Sideshow (9 page)
“What classes are you good at?” Zasper asked gently.
“General classes, like mathematics and systems technology and weapons.”
“Those are important.”
“Nah. Nobody cares about those. Not for Professional-class girls. Professional-class girls don’t use weapons or math much.”
“What happened today when you fought with the other girl?”
“They put me out of the E&P classes. They told me not to come back.” Her eyes were dry when she told him this. She’d finished crying over it, but the guilt was still with her, some guilt at having failed the classes but more—much more—at having felt glad when they’d thrown her out. How could she be a good E&P daughter for Souile if she was glad when they threw her out!
After that, it was pointless to try very hard at school and too painful to try very hard at home. What was easiest was to be where nobody expected anything from her at all. She spent even more time at Bloom’s, with Zasper, or ricocheting around the Swale.
“I like it better here,” she said. “I’m not always messing up when I’m here.”
“None of the messing up was your fault,” said Zasper, turning away to hide his face. “I like you just as you are. Remember that.”
Oddly enough, the old woman said the same thing. There Fringe was, just going down the alley to the Swale, and there the old woman was, sitting on the low wall that ran along Tyme Street, eating a meat pie.
“You look a bit worn and raggedy today,” said the old woman.
“Everybody hates me,” said Fringe in a nasty voice, thinking it was none of this old person’s business what she looked like.
“I like you just as you are, child,” said the old woman, with a strangely penetrating glance. “Raggedy or not. Sit by me and I’ll buy you a meat pie.”
“Rather have a sweet one,” said Fringe, glaring angrily from beneath gathered brows.
“A sweet one then,” said the old woman, patting the wall beside her, so nothing would do but for Fringe to sit down there and have a hot fruit pie all to herself, fresh from the vendor’s kettle.
“Your name’s Jory, isn’t it?” demanded Fringe. “I know your old man’s name too, he’s Asner.”
“That’s right. What’s yours?”
“Fringe. Are you Professional class?” Fringe asked, wondering who else would have time to sit about all day, eating pies.
“Only in a manner of speaking,” said the old woman. “Actually, I’m not from Enarae at all.” “You’re here all the time.” “Vacationing. Seeing the sights.”
“Not much to see,” snorted Fringe, who, as an habitué of the Swale, thought she had seen it all. “People from Denial and Sandylwaith. Globs once in a while. Dinks from City Fifteen.”
“Dinks. You mean dinka-jins.”
“People parts in boxes,” sneered Fringe. “Obs.”
“They eschew the flesh,” said Jory thoughtfully.
“Hah,” barked Fringe. “Like I said, Obs and Uglies.”
“But they’re still people,” said the old woman. “Interesting people. Some of them are very, very smart.”
“Maybe in City Fifteen they are, but not the ones who come here,” Fringe snorted.
“Possibly not. But still, I like people. Picking them out, you know.”
Fringe didn’t know.
“I picked you out,” said the old woman with a smile. “I really did, Fringe. Did you know that?”
Fringe held her breath. “Why?” she asked.
“Why?” The old woman cocked her head and considered this. “Because you obviously aren’t satisfied with yourself the way you are, that’s why. You keep popping out in all directions, playing at being other people. But then, don’t you get dreadfully tired of people who like themselves a lot? Just the way they are?”
Fringe’s eyes stared wide in wonder. “How did you know that?”
“Well, because we’re alike, I guess. Both special in our own way. And then, too, I’ve spent years and years picking out people, all over Elsewhere.”
This came so close to her dream that Fringe didn’t dare listen, didn’t dare believe! “How can they be special if there’s a lot of them?” she sneered, sure it was all deception.
“Not lots! I never said lots. I said all over Elsewhere. Someday you’ll come visit me, perhaps, and I’ll tell you all about them. Introduce you to them.”
Though it was possible the old woman might actually be telling the truth, Fringe took the promise with a grain of salt. It would hurt to believe it and find out it wasn’t true. Grownups were always making promises they didn’t keep.
3
Great Question Day on Elsewhere.
