Sideshow

  “Crude,” suggested Fringe. “Brutal, vulgar, common, gross….”

  Yilland couldn’t find a response.

  “Like me,” finished Fringe.

  “That’s not …” She gulped. “That’s not—”

  “Oh, Yilland. Of course it is! That’s what Grandma Gregoria always thought. What she said the day she told me to get out of her sight and never come back. How is Gregoria, by the way? Did she die? Finally?”

  Yilland nodded, her face flaming. “Before Char … before he married Mother. That’s why Mother married him, because he had inherited….”

  Another thing Fringe hadn’t known. But of course, if he’d inherited from Grandma it would have opened up whole new worlds for him! She sighed.

  “Both Pa and Grandma Gregoria were very clear about my being crude. And Trashy. Which is no doubt why I was deposed in your favor. I didn’t find that out until he died, did you know that?”

  Tears ran down Yilland’s face. “I never asked him to. I never even knew you didn’t know. He didn’t tell us you were still around, anywhere. I thought you were gone away, that you didn’t need anything….”

  “And if I had needed anything?” Fringe asked curiously. “Would you or your mama have helped me out?”

  Yilland flushed again, face quivering, and Fringe felt guilty, as though she’d slapped a child.

  “If he inherited from Grandma, what happened to it all?”

  Yilland gestured helplessly. Gone, her waving fingers seemed to say. Evaporated. Vanished. Well, that was typical.

  “Oh, go on home, Yilland,” Fringe said impatiently. “Don’t worry about the claim. I’ll take care of it, because I’m curious, and because you ask me, and for the fee. No, no, you needn’t pay me now. Later will do. When you get yourself married to some classly Professional.”

  Yilland turned a floral red from her neck to her forehead. “I have no right to ask. Mother and I … we thought you had betrayed Char,” she whispered, unable not to confess her true feelings. “Well, he said you had. Betrayed his Professional status by becoming what you are….”

  Fringe felt first a blinding fury, then a surge of laughter coupled with something almost like pity.

  “You have no idea what I am,” she whispered.

  Yilland paled and stepped back.

  “You have no idea,” said Fringe again. “You and your classly mother, and all the self-satisfied people of Enarae. All the folk of Elsewhere! They live because of me and people like me! Char Dorwalk lived on the blood of people like me. It is we who keep you all situated in your familiar worlds, we who keep you comfortable. If it were not for me and those like me keeping things together, those you despise so readily would rise up and eat you! Or the Hobbs Land Gods would swallow you up and perhaps that would be best for you all!”

  It was what Enforcers said about themselves. Even Fringe didn’t believe it all. But at the moment, it felt exactly the right and final thing to say.

  Night in Tolerance, with nine tenths of the population asleep, the corridors still, and only the night shift on monitor duty. These are the vacant hours, the time for inexplicable happenings. Corridor doors deep below ground swing open of themselves. Distant sounds filter through from ancient armories. People waken from dreams sweating, their hearts pounding. Night workers think they see things at the corners of their eyes. There has been more of this lately, a great deal more. The med-techs are concerned, wondering if there is some kind of epidemic brewing.

  If so, Boarmus is a sufferer, wakening at midnight, lungs heaving, as from a dream of torture and despair. The room flickers around him, as though thronged with transparent creatures. He believes he sees faces, hands, arms writhing like tentacles. He knows he hears voices. Dead men. That’s what Boarmus calls them. Dead men. They never used to come here like this, but lately—lately they seem to wander around to suit themselves.

  Boarmus heaves himself out of bed and goes out just as he is, in his rumpled nightshirt, uncorseted and bleary-eyed. The corridors are vacant except for the flickering, wavering shapes he sees along the walls, except for the pairs of dim white orbs following him down the narrow back hall to the secret tubeway, which opens at the sound of his voice and drops him a thousand feet down and horizontally, clanking through voice-code activated security locks before opening into a small metal-walled cube with blank walls.

