Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “More or less?”

  “Well, there was that business of your rescuing Danivon Luze.”

  “You knew?” Zasper was amazed.

  “Most Enforcers do things like that, now and then. You have to let them get away with a few things. Give them a little leeway. Otherwise they crack on you. It’s all written down in the Provost’s operations manual. How much unauthorized activity to let you all get away with. Better have a guilty Enforcer than a holier-than-thou. Enforcers who feel guilty try to make up for it by being extra conscientious most of the time. Holier-than-thous are a pain. Nobody knows about the real rules, of course, except the Provosts. We keep quiet about it.”

  “You knew!” Zasper repeated, unbelieving.

  “Not only knew but was grateful. Danivon has been very useful. Is, is very useful. I’ll confide in you, Ertigon. It’s not just that he’s useful. I’ve grown fond of him. I have no children of my own, and he’s … he’s what I would have chosen to be, if we were permitted such choices. He’s what I’ve imagined myself being, from time to time. He’s quite a boy. A gallant with the ladies. Ah, well. One can get weary of being Provost.”

  Zasper stared at him, mouth open. Whatever he had expected to hear from Boarmus, it had not been this.

  Boarmus nodded musingly. “And he’s not Molockian, of course, even though that’s where you found him. I got a cell sample from him. His genetic makeup is closest to the people of Shallow, but it isn’t close enough to be proof positive. It may have been modified, of course. So says Files.”

  “How did you know where I found him?!”

  “There are monitors on the inspection ships. For Provost’s eyes only. An old saying covers it. Who watches the watchers, eh? Oh, Ertigon…. I know a lot.”

  “But not how to protect us from this thing in the Core,” Zasper snorted.

  “No. Not that. Sometimes I think whatever it is must be immortal, stewing away down there!”

  “And you’re scared.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Terrified.” Boarmus mopped his face once more. “A Provost shouldn’t have to say such a thing, eh? But it’s true. I’m terrified. One of the voices, I call the gulper. I think it’s part of whatever killed a girl in the tunnels … tore her apart … wrote words in her blood on the walls. Wrote the word ‘fool.’ Wrote what we thought was the word ‘adore,’ but maybe it was the name of one of those … Clore. You said that name to me once. The biography book says he’s down there, one of the four faction leaders.”

  “Faction leaders?”

  “There were factions on the committee. You know, groups with different ideas. Hell, Zasper, you used the leaders’ names yourself, in that damned rhyme you quoted me years ago!”

  “Oh, you mean that Clore! Bland and …”

  Boarmus put his hand on Zasper’s mouth. “Don’t talk about it. If it is them … Or if it isn’t … it thinks anyone asking questions must be plotting against it, them, but at the same time it … they’re furious at being forgotten!”

  “I don’t understand that!”

  Boarmus sighed. “It’s not rational! Don’t expect it to be rational!”

  “How much of this is fact?” Zasper whispered.

  “I don’t know,” admitted Boarmus in a sick whisper. “Files could probably tell me, or at least give me a probability rating. But I daren’t ask Files. It would know the minute I did, and it would be furious. Instead, I’m going directly to City Fifteen from here. Chadra Hume told me the dinks there have a shielded system, and I’m hoping it can run probability checks for me. Maybe they can tell me why. Tell me how.”

  Zasper shook his head slowly from side to side, trying to absorb it all. “Do you think I should go to Panubi?”

  “I thought you might want to. If you do, it’s not something they’d find suspicious. They’d expect me to want a report on what’s happening there. Since Fringe and Danivon are involved, they’ll think it’s a natural thing for you to do.”

  “I’m retired.”

  “Council Enforcers have come out of retirement before now.”

  “And when I get there, what?”

  “I don’t know, Enforcer. All I could do up until now was send Danivon a kind of warning, all I could think of at the time. I told you long ago I’m not a man of action, and I haven’t the least sticky tail end of an idea what you or they can do. Maybe you can at least offer each other mutual support!”

