Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  He came to himself leaning on a stone and weeping. He could not remember stopping, could not remember weeping ever before. Not for anyone. He wiped his eyes and went on. He knew the drill. He just didn’t know how to make the drill fit Zasper, that’s all. Zasper wasn’t supposed to die. Zasper wasn’t ever supposed to die. Not Zasper, not Fringe. Certainly not both.

  He did not stop to rest until he had come some distance from the community, and then he climbed into a large tree and stretched out along a stout branch, his coat folded beneath him, wondering why the invaders had come first to the village rather than to the jail where he and Zasper had been held. Because of the rock, he decided. They had come through the soft soil first. They had encountered Mother-dear and her people first.

  Danivon had not much liked the idea of being Mother-dear’s lover, but he did not relish the idea of her death, either. Hers or that of any of her people. Or anyone’s. Anyone’s.

  Zasper’s.

  Fringe’s.

  He laid his arm across his eyes and forbade himself to weep anymore. Enforcers did not weep. They exacted vengeance, when necessary, but they did not weep! They slept when they needed to, but they did not weep!

  When he woke, his face wet, the first flush of dawn lay on the sky, so he took up his burdens and went westward once more. He felt less like an Enforcer than like some small prey animal, fleeing endlessly from an implacable foe. Why were those creatures behind him so set upon killing him?

  He had asked Zasper that same question.

  “Boarmus says they kill for the same reason men and their gods have always killed. To prove they can.”

  It made no more sense than any other reason for death.

  Jory and Asner were staring down the river from the end of the pier when Bertran and Nela limped out of the woods along the river, very weary and bedraggled. Neither of the old people would have recognized them except for their posture, the one cuddled protectively under the left arm of the other.

  “Jory, look what happened to me!” Nela’s voice crying, like a child calling, Look at me, Mommy, I’m hurt.

  “At me,” echoed Bertran. “Look at me, Asner.”

  The old people looked at them both for a long moment, seeking their eyes, which were unchanged.

  “So,” Jory sighed, “you were on this side of the wall when it happened. What about Fringe?”

  “Fringe was there,” said Bertran, baffled at her lack of surprise. “The gaver got Fringe.”

  “What do you mean, on this side of the wall?” asked Nela.

  Over Nela’s shoulder, Jory saw several of the Arbai gathered with Cafferty on the path to the acropolis. Both Arbai and human seemed equally interested in these new arrivals. “On this side of the wall,” she repeated softly, “where the Arbai Device operates.”

  Nela followed the direction of Jory’s gaze, slowly turning to catch her first glimpse of the Arbai. They were taller than men. And very bony, though not particularly dangerous-looking. She sighed, tired of new things, tired of things always happening.

  “Dragons,” she said, trying to sound politely interested. “Are these Danivon’s dragons?”

  “They are Arbai,” said Asner. “All of them who’re left.”

  Bertran stood on his hind legs, rearing high to get a better look, hands held pawlike before him. “So they aren’t all dead! Somebody said they were all dead! I thought they would seem more mysterious.” He crouched tiredly, letting Nela step away from him. “They should, shouldn’t they? Seem mysterious, I mean? The inventors of the Doors were something very strange and special, I should think.”

  “They are as they are,” said Jory. “Rather reptilian in appearance, though not at all biologically. Slow to grow. Slow to breed. Able to accept any new scientific discovery or technological idea without a moment’s hesitation, yet still, after all these centuries, unable to accept the concept of evil.”

  “But there is evil there,” said Bertran, pointing his muzzle back down the river. “Enough to convince anyone.”

  “Oh, yes, there is,” cried Nela. “They had us in a place like a church, Jory. They told us we had to solve the Great Question or they’d torture us. They made dinka-jins of us. It was … It was awful.”

  “Fringe said that’s what we were,” said Bertran. “Dinkajins. We wanted her to melt us, but she wouldn’t.”

  “I know it must have hurt you,” said Jory. “Otherwise you would not be … as you are.”

  “Someone must stop it, Jory! Someone must stop it happening to people!” cried Nela.

