Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Except, there were no boundaries. All that feeling concept of in versus out, of me versus other, all that was gone. There was no skin. There was no edge. There were only spongy glimmers and shadowy vacancies. Breaze thrust a sponginess at a vacancy and pushed. Nothing there. Nothing at all. A hole. Like a tongue thrust into the place a tooth had been, the firm hardness of it gone, only the vacancy remaining.

  But there had been something there. Something he had used for … What had he used it for? He remembered using it for something. For some purpose. Of limitation, perhaps. Of …

  He couldn’t remember. It was like a dream, like waking and half remembering a dream. And like that, it was unimportant. If it were important, he’d still have it, but he didn’t, so … so …

  So it had been unnecessary. He didn’t need it.

  “… won’t correct your patterns …” someone said.

  “Jordel! You don’t belong here.”

  But it wasn’t Jordel. It was only a memory, something Jordel had said about correcting patterns. It made no sense? What patterns? Nothing needed correcting. Everything was fine now.

  He perambulated around the space he had now, some of it environed, some not. So much space to fill with things. So much space to fill with himself, with his own creations.

  His own religion. His own people. His own provinces, to rule as he saw fit. Oh, yes, it would be better this way. Far better to have one’s own people, one’s own rites, one’s own … answers. For him, Mighty Crawler, Great Oozer, Lord God Breaze!

  From the node near Deep, Chimi-ahm, Great Clore, determined to recapture those who had escaped. He created wheeled eyes to run along the riverbank, and other little eyes to swim upstream in the Floh, and still others to fly over the wall, into the unknown lands. The captives. He wanted them back. He wanted them back very much. The eyes would find them. In the water of the Floh, other things swam, listening for sounds and emitting sounds of their own, some repulsive, some attractive.

  In the node, Clore decided he would go after them soon. In a distant place, Legless God Orimar Breaze decided he would go as well. And the others too. They would all go. Just as soon as the captives were found!

  As she flew into the lower end of the gorge, Fringe found her sight blurring once again.

  “Poison,” she told herself, aloud.

  “Wha’ …” begged one or both of the boxes.

  “Poison,” she said again. “On those things they hit us with. I’ve got to set down. Use the med kit….”

  There was universal antidote in the kit. She should have used it before they left. She’d forgotten, that’s all. Just forgotten. She should do it now, but she couldn’t spare a hand to get it out just now, and the twins couldn’t help. No place to land in the gorge. She’d have to wait until they came out of the gorge.

  “Should have gone over it,” she mumbled to herself. It would have been easier. She could have landed up there. But with the overhang of the looming walls, the curving passage of the river …

  “No way,” she advised herself owlishly. “Can’t get there from here. Got to wait until I get out.”

  “Wha’ …” pled the box again.

  “Not much farther,” she said. “Hardly any way at all.” She concentrated on staying low, almost on the water. The air was quieter here, and the gorge was wider too, where the river had cut it most recently. Softer stratum, something told her. Water’s reached a softer stratum.

  She explained this at length to the twins as the walls of the gorge brightened and dimmed, swelled and receded. Not all of that was the drug, or poison, or whatever it had been. Some of it was real, she assured herself. The walls did change with the light, with the direction of flight.

  And light was there, at the end, the gap, where the gorge ended. She wanted to laugh but didn’t. She’d made it. There for a few minutes, she hadn’t been sure she’d make it. Now she could set down and use the antidote….

  And she was past it, with only a short way farther of tumbled rock and then flatland, a place to set down. She kept it low, waiting for the rock to end, waiting to swerve toward the bank….

  The gaver that came from the river below was one of those that had attacked the Dove. She saw it coming. She hit the risers, watching her hand move, watching it take an hour to move, slowly, too slowly, watching the huge jaws gape, one on either side, the fangs coming toward her as in a dream, slowly.

  The beast took the flier as a fish takes a fly, crunching it between huge jaws as it fell back down into the water, letting the flier break up when it hit the water.

