by Terry Carr
She found herself wondering about what the people in the last cart had said: something monstrous down in the Abyss, something huge and frightening. What could they have been talking about?
Something to do with the foreigner from Aldebaran? She remembered the foreigner; she’d seen it herself on the broadcast. It wasn’t frightening at all; and anyway, foreigners came to Cirque all the time. Half a dozen times a year, anyhow.
She noticed that a cart had stopped in front of her. Looking up, she saw that the traffic marker had changed. She jumped up and ran to the cart’s backbed.
It was filled with a mob of laughing children. One of them, a young boy, saw her and grabbed at her long blonde hair; she fended him off and looked back down the street for another cart. But there were none just now. And the marker was changing again. Before the driver of the cart could pull away, she climbed aboard.
She had to push children aside in order to make room for her feet. There were outraged cries, and one of them shoved back at her; she fell into the lap of a girl of ten or so. The girl said, “Watch it.”
“Sorry,” Nikki said. She sat up, brushed her hair back, felt the cart bumping over the street stones. She said, “It’s so crowded; where are you all going?”
The girl looked critically at her for a moment, then said “Class pilgrimage. That’s our teacher up there.” She nodded toward a man who sat in the middle of the back bed, legs folded, eyes alert. He was looking in her direction; he waved.
She managed to free a hand and wave back to him. Then she asked the girl, “What class are you in? I mean, where are you going?” She hoped it wouldn’t be far; she didn’t relish the idea of sharing a long ride with a mob like this.
“Going to the Winter Gate,” said the girl. “We’re in an awareness class.” She frowned as she inspected Nikki’s clothes. “You should dress neater when you go out,” she said.
Nikki looked down at herself and adjusted the shawl around her shoulders. Her body-suit was tight in the wrong places, but she couldn’t help that. She was big in the wrong places.
“Why should you care how I look?” she asked the girl.
The girl wrinkled her face in an expression of distaste. “I just get so mad at the way girls dress sometimes. You don’t see boys dressing sloppy, but girls think they can wear any old thing.” Nikki saw that this young girl was wearing a precisely fitted body-suit, sleeves and cuffs buttoned tight. She looked like the steam doll that Nikki-One kept in her closet. Every now and then she’d dress it in one of its fashion suits, fill it with water and watch it walk around the floor, singing in its squeaky voice and giving off little puffs of steam.
“I like to dress up, when I can,” Nikki said. “But it’s too hot today. Listen, why are you going to the Winter Gate? What’s your pilgrimage?”
“Ask him,” said the girl, pointing behind Nikki. Nikki turned and saw the teacher crawling toward her through the pressing bodies of the children. He was slim and had long legs, so it was difficult for him to move on hands and knees through the crowd.
Seeing her turn around, the young man smiled—a fresh, open smile, she thought—and said to her, “Everybody in class wanted to see that millipede this morning. So we started cart-hopping north, and then they caught the broadcast from the Abyss, and now half of them want to turn around and go there. Kids. Love to you; my name’s Jordan.” He had reached her side as he spoke; tickling a boy in the ribs, he moved him aside and sat next to Nikki.
“You’re going to the same place I am!” Nikki said. And all these kids too, she thought.
“To look for the foreigner?” the teacher said. “Sure … there’ll probably be a dozen classes at the Gate by the time we get there. Awareness classes, body students, event watchers—maybe even some adult mind-disinterment groups. That poor millipede is going to be busy.”
“It’ll really have its hands full,” said the girl who had criticized Nikki’s clothes. “All of them!” She laughed delightedly at her joke, worming her way around so that she could sit beside the two of them. She sat in a precise lotus, bracing her back against a boy who was making a cat’s cradle out of mind-shadows. He wasn’t able to hold the image very well, Nikki noticed.
“I’ve met millipedes before, a couple of times,” Jordan said to Nikki. “They always seem to be able to handle whatever comes up. Have you ever met one?”