  Asner shook his head wearily. “We’d like to stop it! Oh, yes!”

  “Why did they do it to us, Jory! Why?”

  “Because they’re monsters,” said the old woman.

  “I thought they had perhaps once been men,” said Bertran. “Though they are something else now.”

  Jory made a wry face. “They were men and teachers of men, but man alone is only a halfway creature: half ape, half angel. Some men get worse when they get learning, made monstrous by too much language and the manipulation of ideas. They lose the experience of reality.”

  “But if they are monsters, why don’t people destroy them?”

  “That’s always the question. Who does the destroying? We good men? Good men don’t kill others easily; instead we look deeply into the hearts of bad men, and what do we see? We see things we recognize in ourselves. And once we have admitted that kinship, it’s hard to kill the other man. It’s hard to say he’s evil, for that means we too are evil. It’s easier to pretend he’s sick, easier to pretend he can be cured, even when we know he cannot. We all have the same evils inside us, so what gives us the right to get rid of the other? Ah?”

  “You’re being prophetic again,” complained Asner. “You’ve retired, remember.”

  “I say what comes to me,” she said sharply. “Including this: The problem of men and Arbai is very similar! Both refuse to recognize evil, men in themselves, the Arbai in anyone. That’s why we’re in this mess. The device would save us in a minute, but for that.”

  “Can we meet the Arbai?” asked Bertran. “Talk to them?”

  Asner laughed. “Everyone wants to talk to the Arbai! They’re too annoyed to let anyone talk to them. We’ve overstepped our bounds, the prophetess and I. They even sent a messenger to tell us so, so we’d have no chance to argue with them.”

  “They don’t like argument,” agreed Jory. “They don’t like dissension or being told what they ought to do. I wanted them to use the Arbai Device beyond the wall. Curvis wanted the same. Now you come; they presume you want the same thing, and they don’t want to hear it!”

  Nela and Bertran subsided, leaning against one another in their familiar posture, holding one another for comfort.

  Asner took in their strangeness, shaking his head. Poor things. “How far beyond the wall had you come when you were attacked?”

  “Jory said that too. That we were on this side of the wall. What does it mean?” Bertran asked.

  It was Jory who replied, “Who did you think mended you? Was it your God and mine, who we learned of when we were young? Or a guardian angel, perhaps?”

  They did not answer.

  Asner said, “You were told about the Hobbs Land Gods, weren’t you?”

  Silence. The gylph Nela shared a glance with the otter Bertran. They leaned more closely into one another. He pulled her down to him where she snuggled beneath his arm, eyes wary. “What, Asner. What about them?”

  “The Arbai Device is the Hobbs Land Gods. They’re the same thing.”

  They shuddered. Nela cried out, a tiny, choked cry.

  Asner shook his head at them. “Relax,” he demanded. “You’re not hurt. You’re not maimed or diabolically possessed. You’ve just been fixed, that’s all. Given your heart’s desire. So what’s wrong with that?”

  “It wasn’t our heart’s desire, not really,” cried Bertran. “This isn’t really … I thought I wanted but … and now I’m enslaved!”


  “Enslaved?” said Asner in an offended voice. “What makes you think that?”

  “Fringe said….”

  “Fringe is no expert,” Asner growled. “Besides, you think you and Nela weren’t enslaved before? You were born enslaved!”

  “Now who’s being prophetic,” grumbled Jory.

  “No,” cried Nela. “I wasn’t. I was a free person.”

  “Free to what?”

  “To … to do anything I wanted to.”

  Jory laughed, shaking her head. “Weren’t you told as a child that one way was better than another, one belief better than another? Weren’t you told some things were higher and some lower? That some things were suitable for women, others for men? That your God was more powerful? That your religion was truer? That your language was more expressive? That your customs had more heart, or more soul? That your cooking tasted better? That your way of child-rearing was preferable? That all your ways were so much better than others’ ways that you would die to keep yours as they were, or die to destroy others if they seemed threatening? Weren’t you taught not to change, not to adapt, not to become anything different? Weren’t you taught the word ‘loyalty’? The word ‘tradition’? Didn’t they tell you that animals were higher than vegetables, mammals were higher than other animals, man was higher than other mammals, and your kind of man was higher than other men?