  Before the former Provost, Chadra Hume, had retired to Heaven, he had brought Boarmus here once. There had been no marks on the walls to guide Chadra Hume then; there are none to guide Boarmus now. He simply has to remember where the touch plates are. Three paces left of the lift door at shoulder height (where he thinks he sees two spectral faces howling into his own). One. Six paces the other side, waist high (where he puts his hands through the guts of a wraith). Two. Straight across from the lift door, eye level (under that clutter of ghostly hands). Three. If he’s done it right, there’ll be a click. If he hasn’t done it right, he must go up, come back down, and try again.

  The click is slow in coming, muffled and reluctant. One of the metal walls moves to the right, leaving a floor-to-ceiling slit at the corner. Boarmus shambles into the opening before the wall stops moving, and it closes behind him as he shuffles down soft-floored twisting corridors flushed with effulgent light. Like being sucked down a glow worm’s guts, he had thought more than once. The corridors are lined with rows of cabinets, all of them stuffed with sensory recordings and official transcripts—a millennium’s worth of records of God knows what by God knows whom!

  The door at the bottom opens into darkness. Only when the door has locked itself behind him do the lights come on, showing the console, the speaker, the transparent plate set into the lower wall and floor through which he can observe the crystalline structures below. This is the Core, the first thing built upon Elsewhere. Before the armory, before the Great Rotunda, before all the ramifications of Tolerance, this was built, an enormous, complicated device extending in repeated spirals down to the limit of vision, deep as a mine, wide as a chasm. Spirits cluster thickly upon the spirals, like rotted grapes upon a dangling vine. Boarmus can’t see them. Not really. But he believes they’re there.

  “Boarmus,” says a dead man in a toneless voice.

  “Here,” he answers. It is cold in this place. It is hard to keep from shivering, but he tells himself it has nothing to do with the ghosts, only with the temperature. He has forgotten to put on a coat. Next time he must remember.

  “You have not come timely, Boarmus.” Gulp.

  Boarmus shrugs elaborately. He calls this voice, one he dislikes, the gulper. Boarmus has studied the biography book, over and over again. He thinks he knows who this voice is, but he dares not address it by name. Perhaps, by now, it has become … someone else. Boarmus shudders inwardly at the thought.

  He has made it a matter of pride not to show fear, not before any of them. Chadra Hume had confessed that he sometimes came back from these nightmare forays shaking in his shoes, pale and sweat-beaded. He had puked, he said, puked like a sick dog, heaving dryly as spit ran down his chin. Boarmus has sworn he will not react so.

  “There’s still a day or two before the deadline,” he says expressionlessly.

  It has not been quite a year yet since his last visit. The rules say annually, when the residents of the Core wake up. A fleeting thought related to this disturbs him, but before he can consider it, the voice goes on.

  “We’ve been waiting. We should not have to wait.” The words accuse him, but the tone doesn’t. The machine has only one tone to serve for everything. One tone for anger, joy, hope, pain. Why should there be more? What do dead men know about such things?

  As for their having waited … why would a dead man wait for anything? Tomorrow or the next day, that’s when they were supposed to waken. Chadra had spoken of his own lengthy waits as he fidgeted about in this icy room forever until some one of the dead men warmed up enough to receive his annual report.

  The voice goes on, still in the same
tone. “Files tells us there are people from the past. Files says there are dragons. Explain these things!”

  So they’d been awake long enough to go burrowing through Files! Damn!

  Boarmus breathes deeply, invoking the deity of deadly boredom. He explains the twins in the dullest possible words, managing to convey a yawn in every sentence. The last thing he wants is for the dead men to become interested. They have rarely been interested up to now. Most often they have merely accepted the annual report that he as Provost has been required to give, and then they have gone away. Less often they have become agitated, like this: demanding and intransigent and threatening. So Boarmus talks of people from the past who had showed up, yes, but dull, dull, nothing to concern yourself with at all. They came through the Arbai Door. Everyone knows about Arbai Doors. Even the dead men know about Arbai Doors, and about this particular Arbai Door, which was found on Panubi when Elsewhere was first settled.

