Cirque

by Terry Carr

  “Numbers are a human perception,” the millipede said. “No other race in the galaxy believes in numbers, you see. There is no number other than one—that is my belief.”

  Nikki wondered if millipedes could divide their personalities as humans did. If this person thinks there’s only one number, can it understand that Nikki-Two and Nikki-Three and I, all put together, equal Nikki-One? It must make even less sense to a millipede than it does to me! The idea struck her as comical: she must be a creature of wonder to this foreigner.

  They had left the Apprentice Quarters behind; now the river wandered in great slow curves through grassy fields dotted by wide-spreading oaks and elms, sky-reaching cedars. Here and there, nestled in the shade of the trees, Nikki saw the small villas of the outer estates area. Horses grazed in the fields on their left, and Nikki thought she saw gazelles leaping in the distance on the right bank.

  The sounds of the city were gone; there was only the smooth flowing of the river and the almost inaudible hum of the gravity boat’s motors. And something else, an intermittent note—an owl? The sun beat down on them and was reflected from the river in winking bursts of light.

  The millipede regarded their wide surroundings silently, and Nikki saw its tiny smile slowly spread. Even Robin lost her sullen look as she became aware of the great soft silence.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Nikki said quietly. She breathed deeply; the air seemed richer out here, scented with the fresh smells of grasses.

  “Yes,” said the millipede. “This is what I mean when I say there is no number but one.”

  The boat rode quietly through the water, the open fields passed, and they moved steadily toward the Final Cataract.

  Annalie had never felt her body so much before; it seemed she couldn’t get out of it. She shifted restlessly on her bed of pillows, searching for a position of comfort, but she continued to feel the textures of satin and organic wool, the weight of her slight body, the pressure of warm air on her face.

  Hands touched her soothingly, but she shrugged them away, making small pushing motions with her palms. She heard herself grunting softly deep in her throat. She kept her eyes tightly closed, trying to search out the places in her mind where she could see and hear the life of the city. But there was nothing.

  She heard voices in the room with her—Livy, Sherrard. She didn’t want to hear them; she needed the familiar sounds of thousands of other voices—the conversations of workmen, shopkeepers and street cleaners, the calls of workers unloading produce from boats north of the Winter Gate. She had heard them all this morning, had smelled the crisp morning air and had felt the rising heat of the day through countless people. But where were they now?

  There was nothing in her mind but darkness—darkness and herself. She wasn’t used to being alone inside.

  Is this me? she wondered. Only darkness?

  No, there was more. Shapes moved faintly behind her eyes, dim patterns of color that drifted and coiled sluggishly. She strained to see them clearly, but they receded down into her depths. She tried to follow them with her mind, but she had no control in here. The colors returned in dim bursts, quickly fading; irregular lines of light formed, pale yellows and greens that curled slowly and receded.

  Her heart pounded in her chest; it seemed to shake her whole being. She wanted to cry out with a thousand other people’s voices.

  The colors turned red—bright, so bright. Her temples felt crushed. Then, as quickly as it had come, the color dimmed, leaving only a mottled pale color that grew slowly, filling more and more of her mind.

  She realized suddenly that it was the color of death, of corpses and the white things that fed off them. And it would not stop growing.

  She began to see movement—dim shiftings, slow and sluggish. She wanted to stop them, she wanted to look away, but there was nowhere else. The dead whiteness formed into shapes that grew and reached for her—

  Annalie. I’m Annalie.

  Something was smothering her; she kicked out and felt her legs caught and held. She gasped in air and tasted thick, putrescent liquid—

  I’m Annalie.

  She opened her eyes.

  Livy knelt beside her bed, watching her anxiously. Sherrard stood by the door. Their forms seemed more distinct than she’d ever seen them; objects in the room looked so sharp and clear: the carved oak dresser by the wall, the low table near the door with its tray of lunch, uneaten. Yet everything was so pale, colors faded and lifeless. Even the shadows gave no depth.

  “Annalie?” Livy reached out to her; the girl’s hand seemed to trail a wake in the air. When it touched Annalie, it felt hot, and Annalie jerked away.

