Sideshow (32 page)

“How’d you get there?” Danivon demanded. “To begin with?”
Asner shrugged. “It’s home, Danivon Luze. Cafferty and Latibor came there as children.”
“Noplace?”
“Right. Noplace. Some noplace or other.” He brushed himself ostentatiously, as though to rid himself of their suspicions, then stumped away to the ladder, calling Jory’s name as he went.

9

When Sepel794DZ said the dinks might find it difficult to access the sensory recordings Boarmus had brought, he had conveyed nothing of the patience and skill the operation required. Boarmus was exhausted. His sleep, though full of fearful dreams, was deep, and while he slept the dinks prodded and poked, burrowed through old files, queried ancient systems, until at last they were able to get into the ancient recordings. As Boarmus said, he had picked sensory data left by five individuals: Thob and Breaze and Bland and Clore. And Jordel of Hemerlane.
As chance would have it, the first recording they got into had been left behind by Breaze, Orimar Breaze.
They saw him as he saw himself. A handsome, white-haired man, strolling among age-gentled walls set in an early spring, trees just budding, their trembling lace spread across time-softened stones, themselves dripping with viny green.
He hears voices raised in song:

“Brannigan we sing to thee.”

He hears and feels water splashing. He touches the wetness on his cheeks, feeling the separate droplets, like jewels on his skin.

“Fountain of diversity.”

“I am Orimar Breaze, chairman of the Great Question Committee, elder statesman of academe, appointed by the
almighty Chancellors to the referendum on curriculum reform, prize-winning author of the greatest erotic work of my century,
Jorub and Andacine.”
So he thinks to himself, liking the sound of the words as he murmurs them, contented to be what he is.
“Jorub and Andacine,”
he says again. “A seminal work.”
The dinks feel what he felt, hear what he heard. They are proud to be Orimar Breaze who is not like other men. Not like other women. Who is far and away superior to most men, even to many of those here at Brannigan Galaxity, great BG.
Orimar Breaze is on his way to class. Today he will bring the beautiful young into this parklike burgeoning, seat them on the sward, and then stand before them, a first edition of
Jorub and Andacine
open in his hands. He will read aloud, his voice a mellifluous torrent sweeping them along.
Oh, Brannigan:
It is his mistress, his wife. It is his forum, his stage. It is himself, made manifest.
Vast auditoria reverberating to words deathless as Scripture. Laboratories where genius falls thick as pollen, packed with potentiality. Hallways vibrant with scuttering youth, with striding maturity, and so on and so on and so on….

“Brannigan we sing to thee….”

Eyes, bright eyes, the young liquid eyes sparkling between fringed lids, unlined foreheads shining like little marble monuments, sweet mouths curved into succulent questions. Here they are, seated cross-legged on the grass. “Illuminated one,” they cry. “Tell … tell me … tell me everything!”
Brannigan Galaxity.
A thousand colleges, each with its own history, its own traditions, its own glories to recount….
“… tell me everything,” they cry.
He warms at the heat of their voices, feels the excitement of their excitement. Oh, he can teach them things they will never learn from anyone else.
And he loves the names they have for him, the girls particularly. “Magister.” “Sweet teacher.” “Lord of my heart and
mind.” Who was it had called him that? No matter. There would be others … others.
Ah, the feel of that young skin against his own.
Ah, the surge of adoration from them to him.
Ah, the surge of … of knowledge pouring out of him to them, his body pressed … himself pressed…. That was in the library, the great library, among the books, she and him.
Brannigan Galaxity
:
Libraries sprawling in wandering tunnels of stone across continents of lawn. The infinite distance of painted ceilings where faded figures out of forgotten legends disport themselves …
They were not the only ones disporting themselves!
[Tourists come here to see the murals. He has never really approved of that. Not in Brannigan, which should be sacrosanct, which should exclude the chattering throngs who stroll along, staring upward, spilling meat sauce upon the mosaics. Oh, they should go away! Depart! This is no place for laity. This is where …]
… legends disport themselves. Is that Wisdom teaching the multitude? Or the Queen of who-was-it? issuing thingummies? …
… where the body is pressed … himself pressed … All that working away inside like sparkling wine, bubbling up, pure joy, delight, glory! Glorious these days, these ageless words, these students forever young! Glorious to hear the breathless voice whispering his name. “There he is, Orimar! Teacher! Lover! Oh, Orimar!”
Here twisting stairs clattering beneath niagaras of pounding feet. There dim corridors, endless as roads, running into vaulted passages that grow silent….
He does not like silence. Not when he is alone in it.
No matter. All that is here is also in Files, incorruptible.
Incorruptible. He is incorruptible.
Listen to them, the sweet things, gathered before him on
the sward, their voices whispering his name, “Oh, Orimar Breaze!” Oh, he relishes it still, in this place, just as he always has.
Though there is one among this group who is not looking at him! One there, to the side, who is not responsive. This has happened before. It is happening again!
When he has dismissed the others, he focuses upon that one. “Come,” he says. “What is this? You don’t seem to be enjoying the seminar, dearest girl.”
She has no reason to reject him. Isn’t Orimar one of the illuminati, after all? One of the emeriti, the …

