Cirque

by Terry Carr

  He tried to see the movement again in his memory, but it was becoming infused with Gloriana’s suggestions. He saw a pale tentacle waving out of darkness, and then suckers and the glint of sunlight on moist skin.

  “I don’t know what I saw,” he said. Suddenly he realized that all the excitement had gone from him. He felt only weariness; he wished he’d never seen anything at all.

  “I don’t know either,” Gloriana said. “But I’d better find out. Take me to Guard Base, Jamie; I’ve got to get out a detail in a gravity flier. We’ll go right down into the Abyss and see what it was, and we’ll take holos.”

  Cirque was a city filled with hundreds of temples—for Centrists, Moslem Orthodox, the Death-in-Life Church, Christians, All-Masters, several Hassidic Zen sects, Universalists, Higher Universalists, the Sufi Muse, the Centrifugal Centrists. There were great cathedrals, mosques with many minarets, an extensive Catacomb of the Meek. In the Southern Apprentice Quarters was a seven-story structure housing the Third Decade Revival Church, where the congregation wore open-heeled shoes and tattooed right arms in the style of twenty years past.

  There were even temples for sects from far places of the globe, like the Hoosier Friends of the Earth; and from other worlds: the Faithful of Procyon, and the Binary Dualists.

  But the oldest of them was the Cathedral of the Five Elements, where Salamander III was priestess. The shrine was just upstream from the Final Cataract of the River Fundament; flowering vines climbed from the banks of the river to the base of the ancient building’s west wall. At the front of the Cathedral rose a massive bonded-brick fireplace which was kept alight at all times.

  Salamander herself tended Fire; it was a holy duty. On this morning she had risen with the sun and breakfasted on upstream trout, and now she busied herself feeding the morning Fire.

  “See, young Erich,” she said to her apprentice, “by caring for the holy body of Fire we increase her life.” Salamander laid the pieces of firewood close together and set the chimney damper at a low point. “Now tell me what would happen to Fire if we did not feed her sufficiently to maintain her life through this day.”

  Beside Salamander, staring with large hazel eyes, the apprentice Erich stirred uncomfortably. He was just eleven years old, not yet dreaming of manhood, still partaking of Elemental purity. “Fire is eternal,” said the youth carefully. “Fire might disappear from our sight, but only as a symbol of punishment for us. We would not see her glory made manifest in our cathedral.”

  Salamander nodded, continuing to tend Fire. She was a slight, wiry woman in her fourth decade; flame-red hair cascaded over her shoulders. She wore a red-brown tunic and skirt; a white cape trailed out behind her like a boat’s wake. “It is time to free your Spirit for the day,” she said. “We can do it in the presence of Fire. What are your regrets?”

  Erich hesitated only a moment; he brushed back a shock of sandy hair from his forehead and said, “I think I hurt my father’s pride last night. He’s been carving a big sideboard with lots of religious stuff on it—he’s got Ram-tseu and St. Francis and lots of others, and on top is the Bo Tree with its branches coming down in a circle around all the saints and gurus. He’s been making it for weeks, and it’s got so much detail! There’s even a little figure of Nefertiti reaching up to the—”

  “What did you do?” asked Salamander.

  “Well, he was telling my mom about it—he’s been talking about it all month, all about how the grain of the wood fit in with everything he wanted to do. …” Salamander frowned impatiently at the boy; he hurried on: “What happened was that I got tired of hearing about it so much. So I told him if he wanted to do something useful, he’d carve designs like circuitry that he could ship to the inner worlds and get a lot of money. You know, he could do those circuits that make up religious symbols … maybe just something Centrist; that would be easy, and there are lots of Centrists in the inner worlds.”

  “You would feel more proud of your father if he were to sell his work offplanet?” Salamander asked.

  Erich shook his head. “It was just that he acted like he’d done something so important. …”

  The boy fell silent under Salamander’s soft gaze. “Anyway, I got tired of it, so I told him wood is for burning, we use it all the time here. Fire consumes it, and that’s what makes it holy—it gets pure again.”

