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  An excellent view of these recurrent rituals can be had from the mezzanine, a high-ceilinged, softly upholstered dining balcony reached from the Arrival Floor by a dramatically curved flight of stairs. By convention, certain sumptuously furnished tables on the mezzanine are set aside for senior members of the Council Supervisory. Other tables, more sumptuous still, are located upon a small upper balcony used only by members of the Provost’s Inner Circle. The upper balcony is quite private. Conversations held there cannot be overheard. Not least for this reason, it is a place much favored by Boarmus, the current Provost.

  Today Boarmus has an appointment with Zasper Ertigon, sometime Council Enforcer, who has petitioned the Council for retirement so he may return to his native province of Enarae. Boarmus knows a good deal about Zasper, as he does about most Council Enforcers. He is inclined to grant Zasper’s request, but before he does so, he wants something in return.

  Zasper has given as his reason for retirement that the burden of constant travel is wearing him down, which is not precisely true. He hasn’t really minded the travel; his real reason for retiring is this other thing he’s been noticing and feeling and worrying over without being able to pin it down. This nastiness that seems to be getting worse. The extent to which twisted people are doing nastily kinky things, even in places where twisted people and kinky things have been more or less usual.

  More child sacrifice, more female and child slavery, more wife killing, more ritual rape.

  More pain and flagellation and maiming of celebrants.

  More complicated torture. More mobs, more mayhem, more murder, more meanness.

  Zasper has been around long enough to notice the increase, and he wants out. If it takes some kind of pro forma meeting with the Provost to get out, he’ll attend the meeting.

  So they come together on the upper balcony, the jowly Provost and the stocky Enforcer, the latter now dressed in undistinguished civilian garb, the former—so far as anyone knows—extending this exceptional courtesy to a good Enforcer now growing old, who is—so far as anyone can tell—enjoying the honor of a personal farewell. That neither of them has ever much liked the other isn’t considered important, even by themselves.

  “More tea?” offers Boarmus, ignoring Zasper’s untouched cup.

  “Thank you, no,” says Zasper, who drinks ale when he can get it and believes herbal infusions to be at best old womanish and at worst disruptive of the bowels.

  “I asked you here to take advantage of your experience,” says Boarmus smoothly, making no further offer of refreshment. “In the field, as it were.”

  “Sir,” says Zasper. It is an all-purpose word, essentially meaningless.

  “Confidentially.”

  An interesting interpolation, but the same word serves. “Sir.”

  Boarmus sits back and looks at his guest, almost smiling. Stiff-necked bastard. A good Enforcer. One of the best, but no give to him. Which is what’s wanted. “Confidentially,” he says again, with an unmistakable emphasis.

  Zasper blinks. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

  Boarmus takes a package from his lap and places it on the table. Only Zasper sees his quick sidewise glance, both directions, to see if anyone’s watching. No one is. The hour is early for the evening meal, late for midday. The upper balcony is deserted except for themselves.

  “I received this recently,” Boarmus says, removing the wrappings, though only enough for Zasper to see what’s inside.

  On the table between them lies a plaque of metal (Zasper thinks gold, it looks like gold) with fancy work around the edges (Zasper thinks gems, they look like gems). The words graven on the plaque are in a language commonly spoken on Elsewhere.

  THE PEOPLE OF ELSEWHERE

  ARE RESPECTFULLY REQUESTED

  TO RETHINK THEIR POSITION

  WITH RESPECT TO THE REST

  OF THE UNIVERSE

  •

  R.S.V.P. NOPLACE: Central Panubi

  “Ugh,” says Zasper, completely taken by surprise.

  “These are not predispersion times,” says Boarmus. “When precious metals and jewels had great intrinsic value. But even here and now a trifle like this is somewhat … extravagant.”

  “Ah.”

  “As much for the workmanship as for the materials,” says Boarmus. “My consultants tell me that though the gems are extremely rare, it is even rarer to have something like this handmade. The lettering is hand done, for example. By an actual person who spent a good part of a lifetime learning how.”

