Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Danivon bit his cheeks in frustration. He hadn’t considered that, either.

  Shallow under the sand lie Nela and Bertran Zy-Czorsky, bits and pieces of them tucked away in impenetrable vitreon, unbreakable dura-plast. Not far away is buried what is left of Fringe Owldark, her shredded, blood-drained head, more or less intact. The sand is dry on top where the wind combs it into sparkling surfaces, but it is moist beneath. Between the grains small darknesses gather, tiny dampnesses, miniscule wombs of wet from which something, no doubt, could grow.

  Something, no doubt, has grown. All the sandspit is full of rootlets, fibers, hair-thin, thread-fine, wavering between the sand grains with blunt, exploring noses, wriggling like elvers, slithering like snakes, soft little fibers, moist and tender, gathering and multiplying like mold on bread, cell by cell. Inevitably, eventually, the tip of a fiber touches the side of a dinka-jin case, touches, withdraws, then comes back to touch again, exploring this thing like a carapace that has something living inside. It finds a molecule of vitreon, tastes it, extrudes a molecule of its own that fastens tight, like a key in a lock, and sucks it out with a tiny plop like marrow from a bone, a sound too feeble to be heard by any creature larger than a virus. Yum, says the fiber. The vitreon molecule is savored, its atoms passed down the length of the fiber, disintegrated as it goes. Oh, yum, yes, tasty. Very nice. Patiently, molecule by molecule, the fibers chew at the stuff of the cases, nibbling a tiny erosion, which becomes a microscopic pit, then a hair-thin hole.

  Through the hole the fibers race, coiling and recoiling in their eagerness. Oh, see what’s here, what this is, what that is. Oh, look, here a bone, there a cell, here an organ, here a mechanism. Ugh, nasty mechanism. Ugly and difficult. Inefficient. Painful. Still, interesting. Everything is interesting. This connects to that. This has been disconnected from something that should be here. Fill in the blank. What was it? What could it have been? What should it be? Feel, smell, taste, extrapolate.

  Those fibers not engaged in exploration continue to nibble at the edges of the hole, though by now there are thousands of them thickly furring the outside of the case, thousands of little tongues making infinitesimal erosions of their own. Soon the vitreon is perforated like a sieve, then lacy as a doily, then only a fragile net, more holes than substance, then gone. What was inside is now outside, free, cradled, and covered by the fibers.

  Nela sleeps. Bertran sleeps. They have retreated into dream, into a world of sleekness, of sinuosity, of easy movement rejoicing in its own grace. This is an old gift, this sanctuary of dream. They feel no pain. They have been released from horror too dreadful to bear. Where they are is in the world of antithesis where they live in movement and delight.

  The fibers ramify. Here they like the taste of a cell, so they duplicate it, not once but a thousand times in a coiling chain. There they miss a flavor, so they create it, a new cell, of a new type. Here they form a sinew. There a bone. All very quietly. All very peacefully, not to disturb the dreamers who are all unaware of where they are, of what they were, of what they are.

  Nela dreams she stands upon the precipice, looking out across the world. Around her the birds swirl in a joyous cloud, calling to her. She opens her wings and drops into their midst singing.

  Bertran leaps from the surface of the sea, turns nose down and dives deep, bending and twisting as he follows his fellows in the spiraling downward dance. At the lowest point he turns to follow chains of bubbles upward in a single, pure curve that ends as he erupts laughing upon the silver waters.

  “Nela,” he cries in a sea giant’s voice, calling to the sky, raising a finned hand, a fingered fin, in a gesture of greeting.

  “Bertran,” she answers in a wind sound, drifting over the waters. Her wings brush him as she skims the surface. The breath of her passing cools his face.

  Under the sand, a fiber eats a mechanism, atom by atom. Nasty, this, but it is necessary to digest it and get it out of the way. Metal and hydrocarbons dissolve, tiny chunk by tiny chunk. The wave generator of a gravitic unit sighs and falls apart into constituent elements. The mechanical linkages of a manipulator give up their coherence. Fibers carry the elements away, some to the river to be washed downstream, some to remote stone outcroppings, to be deposited upon the stone atom by atom, some deep beneath the grasses and reeds of the bank. If anyone comes to this place equipped with detection gear, searching, let us say, for certain elements found in vitreon or in dinka-jin mechanisms, those elements are no longer assembled, they are no longer present.

