Cirque

by Terry Carr

  She raised her head as her vertigo dissipated. They were just now coming to the falls; yes, the boat rushed forward faster, lifted from the water and slapped down again, but gently, gently. She felt as light in her seat as the boat was in the water; she felt buoyant, ready to fly.

  “Oh, it’s great!” she shouted to Robin, but the girl was too enthralled to do more than nod without looking at her. The millipede did turn to her for a moment, and it smiled softly. Its fur was matted with water.

  They went over the edge, streaking straight out into the air over the gorge. The river plunged downward, crashing against boulders below, but the gravity boat’s motors carried them in a smooth arc that curved gently down through the rising mists of the gorge. The crashing of the falls seemed soft and distant now, behind and below them; the mists were warm.

  Nikki cried with happiness, sobbing and laughing at the same time. She raised her arms into the air, gathering the wind of their passage.

  She began to sing: quietly at first, a low crooning, tuneless but soul-filling. As the boat curved downward, falling more and more rapidly, her song rose in pitch. She could barely hear herself, but she felt the song in her throat; each note filled her with warmth. She had such a wonderful voice. Oh, bless you, Nikki, you’ve given me so much!

  The sides of the gorge rose past them, covered with ferns, vines and flowers in soft textures and bright colors. Nikki had never seen anything so beautiful. The boat sank easily through the air.

  She heard Robin giggling, and she broke her song long enough to giggle with her. She reached out and rumpled the girl’s wet hair; Robin ducked away, squealing her laughter. Nikki turned to the millipede, hesitated only a moment, then rumpled its fur too.

  The millipede covered her head with several of its forefeet, tickled her and rubbed her long wet hair on her cheeks. Nikki whooped in astonishment, bouncing in her seat; the gravity harness held her.

  The boat came down to the river again and skimmed smoothly over the white froth of the current as it rushed through rocks and boulders. The boat followed the river’s deepest channel, lifted easily over the rocks, set them down again where the water was smooth. The rocks became less frequent, and the boat rode smoothly in the water. The roar of the falls was faint now, far behind.

  “I want to do that again,” Robin said. “Nikki? Will you take me again sometime?”

  Nikki smoothed back the hair from the girl’s face, smiling beatifically. “Sure,” she said. “Whenever I get the chance.”

  “When?” said Robin. “Can we do it tomorrow?”

  Nikki-Four had no idea when she’d be out again, in control of her body. It didn’t seem important just now. “Ask our friend,” she said, looking to the millipede. “You see the future—when can I take Robin on another ride like this?”

  The millipede smiled with its tiny mouth. “I see only what I personally experience. I will leave Cirque tomorrow; how could I know your future?”

  “I guess you couldn’t,” Nikki said. She felt her bodysuit clinging to her, the texture of wet fabric pressed against her breasts and belly. It was cool and wonderful. “It’s hard to get used to the idea that you can see the future but not all of it.”

  “Do you see all of the present?” asked the millipede. “It is the same.”

  “I don’t think so,” Robin said. She looked to Nikki for support. “I still think it’s lying, don’t you?”

  “No,” said Nikki. “Robin, this is such a beautiful world, and there are so many things we don’t even know yet! You’re so young—why are you trying to learn negatives so soon? You have a whole lifetime to learn about separation, illusions, all that stuff.”

  Robin stared at her. The boat floated smoothly in the water, moving more slowly now. The river had widened, and it was quiet out here in the central channel.

  “You keep changing,” Robin said.

  Nikki beamed at her. “Of course! Everything keeps changing, don’t you see? Especially me. Listen, Robin, do you know about how people change their personalities? How they take pills and become different people, only they’re all parts of themselves?”

  “Of course,” Robin said. “I know all that stuff.” But her voice was unsure. She heard the millipede mention it earlier, Nikki thought, but she doesn’t know how it works.