“May thy Golden Towers rise as a beacon for the wise….”

“You need to extend yourself. Be one with the group.”
She says something noncommittal. He sees scorn in her eyes. “Old man,” her eyes say. “I know you, old man.”
What right has she to look at him like that?
He dismisses her, his voice like cutting ice. She will not last, not at Brannigan. He will see to that. One negative report is all it takes, and she may be assured she has earned it from him.

“Immortal may thy children be …”

Brannigan, whose emeriti stand in glittering rows along the Halls of Tomorrow, preserved in impenetrable vitreon until the hour they will be raised from senescence into eternal youth …
What right had she to think him an old man!
He would summon her to his office. He would give her one more chance.
She is there, before him, her face closed, her eyes shut. He suggests that she do … a certain humiliating, undignified thing.
She does not even answer.
Enough then. She has earned her dismissal. Oh, for some other world. Some world in which she could not refuse him in this fashion. A world in which refusal would be sufficient grounds for discipline!

“Brannigan, Great Brannigan! Brannigan Galaxity!”

Discipline is what that one wants. What she needs. And Orimar could give it to her. He can feel it in himself. Hot. All simmering up, full of lusts. He would strike. He would hurt. He would reduce her to a quivering mass. Eventually he would dispose of her while she still screamed and begged for another chance, just one more chance. He would smile. He would shake his head. Too late.
… on the day the Great Question is answered …
The Great Question, the only question so far as Brannigan is concerned. The Question upon which it was founded, which it has translated and reframed and to which it has devotedly sought the answer. The Great Question, which has plagued humanity since it first came down from the primordial trees …
… passion fulfilled …
… down from the primordial trees …

WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE DESTINY OF MAN?

