Sideshow

  “They learned to understand Jory; they will understand you.”

  She leaned across the railing and took a deep breath. It rattled in her throat, catching there. She had no voice left. Her mouth was dry. She grimaced, trying to set her feet solidly and finding nothing below her that felt like feet. She fought down terror and imagined herself possessed of a mighty voice. A huge voice. A voice like thunder.

  “Awaken!” she shouted.

  The voice reverberated, its echoes running around the place once and again, like the gathering of an avalanche, which fell at last upon those crouched below. They jerked and started. They stirred. They moaned. They raised their heads and looked about themselves.

  “Here,” she cried imperatively.

  They looked up and saw her. They spoke querulously.

  “Why are they being disturbed?” the great voice whispered in translation.

  “You have not earned repose!” shouted Fringe. “You have a duty to perform!”

  They moved sluggishly, as though they were too cold to move. Slowly, slowly they spoke again.

  “What duty?” whispered Great Dragon.

  “It is your duty to achieve your destiny,” Fringe cried. “Which is to relinquish all your decisions, to let them go. Decisions are a cause of anguish to you. It is your destiny to lay down this anguish and sleep.”

  Much murmuring below. She saw bodies bend, heard voices raised, as though in complaint.

  Great Dragon whispered, “They have outlived their strength. Decision is impossible for them. They cannot even understand what you ask.”

  “Tell them, in their own language, I do not ask. I do not pose a question. I simply tell. They are interfering with the destiny of man. The only way they can stop interfering is to relinquish all response, even that of inaction.”

  Great Dragon spoke.

  Silence. No answer.

  “If they will not relinquish it, then I will take it from them. It is a simple choice.”

  Great Dragon spoke again.

  Those below returned sluggishly to their circles.

  “Nothing” said Great Dragon. “They are not capable of responding.”

  Fringe held out her hand, trying not to see what hung there at the end of her wrist. It was not her hand, not even a human hand. It was what she needed now, she supposed, but not herself. Ignore that! She imagined that the appendage held within it a device that caused sleep. She had used such devices. This sleep would be so deep and lasting, however, that those caught in it could not wake; could not wake and could not form or keep any intention whatsoever.

  The fibers spun, troubled. She felt them roiling inside her. Her will moved them, but there was another will, close and manifest, the will that had created the device, the will that had not been able to use it. She insisted, using the last of her strength in the effort. What little remained of that other will was diffuse, strained, indifferent. It had no strength. It had no determination. It was passing away. It had gone. Fringe’s will burned hot. It did not waver.

  The device happened at the end of her arm, made of her bone and sinew, drawn from her body and mind. She moved what had been her hand, her arm, aiming it downward, sweeping it around and around the circles until she had covered them all. The Arbai fell over sideways, sprawled with their jaws open, their tongues lolling.

  She tried to move and could not. There wasn’t enough of her left to move. She was lost, part of the device, gone from her own being.

  “They sleep,” murmured Great Dragon, recalling her to herself.

  Now only the Arbai Device remained. She thought of the device idly, without the strength to direct it. All that remained of herself wanted only sleep and forgetting. The struggle to hold herself apart was beyond her. Someone else would have to do what needed doing.

  “Come,” whispered Great Dragon. “You are Fringe Owldark. You are Jory’s daughter. You have inherited wonder.”

  She struggled to acknowledge this, to identify herself with this. After a long time, she was able to nod, to say doubtfully yes, she might be, perhaps she was Fringe.

  “Why, Fringe. Why did you do this? Was it for Jory? For Zasper?”

  She could not make sense of the question. “No. No. They’re gone. I didn’t do it for them.”

  “Then for whom?”

  “Nela,” she said. “I guess I did it for Nela. So she’d have some time to be … what she wants to be. What the device made her.”

  “This device is an enigma to me. I cannot feel it. So will it now do what needs be done?”

  “Only time will tell,” she murmured, thought she murmured, too weary and lost to know for sure.

  “Is there enough time?”

