Sideshow

  “The outrage thus far is quite enough,” said Curvis. “Fringe has done the same thing old Paff did, taken someone from her proper place. She’s broken the basic law of Elsewhere, and I can’t simply ignore it!”

  “Your law is wrong,” said Nela in a firm voice.

  Curvis replied stiffly, “You may find the concept of our law unfamiliar….”

  “Actually, the concept isn’t unfamiliar,” Bertran commented in a dry voice. “Though Nela may not remember. In our world there were a number of smallish countries ruled by unpleasant types, and our country occasionally invaded one of them to set something right….”

  “Killing numerous innocent bystanders in the process,” snapped Nela with a toss of her head. “As well as a good many of their soldiers, or ours.”

  “… and people took sides as to whether it was morally defensible for us to have done so,” Bertran concluded mildly.

  “It was not defensible,” said Nela definitely. “Because at the same time we were invading these bad smallish countries, our politicians were making excuses for our groveling around bad large countries who treated their citizens even worse! I think people should kick out their own despots.”

  “Killing numerous innocent bystanders in the process,” said Bertran dryly. “As well as a good many of themselves.”

  Nela glared at him and worked her mouth as though tasting what she intended to say next.

  Before she could speak, Curvis said, “We Enforcers are taught that we must not set ourselves up as judges. Fringe knows that!”

  “She may know it, but she does judge,” cried Nela. “I saw her face when that monster swallowed the child in the basket! She tried not to show any feeling, but her face betrayed her!”

  “Had it been up to you, you would have rescued the child?” asked Jory in an interested voice.

  “I would.”

  “But you just said one shouldn’t intervene.”

  Nela flushed. “That’s different. The child wasn’t in some foreign country. It was on the river all alone.”

  “Don’t you think a man being tortured in a dungeon feels all alone?” asked Bertran. “No matter what country he’s in?”

  Nela shook her head at him. “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t.” He felt a sudden spurt of anger at her assumption. Why should she believe he always knew what she meant! He didn’t. Sometimes he didn’t care! “I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean. When we were with the circus, I read about a group of seamen and their captain who were captured by a country hostile to their own. The hostiles confined them, tortured the captain, humiliated him, eventually sold him and his men back to their own country for ransom. Of course, the hostiles felt that when they’d humiliated the captain, they’d humiliated his country, which was very satisfying.

  “The point is, after his return, the captain confessed that he and his men had prayed every day that their country would end their pain and wipe out their humiliation by totally destroying the city where they were being held, where their captors were. They were eager to die if it meant they would be avenged. They felt death was preferable to confinement, torture, and humiliation. The captain wrote, ‘It is better to die than be used by evil for evil’s purposes.’

  “Emotionally, I think I’m on the side of intervention. Nela, however, seems to feel differently, and on this world—”

  “On this world,” interrupted Curvis in a furious whisper, “the question does not arise. We do not think of provinces as ‘evil.’ We do not think of death or torture or human sacrifice as ‘evil.’ That is simply the custom in certain places, and intervention is always wrong, no matter who is being saved or for what or who or what is being risked! We intervene only to maintain the status quo!”

  The twins were silenced by his vehemence. His seemed to be the last word on the subject. They fell silent, closed in by the dark that hid everything except the stars and the deeper blackness of the banks whenever the Dove came close to one shore or the other as it tacked upstream. The ship’s progress was made up of long diagonal runs followed by laborious changes of direction. The silent thoughts of those along the rail were accompanied only by the humming of the wind among the shrouds and the rattle of the sails when they came about on a new tack. Then, as they approached the southern shore, Jory took a deep breath, almost a sigh.

  “There,” she said softly. “Along the bank. As I suspected.”

  In moments they all saw what she did, a line of luminescent blotches moving along the southern bank, staying even with the Dove as it made its slow way upstream. Those at the railing blinked, to be sure they were indeed seeing something. Jory shivered uncontrollably. Asner put his arms about her.

  “What’s the matter with her?” whispered Nela.

