Sideshow (35 page)

“You’re about to see a dabbo-dam,” Jory said. “So, stay alert.”
“What does it mean?” whispered Nela.
“The words? Ah. Dabbo-dam means
approach the god
, a ritual during which certain followers get touched or inhabited or, sometimes, eaten by the deity. Keep your wits about you.”
“What will happen?” whispered Fringe.
“God knows.” Jory chuckled humorlessly. “Whatever it is, it cannot hurt you if you do not let yourself be fooled.”
The drums fell silent with the entry of the priests, a dozen of them, bony, dirty, skin-headed, rag-robed, bare-footed. They carried bundles that writhed and stank and torches that smoked, bringing tears to the eyes. They brought an altar with them, a tablelike construction suspended between poles, the gilt-horned altar much stained and scarred. When the poles were taken away, the priests took living creatures from their bundles, killed them upon the altar, doused themselves liberally with the blood, then grasped the horns at the four corners of the altar as they chanted in guttural voices, the smoke of their torches rising in a vaporous chimney toward the distant roof beams. The chant was repetitive, three or four phrases reiterated over and over. The drums took up the rhythm. Several of the Houm added their voices to the chant, then more and more of them until all were swaying and muttering.
“Don’t chant with them,” murmured Jory from the sideshow’s midst. “Move your mouth, but do not say the words. Remember that what you see will not be real. Think about something else if you can. The taste of fruit, perhaps. The pleasures of the bath. I find it useful to think of warm water and soap. I picture it cutting through slime, washing it away.”
Fringe moved her lips and thought, as suggested, of bathing. Danivon moved his lips and thought of cutting Houdum-Bah’s throat. “Boy,” indeed. Curvis moved his lips and concentrated on the coin in his hand that he was making appear and disappear behind Danivon’s back. Bertran saw him and did likewise, controlling his own fear even as he felt Nela’s fear rising inside him, making him quiver. Nela, trembling, shut her eyes and concentrated upon the turtle. Gray wind, gray leaf, gray fog rising. Poor turtle, coming into such danger.
Houdum-Bah left the platform to join the priests. He grasped one of the horns of the altar and blended his own huge voice into the tumult.
Jory whoofed in surprise, as though she had been hit in the stomach. Fringe glanced up to see an expression of astonishment on the old woman’s face and followed her gaze to the smoke where flapping, luminescent flakes had appeared, flakes that gradually joined to one another, coalesced, became a solid thing that shaped itself into a pillar. The pillar gained height and mass, then sprouted roots, branches, became a tree; the tree became a monstrous figure with six arms, six legs, six glaring eyes, six pendulous ears, three sets of great fangs shining from each of its three great mouths that gulped and gulped and gulped again.
“Great Lord Chimi-ahm,” shrieked the priests. “Ah-oh, ah-oh, Great Lord Chimi-ahm!”
“Great Lord Chimi-ahm,” moaned the Houm. “Ah-oh, ah-oh.”
“Great Lord Chimi-ahm,” sobbed the Murrey.
The manifestation pointed its multiple arms, a finger at this one, a finger at that. Here a Houm cried out, shaken by spasms. There another began to jerk and sway. Others then, until several score were in motion. Like puppets, they twitched and danced, inward toward the circling priests, flopping and prancing while, in their midst, the god gamboled awkwardly, triple mouths gaping. Among the dancers, two hounds pushed the young Houm girl toward the altar, Alouez.
The child’s face bore an expression of baffled terror. Fringe knew that expression. She had seen one much like that one long ago in the blotched mirror of the module behind Char’s house. Now the child’s mouth opened and she began to scream as she was thrust by an arm, shoved by a hip, knocked and butted forward an inch at a time, unable to resist the violence of the hounds around her.
“Why did they bring that child,” Fringe whispered furiously. “She’s too young.”
“They were told to bring her, I would imagine,” said Jory. “I would say that Houdum-Bah ordered her brought.”
“Why?” she blurted.
“For himself, of course.”
Fringe risked a glance sidewise at the altar and saw the boss chief’s eyes fixed on the girl no less hungrily than those of the god looming above. No woman could work as an Enforcer
in Enarae without learning to recognize that rapist’s look. “She’s a child,” Fringe cried, horrified and sickened, “only a child!”
“It is said that Zhulia the Whore prefers to pour herself into children,” said Asner in an expressionless voice. “So Cafferty has told us. Though perhaps it is the male worshipers of Lady Zhulia who prefer the children.”
“Look,” whispered Jory.