  “You think you weren’t enslaved by that? You think you had freedom of choice? I have said this to Fringe, I say it to you: A man’s choice becomes his son’s duty and his grandson’s tradition! Thus men assure enslavement of their progeny.”

  “But … but … I’ve been taken over!”

  “By what? By a communication net that lets you in on how the intelligences around you feel and what they think and know. So?”

  “But …”

  Asner growled, “But, if you refuse to know what those around you think and know, if the idea of taking other intelligences into consideration offends you, if you don’t want to be part of it, just say so. Say it firmly, and the Arbai Device will leave you strictly alone. If you think you’re better and wiser than those around you, tell it to fuck off. That’s the way Curvis reacted. That’s the way it was designed to be.”

  “But …” faltered Bertran, running his webbed hand along his side, along his sleekness, his sinuous body, his fluid shape. “I didn’t really want to be … like this. Inside, I’m the same. Inside, I’m human. I need to be human outside too.”

  “Simply wait a little,” sighed Jory. “As soon as it has time to receive your feedback, the device will get it right.”

  “But the people here …” Nela faltered. “Even the people on Elsewhere say the Hobbs Land Gods are evil….”

  “The people brought to Elsewhere were, every one of them, great tribal egos who have always festered like a boil on the butt of humanity,” said Asner.

  “A feverish reminder of old, sorrowful times,” whispered Jory.

  “… or one last cause for a notorious do-gooder,” continued Asner in a grumpy tone, with a wry look in Jory’s direction. “One last wrong needing righting. One last ill for the prophetess to fulminate against.”

  Said she, “What would you have me do! Dragged up as we were out of …”

  “I don’t understand any of this! I don’t understand why any of this is happening!” cried Nela.

  “Tell them about it, Asner,” Jory said. “Tell them all about Brannigan. They missed out on Zasper’s lecture, and it’s time they knew.” And she went back to staring at the river while Asner told them about Brannigan.

  Just before dawn, Danivon reached both the western borders of Beanfields and the point of exhaustion. He had stayed on the stony spine of the hills, letting it lead him westward. There had been no signs of pursuit, though he had seen fires blooming in the night to speak of sleepers awakened and alarms made in the darkness. Now he could see the wall before him and to his right the river, gleaming softly in the starshine.

  “Time to get across, I think,” said Danivon to the air, to himself, to the pocket munks peeking from his shirt, to Zasper’s ghost. He had been talking to this audience for some little time. “It’s an easy slope along here. We’ll build some kind of raft out of reeds.”

  He would need to sleep for a while before he built anything, much less a raft, but he did not dwell on this as he staggered down the wooded slope toward the tall, shadowed growths along the shore. From here the dark line of the wall marched across the world and out into the water, an inviolable barrier.

  “I wish we had Great Dragon here,” murmured Danivon. “To get us across that wall as he no doubt did the women of Thrasis. I’d be willing to ride him bareback if he’d do that.”

  He stared at the wall, his nose twitching. Were the pursuers going to come through the wall after him? Over the wall? Around it?

  His nose said nothing, nothing hostile beyond the wall, but no knowledge of whether they might come there, either.

  At the bottom of the hill a wandering streamlet wove its way among the reeds, reflecting the gray sky to make silver meanders as it sought the river. He waded up to his hips in mud and rotting vegetation, clutching at the tall stems to keep his balance. At last he staggered out of their shade into a shallow sandy-bottomed lagoon to see a dark cluster of anchored boats, their sails furled and gear carefully stowed. Drying nets were silhouetted against the sky, and the outline of a walkway on pilings above the mud told him he had found the fishing fleet of a nearby village.

  “How do you feel about a bit of thievery?” Danivon asked himself as he wiped mud from his face and stared at the walkway in disgust. “Wouldn’t you say we’d earned it? Being such good guys there in Beanfields. Abstaining from any unnecessary slaughter?”