  The vitreon cases hold skulls, hard shells of bone minus the jaws. The fibers take them apart, cell by cell, then rebuild them differently. What is this inside? Are there instructions here inside?

  Gray leaf and gray tree and gray wind rising.

  What is that?

  Sorrow, fleeing from sorrow, swimming, diving.

  This small, shelled thing, climbing, climbing. What is this? Does the other one have this thing too?

  Here too. Sorrow, sorrow. Climbing, climbing. Turtledove, oh, Turtledove.

  Instructions? Perhaps. Though this large mind seems too big, too intelligent to be contained in the little shelled being, which is moved by … by longing to fly. By a longing for wings.

  It is small, yes, but important. Keep it.

  Upon the naked bone, skin forms and a covering for that skin. At the knobbed white ends of joints, cartilage forms, then other bones. At the juncture of organ with organ, other organs form and rebuild themselves—or build themselves for the first time in new systems, in accordance with the dreams.

  All of it goes on below the surface. All of it happens in the warm dark of the sandspit, moisture below, sun above. On the top, everything is still and level, rippled only a little by the breezes, otherwise flat and unrevealing. Tiny eyes forge up and down the river at the end of busy little stems. They jab glances like needles, here, there, searching in irritated lunges for something they do not find. The captives have gone. Where have they gone? In his node near the Deep, mighty Chimi-ahm wants to know. From a distant place, Legless God Breaze wants to know!

  A flier comes, a buzzing bee-sized botherance, one of a numerous hive of such mechanical busybodies. It settles upon the sandspit in the quiet of late afternoon. After a time of turning and staring, it attempts to take off again and cannot. Though it struggles and hums, eventually it succumbs to a deadly ennui, an inability to hold itself together. It has no integrity. It becomes convinced of this fact as it sheds itself, layer by layer, into the inquisitive network below the sand.

  At noplace, the sailors unloaded crates and sacks and the baggage of the passengers. The dragon shapes beneath the trees had vanished. People gathered, murmuring to Asner and Jory.

  Curvis, standing at the rail, stared rudely at the place the dragons had gone, for once almost speechless.

  Cafferty brought on deck the girl child, still pale and inclined to starts and trembles, but no longer terrified.

  “This is Alouez,” Cafferty introduced her. “I have told her that now, for a time, she will be our foster daughter.”

  Latibor murmured his name, took Alouez by the hand, reassured her with a smile, a nod. Curvis kept his eyes on the shore, refusing to take part in this ritual of comfort. The girl belonged back there, in Derbeck, not here, being greeted and accepted as though she were part of a family. Only when the others had gone ashore did he follow, approaching Jory to jab a finger in the direction of the vanished dragon forms.

  “These are not kin to your beast, are they!” It wasn’t a question, for he already knew the answer. Jory’s beast had something of the mythical about it, something of the ultimately strange. The dragon shapes that had departed were real beings. Not human at all, but flesh and blood nonetheless. Scales and fangs too, no doubt, but simple flesh for all that.

  “No, Curvis, they are not kin to Great Dragon,” she said, looking up at him from brimming eyes.

  “These are no doubt what we were sent to investigate,” he said firmly, ignoring h
er grief. From what he had overheard, the old woman thought something had happened to Fringe. So long as it had not happened to Danivon, Curvis would not allow himself to be upset.

  “No doubt,” she said, drying her eyes.

  “And you’ve always known who, or what, they are?”

  “Always since I came to Elsewhere, yes.” She paused, exchanging a look with Asner. “If you are wise, Curvis, you’ll stop staring after them, stop pointing in their direction, stop behaving like a child at a zoo.”

  “I suppose you’ll tell me why I should,” he snarled.

  “Because it is not good manners, and the Arbai put a very high value upon good manners.”

  He didn’t think he’d heard her correctly. He tried several different words in his mind, other words she might have said, finally muttering, “The Arbai?”