  Instinctively Fringe took a deep breath. She was caught between the instrument panel and the door. Water flooded around her, gray and cold. The opposite door had broken off and she saw the boxes float clear. She wanted to follow them but couldn’t get loose, couldn’t …

  Then the remaining parts of the flier collapsed. She came out into the clear, stroked upward, rising, slowly rising. The square silhouettes of the boxes lay above her on the surface with shining halos around them.

  The gaver released the inorganic shell to seize the flesh that had been within. A claw caught her, turned her over. The jaws took her. She felt a pain, a horrible pain, in the neck. He had her by the neck.

  All right, get it over, get it over, she thought, not screaming, not howling, not drowning, still holding her breath, just get it over.

  As he did, biting down, spitting out the smaller piece in favor of the larger one with all the blood in it.

  The smaller piece flew up, into the shallows, rolled and rolled and rolled in the eddies near a protruding sandspit, coming to rest on the sand.

  The boxes floated and screamed, making only bubbling noises. They moved manipulators, trying to swim, but the manipulators had not been made for swimming. When they bobbed to the surface, they screamed again, “Fringe!” the sound shrieking away over the flat banks, into nothing, receiving no response.

  The eddies at the shore caught the boxes too, moved them next to the sandspit, half on, half off, rocked them there, on, off, on, off, each thrust pushing them a tiny bit higher, until at last they did not rock at all.

  The river boiled and belched. From a reddened blotch, scraps of cloth floated up, fragments of the flier floated up, each to be caught by the eddy in its turn, each to be deposited upon the sand. The cloth was torn and darkly stained. Pinned to it was an Enforcer’s badge. I Attend the Situation. A picture of an armed warrior and a gylph.

  A dink moved and mumbled. A box worked its manipulators, trying to straighten the cloth, trying to see the badge that was pinned there. When it did so, it cried again, the other cried, making sounds that echoed strangely in the gorge behind them, the weeping of hopeless spirits, perhaps. The crying of ghosts.

  The boxes did not turn, didn’t know how to turn, so they did not see what lay behind them, Fringe’s head, bloodless but largely intact, lying on the sand with them.

  In the sand with them, for the sand was rising, blown by the wind, rising around them like a blanket.

  “Why didn’t we die?” Mechanical, weary, infinitely sad.

  “Must be a way. Something here we can turn off. Something here we can unplug.” Weary too. Determined.

  Silence. The sand rises.

  “We’ll find a way. I promise.” Bertran comforting Nela.

  “Later, Berty. I’m so tired.”

  “Later.”

  And higher yet, moving gently across the boxes of the dinks, across the still face of the Enforcer, covering the torn fabric, the broken pieces of the flier.

  “Poor Fringe….” Nela, sounding almost human, sobbing.

  “Poor Fringe.”

  The sand covered it all, smoothly, like a carpet.

  From downriver came a ripple on the River Floh, a protruding wavelet, as might be made by an impatient fish, the wavelet spiked with a tiny eye on a stem, turning this way, turning that way, look-look, see-see, what is this, what is that, jabbing impetuous glances at the banks, the rocks, the river,
the sandspit, searching for people, for a flier. It had heard a flier. A flier meant people.

  But there were no people, no flier. Nothing but wind-sculpted sand and moving grass and the back of a huge gaver, floating slowly downstream, the way they did when they had eaten or were hunting. The gaver had been summoned. The gaver was supposed to be here. The eye took no notice.

  The eye dived down through the murky water, looking, looking. The river had already carried the flier parts away. They were far downstream by now. On the bottom, however, something sparkled, and the eye went to that, focusing, fiddling. Nothing much. A circlet of gold, tiny, with words on it. Just as she is.

  The circlet, the words were meaningless. The eye was looking for people or a flier. This wasn’t people, wasn’t a flier. The eye surfaced again. Nothing to report. It would go farther upstream and look again.

  While behind it the sand moved in endless ripples, gently in the wind.

