Sideshow (21 page)

“You took an oath tonight,” he reminded her.
She had scarcely had time to forget. She lowered her eyes to meet his and found them veiled, unreadable.
“It was an oath of loyalty to the Council,” he said.
“Sir!” Did he think she hadn’t noticed what she was swearing to?
“And, therefore, to me, as head of the Council,” he went on.
She wasn’t at all certain of that. She had an idea that loyalty to the Council meant to the whole body of it, not just to one person, even if that one was Provost. She waited to hear what he would say next.
“You are going into an unknown territory. We need to learn everything we can about it.” He put out his hand, and she took the small cube he gave her. “You will carry this transmitter with you, and you will let me know if anything unusual happens.”
“Sir! I was told Danivon Luze was head of this expedition.” Without expression.
Boarmus smiled a lizard smile. “All Council Enforcers are under my command. You will be loyal, as you swore to be, or you will be forsworn.” His tone threatened she would not survive long in that event. “You will not even mention this matter to Danivon Luze.”
She did not reply, merely uttered the all-purpose word again. “Sir!” She much wanted to ask, why me, but it was better to ask nothing, say nothing. Best not to object. Not to inquire. Not to argue. So Zasper had said, on more than one occasion. “Try never to ask a question of a superior unless you already know the answer and are doing it for form’s sake. Always be sure where you are standing before you draw a line and dare another to cross it.”
Boarmus nodded dismissively. She bowed, only the requisite bow, and left the Council Provost staring balefully after her. She could feel his eyes and believed she had given him no satisfaction, but neither any justification for anger. Zasper had been clear about that too. “Don’t let commanders play games
with your head,” he had said. “If you are absolutely correct in your manner, they can’t fool with you. That means no expression at all. No insolence. No dismay. No annoyance. Nothing. Your face should be blank as a chaffer shell. You should show no feelings. Better yet, you should have no feelings.” It helped to be wearing ceremonials. The silks and leathers and flapping coattails always made her feel depersonalized anyhow.
Fringe was wrong about Boarmus. In his opinion she could not have been more perfect. Totally poised. The true and perfect Enforcer, down to her bright little boots, and very nice they were too. A provincial Enforcer just up from the provinces might have been excused for being a bit awed and stuttery at being brought before the Provost, but this one had given no sign of it. Boarmus had counted on that, on the fact she was from Enarae and that Zasper Ertigon had been her sponsor. Enarae being the kind of province it was, Enforcers from there received experience early and often. Zasper being what he was, she was as advertised. Owldark would serve his need.
“Dead men, sleep,” he muttered to himself. Perhaps he would be lucky. Perhaps they would do nothing more, nothing worse than they had done, and he, Boarmus, would need to do nothing. But if they did something, at least he would have let Danivon know.
Back in her quarters, the subject of Boarmus’s consideration stripped off her ceremonials and put them in their case. The purple coat was too fine a fabric for daily wear. She would have a heavier one made when she returned. If she returned. Since they were not going on this expedition as Enforcers, she might not need Enforcer dress—except for her badge, to identify herself if need be. She pinned it to her undertunic. “I Attend the Situation.” And so she would, whatever it might turn out to be.
Whatever old Boarmus decided it would be. She didn’t much like this business with Boarmus. It smacked of sneakiness, ordering her not to tell Danivon. A team could have only one leader; how many times had she been told that? And what did Boarmus want to hear from her he would not hear from Danivon Luze?
The transmitter cube lay on her bed, beside the bonnet, featureless, seemingly inert. She picked it up and turned it in her fingers, eyes suddenly riveted as words appeared on all
faces of it at once, words brought into view, presumably, by the warmth of her hands.
“Give this secretly to Danivon Luze. Silence!”
Even as she read them, they faded, and the cube was blank once more. Her fist closed around the cube as she pushed it deep into the pack she would be carrying. Well! Boarmus, saying one thing, had done another, had engaged in misdirection, as though someone was watching him! He didn’t want anyone knowing he was sending a message to Danivon Luze. Clever fat old man. No one could have seen the words on the little cube. It had gone from his hand to hers. No one could see it where it lay now.
And, come to think of it, it had been Boarmus who had ordered Danivon not to return to Tolerance. Was Danivon in some danger? Or was it the Provost himself who was in danger?