  “Well, I took one of those pills this morning,” Nikki said. “I’ve been changing all day. I was Nikki-Two when you met me—”

  “And now you are Nikki-Four,” said the millipede.

  Nikki glanced at him, and the millipede’s large dark eyes rested softly on her. She felt herself melting into their liquid depths.

  “You knew that all along,” she said after a moment. “You knew I’d change. That’s why you let me come with you.”

  “Yes,” said the millipede. “I have been waiting for you.”

  Robin looked from one to the other of them, confused. “What is this? What are you talking about?”

  Nikki laughed and reached out to hug the girl. Her wet body-suit clung for a moment to Robin’s when they separated. “It’s simple. When we met on the cart, I was Nikki-Two, one of my personalities. She’s a lot like me, only she’s kind of practical. Then, at the Gate, I turned into Nikki-Three—you remember? When I’m Nikki-Three I hate everything. I was pretty mean to you, I think.”

  “You were rotten,” said the girl. “And you kept fainting. Was that because you’d taken something?”

  Nikki nodded. She breathed deeply of the cool breezes on the river, savoring a feeling of openness. “We fight over who gets to be out. The others take it seriously, but it’s really just a game. I knew I’d get my turn, and I did: here I am.”

  Robin shook her head as though that were the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard.

  “Why don’t you just be yourself?” Robin said, but not as a question. She seemed to lose interest in the subject; suddenly she pointed to the buildings of the city. They had risen dramatically in the past minutes. Modular towers of fifteen and twenty stories reared into the bright afternoon air. “Hey, we’re in the Apprentice Quarters already!” Robin said.

  The millipede followed her gesture with its eyes, studying, the tall buildings with great interest. They were built of disc-shaped plastic, their blue and orange and rose modules weathered to subtle tints against the bright blue of the sky. Windows high in the buildings on the left bank shone golden as they reflected the sun.

  “You live in this section of the city, yes?” the millipede asked Nikki.

  “Not around here,” she said. “Down that way.” She waved to the southwest. “But they’re all the same. They’re wonderful places to live—you’re so high up that you can see the sun first thing in the morning and late in the evening. And when it rains—oh, you’d love that; the rain just streams past your window, or the wind blows and washes it against the ’glass. It’s really so open.”

  The gravity boat’s blowers had come on, filling the boat with warm air that dried their clothes and bodies. Nikki felt her muscles relaxing in the heat.

  Robin shifted impatiently in her seat, annoyed to be left out of the conversation. “I live further in,” she said. “Inside the Apprentice Quarters, I mean, in one of the big houses there.”

  “Really?” Nikki asked her. She began to see the girl in a different light: her parents were rich, and she was so bright. What a future she had!

  “Well,” said Robin, “it’s just that my father is in charge of one of the estates. He does all the work on their fliers and carts, a whole flock of them. And my mother is in charge of the grounds. She wants to plant redwood trees, but they won’t let her because they’re too big. They don’t want anything more than a couple of stories high in the estates.”

  “That’s because they used to have slides around the edge of the Abyss,” Nikki explained to the millipede. “They used to build huge mansions, just terribly elaborate, but some of them fell right into the Abyss.”

  “You should see the way they build now,” Robin said.
“All the new houses are made out of aerated stuff, blown plastic and so on. They look like granite or real wood, but you can tell the difference when you touch them.” She shook her head. “Rich people are crazy. Anyway, instead of putting up big mansions with towers and stuff, they spread the houses out as much as they can. The idea is that the more ground you cover with your house, the more important you are.”

  “Also,” said the millipede, “the more unused space they have on their property, the richer they must be. Yes?”

  “Sure,” said Robin. “Just look at the way every foot of ground is used in the rest of Cirque—the tall buildings and everything. They kind of like to waste space in the estates.”

  The blowers cut off. Nikki was dry now, but the occasional splashes over the boat’s side where all the more refreshing.

  “Aren’t people wonderful?” Nikki said to the foreigner. “We take a problem like too much weight on the Edge and we make it into something really positive, something lots of people feel great about.”

