“Tell him,” I said next, to a tall, thick man in the coverall of a maintenance tech. “Tell him that you love him.” He colored over and ducked his head.
“Guys, a seer!” a boy called to his pod and three of them gathered round me. Seers are what people call reader-teller performers. We don’t see, though, we sense and then interpret. I found something in each of them, in their bearing and in the things that connected them, and gave them the happy news that the fourth member of their pod, back in crèche for tests, would be fine and with them again soon.
Readers, we only read what’s there to be read, but isn’t by most folks. We should just be called understanders, or interpreters, or something. Calling us seers is just to make us grand and magic for the show.
I read a bunch more folks, singles and pods, as they came by, spreading the word about the show as I did. When Gilley came to collect me, I was starving and euphoric.
It isn’t like that for every reader. Some get sad, or so tired that they have to sleep. I love it. Hassif’s like me, and Mika gets sad, but in what she calls a luxurious way, so she kind of likes it; Ben, though, always sounds a little insane. It’s like he thinks he’s reading the world or the air. We use it in the show, but it makes the rest of us nervous.
There are stories about readers--one member or an entire pod--that’ve gone wrong, their genesets a sequence off from stable. Mad, ill, broken—then taken back to a sector crèche and never heard of again. Reader pods weren’t common; the geneset was, at that time, one of the most experimental.
Gilley handed me a spiced fish bun. The Wulf-cart, loaded with vegetables, oil-paper packets of fish and seaweeds, sacks of grain and spices, and a big jar of honey, rolled behind her with its rope tail swaying.
Something pale swam through the corner of my vision, like a fish tracing a figure in the currents of the air. I brushed a hand over my eye and pushed my hair back, but my hair is dark, not pale, so it wasn’t my hair that I had seen from the corner of my eye. It came again, a graceful creature of lace and almost-there color describing a figure that tried to say things to me, in that place between my forehead and the back of my shoulders where reading happened.
Then it was gone, and I dismissed it as we walked back through the train yard, a maze of inlets, docks, float tracks, and seatrains, great hulking supply movers and sleek but ornate hotel cars from out of the east, coral frames and cuttlefish skins, all festooned with seabirds, the sky above full of their flight and cries.
We were coming around one of the scuffed heavy supply engines, rocking slightly at its mooring, when pain pulsed through me, just below my stomach.
I made a noise and Gilley said “What?”
“Hurts,” I said, pressing a palm over the pain.
“You ate too fast,” Gilley said.
“I always eat fast,” I said. Another sling of pain, down through my middle and into my thighs, made me whimper.
By the time we got back to the show grounds, just beyond the main train yard, my thighs and arms were trembling. The show was bright and alive with activity in the full morning light, the sea an endless shifting beyond.
I ignored everyone and everything and headed along the dock to my pod’s train car. Hassif was still there and I just mumbled something to him, feeling like I was going to die as I dove for my bunk and curled into a tight knot.
It didn’t help. Polyps and mollusks, I cursed in my own head, what is wrong with me?
Then, of course, crèche-fed knowledge surfaced and I knew. Hassif’s voice had been cracking and changing; Ben had started growing facial hair. Mika had begun to fill out her skirts and vests with curves.
I dragged myself to the car’s commode and confirmed.
So, I knew what to do. I made a pad out of a clean rag and went to the dispensary for supplies, including a patch to take care of the pain and shakiness. I pleaded my case to Gustus, the show foreman, and went back to my bunk to let the patch work.
Curled into a ball, I stared out at the sea, a landscape of crumpled silk and sheen. That thing I’d seen earlier, the angel fish speaking in figures at the corner of my eye, I saw again. A dark one this time, with the luminous glow of a red tide cresting in a train’s wake. It wound through my peripheral vision.
Maybe this was a side effect of reader puberty that was never mentioned in the crèche knowledge feeds?
No, I didn’t think so, either.
Ben’s lunatic pronouncements when he read came to mind and, with that, a chill like damp clothes and sea spray.
