Sideshow

  Probability illegal importation across open border: .967.

  Penalty assessed, Enarae. Fine of cr. 1,000.

  Probability illegal importation perpetrated by category-ten dinka-jin tourist in return for gambling credit: .978.

  Penalty assessed, City Fifteen. Fine of cr. 1,000.

  “Aye,” said the committee, a few of them smiling slightly. C&D machines sometimes seemed capable of a sly humor.

  ITEM 4: Complaint by High Priest, closed-border province of Molock on Panubi. Inhabitants avoiding child sacrifice by escaping via riverboats trading in foodstuffs with neighboring provinces.

  DISPOSITION: Enforcer will investigate and will if necessary assess penalty against riverboat owners or workers or provinces involved. Enforcer will reaffirm to persons in Molock that inhabitants of closed-border provinces have no rights of escape.

  “Aye,” the committee muttered.

  Jacent looked out the window, his mouth moving but making no sound, full of an obscure discomfort. A quick look at the faces around the table showed them unchanged. Obviously, the other members felt the matter of Molock was merely routine.

  “Diversity,” Aunt Syrilla had preached at him. “We neither approve nor disapprove of individual provinces, Jacent. Some of them are, no doubt, quite distasteful, but our interest is higher than approval or disapproval. Even provinces that murder their own children are accorded favorable recognition by us, and in so doing, we continue a chain of diplomacy that has come unbroken from remotest times on Earth itself. We assure the diversity of humanity. No one system has within it all answers to all human needs. So much we know from history. The task set before us is to answer the Great Question of man’s destiny, and from diversity the answer will emerge. So we are taught. So I believe. Only here, on Elsewhere, does diversity exist, and our lives, yours and mine, are given to assuring its continuance.”

  Her tone had been one of auntly concern and lofty assurance. The Great Question and the value of diversity had been drummed into him since childhood, so he’d agreed with her. Of course he’d agreed with her; what member of Council Supervisory could disagree? But still, when one heard the words “child sacrifice,” it did make one pause. He looked around the table again. No one else had even blinked. Well, he would undoubtedly get used to it.

  ITEM 5: Complaint by hemi-province Salt Maresh that hemi-province Choire is overbreeding in order to obtain a few very fine voices, thereby burdening Salt Maresh with supernumerary children, including many who can carry a tune.

  DISPOSITION: Council will suggest to Salt Maresh that it (1) refuse acceptance of children; or (2) that it petition Council for full provincial status, thereby abrogating its agreements with Choire and insuring the integrity of its borders; or (3) that it request Enforcer review of Salt Maresh/Choire mutuality agreements together with whatever solution Enforcer thinks most suitable.

  “Like what?” Jacent whispered to his neighbor, a much older, plumper individual who assented to each disposition in a subdued monotone. Jacent, who had spent the previous year monitoring the C&D machines, had only recently been appointed to this, his first assignment by Council, and was still unfamiliar with it. “What would an Enforcer think suitable?” he asked.

  “Oh, he might decide on a small plague in Choire that would reduce their population to the point they’d need all their children, or maybe a small plague in Salt Maresh to do likewise, or he might decide on a fine against Choire for every child sent to Salt Maresh who isn’t tone-deaf. There’s lots of possibilities.” Jacent’s neighbor scratched his nose. “I’d say the likelihood in this case is a fine, since there’s no real abrogation of contract to get nasty about. You’ve watched the machines for a while, haven’t you? You’ve learned then that before the machines make a disposition, they consider every precedent we’ve accumulated for hundreds of years. We very, very seldom overrule the machines.”

  Jacent put his hand over his mouth to keep from yawning.

  His neighbor looked at him sympathetically. “I know. By the time we get to item number fifty, it’ll really get boring.”

  ITEM 6: Complaint by citizens of New Athens that a tyrant has gained power and is depriving citizens of basic human rights and freedoms.

  DISPOSITION: Constitution of New Athens (q.v., appended) assures all citizens basic human rights and freedoms. Enforcers dispatched to Attend to tyrant and supporters.

