Cirque

by Terry Carr

  Suddenly the flier was jolted, and it pitched sideways; Jamie slammed into the wall of the compartment as the holographer fell against him. She had doubled over instinctively, cradling her camera. The flier rolled, and Jamie, held by his gravity harness, tried to steady the holographer as she tumbled across him. But her hands were slippery with sweat; the camera flew loose and struck him a numbing blow on the right shoulder.

  “Take the stick!” Gloriana shouted at the pilot. Blackness whirled around Jamie; he couldn’t orient his vision. Outside, the light swept across a pale mass that shuddered and bulged. The flier was jolted again, and Jamie saw something ropy and white flash through the lightbeam.

  The holographer managed to climb off him, but the flier was still spinning in air. “Jamie!” Gloriana said. “Giovan’s out!”

  Jamie saw that the young man had slumped in his seat; his head and shoulders were being thrown about as the flier tumbled. “Straighten the stick!” he told Gloriana.

  “I’m trying to!” she snapped. “Jamie, I’ve never flown!”

  He switched off the gravity harness that held him, caught the back of the pilot’s seat and managed to pull himself forward to lean over the pilot’s shoulder. The flier tumbled forward; Jamie fell across the seat-back, but he got hold of the stick and pulled back. The flier seemed to jerk upward. Gloriana grasped him by the shoulders with both hands and pulled him into the seat with her. He lost the stick, the flier yawed crazily, and he caught it again.

  He eased the stick into the upright position and held it steady; the flier righted in the air. Outside, below, the pale creatures surged upward, furred tentacles writhing in the air. The flier was only a few meters above the seething bodies.

  Then one of the tentacles caught the flier, striking it with such force that Jamie was thrown forward against the instrument panel. He pushed off from it and grabbed for the stick again. He pulled it back sharply—and nothing happened.

  The stick moved loosely in its socket. The front port was half covered by the writhing tentacle, its suckers spreading and gripping against the ’glass. The flier began to tumble downward again toward that huge mass of pale bodies.

  There were floor pedals—frantically Jamie shifted position and pressed them. In a gravity flier there must be simple UP and DOWN controls.

  The first pedal he pressed was the right one; the flier rose several meters, but then a weight dragged on it, slowing its rise. Jamie saw another tentacle cross the port, and the flier stopped rising. White suckers opened and closed on the glass like hungry mouths.

  He pressed the antigravity pedal to the floor, but the flier could rise no more; the weight of the bodies on it was holding it back. Once again he pulled on the flight stick, but he could feel that something had broken in the mechanism.

  The flier began to descend as more and more of the creatures below reached up to grasp at it and pull it down.

  Jamie realized suddenly that the creatures made no sound whatever; all he heard was the laboring hum of the flier’s engines. Tentacles writhed across the port in front of him and dim shapes moved below, but they were silent; it was chilling.

  “The lightbeam,” he said then. “Focus it on those things that are holding us.”

  Gloriana understood and moved quickly. The light, which had been directed downward, onto a pulsing ovoid of mottled grey and white flesh, now darted upward and touched one of the tentacles on the ’glass. It quivered and retracted out of sight. The beam touched another; it crawled away, trailing a film of ooze on the port, and Gloriana followed it with the light till it let go and fell.

  “You’re right,” she said, and at the same time he felt the flier begin to rise again. He kept the antigravity pedal pressed to the floor. The light moved back and forth, cutting across pale-furred bodies that tried to crawl onto the flier; at the light’s touch they shuddered and withdrew.

  Behind Jamie the holographer was saying, “Oh yes,” and he heard the hum of her camera again. The slimy trails of tentacles obscured his vision through the port, but the flier continued to rise. The temperature in the flier made Jamie’s vision swim sickeningly.

  The writhing, oozing mass of bodies was falling away farther and farther below. … They were almost free, and Jamie began to feel the vertigo of release.