Eventually, I slept, the gentle rock and gulp of the train a familiar lullaby. When I woke, afternoon light fell gold and laden with dust-motes across my bunk, the car quiet and empty but for me. The cramps and trembles were gone; the angel fish, too, my sight clear of things extraneous to reality. Feeling tentatively pleased with my body’s new maturity, tall and strong as I stretched, I pushed the strange corner-of-the-eye visions from my mind.
That evening as the show lights were kindled in the seaside gloam, as gears began to turn and mesh in the rides, the scent of hot sweet buns to fill the salt air, and sector citizens to arrive, my pod and I circulated to hand out tokens, cheap but glittery moon coins, good for a telling.
Hassif, a mysterious story prince in spangled vest and slim silk pants; Mika, beautiful in layers of gilt and mirror-embroidered, fire-colored silks; Ben, beard coming in, dark eyes kohled and solemn, wearing midnight velvets studded with sequins; me, in antique jodhpurs, embroidered slippers, and my favorite green overvest, patterned with rhinestones in all the shades of the sea, a bright scarf twisted and braided through my hair, making it a crown, and a hair arrangement that felt heavy and regal on my head and always made my neck feel longer, my bones elegant.
When we came together and processed, some of the tumblers leaping before us, a small crowd trailed us, like a wake, to the Fortunate Pavilion. The pavilion was set up to one side of the main show tent. It had an onion dome of parchment and a yellow, striped canopy with lengths of drapery and holo-beadings through which a cosmos moved, an occasional shooting star flicking through the beading across tent panels.
Inside the pavilion, our set was a cave grotto, walls rough and seamed with silver and gems glittering in the incandescence of biolume lamps. The stage was low, painted dark and sprinkled with more glittering gems, and wend like a tributary stream a fair way into the audience.
We had our own little band, an older pod of three, on balalaika, squeeze box, and tabla. They played a barcarole, low, rhythmic, and mysterious to underscore the act.
Mika stepped out with a flourish, flame-colored silks vivid. She strolled along, slowly gathering the audience’s attention to her before she stopped, lifted one hand in a sweeping gesture, and said, “Join us, lovely guests, in an exploration of the shadowed paths and vistas of the possible, the probable, and the imminent.”
“The world went to sleep beneath the sea,” Hassif said, stepping forward as he intoned the Apocrypha of Cephon, “and when we woke, in the crèches, in the sectors, by the sea, some of us had been traced by the salt and kissed by the cephaloi, given the eyes to read the many paths--into this evening, into tomorrow, into the future.” The Apocrypha of Cephon is a hagiography, a poetry of the change time. It doesn’t tell a history truth, but another kind.
I made exaggerated swimming motions behind him, like a loopy fish. Laughter loosens patterns, makes them easier to read.
Mika focused on one of the people who laughed loudest, an elderly woman whose grey and white hair had been augmented with metallic strands woven through.
“You’ll get the news you’ve been waiting for tomorrow,” she said to the woman. “It will seem to be the wrong thing for you and your pod at first, but it will open a new field of inquiry for the work you do.”
The act unfolded, Mika and Hassif flamboyant and charming. I provided
plainspoken predictions and comic counterpoint, while Ben was reserved and mysterious.
We did our freeform segment, taking turns reading out what we sensed for this or that person, then took tokens from those who had them, with requests for specific readings.
You have to be careful with the specifics, because patterns shift, and what we sense are potentials and probabilities projected by the subjects themselves--by their own sense of their lives and relations--not fate or inevitabilities.
It was while answering one of the specifics--a man asked why a woman he still loved had left him, the worst of questions--that the fish and swirls and symbols came back, building through the air around the man. Suddenly, I was no longer sensing, I was seeing, in the most literal sense of the word. My gaze followed a spiny sea urchin as it traced glowing symbols in the air, and I faltered. With a look out the side of his eyes, Hassif swept in front of me to take over.
