a violence of storm, a hurricane of sound, without meaning or order.

  And this too was gone.

  Leaving behind a giant woman with breasts like mountains, crouching enigmatically beside an endless plain.

  The breasts swelled and burst, showering milk onto the plain. It puddled and leaked away in droplets of diamond and pearl, leaving a roiling net with worlds of its own gathered within it, worlds indecipherable to the dinks; a mountain of slippery ooze. A slithering womb in violent contraction. A tentacle that sought to hold, grasp, strangle….

  “Get out,” said Sepel794DZ. “There’s nothing here. Nothing at all!”

  Boarmus woke on his narrow couch, sat up, and chewed his fingers for a while, then nibbled at his lips while Sepel794DZ and several of his fellows hummed and clicked. After what seemed a very long time, Sepel made a sound like a groan.

  “What?” asked Boarmus.

  The dinka-jin shook itself, reminding Boarmus of a dog shaking water from its coat.

  “What?” demanded Boarmus again.

  Tentacles untangled. Boxes moved apart. Synthesizers made noises like moans, like sighs.

  “We read some of them,” said Sepel. “One by Breaze; one by Clore; one by Thob. They tell us nothing! Nothing! Nightmares and visions and impressions and pornographic daydreaming. None of them concern Elsewhere or the Core. They were made long ago, on another world.”

  “And Jordel?”

  “We haven’t accessed anything by him. Not yet.”

  “Nothing that tells us what’s happening now?”

  “Nothing at all. We don’t even know for sure that these … people are involved.”

  “Something using the name of one of them is involved,” Boarmus insisted. “One of the … things introduced herself to me as Lady Mintier Thob.” “That doesn’t mean …”

  “I know. Anyone … anything can use any name it likes.”

  “True.”

  “I can’t stay any longer.” Boarmus sighed. “I presume you’ll go on looking. Do you have any suggestions as to what I can do now?”

  Sepel794DZ shrugged once more, giving a mechanical sigh. “We will go on, yes. We’ve got a few shielded facilities here in City Fifteen: this lab and one or two others, a flier pad, a few routes to and from. We’ve shielded our own Files, just in case there is a network. Other than that …”

  “This is ridiculous,” screamed Boarmus. “The Core was made by men! Mortal men! Basically it’s just a damned chill box with a few electro
nic attachments! And you mean to tell me, we’re completely at its … their … whatever-it-is’s mercy?”

  Sepel didn’t answer. The silence was a reproach.

  “Sorry,” muttered Boarmus. “It just seems so ridiculous.” “We share your feelings. We feel the situation to be basically immoral. Of course, we dinks feel it is difficult to be a man and still be moral. Which is why we’ve become as we are.”

  Boarmus thought about this. “Sepel, what’s it like, being … being a dinka-jin?”

  The main box buzzed for a while. “What’s it like being the way you are, Boarmus? What’s it like being assembled around a stomach you have to keep thinking about and feeding, instead of having your nutritional needs taken care of automatically so you never need to think about it? What’s it like only being able to see one thing at a time? What’s it like being distracted by pain all the time, or discomfort, or hormones, or heat or cold? What’s it like having to eliminate all the time and do other awkward, nasty things with your bodies….”

  “All right,” sighed Boarmus.

  “You asked,” said Sepel794DZ.

  “I know I did.”

  “We don’t find being men particularly useful, that’s all, though some of you are quite … decent. We feel our kind of life is saner, somehow.”

  Boarmus sighed, stretched, too weary to pursue the question further. His mind flailed aimlessly. “What advice can you give me, then. What should I do now?”

  The box hummed. “The two usual answers would be fight or flee. There’s still a long-distance Door at Tolerance. Of course, once people start for it, they may not be allowed to get to it.”

  “Fighting’s out too, isn’t it?”

  Sepel794DZ twitched. Boarmus looked away. The dink was making a grinding sound, symptom of concentration, he knew, but it irritated him anyhow.

  “I was running simulations,” muttered the dink at last. “I found no successful strategy. It … they, whatever, has given you indications it thinks it’s a god, right?”

  “Yes. More than indications.”

  “Well then, play its own game, Boarmus. Be sneaky.”

  “What is its game?”

  “It says it’s a god. Maybe you can make it doubt itself. Challenge it to do something only a god could do.”

  “Like what?” Boarmus cleared his throat and rubbed his forehead.

  The dinka-jin shrugged. “Something godlike, obviously. Like creating a world, or answering some riddle of the universe.”

  Boarmus grunted, feeling the usual burning in his stomach flare up to make a sudden agony. “I’ll think about that. Meantime, I need to send a message to Zasper Ertigon. Privately, needless to say.”

  “If he has not yet left Enarae for Panubi, that at least we can do.”

  As the Dove went down the Fohm with the current, the three Enforcers, wearing their show clothes, joined the twins at the bow rail to watch for the first appearance of Du-you. Danivon had a dry throat and an ache in his sinuses that would not go away. This was not merely a smell! This was a monstrous stench, a threat made manifest!

  Around the next gentle curve of the river, the confluence appeared where the Ti’il met the Fohm, a wide lagoon partly dredged, partly scoured out by the quick spring flow of the Ti’il, separated by overgrown mud flats from the main current of the river. Buoys marked the channels dredged through the flats, and the Dove edged toward the nearest set of markers, the men at the sweeps laboring, the captain at the wheel muttering oaths as eddies thrust the Dove this way and that. When the ship came into the channel, out of the current, it responded more easily to the helm.

  “Hau-la,” (silence) the oarsmen cried. “Hau-la. Hau-la.” The sweeps beat, raised, and beat again.