  “The Arbai. All who are left of them.”

  “What are they doing here?” he blurted, unable to keep his eyes from wandering to the place he had seen them last. “What in hell…. How did they get here?”

  “Through an Arbai Door,” said Asner. “When the Brannigans first explored the shores of Panubi, they found an Arbai Door. They took it. It’s now at Tolerance, so I’m told.”

  “There is one at Tolerance, yes, the one the twins came through,” agreed Curvis distractedly. “I don’t recall that it was originally found on Panubi.”

  “There’s no particular reason you should have known,” Jory said. “At any rate, there was an Arbai Door here, and the Arbai came through it, running from the plague. They shut the Door behind them, or thought they did, though they must have left it open to some linkages because Asner and I came through it. We found the Arbai remnant here on Panubi. They were few, a fragment, believing they were still in danger from the plague, terrified of us for fear we’d brought it with us….”

  “We were able to reassure them about that,” said Asner. “The plague was long over by then.”

  “As a thank-you gesture, they invited us to stay if we liked. Later, when the first scout ships of the Brannigans were sighted, the Arbai moved into the center of the continent and built the wall to mark their own enclave, theirs by right of prior settlement.”

  “But they didn’t take the Door with them?” demanded Curvis.

  “They didn’t intend to use it again, so they left it where it was.”

  “And you didn’t intend to use it, either?”

  They didn’t answer.

  “And the people?” Curvis nodded toward the people standing here and there on the hillside, among the buildings. “The humans?”

  “Our people. People Asner and I have recruited to help us.”

  “Help you do what?”

  “Help us find out what was going on out there in Elsewhere. We ourselves were not always … available to travel about, asking questions. We’d become very worried about the people on Elsewhere, and no one else seemed to know what was happening, or care.”

  “And you live here, you and the old man?”

  “Just over that hill. Asner and I have a house there, and a garden.”

  “And a meadow full of horses, and a porch with a rocking chair and a cat,” said Asner in a sarcastic tone. “All of which, though long coveted, are little used.”

  “Where did the people come from?” Curvis demanded angrily.

  “Either they or their parents were recruited from Elsewhere.”

  “Like Cafferty and Latibor.” He gestured toward the two, standing beside them.

  “We recruited them, yes. As children. Brought them here, and reared them.”

  “For which we have always been thankful …” said Latibor.

  “Interfering in the affairs of a province!” interrupted Curvis in a peremptory tone.

  Jory shook her head at him. “Oh, Curvis, stop sounding outraged. Cafferty and Latibor were babies left for dead, so it didn’t make much difference if we took them or not. I fished them out of the Fohm, if you must know! They got their webs removed later. We’ve only recruited children or young people who really wouldn’t be missed very much. People like Fringe.”

  “Zasper would have missed Fringe!” Curvis’s words defended Zasper’s affections, though his tone said he thought it a foolishness to miss anyone.

  “He would have, yes. We found that out. That’s why we left her in Enarae instead of bringing her here.”

  Curvis much desired to be angry. He much desired to have something to be angry about. “If you’re so busy saving people, why didn’t you save Danivon as a baby? Why did Zasper have to do that?”

  Jory shrugged. “It was one of those times we weren’t … available. Cafferty and Latibor couldn’t reach us. We didn’t even know they’d had a child—it wasn’t the smartest thing to have done, under the circumstances.”

  “It wasn’t,” agreed Cafferty. “The threat to Danivon happened very suddenly. We did what we thought was best.”

  “And it all worked out,” said Asner. “Sometimes things do work out.”

  The sailors came down the plank, carrying the last of their baggage. Those ashore scarcely had time to say farewell before the ship had pushed off again and was out in midriver, moving downstream, the men at the sweeps crying their ceaseless “Hauu-lah, hauu-lah.”

  “It seems I am to stay awhile,” Curvis muttered.

  “As our guest,” said Jory. “Come, be our guest. Everyone be our guest.”