  It was the least Zasper could do, intended to do. In addition to his concern for the young ones, however, he was conscious of a feeling so alien to him, he could hardly believe it. He felt sympathy for Boarmus! Not a bad fellow, he told himself. Considering everything, not a bad old fellow at all.

  And Boarmus, relieved at having someone, anyone, to tell his worries to, felt much the same way. A stiff-necked old bastard, Ertigon, but a good man. Yes, a good man.

  “I’ll go,” said Zasper. “Where do I find them?”

  “By now they’ll be somewhere around Derbeck. The monitors showed a strange manifestation in Derbeck, so I sent a routine message to Danivon, telling him to check on it.”

  Seeing Zasper’s expression, he cried, “I had to! Either that or go there myself. I’ve got to keep up an appearance of normalcy. That’s all that stands between us and chaos!” He heard himself babbling, bit his lip. “Take the Enforcer Post Door to Tolerance. Here’s my authority to take the Door from there to the Enforcer Post near Shallow. It’s a tiny post, but they have a few fliers there. Take whatever armament you think is most useful. I can’t advise you.”

  Zasper nodded, thinking furiously.

  “While I go my way,” murmured Boarmus. “To City Fifteen. This lad I’ve got with me, his name is Jacent. If you receive any message purporting to be from me, ignore it unless he brings it or it has his name. Any message from me alone will be false.”

  “I’ll remember that, Boarmus.”

  Boarmus grunted, wiping his face once more, trying to keep his stomach from rebelling.

  “And, Boarmus….” What could he say to the poor fellow?

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. Sir.”

  The Dove sailed upriver all day, heading for the main river port of Molock province. For a good part of the day, Fringe kept to her cabin, trying very hard to think of nothing at all, not babies eaten by fangy, armor-plated gavers, not children cut into pieces among the reeds, not an immortal music dead before its time, not even herself and Danivon entwined. She had stayed with him until almost dawn, unable to break away from him. Now she found herself considering him in the same light as she did the Hobbs Land Gods: addicting, enslaving, something to flee from because she could not be with him and remain herself. Not, not, not. She unpacked the Destiny Machine and lay on her bunk twiddling the levers, watching the lights, hearing the bells, ignoring the words on the capsules, hypnotizing herself into thinking nothing at all.

  Late that afternoon she emerged to find Jory standing at the taffrail, near where Danivon and Curvis were talking about Molock.

  “The thing is,” said Curvis, “that this child smuggling isn’t being done as a regular thing, or by any certain group. What it is, is individual parents avoiding child sacrifice by stowing their children away on the riverboats.”

  Danivon said he had never before Attended a Situation in Molock and was unfamiliar with the province.

  Curvis described the situation in Molock.

  “Ah,” said Danivon. “So we’re to see that the parents stop trying to save their children.”

  “You can’t make them stop trying to save their children,” said Fringe. “You’ve said so yourself.”

  Danivon looked up, shaking his head. “But they have no right to avoid the way things are. There’s always been human sacrifice in Molock.” He reached out a hand, which she evaded.

  Fringe’s mouth worked as she fought the urge to tell him about at least one human—so-called—who had escaped Molock. “What, exactly, does the complaint and disposition say?” she asked. />
  Curvis took out his pocket file. “Complaint by High Priest, tum-te-tum … Disposition: Enforcer will tum-te-tum assess penalty against riverboat owners or workers or provinces involved and tum-te-tum will reaffirm, and so on.”

  “So, assess a penalty,” said Fringe in a remote, cold voice. “What’s the local currency. Derbecki? Fine them five derbecki.”

  “Five derbecki’s nothing,” said Curvis.

  “I know,” she replied, turning away. “But it’s enough to comply with the C&D. And post a warning here in Molock. That’ll reaffirm.”

  “What’re you carrying on about?” Danivon demanded, newly peeved with her. They had made love twice now, and after each time she had acted like she hated him. She had no right to behave this way! What ailed the woman!

  She said, still in that faraway voice, “Remember Shimm-nau, that’s all. Didn’t they teach you two about Shimm-nau?”