  “Aye,” murmured the committee with some satisfaction. Later they would see the recorded consequence of this vote. Some such assassinations made rather exciting viewing.

  ITEM 7: Complaint by citizens of Derbeck that torture and executions by chimi-hounds of suspected malcontents has reached unconscionable numbers.

  DISPOSITION: Derbeck is a theocracy based on religious and political orthodoxy. Arbitrary executions and torture are integral to such systems.

  No penalty.

  “Aye,” said Jacent, yawning once again behind his hand.

  ITEM 8: Complaint by a citizen of Denial …

  “So, what’ve you decided?” asked Danivon Luze. He was sitting on one of Fringe’s fishbone chairs, staring at the object on the nearest stone pedestal.

  She shrugged, as though she hadn’t made up her mind.

  He sighed, shaking his head at her lack of decisiveness. “Don’t wiffle around,” he said, surprising her. “What’s that thing?” He was pointing at the pedestal.

  “A shell,” she replied.

  “It isn’t pretty,” Danivon commented.

  “No,” Fringe admitted. The thing wasn’t pretty. It was the shell of a turtle, one of the Earthian animals man had carried with him throughout all his generations. Fringe had found the shell at the top of a very tall tree on one of the Seldom Isles. Turtles did not climb trees, and yet the shell had been there, sun-faded and empty.

  “Why do you keep it?” Danivon asked.

  Fringe shrugged. He might have read her Book, but that gave him no right to her thoughts. The shell meant mystery. Wonder. How had it come where she had found it? It was like herself, a strangeness, and none of his damned business.

  “And this thing?” Danivon said, stroking a curved element at the top of another pedestal. It was one of the machines she made as a hobby, now in sunlight and therefore in motion. It shivered and glittered as it carried tiny beads of light from its base to its tip, dropping them into nothingness, over and over again.

  “Just something I made,” she said.

  “Why?” he asked. “What’s it good for?”

  She shrugged again. It was good for just being what it was, and if he couldn’t see that, to hell with him.

  He’d been staring at the stuff in her room ever since he arrived. As though it held some kind of message. Some kind of code, maybe. She was becoming fairly annoyed with him.

  “So, when are you going to decide?” he asked.

  “I’ve decided,” said Fringe, thankful he’d stopped looking and started talking. “I’m still a little ambivalent. Partly because you didn’t tell me everything. I’m a good Enforcer and I like being trusted. You should have told me about the petition things.”

  “Zasper told you!”

  “He did, but you should have. Despite that, I’ve decided to go, provided the terms of the contract are recorded and approved.”

  “They are.” He smiled at her, an invitational smile.

  “When, then?” She ignored the invitation.

  “I guess in a couple days.” He sighed. “I’m like you. Ambivalent. I’ve been fooling around, thinking there should be somebody else going with us, thinking someone might show up. Well, maybe there’s someone else, but not here. Not anywhere near. Not that I can get a sniff of.”

  “Maybe on the way,” she suggested.

  “Likely,” he assented with a gloomy face, glancing at her from the corners of his eyes. The woman was like a good bow, all shiny curves and elegant tensions, making his hands itch to stroke her, bend her. There weren’t all that many women Danivon lusted after, not
that many he enjoyed, but those he enjoyed seemed to enjoy him too, so it wasn’t as though he expected some one-sided thing she’d come to regret. But this Fringe Owldark gave him not so much as a twinkly look, not she! She was all quiet-faced business and no joy. Still, he couldn’t misread that tilt to the head, that glance, that tension…. Could he?

  She, meantime, was thinking that even gloomy the man set off drums inside her. Tumty-tumty-tum. Rotten little drums, making her feet twitch as though they wanted to dance, so she’d let them and find herself danced right over some precipice. Enough of that, Fringe Owldark.

  “So, who do we start with?” she asked in her calmest voice.

  “Five of us. You, me, Curvis, and two people from the past. Their names are Nela and Bertran Zy-Czorsky, and they’re joined people.”