  “Oh, it’s just rich people acting rich,” Robin said.

  The Apprentice Quarters flowed past them, rearing up from the river’s green banks. There were parks and promenades beside the river, and Nikki could see people strolling in the afternoon sun. The giant Apprentice buildings loomed into the sky like jumbled towers of Babel. Floating low over the water came the sounds of the urban circle—the continuous clattering of wheels on the streets, the low drone of thousands of voices. Birds flitted through the acacias and plum trees of the riverside parks, sometimes venturing out over the water.

  “Hey,” Robin said to the millipede, “you keep doing that stuff where you know what we’re going to tell you before we do. Like about how rich people like to show off their open space. You’re really not telepathic?”

  “No,” said the millipede. It was watching the people on the banks.

  “Then why do you need us at all? You brought us along to tell you all this stuff about the city, but you already know it.”

  The millipede gave her its tiny smile. “I would not know any of it if you did not tell it to me sometime.”

  “But you bring up things for us to tell you about,” the girl said. “I wouldn’t have told you about what unused space means here, except you started talking about it.”

  The millipede’s great dark eyes glanced at Nikki and then back to the girl. “You are asking about causality?” it asked.

  “Sure, that’s what I’m asking. I mean, maybe you can see the future, but how can you cause things to happen backwards like that?”

  The millipede shifted in its gravity harness, adjusting it to give its body more freedom. “Causality is difficult for me to understand,” the foreigner said. “What humans think of as causes seem very questionable to those of us who can see time in both directions; the same thing may seem to have different causes when looked at from different times. Only in the moment of actual experience do these things seem clear.”

  After a moment Robin said, “That’s either terrifically profound or it doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Which do you think it is, Nikki?—Oh, you wouldn’t know; you probably think everything’s profound right now.”

  “Yes, everything is profound,” said the millipede.

  Nikki beamed. The river flowed under their boat, around it; the city passed by. “It’s wonderful,” she said.

  “Well, if it’s so wonderful, explain it to me,” Robin said.

  The millipede blinked its furred eyelids slowly. “Explanation is difficult in your language—your verbs all assume the principle of universal causality. My people have always believed that things are much simpler than that.”

  “Simpler?” said Robin. “What could be simpler than one thing causing the next thing to happen?”

  The foreigner said, “You have two important words in your language, how and why. They are the greatest example of your race’s creativity, for you have made two ideas from only one.”

  Nikki was listening with fascination. She loved the soft, reedy sound of the millipede’s voice. She wanted to remember every word so that Nikki-One would be able to experience this too.

  “Hey, what do you mean, ‘creativity’? Are you trying to be sarcastic?” Robin protested.

  “Not at all,” said the millipede. “I admire the originality of human thought. You see a how and you create a why to take its place. Actually there is no why; it is the how that acts.”

  Robin sat back in her seat and folded her arms. Her short-cropped hair ruffled in the breeze of their passage. “Don’t think you can mix me up by talking like that. I’m smarter than you think; ten-year-olds have brains too, you know. I learned all about calculus a year ago, and I can tell you the first ten monitors of Cirque and everything about them.”

  The millipede bobbed its head apologetically. “I do not mean to be confusing. I do find it difficult to speak of a concept that is still foreign to me.”

  “Oh, I understood you. What you’re trying to say is that things don’t happen for any particular reason; they just happen. One thing happens, then another thing happens, and something else, but nothing causes anything else and there isn’t any purpose to it. Isn’t that right?”

  “That is what we have always believed,” said the millipede.

  “Well, so what?” said Robin. “How come there isn’t some reason for it all? What’s the point of having no reason for anything?”

  Suddenly the foreigner laughed. It was a high, chittering sound, like a field full of crickets. It leaned forward in its harness, curling its body in front of Nikki, and reached to touch Robin’s face with its two foremost feet. “Humans are wonderful,” it said, still chirruping its laughter. “Humans are whys. That is what a why is; it is a human.”