  “She’s frightened,” said Asner. “And so am I.”

  “Of those?”

  “We’ve seen something like them earlier tonight,” he reminded her.

  “In Derbeck,” commented Curvis. “Before Chimi-ahm appeared. The shapes in the smoke.”

  Hearing the alarm in their voices, Fringe left the unconscious girl and returned to the rail where she was joined by Danivon. They peered at the southern shore, trying to make sense of the featureless blobs.

  “Ghosts,” said Danivon, remembering Boarmus’s message.

  “No one said anything to me about ghosts,” said Curvis, annoyed once again.

  Danivon shook his head, though he had no doubt these were what Boarmus had warned him against. The elder Luzes came to rejoin the group, peering at the blobs, taking what comfort they could in the company of others as they watched the strange pursuers. Though not large, at least not at the distance they were being observed from the ship, they were numerous, moving with deliberation. No barrier prevented their progress, no copse of trees or swampy morass, not even lofty ramparts of stone, several of which reared against the stars as they moved upriver. The shapes kept precisely even with the ship, slowing when the wind fell, speeding when it grew brisker, growing more numerous the farther they went.

  Curvis found this persistence menacing though he refused to admit it to himself. “Perhaps they are something sent from Tolerance,” he suggested. “By Council Supervisory.”

  “No,” Jory replied, turning to put her back to the rail. “I rather imagine your Council would be as surprised at them—and as frightened—as I am.”

  “I’m not frightened,” Danivon snarled. “Why should I be?”

  “You should be because you’re not a fool, no matter you are a cockerel who crows before he thinks,” she whispered. “You say Boarmus warned you about ghosts. What did he mean?”

  Danivon muttered, “I don’t know what he meant.”

  “Ghosts of whom?” asked Asner, peering through the darkness at the flapping forms, now so close they could be seen as separate things with definite edges rather than mere blotches of pale fire. “Or of what?”

  After a long moment of staring silence, Jory turned toward the others, her eyes gleaming in the dim light from the wheel-house as she fixed them with a percipient gaze, cocking her head to one side. “Have any of you heard of the Arbai?”

  After a moment’s silence, Bertran replied, “We know only what Fringe and Curvis told us. It was an Arbai Door we fell through on Earth and arrived through here.” His eyes were fixed on the ominous shapes. “The Arbai spread such Doors about, and there was a great plague that would have wiped out humanity had we not closed the Earth Door in time.”

  “An extinct race, Fringe and Curvis said,” said Nela. “And Celery also said something of the kind.” She could not take her eyes from the shore where the things were now hopping over something she could not see: like toads, laboriously, but with no slowing of their forward motion. “Celery said the Arbai were about to be, or already were, extinct.”

  Jory said, “In my travels I learned something about the Arbai. It was the Arbai who discovered that time and space flow back and forth through wormholes among the universes to kee
p the energy density constant. As you have remarked, they were the inventors of the wormhole Doors, which make distant points adjacent by going outside our space and coming in again, a concept that human engineers have adapted and—so they claim—improved upon. Eventually, the Arbai became preoccupied with questions of morality. They, like Nela, had always believed that interference with other races was wrong, but their reasoning was quite different from hers. They believed interference was wrong because they had no concept of evil. Their language had no word for it. They could not perceive it when they saw it.”

  “They’d have made perfect Enforcers,” snorted Nela.

  “Not really, no. The plague that killed them was purposefully directed against them by creatures all of us here would call evil, but the Arbai could not see it and thus had no defense against it.”

  “That must have presented them with a dilemma,” said Bertran, nervously watching the shore. The ship was coming very close, and he felt his anxiety increase with every ripple that fled beneath the hull.

  “A dilemma indeed,” Jory remarked. “Most of their race had already died before they knew the reason. The few remaining chose to put all the energies they had left into what they thought of as a moral solution to the problem. They decided that the ‘problem’—which they did not call evil—had arisen out of the inability of disparate creatures to completely understand one another, so they withdrew to a distant place and built a communicator.”