I lost track for a while then, of the show, of myself, and the world, as figures, motions, pale sprites etched my vision in waves. The world yawed wide around me as I was caught on a current that affected only me. I was distantly aware that Hassif, Mika, and Ben moved around me, shuffled me slowly to the back of the stage, into the shadows.
When the clamor of sprites, sea creatures, and symbols faded and I emerged from my abstraction on a shuddering, sudden breath of awareness, Ben was finishing his segment of the show. The lights were low and smoky.
“The waves sing of a sweet wind and all the sectors’ beings breathe together,” Ben said, his rich-timbered voice carrying, though it seemed quiet and low. “Like the children of luciferase, deep in the deepest depths of the sea, our breath is a phosphor, lighting the heaviest of times.” He spun a quarter turn, hand out pointing--though it wasn’t clear at whom. “Heavy times, the weight of loss and despair,” he went on, “it comes on us all--one time and another, and for some of us, it comes soon.”
Mika and Hassif shifted, ready to intervene if he got too dark and doomy--sometimes he did; other times, he seemed to self-implode and fall to distressed silence. But he finished now, “It comes fast as furies, but hold to the song of that breath and all will come well.” Not one of his more alarming readings. Looking back, I see it for the anodyne it was, but that night, my mind was too disordered to know that Ben often softened his readings and purposefully made them less specific. It was only when he couldn’t suppress himself that he made insane-sounding pronouncements.
This was our standard set list, a shot of fey and sometimes sinister with Ben, then a reassuring pageant of what we called fizzies--he or she does love you, don’t doubt it; the business can be saved; you will succeed--then we bowed as the musicians played the audience out.
I slipped out the back while my podmates did the fizzies, unwilling, unable, to hear or answer their questions.
Out in the dark behind our tent, rain-specked sea wind ruffled my hair and clothes familiarly. Music drifted from the ride nearest, mixing with the patter of rain on canvas. The lights of the nearby rides and the midway’s many lanterns glittered and gleamed on the yellow and parchment of the tents throughout an otherwise shadow-strung tangle, the night architecture of the Vivant, familiar to me as the faces of my podmates, the sound of their individual breathing in sleep.
Suddenly feeling hollow as a scoured-out clam shell, I followed the smell of savories to Gilley’s food booth. She gave me a packet of smoked fish wrapped in marinated cabbage leaves, greasy with spicy oil. I ate it too fast and washed it down with a sweet-water, watching Gilley gribble and kibitz with the customers.
Was I a defective, more broken than Ben? I thought of tales told in the crèches, of those whose genesets failed, whose integration of traits hit tragic snags. They would recall our whole pod--between Ben and now me, clearly we were defective.
Watching Gilley, my head filled with questions and panic like a drum with bees, I scanned her and the customers closest for readings—the habit of it as old as my small store of life.
A set of tentacles, ghostly octopod of extra limbs, writhed about one man, stretching through the rainy air toward Gilley. Without considering what I was doing or why, I gave Gilley the sign for watch--hinky with a flick of fingers in the man’s direction. Gilley acknowledged with a dip of chin to chest.
Then—it was like every nerve in my body seized, the fear was so strong. What was I doing? I backed away. My vision was empty of extraneous bits, now that I was deliberately trying not to read anyone. Would I have to stop reading, abandon the act? Would that keep the strange hallucinatory scritchings of the air away? My head echoed with questions; panic twitched and tightened in my muscles, made my overfull stomach queasy.
I faded back into the shadows between tents, the little alleyways and dark offsides that the show’s structures create.
Smell of sandy ground and the shift and feel of it under my slipper soles. Snatches of music and shouts and laughter, as fragmented as the lights of the rides. My head was filled with panic and my breath came short.
One of the ride operators, taking a break for a bite of food behind the octometron, the show’s largest gearwork, said my name as I went by. He was no more than a suggestion of mustache and teeth in the shadows. I waved and didn’t stop.