  “What does it mean?” asks Zasper, cutting through the chatter.

  “I don’t know. It’s the fourth such … petition we’ve received,” says Boarmus. “All of them different. According to my predecessor, Chadra Hume, the first one popped up in the Files about a century ago. For a full day, nothing but a message similar to this would appear in response to any request for information. Various languages, but the same message. The second message appeared during an orbiter surveillance of the highlands of Denial fifty years later, and that one was spelled out in letters a mile high, bright purple crass-brush against the tundra. My predecessor told me about that one too. Twenty-five years later, a third one. I saw it, also on orbiter: herds of grazing animals on the Bi-flom plains forming letters and words, a square mile or so, all with an ornamental border of migratory bat-swans. That was twelve years ago. Now this one.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “Found it on my Files access one morning.”

  “Ah,” says Zasper again.

  “How much did they teach you about the origins of Elsewhere?” Boarmus asks in a low voice, casting another quick glance around himself. “I don’t mean in Enforcer Academy, but when you were in school. As a boy.”

  Zasper shrugs, furrows his brow, and tries to remember. “I learned what most kids learn, I suppose.”

  Boarmus stares at him while trying to recall what children are taught about Brannigan Galaxity, the greatest institution of learning in the galaxy, and how it had established Elsewhere as a refuge from the Hobbs Land Gods. How much are children taught about the refugees being promised complete freedom to live as they liked? About Elsewhere being settled by a thousand different peoples, all of them with ancient gods to propitiate, ancient wrongs to settle, or ancient duties still to perform? Surely Zasper knows this much; surely everyone does!

  Still, one has to be sure. “You learned about the Hobbs Land Gods?” Boarmus asks.

  Zasper nods. “Of course. A kind of fungal plague.”

  “Not one that killed, unfortunately. You learned about Brannigan Galaxity?”

  Zasper leans back with an amused look on his face and nods again. “I learned that Brannigan had this committee to study the Great Question, and when the Hobbs Land Gods began enslaving humanity, the committee felt that threatened their work, so they set up Elsewhere as a refuge”—Zasper sniggers very slightly—“for humanity, including themselves.”

  Boarmus adopts an offended expression. “I’ve never heard it alleged that Elsewhere was set up as a refuge for the members of the Great Question Committee particularly.”

  Zasper’s mouth curls in amusement. “There’s a thing we kids used to sing when we chose up teams. ‘Breaze and Bland and Thob and Clore /ran till they could run no more /then Jordel of Hemerlane /chased them all right back again. One two three four /you’re it.’” He starts to laugh, then stops as he notices the color drain from the Provost’s face.

  Boarmus reaches across the table and lays a slightly trembling hand across Zasper’s mouth, saying in a shaky voice, “Don’t! Remember where you are!”

  “Sorry, Provost,” murmurs the Enforcer in confusion. “I wasn’t aware …”

  “I don’t ask you to be aware,” growls the Provost. “I ask you to use courtesy and good sense. It is not … appropriate to mock the … founders of Elsewhere, certainly not here in Tolerance. It’s true there were Brannigan professors named … the names you mention. And it’s true that Jordel of Hemerlane w
as an engineer much involved in the Elsewhere project, but this makes neither them nor their many colleagues suitable subjects for ridicule.”

  “Well, the way I was taught the story,” says Zasper irre-pressibly, “is that they set Elsewhere up in secret, kept it a secret, and were the first ones here!”

  “That’s also true,” agrees Boarmus in a whisper. “They were almost the first ones on Elsewhere. It was a long time ago, however, a thousand years, give or take a few, and their names are … historic. To be used with gravity!”

  “You asked me, Provost!”

  “What I was trying to establish was whether you understand the historic connection between Elsewhere and the Great Question.”

