Cirque

by Terry Carr

  She smiled faintly: I wonder if there’s some alien race out in the stars that combines all those qualities in one person.

  “North Edge coming up,” said the pilot.

  She looked ahead and saw the green fields of the Edge spreading in a great arc, the jumbled towers of the Apprentice Quarters rising behind them. Late-afternoon shadows stretched from the west; the sheer cliff faces of the East Edge shone with gold and crimson colors.

  “We’ll start right at the Cataract,” she said. “Let’s take a pass in the Abyss there just to get a look first.”

  The pilot nodded impassively. He’s probably bored with this job, Gloriana thought. Wishes he could get back to his house in the hills, his wife and kids and friends. The worst problem he usually faces is a killer bear.

  They approached the Final Cataract, swung to the right and curved back again, flying through the mists that sprayed off the gorge wall. The ports clouded as water covered them; the pilot flicked a switch, and blowers cleared away the moisture.

  “What’s your name?” Gloriana asked him.

  He said, “Lamont. I’ve got a second name too, but you won’t need it.”

  “All right. Get us out from the Cataract a bit, Lamont, so we can see something. Turn on your outside lights.”

  The flier curved left, away from the spray. Lamont touched a switch, lights below the flier came on, and the near wall of the Abyss became clearer.

  Below them was the blackness of the shaft—and a movement. Gloriana looked again, but the motion was gone. Yet she was able to see motionless pale forms far down in the Abyss, distant and indistinct.

  “Take us down,” she said.

  The flier circled in a tight curve and dropped. The lights from its underside preceded it into the depths; Gloriana saw white creepers reaching up the walls of the Abyss, straining out of the depths toward the light.

  They descended past these extensors from the deep, and the vegetation multiplied and spread. It became thick along the canyon wall; it covered the rocks and formed layers on itself. Only a few hundred meters below the rim, the harsh rocky wall of the Abyss was teeming with life that reached up from below.

  There wasn’t a touch of color in any of it; the vines and leaves were dead white, lifeless to the eye. But they reached upward in the patterns of life. And Gloriana remembered the dull white masses she had seen this morning at the bottom of the Abyss: mottled grey and white bodies, phantasmagoric fungoid shapes, no hint of the variety of life colors she was used to on the surface.

  The things that lived down here were specialized. They had one function, one goal: to reach upward into the sun. To reach the surface.

  The thought sent a faint chill up Gloriana’s back. She said, “Start dropping the chemicals right here. Now.”

  Lamont slid an indicator on the control panel to the right, and she heard the high sound of sprayers in the rear of the flier. Looking behind, she saw a cloud of white fall into the depths, glistening in the flier’s lights. The chemicals disappeared as they fell beyond the light.

  “Closer to the wall,” she said. “We’ve got to spray around the Cataract first: that’s where they’re climbing the highest. They’re growing on the damp wall there.”

  It’s the river, she thought; it actually feeds those creatures. It carries rich soil down from the hills and dumps it into the Abyss; it’s done that for thousands, maybe millions, of years. Put that together with the garbage that’s dumped off the North Edge every day, and it must provide a fantastic environment for life to grow.

  The flier banked to the right and curved around to head for the Cataract, its wake of poisons luminescent in the lights. As they approached the cliff wall, those lights picked out the rich colors of stone: brown, grey, ochre and black, in rock strata that canted and folded upon themselves. The familiar sight of the Abyss walls, cross sections of the earth under Cirque. But now she saw pale traceries of vines climbing in the niches of the rock, seeming to spread as she looked at them.

  “That what you’re after?” asked Lamont. “That stuff on the rocks? Biggest weeds I ever saw.”

  “There’s more than what you see now,” she said.

  “I saw the way they grow near the falls. Thick and tough—I guess they have to be in this hole. But the spray will clear those walls better than you expect. Kills anything, those poisons.”

  Yellow and green mosses covered the rocks now, and the vines multiplied, climbing over each other in a thickening carpet that became greener the higher it climbed. The flier approached the Cataract, and the roar of falling water filled the air.