Carnivals and street dancing and solemnities. Processions with bands and clowns and red and gold banners. Music from the rooftops, and children going from door to door begging candy for the traditional give and take:
“Where is the Great Question asked now, child?”
“On Elsewhere, only on Elsewhere!”
“Why only here, child?”
“Because only on Elsewhere are there any humans left!”
“Long ago, where did they ask the Great Question, child?”
“At Brannigan Galaxity! They asked it there!”
A rattle of candies into the proffered container. A whoop and a scamper, off to the next house.
Brannigan Galaxity.
Oh, say the name reverently. Say it with awe. Say it as you might utter the secret name of God.
The center of the academic universe. The repository of all knowledge. The hub around which all reputable research had revolved. The quintessential fount of academe that was.
“Brannigan,” the human teacher had said, in the remote village on the tiny world, laying her human hands upon the heads of her rose-lipped charges. “Study hard and maybe you’ll get to go to Brannigan.”
“Apply effort diligently,” the docentdroids had cried on the eduscreens, to urb-pale students they would never touch, never see. “You may be selected for Brannigan.”
Fat chance. One in ten million had been accepted at Brannigan. Unquestioned and prodigious genius might have gained an interview, if one had known the right people, if one’s parents and grandparents had gone there, if one had been on the AA list. Otherwise, dream on!
Vast auditoria reverberating to words deathless as Scripture. Laboratories where ideas fell thick as pollen, packed with potentiality. Hallways vibrant with scuttering youth, with striding maturity, with ponderous age. Ramified structures, lofty towers, cloud-touched, star-noticed, sky-surrounded.
Voices raised in song:
Brannigan we sing to thee!
A thousand colleges, each with its own history, its own traditions, its own glories to recount. A thousand colleges, each with its own feudally owned worlds to provide goods and services, each with its own recruiters at large in the star-whirl, moving among the lesser schools like sharks among the shoals, picking the little scholar fish who would grow into the intellectual leviathans of the future!
Fountain of diversity!
Libraries sprawling in wandering tunnels of stone across continents of lawn. Mile-long stacks, loaded with volumes numerous as stars, copies of copies of copies from originals long ago turned to dust. Automatic retrieval ladders disappearing into the retreating distance of painted ceilings where figures out of forgotten legend disported themselves. Was that Wisdom teaching the multitude? Or the Queen of Denacia, issuing writs of attainder to her bailiffs? Was that Agriculture with the garden springing up at his feet? Or was it the Winter God Hembadom, readying himself to trample the fertile worlds of Borx? One time the docents had known, had pointed upward while lecturing to legions of tourists and hopeful candidates.
Here twisting stairs clattering beneath niagaras of pounding feet. There dim corridors, endless as roads, running into vaulted passages that grew silent as they left the tenanted areas. And there, at the end, corroded doors opened upon cavernous spaces shrouded in cobwebs, home to the beetle and the fly, where bindings were only templates of green mold
and pages had turned to inscrutable powder. No matter. All that was here was also in Files, incorruptible.
May thy golden towers rise …
Brannigan: glorious with the names of former scholars who had risen to untold heights: the Chairman of the Council of worlds; the Emperor of Eltein; the Goddess-elect of Vamie; the Virgin Inheritor of Rham….
As a beacon for the wise….
Brannigan: whose emeriti had stood in glittering rows along the Halls of Tomorrow, preserved in impenetrable vitreon, awaiting the day the Great Question would be answered. They were to have been raised then, from senescence into eternal youth.
Immortal may thy children be….
Lost. All lost except the Great Question itself. Gone, Brannigan. Gone the towers, the libraries, the teachers, the students. Gone the hope, the pride. Gone as all the galaxy is gone, down the gullets of the Hobbs Land Gods, leaving only …
The Great Question, the Only Question, still to be answered by this remnant at the end of the star-wheel, this tiny spark against the long-dark:
WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE DESTINY OF MAN?
