Sideshow (12 page)

Danivon receives a dismissive nod, bows, about-faces, hooks his right thumb in his belt to give his coat a swagger, and stalks off toward the stairs, gaver-hide boots gleaming, purple plumes nodding, purple coat swirling at the hem, golden badge on his shoulder shining, soft red shirt and trousers
rippling beneath in silken perfection. Behind him the two supervisors sip at their cooling tea and watch him go, Boarmus with slight perturbation, Syrilla with appreciation for the fine picture he makes. Exemplary, she thinks. Truly exemplary.
A Frickian servant brings hot tea and pours. A long, silent moment passes. Syrilla leans forward to set her cup upon the table when a sudden motion catches her eyes. On the Rotunda floor a guard has moved! She leans farther forward, disbelieving. Even though Door guards aren’t supposed to quiver so much as a muscle, one of them has moved! No … two … two have moved!
Boarmus has seen it too. “The Door!” he breathes.
Her eyes flick across the big Door as she follows Boarmus’s pointing finger. Not the big Door. The Arbai Door? But the Arbai Door doesn’t do anything! It has never done anything!
It is doing something now! Scintillating, sparkling, flinging coruscations of bright light around the Rotunda and through the high-arched opening into the balcony, sequined schools of spark-fish, swirling and reversing. Most of the guards are moving, shifting uncertainly toward and away from the glittering gate, casting doubtful glances over their shoulders, waiting for someone to tell them what to do, their weapons twitching in their hands.
Syrilla is half out of her chair when the clap of thunder sounds. She has time to see the guards cowering, and then the Arbai Door flashes like lightning, blinding her, blinding everyone. When she can see again the light has gone, leaving a dark spidery blotch struggling on the Rotunda floor.
Guardsmen raise their weapons. Someone—Danivon, it is—shouts a command as he descends the last few curving steps at a dead run. The weapons are lowered, reluctantly. Danivon arrives at the struggling thing on the floor at the same time as the officer in charge. In a moment they tug at the blotch, the thing, raising it up.
Syrilla and Boarmus stare in disbelief as they move toward the stairs, actually breaking into a trot as a confused babble rises from below.
Later, after Danivon assures everyone that his nose tells him the creature(s) is essentially harmless, after an Alsense machine is obtained and set before the arrival so that its (their) language can be understood, after the creature(s) explains
that it (they) had, only moments before, existed in Predispersion times, a time so remote that only Files has any detailed knowledge of it at all—only then do the people of Tolerance learn that their accidental and extremely agitated guest(s) are Bertran and Nela Zy-Czorsky.
Elsewhere on Elsewhere, in Enarae.
Fringe’s pa died all of a sudden. His name appeared in the daily bulletin published by Enarae Executive Systems for the benefit of the next of kin. When Fringe, now in her early thirties, followed custom and went to review Char’s Blood Book in the Hall of Final Equity, however, she found she wasn’t Char’s daughter anymore.
Blood Books of all deceased were posted in the Hall for the convenience of family and claimants. The first page always listed family members, since they would be liable for the debts of the deceased. Char’s Book had only one name in it: Yilland so-called Dorwalk, adopted daughter of Char Dorwalk. There was no mention of Fringe herself or of her brother Bubba.
Fringe kept herself still, even when the surroundings blurred a little. She felt something rather like pain, though it wasn’t really—maybe more a final awareness, like stepping off a cliff and only then noticing it really was a long way down.
“I didn’t know,” Fringe blurted, almost in a whisper, not meaning anyone to hear.
A huge, shiny-headed bystander, who’d been glancing curiously at Fringe, jerked his head toward someone across the hall and mumbled, “That’s her. That’s Yilland.”
The only woman in that direction was talking in a high, distressed voice to one of the Final Equity arbitrators. She was wispy, skinny, perhaps a little younger than Fringe, and though her words didn’t carry, her voice did—an abrasive sound, like a knife being whetted.
“Don’t want to intrude,” the bald-headed giant offered. “My name’s Curvis. Last time I saw you, you were just a little thing with a great mop of red hair. Now here you are, all growed up, but you’ve still got it!” He stroked his glistening pate and made a wry mouth. “Still got those funny eyes of yours too.”
Fringe nodded, acknowledging that she still had her natal accoutrements. Did the nosy ogre think she might have sold her hair? Her stone-green eyes? Or given them away? Well,
why not. People did sell their features sometimes. Features, organs, appendages. Sometimes they were forced to.