  “I can bank alongside the wall,” Lamont offered. “Shoot the poisons right onto those vines. Doesn’t take much; you’ll be surprised.”

  “Do it,” said Gloriana. The flier was buffeted by sheets of spray from the Cataract—it looked like mist, but it fell with heavy force. They flew past the Cataract, shooting dense clouds of poison at the teeming vines. Some of the chemicals were washed downward by the falls.

  That’s fine, Gloriana thought. They’ll kill anything growing on the bottom here. In fact, maybe we should poison the river itself—simply let the river take the poisons into the Abyss to kill off those things. The river’s been feeding them; it can kill them too.

  But she knew the temples would never allow that. The River Fundament was sacred to half the temples of Cirque; she couldn’t tamper with it.

  The flier had passed the Cataract; now Lamont banked around and headed for another pass. Gloriana craned forward, looking to see what effect the poisons had had.

  It was hard to make out the scene—sheets of water plunged downward; spray floated in the air like ghosts. But there seemed to be more motion than there had been a minute ago. Yes, the vines were moving! As she watched, the darker green mass of vines near the top of the Abyss writhed, shook and fell, trailing downward into the darkness, pulling at other vines that still clung to the wall.

  The flier passed by, spraying its deadly poisons, and in its wake the vines peeled away from the cliff wall and fell into the Abyss like a slug’s feelers retracting from pain. They convulsed as they fell, clutching at each other, at the rocks as they slipped past, at the empty air. And they continued to fall, uncovering pale inner layers of vine, thick and ropey, anchored in the cliffs. The pale inner vines seemed to crawl along the rocks as the poisons touched them, but they did not fall.

  The flier came out of the mists into open air again. Away from the falls, the carpet of vegetation had dropped away, leaving empty rock faces streaked with traces of the vines that had fallen.

  “See how I told you?” Lamont said. “Once more past, and that ought to do it.”

  He was enjoying this, Gloriana realized. He was proud of his clumsy craft that lumbered through the air and shot clouds of death behind it. Proud, and glad that the job would be a short one so that he could soon go home.

  They approached the Cataract once more. The rocky walls seemed to shudder as vines absorbed the poisons, retracted and fell away writhing in the air; the Cataract gorge was a gigantic mass of indistinct movement.

  Then suddenly there was something on the cliff wall that was not a vine, not leafy, not vegetation—something that moved upward, climbing over the stronger vines that still remained, reaching pale limbs ahead and feeling for purchase in the rocks.

  Something dead white. Something that moved jerkily, half-hidden within the mists of the Cataract.

  Something huge.

  Oh sweet lord, it’s one of those things from the bottom, Gloriana thought. Trying to get out, to escape from the poisons.

  The thing climbed with incredible swiftness, scuttling with long tentacles that whipped through the air. It was less than a hundred meters from the rim.

  “Lamont! There!—don’t you see it?”

  But he had already turned the flier toward the creature. They approached the sheer canyon wall, banked through the buffeting spray of the Cataract. The rocks glistened in the flier’s lights, and the heavy m
ists became opaque sheets of white. Through them she saw the scuttling movements of the creature, the shaking of vines as it climbed.

  They passed within a few meters of it, shooting their poisons directly on its mottled body. The wash of chemicals hit it with so much force that it was shaken loose and fell. But it caught at the vines and stopped its plunge; the vines pulled away from the rock wall, but the many-legged thing grabbed more of the vines and held on.

  “Again! Hit it again, Lamont!”

  The pilot threw their flier into a tight circle, its heavy motors laboring, and Gloriana fell against the port on her right. She heard the man cursing softly under his breath. The Cataract’s spray shook the flier.

  “What is that?” Lamont asked.

  “I don’t know. Be careful; it’s dangerous.”

  They approached and passed it again in the mists; as the chemical struck it this time, the creature shuddered and its tentacles jerked in the air. It fell away from the vines; it clung with one tentacle, swaying for a moment. A mouth gaped open in the underside of its body, and then it plunged out of sight.