  The matter of dragons, however, he is unable to explain to the dead men’s satisfaction, and the voice of the machine sizzles and pops its irritation, like fat bones in a fire. “You aren’t explaining!”

  “I’ve sent someone to find out about them,” Boarmus says, keeping his throat quiet to avoid tasting the bile at the back of his tongue. “He’s putting together a team right now. If I could explain it, I wouldn’t need anyone to find out about it! I’m sure it’s nothing very important, but when I get a report about it, I’ll let you know.”

  A long, reverberating silence. During such silences, Boarmus imagines the colloquy going on. This dead man talking to that dead man. He hasn’t seen what lies below in the great coiled mass. He doesn’t want to see it. He imagines the insides of those ramified crystalline structures, something far worse than the dinka-jins in City Fifteen, which are quite bad enough. He doesn’t need to see it to know about it. He has read the original specifications several times, specifications informing him that they are down there below, all their fleshy parts severed and cold, white-rimed and asleep; all their mind patterns being awakened once a year to run through the matrix like scurrying pets on an exercise wheel, whirring, whirring as they update themselves and take exercise, prior to going back into unconscious stasis once more. So the specifications say.

  And then his former fleeting thought returns, suddenly, all at once to leave him gasping at his own obtuseness! How could they be here now if the specifications were being adhered to? How could they have been disturbing him, making those ghostlike appearances, if things were as they should be? If things were being done in accordance with the specifications, the dead men could not have wakened until tomorrow!

  With sick realization he knows the dead men have not been sleeping their year-long sleeps, they have not been waking only annually to update their information as the specifications very clearly spell out. Oh, no. Breaze and Bland and the rest of them have been awake! What had Zasper’s silly song said? “Breaze and Bland and Thob and Clore ran till they could run no more.” And what did the song mean? What had they run from or to? From the specifications, maybe? Could that silly children’s rhyme actually date back to the first days of settlement? Well, what else could their being awake mean? That they’ve recently been awakened by something? Or maybe recently chosen to stay awake? All the time? Or only some of the time? Are they doing it now just to harass him?

  The cabinet containing the specifications and the Provosts’ logs and the biography book is outside in the corridor. The biography book has pictures and histories of every person who went into the Core, all one thousand of them. Boarmus knows those faces as he knows his own. In the log each Provost in turn has recorded the substance of his reports to and conversations with the dead men. In addition to these documents there are stacks of private sensory recordings left behind by those in the Core, sweet reminders of youth, probably, so they can relive old times after they wake up and come out.

  Boarmus has only glanced at the logs from time to time. He has never bothered the private sensory records. Of course not! Though, perhaps….

  “Dragons,” says the voice, sounding like another person. Though it is always the same mechanism, sometimes it gives an impression of difference, which means, so Boarmus believes, that it is moved by a different consciousness, a different pattern. He thinks of this voice as female, even motherly. “Have you asked Files about dragons?”

  Boarmus decides to risk it. He is too curious not to risk it. “To whom am I speaking?” he asks courteously.

  “To … Lady Professor Mintier Thob,” says the voice after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Lady Professor, I have asked Files about dragons, of course.” She (it) no doubt knows as well as he that Files holds thousands of years’ worth of dragons. Lizards that are called dragons, extinct and living. Artworks depicting dragons, ancient and modern. Dragons in legends, human and nonhuman. Intelligent races that resemble dragons, both fossils and flesh. Boarmus had perused them all and now says so.

  That humming silence again. “The Arbai resembled dragons,” says the machine. “Files has pictures of them. Files has data. Where is the Arbai Door that was here on Elsewhere when we came?” The words seem tentative, if a machine can be tentative.

  “It was brought to the Great Rotunda during the early days of settlement, and it’s been there ever since,” says Boarmus. “Nothing has come through it before, if that’s what you’re wondering. Besides, there were Arbai Doors everywhere. All across the galaxy. As for the Arbai themselves, they are extinct.”

