Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “You’re not saying anything, Zasper,” she cried. “I need help and you’re not saying anything!”

  “All right, all right, listen! Pretend I’m a flea living on a dog, all right?”

  “You’re a flea, Zasper. I can believe that.” She choked with hysterical laughter, tears running down her cheeks.

  He pounded her, forcing her to listen. “Right. And I begin to think something’s wrong. And all the other fleas laugh at me, because there’s nothing different. The sun comes up, the sun goes down. The dog eats his breakfast and shits on the grass. Then, one day, the dog falls down dead, and I suddenly realize: That was it! The dog was sick!”

  “So?”

  “So there’s something sick happening to Elsewhere, Fringe. Something sick and dangerous.”

  She stared at him, shaking her head. “Life is sick and dangerous, Zasper. You try and tell me different!”

  That wasn’t what he meant, but he couldn’t make it any clearer. “Being an Enforcer, it’s hard, Fringe.”

  “I don’t care how hard it is.”

  Sometimes Enforcers failed of their duty, he said. He himself had sometimes not come up to the mark. He had never learned to operate a flier well. And there was a little boy he had once saved from certain torture and death, against the rules. And he had opinions all the time. “You will either break your oath or you will hate yourself sometimes,” he said.

  “I hate myself all the time now,” she replied. “Hating me just some of the time would be an improvement.”

  She insisted, overriding his warnings, his confessions of what he said were his failings, wondering at his telling her, telling anyone, for if someone reported him, he’d be in trouble. Not that she would. Never. Not Zasper. She came close to him, put her hand on his arm (something she seldom did or allowed), told him she knew it wouldn’t be easy, she knew some of the work was hard and unpleasant, but no matter how hard or unpleasant, it was better than where she was now.

  Zasper shook his head at her, opened his mouth, then shut it. He had no more arguments and nothing to offer her instead, any more than he had had anything else to offer Danivon Luze. Zasper had been an Enforcer for decades. He knew what being an Enforcer had done to him. After years of doing it by the book, he’d asked himself what he was, what was this Zasper Ertigon? A man with ugly feelings hidden away, emotions he couldn’t express, judgments he couldn’t make. He’d been raised with certain ideas of right or wrong, but over the decades he’d felt a certain moral atrophy, an inability to decide what was right. Now he laughed at the thought. As a child here in Enarae, yes, there had been right things and wrong things, but what did an Enforcer want with such puzzles? That isn’t what Enforcers were for! They were for doing the will of the Council, which meant enforcing right and wrong and any other damned thing. They were for protecting diversity through the status quo. They were for not thinking or feeling any more than they could help.

  Turning the question around, however, he had to admit there were Enforcers who seemed to like the work. Many of them enjoyed the pay and the respect; some of them relished the power.

  “Zasper,” she begged, tears spilling. “Please!”

  It actually hurt him to say he’d help her. It would have hurt only a little more to have refused her.

  Later, she remembered she’d been going to tell Zasper about getting a new name, but somehow she’d forgotten. Though she didn’t get around to telling him the story for a long time, she didn’t forget the name. Owldark. It was hers. Secret, for the time being, but hers.

  One qualified sponsor was all she needed to get into the Academy. Candidates paid nothing in advance of their study. Graduate Enforcers were expected to compensate the Academy for their training by paying high dues to the Enforcer Posts later on, during their more profitable years. So, without telling anyone else, she dropped out of the Wage-earner school, left her shabby room, and moved into one much like it, though rather cleaner, at the Enarae Academy. It was, said Zasper, the second-most prestigious Enforcer Academy on Elsewhere, surpassed in reputation only by the Academy at Tolerance itself.

  Each day she rose before dawn to stand at parade with her fellows, to be told the ancient history of an indomitable people who would not be taken over by the Gods; to hear of the glories of Phansure of old and of Enarae the First, and of Enarae in Exile here, on Elsewhere; to feel her chilled blood warm and stir at the thudding drums and the flickering lash of the long-tailed banners. She recited the oath, every word burning itself into her heart. She heard the Masters cry: “Enforcers! A Situation!”

