Nela shrugged, seeking an answer where there was no answer. She could find pictures, memories of the device unbuilding Fringe in the cavern of the Arbai. Memories of its possessing her at her own invitation, destructuring her at her own command. But had it later rebuilt … remade? Of its own volition, perhaps? Of its own memory?
Had it finished with her? Was she free once more?
Nela couldn’t tell. What had been Fringe had vanished, and the device didn’t know where, or how.
Nela put her arms about Danivon, pressed herself tight against him. “I’m not sure, Danivon. I don’t know what happened.”
Danivon fumed helplessly over her shoulder. “And your Celerian friend said something about implementing human destiny, but how could he do that when nobody’s answered the Great Question!”
Nela held him more tightly. Wasn’t that like Danivon? Not to have noticed the answer to the Great Question as it went flitting by. Oh, well. Bertran put his long arms around them both, laying his cheeks against Nela’s and Danivon’s, all of them wet. Whether they were crying from joy or sorrow or simple exhaustion, none of them were able to say.
In the Core, Jordel of Hemerlane wakened to his newly cloned body, sat it up, got it up, looked it over to be sure it was, in fact, his body, then dressed himself and went into the control section of the Core. A moment’s search through the network and he found the four Brannigan monsters on Panubi, where they were being backed slowly toward the sea. Given sufficient time, the Brannigans would be forced all the way back to Tolerance.
Jordel had never shared the Brannigan paranoia or panic about the Hobbs Land Gods, and he saw no reason to prolong matters. The Brannigan network, ramified and wide-flung as it was, with its personality matrix nodes here and there throughout the world, was still powered entirely from inside the Core and could be shut down from inside the Core. Jordel did so, systematically canceling all physical manifestations.
Lights flickered and went out, mechanisms chattered and died. The spider network of the Brannigan gods lost cohesion and fell apart into its constituent molecules. Chimi-ahm collapsed with a shriek; Magna Mater vanished in a cloud of micro-parts; Great Oozer and Lady Bland lingered only a moment longer and then were gone.
Jordel then instructed the Core to clone bodies for all those who had entered the Core and, when the bodies were grown, to program them with their original mind patterns. Except for Jordel’s few associates (stored, as he himself had been, under the original specifications), they would emerge with no knowledge of what had happened on Elsewhere. So much the better. The less they knew, the quicker they could be sent … somewhere else.
“Jordel,” screamed a ghost voice. “Jordel of Hemerlane, you bastard!”
It startled him momentarily. But, of course, the monsters would have returned to the Core when the power to the nodes was removed. Now they were here, with him, so to speak.
“Jordel! This is Magna Mater. You turn us back on!”
“Jordel, you have no right….”
He drew a deep breath. Slowly, carefully, he isolated his colleagues and the original storage area, then turned off the power to the rest. The voices dwindled. They were a mere gnat’s hum to his ears when he turned them off entirely.
“Except for the following sections, wipe the matrix,” he instructed, rapidly entering locations. “Keep nothing.”
As he had told them long and long ago, if they insisted on living forever, error would creep in. There was nothing there worth keeping.
In later years on Elsewhere, the fifty day of Springflower, which had heretofore been dedicated to the Great Question, was celebrated as Emergence Day. On that day, the thousand inhabitants of the Core straggled forth onto the plaza outside the old Frickian barracks, most of them blinking and weaving in the unaccustomed light of the day like toddlers just learning to walk. On awakening, they had been told the answer to the Great Question. Aside from that, they knew only what they had known when they went in.
Nela and Bertran came to the plaza early to sit on a low stone coping and watch the Core inhabitants stagger out in twos and threes. There Danivon joined them, bringing with him a shambling man whose sagging flesh proclaimed he had once been fatter.
“Nela, Bertran,” said Danivon, “you remember Boarmus.”
Nela rose and kissed Boarmus on one flabby cheek. “You were very brave,” she said. “Jacent told us.”
“Oh, well.” He gestured vaguely as he looked her over. “There really wasn’t anything else to do but what I did.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Most of us are going home to Heaven. I don’t know what we’ll do there. Things will sort themselves out, I suppose. Jacent says there’s always a place for bureaucrats, but I think he’s being provocative.” The twins didn’t seem familiar to him, but he couldn’t place the difference. Things had been rather confusing of late. He had difficulty remembering a lot of things.
“Will you miss being Provost?” Nela asked.
He turned to stare at the bulk of the Great Rotunda, as though he had not seen it before. “I don’t think so. I never liked it that much. It was just, you know, something to do.”
“Have you been very busy?” she asked sympathetically.