Nikki shook her head. “No; that’s why I’m looking for this one. It ought to be fun.”
“More fun than some big old creepy snake-thing,” said the young girl. She shivered exaggeratedly.
“Now, Robin, you didn’t really see that thing,” Jordan chided her. “Be fair.”
“I did!” protested the girl. “I saw it in that woman’s mind—Gloriana, her name was. Remember?”
“But we’ve seen how a person’s memory can distort things, haven’t we?” said her teacher. “Even after just a minute or two.”
Nikki felt more and more curious about the broadcast she’d missed; it sounded as though it had been exciting. “Did you see it?” she asked Jordan.
He smiled faintly. “Just for a moment. There really wasn’t much to see.”
“Everyone seems to be talking about it,” Nikki said. Two girls behind her were wrestling and they bumped against her, but Nikki was heavy enough not to lose her balance.
Jordan put out a hand to steady the children down and said to her, “Nobody could see much. But the people in the glider were very out and open—you know how it is in a glider?—and their reactions were intense. I think that’s why it upset so many people.”
“It didn’t scare me!” Robin said defiantly. She rocked back and forth in her lotus, angry. “That woman, Gloriana, she was scared, and she’s a grownup, but I wasn’t scared! I don’t even want to go see it. I’m just not interested!”
“It would take too long anyway to double back and hop carts all the way to the Final Cataract,” said Jordan. “Besides, I’m looking forward to meeting the millipede, aren’t you?”
“No!” said Robin, and she closed her eyes and began to trance.
Jordan met Nikki’s eyes and grinned. She grinned back at him and felt the warmth of the sun. Around them the kids yelled and giggled, and the cart shook them as it bumped along. Nikki wondered suddenly if she was still sweating, and if Jordan would hate her for being fat.
“I’ve never seen a millipede, ever,” she told him. “I’ve never even met anybody from England City or Mars.”
“Where have you been all your life?” he asked her.
She wondered if she ought to tell him that her “life” probably totaled less than twenty-four hours so far. But that wouldn’t really be true anyway: she shared Nikki-One’s memories; she felt twenty-three years old. And maybe she was—after all, the capsules didn’t create alternate personalities within Nikki, they just freed the ones who were there.
“I don’t get out very often,” she said. “I mean I’m not exactly a dragonfly socially—for obvious reasons.”
Jordan looked her over in an openly appraising way, eyebrows slightly raised. The light fuzz on Nikki’s upper lip suddenly felt acutely damp to her.
“You ought to smile more often,” he told her. “I liked it when you smiled a minute ago. Anyway, I’m no good at feeling sorry for people.”
Nikki had to laugh at that—not because he had complimented her, but because he had seen into her. There’s something wonderfully naked about finding someone who understands you inside, she thought.
“I’m terrible at it too,” she said. “I’m even terrible at feeling sorry for myself, except when I do.” Actually, she reminded herself, this body isn’t really mine; why should I feel embarrassed about it? “How did you meet so many foreigners?” she asked.
“Stop pushing!” yelled the boy who had been making the shadow cat’s cradle. He shoved backward against Robin, who elbowed him in the ribs without coming out of her trance. The boy howled and protested to Jordan. “She pushed me, and she ruined my concentration!�
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“You’re ruining mine,” said Jordan. “Start again; you didn’t have the image quite right anyway.” To Nikki he said, “A millipede came to my class last season because it wanted to find out what we meant by ‘learning.’ It didn’t understand anything that went on. We were doing arithmetic sets that morning, and it said, ‘What are these objects you speak of? What are these numbers?’ Can you imagine?”
“It didn’t know what numbers are?” asked Nikki.
“It said it knew about zero and about one. But it thought two and three and so on were just different ones. Whatever that meant!” Jordan laughed, a short burst of real amusement. “I wonder how the millipedes ever developed the technology for space travel anyway.”
