Sideshow (20 page)

“Now what,” he asked.
“See what they say,” she suggested, turning a capsule so he could see the word written on it.
“Journey,” said one. “Ancient,” said another. “Danger,” said a third.
“We journey into ancient danger,” she intoned portentously. “But then, we knew that.”
His mouth dropped open. He closed it with a snap. “You had it set for that message! How random is it?”
“It won’t repeat itself, if that’s what you mean. Not if I put each word in the pot only once. The capsules aren’t all shaped alike. Actions fit on one track, descriptives on another, entities on a third. It’ll deliver from three to five words, assorted.” She pressed a key, dumping the capsules back into the machine’s innards. “This one is only a sample. It isn’t nearly complicated enough. To be properly impressive, it will have to be more complex, with more noises and movement to it.”
“What do the levers have to do with it?”
“Not much,” she admitted. “They all press the same start bar. I’ll change that on the final model. Make different levers start it at different places.”
He laughed, his eyes squinting shut in amusement. “What do we call it?” he asked. “What’s our hype?”
“Hype?”
“That’s what the twins say we need. Hype. They tell me hype is the message that evokes wonder or desire in the observer. Excited words. Loaded language. Hype. Evidently many activities in their time depended upon hype.”
Fringe considered what would make the device seem more
marvelous. “We can say it’s ancient,” she offered. “People are always fascinated by ancient things. We say it was discovered in some uninhabited place. Desolations are intriguing too. Maybe we’ll say something about the mysterious creators of the machine and how they vanished. We’ll call it the Destiny Machine….” She paused, thinking. “Oh, I know! We can pretend the Arbai invented it.”
“Make it look corroded like the Arbai Door, then.”
“I’ve never seen the Arbai Door.”
He described the convolutions and corrosions of the Door while she nodded thoughtfully. When he had finished, he took in her intent expression and laughed. “Fringe Owldark. I didn’t expect it of you. I marked you as lacking imagination.”
She flushed, angry at him. “I have as much as I need, Danivon Luze. Isn’t it the kind of thing you wanted?”
“Oh, yes. It’s quite marvelous. Finish it. Tell me what you need, if anything. You’ll have to have some kind of traveling crate for it. We’re leaving in two days’ time.” He stood smiling at her, obviously enjoying what he was looking at.
She flushed again, at first in embarrassment, then in annoyance at his smile. It knew too much. It belonged to one who had read her Book. Who had transgressed upon her privacy. “Well then,” she said in an angry voice, “let me get on with it.”
“It’s almost mealtime,” he wheedled. “You must have a favorite eating place. Let’s go there.”
She shook her head, still peevish. “No. I should get this thing mostly finished before we go, though I can add the final bits and pieces on the way. Besides, I’m not hungry.” Her palms were wet, and she wiped them on her trousers, a gesture of rejection. “We’ll have plenty of time for lunches in Tolerance.”
He flushed. “No. Sorry. I’ve received orders….”
“Orders?”
“I’m not to return to Tolerance. For some reason old Boarmus wants me to stay clear of the place. He’s invented a job for me in Denial. Curvis will go with you to Tolerance, and I’ll meet you two and the twins in the Curward Isles.”
She stared at him in bewilderment. Why should Danivon be warned away from Tolerance? Him, a Council Enforcer? She didn’t ask that question, but instead, “Why do I have to go to Tolerance at all then?”
“Don’t you want to be initiated as a Council Enforcer?” he asked.
“Is it required?” she demanded.
“Well … not strictly, no.”
“Then I don’t.”
“It’s a nice ceremony, very impressive ritual.”
“I don’t like ceremony. I don’t like ritual.” She avoided either, whenever she could. They reminded her unpleasantly of other things, other times.
He shrugged. “Well, take your ceremonials anyhow. Boarmus will probably want to see you. He does that with all the Council people.” He rummaged in a pocket and drew out a travel disc that he dropped on the table by the machine. “Here’s your authorization. There’ll be a CE flier at the northeast flight center, first watch, day after tomorrow.”
She nodded, silently.
“You’ll need help with your machine.”
“I’m competent,” she muttered. “I can manage.”
“I was only offering….”
“Not needed,” she said, dismissing him, standing where she was until he had gone, until the door was shut behind him, until she could catch her breath.
“No,” she said to no one in particular. “Absolutely not needed.”