  “What the hell is that? And what do you mean, the past?”

  He described Bertran and Nela, their oddity, their odyssey, making it dramatic for her amusement. Though who knew what would amuse this one!

  Fringe succeeded in visualizing this unlikely concatenation only with some revulsion. “They’re going to get parts cloned and be unjoined before we start out, I hope!” she said with fervor.

  He shook his head. “Takes too long. Later. When we get back. Disconnecting them’s the price I offered them, like I offered you twice standard. None of you get paid up front.”

  “Then I sincerely hope there’s no danger where we’re going, Danivon Luze, for these folk sound like a real handicap to me.”

  “There’s that,” he admitted. “Nonetheless….” He stroked the medallion at his neck.

  “Your nose says not.”

  He smiled, surprised. “My nose says not.”

  The motion of his fingers drew her eyes to the medallion around his neck.

  “What are the plans so far?” she asked in a practical voice, staring at the thing he was stroking. Talk of dragons! He was wearing one around his neck, a toothy monster ridden by a robed figure. Man or woman, she couldn’t tell.

  “We fly to Tolerance. Bring your ceremonials along because you’ll need them for your initiation as a CE.”

  “Oh, shit,” she groaned, half under her breath.

  “Can’t serve as a Council Enforcer without being initiated,” he said firmly. “It isn’t done.”

  She grimaced, throwing up her hands. She hadn’t thought about the initiation as Council Enforcer. Damn. She hated that. Attending solemnities was the worst thing about being an Enforcer, even though it was only a semiannual obligation. She liked parade, that was fun, but ritual made her teeth itch, her legs twitch.

  Danivon went on, “From Tolerance, we go to the Curward Isles, and from there to Panubi by boat. We could fly, but the twins need to learn the local language, and that’ll give them time to pick up a smattering. Then once we get to Panubi, we’ll go upstream by riverboat, taking care of routine items as we go.”

  “What do we travel as? Enforcers? Traders? Explorers? What?”

  “Now it’s interesting you should ask that question,” he said thoughtfully. “Boarmus says we’re not the first to go looking around Panubi. Enforcer types have gone there before. I thought it might be better if we didn’t make a big thing out of being Council Enforcers, at least not when we got near the unexplored parts, and when I mentioned it to the Zy-Czorsky twins, they suggested we travel as a sideshow.”

  “As a what?”

  Danivon attempted to explain a sideshow, fumbling for a concept that he only partially understood. Eventually she got the idea, telling herself that the rest of the party were freakish enough, though how she herself would fit into such a pattern eluded her. When Danivon eventually took himself off, saying he’d return on the morrow, she still hadn’t figured out how she’d fit into a troupe of oddities.

  Her best talent was with weapons, but knife throwing or target shooting would call attention to her Enforcer training. Unarmed combat was likewise out. It had to be something else, something that would appeal to the ignorance and superstition rife in low-category places, but not anything overtly violent.

  A late-afternoon sunbeam fell through the tall windows to bring one of her machines to life. Bright bits rose to the top, plunged down, disappeared, only to appear again, rising. The movement was relaxingly repetitive, yet irregular enough to be enjoyably unpredictable. The sporadic rise and fall had been inspired by Bloom’s legs, except that Bloom’s legs carried Bloom, while Fringe’s machine carried nothing but random sparkles.

  Of course, she could make it carry something, if she wanted it to. Something like … omens, maybe. She sat staring and planning for some time as the sun dropped lower, her eyes fixed on the silent gyrations of her devices. When the light went at last, she nodded to herself and went into her secured room to get her tools.

  When Danivon returned the following morning, he found her working on a skeletal array, a bony assemblage of rods and tracks and bright bits of moving mirror reflecting shards of lasered light.

  “What in the devil?”

  “Tell your destiny, Danivon?”

  “My what?”

  “Tell your destiny?”

  He gave her a questioning look. “I suppose.”

  She beckoned him to sit where she was sitting. Before him sprouted a forest of little levers, some gemmed, some plain, some colored, some black, variously shaped.

