Sideshow Read online

  Sometimes walking over bodies was part of the job. Not all Enforcers worked for the Council, but no Enforcer could work against it, such was the rule of the Craft. Adam-the-man could hire any Enforcer he liked to protect him against all threats except those posed by Council Enforcers. If CEs came looking for him, other Enforcers stood aside. When a CE lifted his hand in salute and recited a complaint and disposition number to confirm he was Attending the Situation, other Enforcers were expected to remember pressing business elsewhere. Sometimes afterward there were bodies to walk over.

  “I’ve heard whispers about that Panubi dragon business,” said Zasper. “Interesting. What do they offer?”

  Fringe told him and he whistled between his teeth. “Couldn’t do much better than Council Enforcer and twice standard! Plus an annuity.”

  She snorted. “If I survive.”

  “There’s always that.”

  Down on the floor below, Bloom was shrieking at a croupier, his truncated form erupting out of the swarm like a jumping fish from roiling water. Strictly speaking, Bloom’s legs were not category seven. He’d imported them from some nine or ten province in defiance of the ban against higher category imports, but nobody in authority seemed to care.

  Fringe touched the service button and a voice said, “Yah?”

  “Black ale,” Fringe muttered. “Two.”

  Black ale had been what Zasper offered her when she had come begging his sponsorship at the Academy. It had been what she offered him the day she graduated, after he pinned the Enforcer’s badge on her shoulder. It was part of their relationship. She turned half away from the hubbub below and said musingly, “There’s this giant goes around with Danivon Luze, you seen him?”

  Zasper nodded. “Curvis. I know him. Sometimes a little … rigid. Mostly reliable.”

  “He said Luze smells out who he’s going to work with.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.” Zasper grinned to himself. “Smells out all sorts of things, like who’s bluffing and who’s not.”

  She waited, but he offered nothing more.

  “You’re not saying much, Zas! I come to you for help, and you don’t say pollywhop. Just sit there smirking.”

  Two sealed pods slid onto the table from the service hatch, popping lids and extruding handles as they arrived.

  He shrugged and went on smiling. “What’s to say, girl? Tell you to send him packing and stay safe here? Tell you to go for the prize? Tell you you’re Fringe Owldark, all grown-up, got to make up your own mind? What?”

  “Well, hell, something, Zasper!” She put her nose to her mug and drank. “Did I ever tell you how I got the name Owldark?”

  He cocked his head. “Thought you made it up.”

  Grinning, she told him about the time Jory had named her. “Did you ever catch sight of her, Zasper? I used to tell you about her. She told me I was one of her people. I keep expecting her to show up again, but she never has.”

  He frowned, finding the story ominous without being able to say why. “Sure she was a woman?”

  “Looked like a woman. She had something with her, though, something that could have been a glob. Something shadowy. Maybe that’s what reminded me of her. What Danivon said. Monsters in the shadows, nobody knows what they are. He says the Gods may be here on Elsewhere.”

  “That scares you?”

  “You know it does!” She swallowed painfully, shuddering a little. “Having those things eating your soul, doesn’t it scare you?”

  Zasper waved that away with one hand. “Every few years, somebody says the Gods are here on Elsewhere. Whether they are or not makes no difference to what you’re going to do, does it? Want me to tell you again what your trouble is, you don’t trust who you are. Hell, you know that already! How many times we talked about that? All the time second-guessing yourself. Remember the story I used to tell you? The one about the warrior maid and the gylphs?”

  “I remember,” she said, making a face. Zasper had dwelt on that story overlong and overoften. Poor weighted-down heavy-armored warrior, envying the magical gylphs their power of flight, not satisfied to be herself but not willing to take off her protective armor, either.

  “You’ve always told me you thought you were born for something special,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the whoops of laughter from below. “And either that’s true or it isn’t. If it’s true, likely you’ll find out when something like this comes along. If you duck it when it comes, what does that mean?”

  Fringe diddled, drawing pictures on the tabletop with one wet forefinger. “I’m not ducking, Zasper. I don’t mind the thought of dragons, not if that’s what they are. The idea of Gods scares me spitless. When I hear there’s a possibility of that, I sort of shrivel. Like there’s no hope, no reason to go on.”