  The pale vines, torn away from the rocks, shook in the Cataract’s heavy spray; they began to slide down the wall of the Abyss.

  As her eyes followed the falling vines, Gloriana saw more movements below. The flier circled away from the Cataract before she could make out anything clearly, but she had recognized the scuttling motions of the tentacled creatures. More of them were climbing.

  “We got it,” said Lamont. “Told you the poisons would kill anything.”

  “We’re not finished,” said Gloriana. She pointed downward.

  He watched as two dull white creatures scrambled up into the illumination of the flier’s lights. He put the flier into another tight circle. “I don’t believe this,” he said.

  “Just be sure you get them. If even one of those things gets out of the Abyss—”

  “It won’t.” The flier came to the Cataract again, its chemical sprays washing against the cliff. The vines here at the top were almost gone now; the few that remained were as thick as the trunks of trees.

  The creatures Gloriana had seen climbed upward right into the direct spray of poison. One was shaken loose by the force of the spray; it fell and disappeared below. The other stopped in its climb, but clung to a thick vine; it seemed to freeze against the rocky wall.

  She saw more of them coming from below. Three, four—another had climbed almost to their height before she saw it. They moved astonishingly swiftly.

  “Wait a minute,” Lamont said, moving the flier’s controls with angry thrusts of his big hands. The roar of the flier’s motors became higher in pitch; Gloriana felt the entire compartment vibrating.

  “Gravity engine,” said the pilot. “We can move right in and hover to concentrate our spray.”

  “Stay, out of their reach,” Gloriana said.

  “Oh, I will.” The man was grim-faced. He brought the flier in close to the wall, moving more slowly now. He hovered over a tentacled creature and played the spray directly on it for several seconds. It writhed frantically and fell away. Lamont moved on to another of them and washed it off the cliff just as quickly.

  Gloriana scanned the Abyss wall below as he worked; the creatures were still coming. There were so many! Their pale-furred tentacles glistened in the lights. As they climbed out of the depths Lamont blasted them with poisons, and one by one they fell away, still writhing as they plunged downward.

  The last of the vines were disappearing now; even the thickest of them seemed to crumble as the spraying poisons washed over them, and they too fell into the blackness. After many long minutes, Gloriana surveyed the cliffs before them and saw no more vines and none of the climbing creatures. She allowed herself a deep, slow breath.

  “I don’t see any more,” said Lamont. He flew the craft slowly past the Cataract, peering into the mists for signs of movement.

  “I think they’re done,” Gloriana said. “But we’d better—Damn!”

  She had looked upward to the very top of the cliffs, where the water of the Cataract plunged over the rim at the beginning of its great fall—and there, clearly outlined against the sky, she saw moving tentacles. One of them had gotten past—had managed to climb all the way to the surface!

  Lamont followed her pointing hand, squinting through the mists. The flier’s engines blared loudly as he accelerated to climb; Gloriana was pressed back into her seat. The flier labored over the rim of the Abyss, then rose above the Cataract.

  They had lost sight of the creature as they climbed; now they peered below, searching for a sign of those moving tentacles. The land here at the Final Cataract was a savannah; low bushes and trees grew along the banks of the river and extended out into the channel, rising on their roots like waiting spiders. Leafy vines covered everything, and bright flowers dotted the banks.

  There was no sign of the creature. They flew across the river at the lip of the Cataract; water rushed through the vegetation below, frothing white as it ran over great boulders near the Edge. Gloriana looked upstream, where the river flowed in a long zigzag, lazy in the late afternoon.

  “What’s that?” She had seen something on the river, something that rode the water smoothly in the center of the channel.

  Lamont leaned over her to look upstream. “It’s a boat, isn’t it? Gravity boat. I rode one of them last time I came to Cirque. They start up at the Winter Gate, come down all the way through the city to the Cataract.”