  He waited a moment, as though for an answer, then answered himself. “Indeed, we’ve earned a bit of license. If one boat will do, by all means, do one boat.”

  He had smelled death behind him since Zasper died. It had come closer since midnight. He thought it would be less likely to catch up if he were on the river.

  He tossed up a handful of leaves and saw them spin away toward the west. “The wind’s in the right direction, at least. Won’t need to tack back and forth. Which is a good thing!”

  Danivon was no boatman; though he had had the advantage of observing the sailors on their way up the Fohm, he was not at all confident he could get safely across the river.

  Still, there was no other choice. He pushed the nearest boat into the river, held to its side while he dunked himself repeatedly to wash the stinking mud away, then climbed in and set the sail more or less as he had seen the captain of the Dove doing all the days of their upriver trip. The wind was gentle, barely enough to move them against the current, and he lay wearily in the bottom of the boat, fighting to keep his eyes open, the tiller beneath his arm as he watched the shore creep slowly by. After what seemed an eternity, the wall approached, grew taller, loomed off the port beam, then edged away behind him.

  “Now cross over,” said Danivon wearily. “If Fringe and the twins are anywhere, they will be on the other side.”

  The little boat had been designed for use in the slow waters and quiet lagoons along the bank. It jigged like a beetle as it inched its way across the wavelets in its reach for the far shore and Danivon thought hopelessly of gavers. He was of the opinion the Brannigans Zasper had told him of had set the gavers against the ship. He was almost certain it had been a gaver that had taken Fringe. A huge and inexorable beast, lunging up from beneath the waves.

  Dawn came. The sky lightened. The far shore became visible and drew gradually closer, the undulant banks rising into grassy precipices or falling into mud flats. Danivon steered for a place where the banks were low. At last he felt the keel thrust into the mud and hold there, the boat shivering for a moment before it tilted against the soil and was still. He furled the sail.

  “Could we set the sail, do you suppose, to take it home?” Danivon asked of the air. “Back to Beanfields?�
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  There would likely be no one there to use it. No doubt the Brannigans were making their usual wholesale destruction.

  He staggered up the bank, clawing his way the last few feet to the cushiony grasses at the top, then lay there, unable to go farther. At the rim of the sky, the last stars winked out.

  “I saw you coming,” said a voice. “I was very glad to see you alive.”

  He looked up, taking in the purple plumes against the gray sky of early morning, the polished boots beside his head.

  “Fringe,” he breathed, unable to believe it. He stood up, took her by the shoulders, hugged her to him. “Fringe.”

  “Danivon,” she said.

  He stood back and looked at her, his joyous smile fading. It was Fringe. Her eyes, her face, her voice. And yet, not Fringe. Not Fringe at all. No nervous little movement as she pushed him away a little, no sidelong look. No apprehension in her gaze, saying, Love me, leave me alone, love me. Nothing of that at all. Only sureness. Competence. Poise. Certainty.

  She smiled gladly. “It is good to see you well. I was worried about you.” Her voice was unworried. “Where’s Zasper?”

  Danivon reached out to her, to the gap in her shirt that showed her bare throat. “Where is the pendant he gave you. You wore it all the time.”

  She felt at her throat. It was gone, of course. The gaver had taken it when it had taken her head off. “Gone,” she said smilingly, shaking her head. “Too bad. Where’s Zasper?”

  Danivon stared at her with his mouth open and his nose quivering. His eyes filled as he heard the pocket munks in chorus repeating what she had said.

  “Gone,” they whispered. “Too bad.”

  Microdevices moved through the soil of Beanfields, spewing out a million more eyes and ears, a million more miniscule Doors, a million more tiny gravitics, and killers, of course, even though the instructions of the network were clear: Hold certain persons captive, do not kill them! Hold captive Danivon Luze and Zasper Ertigon.

  When the network reached the prison at the top of the hill, however, the two were gone. There were only the bodies of two guards killed by one of Clore’s machines, the battered pieces of that machine, and a burned place on the soil. Mechanisms designed to travel overland looked for the two humans but couldn’t find them.