  “So are we,” says the first voice once more, and for a moment Boarmus believes he can hear hideous laughter. “In a sense. But it doesn’t matter. We can do more … extinct.”

  “If that’s all,” Boarmus says, only with great effort keeping it from sounding like a whimper. He wants out of this place, away from them. He needs to consider the implications of this. He needs to think!

  “No. It isn’t all.” Though the voice is toneless, Boarmus interprets the words as threatening. “Someone has asked questions about us, Provost. Someone has asked questions of Files.”

  His mind shudders in panic, like a child caught in a bit of naughtiness. It was such a little thing! He hadn’t expected them to notice. Possibly he should have expected it, but he had hoped…. Damn. Damn Danivon Luze. Well, Danivon is well away from Tolerance, so what?

  “Tell what happened,” the voice demands.

  “About what?” He feigns ignorance.

  “Someone asking … about us?”

  Boarmus shakes his head, making a tsking sound. “I don’t believe that anyone has knowingly asked about you. From time to time people who are reading history come upon some reference to the early days of settlement, that’s all. Every Great Question Day people consider the early days of settlement, and the committee, and the fact that the members of the committee came here to Elsewhere. That doesn’t mean people know about the Core, or know that you … are still here.”

  “They think we’re dead!” says the voice flatly.

  “They think you lived out your lives here and died, yes. That would have been the normal course of events,” muttered Boarmus. “No one knows about the Core but me.”

  No one had ever known except the current Provost, and his living predecessor(s), if any. Though what difference it would make, Boarmus can’t imagine. Before the first refugees arrived on Elsewhere, the Core had been set deep into immemorial stone, cased in impenetrable vitreon, double housed in a power-shielded hull along with its own storehouses, its own factory, its own power sources. The Core has never depended on Elsewhere for anything! Even if every person on Elsewhere knew about it, what difference would it make? It isn’t as though any fool with a hammer could break in!

  “The person you speak of was not the only person. There were other persons asking about this place, where we are. Asking about this place is also forbidden.”

  Another person? Boarmus swallows. He had no idea someone else had been asking…. “Well, I’d have to review the recent Files to
determine what they actually wanted to know. Questions about … places aren’t forbidden, exactly. Some answers just aren’t available, that’s all.” Boarmus manages to yawn convincingly, though he is in a perfect fever to find out who the voices are speaking of.

  “You’re sending one of the questioners away,” says the dead man.

  Boarmus raises his brows. “If you mean Danivon Luze, he’s the one I’m sending to investigate this business of dragons on Panubi. He’s the best person I have for the job.” Boarmus does not mention the petitions. He hopes the dead men do not know about the petitions. If they are set off by a few harmless questions about history, what will they think of being asked to rethink their position about anything!

  Silence. The silence is somehow worse than the voice, for it has a hungry howling at the back of it, barely detectable. In the vault he believes he sees the dead men twisting like snakes, coiling upward toward the glass. Chadra Hume had confessed to having dreams in which snakelike arms actually came through and seized him. Boarmus shuts his eyes and recites bawdy verses to himself. “Here’s to the girl from Denial /who thought dinka-jins worth a trial….” The dead men are harmless. They may be able to counterfeit appearance and sound (though perhaps it is only suggestion that makes him think he can see and hear them), but they cannot touch him.

  The silence thins into a knife edge of unsound. Then the gulper’s voice once more:

  “We do not want anyone asking questions, Provost. It is not fitting that mere … mortals should question us. Not who we were. Not who we are. We will … rid ourselves of those who ask questions. Likely we will rid ourselves of Danivon Luze. Also the others when we find out who….”

  They will rid themselves? They? How will they manage that? And mere mortals? Where did that come from?

  “Danivon Luze is invaluable to me,” Boarmus blusters.

  “No matter about you,” the voice says, chuckling. “We have the power, Boarmus. All the power. We are becoming … more than mere mortals, Boarmus!” The voice chuckles gulpingly.