Who? she asked herself quietly, moving slowly and deliberately, showing no outward evidence of the sudden anxiety that she felt. Who could be watching Boarmus? There was no one above the Provost, no one superior to him! Provost was as high an office as one could achieve on Elsewhere.
Inescapably, however, one had to consider that if Boarmus was being watched, perhaps those he met and talked with were also being watched, including Fringe herself.
Zasper’s tutelage had covered such possibilities. Enforcers routinely went into category-nine and-ten places where they might be watched, overheard, spied upon. She pretended unconcern. It wasn’t necessary for her to feign weariness. She got into bed fully intending to sleep at once. “Sleep when you can, pee when you can, eat when you can” was the common wisdom among Enforcers. She didn’t sleep. Instead she lay long-time wakeful in the dark, going over the stories she had heard about the girl who had been found dead, the boy who had disappeared, considering the tension in the place, wondering until the mid-hours of the morning what in the name of holy diversity was going on.
Curvis, Fringe, and the twins flew to the Curward Isles on the following morning. Danivon awaited them there, and Fringe put the transmitter cube into her pocket, ready to pass on to him. Though she approached him at various times during the day, Fringe had no opportunity to speak to him alone. Curvis
always hovered at his shoulder, or one of the sailors was there, or some official concerned with loading their baggage. By midafternoon, when the five of them embarked on the
Curward Industrious
—a cargo ship of the Curward fleet—no appropriate occasion had presented itself.
To her dismay, no proper occasion arose at any time on the ship, a crowded vessel upon which privacy was nonexistent. The message to her had said “Secretly” not “Urgently,” therefore (she assured herself) Boarmus had considered confidentiality more important than immediacy. During each of the ensuing days, she looked for a time or place to pass the cube along without anyone noticing, but there were no opportunities. Who knew what eyes and ears might exist on the ship? Who knew which of the sailors might be a spy? If the message was to be passed in complete secrecy, she would have to await an appropriate and natural occasion.
There was no such occasion. She was never out of hearing of the sailors or other members of their group. After a few days of frustration, Fringe put the matter out of mind. She would deliver the message as soon as possible after reaching Panubi.
Meantime, the members of the sideshow spent each day on the forward hatch cover, returning to the tiny shared cabins only after the night winds had cooled them. Danivon and Curvis exchanged Enforcer stories and Fringe taught the twins the local trade language. Fringe was a reliable teacher, though more conscientious than talented. Luckily, Nela and Bertran acquired languages easily. The Curward sailors offered considerable help with the more vulgar words, since they called out bawdy suggestions whenever Curvis and the twins practiced their sleight of hand, making things vanish from Curvis’s hands to reappear in Bertran’s, or vice versa. The twins knew they were improving when the sailors quit jeering at their patter and started whistling and telling them jokes in local patois.
Each morning Danivon stripped to his smalls and poured buckets of seawater over himself, watching Fringe from the corners of his eyes to see if she was appreciating him. He had an appreciable body, or so he’d been told, not that she seemed to notice. Danivon found himself getting peevish about it, spending time contemplating assault, or rape, or both successively. The damned woman would not be anything but
impersonal. She would not meet his eyes. Would not … anything.
“What’s wrong with me?” he asked Curvis in their cabin aboard the ship, peering at himself in the mirror, meantime, to see if he’d grown two heads, though she, Fringe, seemed fonder of two heads than one! She got along well enough with the twins!
“Nothing,” grunted Curvis. “Nothing the matter with you.”
“Then why does the fool woman act this way!”
“Shit, Danivon! We’re on a mission. Attend the Situation. Leave her alone.” Curvis had no objection to women, particularly as cooks or bedmates, but Danivon’s preoccupation with Fringe was becoming an annoyance.
“I don’t want to,” Danivon said softly. “I just don’t want to. She’s … different.”
Curvis laughed shortly. “The only difference with that woman is she wants nothing to do with you. It’s the novelty of that fact has you fascinated.” Fringe was not a type that appealed to Curvis, and he did not take Danivon’s infatuation with her at all seriously.
“Why doesn’t she want to?”
