Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “The gavers couldn’t have surfaced at a worse time,” admitted Fringe. “Almost as though something drove them toward us just to press us close to shore.” She knelt and put her hand to Nela’s forehead once more, then bent to her ear, whispering, “Anything we say can probably be overheard. I wouldn’t say much.”

  Nela swallowed and closed her eyes.

  Fringe made the rounds of the chamber once more. It was warm—warm enough, at least, though the water in the shallow stream was cold. They could drink from the upstream end and eliminate into the water where it ran out of the cavern if they were confined long enough to make that necessary. There was nothing to eat, but presumably food would be supplied. Like all Enforcers, on duty or not, she had certain equipment built into her clothing, some even built into her body, none of which seemed very useful at the moment. Nonetheless, she did a mental inventory, this bit, that bit. If their captors were corporeal, she could do them some damage, at least. She was wearing her badge, with its locator device. Very useful for finding wounded or dead Enforcers lying under the sky. Not very useful for finding people very far under the ground.

  Bertran groaned.

  Fringe knelt beside them once more. Bertran’s eyes flickered open. He smiled. “I dreamed,” he whispered. “Oh, I dreamed I was swimming….” His eyes shut again, he winced with pain. The dream had been wonderful, painless, weightless. He longed to go back to it.

  “What did you dream?” Fringe asked.

  “Nothing,” he murmured. “Nothing.” And it was nothing, vanishing, as dreams always did. “It’s gone. Where are we?”

  “In a cave,” Fringe answered. “In a damned hole.”

  “I can’t breathe,” complained Nela. “Can you sit up, Berty?”

  He struggled to do so, the two of them edging themselves up against the low shelf. They leaned against it as though after a long race, breathing heavily.

  “Thirsty,” he murmured from a dry mouth. He licked his lips and panted.

  “We haven’t a cup,” said Fringe, scooping water from the stream and offering it in her cupped hands. “Forgive my skin, Bertran, but it’s the best I can do.”

  He drank greedily, emptying her hands several times.

  “This seems fairly hopeless,” he commented, wiping his wet mouth on his sleeve. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Too soon to say,” murmured Fringe. “Actually, the place isn’t as bad as it could be. There’s light. There’s water. It’s fairly warm. There’s nothing threatening to kill us just at the moment.” Dismayed by the pallid gray of Bertran’s skin, the liquid pain in Nela’s eyes, she set herself to be as comforting as possible.

  Bertran tried to smile, unsuccessfully. “A pity we could not save your Destiny Machine, oracle. We might find out what’s going to happen to us.”

  “We don’t need the Destiny Machine for that,” said Nela in a weak, pained voice. “We do need to lie down. When they grabbed us, they messed us up.”

  “I’ll help you.” Fringe helped them lie back on the furry ledge, tucked their own coats and her robe around them to keep them warm, and stood watching as their eyes closed, as their breathing eased slightly, an old familiar feeling possessing her, of helplessness, of grief, of concern. So she had felt about Souile, sometimes. About Nada, sometimes. She had learned to shut those feelings off, not to care because there was nothing she could do. But this was Nela, once again her friend. This was Nela’s brother. Both, both her friends, come to this through no fault of their own. They were not Enforcers. They shouldn’t have shared Enforcers’ risks. They should be somewhere on a well-lit platform, joking and doing magic tricks. They should not be here. Whoever … whatever had done this was an evil person, an evil thing, and she, Fringe, would have to do whatever she could to set matters right, diversity be damned!

  She looked the place over more carefully, examining it inch by inch. Though in far better physical shape than the twins, she felt as weary as they. It had been a long day, maybe more than one, since she had slept. The recent unconsciousness had not been sleep, for it had not left her rested. All the tumult of Derbeck was still roiling about inside her mind, the terror at Chimi-ahm, the fear for the girl, the apprehension of betrayal at Curvis’s hands—or Danivon’s.