  Suddenly, with a searing jolt, he realized what that life mass was, and the understanding froze him with horror. The Beast. A blind thing whose body was refuse, whose mind was black sin. The creature of all evil, come to life in the secret depths of the Abyss and feeding on the putrescence of soul and body that was cast daily into the darkness …

  Jamie shook his head. This wasn’t his thought; he knew nothing of the Beast, of the sense of sin that flooded into him. His mind was being invaded by someone else’s vision, a consuming dread that saw these creatures as the embodiment of primordial evil.

  On the ’glass port in front of his eyes, suckers opened and closed, shuddered in the lightbeam and writhed away into the darkness.

  It’s all one enormous creature, he thought. It fills the floor of the Abyss and crawls toward the surface, driven by some awful hunger …

  But I don’t believe that!

  Yet he did, and the fear that went with the understanding mingled with his bewilderment at losing control of his own mind. He saw the Beast-mass pulsing and rising, gathering itself into a mountain of pale flesh as the creatures crawled and scrabbled over each other in their effort to reach the flier. Tentacles flashed sinuously through the darkness; there were thumps below as they struck the underside of the flier. … A dead-white sucker opened and closed on the port right in front of him, its mucous interior clearly visible against the ’glass. It was an obscene sight, and he felt his stomach twist within him.

  Suddenly he struck at the tentacle and began to pound on the ’glass with both hands. He heard a shrill screaming and realized it was his own voice.

  He stopped pounding. Gloriana had grabbed him by the shoulders and was trying to wrestle him back into the seat; his shoulder, the one the camera had struck, sent sharp stabs of pain through him.

  “Stop it, Jamie, stop it! We’re almost out!” It was her voice, Gloriana’s. He must have stopped screaming. For a moment he saw the flier compartment clearly, lit by tiny interior lights, while outside the ports the intense white of the lightbeam sliced across heaving shapes.

  Then the fear came again, filling his body and mind with electric agony. He felt bombs exploding in his stomach, one after another, and they wouldn’t stop. The tentacle crawled on the port; another whipped across it and fastened to the ’glass, suckers gripping.

  “Get us up!” Gloriana said.

  “Yes,” he said, “I know.” He tried to remember how to lift the flier, but the Beast clotted his thoughts. That writhing mass … He fumbled with the useless stick, then remembered: the foot controls.

  He found the antigrav pedal, pressed it, and the flier began to rise again. The pounding against the underside stopped, and his mind seemed to clear.

  The last tentacle slid down the port and the dim shape of the creature fell away. They were free, and they rose in the darkness. Jamie looked up quickly, and saw, far above, a brilliant patch of light: the sky above the Abyss.

  “Are you all right?” Gloriana was asking him.

  “Yes …” He sat up in the seat, disengaging himself from her. Had she been holding him down? “I’m okay now. But I saw—”

  What had he seen? The Beast, monstrous putrescent flesh that pulsed and rose from the floor of the Abyss, bringing endless death with its touch...

  “I know,” said Gloriana. “You saw the Beast. Don’t think about it now; let’s get back to the field. Giovan needs medical help; so do you.”

  His shoulder ached; he felt it gingerly with his left hand and wondered if bones were broken. His whole body was drenched with perspiration. The flier rose, and the lightbeam showed nothing in the darkness now.

  “I think I was crazy,” he said.

  She shook
her head. “No; I saw it too for a while. It was a broadcast—one of the priestesses, I think. It was her vision, and you fell into it.”

  Jamie saw the pilot stirring beside him, trying to sit up. There was a red gash across his forehead. Jamie helped the young man to steady himself.

  “I saw it too,” said the holographer behind them. “But I tuned it out. I was shooting those things down there.”

  Jamie thought: So it wasn’t my own vision. I thought I’d gone completely out of my head, but …

  The sense of writhing, oozing evil returned for a moment in his memory, and he shut it out with an effort of will. But he knew that chill vision would remain with him forever.

  In her textured, dim room in an isolated house on the South Edge, a fifteen-year-old girl who had been sitting in a simple lotus suddenly tensed with pain, broke her lotus and writhed on the floor, uttering soft, bewildered grunts.