  Zasper snorts. “Every kid knows that connection. Grownups won’t give you candy on Great Question Day unless you can go through the question-and-answer routine. There was a verse about that too: ‘There once was a girl from K’van/who was asked the Great Question of Man….’” He catches Boarmus’s expression and goes on hastily, “though, quite frankly, Provost, I don’t see what this all has to do with this thing you’ve received.”

  “Then you’re not using your imagination, Ertigon!” Boarmus flushes angrily, suspecting the man opposite him of willful ignorance or dumb insolence or both. Most likely both! “This petition, if that’s what it is, suggests we ‘Rethink our position regarding the rest of the universe.’ The rest of the universe, this galaxy of it, at least, was long ago taken over by the Hobbs Land Gods. Only Elsewhere is free of enslavement. Thus, only on Elsewhere may the Great Question be answered. So, to a suspicious mind like mine …”

  “You think maybe someone … something doesn’t want the question answered?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind. Which is one reason I’m talking to you. The petition says R.S.V.P. Noplace: Central Panubi. You’ve been on Panubi.”

  Zasper, remembering a few times he’d been there, keeps his face expressionless. “Many Enforcers have been on Panubi.”

  “That’s true. Unfortunately, few of you have been over the wall to Central Panubi, which should have been explored generations ago!”

  The excuse originally given for not having explored Central Panubi before settlement was that there hadn’t been time. The advance of the Gods had been swifter than anticipated. There had been ecological adaptation delays on Elsewhere. There had been the construction of the Great Rotunda to get finished off and a Frickian army to transport and house. There had been staff to hire and settlement protocols to be developed. There had been on-planet Doors to set up for transporting refugees to their provinces. Exploration of Central Panubi, it had then been felt, could wait until all these matters were taken care of. The reasons given now were different ones, but exploration still waited.

  Boarmus’s musing over this fact is interrupted by Zasper’s impatient question.

  “Provost, what do you want from me?”

  “Well, I don’t want the matter talked of here, for one thing. Since you’re going home, you won’t be here to talk about it. We Council members are not people of action. We don’t think that way. We like precedents. We like rules. You, however, you’re a man of action, so you can tell me what a man of action would do under the circumstances. That’s what I want from you.”

  “I’d send someone to Central Panubi to find out what’s going on,” says Zasper firmly.

  “Well, I have considered that,” Boarmus replies, offended once more. “That seems self-evident, rather. The former Provost and I both considered doing that. But it’s very difficult to send anyone to do anything and keep it secret! One man, maybe. But one man couldn’t be expected to …”

  Zasper thinks about it. “You don’t want to mount a major expedition?”

  “I don’t. I don’t want the talk. All it takes is the least bit of tittle-tattle and all Tolerance buzzes like a hive, all the charge monitors get themselves in a muddle, and nothing gets done for ages. Work backs up. The status quo is threatened. No, we couldn’t have a major expedition without talk.”

  “Well, if I couldn’t send someone to find anything out, then I’d simply wait. You’ve probably noticed that the intervals between messages are getting shorter. Whoever or whatever it is may be growing … less patient. If you wait, the petitioner may come to you.”

  “If you had to guess, what would you think this thing means.”

  Zasper, well schooled in tactics at the Enforcer Academy, ticks off the possibilities on his fingers: “Agitation, misdirection, misinformation.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning these messages may be mere harassment, attempts to throw you off balance. Or something or someone might be trying to make you look at Central Panubi so hard you don’t see something happening somewhere else. Or perhaps there are beings in Central Panubi who believe they can get us to leave Elsewhere, some of us at any rate, going out where we’d be vulnerable—or who simply believe we ought to; no accounting for some people’s idiocies.” Zasper nodded. Idiocy was one thing Enforcers knew could be counted on.

  He went on musingly, “Inasmuch as this thing suggests we turn our attention outside our own system, I could suspect the Hobbs Land Gods have something to do with it. Of course, there is another possibility, which is that the messages are meaningless. They may be created by some entity who’s just fooling around. Maybe even a series of entities. It could have started generations ago with some kid recently brought to Tolerance from Heaven, and then he passed the joke on to succeeding generations.”