“Well, this and that. We’ve taken the guards off the Doors, of course. And there’s no more Enforcement to worry about….
Which reminds me, I owe an explanation to that little Enforcer girl, the one I sent the message to Danivon by.”
“No longer with us, sir,” said Danivon, keeping his voice level with some difficulty.
“Oh. Killed by the things, was she?”
“No, sir. We’re not sure what happened to her. She went away, that’s all we know.”
A small group of Brannigans emerged from the arched opening to the Core and stood blinking in the sunlight.
“Look,” said Nela, nudging Bertran.
The man she pointed out had a face familiar to Bertran if not to the others.
Seeing them looking at him, Orimar came toward them.
“Good morning,” he said, nodding to the men before focusing on Nela. “And who’s this pretty thing?”
“Nela,” she said. “And this is Danivon Luze, and my brother, Bertran. You know who this is, Bertran. This is Orimar Breaze.”
“Have we met?” asked Breaze doubtfully.
“Only in passing,” said Bertran, thinking of this face among other faces in a golden cavern.
Orimar gave them all a charming smile, then returned to Nela. “Well, Nela. Are you a student here?” So luscious, she was. So sweet. Lips like roses.
Nela smiled, a wry twist to her lips. “I’m not a student. You must remember, this isn’t Brannigan.”
His mouth trembled momentarily. Of course it wasn’t. It wasn’t Brannigan Galaxity. Brannigan was somewhere else. They had come from Brannigan to this little Elsewhere world, and a thousand years had gone by, but nothing had happened the way they’d planned it. There was no diversity anymore. They’d been told that, just this morning, when they’d been embodied.
“That’s right,” he said in a querulous tone. “I remember: They’ve answered the Great Question, so we came out. We were supposed to … supposed to do that. But”—he gestured vaguely, waving away his own confusion—“I don’t remember much about it. None of us remember what happened.”
“But you do remember the answer to the Great Question?” Nela asked, a hard edge to her voice.
“Yes,” said Orimar Breaze, feeling tears welling up that he was quite unable to control. “Yes.”
“You’d like to share it with us, wouldn’t you?” He shook his head, gulping. He didn’t want to share it. He didn’t want to hear it again.
“The Ultimate Destiny of Man …” Nela prompted.
“The Ultimate Destiny of Man …” he said, swallowing the tears. What was this? Why this surge of sorrow?
“Is to …” she prompted again.
“Is to …” He tried once more,
unable to get it out.
“Is to stop …”
“Is to stop …”
“Being only man,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed, wiping tears from his eyes. “Sorry, I don’t know what’s come over me.”
“That’s all right.” She patted him on the shoulder. “We understand.”
Bertran put his arm around Nela as they watched the man move away, seemingly overwhelmed by emotion.
“You had to see for yourself, didn’t you,” Bertran asked softly. “I wonder what’s going to happen to them?”
Danivon replied, “They’re to be repatriated to Brannigan Galaxity, according to Jordel.”
“The Galaxity is still there?” Nela asked, amazed.
“It’s always been there. Now it wants to study these people, learn the effects of long-term storage on the purely human psyche. I’m told these Brannigans are the only remaining examples of unalloyed humanity. They’ll have a nice shielded campus at Brannigan, where they won’t be bothered by the Gods.”
“Poor things. So even now they won’t have the advantage of the Arbai Device.” Nela shook her head. “They’ll be shut up in their own heads forever.”
“They made the choice,” said Danivon, looking into the distance to avoid their eyes. “They didn’t trust change, or growth if it felt like change. It made them fearful, so they made the choice first to define man as the crown of creation and then to be forever no more than they were….
“We respect their choice. It would be … inappropriate to interfere.”
Say the name enthusiastically. Say it with joy. Say it as you might utter the holy name of God.
Brannigan Galaxity:
The academic center of Fauna Sapiens. The repository of everything known to be so. The hub around which all interesting questions are asked. The quintessential fount of academe.
“Brannigan Galaxity,” says the teacher in the remote village on the tiny world, laying its appendages upon the heads of the young. “Question well, and maybe you’ll go to Brannigan.”
“Imagine diligently,” cry the docentdroids on the eduscreens, to isolated individuals they will never touch, never see. “You may be selected for Brannigan!”
There is every likelihood they will. Those who desire Brannigan almost invariably end up there. Unquestioned and prodigious genius is the standard, of course, when each one can know what everyone knows, but there is great need for more than merely that! Great need for questioners, seekers, unravelers, and untwisters, great need for those who will push the boundaries of mystery out a little farther yet. Fauna Sapiens sometimes sings:
Brannigan, we sing to thee!