  The man who was her attendant rushed to her side and held her, stroking her temples, and murmuring soothingly. But it was many long minutes before her heart slowed and her knotted muscles relaxed.

  Sounds and sights and smells returned slowly, the comforting sensations of the entire city. The monitor saw everything again; she was everyone; she thought their thoughts and felt their breaths, thousands each second, entering and leaving her lungs. She was full again, and the brief nightmare receded to forgotten memory.

  For a few cold seconds she had thought she was only one person.

  Is it possible to see too far?

  Though we see only truth, our vision may be false:

  In open space we see galaxies, but few suns.

  At least, on planets, there are horizons

  where some can see time move.

  —The Book of Causes

  THERE was already a crowd at the Winter Gate. Mostly class children, dozens of them, but quite a few adults too. Nikki-Three wrinkled her nose in disgust—people would do anything to break the monotony of their lives. The foreigner was just a millipede after all, just someone who happened to have a lot of legs and patchy fur like a dog with mange. In fact, it was about as smart as a dog—hadn’t Jordan said millipedes couldn’t even count?

  She smiled joylessly to herself. A crowd of people gathered from all over the city, come to talk with a mangy dog.

  “Are you feeling better?” Jordan asked her, seeing her smile. He had stayed with her even when his class children had dispersed to push their way into the crowd. The two of them, tall gangly Jordan and short fat Nikki, sat in sun-warmed dust outside the Winter Gate and waited.

  “Better that what?” Nikki said wearily. He was so dull; what had Nikki-Two seen in him? But then she was such a drab herself, so unthinking, so unaware, so stupidly eager about everything. It was amazing Nikki-Two could breathe without falling in love with air.

  “You seemed sick earlier,” Jordan said. “And upset. I guess the sun bothers you more than me.”

  She glared at him. “Why? Because I’m fat? Listen, I didn’t make this body and it doesn’t bother me. Who are you to criticize anyway? You’re so tall it probably takes you three minutes to wiggle your toes. You’re a freak.”

  “I lead a long life,” he said with the air of someone who’d said the same thing many times before. “Tell me about Nikki-One—what’s she like?”

  “What do you care?” Nikki-Three said. “She isn’t out—I’m out.”

  “If you call that out,” Jordan said. “Come on, Nikki, I’m curious—what sort of person produces both you and the one I met earlier?”

  “A fat one,” Nikki-Three said. A sloppy, disgusting one who never had anything because she never deserved anything, she thought. A stupid girl who’d wear a hot shawl out into the sun and expect her, Nikki-Three, to carry it around all day. Or was it Nikki-Two who’d put on the shawl? No wonder she had a fat body; how else could she have fit all of them inside?

  Nikki began to struggle out of the shawl; she pulled it over her head, holding down her blouse to cover her cavernous belly button. She dropped the shawl on the ground beside her. Let some other Nikki come back and pick it up, she thought. I’m not going to.

  “Nikki-One,” she said for the benefit of Jordan, who sat waiting patiently for her to say more, “even disgusts herself. That’s why she takes the pills—so she can become someone else. Except she doesn’t; she just gets taken over by the rest of us. She just dies for a while. I guess that’s what she wants, and no wonder.”

  Jordan said, “I took one of these pills once. It was interesting; would you like to hear about it?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Who did you become? Probably a professional hiker and a male belly dancer and a philosopher. One personality for every meter of your body.” She guffawed.

  “Nikki,” he said, “you’re a pain in the ass.” He got up and went to join the crowd waiting for the millipede. Nikki saw him work his way around the fringes of the crowd, looking over people’s heads to get a better view. Some people, she thought sourly, can stand at the back of a crowd and still see everything.

  She felt very alone suddenly. Not that it bothered her, but it was a little boring. She climbed to her feet, glanced at the shawl and went after Jordan. He disappeared into the crowd as she approached; Nikki tried to follow, but the press of bodies was too tight for her. She began to shove her way through.

  “Watch it,” said a young girl, pushing back at her. “You think just because Jordan talks to you, you can do anything you want?”