  The men fell silent as they considered Shimm-nau, a category-five theocracy, rigidly ruled by a priestly class and constantly subjected to heresy trials, torture, and executions. Because of its proximity to Tolerance, Enforcers had kept the place under unusually tight supervision. Someone in Shimm-nau had discovered a ravenous disease bacteria and had, with the aid of at least a thousand coconspirators, simultaneously infected the water supply in all parts of the province. It was Elsewhere’s only case of provincial murder-suicide. There had been no survivors. Shimm-nau was a cautionary example often stressed at Academy.

  “You know,” Curvis offered in a careless voice, “she’s right to say a five-derbecki fine and a posted warning will comply. I mean, that’s all that’s strictly necessary. If anyone criticizes, we can mention Shimm-nau.”

  “You have to leave people some way out,” said Fringe, turning to glare into Danivon’s eyes. “Even if ninety and nine in Molock approve of the way things are done, you must leave the hundredth one a way out! No destiny is right for everyone!”

  “But it’s the Molockian way,” Danivon objected stubbornly, totally missing the point she was trying to make. “I think we ought to do something a bit more forceful than a five-derbecki fine and a posted announcement!”

  “What?” she demanded, turning on him wrathfully. “Maybe you’d like to starve a few little kids yourself, just to show they can’t get away. Maybe you’d like to beat their bones when they’re dead!”

  They glared at each other, then Fringe stalked away to stand beside Jory at the rail.

  “Women are no damned good at Enforcement,” snarled Danivon, now thoroughly angry. “They get too emotional. They can’t keep their minds on the philosophical reasons for things.”

  “You’re very angry,” Jory murmured to Fringe.

  “With myself mostly,” she replied sullenly. “Not with Danivon?”

  “Well, him too. There’s Enforcement that stays with the letter of the Complaint and Disposition, and there’s Enforcement that tramps all over people.”

  “And Danivon tramps all over people?”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “Including you?”

  “Well …” She thought about this, trying to be fair. “Yes, he does. But I’m afraid when he does, it’s because I let him.” “Ah,” said Jory. “And that makes you angry.” Fringe flushed and nodded. Of course it made her angry. Acting like that. Acting like any lovesick schoolgirl! Longing for … for whatever it was she had longed for all her life, and then forgetting that to lie down for Danivon, like any bitch in heat!

  Besides, she kept remembering what Zasper had said to her about the child he had saved. Certainly Danivon had been that child, though Danivon didn’t know it. He could have been one of those skulls on the rack, but he didn’t know that either. Perhaps it was time he did know it!

  She had no intention of betraying Zasper, but she wasn’t going to let Danivon get away with murder either.

  City Fifteen was three-quarters occupied by dinka-jins, about half of whom were dedicated to the life of the mind. Why, after all, go through disassembly if not to free the mind from fleshly concerns? Why put one’s germ plasm on standby, one’s innards in cold storage, if not to focus upon the attainments of the intellect?

  The other half of City Fifteen’s dink population had come up with reasons: reasons erotic, reasons financial, reasons political, reasons of custom. Dinks, so the aphorism said, begot dinks, so they were never in short supply.

  The trick to City Fifteen, as Boarmus’s predecessor had told him at length, was to be sure you were talking to a brain dink and not one of the other kind. The creature who delivered Boarmus’s packet was certainly one of the others, a dilettante tourist dink who had lost heavily at Bloom’s—a debt he (she or it) had been unable to pay—and who had been given the choice of running the simple errand or being sold for parts. The dink to whom the packet was directed was Sepel794DZ, a brain dink of the highest order, to whose home/lab/study Boarmus was guided after arriving at a shielded location.

  “I brought these things,” said Boarmus, dumping the contents of his pockets onto the table before him while carefully avoiding looking directly at Sepel794DZ. He had nothing against dinks. It merely distressed him to look at them.

  “Sensory recordings,” said Sepel794DZ tonelessly. “Old ones, from the look of them. Where did you get them?”