He made what was meant to be an apologetic grin and shrugged one enormous shoulder. “Somebody told me your pa adopted her. You honestly didn’t know?”
“I didn’t know,” she repeated, so surprised she forgot it was none of his business. “But then, I haven’t talked to Pa for … well, for quite a while.”
“Old barstid,” commented Curvis, shaking his massive head as though this confirmed an earlier opinion. “Doing a thing like that to his own blood.” He stroked a capacious pocket on his chest where something moved beneath the fabric. Some device. Or a live thing, maybe.
Fringe swallowed the lump behind her breastbone and said with an expressionless face, “Since it eliminates my debt risk, I ought to be grateful.” Despite her words, she was still thinking it might be some kind of mistake.
She took up Char’s Book to look again, but it wasn’t a mistake. The new daughter really was the only family member named, as well as the sole heir. Fringe felt a cold wash of sadness, like a flash flood down a long dry gully, not for the inheritance (she’d never thought there’d be anything to inherit) but because there was no word there for her. And because the Book said Char had adopted the new daughter and written off his natural one at a time he had made a promise of quite a different kind to Fringe.
She took a deep breath and put the Book down, the little chain that linked it to the claim desk rattling noisily. One of the uniformed assemblers frowned up from his workstation, then went back to the figures rolling by on his tabletop display. Someone’s lifetime transactions being put together there. Everything came here, in the end. Whatever you hoped or dreamed or actually managed to accomplish; whatever you failed at or fell short of, it all came to Final Equity, where creditors, friends, and kinfolk, who could be creditors of a different sort, looked over the result amid confused murmurs and muffled sobs and angry mutters. The vaulted hall soaked up the sounds, softened them. There were always deaths and killings, so there were always books set out for people to examine. They came and went, their feet making shuffly whispers in the quiet. It was all very ordinary, Fringe told herself sternly. No cause for tears or guilt or sentimentalism. He’s dead, that’s all. He left you no word, but then, if he didn’t talk
to you while you were alive, why should you expect a word after he died?
When Fringe looked up again, she caught the woman, Yil-land, staring at her with an avid, restless expression, like some hungry animal in too small a cage. Fringe let her glance slide across the woman’s face, and then back to the book, wondering whether the balance in it would be enough to satisfy the claimants against Char’s Book, or whether the woman across the room would be asked to make satisfaction. Heirs were sometimes sold, entire or in parts, to cover the debts of a deceased. Creditors had been known to get nasty carving up an heir. Fringe had paid out a good bit on debt insurance over the last fifteen years. She’d been more than a little anxious, knowing Pa as she did. Well, wasted credit. She needn’t have worried. She was out of it.
And Yilland so-called Dorwalk was in.
Fringe nodded a farewell to the bald ogre, then turned and walked away, eyes straight ahead, striding from the Hall like a woman with somewhere to go, only to be accosted by a uniformed flunky at the portal. The Final Equity Exec begged the courtesy of an interview, said he. She glared in disbelief, but he nodded and beckoned and pressed his lips together impatiently until she followed him. Curvis, the giant, was watching this encounter from across the room, head cocked to one side. She cocked her own in reply, and shrugged. Who knew what Execs wanted?
She was led down the echoing corridor into the office wing behind the Hall, where the flunky paused at a tall door, rapped on it, opened it, and bowed her through. The Exec sat behind a desk that looked carved from a single block of chalcedony, though Fringe, mentally computing weight and noting the relatively fragile structure on which it rested, believed it a fake, symbolic, an accoutrement of Executive class. No other class handled money matters so well, no other class displayed such elegant contempt. People born Executives didn’t need money, so they could disdain it. No other class could pretend to justice so convincingly, for Executives didn’t need that, either. This man was classly dignified and alert too, she could see that; but then, Executives were the only class that could and did declassify members for being stupid.
He turned a serene gaze upon her and took his time assessing what he saw. “Char Dorwalk’s Book came up on the Files to be approved by this office,” he said. “The scanner
advised me you were present in the Hall. Examining the record, it occurs to me you may wish to make a death claim against the estate of your natural father. Disinheritance is always subject to review by this office, and so far as I can see from your father’s Book, you were cut off for no valid reason. I find no record you were ever notified or given a chance to object. You’re entitled to file a death claim.”