  She looked at Zasper to see if he understood what she was saying. “But even if I’m scared, I swore to protect diversity and humanity, and the only diversity and humanity that’s left is right here on Elsewhere. I believe in it. It makes more sense than anything else I was ever taught, so I can’t just let them come on and take us over if maybe we could stop it. And besides, it may not be the Gods at all. I have to go, I guess. It’s just Danivon … he’s …”

  “I know what he is. He cuts a swath through the girlies. Pulls like a magnet. Gets at you, huh!”

  She gave Zasper a look. None of his business, dirty old man. Except he was the pa hers hadn’t been, the brother hers hadn’t been, somebody who listened. “Yeah,” she admitted. “Sort of.”

  “So, tell him. You’ll go, but keep it business because sex disrupts your efficiency. Drops your weapon scores. Makes you miss easy targets.”

  Damn him, he was laughing at her. “It does not!” she blurted. “You know that’s not it!”

  Now he really was laughing. “Fringe! What the hell you want me to say?”

  She shook her head, half amused, half tearful. “I don’t know, Zasper. Maybe I’m afraid I’ll be homesick.” Her clean bare rooms. Her things. Comfort. Safety. A place where she could lock the door against the clamoring world.

  “You going?” he asked her.

  “Prob’ly,” she admitted.

  “Well then. Something I want to tell you about.” He leaned forward, his lips within inches of her ear, and told the story of his last interview with Boarmus, concluding, “Danivon say anything about those petition things?”

  “Not to me, he didn’t.”

  “Well, my bet is Boarmus told him. Just figured you ought to know. Dragons probably aren’t all he’s after.”

  She thought about it, but it made no sense. “Who’s petitioning who?”

  Zasper shrugged. “You know what I know. R.S.V.P. Noplace. That’s all I know.”

  She decided to change the subject. “The Bloom says they’ve improved the Finalizer seven-aught-nine.”

  He grunted. “That’s his opinion. It’s lighter, faster, and you can hit what you aim it at maybe one time in ten if you’re real careful. I borrowed one from Gaunt’s man, just to test-fire it. Fool thing’s all over the place. Real good weapon for nipping, Fringe.”

  Nipping, the more-or-less accidental slaughter of Non-Involved Persons, wasn’t considered professional when done by Enforcers, though Trashers did it all the time. Fringe said disapprovingly, “Then the Bloom shouldn’t have said it was improved!”

  The Bloom, as though invoked by the mention of his name, appeared at tableside, still bouncing up and down. “Hey, lady love, this old fart bothering you?”

  She shook her head, trying to grin. “No more’n usual, Bloom.”

  “If he is, I’ll call him out. Two shots, fifty paces. Make him pay, worthless old chaffer.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about you and fifty paces,” rumbled Zasper. “You get up-sun of the guy, and before he gets a shot, you zoom your legs and let him have it out of the glare. You shoot dirty.”

  “Dirty takes the pot! Which is better’n you’ve been doing,” Bloom said severely.

&nbs
p; While Zasper had never admitted to it, Fringe assumed that since his retirement, Zasper played for Bloom’s. Zasper’s response seemed to confirm that.

  “Chaffer spit, yes. Got to recoup,” he said, struggling to his feet. “Listen, girl. I’ll finish this game sooner or later. Prob’ly sooner, since I’ve already shot my credit.” He cast a sidelong glance at the Bloom. “I’ll buy you dinner. We’ll talk about it.”

  “That’s all right, Zasper,” she said. “I knew what I was going to do before I came down here, that is, if you didn’t say I was crazy. When Enforcers swear to protect diversity and humanity, they can’t turn down the protecting when it comes along, I guess. And only a fool would turn down a chance at twice Council standard!”

  “Twice Council standard!” said Bloom reverently. “Now there’s a dream.”