  • • •

  The Dove arrived at noplace.

  Curvis, standing at the rail, saw pale buildings atop a nearby hill. He saw people, here and there. He saw tile-roofed dwellings scattered along the shore, beneath the shade of enormous trees. At some distance, among other trees, he saw the dragons.

  Not Great Dragon. Not remotely related to Great Dragon. Though dragonish in appearance, these were entirely different beings.

  He turned to speak to Jory, only to hear her cry out, reach out as though to grasp someone, then cry once more.

  “What is it?”

  “Fringe,” she said brokenly. “Something’s happened to her.”

  The old man took her by the shoulders.

  “Tell me! What is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” she cried. “She was coming back….”

  “Then they’ve rescued her.”

  “But Danivon isn’t there. Zasper isn’t there.”

  “The twins?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell. Oh, Asner….”

  “Shall we go there, where they are?”

  She put her hands over her face, murmuring, “I don’t know what to do. It’s all lost. She’s gone.”

  The old man held her while she cried. Held her and rocked her to and fro.

  Curvis made no effort to comfort Jory. He merely nodded to himself, glad that Danivon hadn’t been hurt. Zasper hadn’t been hurt. Too bad about Fringe, but …

  He looked back toward the dragons. Gone. Gone in under those trees. Vanished.

  They had been wearing clothing. They had been carrying tools. And they were undoubtedly what he and Danivon had been sent to find.

  FIVE

  13

  Zasper and Danivon moved along the water with the practiced lope learned in Academy and perfected over years of duty. In low-category places, Enforcers often went on foot, and it was necessary to move swiftly and tirelessly—and silently. There was no need to discuss strategy. Their entire strategy was to move and keep moving, to stay out of inhabited areas, to get through Beanfields and on west, past the wall, where, so Danivon had told Zasper in a few grunted words, the underground monsters probably hadn’t gained a foothold yet. He had gained that impression from Jory, sniffed it out, though he would have been hard put to explain it.

  Their scuttling anxieties kept up with their trotting legs for a time. Trying to keep watch on all sides was exhausting. As the miles went by without attack, however, the anesthetic of movement took over, and thoughts faded until suddenly Danivon stopped short, murmuring in a choked voice, “Wait. No. Fringe….” He was sniffing the air, his face stiff with apprehension.

  Zasper had sensed something too, though it didn’t come to him as a smell. It came more as a sound, a far-off roaring, something surging and surflike. Wrongness. Not merely the general wrongness that went with Elsewhere and grew daily more deadly, but something more personal and grievous.

  “Fringe,” he said, acknowledging Danivon’s concern. “And the twins?”

  Danivon’s nose twitched painfully, full of that stale, old-ice smell, lung filling, lung chilling, like breathing stagnant water. “Something wrong. Very wrong.” Feeling a sob coming up in his throat. Oh, something terribly wrong.

  Zasper wiped his face. “The twins?” he asked again in a voice he fought to keep dead calm. “All three of them?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t smell anything about them. They could be … all right.” He didn’t mean all right. They hadn’t been all right when he had seen them last. He merely meant he had no sense that they were dead, gone, unliving. But then, he had no sense they were living, either.

  “How could they be all right and Fringe not?”

  Danivon gulped, unable to breathe, aware of loss, as though an arm were gone, or his sight. This was grief. He’d never felt grief before, never lost anyone before.

  “Do you get any feel for where they are?” Zasper persisted grimly.

  Danivon’s senses said westward. He pointed wordlessly. They were headed that way anyhow. No change of plans needed.

  Zasper nodded, fighting to keep his mind still, his body relaxed. Enforcers had no time for grief. Time or not, he felt it, had to express it. “Danivon,” he said evenly. “She was … she was like a daughter to me. Like family.” He had never had any other family. She—and Danivon himself—were all there were.