“Didn’t we teach it to them?” Nikki asked. She wasn’t sure; but Gregorian sometimes lectured her about how much the other races of the galaxy owed to Earth.
The cart stopped at a traffic marker, and a burly grey-haired workman pushed his way into the backbed, cursing sleepily. With the cart no longer in motion, Nikki felt the heat of the sun more strongly; she fanned her face with the shawl and wished they’d start up again quickly. Robin untranced, opened her eyes and stared for a moment at the workman. “He’s boring,” she said, and went back into trance.
Jordan saw Nikki looking bemusedly at the girl. “Robin’s learning about negatives today. One of the smartest people in the class. Most kids can’t really understand negatives till they’re past puberty.”
Nikki continued to look at her for a while. When she tranced, the tight set of her mouth relaxed completely; she looked like another person. The traffic marker changed and the cart started forward again.
“I’ll bet you’re a good teacher,” she said. “I remember when I was studying, I had a teacher who gave us tests every day. Body tests, emotion tests, brain tests—I never got to enjoy learning anything; I always had to know it. That’s when I started getting fat.”
“You had a male teacher?” Jordan asked.
“Yes.”
“And as soon as you got your first period you started getting fat,” he said.
She thought back, and he was right. “How did you know?”
“That’s a common thing—if you’re a girl just entering puberty and a male dominates you like that, it’s very threatening. It seems unnatural, and girls in that situation do all sorts of extreme things.”
She regarded him with growing respect. She had come into life late—she wasn’t really the Nikki who had gone through their childhood—so she should have had the objectivity to understand that herself. But she hadn’t.
I don’t really think much about Nikki-One, she said to herself. I just take her as a given. Which is about what she is.
“What else do you know about me?” she asked Jordan.
The cart stopped again, and half a dozen people crowded around the back trying to get on. But there really wasn’t room; the class children screamed and protested whenever one of the newcomers tried to climb aboard, and there was some scuffling. Then the muscled workman who had gotten on at the last marker said loudly, “No more on this cart, or I’ll bust your heads!” His bunched fists were the size of street stones.
The crowd hesitated; some went to other carts farther back. The marker changed and the cart bumped forward once more.
The workman grinned at Jordan and Nikki, flexing his hands in a satisfied manner. “I love getting out with people every morning,” he said. “I don’t have to ride the carts; I’m old enough that I can have my own, but I like to relate to people. Wakes me up.”
“People are boring,” said Robin, her eyes open since the scuffle.
“Not around me they’re not,” the workman said. “See, if you really like people, they sense that and they’re looser around you. When you’re older you’ll know that. Right?”
He asked this last of Nikki and Jordan. The teacher said, “Absolutely.” Nikki said, “I guess so.”
“You guess so?” said the workman. “It’s a fact. You take that millipede that showed up this morning, for instance. The guy meditating on the sun just didn’t want to be interrupted, remember? So the millipede went away. Yet that was somebody from way out in the stars, come all the way here, and the first guy it met wasn’t interested in talking. If I’d been there when it came, I’d have jumped up and taken it to the Winter Gate, shown it a good time. See what I mean?”
The cart was nearing the Gate; the homes were more widely spaced on the street, and there were fields of corn and artichokes. Nikki craned to look forward and saw the sunwashed silhouette of the Gate rising ahead.
The Winter Gate was the oldest in the city; it was a high granite structure, built centuries ago when Cirque was still a small town growing along the river from the Final Cataract northward to the trade road into the mountains. One of the early temples had raised funds to build the Gate; Nikki didn’t remember which temple it had been. One of the big ones—probably the Centrists or the Universalists.
“We’re almost there,” Nikki said to Jordan.
“Well, say hello to that millipede for me,” said the workman. “Tell it to forget that guy at the Morning Gate—most of the people in Cirque are really friendly.”