  “Maybe more than a dream,” she said. “Maybe more than, Bloom.” She left them, going back down the stairs and through the crowd where the dinks still swarmed. At least they’d left their genitals home, or were carrying them in closed boxes. Fringe had never gotten used to penises zipping around on their own hovers, rubbing up against anything that felt good. Female parts were even worse, cozying up to the nearest hands. She looked around for dink modulator units and found three of them over by a gambling table with three sets of hands and one pair of eyes, playing Four Ladies.

  A dink nose sniffed intimately at her as she went by, and she slapped it without thinking. From across the room, a dink voice box screeched, “Violence! Violence!”

  “Kill the damn thing,” a bystander urged her with barely controlled belligerence. “Kill it, Enforcer.”

  “Open borders,” screamed the voice box in a hysterical soprano. “Open borders.”

  Fringe shrugged an apology. The voice was right. Enarae had open borders. It welcomed tourism. Even dinks, who, thank the ’Toter, seldom showed up anywhere but in the Swale.

  A voice spoke in her ear, “What’s the matter, killer? You don’t like dinks?” Another dink voice box, this one a sneery baritone, with an eye on top and an ear at one side. A conversation module, no less.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t like dink noses sniffing my crotch. I don’t like dink eyes looking down my neck, or at my cards when I’ve got a bet down. I don’t like dink hands grabbing anything they can grab or dink pricks shoving up against me. Open borders means open both ways, box! You don’t like my not liking, then the border’s open to get out.”

  “Now, now,” said Bloom, appearing at eye level. “Now, now, bad Fringe! Bad box! Naughty. Play nice or Bloom will insist upon assembly.” He waved at the sign over the bar, which read, “Bloom reserves the right to refuse service to globs and disassembled entities.”

  Fringe muttered an apology, while the voice growled something threatening. Ignoring the sulky mutter, she went out into the street. Empty, as always, except for a meat-tart vendor who’d parked his smoky cart fifty paces away at the bottom of the stairs and was stirring his kettle of hot fat with a long slotted spoon. The smells of woodsmoke and frying meat filled the street. Fringe swallowed, suddenly ravenous.

  She had juice dripping from her chin and her hands full of hot food when Bloom’s door crashed open and one of the dinks came out, evidently hastily assembled, though all its interlocking parts were arranged more or less in anatomical order.

  “Hey, girly!” it yelled in its sneery baritone. “Hey, Enforcer!”

  Still chewing a mouthful of succulent meat and pastry, Fringe turned slowly to confront the aggregation. Its left arm had been disassembled, probably for parts, leaving only a forearm and hand unit, but the muscular right arm was complete, including a shoulder cantilevered from the modulator core. The assembly had a weapons belt strapped around it, hanging low on one side. Fringe choked on a bit of crust. It looked like a caricature of the Guntoter icon. Like an animated costume rack in some ancient predispersion gunfighter myth. Fringe had seen them all as re-created by the Files. When she was about ten she’d watched nothing but gunfighter re-creations for days at a time. She swallowed the laugh that came bubbling up, reminding herself survivors didn’t laugh at challenges, no matter who they came from.

  A long time back, you might have laughed at some idiot carrying a weapon because you knew he had no skill. Then technology superseded skill, and the weapon itself did the killing. The one the dink was carrying was a case in point, a broad-beam aitchem that could do her serious damage if merely discharged in her general direction. Fringe had only a pain needler on her belt. In skilled hands that would ordinarily have been quite enough. Unfortunately, most dinks had been disconnected from pain. The worst she could do was make it itch, which the dink damned well knew.

  Bloom’s doorway was full of dink eyes, watching, dink ears, quivering.

  “Are you provoking a fight, dink?” Fringe called curiously. “That what you want?”

  “Damn right,” yelled the dink, its hand jerking up and down near the weapon.

  Fringe dropped the remains of the tart and herself to the street, rolled sideways with her legs curled under her, came up with her right hand full of the weapon she had been carrying in her right boot, and shot the dink assembly through the modulator, upper left corner, where the brain can usually was. Her boot weapon was always loaded with explosive slugs. Shreds of the dink flew in all directions while what remained sizzled, smoked, and fell apart into disparate boxes, some of which trembled for a time while the voice went “Gaaaaaahhhhhh,” in a terrified and dying wail.