  She rose with a hundred others to shout the response: “We Attend the Situation!”

  She swallowed it whole. Enforcers were honored and honorable. History flowed through them, like power through a fiber, illuminating and warming all it touched. Without Enforcers, there would be no diversity, and therefore, no humanity. She and her fellows were the gallant few who kept the unthinking majority safe. Her passing doubts she put down hard, buried them, wouldn’t consider them. Any flicker of her old rebelliousness she dealt with the same way. She had chosen this! She would not allow anything to sully her choice.

  She learned weapons, weapons she hadn’t known existed until now. She learned drill and signals, overt and covert, to be used among Enforcers. She learned command, how to make people obey her, even when they didn’t want to. She joined in case studies of provinces that had strayed from the status quo in the past and how Enforcers had put them back on track.

  She became almost proud. Her rat-tailed hair turned glossy. Her chewed nails grew out. Her skin cleared up. She stood up straight with her head high! She was someone, someone special at last!

  Even Zasper had to admit she bloomed.

  Had she thought about it, she would have known she was too happy for it to last. Something had to come along and destroy her contentment. The blow came in the form of a message from her pa, demanding that she come see him. Full of trepidation, she went, not knowing what to expect.

  He regarded her morosely when she came in.

  “I’ve found out,” he said.

  Her jaw dropped. Found out what? She’d hidden nothing.

  “You’re to leave that place,” he said.

  “Leave?” She gaped, then laughed almost hysterically. “Leave! You mean the Academy?”

  “Do you have any idea what it will do to my reputation as a Professional to have a daughter at the Enforcer Academy!” It wasn’t a question. He didn’t expect an answer.

  By this time, Fringe had quite an accurate reading on her pa’s reputation as a Professional. She shook her head stubbornly and said, “I have to do something, Pa.”

  “There are a hundred professions!” he trumpeted, sounding so much like Gregoria that Fringe was astonished. “A hundred professions!”

  Though in the past she had been inarticulate when confronted by Pa or Grandma or even the teachers at school, she was voiceless no longer. Not since that day at Grandma Gregoria’s had she been silent or tongue-tied. Now she was hot, fiery, and she matched Char’s vehemence with gritty resolution.

  “There’s a hundred professions, that’s right, but they all take schooling or apprenticing or buying in. And all of that’s expensive and has to be paid up front! Where is the setup money, Pa? Professional-class girls all have setup money. You wanted Ma enough to risk everything for her. I understand that. Well, you got her, you got her people, now she’s dead, they’re gone, I’m gone, it’s done and over. You risked what you had, used it up on them, and there was nothing left over to keep me a Professional. I’m not mad at you. I’m done crying about it. But don’t try to stop me making my way, Pa!” Despite her words, she had been unable not to cry, feeling the wetness dripping from her jaw.

  Pa turned red, then white, then he surprised and disarmed her by weeping in his turn. She had never confronted him before. Except for his own mother, no one had ever confronted him. He did not know how to deal with it. He had not been prepared for it. Tears flowed in st
reams as he promised her he would move in with Gregoria and sell the house to provide setup money for her. She was right! It was owed her. He would do it at last. She must not blame him! He would make it up to her!

  And although she knew it would mean pain and rejection and loneliness all over again, Fringe clung to him in a great flood of warm sentiment, pledging herself to becoming a Professional. They hugged each other and smiled tremulously into each other’s faces, and Fringe went away aching with a longing she had almost forgotten. Come morning, she told herself, she would resign from the Academy. She would apologize to Zasper and beg his forgiveness, but she would resign. That night she chewed her fingers to the quick and broke out in spots, but remained resolute.