On Earth, success followed success for Mulhollan’s Marvelous Circus. Despite Sizzy’s adjurations of modesty and humility, Nela and Bertran sometimes felt they were indeed the main event. Sometimes they were sure the whole circus focused on the freaks in the sideshow tent where the attraction was the people themselves. Other attractions were only tricks, as when a monkey pedaled a bicycle or a bear juggled a barrel or someone did three somersaults between the trapezes. But in the sideshow, no matter how professional their act, it wasn’t the tricks or the sparkle that mattered. It was they, the sideshow artists, who were the show, what they were and suffered. It was their oddity that brought people in.
“Turtledove writes that he is terribly proud of us,” said Nela. “We have been reviewed in
The New York Times.”
“It isn’t easy, being a jackplane,” Bertran admitted with a wry grin. “But we’re getting good at it!”
Even so, oddity alone would not satisfy the audience once it had seen. Once the spectators had sated their curiosity about whatever peculiarity had piqued them, many of them lingered, looking for something more. Nela learned to recognize that searching stare fixed on her, on Bertran, that perusing eye that caught her own and asked recognition of it. And when she nodded or smiled, acknowledging the unspoken question, the viewer nodded too, as though saying to himself, herself,
Why, she’s like me, he’s like me, no matter what they look like, they’re like me after all.
It was the oddity that brought them in, but it was the humanity that let them go again.
“If they wanted only difference,” Nela explained her thought to Bertran, “they’d go to an aquarium. Or to a museum, to see a collection of fossils. They’d seek out spiny creatures, things with many legs, aliens, weirdnesses, but they don’t go there, they come here, where the strangeness is people, because it isn’t the strangeness they’re really looking for, but the fact we’re people, no matter how we look. It’s the identity under our skins they want to assure themselves of. Now, I wonder why that is?”
It seemed to Nela there had to be a reason. Something beyond mere curiosity. Something, as she sometimes thought, intended.
Bertran agreed it was the humanity behind the freakiness the audience wanted to see. However, he said, though most of them went away afterward chattering and relieved, some of them were strangely silent, as though the humanity behind the barker’s chatter had not been enough. “They’re looking for something they don’t find,” he said, wondering what they were looking for. Something more meaningful or knowing. Some definition, perhaps, of what humanity was, a definition that
had
to be sought in sideshows because the answer could not, never would be found among ordinary, everyday mankind.
“Turtledove believes that people are seeking an oracle,” Nela said. She often quoted Turtledove as saying things she herself felt or thought but, for some reason, did not want to have to defend as her own opinion. “People want a seer.” Though she wasn’t sure, she thought this might be true. People wanted someone to drop key words in their ears, the revelation
they needed right then; help, surcease, pity, forgiveness, hope—the secret of existence. They were looking for all those things in a sideshow because they hadn’t found them anywhere else.
The audience didn’t get any of that. Not help nor hope. All it got was a moment’s wonder, a wink of complicity, plus magical rings, disappearing scarves, and patter. “Which is all we’ve got to give, Nelly,” said Bertran. When he said it, he believed he spoke the truth.
It was during the third European tour, ten years after the twins had joined the show (Turtledove, they told one another, had just won an international violin competition and had fallen in love with a girl named Sylvia Syllabub who played the bassoon), that Bertran and Nela met the Alien. The circus was performing in Rakovnik in Czechoslovakia, in a building constructed for year-round performances of circuses. Bertran and Nela had just left the sideshow after the last performance. The rest of the artists had joined the performers and support personnel to discuss a minor wage problem they were having, something to do with the rate of exchange. Bertran said he and Nela had talked about it enough, that they were going back to their trailer. Nela, as was unavoidable when Bertran made pronouncements, went along. They were still dressed for display: Nela, fluffy and pretty in her sequined and beruffled dress; Bertran, saturnine and handsome in his tails and stiff shirt.
Both were in good spirits, their mood currently rising after a few days of that episodic and paralyzing depression they had long ago learned to recognize, a depression that physicians over the years had blamed upon the weather, the work, or perhaps on Nela’s ovaries or whatever they were attempting to be cyclical. Nela herself called the episodes NMS, or nonmenstrual syndrome, and both she and Bertran had learned to suffer through them stoically (eschewing any thoughts of suicide until later) in anticipation of the euphoria that very frequently ensued. Bertran was reading a note that had been passed to Nela during the performance, and his current upswing kept him cheerful about it, though he didn’t find the contents honestly amusing.