“Enough,” said Sepel794DZ. “We know him well enough. There is nothing there to help us. He was no technician, no engineer. He thought nothing about Elsewhere or the Core.”
The other dinks acquiesced. Brain dinks as a class were not deeply into feelings. They had understood only a little of what they had felt in Orimar Breaze. None of them knew why this particular memory had been kept for later reference. They withdrew from Orimar Breaze, all of them eager to find something they understood better.
On his bed, Boarmus shifted.
“Let us try this one,” said Sepel794DZ. “This one labeled Clore.”
The first sensation they encountered felt roadlike. The road was not, however, a surface of durable substance making up a continuous and more or less cohesive pathway, which is what even residents of City Fifteen usually meant when they thought “road.” In the Core, “road” was a less-concrete concept than that. Its parts emitted roadness though they were only remotely and occasionally contiguous. Its nature was of a resilient discreteness, an unwillingness to connect. Sepel and
his colleagues were conscious of moving (seeming to move) from rubbery chunk to rubbery chunk, all of which were changing position relative to one another and bouncing apart if they happened actually to touch. There was little indication of distance and “direction” was a matter of arbitrary decision.
“What is this?” a dink asked.
“A dream,” said Sepel. “Clore is dreaming, and he has recorded his dream.”
“Why would he do this?”
“Perhaps he wishes to review his dreams in all their details, and he chooses this way of doing it. Persevere! Even a dream may tell us something useful.”
They persevered. They saw an eruption from the underlying stratum, an exudation of words in several languages, both archaic and current, indicating that they were approaching the lair/kingdom/residence of Great Lord Something. The words could be both seen and heard. They sprouted along the way like mushrooms, then deliquesced, running off in inky utterances among structures that stood here and there, more or less adjacent.
These might have been buildings or chimneys or mountains or trees. As the dream went forward, items became more certainly either thin or flat, finally becoming almost definable. They were proceeding through a dimensionless and arid wilderness that might have been painted by an untalented child of eight or nine on dirty paper with a limited number of colors: ochre, dun, bile-green, dung-brown—those left in the box when all the brighter and more favored colors had been used up.
The farther they went, the more solid things became. More words popped up indicating the approach of the Great God Something. The quality of the surrounding area changed, becoming less sketchy in character and more susceptible to perspective. They came upon definite growths, with perceivable thorns, and at last the dinks felt themselves mounting a ridge of rusty iron where they gazed down upon a fully realized landscape.
The valley echoed with muted howls, the thwack of slack drums and the clash of dissonant cymbals. A vaporous procession wound its way down the ridge beside them toward a vaguely circular chasm of black smoke. Across that chasm and to either side were other ridges, other processions, and
through the sullen air came the dirgelike mourning of the mist-veiled marchers.
Within the chasm a stone mesa seemed to float upon the haze, a rock scarcely large enough to hold the hideously ramified bulk of the building upon it. Joining this isolated structure to the deeply creviced lands around it were bridges of black iron, spiderwebs of cable and strut leaping outward from the central plateau in flat trajectories to bury themselves at the ends of the squirming ridges. The building lay like a monstrous iron spider at the center of this web of ways, and like a spider it twitched its extended legs in great annexial spasms, seeming to shiver in constant motion, as mirages seem to shiver, an effect possibly caused by the haze of smoke that rose between the observers and the edifice itself.
Occasionally the chasm belched red fire that oppressively illuminated the narrow ledge between the building and the chasm, and there strode a monstrous six-legged being, insectlike, whose three great mouths grazed bloodily upon the processions attempting to cross the ledge to enter the great building.
And they were the creature upon the ledge, ravaging the marching hordes.
“Out,” murmured Sepel794DZ. “This isn’t helping us.” His colleagues did not argue. They withdrew from the recording.
“This tells us nothing,” murmured a dink. “People dream all kinds of things. Even we do. This was a nightmare. What good can we get from that?”
“The fact that he saved it,” murmured Sepel794DZ. “Only that.”
“Shall we try Thob?” asked another wearily.