  “Don’t know,” she sighed, thought she sighed. “May be too late. How long did it take to get here?”

  “A long time.” The time he meant was measured in hundreds, thousands of years.

  The time she meant was not so long. “Is it dawn, outside?”

  “Yes,” said the great voice, very softly. “Some time ago was dawn.”

  15

  All through the night, Danivon stood wakeful: while the darkness drew in, while the stars came out in scatters, while light left the world below, remaining only on the higher clouds; even after true darkness came, he blundered his way from tree to tree, clearing to clearing, unable to rest. He was waiting for Fringe. Fringe had gone away after Great Dragon. Perhaps Fringe had departed from Panubi, cloaked in the dragon’s power and invisibility, slithering through the lines of the killers, saving herself.

  He hoped she had.

  He knew she had not.

  He tried to imagine where she might be and failed. She had had some purpose, that much he guessed, but what? This question brought with it a fit of hysterical though silent laughter. Much of the time her purposes had made no sense to him. Why should he understand this one? He yawned uncontrollably and leaned against a tree, listening to the breathing of those around him, wondering how long he dared let them sleep, half sleeping himself as he stood.

  Dawn came at last, with high pink clouds foretelling the arrival of day. From the killing ground, the monster machines began to yammer. Danivon forbade himself to listen, throwing back his head to look up at the clouds, storing up the memory. When death came he would not think of death, or of Fringe, or of anything to do with man. He would hold in his mind a picture of clouds turning from black to gray to blooming rose.

  Such resolution did him no good. Fringe remained at the center of his thought. What was she really like? What had she really wanted? He found himself remembering her, every detail, every nuance of expression or action. Zasper had talked about her. He remembered all the things Zasper had said. Her presence was like a rhythm he couldn’t get out of his mind, like a litany he kept telling over and over, like a summoning spell, an invocation.

  Above him the clouds brightened and faded, except for one high, crescent shape that went on glowing with color after all the rest had faded to white.

  And then another below it, appearing out of nothing.

  “Bertran.” Danivon spoke softly. “Nela?”

  The two were already half-awake. They roused themselves and came to stand beside him.

  “There,” he said, pointing upward. Something was growing like linked moons, softly shining. A murmur of voices came from the sides, near and far, where others who had been early wakeful had also seen the strangeness. Cafferty and Latibor came from among the trees to stand beside them, watching.

  “Did Fringe ever come back?” whispered Nela.

  Danivon shook his head, unable to speak.

  “I’ve been thinking about her and thinking about her,” said Nela. “So has Bertran. Ever since it started to get light. We can’t get her out of our heads!”

  An odd coincidence, Danivon thought, giving it no more attention than that, distracted by the thing in the sky that was continuing to unfold, little by little. The sky brightened, and still the thing grew, each linked crescent a bit lower, a b
it closer, the whole mass centering itself upon the great rock dome as upon the bull’s-eye of a target. At last whatever-it-was seemed to occupy most of the massif, many miles across. From its translucent base it rose in a series of interconnected curves, vanishing beyond vision, sunlit at the height. The massif creaked alarmingly, roared and trembled a bit, then steadied. Either it had decided it could hold the weight or the weight had been removed.

  The others came from among the trees.

  “What is it?” marveled Cafferty.

  “No idea,” said Danivon. “Nela?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Have you, Latibor?”

  He shook his head in return. Never. Nothing like it.

  Every person left on Panubi had been gathered tight at the base of the massif, and all of them saw the thing come, though they could not comprehend the arrival. It looked like nothing material, nothing solid, so no one around the massif thought of it as a way of escape. They merely gaped and murmured in hesitant voices, slowly edging toward the thing, standing very quietly with their arms folded, all peering at this hugeness, this wonder, this quite marvelous thing come from nowhere to mystify their last hours.