  And along with all that, a longing for Danivon so great that it made her want to weep. She had heard him cry her name when they had been seized up. It had had the sound of someone who cared, the sound of a lover crying warning and woe. She had heard fear in his voice, fear for her! Moisture gathered at the corners of her eyes, tears she would not let fall, as she quartered the cave, again and again. Nothing. No way out. No place to hide. They were well and truly caught.

  When she was sure of it, she sat cross-legged against the ledge, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. Thus far their captors had not shown themselves. Itself. No point in remaining awake or on guard. Undoubtedly it or they would show up when they felt like it. Meantime, she would conserve her energies.

  She focused her mind upon one of the relaxation exercises she had learned at the Academy, a soothing recitation to quiet her mind, relax her body, soften her terror into something manageable, make her ready for whatever was to happen. Eventually, she slept.

  11

  Most of those aboard the Dove had gone below; the captain to lie sleepless, wondering if the gavers that had attacked the ship were gone or only lying low; Cafferty and Latibor and Asner to murmur with one another in fruitless speculation; Danivon to curse and stamp about, unable to hide his feelings from Curvis, who, if the truth were known, thought good riddance to Fringe and the twins both. The long middle hours of horrid night had passed but morning had not yet come as Jory stood at the railing with her oldest friend.

  “I stayed too long in Derbeck” he said silently, in her mind, as he had always spoken to her. “I should have been here, with the ship. Perhaps I could have prevented …”

  Jory shook her head. She didn’t need to speak. He knew what she thought, that he could have done nothing. Perhaps none of them could do anything.

  “I left it too late,” she said aloud. “I thought in usual terms. Human perversity. If one could identify it, one could fix it. But there’s something here beyond our power to fix, old friend. Something immune to reason, I think.”

  “Your friends upriver could fix it.”

  “My friends upriver.” She laughed, a pained laugh. “Someone once told me they are too good to be any good. Or words to that effect.”

  Silence, then, “You’re right. The ones upriver will be full of kindly concern but they will do nothing.”

  She sighed, profoundly weary. “I should have gone directly to Tolerance years ago, instead of being so damned … tentative.”

  “You didn’t want to upset them, upriver.”

  “That, and also I was working with the avalanche theory: A few little falling stones, and whoops, here comes a general downfall to make Council Supervisory question what it’s doing!”

  “Your petitions. So nicely thought out. So very nicely executed. With my help!”

  She laughed. “I shall not forget your description of Boarmus’s face when you made him believe he was breaking out in words. That was fun. At my age, I’m entitled to have fun. Surely even God must have fun occasionally. I meant the petitions to provoke thought, to create discussion, but I underestimated the inertia in the system. I forgot that inertia is what bureaucracies are all about!”

  “Except for the Provosts, no one heard of the petitions.”

  “I chose the wrong audience. We should have gone to the people themselves. I heard Fringe say it, with my own ears, on the trip up from Shallow. She said, ‘You’ve got to leave people a way out.’ We should have offered the people a way out.”

  “Isn’t that a little beyond your power? Where would you have had them go?”

  She sighed. That was the question, of course. Only two Doors on Elsewhere. Both of them in Tolerance. Both of them guarded. No way to use either of them without a figh
t. “There’s home,” she said. “There’s beyond the wall here on Panubi. There’s room for some. Just because there isn’t room for everyone doesn’t mean I couldn’t have saved some. Or can’t now. There’s still time to save some!”

  “Marjorie….”

  “Come death or destruction, old friend, I will offer a choice to some.”

  “To whom?”

  “There’s only one more province upriver of us. Thrasis. I’ll offer a choice to the women of Thrasis.”

  “Despite how those upriver are going to feel about it?”

  “Despite that. Why should the women of Thrasis go on suffering alone if we can give them a way out, a change in their lives?”

  His voice in her mind was amused but tender. “You’re still hoping for change!”

  Change. Oh, yes, she went on hoping for change. She had always hoped for change since … When had it been? When she was nine? Ten? As a special treat she had been taken to an exhibition of things found in an ancient tomb, artifacts of a people who had lived—what had it been?—five or six thousand years before she was born. Oh, the anticipation of that! She had thought of it as utterly wonderful, seeing things so old….

