Sideshow

  There was no such occasion. She was never out of hearing of the sailors or other members of their group. After a few days of frustration, Fringe put the matter out of mind. She would deliver the message as soon as possible after reaching Panubi.

  Meantime, the members of the sideshow spent each day on the forward hatch cover, returning to the tiny shared cabins only after the night winds had cooled them. Danivon and Curvis exchanged Enforcer stories and Fringe taught the twins the local trade language. Fringe was a reliable teacher, though more conscientious than talented. Luckily, Nela and Bertran acquired languages easily. The Curward sailors offered considerable help with the more vulgar words, since they called out bawdy suggestions whenever Curvis and the twins practiced their sleight of hand, making things vanish from Curvis’s hands to reappear in Bertran’s, or vice versa. The twins knew they were improving when the sailors quit jeering at their patter and started whistling and telling them jokes in local patois.

  Each morning Danivon stripped to his smalls and poured buckets of seawater over himself, watching Fringe from the corners of his eyes to see if she was appreciating him. He had an appreciable body, or so he’d been told, not that she seemed to notice. Danivon found himself getting peevish about it, spending time contemplating assault, or rape, or both successively. The damned woman would not be anything but impersonal. She would not meet his eyes. Would not … anything.

  “What’s wrong with me?” he asked Curvis in their cabin aboard the ship, peering at himself in the mirror, meantime, to see if he’d grown two heads, though she, Fringe, seemed fonder of two heads than one! She got along well enough with the twins!

  “Nothing,” grunted Curvis. “Nothing the matter with you.”

  “Then why does the fool woman act this way!”

  “Shit, Danivon! We’re on a mission. Attend the Situation. Leave her alone.” Curvis had no objection to women, particularly as cooks or bedmates, but Danivon’s preoccupation with Fringe was becoming an annoyance.

  “I don’t want to,” Danivon said softly. “I just don’t want to. She’s … different.”

  Curvis laughed shortly. “The only difference with that woman is she wants nothing to do with you. It’s the novelty of that fact has you fascinated.” Fringe was not a type that appealed to Curvis, and he did not take Danivon’s infatuation with her at all seriously.

  “Why doesn’t she want to?”

  Curvis glared at him, then grinned. “If you want to understand Fringe, ask Nela. Close as the two halves of a chaffer shell, Fringe and Nela. Bertran will be a good fellow and pretend not to overhear.”

  So Danivon waited until Fringe was below and asked Nela.

  She thought for a moment, recalling things Fringe had said about her childhood. “On the surface, there’s little mystery about Fringe, Danivon. When she was a child, she thought the world began and ended in her daddy. She talks about him, you know, but always about him when she was a toddler, a little child. She was no doubt adorable, as many little beings are. Wide-eyed. Bright-haired. With baby skin and baby talk. So he petted her like a kitten. Then when she grew older and became prickly and difficult, as many young folk do when confronting the reality of the world, he shoved her aside as troublesome. I doubt he meant her harm. He was preoccupied with other problems and had no idea how to deal with a girl-woman.” She shook her head, reflecting that things had not changed much in thousands of years—not so far as families and children were concerned.

  Bertran had the same thought. “It amazes me, Danivon Luze, that human nature, which had changed little in the several thousand years before our time, is still unchanged all these millennia later! Man has swept himself along on wings of technology, but he remains psychologically much the same. As I read it, Char Dorwalk’s life was unconventional enough that it let him in for a good deal of criticism from his class and family. Perfection in his children would have justified his break with convention.”

  “Bertran may be right,” Nela said in a doubtful tone. “Since his daughter was not perfect, she justified nothing. He may have resented her falling short of his expectations.”

  “Which has what to do with me?” growled Danivon.

  “Only this,” said Nela. “Little girls learn about men from their fathers. They learn to trust, or not; to respect, or not. And Fringe may remember her daddy being handsome and charming and herself being of little value to him when push came to shove. And aren’t you handsome and charming also, Danivon Luze?”