  When morning came, however, she made herself sit quietly and think the matter over. There had been times … times when Ma and Pa had cried all over each other, promising this, promising that, things that never came to pass. She’d seen Char promise Grandma Gregoria too, and those promises hadn’t usually meant anything much. Besides, she had nowhere but the Academy to live, and if Pa was going to sell the house, where would she stay? Would she be welcome at Grandma’s? Perhaps it would be better to wait until things were a little more definite….

  She told herself this, refusing to admit real doubt. She thought of going to Char and getting the details straight, but told herself that might be pressing him too much, even as she suspected it might be pressing herself too much. Days went by. She heard nothing more about setup money. Her emotions wavered from anger to relief, back and forth, like a children’s balance board, up and down, up and down. She hadn’t really wanted to leave the Academy. And yet, if he truly would provide …

  At last, telling herself she needed to make an end of the uncertainty, she went to ask him face-to-face. The house was empty. A neighbor saw her standing there and told her Char was away on a long trip, a marriage trip. He had married again. A Professional-class woman, a widow. The house was being expensively refurbished against his return.

  The cold that washed through her was no worse than it had often been before. Pa had obviously decided it was better to get himself a new wife and start over than saddle himself with the old wife’s daughter—particularly since she wasn’t really a credit to him. Too spoiled by the Tromses, no doubt.

  She went back to the Academy and put the memory in that place she had put other memories, that locked, secret place. Why become a Professional Dorwalk when she wasn’t Dorwalk at all? She was Owldark. She had been gifted with that name and had been carrying it about with her for some time now. She liked the sound of it. Sneaky, and quiet, and unseen, that was her. She would become an Enforcer, she would become Owldark, she would have a place of her own.

  Though she sometimes dreamed of him thereafter, she never saw Char Dorwalk again.

  Jacent, Syrilla’s protégé, found Tolerance increasingly intolerable. He hovered between tedium and terror most of the time, being bored by mind-numbing routine in the days and panicked by nightmares at night. The med-tech from whom he shamefacedly sought help recommended a sleep inducer and spoke of the difficulties of adaptation to a new environment. Give it time, the med-tech urged. Jacent gave it time, waking night after night with his heart thundering in his chest, fighting to catch his breath, frightened out of his wits for no reason he could name. He knew he spent far too much time worrying about it, but there were no distractions to keep him from worrying. No workshift was distinguishable from any other. Persons and events seemed to flow together, fungible as water. Nothing had any edges. All was pose and habit, all eccentricities smoothed away. He was not allowed to appear concerned or show surprise at anything real. Though some of the provinces he monitored had unbelievably nasty customs, it was custom to accept them without comment. In public he was expected to twitter engagingly about trifles, but never to mention anything important or significant. The whole structured artifice was too much to bear.

  Jacent told himself he wasn’t old enough for all this habit! He needed some exciting reality! Perhaps if he had something interesting to think about, he would be able to sleep! His chance came when he was invited to join a group of giggling youngsters in their exploration of the abandoned installations north of the Great Rotunda.

  “There will be tunnel rats as long as your arm,” whispered Metty, a girl almost as recently arrived as Jacent himself, a friend, someone who shared his brooding boredom, his disenchantment and discontent. They talked about their plans late at night, under the covers, between more or less successful attempts at erotic distraction.

  “Rats and maybe serpents,” said her brother Jum, he of the curly hair and extravagant clothing, when invited to join the group. “We’ll take net-guns and capture some for the zoo!”

  There was a stasis zoo at Tolerance, where odd flora and fauna brought by settlers were preserved, at least those species that hadn’t fit into the terraformed ecology originally adopted on Elsewhere. Capture of interesting creatures would provide a reasonable-sounding excuse for the unauthorized expedition, though one of doubtful legitimacy. Capturing animals was Frickian business. In fact, in Jacent’s opinion, anything adventurous and fun seemed to be Frickian business, while everything routine and dull was the business of Supervisors.

  “How do we get into the place?” Jacent asked. “I thought all the old army quarters were sealed off.”