The cart slowed as it approached the Gate. The arch was narrow, built long before electric carts had become common in Cirque. Traffic moved only one way at a time through the Gate, regulated by another unstable-element marker. Children began to jump off the cart’s back, trailing along behind on foot. The sun continued to climb in the sky, and Nikki found the bed of the cart getting uncomfortably hot.
She picked a smooth stretch in the road and slid off the back; Jordan followed. They walked after the cart as it trailed more class children, and Nikki saw that Jordan was even taller than she’d thought when they were sitting in the cart’s backbed. Tall and slim: what a contrast to her lumpish figure. Even his loose green and gold body-suit seemed to hang gracefully on him.
She found herself wondering why she had come here, why she had allowed herself to be seen outside the shadows of her home. She hated her body and the coarse seaminess of her face; how could she let other people see her so clearly? The sun beat down malevolently on her and she felt faint.
She stopped walking and stood swaying at the side of the road. I’ve got to go back, she thought hopelessly, and realized how very far from home she had come, how long it would take to get back to shadowed safety. The world around her wavered and blurred, and abruptly she sat down on the grassy verge of the road. Her ears roared.
I’m going, she realized faintly. Nikki-Three is coming out. This is all the life I’ll get today; instead I’m becoming Three, and she doesn’t even want to live.
Children shouted piercingly around her; Jordan bent over her, talking at her, talking.
It isn’t fair, she thought. Just when I was getting to know someone I could love—
The thought frightened her; her stomach knotted and a consuming roar pressed in around her. She shuddered uncontrollably. Nikki-One, she thought dimly—Nikki-One loved Gregorian. She had no right—
She began to moan, and Jordan knelt beside her, holding her by the shoulders. She saw his lips move, but she heard nothing but the roaring in her ears. A red haze covered everything, and she closed her eyes tightly.
She tried to speak. “Jordan … Jordan, I’m multiple—” Her tongue, her lips were too heavy.
Then gradually the sick whirling lessened, the pressure at her temples began to go away. She heard Jordan ask, “Nikki, what’s happening?”
She opened her eyes fearfully and saw her surroundings in all their stark harshness—the glare of the sun, the filth of the ground where she sat. Children clustered around her, pressing in, pointing.
“Never mind,” she managed to say.
She tried to squirm free of Jordan’s grip on her shoulders, but he held her tightly. His face before her was that of some stranger: irregular features, hawk nose. What did she know about this man anyway?
“Are
you feeling better?” he asked.
“Let go of me,” she said coldly. Jordan loosened his grip and sat back; he looked so surprised she almost had to laugh at him. He was a coward, like everyone else.
“Don’t touch me again,” she said. “I’m not who you thought I was. You’re going to be sorry you ever met me.”
The broadcasts in Cirque were controlled by a holopath who monitored millions of sensory data every hour and chose for broadcast those experiences that would be most interesting to the people of the city.
She had an aptitude for this. It wouldn’t have been enough if she’d been only a telepath; she had to be able to scan many thousands of minds every moment, to understand everything holistically. Her judgments were instantaneous; when she picked up anything worthy of broadcast, she sent it out immediately, without thinking.
She had been born with this talent and had taken this job when she was just six years old. She was fifteen now, two years older than her predecessor had been when she had died. Holistic people don’t live long, but they live a lot.
She had every bodily comfort she could want: she lived in a large house on the South Edge with servants who attended to needs she never even knew she had. They fed her and bathed her and moved her body into different positions several times a day. They brushed her hair and filled her room with fresh scents; they stimulated her with selected frequencies of sound. Someone always held her while she slept.
She had assistants—children in training to succeed her when she died, girls and boys with high telepathic and holistic aptitudes. They linked their minds with hers, their energies fed hers, and their personalities probably influenced what she did.
The assistants were all orphans, as she was herself. No parents would want their children condemned for life to listening to others’ minds, never thinking for themselves, even dreaming other people’s dreams at night. And dying young, so young. Most people in Cirque lived to be two hundred.