  And she had seen: wooden chairs, carved and painted, not unlike chairs at home, a wagon that looked a lot like her pony cart, a hand mirror not unlike one her mother had—bronze, not glass, but otherwise much alike.

  She had waited for the wonderful, but there had been only ordinary things: tables, boxes, wagons, jars, dishes, spoons.

  “You were disappointed?” He’d been reading her mind.

  “Not so much in the people from the past as I was disappointed in us. I’d had a childish belief that man was changing. Past was barbaric and primitive. Present was civilized and advanced. That was my faith, strong as my religion! But here we were, after six thousand years, still using the same furniture!”

  “So man hadn’t changed much?”

  “When I got older, I decided it was our own fault, that we’d stopped evolution. We’d defined ourselves as what man was supposed to be. We’d looked in the mirror and said, ‘That’s Homo sapiens, right there, right now. The brightest and best among us are Homo sapiens, but the sick, stupid, sociopathic ones are also Homo sapiens. Every warped and evil thing born to us is nonetheless Homo sapiens because it comes from a human womb and is therefore sacred! Homo sapiens, crown of creation, the only important living thing! When God made the rest of the universe, he was only kidding around, but when he made man, he meant it.”

  Laughter, deep and abiding.

  She flushed angrily. “Well, it’s true! It’s exactly the way we thought and acted. Man didn’t have to be better! At least, not in terms of western thought, he didn’t. He strutted and crowed and told himself just as he was, he was made in the image of God! It was easier to depend on heaven than be responsible on earth, but humans were divinely created, so why worry.”

  “And you don’t believe he was? Human?”

  “He wasn’t what I thought of as sapiens. In my opinion, very few of us were sapiens. Maybe none of us were. Maybe we’d had a chance at becoming sapiens, but we threw it away.”

  “When did mankind do that?”

  “In Nela’s time, I think. It was then that pitiful people who saw no reality and knew no science declared the holiness of reproduction. And while the liberals were preserving the right to beget, the reactionaries were preserving the faults in our gene pool. We could corrupt and destroy all the rest of creation, but our own germ plasm was sacred. It didn’t matter that there were billions of us, that anything sapiens about us was far more threatened by our numbers than by any change we might make in ourselves….”

  “But man was saved, wasn’t he?”

  “You mean out there?” She gestured at the far stars. “Yes, in spite of ourselves, we were. Almost incidentally, we were. But not here. Here priests and prophets are doing what priests and prophets have always done, forbidding their people to become anything except what they already are! No interference. God, what foolishness!” Her shoulders shook and she mopped at her eyes.

  “I know.” The feel of a pat on a shoulder, a hug, a vast unhuman sympathy.

  “Just such a pity, that’s all,” she said, recovering herself with a last shuddering sob. “And when I’m foolish enough to try to improve matters, I have to struggle against all the weight of human nature plus the nature of those upriver. It’s like being married all over again, someone always making rules for me. Sometimes I wonder why you and Asner and I ever settled down among them.”

  His voice was soothing, organlike. “We came here because it was a place we’d never been. And not too long after we got here, you were tired.”

  For an instant she felt an overwhelming sorrow, transmitted into her mind from the other, an irreconcilable grief, shut off as quickly as it came, becoming merely calm, a loving tranquillity that she had learned to depend upon utterly.

  The silent voice went on calmly: “What was it you told me at the time? There were peaceful things you wanted to do. Look at trees, as I recall. And you wanted to plant an English garden. You wanted to sit in a rocking chair and play with kittens and watch horses in the meadow.”

  “There weren’t any cats here on Panubi. Or any horses either.”

  “The ones upriver arranged to provide some for you.”

  “True. I remember that. But after I’d planted my garden, after I’d patted the horses and rocked awhile, why didn’t we leave then?”

  He didn’t answer. He knew the answer, but it did not bear speaking of. Above them in the night came a quiet humming, a purposeful, directional noise.

  “Flier,” he said, to distract her.

  She nodded. “Headed upriver. Someone from Tolerance. Someone from the Council … no, it must be from Boarmus. It’s probably headed for Thrasis. We’ll dock there in the morning and find out.”