“By this office,” indeed. Why couldn’t the damned Execs just say
me
, like anyone else? They were always “this office,” or “this council,” or “this governing body.”
“Shit,” she said, allowing herself to sound more like a Trasher than usual, “why should I?”
The Exec raised one high-bred nostril. Such language was not often directed at top castes, certainly not by shapely, red-haired, light-eyed women of middling-young years and uncertain classification. What was she? He could usually tell, but not with this one. Despite her language, she wasn’t Trasher class, that was sure. Trashers tended to be either obsequious or defiant, but he detected neither in Fringe. She showed neither Wage-earner servility nor Professional-class hauteur. The quality of her clothing was almost Executive, but if she had been Executive he’d have known her. Besides, the weapon on her hip was not the usual Executive toy. Maybe she was Out-caste, one of those interesting oddities who didn’t fit the system. An artist or entrepreneur, perhaps.
Fringe laughed openly at his puzzled expression and almost winked as she said, “Offended, sir? I do beg your pardon. Hell, I don’t want anything from him. Let his classly adopted daughter have what she can salvage.”
The Manager had enough sensitivity to realize she might be distressed. His expression softened. “His wives both died some time ago. And you’re entitled—”
“To nothing,” she said firmly, surprised by the pain she was feeling. She had forgotten that pain, mostly. Now she ignored it as she explained: “He did not approve of me, good sir. I disappointed him. If I take nothing from him, I am free of that. Owed nothing, I owe nothing. I may go my own way.”
“I have the feeling”—smiled the Manager, suddenly taken with her—”that you’ve always done that.”
“And well, perhaps I have,” Fringe said, her eyes fixed on some distant scene that only she could see. “There were times it seemed there was no other way to go.” She was thinking that there had been Dorwalk on her father’s side and Troms
on her mother’s side; she couldn’t be both, so she had ended up neither.
The Equity Exec had been watching her musing face with complete attention. “I know it’s a personal question, but what’s your classification?”
“Born to, earned, or claimed?” she asked.
“They’re usually the same thing.” He gestured sameness.
“Born Professional, earned and claimed Outcaste,” she said with a matching gesture.
“You’re an artist then?” he asked, charmingly, to show how sympathetic he could be, how open-minded. Even Executives associated with certain Outcastes, like artists and singers. “Or an actor, perhaps?”
“Not exactly,” she said, the weapon she wore on her hip seeming to leap of itself into her hand. “What I do is, I Attend to Situations.” The eye of the weapon stared at him as her thumb twitched above the power stud.
The Exec swallowed, stood up quietly, opened the door for her, and stood aside, bowing very slightly as she left. When he sat back down at his desk, he noted with some astonishment that he was trembling. The weapon had been aimed between his eyes. If she had wanted him dead, she could have pushed the button and he’d have been scattered atoms or fried meat, depending on how tidy she was. He touched the ornamental weapon at his own belt, almost with revulsion. It was good for little. High-class persons carried weapons mostly as costume accessories. It was the custom to carry them, but no one ever used them. Well, hardly ever.
He licked his lips. It was a matter of pride with Executives not to be caught off guard. Someone should have warned him. He should have been more careful in checking before he invited her in. The Files had said merely Fringe…. Fringe Dorwalk. He keyed through the records before him. AKA, blinked the small codiforms squeezed in between two other things he hadn’t bothered to look at. AKA: Professional Name…. She had rearranged the letters in her name to spell something she liked better.
And she was a licensed Enforcer.
In Tolerance, Supervisor Syrilla had invited her young protégé, Jacent, to lunch. Jacent was a mere boy, only recently
arrived from Heaven for his first tour of duty at Tolerance, but he was part of her “family” and therefore her responsibility.
“What do you make of this Arbai Door arrival?” asked the Supervisor of her young kinsman. “Do you believe it?”
“One believes one’s eyes,” he said firmly, tossing up one hand in an ebullient gesture. “You believe yours, Aunt Syrilla. You saw them come through.”
Syrilla frowned. Among themselves Council members cultivated a languid and unruffled demeanor, one which sought to convey they had seen it all and were not surprised at anything. Seeing her expression, Jacent flushed and put his hands in his lap. He had been warned not to wave his arms about except in public. When on display, yes, be shrill and mannered as a cageful of birds, but not when closeted, as now.