  “I wouldn’t treat her like that!”

  “Of course not,” Nela said, turning her attention to the costume she was sewing for Fringe. “Oh, of course you wouldn’t, Danivon Luze.”

  When Danivon left, Bertran asked, “You said, ‘On the surface,’ Nela. What did you mean?”

  She gazed at the sparkling waves, her hands for the moment still. “Only that it’s all too easy an explanation for how Fringe is, Bertran. You know, some people are the way life has made them be …”

  “A truism, dear sister,” he interjected.

  “… and some are the way they are, despite what life hands out. I’m not sure which applies in her case. There is something about Fringe that feels … immutable.”

  Bertran hadn’t noticed it, but he took her word for it.

  Nela was curious enough to mention the matter to Fringe. “He’s a good-looking man,” she said to Fringe. “You’re sure you want nothing to do with him?”

  “Certain sure,” muttered Fringe. “Listen to the man talk. Never a woman mentioned except as someone met on the way who gives him directions to the nearest alehouse. I think that unlikely.”

  “True,” mused Nela. “When a man like that expresses no grief over a lost love, no sorrow over a failed one, it would give one pause.”

  “Perhaps he is simply chivalrous and chooses not to speak of women,” Bertran offered.

  “If he chooses not, it’s because they were so few they are sacred to him or so many he’s forgotten most of them,” Fringe flared up.

  Bertran laughed. “You choose neither to blaspheme his relics nor be added to his trivialities, is that it?”

  Yes. That was it. She thought that was it. “An Enforcer can’t afford that kind of distraction,” she said soberly, believing it quite sincerely.

  The twins had no idea what an Enforcer could afford. Since members of the Craft were habitually either reticent or euphemistic about most aspects of their work, the twins had come to picture Enforcers as made up of equal parts public health inspectors and accountants. Though they asked endless questions about other things, somehow they never thought to find out about Enforcers.

  “I want to know about these Arbai creatures,” demanded Bertran late one afternoon, when they had all wearied of other diversions and were lying about, half insensible from the sun. “And also about these Hobbs Land Gods. The religion in which I was reared would say they cannot exist, but you all seem to accept their existence.”

  Danivon exchanged looks with Curvis. Fringe continued her exploration of her toes, which had lately acquired a pesty itch.

  “Well?” demanded Bertran.

  “What can we tell you,” droned Fringe.

  “Just tell me all about them, or it.”

  Fringe took a deep breath. “Well, as to the Arbai, I can’t tell you much. They made the Doors and scattered them around, and they went extinct from a plague. That’s all anyone knows about them.”

  “Not quite,” said Curvis.

  “That’s all I know,” she said.

  Curvis shook his head. “They wrote books, which have been translated and can be found in the Files, though they don’t make much sense to humans. And they built cities. Actually, there’s quite a bit about them in the Files, if you’re interested. It’s true, though, that they’re extinct.”

  “Well, tell about the Hobbs Land Gods, then,” asked Nela.

  Fringe said, “Some time ago, quite a number of generations, the human settlers on a farm world called Hobbs Land discovered ??
?”

  “Were discovered by,” amended Curvis.

  “… a kind of parasitic growth that propagates through soil and rock and into trees and buildings and flesh….”

  “A kind of net,” said Curvis.

  “A root system,” corrected Danivon. “That grew in people.”

  “And animals,” said Fringe. “That is, intelligent animals. And other races.”

  “How dreadful!” cried Nela. “Couldn’t they kill it?” “They didn’t try,” said Danivon.

  “They liked it,” said Fringe with disgust. “And I would appreciate being allowed to tell this story without interruption. After all, it was my ancestors who fled from the Hobbs Land system, not yours!” She glared at Curvis and Danivon.

  “I didn’t know that,” said Danivon. “Enarae was settled by people from the Hobbs Land system?”

  “I’ll tell it my way, all right?”

  The others subsided.