  “An Alsense machine?” Curvis asked, almost distracted from the approaching shore by this revelation. “The Arbai created the Alsense machine?”

  Asner shook his head, answering for her. “No, an Alsense is merely a contextual device that compares speech patterns to a library of such patterns, establishes similarities, extrapolates possible meanings, then refines these from continuing utterances. Among languages based on common thought systems, an Alsense serves well enough….”

  Jory interrupted. “The Arbai did better than that. They built a true communicator. An empathetometer. A meaning feeler. With typical understatement, they called it the Arbai Device.”

  Danivon said, “How very interesting.” He fidgeted, approaching the rail, then stepping away from it, finally blurting, “Shouldn’t we be coming about? We’re getting very close to the shore.”

  “I’d noticed that,” said Asner. “Perhaps the captain wants to get a better look at those things.”

  “Better in daylight,” whispered Nela. “I think. Though spirits can’t cross running water.”

  “Is that so?” asked Asner.

  “In our time it was said to be so. In fairy tales. Evidently it’s true here, now.”

  They fell silent as the ship drew ever closer to the shore. “There’s the reason we’re coming so close,” said Asner, pointing upstream where a foam of white showed dimly. “There are rocks midriver. The captain is coming as far as possible to port so our next tack will bring the rocks on our starboard side.”

  “You were speaking of the thing the Arbai invented,” said Danivon from a dry mouth. “Are you implying there’s such a device here on Elsewhere?”

  Jory tore her eyes away from the bank where the shapes danced and jittered, seeming almost to extend themselves onto the surface of the water. “How could there be? If evil results from a lack of empathy (which the Arbai believed), and if evil is included in diversity (which you Enforcers seem to believe), then wouldn’t diversity also result from a lack of empathy? In which case, the presence of an Arbai Device here on Elsewhere would have destroyed all diversity long ago.” She gave him a distracted look and turned back to the rail. Bending and twisting, the flattened luminosities oozed outward, becoming elongated, stretching themselves into tentacles.

  “Why are we discussing Arbai Devices?” demanded Bertran. “Has it something to do with these … these things?”

  “I was only thinking,” said Jory. “That I’d like very much to understand what they are and why they are following us.” She laughed, without amusement. “Quite frankly, I was wishing we had the Arbai Device, here and now!”

  “Ready to come about,” cried the captain.

  The group fell silent, holding their breaths. The boom swung, the sails rattled, the ship began moving away as the forms along the bank became suddenly agitated, flopping toward the water in spasms, as though to fly across it.

  “Ware,” screamed the lookout from the mast.

  “Hard a’port,” shouted the captain, his voice cracking.

  The Dove shuddered and bucked as something huge rubbed along its starboard side, thrusting it inexorably shoreward.

  “Ware,” screamed the lookout again, “two of them!”

  Over the starboard rail loomed the head of a monstrous gaver, jaw gaping, teeth gleaming in the dim lights from the wheelhouse, lurching upward toward the watchman on the mast.

  “God, look at the size of it,” marveled Danivon aloud, too astonished in that instant to be fearful. “The size of it!”

  Beyond the nearer beast, its mate reared higher yet, looming into the starlight, a clifflike bulk, curved fangs snatching at the protruding spar, the spar shattering, then falling in a slither of broken wood and torn sail. They heard the scream of the lookout as he plunged to the end of his safety line, panicky shouts from the men, all subsumed into the thrashing sounds of water frenziedly beaten by monstrous tails. Something else fell from above, accompanied by an outraged howl from the dangling man.

  Suddenly the beasts were gone downstream in a flurry of spray, droplets falling everywhere, like a squall of rain.

  “Hard t’starboard,” shouted the captain. Three men were scurrying aloft, clinging to the ratlines as they hauled in the watchman, now dangling silently. Below on deck other men tugged at the wreckage of timber and ropes where the half spar had fallen, missing the main sail by a finger’s width.