“This man wants to marry you,” he said with a wry grin.
“I know. That’s my fifteenth proposal, Berty. I’ve kept count.”
“They never want to marry me.” He pulled a long face. “Here I am. Always a bridesmaid….”
“Well, they want to do what they
do
want to do, with you.”
It was true that Bertran had been propositioned from time to time. “Only because you’d be there,” he said. “Your inescapable presence makes the prospect excitingly wicked.” Bertran contorted his mouth as though to spit. He claimed not to be intrigued by those who propositioned him, though he sometimes found Nela’s suitors truly amusing.
She shook her head, pouting. “I think the ones who want to marry me want it for the same reason. Let’s tell this one yes and see what happens. What’s his name? Ladislav Something?”
“Poor fish. When you tell him I’m coming along on the honeymoon, he’ll gasp and his little gills will quiver. He probably thinks we’re a fake.”
She nodded in agreement as they swerved to the right, into the stables, where they moved between two lines of glossy horses, all munching, stamping, looking up with glowing dark eyes to greet whoever was coming through. The twins enjoyed this short detour after every show, and they paused to stroke sleek flanks and soft muzzles, receiving whickers and nuzzles in return.
“Why do these crazies want to marry me, Berty?”
“Because you’re exotic,” he said. “Beautiful, but very, very strange. It’s the same thing we’ve talked about before. Some people hunger for the strange because they have not found answers in their ordinary lives. They want to be different.”
“None of them would trade places with us. We’re different.”
He thought about it. “Well, perhaps they desire singularity more than difference. They feel their humanity is not all, not everything, not enough. They feel strangeness immanent inside them, and they want to understand it as singularity without displaying it as oddity. They want to be pointed out for their distinction, not because they’re weird.” He looked down at her. “Or, perhaps, they lust after variety, diversity, newness. Who knows?”
Bertran’s gaiety flattened somewhat as he considered the matter. From time to time, unpredictably, he quivered with indefinable longings and nostalgic melancholy quite distinct from the depressive episodes, times during which he thought he must be yearning for some place he had forgotten or had
not yet seen. He called these moods
ubalgia
, where-pain, but only privately, to himself, never speaking of them, not even to this, his probably dearest and certainly nearest kin. From time to time he dreamed, dark reflections of dreams he had had in childhood, now more erotic and more perilous. He tried not to dwell on these, either, realizing without asking that he was probably not alone.
During one late, restless night fairly recently, in fact, Nela had spoken into the empty darkness, almost a whisper, as though to herself.
“I want to sleep. Except I dream about Turtledove, at least he starts out as Turtledove, but then he turns into the heavy little turtle who spied on the birds. ‘Gray thorn and gray leaf and gray wind rising.’” Her voice had seemed to inhabit the darkness like a lost spirit. “And then suddenly he has feathers, and he is Turtledove, really, with wings and he’s reaching for me, calling me, Mommy, Mommy, and I’m trying to find him….”
Her words summoned a picture of a moon peering through mist while voices from childhood called in the dark, “Berty! Where are you, Berty?” Fog and autumn smoke, and a nostalgia bittersweet. Where had it been? Who had been calling him? Not Mother. She had called “Nai-lah … Ber-tee,” both names, always. Who was it who had called him alone, just him, as though he could answer as the turtle had answered, alone, “Here I am!” That’s what the little turtle had cried when he heard his friends calling, his plodding, heavy little friends, searching for their longlost comrade, high on the windy mountain.
Caught in his where-pain, Bertran hadn’t responded to Nela’s whisper in the shared dark. Instead, he had lain quiet, pretending he hadn’t heard, and after a time he had fallen asleep. The memory hadn’t left him, though, and it was of that calling voice he was thinking as they emerged from the stables with the last of the sunset in their eyes, a rose-violet glow, bright enough that the figure stepping from behind the nearest wagon was silhouetted against the light and showed, for that moment only, as a stalky and featureless blackness.
“Please do not be alarmed,” it said. “I am not from your world. May I have a moment of your time?”
