Sideshow

Sideshow

Sheri S Tepper

To all those
who ride the great dragon
Wonder

heaven longing ape
angel who stumbles
blind light bearer
who falls and fumbles
worshiper of error
seeker after truth
hurting and aging
lover of lovely youth
wild beast raging
craven and brave
freak of fashion
and custom’s slave
puppet of passion
lowest and loftiest
a sideshow gape
god’s fool, nature’s jest
heaven longing ape
“MAN”
Koi Bashi

ONE

1

Humanity was saved from certain destruction when, on their wedding night, Lek Korsyzczy informed his wife that their first child was to be a son. Certain intelligences (the Celerians, actually) established later that this was the event setting causation in motion. It happened at around one o’clock on an October Sunday morning during the 1990s, common era. Lek made the remark as Maria was about to get into bed with him, his voice slightly slurred from the wedding champagne, but with nothing tentative or doubtful in it to indicate that Marla had any choice in the matter.
Marla thought he sounded like a builder, like one of the customers at the lumberyard where she worked, matter-of-factly ordering framing timbers. She gave her new husband a thoughtful, rather troubled look. “Leksy, I think that just sort of happens how it happens, you know? Like my sister Judith, the one married to the plumber, she had four girls before she had Buddy.”
Leksy shrugged. His heavy shoulders were covered with large orange freckles and a pelt of fine, red-blond hair. Marla had already decided he would have to wear something with sleeves when they made love, because his fur tickled. She was sure, ticklish as she was, they would start doing it and she’d start laughing, and laughter, so her sister Judith had informed her, was never a good idea then.
“They don’t tell you how ridiculous it is,” Judith had confided in the rest room, after five glasses of champagne at the wedding supper. “The nuns sure don’t tell you. The priests
don’t tell you. They go on and on about sin, but nobody says how ridiculous it is. And then there you are, doing this silly thing—oh, don’t get me wrong, it can be fun—and you start thinking what it must look like and you want to laugh, and let me tell you, don’t! That’s one time you do not want to laugh. You wouldn’t believe how bent out of shape some men can get!”
So, now, looking at the tickly pelt of hairs on Leksy’s shoulders and arms, almost to the wrists, Marla knew she’d have to take steps to avoid laughter. “I mean,” she told him, “I wouldn’t want you to get your heart set on a boy right away, or anything.”
“You don’ unnerstan’,” he told her, hiccuping slightly as he slid completely under the influence of the multiple toasts he had drunk. “I got it all work’ out with the Blessed Virgin.”
“You what?”
“I got it all work’ out.” And with these words Leksy’s eyes fell shut as his mouth opened to emit a tiny snore. It was only a raspy breath, a mere puppy gargle so far as snores went, but it was definitely a snore, not something else. Not lust, for example. Not passion.
Marla sat looking at him, not sure whether she wanted to laugh or cry. It was kind of like a dirty joke, him falling asleep that way. “There was this guy, see, and he drank too much at his wedding and that night his new wife stayed in the bathroom a long time, so he fell asleep before anything happened, see….” Not that she’d been in the bathroom that long! On the other hand, his being asleep gave her a little time to think about what he’d said, that he’d worked it out with the Blessed Virgin. It didn’t exactly surprise her. Well, it did, but then it didn’t. Lots of things Leksy did seemed kind of surprising at first, but not after you thought about them. The whole Korsyzczy family was religious. No, pious. That was the word. Maybe a little more pious than was good for them. Who else did she know besides Leksy who had five sisters who were nuns and three older brothers in holy orders. Holiday dinner at their house was like a convocation! And they were all the time dragging religion into everything, like God was watching every breath you took! Like your whole life was bugged for holy!
Marla was tired and just a little bit drunk herself, which meant queasy in the stomach, because she couldn’t drink, not really. Whenever she tried, she either threw up or passed out.
She decided to have a nice long hot bath and not worry about it. It wasn’t romantic of Leksy to fall asleep that way, but their marriage would probably get off to a better start if he slept off the champagne. And she’d enjoy things more if her stomach was settled down. They’d both be better off for a little sleep. Leksy would probably wake up in an hour or two, and then they could do what he’d been self-righteously keeping them both from doing for the past six months since they’d gotten engaged.