  “We didn’t lose way,” said Asner. “We didn’t go aground. There for a minute I thought sure we’d …”

  “Where’s Fringe?” asked Danivon, his voice shrill. “Where’re the twins?”

  “They were right here,” said Curvis. “Beside us.”

  Jory turned slowly, taking an inventory. Danivon, Curvis, Cafferty, Latibor. Herself and Asner. Over on the piled sail, Alouez, the girl child. Forward, sailors rushing to and fro like ants, swearing and chopping. No Fringe. No twins. Where were they?

  “Look!” breathed Cafferty. “Ashore!”

  There the pale blobs of fire twirled in an oozing spiral of light, pallid gray, twisting like an auger. The dully gleaming pillar sunk into the ground, bearing with it two struggling shapes, two blotches of darkness.

  “Fringe!” screamed Danivon, hearing the word come out of him with a sense of surprise, not only at the sound but at the feeling of loss and grief that pushed it up and out of him. “Fringe!”

  “Nela and Bertran,” murmured Jory. “Oh, Asner, we came too close to the shore, too close….”

  “Fools,” Asner cried in a cracked voice. “We’ve been fools, Jory. Looking in the wrong place. There’s your devils, the ones at the root of all this wickedness, whatever the damned things are!”

  “Boarmus warned Danivon of ghosts,” she wept, “and ghosts they may be, but of what? Of whom?”

  The last of the corpselight plunged downward and disappeared. The boat drew away, upstream.

  “They’re gone! They’ve quit following us,” cried Latibor.

  “Oh, yes,” said Jory in a flat, uninflected voice. “Quite right, Latibor. It will give us no satisfaction, but yes. For the moment they have quit following us.”

  Fringe saw the gavers. She opened her mouth, maybe to warn someone, maybe to scream. She clutched at the nearest person: Bertran. Then cold, an icy grip of air, herself looking down at the river from high above it, the muddy bank twisting like a snake. Then herself, themselves spinning in a maelstrom of gray fire. She tried to scream for help, but there was no air.

  From a distance she heard Danivon shouting her name. Beside her, Nela s
hrieked with pain. Then everything went away.

  She woke sprawled on a ledge in a stone chamber dimly lit by a few glow points scattered far above. The ledge beneath her was thickly though not softly furred, as by the hairy rootlets of trees. She could hear water running. She played dead, exploring what she could see through slitted eyes. Nothing. No one. Whoever or whatever had taken them was not present.

  She got up and examined the chamber: stone floor, walls, ceiling. The streamlet ran along one wall, coming and going through shallow slits not more than a handbreadth wide. She could see no opening that might have admitted them; no way of escape. And her belt weapon was gone.

  She stripped off the oracle’s robe she’d been wearing, doing a quick inventory while hidden beneath its folds. The slug weapon was still in her boot. She left it there, drawing no attention to it. Whatever had removed her belt weapon had not searched her carefully. She tucked the item of information away with no idea of its meaning. Was the person or thing merely curious or had it intended to deprive her of any weapon? In either case, it had not been quite curious or careful enough. A certain tendency toward sloppiness on the part of their captors was the only inference she could draw at the moment. It was too early to make guesses.

  “What happened?” asked Nela in a feeble voice, hearing their heart thubbing desperately away between herself and Bertran, their lungs laboring.

  Fringe put one hand to the girl’s head, knelt to give Bertran a look. Pallid, both of them, gray, with flaccid limbs. If they had been handled as she had been, they had been badly wrenched about during their abduction. Nela looked very ill, and Bertran had not moved at all.

  “Lie still,” Fringe advised. “Don’t try to get up. Don’t try to move.” She fetched the oracle’s robe and tucked the abundant fabric around them.

  “What happened,” begged Nela once more.

  “The ghosts got us,” said Fringe matter-of-factly, swallowing the hysteria that threatened to come pouring from her throat. “Whatever they are.”

  “We were too close to the bank,” whispered Nela. “I thought so at the time.”