  Nikki looked down and saw the crisp figure of Robin, looking calm and self-composed even in the middle of this hot crowd.

  “The foreigner’s almost here,” Robin said. “You’re too late to get a good place.”

  Nikki was annoyed by her air of superiority. “I see you aren’t at the front,” she said.

  Robin wandered away from the crowd and began to draw neat squares and triangles in the dust with her heel. “I gave my place to some kid who was interested,” she said.

  Nikki glanced again at the press of bodies and saw that she’d never get through them to find Jordan. Well, good riddance. “You don’t fool me,” she said to Robin. “You’d give just about anything to get a good look at that millipede.”

  “No I wouldn’t,” said Robin. “Just a dumb worm.” She drew lines from the corners of the squares to the points of the triangles. She added a circle, then immediately scuffed it out. “You know what I’d really like?”

  “You’d like to go to bed with your teacher,” Nikki said, feeling deliciously nasty.

  Robin grimaced impatiently. “Do you want to hear or not?”

  A murmur rose in the crowd; Nikki heard someone say he saw the millipede coming. She turned her back to the noise. “All right, tell me. What would you really, really like in your inmost soul?”

  Robin stared at her for a second, then looked down at the figures she’d drawn in the dust. Almost to herself she said, “I really wish somebody would just tell me what everything’s all about. Instead of lessons, I mean, and pilgrimages and stuff. Just tell me what the point of everything is.”

  Nikki laughed in surprise. “There is no point, don’t you know that?”

  “I bet there is,” Robin said. “You just mean you don’t know what it is. And you’re all grown up.”

  Nikki decided that she despised this smug little girl. She was as hateful as the rest of them.

  Then she saw the way Robin was looking at her. Eagerly, hopefully. Waiting for her—Nikki—to tell her something.

  “Look,” she said, “don’t fall into all those sewers they give you. There isn’t any meaning to anything that happens. And don’t take any of their mystical garbage either; that’s the worst of it all. Just take a look at the priestesses and gurus and so on, and compare them with the rest of us. Who’s got the money? Who gets to do whatever they want?”

  Robin went back to drawing in the dust with her heel. She drew a circle again and filled it in, carefully piling up dust around the edges.

  “It’s
people like them who know better than to believe any of the stuff they say,” Nikki told her. It seemed important to make this little girl understand—maybe because she seemed a little like Nikki herself suddenly. “But they want everybody else to think there are purposes and meanings and … values and garbage like that.”

  Robin sighed. “I know. But what’s the point of all that?” She looked up then, right into Nikki’s eyes, and Nikki had to look away. The sun was shining right in the girl’s eyes, making them bright golden mirrors.

  It was so hot out here.

  “Oh well,” said Robin, scuffing out the circle she’d drawn in the dust. “Maybe the millipede will be interesting after all.” She turned away and went toward the crowd, leaving Nikki as though she were a doll run dry of water.

  Nikki hesitated a moment, then followed Robin into the crowd. People moved aside for Robin, who didn’t hesitate to use her elbows, and Nikki pushed her way through the small spaces left in the girl’s wake. Some of the children tried to hold her back, but when Nikki used her bulk they couldn’t stop her.

  Before she’d reached the front of the crowd she heard Jordan talking: “We always meet visitors,” she heard him say. “I know you people come here to learn, because Cirque is a spiritual center, but, you see, we need to learn about everything else.”

  A dry, reedy voice said, “You wish to learn? From me?”

  “That’s right,” said Jordan. “We’re really pretty isolated here. A lot of people come to Cirque, but we seldom go anywhere ourselves. I guess because—well, we love our city.”

  “Cirque is famous for its beauty,” said the reedy voice, “both of sight and mind.”

  Nikki couldn’t get any farther forward; bodies were pressed too closely together at the front of the crowd. Robin had disappeared, burrowing under elbows and hips. Nikki couldn’t see anything but the backs of heads. She stopped pushing; she thought: Everybody always gets there before me.