  Zasper feels this latter alternative is not unlikely. Kids do silly stuff. Even he, as a kid … Well, no matter. Of course (he has to admit this, proud as he is of being what he calls a realist) his feeling that this is foolishness could be just him getting old, losing his resiliency and perceptivity. He doesn’t mention this, however, any more than he mentioned it to the Supervisors when he asked to go back to Enarae and become a mere provincial Enforcer again.

  Boarmus frowns thoughtfully. “None of the reasons you mention would require that any of us actually go to Panubi.”

  “No,” agrees Zasper. “None of them require that you go there. At least, not right now. Later, maybe. I can’t help thinking that whoever sent that didn’t really expect a response. The message is too enigmatic. Were the others equally so?”

  Boarmus nods gloomily.

  “Well then, he, she, or it may not expect an answer. The fact it’s so nonspecific really lends weight to the idea that someone’s playing games.”

  “Then we should wait, you think?”

  “I don’t think what you should do, Provost. That would be presumptuous of me. But it’s what I’d do.”

  “Thank you for your opinion, Enforcer.”

  “Sir!”

  In the other place, on twentieth-century Earth, Bertran and Nela Korsyzczy became bookish, both by necessity and inclination, their fondness for stories stimulated by Marla’s habit of reading to them at bedtime. The comfortable hour she spent each evening sitting beside the twins’ bed holding the pages of a favorite book in the glow of the little lamp with the ruffled pink shade was Marla’s favorite time.

  One night, while she was reading Alice in Wonderland, a new edition, with many colored pictures. Bertran broke into the story to ask, “Do you have to read girls’ stories all the time.”

  “It isn’t a girl’s story,” Marla said in surprise. “It’s a classic. Alice could just as well be a little boy.”

  “She could not. She’s all the time crying and talking to herself and doing stupid stuff.”

  “Well, she has to talk to herself,” Nela objected. “There’s nobody else there for her to talk to.”

  “A boy wouldn’t,” said Bertran stoutly. “A boy wouldn’t talk to himself like that. He’d do something!”

  “Oh, pooh,” said Nela. “What would you do?”

  “I’d smash that caterpillar for one thing.”

  “Boys are always smashing something,” sneered Nela.

  Bertran subsided with a g
lower.

  “I’ll read something for you tomorrow night,” his mother promised. “You pick it out.”

  “Read the turtle,” he demanded when the time came. “Not the Ninja one, the other one!”

  Marla wondered why the turtle was more a boy’s story than Alice had been, but Nela was making no objection so she burrowed for the raggedy old book. It was behind the fairytale tapes, on the bottom shelf, much creased and worn and stained with jam or something worse. It was called The Turtle Who Wanted to Fly.

  “‘Once there was a turtle,’” she read, telling of the turtle who swam in the pond and dwelt in the mud, who ate green things and wormy things and listened to the splash of water and the humming wings of the dragonflies, who saw the swallows dipping the silver surface of the water.

  “‘Came autumn, a time of gray thorn and gray leaf and gray mist rising,’” she read. “‘Turtle saw the glimmer of the swallows in the evening mist and wondered at them, for he could not see them clearly, darting as they did, their silver bellies and sapphire backs making bright arcs and darting dances along the ripples. “Oh, I want to see them,” cried the turtle. “See them close and feel their feathers and the whisper of their wings, for I believe if I could see them closely, I could learn to fly….”

  ““‘To see them closely, you must go to the secret sanctuary of the birds,” said the bullfrog, whose eyes were so constructed that he could see only the movement of the birds, not the birds themselves. “My grandfather told me of the place high on the windy mountains.”

  “‘ So turtle went, by long ways and sad ways and hard ways always, gray tree and gray stone and gray wind blowing, until he came to the secret sanctuary of the birds.’”

  “And there he saw the birds, as he had longed to do. And there he was made a certain offer that he could not accept.”

  “I don’t like that story,” cried Nela, tears on her cheeks, anger in her eyes.