They tried Thob and came upon a landscape; a shore, rocks, sky in flat primary colors: shore a line of brown, sea a plane of green, rock shapes of black, the sky a plane of blue. Was this what the Thob person saw? Or imagined? Was this her vision of life?
This passed, giving way to:
Clashing spheres, a violence of storm, a hurricane of sound, without meaning or order.
And this too was gone.
Leaving behind a giant woman with breasts like mountains, crouching enigmatically beside an endless plain.
The breasts swelled and burst, showering milk onto the
plain. It puddled and leaked away in droplets of diamond and pearl, leaving a roiling net with worlds of its own gathered within it, worlds indecipherable to the dinks; a mountain of slippery ooze. A slithering womb in violent contraction. A tentacle that sought to hold, grasp, strangle….
“Get out,” said Sepel794DZ. “There’s nothing here. Nothing at all!”
Boarmus woke on his narrow couch, sat up, and chewed his fingers for a while, then nibbled at his lips while Sepel794DZ and several of his fellows hummed and clicked. After what seemed a very long time, Sepel made a sound like a groan.
“What?” asked Boarmus.
The dinka-jin shook itself, reminding Boarmus of a dog shaking water from its coat.
“What?” demanded Boarmus again.
Tentacles untangled. Boxes moved apart. Synthesizers made noises like moans, like sighs.
“We read some of them,” said Sepel. “One by Breaze; one by Clore; one by Thob. They tell us nothing! Nothing! Nightmares and visions and impressions and pornographic daydreaming. None of them concern Elsewhere or the Core. They were made long ago, on another world.”
“And Jordel?”
“We haven’t accessed anything by him. Not yet.”
“Nothing that tells us what’s happening now?”
“Nothing at all. We don’t even know for sure that these … people are involved.”
“Something using the name of one of them is involved,” Boarmus insisted. “One of the … things introduced herself to me as Lady Mintier Thob.” “That doesn’t mean …”
“I know. Anyone … anything can use any name it likes.”
“True.”
“I can’t stay any longer.” Boarmus sighed. “I presume you’ll go on looking. Do you have any suggestions as to what I can do now?”
Sepel794DZ shrugged once more, giving a mechanical sigh. “We will go on, yes. We’ve got a few shielded facilities here in City Fifteen: this lab and one or two others, a flier
pad, a few routes to and from. We’ve shielded our own Files, just in case there is a network. Other than that …”
“This is ridiculous,” screamed Boarmus. “The Core was made by men! Mortal men! Basically it’s just a damned chill box with a few electronic attachments! And you mean to tell me, we’re completely at its … their … whatever-it-is’s mercy?”
Sepel didn’t answer. The silence was a reproach.
“Sorry,” muttered Boarmus. “It just seems so ridiculous.” “We share your feelings. We feel the situation to be basically immoral. Of course, we dinks feel it is difficult to be a man and still be moral. Which is why we’ve become as we are.”
Boarmus thought about this. “Sepel, what’s it like, being … being a dinka-jin?”
The main box buzzed for a while. “What’s it like being the way you are, Boarmus? What’s it like being assembled around a stomach you have to keep thinking about and feeding, instead of having your nutritional needs taken care of automatically so you never need to think about it? What’s it like only being able to see one thing at a time? What’s it like being distracted by pain all the time, or discomfort, or hormones, or heat or cold? What’s it like having to eliminate all the time and do other awkward, nasty things with your bodies….”
“All right,” sighed Boarmus.
“You asked,” said Sepel794DZ.
“I know I did.”
“We don’t find being men particularly useful, that’s all, though some of you are quite … decent. We feel our kind of life is saner, somehow.”
Boarmus sighed, stretched, too weary to pursue the question further. His mind flailed aimlessly. “What advice can you give me, then. What should I do now?”
The box hummed. “The two usual answers would be fight or flee. There’s still a long-distance Door at Tolerance. Of course, once people start for it, they may not be allowed to get to it.”
“Fighting’s out too, isn’t it?”
Sepel794DZ twitched. Boarmus looked away. The dink was making a grinding sound, symptom of concentration, he knew, but it irritated him anyhow.
“I was running simulations,” muttered the dink at last. “I
found no successful strategy. It … they, whatever, has given you indications it thinks it’s a god, right?”
“Yes. More than indications.”
“Well then, play its own game, Boarmus. Be sneaky.”
“What is its game?”
“It says it’s a god. Maybe you can make it doubt itself. Challenge it to do something only a god could do.”
“Like what?” Boarmus cleared his throat and rubbed his forehead.
The dinka-jin shrugged. “Something godlike, obviously. Like creating a world, or answering some riddle of the universe.”