The tri-une monster in the smoke was splitting. Its three foreheads protruded like the prows of boats, pushing outward, pulling the faces behind them. Eyes followed foreheads, then noses, mouths, jaws as the head came apart into three, each of the three heads striking outward like the head of a serpent, coiled necks following, lashing away from the body, drawing shoulders behind them, then arms, torsos, legs, recoiling then, becoming three beings where there had been only one:
One wide-hipped with a torrent of smoky hair, a wristlet of skulls, breasts like great melons. One mighty thewed, armored, armed, his maleness carried before him like a spear. One slender, flexible, long-legged, narrow-faced, sexless lips bent upward from a sharp-toothed smile. He. She. It.
“Zhulia the Whore, Lord Balal, Chibbi the Dancer,” muttered Jory, nodding her head as though confirmed in some private apprehension. “All present and accounted for. Plus some of the minor gods. Look at the hounds.”
The hounds twitched and shivered, throwing up their furred arms, opening hands that were now clawed, mouths that were now fanged. Hounds indeed, slavering and staring about themselves with red eyes.
Chibbi the Dancer spun on its toes, arms extended, those arms becoming the spokes of a wheel, the spokes becoming arrows of light that flew out among the twitching Houm, penetrating them. They went on dancing, howling as bones cracked, bodies fell, limbs flailed uselessly. Splintered bones protruded from bloody flesh as the Houm convulsed themselves into wreckage.
The mighty male form of Lord Balal turned toward Houdum-Bah, moved ponderously toward him where he stood below the platform. Houdum-Bah stripped off his garments and awaited the god, arms wide, eyes half-closed.
And before them on the floor the little girl shivered as the female form leaned down, touched her, poured into her like water into a hole. The child seemed to swell. Her clothes
ripped away from burgeoning breasts, from wide, luxurious hips, from a vulva thatched with thick, shining hair.
Fringe blinked rapidly, shaking her head, snarling. There was no Lady Zhulia. There was only an eleven-year-old girl standing there. Slight. Breastless. Her little ribs heaving as she panted and tried to cover herself when her clothes were ripped away by one of the priests. A little girl, shivering, her eyes wide and lost.
“No,” said Fringe.
“It’s their culture,” said Danivon firmly, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “This is what they do.”
“No,” said Fringe again. “Jory, no. He’ll hurt her. She’s only a child. He’ll rape her. He’ll kill her.”
“This is what they
do,”
repeated Danivon desperately.
“Diversity
, Enforcer!”
“No,” she said again. “Jory, do something.”
Jory stared around herself, her face a mask in which surprise and fury were equally mingled. “What makes you think
I
can do anything, Fringe Owldark?”
“You can. Somebody must.”
Jory laughed angrily. “Then
you
do something!”
Without thought, Fringe sprang forward, her weapon leaping into her hand. She seized the girl by the shoulder and drew her away from Houdum-Balal, thrusting the child behind her, threatening Houdum-Balal with her weapon.
He roared with rage, and all the hounds echoed the roar as they came toward her.
She brushed them with heat, enough to stop ordinary men, but they were too hot with rage to feel it. She thumbed the control and tried again, sending them reeling back, all but Houdum-Balal, who came on, arms outstretched, mouth wide in rage, seemingly untouched by the heat.
Fringe backed up, suddenly aware she had no support. Danivon and Curvis were not helping her, were, in fact, reaching out to take the child away from her, to return it….
Jory laughed.
The laugh fled into the smoke and the drums and returned louder. It went out against the walls and returned, louder. It rattled in the corners and returned, louder yet, growing like summer thunder, booming, cracking. The drums fell silent, and the chanting.
“Great Dragon Comes,” snarled Jory into the laughter, each word reverberating and growing, each separate, each
connected, the whole larger than its constituent words, the phrase bouncing off the walls until it overrode all other sound. “Great Dragon Comes!”
And Great Dragon came, Great Dragon was there, taller than Chimi-ahm, more powerful, one huge paw on the edge of the altar, his fanged maw no more than an arm’s length from Houdum-Balal’s surprised face.
“No,” whispered the dragon in a voice of hushed thunder. “No Chimi-ahm. No Zhulia the Whore. No Chibbi the Dancer. No Lord Balal. None of them. Dabbo-dam is done, boss chief. Dabbo-dam is done!”
Fringe thought she heard the words, believed she heard the words, but they had no sound to them. No timbre she could identify. Almost as though she heard them through some other part than her ears.