  The dinks who’d been watching disappeared inside Bloom’s place like snakes down a hole.

  “For a dink to provoke a fight with an Enforcer is not a smart thing,” she remarked to nobody in particular, the monitor, maybe, if the stupid thing was listening. “Which information should be disseminated to every cocky box as it arrives.” She walked forward and blew the dink’s weapon apart with another ear-shattering jolt. No point leaving it around for some crazy to maim thirty noninvolved pedestrians with.

  Bloom’s door had closed abruptly, but something moved at the upstairs window. She brought up the weapon, but it was only Zasper, waving. He’d been watching the whole thing. She waved in return. Bloom’s door opened, and a salvage machine with a Guntoter icon on its snout came out to suck up the shreds of the dink. Fringe walked back to the food cart and told the recumbent vendor to get up off the street and give her another tart to replace the one she’d rolled on. She took it from his trembling hand and climbed the stairs to the corner, leaving the Swale.

  Behind her, in the window of Bloom’s place, Zasper turned to the man beside him, the player who’d been winning steadily.

  “She killed it,” Zasper said.

  “Thought she would,” said Danivon Luze, his fingers stroking the medallion at his neck. “No hesitation at all.”

  “Were you expecting hesitation?”

  “I was expecting something,” said Danivon Luze in an unsatisfied voice. “Something I smell about her. Something sort of … uncertain.”

  “There’s nothing uncertain about Fringe’s skills,” said Zasper stiffly. “I told you she was good and I meant it. Any uncertainty has to do with other things. Wouldn’t want you to mistake that, Danny! You sure she’s the right one to go along?”

  “Oh, yeah, she’s the right one. One of the right ones.”

  “You didn’t tell her about the petitions, but I bet Boarmus told you!”

  “Haven’t told anybody. Not even Curvis. I will, when it seems appropriate.”

  “I told her.”

  “Well, damn, Zasper.”

  “She’s a friend of mine, Dan.”

  “So?”

  “You know. Treat her like a friend.”

  “Do my best,” said Danivon, flushing, not sure what his best might be in this context.

  “What is it you’re smelling, Danivon Luze?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Everybody talking about dragons and petitions and possesseds, scared of all of ’em, scared of anything new because it
might mean changes. Of course, expecting Council Supervisory to welcome change is like expecting a chaffer to fly. ‘Change’ is a naughty word on Elsewhere. We all know that.”

  Zasper stared in the direction Fringe had gone and nodded, well aware that everyone did, indeed, know that.

  In Tolerance, Jacent was attending his first committee meeting.

  Business before Council Supervisory, Complaint and Disposition Review Committee A., Day 26, Period 10, Year 1353 P.S. (Post Settlement)

  AUTHORITY: Articles of Organization, Council Supervisory of Elsewhere, Rule Number 53, Paragraph M, Section xiii. “All dispositions entered by C&D machines shall be reviewed by Council members (human) before implementation.”

  AGENDA

  COMPLAINT AND DISPOSITION

  Items one through one hundred fifty-nine

  of this date.

  ITEM 1: Complaint by the brotherhood of dinkajins, City Fifteen (category ten); one of their members wantonly killed while traveling in Enarae.

  DISPOSITION: Official warning to brotherhood of dinka-jins that members travel at their own risk. Enarae is category seven, confrontational, weapons-using society, and killing is not untypical of that province.

  No penalty.

  “Aye,” said the members of the committee.

  ITEM 2: Complaint by the brotherhood of dinka-jins, City Fifteen; citizen of Enarae found using category-nine bionic prostheses in category-seven province.

  DISPOSITION: Complaint denied as not meeting criteria for legal standing. Only Enaraen citizens may complain about internal matters.

  No penalty.

  “Aye,” said the committee again, as with one voice.

  ITEM 3: Complaint by the brotherhood of dinka-jins, City Fifteen; citizen of Enarae guilty of importing category-nine prostheses across borders into category-seven place in defiance of ban against higher category imports.

  DISPOSITION: Standing affirmed. Any citizen may complain of categorical border violations.