I thought about what I’d seen around that man in the audience. Little figures and symbols, like the figures I’d sometimes seen scribbled in the dark above me when I was little, lying in my bunk. Meaningless. Stick figures, a chair, a spoon, a seatrain car, a school of fish. Around the man, the figures had swirled. A fish chasing a bubble into the branches of a tree and emerging as a bird. The sea urchin writing words. A bird, flying with a school of fish, had carried, trailing from its claws, a ribbon of symbols.
I’d rather have to interpret my sense of a person’s potentials; I knew how to do that, had spent my life to that point doing it. If that swirl of scratching was trying to tell a story, it was one I didn’t understand.
Didn’t want to understand--was terrified of understanding.
Clear of the show’s structures and lights, beyond the inlets and docks of the seatrain yards, I came out to the dunes at the outer tip of the sector headland. Below the marram grass-stitched sand hills, waves curled in and laced over the beach, over and over.
The world’s breath, we call it.
The shush of steps through the sand came sometime later, and I realized I’d just been standing there, staring out, but not seeing anything.
Ben came even with me, and we both stood there for a while more, watching the waves, breathing with the world’s breath.
“You’re shaking,” Ben said, quietly. He took my hand and I realized I was trembling--scared, in shock, not cold.
Ben’s hand was warm, grounding. Ben, the least grounded of us.
“I’m seeing…things,” I said.
“What kinds of things?”
I gestured with my free hand, clutching his hard in my other. “Childish drawings in the air…it started in my peripheral vision, but tonight, when I was sensing the patterns for that man…it was just there, in the air all around him.”
“You’re evolving,” Ben said, like it was a simple, good thing.
I drew in a breath on a slightly hysterical gasp. “Devolving. Broken is more like it. I can’t read the things I’m seeing. They’re--silly, meaningless.”
Ben grunted. “Seb,” he said, “I’ve never sensed patterns and futures the way the rest of you do. I hear them. I hear music, and voices, and other sounds. They tell me different things than what you all sense. I know they sound…mad…but they’ve been borne out, just as often as yours or Mika or Hassif’s readings. What I hear…it’s of…I don’t know, wider, or another level? Or, just different…
“But here’s the point, Sebira. I had to learn to interpret them. At first, it was just noise, cacophony.”
He wasn’t lo
oking at me. I stared at his profile. “You’ve never…never said.” As close as we all were, I couldn’t quite believe it, couldn’t encompass his keeping such a big secret.
One of his brow’s rose as he did look at me, a wry twist to his mouth. “For the same reason you ran away, instead of telling any of us you’d started seeing things, I’d guess. I didn’t want to be recalled to the crèche, or be the reason the whole pod was recalled, labeled defective.”
Those stories, whole pods disappeared back to crèche because one of their members was broken. He’d been protecting us, all of us.
“You all already thought I was…broken, a little, Seb. But I’m not--we’re not. Not broken, Sebira.”
“Ben, I can’t--”
A sudden flood of figures and motions filled the air—hugely—above one of the inbound seatrain tracks. A cartoony line of sharks, nose-to-tail, looped through the air into a confused knot, then exploded out in all directions until, momentum expended, the sharks flopped over with x’s for eyes.
Great huffing mollusks, I remember thinking, what does that mean? Because, whatever it was, had urgency.
Ben’s hand clutched at mine.
“I hear screams. And--” he shook his head and shut his eyes for a moment. “A popping sound and trainsong”--the magnetic song of maglev skimmers--“broken and stuttering. I think. What do you see?”
I told him. “Should we--”
“We need to tell the station master,” Ben interrupted. “Now.”
He started at a lope toward the station, still holding my hand and dragging me with him.
“But--” There was no train in sight, and I didn’t know what I’d seen.
I tripped after him, slipping up and down the sand dunes.
The station master sat in her geodome shack, playing dice and drinking with another woman--Zadey, our boss; I remembered Gilley mentioning her mother was long-time friends with this sector’s station master. The panes of the geodome were mostly opaque from the outside, only a little light spilling from the structure. structure. From inside, though, the panes provided a panoramic view of the rail yard inlets, coastline, ocean, and, currently, the lights, tent domes, and rides of the Gamboges Vivant.