  Behind them came a clatter, a shout.

  A boom had been lowered behind them to block the channel. They could not go out again. At least not by that route.

  Curvis and Danivon shared expressive glances.

  “What?” asked Fringe.

  “Shh,” said Danivon.

  When they came to the pier, sailors leapt ashore carrying lines to make fast. The riverside was piled high with straw-wrapped bundles, crates and barrels, cargoes coming and going. On the riverfront, white-clad little people scurried madly here and there, wheeling carts and barrows, carrying kegs upon their shoulders, crying their wares in surprisingly high and plangent voices, like bells. “The Murrey,” said the captain, spitting from the corner of his mouth. Among these little people walked a taller folk, dressed in brightly patterned fabrics and carrying parasols, waving fringed sleeves at one another, chatting in shrill, bird-cheep sounds. “The Houm.”

  Beyond the scurry at the wharfs were the outskirts of the town, low buildings separated by cobbled streets, then higher structures as the streets rose from the unstable land of the delta and gained the more solid ground away from the river.

  Danivon moved uncomfortably, overwhelmed by the stink. It seemed to come at him like a wind from the shore.

  “What?” Fringe asked, seeing the pain on his face.

  He shook his head gently. Any sudden movement hurt. “I don’t know. I’ve never smelled anything like it before. I wish we hadn’t had to stop here.” He remembered Boarmus’s message. Both messages. The smell of the place was the smell of Boarmus’s message. Deadly. Horrible.

  Fringe remembered that same message. Though she didn’t know what it had contained, its method of delivery meant it could only have been a warning. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder, seeking any sign of the people from noplace. All of them were below and evidently intended to stay there.

  She spun back to the rail as a drum spoke warningly from behind the nearer buildings, TID-dit, TID-dit again, then a steady tattoo. TIDdit-’-aTUM-tum TIDdit-’-aTUM-tum. Those who came shambling behind the drums were neither the little nor the tall, neither the white-clad ones nor the bright folk with their bitsy parasols. These had long and tangled hair, bare arms scarified upon the shoulders and tattooed from there to the fingertips, and they grunted in time with the drums as they slouched forward: HA-ghn, HA-ghn, HA-ghn, scattering the Murrey as a great fish scatters a shoal of tiny ones. The fragile Houm dissolved before them.

  “Not the Murrey and not the Houm,” murmured Curvis, in Fringe’s ear. “These are the chimi-hounds Ghatoun spoke of, so watch it.”

  So much she might have guessed from the weapons they carried. Fringe was suddenly glad of the broad-beam heat gun on her belt and her usual weapon in her boot, either of which was considerably better than anything the chimi-hounds were carrying.

  “Captain,” the hound leader drawled, making a sneer of it. “Kap-tahng.”

  “Chief.”

  “You got pahssen-jhairs?”

  “None for Derbeck. Cargo, but no passengers.”

  “I see your mah-ni-fest, Kap-tahng.”

  “As you will,” said the captain, nervously eyeing the remaining hounds lounging on the pier. He led the way to his cabin, the chimi-hound swaggering after. The remaining hounds slouched insolently at the edge of the pier, staring at the women, making obscene finger talk to one another.

  “Nela,” Fringe muttered. “If I were you, I’d work my way over to the cabins and go below. Bertran.”

  The twins were already on their way, walking as casually as they could manage it.

  Fringe, Danivon, and Curvis turned their backs on the chimi-hounds and went to the opposite railing.

  Danivon muttered, “Boarmus told me to look this place over, but we’re not traveling here as Enforcers.”

  “We don’t have to be Enforcers to look it over,” said Curvis lazily. “Let’s stick with our disguise and see what happens.”

  The captain stuck his head out of the wheelhouse. “Showman Luze,” he called in a tight voice, “could you come in here?”

  Danivon went in a hesitating strut, unable to see clearly for the pressure in his head. After a time, Fringe and Curvis were invited to join him. They found Danivon and the captain, both of t
hem white about the lips, confronting a jovial and mad-eyed chimi-hound.

  “This man says the boss chief wants us to bring the sideshow ashore,” said Danivon. His words were clear, though his eyes were unfocused. “As part of his preelection festivities.”

  Fringe stared at her lap, where her hands tried relentlessly to control one another. She made them relax.

  Danivon turned a vague, unseeing look on her, which she interpreted as a caution. “The boss chief has somehow learned … of the performance we gave in Shallow. He is pleased that we have arrived here in Derbeck, where he invites us to perform at the celebration of his election as leader.”

  “Is small thing to ask,” cried the chimi-hound in trade language. “If people say no-can, we wonder why! Such wonder makes us fret. We are silly people when we fret. We do nasty things.” He grinned widely, showing sharpened teeth.

  “When is the election?” asked Fringe in the same emotionless tone Danivon was using.

  “Tomorrow,” cried the hound. “So, you see, is only small delay in your journey. You come to banquet. Tonight.”

  “What banquet is that?”

  “Boss chief’s banquet, that one, in warehouse at top of Moolie Street. All chimi-hound chiefs will be there. All high priests will be there. Maybeso High Lord Chimi-ahm will be there with Lady Zhulia and Chibbi the Dancer and Lord Balal!”

  “Five of us can come,” said Danivon. “The two old people are not strong enough.”

  “Mah-ni-fest say seven in show,” said the chimi-hound with hectic gaiety. “All come. Seven. Seven is good number.” His eyes glittered and he turned to smile at Fringe, a theropsian smile, full of teeth. The pupils of his eyes were very small. Here and there in his face small muscles jumped, like tiny creatures trapped there, individually attempting to free themselves.