  Gloriana stared, horrified. He was right; it was a tourist craft. The smooth sides of the boat barely skimmed the surface of the water; it gathered speed as the river approached the falls.

  And as she looked, she saw the tentacled creature erupt from the water directly in the boat’s path.

  Mind, not me, has seen this moment:

  coils of flesh enwrap the air

  and churn the River into white.

  Here fear is born, and so am I.

  (Another moment follows, and another birth.

  Each conception takes forever.)

  —The Book of Causes

  “I’LL bet you don’t have cities like this where you live,” Nikki said to the millipede. “Cirque is the most beautiful city in the galaxy—isn’t that true?”

  Reeds and brilliant red flowers grew in the shallows of the wide river here near the Final Cataract. Few homes were visible this close to the Edge, but those that they saw were great sprawling affairs with guest cottages dotting the fields around them.

  “Cirque is the most beautiful of the human cities,” said the millipede. “In the Aldebaran system, human cities are crowded and somewhat dirty. And they become more so as time passes.”

  “That just means they’re growing,” Robin said. “Jordan says the cities on other planets are all covered by domes to keep the air in, and the heat and all. They can’t spread out like Cirque.”

  “Oh, it’s not just the space we have,” Nikki said. “We’re an old city; we’ve learned how important beauty is.” She was leaning back in her seat, her arms spread across the backs of the seats beside her. Now and then her hand brushed against the fur of the millipede’s back.

  “I think,” said the millipede, “that perhaps humans confuse beauty with time. You see only the present, and you enjoy the sense of great time in your old buildings.”

  “I guess you have some different ideas about what’s pretty,” Robin said. Nikki was pleased by the note of respect in the girl’s voice; evidently she had come to realize that the foreigner was not stupid just because it said strange things.

  “Actually we have many of the feelings you humans have,” said the creature. “We too enjoy the sense of duration in our surroundings. The difference is that we see much of what is to come also. We are moved not only by the past of Cirque, but also by its future. Do not imagine that your city’s glory is past; it is on the edge of new wonders.”

  “Really?” said Robin. “Like what?”

  “The eruption from your
Abyss is happening even now,” said the millipede. “Cirque becomes greater from today onward.”

  Nikki felt a surge of excitement. It was hard to imagine any great changes coming to Cirque so late in its history, but the foreigner seemed sure of what it said. Nikki sat forward, turning to the millipede. “That must be why you came here today! Can you tell us about it, about what’s so exciting?”

  The millipede was silent a moment, its dark eyes gazing across the low green fields beyond the river edge. Robin said, “Maybe you shouldn’t. I mean, isn’t that what’s so exciting about things—being surprised when they happen?”

  “That may be true for humans,” said the millipede. “You are such an energetic race, much more excitable than the rest of us.”

  “That’s because we live in the present,” Robin said. “We can’t see into the future, so everything’s new.” She said it proudly, as though it were a truth she had just figured out.

  “Everything is new to us too in a way,” said the millipede. “Perhaps we see each moment more sharply than humans do, in fact. You spend much time guessing about the future, worrying or hoping. Races who know what is to come concentrate totally on what is happening at the moment.”

  “Well, I like surprises,” said the girl. “Anyway, I’m not sure I want to know about those things in the Abyss; they’re creepy.”

  “You’re not afraid, are you?” Nikki asked her. “You said this morning you thought they were boring.”

  Robin made a face. “I just don’t want to hear about them. I didn’t like the broadcast.”

  “You know of the eruption only through what you saw in your broadcast—is that true?” asked the millipede.

  “Sure,” said Robin. “How else? I wasn’t there, you know.”

  The millipede watched the river unwinding before them as the boat rode the smooth current. “Seeing through someone else’s eyes is not truly seeing, I believe.”

  Nikki laughed, remembering how sharply she had smelled the odors of dawn at the Morning Gate while she had been at breakfast in a tower in the Apprentice Quarters. “I guess you don’t understand what our broadcasts are like,” she said. “We not only see and hear and taste everything, we even feel what the other person is feeling.”