  “What is it, Annalie? What’s happening?”

  Annalie shook her head, too confused to speak. Where was Livy’s mind? Where was Sherrard’s?

  The silence of the room filled her mouth, her nostrils; suddenly she felt a jolt of fear that she couldn’t breathe. She closed her eyes—

  The dead colors were still in there, pulsing and quivering. She moaned softly and forced her eyes open.

  Sherrard came to her side, his steps shaking the room. He bent over her, his features flowing like water. “Annalie, we all love you. Do you know that?”

  Sherrard’s voice, and not Sherrard’s voice; it seemed to come from somewhere else, another room. His words echoed in the halls.

  “I’m so tired,’ she managed to say.

  “You’ve been sick,” said Sherrard’s echoing voice. “Don’t worry. We’re taking care of you.”

  Annalie looked away from the anxiety in his eyes. The walls of the room were hung with soft, embroidered drapes, but the figures writhed and coiled restlessly. Their colors changed; red became green, blue was blazing gold. Nothing was substantial.

  “I can’t hear,” she said.

  She saw Livy lean forward, trailing afterimages. Their eyes met, and Annalie saw the delicate lines of blue in her irises. So strange; she’d never known Livy’s eyes were anything but a pure color.

  “What can’t you hear?” Livy asked. “Can you hear my mind?”

  Annalie continued to stare into her eyes as though that contact would give her entry. The eyes grew pale, became a dull white, disappeared and left only black pupils. Annalie shuddered and looked away.

  “I can’t hear anything, Livy.”

  “I can’t hear you either,” said the girl. “None of us can, not Mithra or Edouard—”

  “I can’t hear the city,” said Annalie, and she felt tears coursing down her cheeks like tiny flows of burning lava. She was powerless to stop them.

  She blinked and saw white. She forced her eyes to stay open.

  “It’s all right,” Livy told her. “We’re monitoring—the three of us. We can do it till you get better.”

  Annalie looked around the room in wonder. She’d spent so many years here, yet she’d never really seen it. The dark wood floor, worn with two centuries of traffic. The drapes, receding now into impenetrable shadow. The heavy wooden door, standing open, and the dark hallway beyond. The darkness out there seemed to move like water in a pool.

  She looked down at herself; her nightclothes were damp with perspiration. She must have torn at her nightshirt in her efforts to breathe; it lay open, exposing her small chest, her prominent bones. A blanket was wrapped around her legs, tangled so that she could barely move. She kicked out weakly, but couldn’t free herself.

  Sherrard unwound the blanket, then lay it over her and drew it up to her neck. Annalie pushed it aside. The room pulsed, pale colors and sharp outlines winking in and out.

  “But I’ve always seen the city,” she said. “I monitored everything even before I came here. Back when I was in the Home—”

  “You’ll get it back,” Livy said. “You’ve been sick.”

  The air was so thick. Were the windows open? Annalie couldn’t see that far through the shadow-choked air.

  “Am I getting better?” (Please.)

  Livy smiled. “Yes, you’re much b
etter. You’ve had a fever, but it’s gone down.”

  “You do know we’ll take care of you, don’t you?” asked Sherrard.

  Annalie remembered a monitor before her. A boy named … Sebastian? Yes, Sebastian. Thin, dark-haired, with such large eyes. When she had been here only a month, he had gone into fever, had cried out at night for a week—more faintly every day. Finally he had died, and none of the assistants had talked of him again. But she remembered how thin he had been when the servants took him out.

  “Sebastian was only ten,” she said. “Marian was next. She died when she was eleven.”

  “You’re not going to die!” said Sherrard. But she heard the quaver in his voice. “We love you—we all do; we won’t let anything happen to you!”

  “I can’t feel your love,” Annalie said hopelessly. “I can’t feel anything.”

  But she could. She felt her own terror, dull now but very real; she felt the throbbing in her temples, the closeness of the air. Her immediate surroundings were sharp and oppressive, and there was nothing else. She was imprisoned.