  “From your tone, I assume this thing, this fungus or whatever, did not kill the people or animals involved,” said Bertran, with such distaste as to imply it had been far better had the stuff killed them instantly.

  “It did not kill them, no,” said Fringe. “It mushed them up with animals and other races until they could all sort of read one another’s minds and it made them into something they called Fauna Sapiens.” She shuddered dramatically. “The point is, of course, that they were all enslaved by this thing, humans and other races both. Once enslaved, some of them sneaked into the galaxy spreading the stuff around!”

  “Saint Sam,” said Curvis, interrupting once more. “Wasn’t it Saint Sam?”

  “Saint Sam was the one who went through the Arbai Door in search of the Thyker prophetess. However, before all that, people went from Hobbs Land to the other planets in the system, to Thyker and Phansure and Ahabar. My forefathers were weapons engineers who lived in one of the northern provinces of Phansure. Our people would not be enslaved! Before the Gods got to their province, they fled all the way across the galaxy to Enarae the First. Even that turned out not to be safe, because the Gods kept spreading.”

  “And no one could kill them, it?”

  “Once it had hold of you …”

  “It must be like a drug,” said Nela firmly. “Something addictive. We had that, in our time. Drugs that could be absolutely lethal, you could know they were going to kill you, but you used them anyhow.”

  “But this wasn’t a drug and it didn’t kill you,” corrected Fringe. “That was it, you see. It didn’t. But it did make people not people anymore. Not human. That’s why my ancestors ran away!”

  “How, not human!” demanded Bertran. The three Enforcers looked at one another and shrugged. “Not human,” muttered Fringe. “That’s all. Enslaved, like I said!”

  “Why did people like it so much if it wasn’t like a drug?” asked Nela in an obstinate voice. “I mean….”

  “Because,” said Fringe, “it sort of … got rid of a lot of their problems, I guess.”

  “Well, drugs do that. Or seem to.”

  “No, this really did. That’s what made it so insidious.”

  “What kind of problems?” asked Bertran.

  Fringe shrugged. “Problems between people. Environmental problems. You know, problems. The kinds people have.”

  “That would be insidious,” he murmured. “You’re saying it was benign, then. Beneficial.”

  “If something makes you a slave, how can it be beneficial,” cried Danivon, shivering angrily. He found the discussion intensely disturbing. “Even if you’re … superficially more … peaceable, if you don’t do it yourself, if it’s imposed on you …”

  Bertran felt argumentative. “Well, in our time, in our religion, for example, we might say a man incapable of solving his problems by himself could do so by God’s grace. Would that have made him a slave to grace?”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Danivon said furiously. “You might have had enough of this grace to solve your problems, but it would still have been just you, individually, not everybody all mushed up together….”

  Bertran said, “You’re talking about some kind of hive mind? People lost their own personalities? Their own minds?”

  Fringe nodded slowly. She hadn’t thought about it in those terms before, but that sounded right. “No diversity,” she added. “They were all alike. Not like here.” All of Enarae— all of Elsewhere—believed this was true. It was the ultimate horror. “They all thought, believed, acted the same.”

  The twins regarded each other with a measure of skepticism. “In our world,” said Nela at last, “there were certain authoritarian regimes that regulated what beliefs people could have. At least, the beliefs that could be publicly spoken of.”

  “We have those too,” said Danivon. “Molock, for example. Also Derbeck. And there’s a whole bunch of totalitarian provinces over by the Throckian Gulf.”

  “People could be imprisoned, or tortured and executed, for saying or writing things indicative of the wrong attitude?” asked Nela.

  Danivon nodded. “Yes, that’s true in Molock and Derbeck too.”

  “Or for trying to escape?”

  “Yes. That’s also true in Thrasis.”

  “We had some societies that were divided along racial lines, with one race being enslaved by another,” Bertran went on.

  “Derbeck again,” said Curvis. “Where the High Houm lord it over the Murrey, and the chimi-hounds over them all.”