  He looked to Salamander for approval, but she only gazed quietly at him, waiting. After a moment Erich looked away from her eyes. He muttered, “I told him if he really wanted to carve something real, he’d be a fire sculptor.”

  Salamander smiled faintly: it was not such a great sin for a boy to wish his father were more devout. “Fire is only one of the Elements,” she said. “Men like your father work with Spirit.”

  “I know,” Erich said quickly. “I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

  “Then if you regret it,” Salamander said, “we can discard the action. Think of darkness.”

  Erich obediently closed his eyes; Salamander saw his features clear as he cast his thoughts into the Abyss. “Think of the great chasm; visualize its immense emptiness,” she said.

  But the boy’s face tensed suddenly, and he stirred uncomfortably beside her. He made an obvious effort to relax, but she saw that his hands were spread taut in his lap.

  “The Abyss will receive all,” Salamander said, casting her voice in the rhythmic cadences of the ritual. “All fears, all guilts and regrets …”

  The boy twitched and his eyes came open, staring. He shut them tight, straining.

  “Feel the warmth of the Abyss,” Salamander said. “It surrounds you with peace.”

  Erich’s eyes came open again. “I can’t,” he said weakly.

  Salamander sighed. Would the boy never learn even this simple ritual? Softly she asked, “Where is your Spirit right now?”

  He looked anxiously at her. “My Spirit is in the Abyss,” he said dutifully.

  “It is not,” said Salamander. “You own a portion of Spirit, but you are not allowing it freedom within you; you are trying to control it. Is this not true?” She fixed the boy with her eyes. “Where is your Spirit?” she asked very deliberately.

  Erich avoided her gaze; he looked at Fire and at the hard Earth on which they sat. “I was distracted by a broadcast,” he said at last.

  Salamander was not surprised; children always seemed mesmerized by Cirque’s broadcasts, unable or unwilling to tune them out of their minds when more important matters were at hand. It was difficult, she knew, to free one’s Spirit when a broadcast was in progress, because it reached directly into the mind. If one’s concentration wandered—from inattention, from fear, from anything that robbed the innermost will—then a broadcast could dominate the mind.

  She sighed. “What is it that you find more worthy of attention than freeing your Spirit?”

  The boy’s face subsided into a distant expression. He said, “It must have been an illusion. I’ve seen a lot of strange things in the shadows—” The intonations were not his own.

  “Don’t read it out to me!” Salamander ordered. “Tell me what you found so important!”

  “But they’re still up there,” Erich said vaguely. Salamander saw that his eyes were unfocused: the boy was completely lost in the broadcast.

  Curiosity caught her; whatever was being broadcast must truly be very interesting. She tuned in with her own mind.

  She felt the sensation of flying in a glider, smelled the closeness of the air in its compartment, saw the great expanse of the Abyss tilting below her. She was saying, “It was huge. At first it moved slowly, but that last time …” She wanted to turn around to look at Jamie, but her gravity harness prevented it. “It was fast the last time,” she said.

  And in her memory she saw something monstrous loom up out of the Abyss, something that pulsed and quivered, and then something ropy that flashed out of the blackness for a moment. She saw all of that in an instant, and saw it again, and again. Gloriana’s shock pervaded her own
body.

  “Yes, I saw that,” she heard Jamie saying. “Like some fantastic jungle vine whipping through the air.”

  She heard herself speak again, but she paid no attention. She was watching in Gloriana’s memory as the darkness of the Abyss pulsed and threw out that great tentacle. She heard Gloriana and she heard Jamie, but only that vision mattered.

  After a while she realized that the Abyss was gone; the broadcast had ended. She was sitting on the dirt floor of her Cathedral, Erich beside her, Fire leaping and warming them. For a moment she thought she saw a tentacle in the flames, but she cleared her mind.

  The boy said softly, “Salamander?”

  She remembered that she was a priestess. “Yes,” she said.

  “Do you know what it was?” he asked.