  “Oh, they were,” said laughing Kermac, known for his incautious adventures among the Frickian servant boys. “But we’ve broken one set of seals and pried open a door. There’s oodles of corridors down there, and lots of the lights are still working.”

  So it was with these and another half-dozen temerarious adolescents that Jacent sneaked into the lower corridors and through the narrow crack that was the best Kermac had been able to achieve with the stout and obdurate door. Anyone less lithe than the youngsters could not have wriggled through that narrow slot at all.

  They emerged into a variable dimness that was, so Jacent soon decided, rather worse than darkness, for in darkness he would not constantly think he saw things that, on second glance, did not seem to be there. The place also provoked a breathlessness that reminded him unpleasantly of his nighttime terrors. He thought apprehensively of the noxious gases said to gather in ancient vaults. The others, however, were having no trouble breathing, as their chatter indicated. He took himself firmly in hand, assuring himself the seeming lack of air was all imagination.

  The place was a labyrinth. Corridors connected and divided. Rooms had multiple doors, which often opened at unexpected places; stairs plunged up and down with little regard for system or direction. It was impossible to get any sense of where one was in relation to where one had been shortly before. Had it not been for the hansl, the trip recorder Kermac had borrowed (unauthorizedly) from Supplies, they would have been hopelessly and helplessly lost within moments.

  With the lifeline of the hansl to depend upon, however, they progressed ever more deeply into the tangle, finding nothing interesting but continually hoping to do so. Walls and floors had been uniformly gray to begin with and were now uniformly laden with velvet dust. All the surfaces were featureless. Glow beads along the floors let them move about without stumbling. Here and there work lights came on at their approach, letting them actually see where they were, though there was nothing to see. No interesting sights, no sound at all, not even the subliminal hum and hiss of moving air. When the work lights came on, they created a gray and swampy glow, bordered by shadow. When the lights turned off behind them, they left a darkness deeper than before.

  At the bottom of an uncertain number of stair flights they found a short corridor debouching into echoing space, into what might once have been an assembly hall. Their chatter had long since been stilled by the dusty silence. Now, in this huge space, the quiet weighed upon them so heavily that their spirits demanded interruption of it.

  “We’re hunters,” Metty shouted suddenly. “Haii, we’re hunters!” She waved her net-gun, as though to some invisible watch
er.

  Her voice went out into a silence so utter that each of them stopped, poised to flee, hearing the shocking sound escape into nothing, awaiting the echoes that had to come back from the hard-surfaced labyrinth. Their ears pricked in anticipation of the sound they knew was coming, and their minds supplied the expected reverberation: “… ters … ters … ters.”

  The reply, when it arrived at last, was a mere insinuation, a flabby softness on the ears, as though the velvety dust were capable of devouring the bones of sound and leaving only its fat and skin.

  “We’re … hungers….” The words, though soft, came clearly, then the repetition, falling away into silence once more. “… gers … gers … gers,” the sound gulped hungrily.

  The young people looked at one another uncomfortably, each wondering if the other had heard what he or she had heard.

  “Hungers?” whispered Jacent. “Is that what you yelled? I thought you said hunters?”

  Metty shook her head at him, suddenly haunted by the vision of some soft and repulsive creature crouched just out of sight around the nearest corner, cunningly capturing words and twisting them as it sent them back, making the explorers doubt not the echo but the original utterance.

  “Hunters is what I said,” she whispered from a dry throat.

  Her brother Jum, white-faced but restive, raised his voice, challenging the darkness.

  And again the echoes came, meeping and maundering, twisting the words into different, quite dreadful meanings.

  Jacent, feeling the hairs on his neck stand up, knew it could not be an accidental effect. It had to be deliberate. Such intelligible warpings would not happen by chance! He started to say so, then caught himself. He shouldn’t say so, not here. His ears had heard vile obscenities Jum’s tongue had never uttered, but it would be wiser, far, far wiser to pretend not to have noticed. He glanced at Metty, to see her flush and look away. Well, then. So she had heard the same.