Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The old woman who now came mumbling along with her list was a reminder.

  “Haifazh? Are you clean now?”

  “No, Mahmi. I am still unclean.”

  The old woman made a check mark. “Bulerah? Are you Bulerah?”

  “I am,” the woman said.

  “You will return to your owner when your child is weaned and sold. Is your child weaned.”

  “She is only a week old, Mahmi,” said Bulerah.

  “Ah,” said the old woman, stumping along, making another check mark.

  “Your uncleanness has lasted a long time,” said Bulerah wonderingly. “Your child looks to be half a year old.”

  So far as Haifazh was concerned, the uncleanness she had originally counterfeited by smearing herself with filth would last forever. The old women never bothered to check. They just asked and believed what they were told. “True,” she said calmly. “It is probably not uncleanness at all but a disease. An infection from when they cut and sewed me again when my baby was born. I will probably die of it.”

  She intended to continue unclean until she died, that was certain. Where this spirit of rebellion had come from, she could not tell. It had arisen out of nothing, out of pain and fear and a fire burning inside her that required vengeance to be quenched. So, she would continue unclean. The House of Restitution was peaceful, at least. She could stay here so long as she could work the loom. It was preferable to the bower of her owner—fat, sweaty, heaving gaver of a man. He had liked to bite her breasts until they bled. It had pleased him to make bruises.

  “I can’t wait to go back,” sighed Bulerah. “I don’t like this place.”

  “Weren’t you raised in the tower?” Haifazh asked, curious. “I was.”

  “I was raised in the bower of my progenitor,” the other said proudly. “My mother was his favorite and I was twin of his oldest son.”

  Haifazh’s lip curled. “Don’t crow, woman. No matter where you were raised, you were cut and sewn when you were a child; then when you were twelve or so, your progenitor sold you to your owner who sooner or later sent you here.” She gestured at the room around them. “When you had your child, the midwives cut you again and sewed you up so you could hardly pee. You were lucky not to become infected and die as a fifth of us do when they cut us. One out of every five daughters, lost. One out of every five mothers, lost. You are maybe lucky to be alive, but maybe not, for when your blood time comes, the blood will clot inside you, and cleaning yourself will be agony. Then, when you go back to him, he’ll hurt you even more, expecting you to be silent while he does it. And when you’re old, Bulerah, they’ll put you out in the Court of Removal to die. Bower or tower, where you were reared makes no difference in the end!”

  The other flushed and turned her eyes toward her child.

  “Nothing makes any difference to women,” muttered Haifazh. “If there were no women, that might make a difference.” She stood up, still cuddling Shira, and looked through the tall window, across the Court of Removal and the high wall, across a corner of the fye fields to the River Fohm. What she saw there made her exclaim in surprise, bringing all the other women to their feet.

  The ship tied at the dock and the flier beside it on the bank had been there earlier, rare enough to warrant watching though not truly astonishing. What had not been there before were the women, women standing about with their faces uncovered and behind them something shifty and wonderful-looking, with scales and horns, or perhaps plates and fangs, but at any rate a mysterious and unusual sharpness, protectiveness, hugeness kind of thing that none of them could see clearly. Heedless of the commands of their keepers and the halfhearted blows of the canes on their basket helmets, the weavers thronged the windows, leaning out to see better.

  “That’s a flier,” said Haifazh. “I saw one once before.”

  “What is a flier?” asked Bulerah. She had never seen a flier, a ship, a river until she came here. There had been nothing at all to see from her owner’s bower except the tops of the trees and the sky. Nothing to see but the sky, nothing to do but bathe or sleep or tell stories or sing, very softly, or come to her owner’s bed when he sent for her. Haifazh’s words had reminded her how much it had hurt when she was new-bought. Now she’d been cut and sewn again, there would be pain again. She hadn’t thought of that until now. The thought almost drove away the pleasure of seeing new things.

  Below them, on the riverbank, the passengers of the Dove became aware they were being watched.

  “All those windows over there are full of women,” said Cafferty. “If I couldn’t see them, I could smell them from here. They’re frantic with curiosity.”

  “Never mind about them,” growled Zasper, who had seen starlight on the sails of the Dove in the early hours and had been awaiting her arrival since he had landed, to the consternation of the guards who were even now hovering at a safe distance, growling among themselves. “You tell me Fringe is missing; so what, if anything, have you done about her?” He glared over Jory’s shoulder at Danivon, who stood broodingly at the rail of the ship.

  “Don’t snarl, Zasper,” Danivon said in an empty voice. “They were already beyond our reach when we noticed they were gone. We saw where they went, at least we took sightings of the last place we saw them. I wanted to go ashore and search, but the others overruled me. They said she could be miles away by the time we started searching; they said the lights might end by getting us all; both things seemed likely. If you know something we don’t, tell us about it! We need a plan to rescue them!”