  “And you’re still going to do it, in Thrasis?”

  “If you and your great-grandchildren will help me. I can’t do it alone.”

  “You always have my help. Forever.”

  “Then I’m going to do it. I’m going to accomplish that much, at least. I will not let this be a total failure!”

  “They, upriver, won’t like it.”

  “They, upriver, will be presented with a fait accompli. When they let me settle among them, I never agreed to do everything their way. Some things, yes. Not everything. Their way doesn’t work with mankind. They should know that, but they have this stubbornness.”

  “The pot calls the kettle….”

  “Oh, hush.”

  They fell silent, listening to the water, each occupied with memories spreading over galactic distances, over eons of time. Very softly he touched her. Very quietly she folded into his embrace. For a brief time thereafter, neither of them was old.

  Noon in Thrasis. In the Towers of the Daughters of the Prophet, the woman Haifazh sat at her loom in the House of Restitution, as she had done every day for the past half year. Her hands moved, the shuttle flew, her feet moved, the loom clacked; around her scores of other looms clacked and rustled. From the floor below came the muted thwack and murmur of women beating soaked fye stems to separate the core fibers from the rotted skins. From the rooms alongside came the scrape and hum of the spinners as they combed the fibers and turned them into thread. Though the earpieces of her basket helmet were padded to exclude as much sound as possible, and though the blinders on each side prevented her seeing anything except the loom directly before her, Haifazh could tell from the light in the windows that noon had come. Both sides of the wide embrasures were lit; there were no shadows. Time had come for peeing, nursing babies, maybe a little talk. Dawn and dusk were food times. Dark was rest time. Every possible hour of daylight in this place was dedicated to making restitution for having offended her owner.

  She braced herself for the cane that would soon descend on her basket helmet. The old women who used the canes were as hungry and tired as she. Sometimes they let their
fatigue and hunger get the better of them. Sometimes they made a punishment out of the announcement that noon had come.

  The cane knocked on her helmet, not too hard. Thank the prophet for all mercies, she muttered, forgetting for the moment that she did not believe in the mercies of the prophet. At one time she had believed, or had, at least, not disbelieved. Not now. Not here. Not in this place.

  First to the latrines, to relieve herself. She had been cut while in labor with Shira, and sewn up after, as all the women in Thrasis were cut and sewn, first as children of seven and again when a baby was born. Peeing was still painful, but not—she reminded herself—as bad as sex would have been. The first time she’d had that experience, she’d been fifteen; her new owner had been so impatient he’d neglected to gag her, so she’d been punished twice, once by his maladroit maleness, once later by the whip, because she had screamed when it happened.

  She went to the bucket for her water ration, as little as possible, otherwise she might wet herself at the loom during the afternoon. Then to the place against the wall below the windows, where the babies waited. She cuddled Shira to her breast and felt her nipple tugged into the little mouth. Shira never cried, thank the prophet (forgetting again). Girl babies who cried were often gagged.

  The woman to her left was someone new.

  Haifazh leaned forward. “I’m Haifazh,” she introduced herself softly, eyes down. Talking while nursing was discouraged. Talking at other times was forbidden, though they all did it at night, on their pallets along the walls, when darkness hid them and the old women had fallen asleep.

  “Bulerah,” the woman next to her murmured.

  “What’re you in for?” she asked.

  “Bearing a daughter,” the woman answered.

  “Ah.”

  “And you.”

  “The same.”

  It wasn’t the same. She wasn’t in for bearing a daughter, not exactly. Haifazh’s owner hadn’t minded having a girl child, so he said. He had plenty of sons and healthy girl children were a good cash crop, much in demand by the story weavers. Little fingers could tie the tightest knots, take the smallest stitches, and girl children ate less than grown women, much less if one starved them as they approached adulthood. No, it wasn’t having a girl child that had upset Haifazh’s owner but the fact that Haifazh’s flow hadn’t stopped as soon as her owner thought it should. Her uncleanness persisted too long. It was, so her owner said, inconvenient. She should go to the House of Restitution until she was fit once again for his use.