  “Or where the military ruled the civilians….”

  “Frick,” said Danivon. “In Frick if you’re not from a military family, you’re nothing.”

  Nela took up the inventory. “Though there were also some supposedly freedom-loving countries, though they had rather burdensome bureaucracies….”

  “New Athens,” said Danivon. “They make a big thing out of freedom in New Athens, but even they know they’re slaves to their bureaucracy. They make jokes about it, but they don’t really think it’s funny.”

  “We had so-called benevolent despotism in some places. Where a strong man ran the country but most of the people approved of the way he did it.”

  “Sandylwaith,” said Curvis. “High Lord Say-so in Sandylwaith. You obey the law—and the law’s sensible mostly, for it’s a peaceful, lovely place, Sandylwaith—and you get along fine. But if you break the law, there’s no second chance. High Lord Say-so will have your ears off first, then your feet and your eyes next, with what’s left of you sitting in the square as a warning to the populace.”

  “Dreadful,” shuddered Nela.

  “Well,” Danivon offered judiciously, “there’s no crime or violence to speak of in Sandylwaith. No thievery. No rape. The people there like the system, even though you might say they’re all slaves of the Lord. Of course, what happens when the current High Lord Say-so dies, who knows? Some of them haven’t been so sensible.”

  “We had religious dictatorships, run by old men, hereditary cultists, where women had no rights at all,” Bertran said.

  “Thrasis,” said Curvis. “We don’t even send female Enforcers to Thrasis. Women go veiled in Thrasis; they are property, first of their begetters and then of whoever they’re sold to. If their owners die, they go into the towers of the prophet, for the prophet owns all otherwise unattached females in the country.”

  “They are all his property,” said Fringe, making a face.

  “Enforcers do not have opinions on the internal matters of provinces,” said Danivon in a mocking tone. “Don’t make faces, Enforcer!”

  He was right! She hadn’t even realized she was doing it. She flushed.

  “Of course,” Danivon went on, “in Beanfields, men have about the same status as women do in Thrasis. Mother-dear rules in Beanfields, and every man is owned by his mother. Not his real mother, but his surro-mother. Whoever his real mother gives him to. When male Enforcers go there, a female Enforcer always goes along as their mother. Otherwise they’re up for grabs.”

  “And thi
s is the diversity you are sworn to preserve?” asked Nela.

  “There are one thousand and three provinces,” said Fringe. “We have mentioned only a tiny few of them. On Elsewhere, mankind is free to be whatever he can, or will.”

  The twins thought about this for a time before Bertran asked, “Let us suppose one of the women of Thrasis wishes to escape. Or one of the—what did you call them? The Murrey?—one of the Murrey from Derbeck? Let us suppose a civilian from Frick grows weary of being ruled by soldiers. What recourse have they?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Danivon. “Recourse?”

  “Are they free to leave?”

  “Of course not,” said Fringe. “Persons must stay in their own place, in the diversity to which they were born.”

  “But …” Nela offered, “if they try to escape, aren’t they being diverse? I mean, even more diverse, when they choose to be something else?”

  “Where would they go?” asked Fringe gently. “There’s no place for them. Except for the middle of Panubi, all the places are taken up.”

  “Whether there is any place for them or not, if they cannot leave, then Elsewhere is not devoted to what I would call diversity,” said Bertran. “All of its people are imprisoned in their own systems, though each system may be different.”

  “What would you call it then?” asked Danivon curiously.

  The twins thought about this for a time. It was Nela who spoke at last.

  “I’d call it a people zoo,” she said. “Just like zoos on Earth of long ago, with all the people in habitats.”

  Fringe and Danivon shared a pitying glance. Poor things. They had no idea what they were talking about at all.

  THREE

  7

  The sideshow arrived in Shallow late one afternoon when the ship dropped anchor near a lagoon of blue lilies, a scene of such tranquillity that it was only the muttering among the sailors that told the travelers something was amiss.