  Zasper fumed, full of speculation he wanted to share but unwilling to say anything at all while they were here on shore and might be overheard. Just as he had left Enarae, a tourist dink had brought him a transmitter cube from Boarmus with a very long, rambling message adding to the somewhat muddled but nonetheless threatening picture of what they were all dealing with. Zasper had spent the flight to Thrasis listening to the cube and trying to figure it out: According to Boarmus, Elsewhere had been taken over by something both omnipresent and omnipotent, something paranoid and erratic, full of malice and cunning, which seemed mostly concerned with its own sense of esteem and power. “It wants to be a god,” Boarmus had said. “Maybe it is one.” Little god or big god made no difference, Boarmus said. A big one might kill them all at once, little ones could nibble them to death. They’d be just as dead either way!

  Zasper stared at Danivon and made a covert sign in use among Enforcers that meant, roughly, “I’ll tell you later.”

  Danivon replied with an angry gesture, his lips drawn back in an impatient snarl, but he held himself in check.

  Jory blinked at the recent interloper and murmured, “If there’s nothing else….”

  Zasper growled, “There’s a good deal else, old woman. Am I right that you are the same Jory somebody who used to follow Fringe around when she was a child?” He took her silence for assent and demanded, “What are you doing here in Thrasis?”

  “I’m here because the ship is here. The ship is here because it has cargo to unload. I’ll go when the ship goes.”

  “Go where?”

  “Home,” she said.

  His eyebrows lifted almost to his smoothly drawn-back hair. So this was Fringe’s Jory. The legendary Jory. Oh, he wanted to talk to her, now or later. Later, probably. Without Danivon hovering at his elbow. “Home being?” he asked her.

  She pointed westward, up the river.

  Zasper and Danivon exchanged glances. Danivon lifted his hands, palms up, sniffing the air. He tilted a palm, this way, that way. He couldn’t tell, couldn’t smell it.

  Zasper sighed and scratched the back of his head. “Women aren’t allowed to walk about loose in this province.”

  “The things that followed us aren’t on this side of the river, yet,” Jory said, “and I have business here.”

  “He’s trying to tell you you’ll be killed,” Danivon said flatly as he came down from the deck of the Dove. “The servants of the Prophet will kill you a
ll. Women have to be in the bowers of their owners or in the towers, no place else.”

  “Great Dragon comes with us,” said Jory. “And I don’t think the servants of the Prophet will interfere. I would invite you to join us, except that you Enforcers already know all about Thrasis. No doubt you want to talk man talk. Or is it Enforcer talk? Whichever, we’ll leave you to it.”

  She took Cafferty and Latibor by the hands and moved away from the ship.

  “Why are we doing this?” Cafferty asked Jory.

  Jory pointed at the bulky towers along the river. “Because we’re here. Because we can.”

  Latibor murmured, “Great Dragon comes.”

  They couldn’t see Great Dragon, though they had a sense of something beside them as they left the ship and strolled down the waterfront. Their way was immediately barred by infuriated men who screamed and waved curved blades at them, but who then mysteriously lost their enthusiasm for confrontation and ran off toward the town, not looking back. The Luzes and Jory were not surprised.

  “These buildings are still called towers,” said Jory in a didactic tone as they approached the nearest of several similar complicated structures. “Though they are not towers in the architectural sense.”

  The whole was surrounded by high walls pierced with fretted gates. As they came near the gates, the guards fled and the gates burst open, allowing Jory to walk through with the others behind her.

  “This is the Court of Removal,” Jory continued in a lecturer’s tone. “Old women like us, Cafferty, are left here to die. It would not be fitting for them to die where men who don’t own them might look upon them—and of course their owners don’t want to look at them—so they die here, where none see them. The religion of Thrasis prohibits murder. They are merely given no food or water and left to the mercy of the Thrasian god.”

  She walked across the wide yard, the others tiptoeing behind. “Through there,” she said, pointing, “is the tower proper. The tower administrator, an office he purchases from the Prophet, is allowed to buy selected girl babies, to rear them, to train some of them in music and dancing, then later sell them as breeders or entertainers. We won’t go in there. My business is with the House of Restitution.” She headed toward a massive block whose windows were crowded with women peering out at them. “This is the place from which girl children are sold as workers and where women who have proven unsatisfactory to their owners are allowed to labor on an interim basis.”

  Cafferty asked, “Unsatisfactory to their owners? How proven unsatisfactory?”

  “Oh, by growing ugly. Or sexually unexciting. Or bearing a girl instead of a son. Or speaking where a man can hear them. Or allowing a man other than their owners to see their faces. Or menstruating at a time when a man would prefer they did not. Or giving birth inconveniently. Or being sick. Or getting old.”

  She turned, pointing once more. “The walled fields to your right, stretching down to the river, are where the women of this tower grow their food and fiber. They are expected to feed themselves since they have displeased the owners who might otherwise have fed them.” As they approached, the wide doors burst open onto an empty hallway.

  The hallway didn’t remain empty. Women came out of the place like bees out of a hive, pouring out of doors and down stairways. As Jory and the Luzes walked down the corridors, the women of Thrasis came after, a buzzing swarm of them. By the time they reached the central courtyard, the women surrounded them on all sides in a murmurous throng, all crouched and staring at them as though they had been angels made of fire.

  “Are you captive here?” Jory asked gently.

  “We are the daughters of the Prophet,” several murmured, turning their heads to glance at one another from behind the wings of their basket helmets.