The bath helped. Afterward she lay down beside him, expecting he’d wake up pretty soon. Several times during the night, she came out of a doze, thinking he was about to, but he only snored that same puppy snore and snuggled more deeply into the pillows. Along about four o’clock, she fell soundly asleep, and when he finally reached for her, around seven, she couldn’t rouse herself and wasn’t really aware how annoyed she was with him until she heard her own response.
“Don’t,” she said sharply. “I’m too sore.” Judith had warned her about
that.
“Sore?” he asked stupidly, looking at her bleary-eyed. “Sore?”
“I think you ought to have more consideration, Leksy,” she said. “I’m not used to this, and four times is just too much all at once.” And she turned over with a little secret smile and went on sleeping, leaving her husband to puzzle, then grin, then chortle as he got up and went in to take a shower. That small happening continued the chain of consequences that had begun with Lek’s announcement and would culminate with the arrival of the Alien and the saving of the planet Earth, for, as Marla’s eldest sister Sizzy had been fond of saying, you just never know.
That small happening also became a marital sandbag for Leksy, part of the accumulated grit any two people rub off each other that ends up reinforcing the family levees against the outside world. Marla didn’t realize that’s what it was. She had meant it as a joke, not a shibboleth, and she didn’t think twice before sharing the story with her sister Judith. Sometime later, Judith told her husband about it, and a year or so after that, during a drunken party, her husband told a guy he worked with, and a couple of years after that, the man remembered it during a fishing trip and told someone else. The town was a small one on the U.S.—Canadian border, the kind of town where everyone knows everyone, and though the story
wasn’t one of those knee-slappers that move like wildfire, it was a sort of amusing anecdote that hung around in people’s minds and got retold from time to time. It took almost seventeen years before it got back to Leksy.
Meantime, it was business as arranged for and sanctified, which, by the end of the honeymoon, had pretty much settled into the pattern it would occupy in their lives for the foreseeable future. Nothing fancy. Leksy had a horror of anything fancy. Fancy was stuff whores did. Fancy was stuff you could go to hell for or get AIDS doing. Mouths were for kissing only, and hands could be used discreetly at the beginning only, and the rest of it was up to the parts designed for the purpose, provided the one was securely inserted in the other before anything went bang. So said Father Jabowsky, and so Leksy believed because that’s the way he had done it every time he’d done it, and he hadn’t had any complaints. Of course, his mostly willing though often drunken partners hadn’t been asked for critiques.
It never occurred to Leksy to inquire whether Father Jabowsky was giving him good advice. Father was father, so it was the right advice, necessarily. The priest was almost seventy-five; he firmly believed that Vatican II had been a hallucination; he still said Mass in Latin whenever he thought nobody was listening; and he had never, even as a boy, felt in himself the slightest sexual urge, a fact he mentioned from time to time during premarital counseling sessions with a kind of quiet pride. Father Jabowsky took marital sex on faith, the same way he took transubstantiation. The church said the sacrament was there, so it was there, even though Father couldn’t see it, smell it, or taste it. You could tell it was there from the effects. Grace on the one hand. Babies on the other.
Marla rather wished Leksy had another confessor. She thought she knew a lot about sex, mostly from watching Oprah and Donahue, and though she found her relations with Leksy generally satisfying, she would have liked a little more variety. Maybe, she told herself, when Father Jabowsky died or retired, she could ask the new priest to talk to Leksy. Judith said some of the younger priests had actually studied about sex and were able to counsel about it intelligently. In the meantime, however, Marla amused herself by teasing Lek about “the way he did it on their wedding night.” Whenever they made love, and he asked if she’d liked it, she said yes, but
she wished he’d do it the way he’d done it on their wedding night.
Leksy couldn’t admit he didn’t remember. A few times he went so far as to say he couldn’t remember he’d done it any
different.
To which Marla merely smiled an enigmatic smile that drove him crazy because he got to wondering what he’d
done
, and whether it had been something maybe, you know,
perverted
, only it couldn’t have been because whatever it was, she’d liked it!
Aside from the teasing, Marla didn’t worry about it much. The main thing was to get pregnant, and people got pregnant in the missionary position as well as any other.
Except that she didn’t. After six months, she went to the doctor for a checkup. The doctor ran tests and filled out a long questionnaire and asked her to have her husband come in for a sperm test. Marla tried to explain about Leksy, who wouldn’t submit to a sperm test in a million years, while the doctor muttered something about ritual and superstition and being back in the Dark Ages.