  Livy said, “You’re just tired. Don’t worry.”

  “But what’s happening in the city? This morning I was watching—I wanted to see what would happen when—” She ran out of breath for speech. What had she been watching anyway? Something in the heart of Cirque, some danger that she knew she must keep in view.

  “The city is just as it always is,” Livy said. “Shall I tell you? That boy, Raymond, the one who fell off a cart—he broke his foot but he’s all right. Right now he’s learning about pain points from his teacher. The man who uncovered an old statue on his estate has called an anthropologist to ask him what it is; he’s excited because he thinks the statue looks like him. Maybe it’s an ancestor.”

  “No,” said Annalie. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “The Council has voted to allow sporting games in three of the riverside parks. They’ll use Cassiodor Fields, the Weasel Meadow and the Stadium—”

  “Livy, you’re trying to hide it from me!”

  Livy stared at her uncertainly. Her face glowed with inner fires, bright in the shadowed room. Then the hidden fires faded, and she was only Livy, beloved Livy. Her face was so plain, so very plain; how would anyone recognize her in a crowd without knowing her heart?

  “I’m not hiding anything,” Livy said. “But there’s so much happening, and I can’t keep up with it, talking out loud—”

  “Oh, Livy!”

  “I know, you miss it. You must; I would too. But I’ll tell you anything you ask. Until you get better.”

  I’ll never get better, Annalie thought. Already the memory of the city was becoming dim, a dream; how could she have seen more than she could now?

  “Will you eat?” asked Sherrard. She looked for him, following the sound of his voice through the moving air till she found his tall figure standing at the foot of her bed. He had brought a new tray to her; he held it out, and she saw thin wedges of cheese, a bowl of broth.

  “Put it near me,” she said. “Here, at my side.”

  Sherrard knelt and set down the tray. He couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “Please eat some of it,” Livy said. “You need it to get better, you know.”

  “All right.” She waved Sherrard away and waited till he left the room. “Listen to me, Livy. I’m not just sick; no one is ever just sick, you know that. There’s a reason for it—something frightened me this morning, and now I can’t even remember. Won’t you tell me?”

  Livy’s eyes shrank away as she stared at her; they became black pinpoints in the whites of her eyes. “I’d tell you anything if I could,” she said. “But what do you think happened? Annalie, you’re sick, that’s all.”

  She saw it then: the expression in Livy’s eyes, her eyes that tried to hide from her gaze, retreating into darkness. Livy was afraid for her. But what did she fear?

  “You know,” said Livy, stumbling over her words, “sometimes people do get sick just from what happens in their bodies. It happens to people who—”

  “It happens when people are mental defectives so that they can’t control their bodies,” said Annalie. “And it happens when people get old and their beings decay. But I’m only fifteen, Livy; I’ve barely used a tenth of my life.”

  Livy looked miserable and tried to mask it. Her eyes found the lunch tray, and she fashioned a hesitant smile. “This will sound selfish,” she said, “but could I—I mean, I’m hungry. I’ve been so worried I forgot to eat anything.”

  “Of course. We’ll share it.”

  Livy sat beside her on the bed and balanced the tray on her lap. She ate a wedge of cheese and pretended to be hungry. She offered cheese to Annalie, and Annalie took it. She nibbled at it, unable to focus attention on food.

  After a while she asked, “Is Edouard any better? I think he caught some of my fear this morning. He’s so young and vulnerable.”

  She saw Livy listening in her mind before she answered. “He’s a lot better now.” Livy smiled faintly. “He got better after you went out of contact, I guess.”

  There was silence between them for a moment. Livy sipped at the broth through a reed straw.

  Then Annalie asked, “Am I too old? Is that what’s happening to me?”

  Livy froze for a moment, almost imperceptibly; but Annalie, with her sharpened perception of things near her body, saw and recognized it.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said. “I’ve burned up my time; I’m dying. After all, I’m older than most of the monitors before me—none of us lives as long as normal people. First we lose our talent, then everything else goes and we die.”