  “Pick some at random,” she told him. “Any of them.”

  He pressed some half dozen, mostly blue ones. The machine made questioning sounds, hummed, glittered at him as though it were looking him over. Light flickered into his eyes and away, quick mirrored glances. Bells rang, singly and in harmonic series. Small bright capsules plunged down, while others spun off into remote parts of the maze. A capsule was retrieved from some distant siding, edged nearer in repeated orbits, then dropped into a bin before him where it was joined eventually by another and yet another. The machine tinkled and became quiet.

  “Now what,” he asked.

  “See what they say,” she suggested, turning a capsule so he could see the word written on it.

  “Journey,” said one. “Ancient,” said another. “Danger,” said a third.

  “We journey into ancient danger,” she intoned portentously. “But then, we knew that.”

  His mouth dropped open. He closed it with a snap. “You had it set for that message! How random is it?”

  “It won’t repeat itself, if that’s what you mean. Not if I put each word in the pot only once. The capsules aren’t all shaped alike. Actions fit on one track, descriptives on another, entities on a third. It’ll deliver from three to five words, assorted.” She pressed a key, dumping the capsules back into the machine’s innards. “This one is only a sample. It isn’t nearly complicated enough. To be properly impressive, it will have to be more complex, with more noises and movement to it.”

  “What do the levers have to do with it?”

  “Not much,” she admitted. “They all press the same start bar. I’ll change that on the final model. Make different levers start it at different places.”

  He laughed, his eyes squinting shut in amusement. “What do we call it?” he asked. “What’s our hype?”

  “Hype?”

  “That’s what the twins say we need. Hype. They tell me hype is the message that evokes wonder or desire in the observer. Excited words. Loaded language. Hype. Evidently many activities in their time depended upon hype.”

  Fringe considered what would make the device seem more marvelous. “We can say it’s ancient,” she offered. “People are always fascinated by ancient things. We say it was discovered in some uninhabited place. Desolations are intriguing too. Maybe we’ll say something about the mysterious creators of the machine and how they vanished. We’ll call it the Destiny Machine….” She paused, thinking. “Oh, I know! We can pretend the Arbai invented it.”

  “Make it look corroded like the Arbai Door, then.”

  “I’ve never seen the Arbai Door.”

  He
described the convolutions and corrosions of the Door while she nodded thoughtfully. When he had finished, he took in her intent expression and laughed. “Fringe Owldark. I didn’t expect it of you. I marked you as lacking imagination.”

  She flushed, angry at him. “I have as much as I need, Danivon Luze. Isn’t it the kind of thing you wanted?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s quite marvelous. Finish it. Tell me what you need, if anything. You’ll have to have some kind of traveling crate for it. We’re leaving in two days’ time.” He stood smiling at her, obviously enjoying what he was looking at.

  She flushed again, at first in embarrassment, then in annoyance at his smile. It knew too much. It belonged to one who had read her Book. Who had transgressed upon her privacy. “Well then,” she said in an angry voice, “let me get on with it.”

  “It’s almost mealtime,” he wheedled. “You must have a favorite eating place. Let’s go there.”

  She shook her head, still peevish. “No. I should get this thing mostly finished before we go, though I can add the final bits and pieces on the way. Besides, I’m not hungry.” Her palms were wet, and she wiped them on her trousers, a gesture of rejection. “We’ll have plenty of time for lunches in Tolerance.”

  He flushed. “No. Sorry. I’ve received orders….”

  “Orders?”

  “I’m not to return to Tolerance. For some reason old Boarmus wants me to stay clear of the place. He’s invented a job for me in Denial. Curvis will go with you to Tolerance, and I’ll meet you two and the twins in the Curward Isles.”

  She stared at him in bewilderment. Why should Danivon be warned away from Tolerance? Him, a Council Enforcer? She didn’t ask that question, but instead, “Why do I have to go to Tolerance at all then?”

  “Don’t you want to be initiated as a Council Enforcer?” he asked.

  “Is it required?” she demanded.

  “Well … not strictly, no.”