  “Do I have a choice?” He stared around him, at the great trees—larger than any he had seen heretofore on Elsewhere—at the simple tile-roofed buildings clustered beneath them, at the grassy slope stretching up to a summit crowned with other structures: temples, perhaps, or monuments. The acropolis had a certain formality about it, a reasoned arrangement that spoke of ritual purposes: flights of wide stairs, pillars, porticos, and domes, each calling to each in a simplicity of completion. Above the building rose trees even larger than those at the riverside, looming giants whose enormous branches stretched over the structures like verdant clouds.

  A human person came from the shade of these trees and moved rapidly down the hill toward them.

  “What is that?” Curvis gestured toward the buildings on the hilltop.

  “That is their center of government,” said Jory. “Such as it is.”

  “Ah. Then I suggest we go there now and arrange for reinforcements to be sent to the aid of Danivon and Zasper.”

  Jory shook her head slowly, ruefully. “You may ask, if you like, but it will do no good.”

  “You mean they’re unfriendly?”

  “They’re not at all unfriendly. They just won’t intervene in anything beyond the wall.”

  Curvis considered this. Though he couldn’t find it in himself to care greatly about Zasper or Fringe or the twins, he cared a good deal about Danivon.

  “I was a fool to let him go with the old man. I should have gone with him!” He turned a suspicious face on the surrounding crowd, receiving untroubled glances in return. It was obvious these people felt no awe for Enforcers, and this merely added to his irritation. “I’ll go to these Arbai and demand …”

  The person, reaching the bottom of the hill, came toward them, hugged Jory briefly, then whispered rapidly into her ear.

  Jory sighed. “It seems the Arbai are aware of your intent, Curvis, and they wish to forestall it. The current deciders are sending us a formal message.”

  “Current deciders?” asked Curvis.

  Jory said, “They are not a numerous people, and each of them takes a turn at the duty of deciding things. They’ll send one of our people as messenger.”

  “What’s to keep us from going to them?”

  “The fact they’ve told us to await a message. It means they don’t want to talk to us. Maybe they’re tired of hearing about it. Or possibly they’re annoyed with me.”

  “Because of Thrasis,” said Asner. “Well, you knew they would be. You pushed the limits there, Jory.”

  She shrugged, again with that rueful smile. “No doub
t. Well, I think Asner and I will go home. You’re welcome to come with us.” She led the way across the open riverside into the trees, through the narrow neck of woodland, and out onto an open meadow where a small brown house crouched low to the ground. It seemed too small to house them all, but as they came closer, they saw a long wing extending from the far side.

  “You’ll find rooms in the guest wing,” said Jory. “You, Curvis. And Cafferty and Latibor, and Alouez, of course.”

  “In the guest wing,” said Cafferty with a glance at Latibor. “Of course.”

  They went in through an open door, across wide-planked floors strewn with woven rugs, through the door in the corner and down a shining corridor where doors stood open into rooms for each of them, as though the house had known how many guests to prepare for.

  “We’ll have lunch when you’re ready,” Jory called after them. “Have a wash, or a rest.”

  Obediently, they went into their rooms. Curvis paused in the room only long enough to note that it held a bed large enough for even his giant frame. He dropped his baggage and went out the window, telling himself he would not be penned up in any structure until he knew what lay around it, how it could be defended, and how attacked.

  Horses raised their heads and whickered at him as he passed, then went back to grazing. Behind the house a small building was home to the flock of birds that clucked and muttered, pecking at invisibilities in the soil. A little farther back, at the top of the rounded hill, he found two carved stones.

  He read the inscriptions: “Jory, born Marjorie Westriding, Planet Earth, Sol system, twenty-second century of the common era. Master of the Hunt. Far-traveler. Prophetess emeritus.”

  “Asner, born Samasnier Girat, Planet Ahabar, Bogar system, thirty-seventh century of the common era. Myth-eater. Missionary. Fellow far-traveler. Retired.”

  Almost four thousand years had elapsed since Jory’s century and the current one. During most of that time she must have been in stasis between Doors. Like the twins. And Asner too. Curvis ran his fingers across the stones. He had seen such monuments before, prepared by old folks or their families, so the old ones could be assured of their own memorials. It was custom in a dozen provinces he knew of.