Curvis glared at him, then grinned. “If you want to understand Fringe, ask Nela. Close as the two halves of a chaffer shell, Fringe and Nela. Bertran will be a good fellow and pretend not to overhear.”
So Danivon waited until Fringe was below and asked Nela.
She thought for a moment, recalling things Fringe had said about her childhood. “On the surface, there’s little mystery about Fringe, Danivon. When she was a child, she thought the world began and ended in her daddy. She talks about him, you know, but always about him when she was a toddler, a little child. She was no doubt adorable, as many little beings are. Wide-eyed. Bright-haired. With baby skin and baby talk. So he petted her like a kitten. Then when she grew older and became prickly and difficult, as many young folk do when confronting the reality of the world, he shoved her aside as troublesome. I doubt he meant her harm. He was preoccupied with other problems and had no idea how to deal with a girl-woman.” She shook her head, reflecting that things had not changed much in thousands of years—not so far as families and children were concerned.
Bertran had the same thought. “It amazes me, Danivon
Luze, that human nature, which had changed little in the several thousand years before our time, is still unchanged all these millennia later! Man has swept himself along on wings of technology, but he remains psychologically much the same. As I read it, Char Dorwalk’s life was unconventional enough that it let him in for a good deal of criticism from his class and family. Perfection in his children would have justified his break with convention.”
“Bertran may be right,” Nela said in a doubtful tone. “Since his daughter was not perfect, she justified nothing. He may have resented her falling short of his expectations.”
“Which has what to do with me?” growled Danivon.
“Only this,” said Nela. “Little girls learn about men from their fathers. They learn to trust, or not; to respect, or not. And Fringe may remember her daddy being handsome and charming and herself being of little value to him when push came to shove. And aren’t you handsome and charming also, Danivon Luze?”
“I wouldn’t treat her like that!”
“Of course not,” Nela said, turning her attention to the costume she was sewing for Fringe. “Oh, of course you wouldn’t, Danivon Luze.”
When Danivon left, Bertran asked, “You said, ‘On the surface,’ Nela. What did you mean?”
She gazed at the sparkling waves, her hands for the moment still. “Only that it’s all too easy an explanation for how Fringe is, Bertran. You know, some people are the way life has made them be …”
“A truism, dear sister,” he interjected.
“… and some are the way they are, despite what life hands out. I’m not sure which applies in her case. There is something about Fringe that feels … immutable.”
Bertran hadn’t noticed it, but he took her word for it.
Nela was curious enough to mention the matter to Fringe. “He’s a good-looking man,” she said to Fringe. “You’re sure you want nothing to do with him?”
“Certain sure,” muttered Fringe. “Listen to the man talk. Never a woman mentioned except as someone met on the way who gives him directions to the nearest alehouse. I think that unlikely.”
“True,” mused Nela. “When a man like that expresses no grief over a lost love, no sorrow over a failed one, it would give one pause.”
“Perhaps he is simply chivalrous and chooses not to speak of women,” Bertran offered.
“If he chooses not, it’s because they were so few they are sacred to him or so many he’s forgotten most of them,” Fringe flared up.
Bertran laughed. “You choose neither to blaspheme his relics nor be added to his trivialities, is that it?”
Yes. That was it. She thought that was it. “An Enforcer can’t afford that kind of distraction,” she said soberly, believing it quite sincerely.
The twins had no idea what an Enforcer could afford. Since members of the Craft were habitually either reticent or euphemistic about most aspects of their work, the twins had come to picture Enforcers as made up of equal parts public health inspectors and accountants. Though they asked endless questions about other things, somehow they never thought to find out about Enforcers.
“I want to know about these Arbai creatures,” demanded Bertran late one afternoon, when they had all wearied of other diversions and were lying about, half insensible from the sun. “And also about these Hobbs Land Gods. The religion in which I was reared would say they cannot exist, but you all seem to accept their existence.”
Danivon exchanged looks with Curvis. Fringe continued her exploration of her toes, which had lately acquired a pesty itch.
“Well?” demanded Bertran.
“What can we tell you,” droned Fringe.
“Just tell me all about them, or it.”
Fringe took a deep breath. “Well, as to the Arbai, I can’t tell you much. They made the Doors and scattered them around, and they went extinct from a plague. That’s all anyone knows about them.”