She did need help with the machine, but she got it from Ahl Dibai Bloom, who brought two craftsmen over and stayed most of the day. They came to help her finish the construction and build a traveling case, but they got so involved in playing with the gadget it was hours before they accomplished what they’d come for. When they were finished, the device was larger and vastly more complicated than the one Danivon had seen. Also Fringe had done what she could to make the machine look old and mysterious, with capsules that seemed truly oracular by virtue of their odd spellings and dim archaic lettering.
“I want one, Fringe!” Bloom demanded, chortling over his fortune—his eleventh or twelfth, all different. “I want a machine like this, a bigger one, for my place in the Swale.”
“So, we’ll build another one, Bloom,” she said, dropping some newly lettered capsules into the supply box.
“When?”
“When I get back.”
“And when will that be?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“I was afraid of that. Will you take care, lady love?”
“Always, Bloom. If you’ll say good-bye to Zasper for me.”
“I think he plans to do that for himself.”
Zasper did plan to do that for himself, arriving at the flight center as the Destiny Machine was being loaded. He didn’t come directly to the place Fringe was standing, but went off across the field to where Danivon was packing himself into another flier. Fringe noticed, to her amazement, that Zasper hugged him like kin. When he came back across the field, he greeted Curvis like an old friend before taking Fringe’s hand and presenting a tiny box.
“What’s this?” she asked suspiciously.
“A present,” he said. “A nothing, Fringe. A keepsake.”
She choked, felt herself getting red.
“No,” he said firmly. “You’re not to get angry and flustered at me. I want you to take it and wear it to remember me by. When you see it, you say, ‘Zasper thought I was all right whatever I wanted to be. I didn’t need to be anyone else for Zasper.’”
She felt tears.
“Promise you will?”
“Promise,” she said softly.
“Fringe,” he said as softly. “You know, a long time ago I told you about that boy I saved. It might be wise not to mention that on your way to … to wherever.” His eyes flicked sideways, to the place Danivon’s flier had been.
“Hell, Zasper. What do you take me for. Of course not.” She said it, but her mind was elsewhere, putting together the hug, the glance, his obvious discomfort. So Danivon had been the little boy Zasper’d rescued. Well!
“Well then. Good luck, girl. Attend the Situation!” He saluted, turned himself about, and stalked away, back rigid, shoulders straight.
When she was in her cubicle aboard the flier, she opened the box. A circlet of gold and a chain. The circlet made up of the words “Just as she is.”
It hurt. It hurt like that time Char had offered to sell the house. What she felt was something grabbing at her, something holding on to her. She knew it as pain, a pain she’d learned to avoid. She hung the circlet around her neck, buttoned
her shirt over it, felt it burning against her skin, and tried to forget it was there.
Why couldn’t he just have said good-bye?
The people of Tolerance were charming and hospitable and so mannered that Fringe felt they stuck to her like swamp slime. The place itched her. It dripped into her boots. Being here made her want to bathe, over and over, and she could not tell why. There was something severely amiss in Tolerance, though no one seemed to notice but her.
“Relax! We’re only here for a day or so,” said Curvis, giving her a curious look. “Are you always this jumpy?” They were returning from the Rotunda balcony where Fringe had moved the components of an excellent dinner around on her plate without eating any of them.
She twitched, flushing. “No. I’m not. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. If I were Danivon, I’d say I was smelling something very wrong.”
Tolerance seemed no different to Curvis than it had always been. There was always a good deal of tension in the place. And then recently there’d been that case of dismemberment and disappearance, but that mystery would no doubt soon be solved. Some visitor gone mad, no doubt. It happened sometimes. Curvis had never been alert to nuance, so he had no inkling of what was bothering Fringe.
Nonetheless, he attempted reassurance. “Tolerance always has a kind of agitation about it, too many people in too small a space, monitoring, fussing, like that.”
“Agitation alone wouldn’t make me feel like this.”
“Do the twins make you uncomfortable?”
She shook her head. It wasn’t the twins. She had at first been in an agony of embarrassment over the twins, but it wasn’t them. “They speak Lingua very well,” she said lamely. Though learning to talk with such strange beings, even in Lingua, was a problem she had struggled with. “Though it’s a little hard for me to figure them out.”
Bertran and Nela had noted her discomfort. She had been obviously anxious to say the right thing or, at the least, to avoid saying the wrong one, and their first interchange had been marked by long silences and inconsequential mutters. After a time, however, she had devised a solution that suited her, for she began to act toward them as she might have done
toward two totally independent persons. She stopped trying to make sense of their condition, stopped saying “you” to include them both, and began to address them as Nela and Bertran, speaking to them separately, as distinct people.