Boarmus grunted, feeling the usual burning in his stomach flare up to make a sudden agony. “I’ll think about that. Meantime, I need to send a message to Zasper Ertigon. Privately, needless to say.”
“If he has not yet left Enarae for Panubi, that at least we can do.”
As the
Dove
went down the Fohm with the current, the three Enforcers, wearing their show clothes, joined the twins at the bow rail to watch for the first appearance of Du-you. Danivon had a dry throat and an ache in his sinuses that would not go away. This was not merely a smell! This was a monstrous stench, a threat made manifest!
Around the next gentle curve of the river, the confluence appeared where the Ti’il met the Fohm, a wide lagoon partly dredged, partly scoured out by the quick spring flow of the Ti’il, separated by overgrown mud flats from the main current of the river. Buoys marked the channels dredged through the flats, and the
Dove
edged toward the nearest set of markers, the men at the sweeps laboring, the captain at the wheel muttering oaths as eddies thrust the
Dove
this way and that. When the ship came into the channel, out of the current, it responded more easily to the helm.
“Hau-la,” (silence) the oarsmen cried. “Hau-la. Hau-la.” The sweeps beat, raised, and beat again.
Behind them came a clatter, a shout.
A boom had been lowered behind them to block the channel. They could not go out again. At least not by that route.
Curvis and Danivon shared expressive glances.
“What?” asked Fringe.
“Shh,” said Danivon.
When they came to the pier, sailors leapt ashore carrying lines to make fast. The riverside was piled high with straw-wrapped bundles, crates and barrels, cargoes coming and going. On the riverfront, white-clad little people scurried madly here and there, wheeling carts and barrows, carrying kegs upon their shoulders, crying their wares in surprisingly high and plangent voices, like bells. “The Murrey,” said the captain, spitting from the corner of his mouth. Among these little people walked a taller folk, dressed in brightly patterned fabrics and carrying parasols, waving fringed sleeves at one another, chatting in shrill, bird-cheep sounds. “The Houm.”
Beyond the scurry at the wharfs were the outskirts of the town, low buildings separated by cobbled streets, then higher structures as the streets rose from the unstable land of the delta and gained the more solid ground away from the river.
Danivon moved uncomfortably, overwhelmed by the stink. It seemed to come at him like a wind from the shore.
“What?” Fringe asked, seeing the pain on his face.
He shook his head gently. Any sudden movement hurt. “I don’t know. I’ve never smelled anything like it before. I wish we hadn’t had to stop here.” He remembered Boarmus’s message. Both messages. The smell of the place was the smell of Boarmus’s message. Deadly. Horrible.
Fringe remembered that same message. Though she didn’t know what it had contained, its method of delivery meant it could only have been a warning. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder, seeking any sign of the people from noplace. All of them were below and evidently intended to stay there.
She spun back to the rail as a drum spoke warningly from behind the nearer buildings,
TID-dit, TID-dit
again, then a steady tattoo.
TIDdit-’-aTUM-tum TIDdit-’-aTUM-tum.
Those who came shambling behind the drums were neither the little nor the tall, neither the white-clad ones nor the bright folk with their bitsy parasols. These had long and tangled hair, bare arms scarified upon the shoulders and tattooed from there to the fingertips, and they grunted in time with the drums as they slouched forward:
HA-ghn, HA-ghn, HA-ghn
, scattering the Murrey as a great fish scatters a shoal of tiny ones. The fragile Houm dissolved before them.
“Not the Murrey and not the Houm,” murmured Curvis, in Fringe’s ear. “These are the chimi-hounds Ghatoun spoke of, so watch it.”
So much she might have guessed from the weapons they carried. Fringe was suddenly glad of the broad-beam heat gun on her belt and her usual weapon in her boot, either of which was considerably better than anything the chimi-hounds were carrying.
“Captain,” the hound leader drawled, making a sneer of it. “Kap-tahng.”
“Chief.”
“You got pahssen-jhairs?”
“None for Derbeck. Cargo, but no passengers.”
“I see your mah-ni-fest, Kap-tahng.”
“As you will,” said the captain, nervously eyeing the remaining hounds lounging on the pier. He led the way to his cabin, the chimi-hound swaggering after. The remaining hounds slouched insolently at the edge of the pier, staring at the women, making obscene finger talk to one another.
“Nela,” Fringe muttered. “If I were you, I’d work my way over to the cabins and go below. Bertran.”
The twins were already on their way, walking as casually as they could manage it.