  Not so the Brannigan machines. Around the circle they erupted in sudden frenzies. From behind them, the mighty mountain shivered and growled and moved itself as Great Oozer slithered, leaving dead forests smashed to ashes in his wake. To the south, Chimi-ahm came grinning his tripartite grin, lighted from within by mighty fires, howling like a tempest and beating the ground with a huge flail. From the west, Magna Mater rolled on studded wheels across the forests, each spiked tiptoe an earthquake, each earthquake a catastrophe of broken mountain and flooded river. From the north Lady Bland came on her great car, crushing hills and filling valleys. All four of them approached, mighty as mountains, to crouch just beyond the circle of the Arbai Device, staring at the thing on the massif, no more able to comprehend it than were the people.

  The thing took no notice of astonishment. Its only response was to open a tiny crack at the base of its substance from which a single creature emerged. The form was completely familiar to Nela and Bertran as it trundled down the slope toward them emitting a strong smell of hay fields.

  “Celery,” whispered Nela. “It’s Celery.” She shared a look of hopeful surmise with Bertran, the two of them deep in a wordless interchange during which they remembered the exact wording of their request. Now it seemed inadequate, superficial. It had been so long ago!

  They stared at the approaching figure, building together a silent strategy.

  “But he won’t want to talk to us,” Bertran muttered in sudden panic as the leafy creature approached. “We’re not multiple anymore.”

  “You’re more multiple than you ever were,” murmured Cafferty. “At least for the time being. The Arbai Device is not yet gone.”

  The creature reached them and bowed.

  “Nela-Bertran,” said Celery (or what they assumed was Celery), “how nice to meet you at last.” (Well then, it wasn’t Celery.) “We’ve heard so much about you.” There was a faint, a very faint overtone of irritation in its voice, as of courtesy strained to its limit.

  Bertran bowed. Nela bowed, realizing that somehow here she was under Bertran’s left arm. Habit! She moved slightly away and stood tall. If she was multiple, it didn’t depend on where she was!

  “We did what we promised Celery we’d do,” said Bertran, unable to think of anything more apropos.

  The being nodded. “We know. And we received your message, of course. Which is why we’re here. I apologize for our being so tardy, but …” (Bertran thought he detected a definite tone of asperity) “we’ve had to come a long way.”

  “We’ve interrupted your journey,” said Nela in her most sweetly sympathetic voice. “And after you’d gone to such trouble. Earning your … what was it? Your concession.”

  “Well,” said the being with a sidewise look at her, “it was our own fault, wasn’t it.”

  “We think it was,” agreed Bertran with a hint of asperity of his own. “Yes.”

  “An exemplary situation, however,” the Celerian continued. “One our younger aggregations will profit from for untold generations. Which is, at the moment, neither here nor there….” It made an equivocal gesture and emitted a smell of disappointment.

  “When we received your message, we started back, ready to keep our end of the bargain, only to learn as we approached this place that it would be impossible for us.”

  Bertran felt himself dwindle. Nela reached for his hand as Danivon cursed slowly, monotonously.

  “However,” the creature went on, glancing upward over the trees, at the looming monsters, “since we’re here, there are some things we’d like to clarify. For our own information. We’d like to know what you meant, in the cavern, when you said ‘we’ and ‘us.’”

  Danivon came closer, his hands knotting into fists. The Celerian regarded him blandly.

  “In the context of what we knew about humans, the words were confusing. We were sure you meant you-Nela-Bertran, of course. That would have been what you meant by ‘us’ at the time you met our colleague. Before you came here. But at the time your wish was uttered you weren’t alone, so we knew you meant Nela-Bertran-Fringe….”

  Nela fixed the being with her eyes and shook her head firmly. “No. As a matter of fact, we meant all of us who are here, around the massif….” Even if the Celerians could not help, let the record show!

  “And everyone on Elsewhere,” added Bertran. “Our request referred to all our kind. We asked that mankind no longer be influenced by gods he made in his own image.”