The accent was patrician, if anything, delivered in a mellow though slightly raspy baritone. It was Alistair Cooke’s voice. Bertran immediately guessed it was intended to be reassuring,
since anyone with senses would know at once the creature was not human. Not human, not animal, not earthly at all. Bertran had been with the circus for over a decade. He and Nela had traveled over most of the world, the more thickly populated parts of it anyhow, and nowhere had they seen or heard of a striated, very skinny, seven-foot-tall, L-shaped creature with four legs at the bottom and two arms at the top, centaur style, rather pale in color and looking much like a huge stalky vegetable. There were even frilly protrusions at the top and at the joints of the extremities that appeared leaflike.
Nela thought, from the midst of an icy calm, that if one scattered some facial features at the top of an immense stalk of bent celery, it would resemble what confronted them. Without panic (even while reminding herself she would undoubtedly have hysterics later) she studied the creature as she waited for Bertran to respond. In cases of surprise or emergency, it was easier to let Bertran do the talking because even if she spoke, he would invariably interrupt her.
“What did you want to talk about?” asked Bertran, his voice betraying no apprehension, though he felt it. It had been a long time since he’d been startled over anything—working circus tended to make one almost startle-proof—but this thing had appeared when he was already feeling somewhat off balance, and there was a definite yaw in his perceptions.
The Alien took a moment before answering, “We have come from a far place. We would like to talk with you about—our presenting a Boon.”
The creature’s face wasn’t much. A small vertical orifice that emitted speech, another two or three triangular depressions of ambiguous purpose, several roundish ones that glinted rather like eyes, or at least more like eyes than anything else. It had a strong vegetal smell, also. A summery smell. Heavy, but not unpleasant. Like mown hay and gardenias over a faint breath of rain-wet soil.
“We’ve got some time,” said Bertran. “If you’d like to come to our trailer.” He rather wanted to get out of sight, preferring that this encounter continue without witnesses. The instinct to hide was a holdover from childhood, when any new or possibly embarrassing thing needed to be considered in private before the twins were forced to deal with it in the public gaze. Even if the Alien proved dangerous, it would be better to meet that danger in private. So his blood said, hammering
in his ears, no matter what cautions his brain urged upon him.
The Alien nodded. Since it had no neck, the whole body bobbed, almost a curtsy, the four bottom legs folding and unfolding like springs. They were set at right angles to the body, like insect legs, and looked tacked on. Assembled. Like a plastic toy. Fit pegs A, one through four, into holes B, likewise.
The twins moved toward their trailer, at first tentatively, then picking up speed as the thing trundled closely behind. Nela hoped the other sideshow people were still involved with their meeting. If this parade was observed, she and Bertran would never hear the end of it. My God, that time the baby goat from the animal act had become enamored of Bertran and had followed them home, they had been baa-ed at by their colleagues for days! What would they say about this?
The creature had some trouble getting into the trailer. Human-type steps were obviously not spaced well for its legs. Once inside, however, it managed to curve itself into a chair and tuck its bottom appendages beneath and around it, out of the way, showing that it knew what chairs were for, though it obviously needed one of a different shape.
“My name is m’dk’v*dak’dm#,” [Muh-click-duhk-click-vuh-rasp-dak-click-duhm-gurgle] the thing said, making a chain of mechanical and consonantal sounds.
“I’m afraid I’d find that a little hard to say,” said Bertran with his most studiedly charming smile. He patted at the sweat along his hairline with an immaculate handkerchief. His breath was slowing. Both he and Nela were growing calmer. The thing did not seem threatening at all. “Would you mind if we called you Celery.” He put the handkerchief before his mouth to hide the fact he was nervously chewing his lower lip.
“Celery,” the Alien said in a musing voice. “Vegetable. Comestible. Considered worthy. Valued. Often associated with ritual or holiday occasions shared with kin and close friends. In some cuisines, a customary ingredient. No inimical implications. Why not Celery.”
Bertran nodded and smiled in automatic response as he and Nela moved to their usual places on the small couch across from the single chair. There were some folding chairs in the closet, for occasions when they had more company, but usually the couch, the chair, and the dining table with its two benches were all they needed for seating during tour. They