  The millipede settled back into its seat, still quivering with amusement. Robin glared at it, her face reddening. She looked to Nikki. “Listen, are you going to let this—oh, sure you are, you’re just a goon. I wish you’d change again; you’re no help grinning like that.”

  Am I grinning? Nikki thought. She realized that she was. She liked the way the millipede laughed.

  “Hey, is it true you don’t know anything about numbers?” she asked the millipede. “Can’t you count?”

  “I have never understood your numbers,” the millipede said. “I know their names. Two, three, six, seven. Ten, twenty. I do not understand what they mean. What is a six?”

  Robin stared at the creature. Nikki said, “A six is like two threes.”

  “What is a two?” asked the millipede. “How can something be a two and also a three? Perhaps at one time a thing is a two, and later it is a three?” The creature looked hopefully from Nikki to Robin.

  “No,” said Nikki. “It’s two times three.”

  The millipede blinked slowly, fur rippling above its eyes. “Do you mean that if a three lasts long enough in time, it will-become a six?”

  Robin laughed suddenly; she reached around Nikki and ruffled the fur of the millipede’s face. “And you think you’re so smart! You try to tell us about how and why and causality and all that stuff. But you can’t even count!”

  She looked at Nikki and suddenly reached up and ran her fingers over Nikki’s face too, as she had over the millipede’s. “And you thought it could tell us so much! It doesn’t even know as much as I do!”

  Nikki was delighted by the girl’s gesture of ruffling her nonexistent face fur. She tried to do the same to Robin, but the girl ducked. Nikki turned instead to the millipede and ruffled its face.

  The millipede chittered laughter, its mouth opening to show bony ridges instead of teeth. It looked so comical that Nikki began to laugh uncontrollably; tears filled her eyes, and she held her bouncing stomach. The millipede ran its forefeet across her face, and she laughed even harder. The millipede’s cricket sounds rose in pitch till they were nearly inaudible.

  She heard Robin saying, “Hey. Hey!” Nikki stopped laughing and looked at the girl; Robin’s face was set and stern.
It made Nikki break up laughing all over again.

  When she subsided, Robin had settled back in her seat with her arms folded, looking straight ahead as though she didn’t know these ridiculous creatures beside her. The millipede was wiping its tear-matted face with its forefeet, smoothing down its soft fur like a cat washing.

  “Are you through?” Robin asked coldly.

  Nikki held in a giggle. “I guess so. Are we through?” she asked the millipede.

  “Yes,” it said, still smoothing its face fur. “That was even better than I remembered. I have been waiting for that ever since I came to Earth.”

  “Oh boy,” said Robin sarcastically. “I’m sure learning a lot from this foreigner. What a wonderful educational opportunity it is to ride with someone from the stars so that we can mush each other’s faces around and giggle like idiots.”

  “Come on, Robin; it was fun,” said Nikki. “I haven’t had so much fun since—” She broke off. Since that time when Gregorian and I fell out of bed, she thought. But she couldn’t say that in front of someone from Aldebaran.

  “It’s just dumb,” said Robin.

  “No!” said the millipede, and Nikki was startled by its vehemence. “Laughter is not at all dumb. It rises from a deep understanding of—”

  “Oh, quit it,” said the girl. “It’s just dumb. You can’t even add two and two.”

  “Have you ever laughed when you added two and two?” Nikki blurted out. “Four!” she cried, and laughed deliberately. “See, it isn’t funny.”

  “Why should it be?” said Robin.

  “Please,” said the millipede, wiping its great dark eyes. “Do not say ‘why’ again. I laugh when you say ‘why,’ and you do not like it.”

  “This is my planet, and I’ll say what I feel like,” Robin told the creature. “Don’t think you can tell me what to do just because you’re older than I am or something. Are you older? Do you even know how old you are? You’d have to be able to count to know how old you are, and you can’t do that.”