  She remembered a time when she had been much younger, had been apprentice under Salamander II. She had spent a long night in the Cathedral, alone, contemplating the ever-burning Fire. She remembered how the flames had seemed to expand, how the darkness had fallen back; and she remembered that on that night she had first felt the true power of her faith. A timeless moment of realization had come to her and she had heard the silence within the sounds of night. But she hadn’t been ready; she had grown afraid, and she had passed from that state of grace. The darkness had come back, had surrounded her, touched her heels and licked at her back, trying to grasp her in strong tentacles …

  “Yes,” she said to Erich, “I know what the creature was.”

  “What, then?”

  “Tell me what being is the eater-of-Earth,” said Salamander. “The drinker-of-Water, quencher-of-Fire—”

  “You mean that was the Beast?” Erich asked, his voice muted with awe.

  “Yes,” she said. “He is rising again.”

  She could feel the cold tips of the creature’s limbs trailing down her back even now, clutching and flailing. She leaned closer to Fire.

  And she wondered what she could do to send the Beast away again, now that it had taken form in the deep darkness at the heart of the city. Others had seen it this time—how many thousands must have seen the broadcast? And the people of Cirque had so little faith today with which to fight the creature. …

  Nikki-Two waited at the side of the street for cart traffic to stop. Beside the intersection stood an unstable-element marker that changed color at short, random intervals; when it changed again, northbound traffic would have to wait. While the electric carts waited, passengers could climb on and off their backbeds.

  Nikki watched the marker impatiently. What if the foreigner should reach the Winter Gate before her, pass through and lose itself in the city? Anxiously she tried to calculate the time it would take her to reach the Gate by cart-hopping against the time the millipede would require to walk there from the Morning Gate. But how fast could a millipede walk? And how many carts would she have to ride to reach the Gate?

  It seemed important to her that she find the foreigner. She didn’t think to wonder why; Nikki-Two felt an urgency about so many things in life. Perhaps because she had been born as an independent personality only a few weeks ago, and even now she managed to come out so seldom. When she was out, there was so much to do!

  The marker changed; traffic slowed to a stop. Nikki chose a cart whose backbed had only two people riding and climbed aboard. The other riders were a young woman and man who were apparently together. Nikki judged their age as under twenty and wondered at the way they dressed: loosely fitting brown and red two-piece suits. It was no fashion she was familiar with.

  “Love to you,” she greeted them. “Do you happen to know how far he’s going?”

  The young woman shrugged bony shoulders. “He doesn’t have a voice horn,” she said. Nikki thought the woman’s straight brown hair was stringy and unattractive, but she liked her wide mouth.

  The man said, “We’re just going as far north as the Final Cataract; we’ll have to change carts soon anyway.”

  “We’re questers,” the woman explained.

  Nikki’s interest quickened. “Religious?” she asked.

  “We’re going to the Cathedral of the Five Elements,” the woman said. “We’ve been granted an audience!”

  She was obviously proud of it, but Nikki wasn’t impressed. Outlanders on quest were always going to the Cathedral of the Five Elements, but to the people of Cirque it was just an outdated holdover from the past.

  The electric cart bumped along over the worn stones that paved Cirque’s streets; Nikki had to hold onto the sides of the backbed to keep from being thrown about.

  “Where are you from?” she asked the couple. Knowing that they were questers explained their unfamiliar clothing at least.

  “We’re both from Springs Crossing,” the young man told her.

  Nikki looked blank; she had never heard of their town either.

  “The priestess of the Cathedral of the Five Elements visited there for a whole fortnight last year,” said the young woman. “It’s over eighty kilometers from Cirque, but she came all that way.”

  Nikki wondered how many kilometers away Aldebaran was. “Did you tune in to the broadcast?” she asked. “You know, the foreigner from Aldebaran?” She twisted in the backbed to see where they were. Jumbled towers rose into the morning air, brightly lit from the east. Still the Apprentice Quarters, then.

  “Foreigner?” said the young woman. “The only broadcast we tuned in to this morning was the one over the Abyss.”

  “Which?” Nikki asked. The driver of their cart seemed to be getting ready to turn off the curving north-south route; she watched as he slowed the cart.

  “Some people were gliding over the Abyss,” said the young man. “They saw something pretty scary down inside it.”