  “You are not referring to the Creators?” asked the Celerian curiously. “We would not want to give you the impression we could have had any effect at all on the purposes of the real …”

  “We mean,” interrupted Nela, pointing at the monsters visible over the treetops, “things like that, whether visible or invisible, whether real or imaginary. No matter how traditional they are. No matter how divine they are said to be. Now, or ever. Here or anywhere. We want to be free of them.”

  “Ah, I do see.” The Celerian did something with its face that gave the effect of a glowing smile. “You wanted us to implement the destiny of man here as elsewhere.”

  Nela squeezed Bertran’s hand as she replied, “The Arbai had the power to do it, but they couldn’t accept ambiguity. They worried too much about means and ends. They wouldn’t interfere because they couldn’t accept risk, they couldn’t take the guilt or the pain of possibly being wrong. I understand that. I’ve been like that myself. But you … our experience indicated your people had no hangups about interference.”

  “That’s true,” breathed the Celerian in a strangled voice. “We have no hangups about that.”

  “We thought you’d be willing to risk it,” said Bertran, head cocked as though thinking deeply. “Willing to risk being wrong.”

  “It was our willingness to risk being wrong that won us the great concession,” whispered the Celerian. “The emergence from mere creaturehood demands risk. Intelligence demands risk. Holiness demands risk … and growth, and change. No. We’d have been willing to risk it.”

  “But you won’t help us,” said Nela.

  The Celerian bowed, tilting forward until its leafy crest almost brushed Nela’s face. “We confess to you: We would feel infinitely more worthy if we could do as you ask. Even we, however, cannot go back in time to do what has already been done by someone else.”

  Nela stepped aside, confused, turning to the others for explanation as the Celerian moved away. It paused only briefly, to call, “Your colleague says to tell you farewell.”

  “Colleague?” grated Danivon.

  “Your colleague,” said the Celerian. “Who in paying our debt to you has indebted us to … them.”

  It went swiftly up the hill, giving them no time to ask the questions that slowly formed in all their minds. After the ship swallowed it up, the sh
ip itself went away as it had come, by vanishment a little at a time.

  And nothing happened. The people nearby peered into the brightening day, muttering, retelling, not sure they had not dreamed it. Nothing at all happened. The Gods continued bellowing, but they came no closer. The killing machines yammered and gyrated, but they danced in place. The sun rose, throwing long shadows up onto the massif. People murmured.

  And then at last, Chimi-ahm howled more loudly than ever and moved back. Magna Mater backed up. Slow wriggle by slow wriggle, bellowing with each movement, uttering imprecations, Great Oozer slithered in reverse. Lady Bland, shrieking and snarling on her great car, crunched a retreat. Little by little, their movements became a steady withdrawal.

  “What happened?” Danivon breathed.

  Nela murmured, half hearing, half intuiting what must have occurred. “By the time the Celerians got here, they couldn’t do anything else, because Fringe and Great Dragon had already done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “I think Fringe … both of them went down under the massif and took the device away from the Arbai.”

  “They could do that?” asked Danivon, dumbfounded. “Then why did they wait so long! All this time! While so many died? Why did they wait?”

  Bertran shook his head slowly, searching inside himself for answers. “I assume Great Dragon wouldn’t interfere in human affairs unless Jory asked him to,” he murmured. “They were mated in a way I don’t understand. But Jory, though very much her own being, or perhaps one should say a being made in her pattern, was still a creation of the Arbai Device here on Elsewhere. Rebellion was her nature, but she could be … rebellious only to a degree. She could not threaten the fundamental structure of the Arbai. And it wasn’t until Fringe realized what Jory actually was that she could take over…. Or try.”

  “But how?” breathed Danivon. “I can’t imagine how?”

  “No,” Nela murmured, “I can’t either, Danivon. But she couldn’t have done it as she was, solitary as she was, I’m sure of that. I get this notion of enormous sacrifice….”

  Danivon gritted his teeth, astonished to find tears in the corners of his eyes. “And now she’s gone, is that it? Gone into the device? Or gone off with the Celerians? Or was it Great Dragon who went with the Celerians?”