  “But are you captive here?”

  “We follow the destiny of women,” said one in a puzzled voice. “This is our fitting place.”

  “I ask again, are you captive here?”

  “Oh, by my breasts and womb, yes, we are captive here,” cried a shrill voice. “I am Haifazh, and this is my daughter Shira, and no matter what these other cooing doves may say, yes, we are prisoners and slaves, and I am sick of it if they are not.”

  Jory smiled. “Well then, Haifazh, it is to you that I bring my news, though any others who listen may hear it or not, as they choose. I bring you word of a way that opens for the women of Thrasis.”

  She spoke briefly. Some of the women fled, their hands thrust into their helmets to cover their ears, shutting out the heresy, stopping just within earshot to listen again. Others stayed close, punctuating Jory’s discourse with little shrieks. Haifazh herself listened intently and wordlessly to it all.

  When she had finished speaking, Jory took Haifazh by the hand and asked, “Are there women who go between the towers and the bowers of the town?”

  “Midwives,” said Haifazh. “And inspectors for the auctioneers.”

  “You will be sure they hear this news.”

  “They will already have heard,” said Haifazh. “There are no secrets in the world of women. We have too few amusements to let any opportunity pass.”

  The three travelers went on to the other towers, staying a time at each, and returned to the Dove early in the evening, where Zasper was waiting impatiently.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded.

  “To the towers, where I said I was going,” Jory told him. “We found a few rebellious souls. Rebellion invites intervention, don’t you think? Not that Nela would agree (poor Nela), though Bertran might. So, we’ve been carrying the gospel to the women of Thrasis. Once those things that followed us get across the water, the women will be the first victims. I can imagine the god of Thrasis made manifest, given flesh and bone! The women would die like flies—not that they don’t already.”

  “And what might your gospel be, Jory?”

  Jory smiled on him, a bittersweet smile. “To the imprisoned, I speak the gospel of flight, Zasper Ertigon. As I think your friend Fringe remarked, ‘You have to leave people a way out.’”

  “Well, whatever you’ve been preaching, come aboard. Your interference in Thrasis has upset the populace; there are more guards arriving on the shore every moment; and the captain wishes to anchor in deeper water, where we are less at risk.”

  As they boarded the ship, Curvis summoned them to the place where he and Danivon sat on the deck, their eyes fixed on the pocket munk on Curvis’s knee.

  “Has it done something interesting?” asked Jory.

  “Listen,” Danivon directed. “Perhaps it will say it again.”

  The munk was chewing its way around a cracker. When it had made the remnant perfectly round, it thumped it with a tiny paw and asked conversationally, “Where are we?”

  It was Bertran’s voice, very weak and sad.

  Cafferty started to say something, but was silenced by a gesture from Curvis.

  “In a cave,” said the munk in Fringe’s voice. “In a damned hole.” Fringe sounded all right. Angry, if anything.

  The munk took up another cracker and started eating its way around it.

  “The mate to this one was in Bertran’s pocket when we performed in Derbeck,” rumbled Curvis. “He didn’t give it back to me, afterward—we were all thinking of other things. When he was taken, the munk went with him.”

  “And this one reads the other’s mind?” asked Latibor.

  “I’ve always assumed so,” said Danivon. “Hears what the other hears, at least.”

  “It was part of the act,” said Curvis. “To have the one recite what the other heard. It made people believe we had actually magicked the little beasts through space.”

  “Will it work in reverse?” asked Jory.

  They stared at her.

  “Will the one with Bertran say what this one hears? We could try a message of hope and reassurance, at least,” she said.

  “Lies, you mean,” said Danivon bitterly.

  “Not necessarily. You are going to try to
rescue them, aren’t you?”

  They stared at one another, then at the widening strip of water as the sailors pushed them away from the shore.

  Zasper said, “She’s right. Hope is never a lie. Hope could keep her alive. All three of them alive.”

  And when they had put sufficient distance between themselves and the shore, he drew them close, all of them, and in that huddle told them what he had not dared tell them ashore—all that he had learned from Boarmus, all that Boarmus had learned in City Fifteen.

  When he had done, Jory and Asner went away from the others, their faces pale and drawn, to sit muttering together against the wheelhouse. Danivon, however, fastened on the item of most concern to him.

  “So Fringe could be anywhere,” he cried in anguish. “Anywhere a Door could reach!”

  Zasper put a finger to his lips, counseling quiet. “Don’t yell. Sound travels over water, and they may hear you from the shore. No, Fringe couldn’t be just anywhere. We know from what the munk said that she’s in a cavern. Moving anything over distance takes large-scale installations. The dinks in City Fifteen postulate a network tiny enough to have gone undiscovered. We’re dealing with localized effects, Danivon!”

  “Tiny little projectors,” mused Curvis. “Tiny focused transmitters. Tiny ones, but everywhere.”

  “Even tiny ones can do a great deal of damage,” said Zasper.

  “Perhaps we can think of something on our way upstream,” said Curvis soothingly.

  Danivon cried, “I won’t go upstream! Now that I know Fringe is near the place she disappeared, I’ll go back to look for her! Zasper!”