“As I was saying to Nela just a while ago,” she would say to Bertran, ignoring that he must have heard. Or to Nela, “As I remarked to Bertran …” She had decided to pretend that only one of them was present at a time, though the time might be only momentary. After an hour or so of being amused at her, they adapted to her pretense, finding it novel if not entirely convincing.
Fringe, to her own amazement, became quite comfortable with them, more than she was with most people. When in company, she usually felt herself to be the anomaly. Compared to Bertran and Nela, she was ordinary. By the second day, she was becoming confidential with them, almost voluble.
“She belongs in a sideshow,” Nela remarked to her twin. “Just as we did. You see how easy she is getting to be with us? Yet, see how she behaves with others, all flushes and starts, or silent as a rock. Gauche, Aunt Sizzy would have said. No poise, except when she is being professional.”
“I don’t understand,” said Bertran, who had been thinking of something else.
“She thinks she’s a freak,” explained Nela softly. “Don’t you see? No matter what person she is being, she feels others will judge it to be inadequate. So, she’s constantly on the defensive. And so are we, in a way, all of which makes us colleagues, friends. Now that she is used to me, when she sees something amusing, she gives me a girlish glance, making me her coconspirator. She’s never had any friends, but she’s becoming our … my friend.”
“Why would she not have friends?” he asked, amazed. “She’s a beautiful woman!”
Nela nodded thoughtfully. “The beauty has come upon her recently, I think, and she doesn’t acknowledge it. And who knows exactly why? Something to do with the way she was reared, perhaps. Rejected by this one or that one, perhaps. For whatever reason, she thinks she’s a freak.” She shook her head. Something about Fringe troubled her, some mystery hiding behind those stone-green eyes.
“Well, so does Danivon think he’s a freak,” her twin said. “That’s obvious.”
“Oh, no, not Danivon,” said Nela. “Though he really is an
oddity, he takes himself for the paradigm of Adam-the-man with bells on. Danivon was reared in an atmosphere of general approbation. Like a pet puppy. He is very pleased with himself. You can tell. Danivon is the very opposite of Fringe Owldark.”
“If he really is odd, Fringe ought to get along with him at least as well as she does with us,” Bertran persevered.
“No. I think she will not,” Nela said soberly. “But it won’t be for lack of collegiality, love. I’d wager that’ll be sex.”
Fringe took the oath as Council Enforcer in the Grand Master’s private office, without ceremony, accepting with reasonable grace the purple coat they gave her to replace her Enarae Post blue one. They also attached a jeweled fatal-hands dangle on the bottom of her Enforcer’s badge, the one Zasper had had made for her with the warrior and the gylph on it. Enforcers could have any device they liked on their badges, but the dangles were all alike and so were the words around the edge: I Attend the Situation.
She was headed back to her room after the ceremony when a Frickian flunky came to say the Provost wanted to see her.
The Provost! That would be Boarmus. Well, she thought, as she followed the Frickian up endless stairs and down lengthy corridors, this was the last bit of business in Tolerance she had to get through. She cast a sidelong look at herself in a long series of mirrors and was satisfied to find herself quite correct. Leather belt and boots polished. Purple coat swinging absolutely straight from shoulder to ankle. Purple bonnet tilted to one side, hiding the helm beneath, plumes bushed up like a cock’s tail on the other side. Red silk shirt and trousers flowing and snapping, full everywhere except neck and wrists, and there tight as her skin. She faced dead ahead and clamped her teeth together, being resolute.
Boarmus was a jowly man with fuzzy eyebrows and an unhealthy pouchiness around his eyes, like a man who has not slept well in some time. The corners of his mouth lost themselves in pinch wrinkles, as though he clamped his lips tight often, to shut in words, perhaps.
“I’m Boarmus,” he told her, giving her a long, measuring look. She was impeccable, leather gleaming, coat falling in immaculate folds. Her Enforcer’s badge shone on her shoulder, the two gold fatal-hands dangles attesting to her years of
experience, the gemmed one to her new status. He continued, “I am Provost, thus head of the Council.”
“Sir!” she said, standing easy. Bridling at his look would only gratify him. Besides, it would do no good. The best defense against that look, so Zasper had always said, was not to notice it. She stared straight ahead.