  “Don’t say was,” Danivon demanded angrily. “Oh, don’t say was, Zasper. Maybe … maybe she’s—I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t what we think. Maybe she’s not dead. No. Something….” He couldn’t say what. Something else. Something even worse, maybe, he couldn’t tell. “Don’t say was. Just … just something wrong, that’s all.”

  Talking would not help it, but he had to talk.

  “She wouldn’t … she wouldn’t love me, Zasper. You were right about my loving her, but she wouldn’t love me. She wanted to. I know she wanted to, but she wouldn’t.”

  “She wants something else more,” said Zasper. “Jory knows about it. About that wanting.”

  “What? What does she want more?”

  “Damned if I know, Dan. There’ve been times maybe … when I was younger … when I felt like that. Wanting … wanting something else. Almost as though I had a hunger that had never been fed, some kind of tastebud that hadn’t ever been stimulated or something. A hole in my mind asking to be filled. Something itching at me. You ever feel like that?”

  Danivon shook his head. “Not that I know of. When I want something, I’m pretty sure what it is.”

  “Not Fringe. I’ve tried to figure her out since she was a little girl. She wants something that doesn’t exist, maybe.” He thought deeply. “She wants something beyond, Dan. I think … I believe there’s a place of satisfaction, an attainable plateau, that suits ninety-nine point nine percent of all people. For those people there’s a destiny that fills all their needs. That’s the answer to the Great Question, maybe. But for that one in a thousand, or maybe even one in a million, other people’s destiny is no good at all. Nothing will suit except a singularity. Fringe is one of those.”

  Danivon shook his head, not in disagreement but in dismay. “Oh, I wish …” What Danivon wished, Danivon didn’t go on to say. Instead, he fell silent, mumbled to himself for a moment, then turned to check Zasper’s wounds, which were painful but not serious, already healing under the balm of the med-kit growth agents and the universal antidote. After this, they ran once more. Time spun by, and distance, rock and tree, hill and valley, always the river sparkling on their right, bright or dim as clouds moved across the sky. At last, as they crested a hill and faced the lowe of the setting sun, they saw a shadowy line along the horizon to the northwest, as though an artist had brushed a long black stroke to separate earth and sky.

  Danivon stopped and pointed. “The Great Wall west of Thrasis.”

  “West of Beanfields too. It makes a great circle all around the center of the continent, in fact.”

  Danivon nodded slowly in realization. The line had been on the maps, and he had known it was there—
he had even seen it when in Thrasis—but the reality of its size hadn’t come to him until now. “I wonder who built it? Jory could probably tell me.”

  Zasper, conscious of several aching vacancies, could not care about the wall at the moment. “We brought food?” he asked, mopping his face. “I hope.”

  “Yes,” Danivon replied, turning from his examination of the lands to the west. “Field rations in my leg packs. We need water. We’ll get down to the river.”

  “Tributary streamlet just below us,” Zasper said, pointing. “How long shall we keep moving?”

  “Until it’s too dark to move at all. If it’s clear, there may be enough starlight reflected off the river to keep going. Can we run faster than they can build?”

  Zasper barked weary laughter. “Than they can build the network, yes. But there’s nothing to prevent their creating autonomous units, flying eyes and ears, maybe even killing machines. We can do it, so I assume they can. Anything we can do, they can do … and more.”

  “Damn,” said Danivon, who had not considered autonomous machines. “Then that’s what I’ve been seeing.” He turned to stare back along their trail. At the limit of sight swarmed sparkles, brightnesses, reflective gleams, growing larger and more obvious even as they watched. Something or somethings had found their trail and was coming very swiftly along it.

  Zasper saw them and cursed as he did a quick inventory of the weapons and devices he carried, plus those built into his clothing and into his body, regretting those he’d had removed when he retired. Built-in weapons were useful, but damned uncomfortable. Now he wished for every one he’d ever had.

  “Another thing,” he grunted, pointing to a fold of ground to the west, where a glimmer of lights moved near the river. “We’re going through Beanfields, and we have no mother with us nor any pass from Motherdear.”