  “There’s nothing in the Abyss,” Nikki said distractedly, still watching what the driver was doing.

  “Oh, yes there is!” said the woman. “It’s something really big, too—you mean you’ve never seen it? But you’re from Cirque, aren’t you? How could you not know about something that big that lives right in the center of your city?”

  Nikki turned to her with some annoyance. “What are you talking about?”

  “The big thing down in the Abyss,” said the woman. “Big and sort of white, with tentacles a kilometer long. Haven’t you seen it?”

  Nikki shook her head, wondering if these people knew what they were talking about. They had tuned in to a broadcast she’d missed—but they must have misunderstood what they’d seen.

  “There’s nothing down in the Abyss,” she said patiently. “It’s just a big hole that goes all the way down to … well, wherever. Depends on your temple. But there’s nothing in it. That’s the whole point.”

  The young woman was smiling now, her wide lips pointing up at the corners in a peculiar quirky expression. “You’re wrong,” she said. “There’s something monstrous and awful down there. The people who saw it thought so too; they were pretty scared. You mean no one ever saw it before, huh?”

  Nikki didn’t have time to argue: the driver had turned his cart onto a side street, one of the radiators that led outward from the Abyss. Nikki craned over the side to look for crossing markers ahead, but saw none.

  “Listen, I have to leave,” she said, and just then the cart slowed for a rut and Nikki took her chance. She jumped heavily off the back of the cart, caught her balance with one hand against the stones of the street, then stood and waved as the cart carried the two young questers away.

  “They should’ve jumped too, if they want to get to that Cathedral,” she said to herself. “He’s going outward, away from it.” She shrugged and looked around to see where she was.

  The cart had carried her outside the Apprentice Quarters. Two-and three-storied homes with wooden pillars carved in the Neo-Greek style lined the streets, several with bas-reliefs over the doors painted in gaudy colors. Large oaks and bay trees shaded the street.

  She turned north at an intersection and hiked for the next traffic marker. The mornin
g sun was warm now, and though she kept to the shade of the trees she began to sweat. She didn’t mind sweating, but she knew Nikki-One did—strange how the two of them could have such differing feelings about precisely the same thing. It wasn’t as though they had different bodies; they literally lived in the same muscles, bones and flesh. Yet when Nikki-One was out and she sweated, it itched and stank to her, whereas to Nikki-Two it was just a free body reaction, like breathing.

  She thought of Gregorian and wondered about her feelings for him. She knew that Nikki-One loved him in a hopelessly dependent way, and the other Nikkis all loved him too in their own ways. And her, Nikki-Two? Well, she … was fond of him; she could see the worries and hopes beneath his abrasive manner. She guessed that meant she loved him.

  But actually, she realized suddenly, she didn’t really react to him directly; whenever she was with Gregorian she tried to treat him nicely, as Nikki-One would … because Nikki-One was painfully afraid of losing him, and Nikki-Two didn’t want to hurt her. Nikki-One, after all, was the “owner” of their body, the one who lived in it most of the time; that ought to give her some rights.

  Not that I wouldn’t be glad to come out more often myself, thought Nikki-Two. She wondered if she might be able to influence Nikki-One to use the parasanity-inducing pills more often. How could she do that? They had no contact within their mind: when Nikki-One was out, Nikki-Two was asleep, and vice versa.

  Could she leave a message? The only way she could think of was through memory; all the Nikkis shared the same memory, of course. Then the idea came to her: the best way to influence Nikki-One to bring her out more often was to enjoy herself to the utmost and leave behind good memories, warm memories, happiness.

  Well, she thought, isn’t that what I do anyhow? Really, I just try to enjoy myself as much as I can.

  She came to a traffic marker and stopped next to it. She sat on the curbstone beneath a dusty cherry tree whose leaves seemed afire with the sun shining through them. She scanned the street to the south. It curved away to the right, filled with many carts: she’d be able to get a ride quickly. Meanwhile, waiting for the marker to change, she leaned against the base of the cherry tree and relaxed. It was delicious to sit for a moment; Nikki’s body wasn’t used to so much walking.