Great Dragon was turning, tail flailing, claws reaching, snatching at the priests, tossing them, eating their torches, swallowing their smoke, shredding the images of the gods, sending them screaming out into the night with the dragon in pursuit, leaving Houdum-Bah, suddenly dwindled, with his mouth open and all his chiefdom in disarray.
“Let’s go before he decides whose fault that was,” said Jory.
The girl child lay behind Fringe where she had fallen, unmoving, her eyes rolled up into her head. Fringe snatched her up, wrapped her in a fold of the oracle’s cloak, and carried her along, shrugging aside Danivon’s clutching remonstrance.
“Get off me!” she growled at him. “Get off!”
“She belongs here,” he whispered, running at her side. “For the love of diversity, Fringe. She’s not yours to take!”
“Someone took you!” she snarled in return. “Someone took you. Kept you from ending up on the skull rack in Molock. Kept them from killing you, beating your bones to powder. Zasper Ertigon took you, Danivon! Now I’m taking her. Get out of my way.”
And there was no time for argument, for the city came awake like a hive disturbed, with riot and burning and screaming in all directions, for there seemed to be dragons everywhere, pursuing the populace wherever it would run.
• • •
In City Fifteen, Sepel and his colleagues set aside the sensory recordings left by Clore and Thob and Breaze and Bland. Those left, only a few, are by Jordel of Hemerlane.
“Join me?” Sepel invites his colleagues.
Tentacles are joined. They are conscious of being Sepel794DZ and colleagues….
Then, in an instant, they are Jordel of Hemerlane.
Jordel of Hemerlane, unconscious of any being save himself, seeing what Jordel saw, knowing what Jordel knew. Being where Jordel had been….
High in the tower room. Such heights usually give him a feeling of exhilaration, an appreciation of the forces supporting such great structures in their skyward reach. Today he feels only depression, frustration, anger. Across from him, outside the windows, clouds scud by on a summer wind. At a distance is a glimmer of banners on pinnacles, a shiver of windblown flags. This is Brannigan Galaxity, heartbeat of humanity.
Before the windows, silhouetted against the racing clouds, stands Orimar Breaze, handsome and silver-haired, his head like that of a prophet. The group is assembled in his place, his important place, this apartment at the top of the highest tower, this apartment that is above even the Pinnacle Study where the meetings of the Great Question Committee are held. And handsome Orimar Breaze is making a scornful shape with his lips as he hears what Jordel has to say.
Jordel feels his tongue flap between dry lips as he pleads with them. “… must protest this unwillingness to accept our specifications! We can’t risk this!” He swallows, trying to mitigate the panic he feels in the presence of these uncomprehending, unscientific … idiots!
No understanding on the face of Orimar Breaze, nor on the faces of Mintier Thob or Therabas Bland, who already have their mouths open in incipient argument.
“Dear boy …”
So speaks Mintier Thob as she smiles that patronizingly maternal smile. Though it convinces many people she is sensible and honest, it no longer convinces Jordel of anything:
“When we go into the Core on Elsewhere, you want our patterns to remain in stasis except for fully automated annual updatings. Believe me, dear boy, we understand what you’re saying. However, we prefer that our patterns shall
not
remain
in stasis and they
shall
be updated and corrected on a discretionary basis rather than automatically.”
She smiles, she speaks: calmly, briefly, seeming to cleave to the point while actually grazing it only slightly. So she has enlightened many desperate issues with ignorant complacency. So she does now. Secure in her comfortable, motherly tone, she solicits approval from the others.
And receives it.
Yes
, say Breaze and Bland and Clore.
We prefer our own discretion to your automatics, dear boy. Yes, we do.
“Then you don’t understand the implications,” he cries, stung into undiplomatic truth.
“Oh, my boy, indeed!” squawks Therabas Bland, a stringy old hen who eschews body sculpting and syntheskin to sag unappealingly in the dangling beads and flowing draperies of her girlhood. Beauty and grace are nothing to her, she often says, nothing to one to whom the secrets of the universe have been disclosed. She is a mathematician and proud of her mind. She will not believe it might fail her. Her own thoughts must be correct, else she would find them unthinkable. So she waggles a finger at him, cackling, “My boy, indeed, let us say it simply. We prefer to stay awake. We prefer not to emulate some fairy-tale heroine and sleep for a few hundred years. Surely you can understand that!”
What can Jordel say he has not said a thousand times before? He nods, he holds out his hand placatingly. “It is instinctive to respond as you are doing. My gut response is the same as yours. It is not, however, the correct thing to do, and the implications of it are very grave.”