  “Down near the Core. Not in the communications room itself, but in the corridor nearby. There are cabinets full of them. I couldn’t bring many, so I picked the ones done by the faction leaders, and by someone called Jordel of Hemerlane. He shows up in the old … well, accounts, I guess you’d say.” Did one call children’s rhymes “accounts”? And why not. Tradition was tradition, no matter who maintained it.

  “You haven’t accessed them?” asked Sepel794DZ. “You don’t know what’s in them?”

  “I couldn’t access them without using Files, and I can’t do that without whatever’s in the Core knowing. It … they know everything I do, every breath I take!” He jittered, feeling the sweat dripping down his neck, under his arms, on his chest.

  “Sit down, Boarmus,” said the dink in a dry metallic dinka-jin voice that somehow managed to sound kindly. “I had a chair brought in for you.”

  Dinks didn’t need chairs. Dinks didn’t need much, Boarmus thought. Except answers. Dinks liked answers.

  “I need help,” he begged as he sank into the chair, which was too small but no less welcome for that.

  The dink tipped one of its boxes. It took a moment for Boarmus to recognize the gesture as a nod. “We’ve been monitoring the physical effects, just as you have, ever since Chadra Hume brought the matter to our attention. We feel the effects originate in the Core. We’ve postulated various ways they might be accomplished. Most of us believe there must be some kind of network coming from the Core and extending over wide areas. We’ve looked for it. Either we’ve looked in the wrong places or it’s shielded in ways we can’t even recognize.”

  “You can’t … identify it?”

  “We haven’t yet. And we may be wrong.”

  Boarmus mused. “You postulate a network?” He tried without success to imagine what kind of network.

  “It would have to extend over most of the planet, actually.

  It would have to include miniature devices, tiny but synchronized….

  “Devices that can make footprints in rock? Devices that can make imaginary things real? Devices that can tear off real arms and legs, kill people really dead? Devices that can hear everything, see everything….”

  The dink twitched. “I know it sounds illogical. Of course, we may be wrong.”

  “You keep saying that!”

  The dink didn’t reply.

  “If it emanates from the Core, what if we isolate the Core. We can’t get into it, but what if we dig it up? Suspend it? Cut it off?”

  Sepel794DZ made a noise like a snort. “Chadra Hume asked that same question. From what we know, we can’t touch the Core; it’s too well protected from outside interference.”

 
“Well then, suppose we concentrate on finding this network. When we do, can we destroy it?”

  “Yes. Given time. We could destroy it, if we could find it, but while we were destroying part of it, another part could be building. Besides, as I said, we could be—”

  “Wrong!” shouted Boarmus. “I know, I know. Stop saying that!” He simmered, thinking.

  “The power must come from the Core,” he offered.

  “Probably.”

  “Can we shut off the power?”

  “Not from outside the Core, no.”

  “So what do we do?” he cried, feeling tears of frustration gathering.

  “Provost, we’ve been working on that for years! Ever since your predecessor came to us and told us what he suspected.”

  Boarmus made a hopeless gesture toward the cubes he had brought with him. “Maybe there’s something in there that will help.”

  The dink wagged one of its boxes, a gesture only remotely resembling a doubtfully shaken head. “Perhaps. My colleagues and I will go through them. Even if they don’t tell us what’s happening now, perhaps they’ll give us accurate background.”

  “What a comfort! We’re all going to be dead, but we’ll know the background.”

  “We don’t need to bother if you think it’s futile.”

  “How do I know what’s futile. Do whatever you think might help.” Boarmus made himself look directly at Sepel794DZ. So very plain. So very … boxish. Without even any decorations on it, just a few lights and sensors. “How long will it take you to do that?”

  “Who knows?” Did the dink actually sound weary? “It may take some little time. I know these are sensory recordings, but I don’t know how to access them. It may take a while to find out. We don’t feel fatigue, but I know you must be tired. I had a bed brought in for you. It’s over there, under the auxiliary files, where it’s quiet. There are foodstuffs there as well, and liquids if you need them. Perhaps you’d like to refresh yourself while we get on with it?”