  “No,” said Livy.

  How can I feel cheated to die so young? Annalie thought. I’ve lived so many other people’s lives for years!

  “Admit it,” she said to Livy. “It isn’t your doing; you shouldn’t feel responsible. Am I dying of age?”

  At last Livy looked at her. Her compassion burned like fire.

  “Mithra thinks that’s it,” Livy said softly.

  Annalie sipped at her broth. It tasted dark and rich, as though Sherrard had stocked it with medicines. He probably had, she thought. How terrible to be Sherrard, responsible for the life of a monitor and unable to do more than slip medicines into her broth.

  She looked at Livy and was surprised to find that she felt pity for the girl—because she had to watch a monitor die and know that she was next in line. Livy was seeing a preview of her own death.

  “You can still leave, you know,” Annalie said.

  Livy started. “Why should I leave?”

  “To escape this—what’s happening to me. You could leave—go and live a normal life in the city. No one will force you to serve as monitor if you don’t want to.”

  Livy’s eyes, resting on hers, gleamed with sudden tears; she blinked them back. “I can’t leave here, Annalie; you know that. If I went to the city and tried to live like everyone else, it would be worse. No one can suppress the talent—I’d see and feel everything anyway, and I’d burn out just as quickly.”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t,” said Annalie.

  “Yes, I would. And I’d be of no service to anyone; I wouldn’t be able to focus on any other work, and I wouldn’t be doing the work to which I’m called.”

  Annalie sighed; she knew that was true. When she’d been at the Home, before she’d understood about her talent, she’d tried to live as the others did and had failed. Like it or not, desire it or fear it, she had the monitor’s holopathic talent; it was what made her herself.

  Annalie raised the bowl to her lips and drank deeply, deliberately. The broth had cooled, and its taste seemed bitter, but she forced herself to swallow. And to smile.

  “You know, I think Mithra was wrong,” she said. “I’m feeling a lot better. Livy, I’m sorry to make such a fuss.”

  “Don’t apologize, please. We just want you to get well.”

  She saw the love in Livy’s eyes—yes, and the fear. The girl’s em
otions were so naked; what need was there to see her mind?

  “I will,” Annalie said. “I think I can hear some of them already.”

  But she couldn’t. In her mind was only silence as deep as the Abyss.

  Gloriana had had to issue a special order to have an agricultural flier brought to Guard quarters from the fields north of Cirque. By the time it arrived, loaded with its cargo of poisons, she was behind her schedule for the drop into the Abyss.

  Not that it matters to the things down there, she thought. It’s only my own orderly mind that cares. I want to kill those things, and I want to do it on time too.

  The Abyss plunged into darkness below the flier as it headed due north, toward the Final Cataract on the far rim. The motors of this craft were louder than those Gloriana was used to; people didn’t worry as much about noise in the outlands as they did in Cirque, where the sounds of the many thousands of motors had to be damped if people were to hear their own thinking. The roar of the flier made her edgy; she wanted to get this job over with.

  “Can’t this thing fly any faster?” she asked the pilot. He was a stolid man from the outlands, some sort of minor hill Guard officer. He turned startling grey-blue eyes to her for a moment, then reached forward to move a lever half a notch. The roar of the motors grew still louder.

  “She’s not built for hurrying,” the man said. “Just a spray flier.”

  “All right, but let’s use what speed we can,” said Gloriana.

  The man nodded without looking away from the forward ports. Gloriana studied him disinterestedly: about sixty, born and lived his whole life in the foothills most likely. Family man with eight or ten grandchildren, all of them still living in the hills too. Probably still married to his first wife. Temple twice a week. Probably happy with his life too.

  Maybe I should marry Jamie, she thought. Because I know Jamie’s secret: inside, where even he may not know it, he’s as predictable and reliable as this outland pilot. He’d spend the rest of his life thinking of ways to keep me happy.

  But keeping me happy is going to take more imagination than he has, she thought. What I need is somebody dynamic, lively, strong, and sexy … and also calm, stable, willing to let me make decisions without arguing.