Fount of magnanimity….
Brannigan Galaxity.
Here twisting stairs clatter beneath niagaras of pounding extremities. There dim corridors, endless as roads, run into cavernous spaces where dinka-jins and other strange peoples ask those questions peculiar to themselves.
May thy ancient precincts be …
Wondrous with discovery….
Tourists still come to Brannigan, still wander in gaping groups among the quadrangles, along the gardens, beneath domes and vaults decorated with murals so recently painted they are scarcely faded at all. On one of the paintings most frequently visited, all the figures are joined by planes and lines of light and dark that, from a distance, make them seem the parts of some glittering and wonderful machine. The mural is, in fact, referred to by the docents as the Destiny Machine.
“The creatures at the very top of the dome …” cries a guide directing their eyes upward, “… are the Arbai, creators of the Arbai Device that saved mankind from itself through the establishment throughout the galaxy of Fauna Sapiens. A remnant of the Arbai is now in stasis upon the planet Elsewhere.”
The tourists finger their pocket files, recording this experience for later delectation.
The docent moves her light pointer to the left: “The figure on the east of the dome is Marjorie Westriding, who saved mankind from the Arbai plague. She was a prophetess of the mid-dispersion period, and the man beside her is her companion, Samasnier Girat, sometimes called St. Sam because of his dedication to the perpetuation of the device.
“The Prophetess Marjorie and St. Sam were sometime resurrectees upon planet Elsewhere. Approved pilgrimage schedules are available in the office of the Vice-Chancellor for Historic Realization.”
At least one or two in every tour group seriously consider going on pilgrimage. Almost no one ever gets around to it, which disappoints neither the prophetess nor the saint, who have proven insusceptible to further resurrection.
“The figures to the west of the dome are the Zy-Czorsky twins, Nela and Bertran, saviors of mankind in predispersion times. Nela points upward, toward the mystic turtledove, while Bertran holds the symbolic jackplane. Beside Nela is her lifetime companion, Danivon Luze. The Zy-Czorsky twins also succored the planet Elsewhere by summoning to its aid the inscrutable Celerians—shown to the left.”
It is easier to believe the Celerians saved Elsewhere than to believe the truth. Besides, no one is entirely sure what the truth is.
Around the bottom of the dome, only briefly mentioned by the docent, are many other images: among others, a woman with apricot-colored hair and bangles on her arms; a scatter of dinka-jins; a stocky man with a long gray braid and a badge on his shoulder; a fat man holding a teacup, his other hand resting on the shoulder of a smiling youth.
One likeness to which eyes return again and again is at the edge of the vault, a woman striding away across the stars, dressed in purple coat and purple plumes and carrying in one hand a turtle shell. Her expression is one of ferocious joy. Behind and around her, the artist has conveyed the impression of something wonderful and mostly invisible, so that though the woman is painted as a solitary figure, the observer understands clearly that she is not alone.
Brannigan is no longer preoccupied with emeriti. What one knows, all know. It is not individual lives but the pursuit of knowing that matters—any tangled mystery, any challenging wonder, any great question—though one in particular is much discussed by Fauna Sapiens. The Celerians are said to know the answer to it. If they do, they have not shared it with the people at Brannigan, who are determined to find out for itself/themselves.
Laughingly, they speak of appointing a committee to find an answer for this new Great Question (For which one who was of mankind may have already found an answer. Old beast voices forgotten, old forms and sensations vanished, the birth galaxy like strewn sand behind, a sparkling whirl, a fading gather. Here, an arrow of intellect, a flight of imagination. Light ahead, an ascending path. A new wonder teasing the edges of the universe. Farther. Farther. Farther yet. One rider, one ridden. Companions, urging one another on….):
WHAT SHALL WE BECOME,
NOW WE ARE NO LONGER MAN?
About the Author
SHERI S. TEPPER is the award-winning author of A Plague of Angels, Sideshow, Beauty, Raising the Stones, Grass, The Gate to Women’s Country, After Long Silence, and Shadow’s End. Grass was a New York Times Notable Book and Hugo Award nominee and Beauty was voted Best Fantasy Novel by the readers of Locus magazine. Ms. Tepper lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
And look for Sheri S. Tepper’s
epic new novel
GIBBON’S DECLINE
AND FALL
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SIDESHOW
A Bantam Spectra Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published May 1992
Bantam paperback edition / March 1993
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are
trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1992 by Sheri S. Tepper.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 91-40420.
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For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-57396-4
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Sheri S. Tepper, Sideshow
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