“Well, since I can’t find anything obviously wrong with you,” he said at last, “next time you have intercourse in the morning, come on in as soon afterward as you can. We’ll take a smear and try to determine from that.”
Which meant waiting until the next time Leksy had a weekday off, so they could stay in bed almost until the doctor’s office hours, and then pretending she had an appointment with the dentist to explain her rushing off, even before breakfast. And it turned out useless, after all. “Enough sperm to populate the planet,” grumbled the doctor into his microscope. “All flapping around like trout.”
So another six months went by, and still no pregnancy. Leksy’s relatives were beginning to look at her funny. Father Jabowsky came right out and asked her during her confession if she was using birth control, which made Marla very upset with him, and she called him something—well, not him exactly, she just said people who suspected things like that had dirty minds—so he ended up loading her penance. That certainly wasn’t fair. He was the one with the nasty uncharitable thoughts.
After that, she stopped going to St. Seraph’s and started going across the parish line to Holy Redeemer. A lot of the younger people did, so that was all right. Even Leksy knew that, and he didn’t say a word about it.
She had the doctor repeat the tests when they’d been married a year and a half, even going so far as to have him look at Leksy’s sperm again, just to be sure. By this time she was so upset she spent almost an hour crying in the doctor’s office.
“You’re trying too hard,” he told her.
“Relax.” Relaxing wasn’t exactly what she was able to do. Leksy kept at her and kept at her. She told him he was wearing her out, but he said marriage was for babies, so until she got pregnant, it was his moral duty to keep at it and there was no sin involved. Besides, since she’d quit working at the lumberyard—Leksy had thought maybe it was her job that kept her from getting pregnant—she could always take a nap in the afternoon. Leksy wasn’t worried. He had it all worked out with the Virgin, and nobody was accusing
him
of using birth control.
At the end of two years, Marla was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“Three and four times a day,” she said. “I can’t even turn around if he’s in the house or he drags me into the bedroom. I like sex, Doctor, or I used to, but this is getting ridiculous.”
“There’s this new drug,” he told her. “Ovitalibon. Made by one of the big European drug companies, just recently released for use in this country. I’ve used it with some success in situations like yours, cases of unattributable subfertility.”
“I’ve read about those drugs,” she said. “Women pregnant with nine babies, like a mama dog with a litter. All of the babies die. Or they have to abort some to let the others live. Leksy wouldn’t do that in a million years. He’d leave me first.”
“No, no,” the doctor huffed, making pursey little lines around his mouth. “By this time I’m well aware of your husband’s religious hangups, Marla. No. That’s a different drug you’re talking about. Ovitalibon doesn’t do that. It does slightly increase the incidence of twins, but it doesn’t cause multiple births. In fact, we’re not entirely sure how it works.”
By which Marla understood that the drug had probably been invented for some other condition entirely, then had been found to have fertility effects, but nobody knew why. Just like the birth control pill had originally been invented for infertility. Watching Donahue kept her well informed, though it had also made her slightly cynical.
“You’re sure it won’t give me like five or six babies all at once.”
“I’m sure,” he said. And he was. About that.
The drug was miraculous. Within two months she was pregnant. As soon as she was sure, she told everyone and peace descended like a dove. She told herself peace came exactly like a white-winged dove. Fluttering down. All soft and cooing. Leksy let her alone. Her relatives let her alone. For the first time since their wedding, she got a full night’s sleep. For the first time since their wedding, she found herself ecstatically, totally content.
Everything, so says Jordel of Hemerlane (whom you will meet in due time), is connected to everything else. Time imposes no limitation on this rule. Everywhen is connected to every-other-when. Tit floweth from tat, tut floweth from tit. Past, present, future, are not disparate things but a continuum, a recoiled helix of interconnections in which time no more serves to sever than does distance. Here and there are not separable. Now and then are not divisible. Everything burrows through the myriad wormholes of reality to become part of everything else. Time and space are coiled like some unimaginable DNA, pregnant with both possibility and certainty. In this multidimensional womb, separation is a fiction, all things are adjacent, and twentieth-century Earth snuggles close against the warm cheeks of the planet Elsewhere….