Sideshow (37 page)

“Shut up,” muttered Fringe. “Damn it. I’m not a fool! I’m aware of the hypocrisy. You of all people ought to understand why I took her!”
“We do understand,” said Nela, suddenly contrite. She bit her lip and cast a sidelong look at Bertran.
“That’s what she’s saying,” he said to Fringe. “She’s trying … we’re trying to apologize for our earlier … lack of understanding. We’re saying we don’t blame you for … whatever you feel you have to do.”
“You blame me if I don’t do,” said Fringe in a weary voice. “If I do do, Curvis blames me. And Danivon.”
Jory nodded. “That’s true, but then, Curvis and Danivon foresee trouble. They’d be fools if they didn’t. If they don’t take action against you, they become accomplices, because word of your action will get back to Tolerance, if it hasn’t already.”
Fringe was simply too tired to answer. She could not explain to herself what she’d done or why she’d done it. She longed for Zasper. He’d done the same thing she had. He could advise her. Or maybe he couldn’t! No one had seen Zasper break the law. Zasper had done it secretly, and he’d kept it quiet. How could Fringe keep this quiet? Everyone knew what she’d done. And they’d heard Zasper’s name used too. She’d allowed that to be blurted about. She dropped her head, feeling terror all at once, for Zasper, for herself. What had she done!
It was too much! She should be able to live without all these feelings, these guilts and urges and fallings short! She should be able to be what she so longed to be, clean and pure and hard, like the blade she carried, fitted for the job it had to do, without all these mawkish sorrows, without all these painful sentiments. She was sick of feelings!
A cool old hand stroked her forehead. “Put the child over there on that pile of sail,” said Jory. “Lie down beside her and hold her, Fringe. She needs caring arms about her, and it is not yet the end of this world.”
Too weary to argue, Fringe did as she was bid. It might not be the end of the world, and yet it felt monstrously like it.
Those left behind stood wordlessly against the rail.
“It’s time I went below,” said Curvis in a tone of haughty annoyance. “I must consider what to do.”
“Don’t go. Wait,” said Jory.
He peered at her through the darkness. “For what, old woman?”
“I get hunches,” she said, staring into the darkness.
“You’re having one now?”
“Something like.”
He waited for some moments, then prompted her, “Hunches about what?”
“You wouldn’t question there was something dreadful there in Derbeck?” she asked. “Something that knew we were coming? Something aimed at us?”
“I wouldn’t question that, no. And so?”
“And so, now we’ve left, I don’t think whatever it was will stay behind in Derbeck,” she said. “Not now that it has us located. I think we may expect some additional … outrage.”
“The outrage thus far is quite enough,” said Curvis. “Fringe has done the same thing old Paff did, taken someone from her proper place. She’s broken the basic law of Elsewhere, and I can’t simply ignore it!”
“Your law is wrong,” said Nela in a firm voice.
Curvis replied stiffly, “You may find the concept of our law unfamiliar….”
“Actually, the concept isn’t unfamiliar,” Bertran commented in a dry voice. “Though Nela may not remember. In our world there were a number of smallish countries ruled by unpleasant types, and our country occasionally invaded one of them to set something right….”
“Killing numerous innocent bystanders in the process,” snapped Nela with a toss of her head. “As well as a good many of their soldiers, or ours.”
“… and people took sides as to whether it was morally defensible for us to have done so,” Bertran concluded mildly.
“It was not defensible,” said Nela definitely. “Because at the same time we were invading these bad smallish countries, our politicians were making excuses for our groveling around bad large countries who treated their citizens even worse! I think people should kick out their own despots.”
“Killing numerous innocent bystanders in the process,” said Bertran dryly. “As well as a good many of themselves.”
Nela glared at him and worked her mouth as though tasting what she intended to say next.
Before she could speak, Curvis said, “We Enforcers are taught that we must not set ourselves up as judges. Fringe knows that!”
“She may know it, but she does judge,” cried Nela. “I saw her face when that monster swallowed the child in the basket! She tried not to show any feeling, but her face betrayed her!”
“Had it been up to you, you would have rescued the child?” asked Jory in an interested voice.
“I would.”
“But you just said one shouldn’t intervene.”
Nela flushed. “That’s different. The child wasn’t in some foreign country. It was on the river all alone.”
“Don’t you think a man being tortured in a dungeon feels all alone?” asked Bertran. “No matter what country he’s in?”
Nela shook her head at him. “You know what I mean.”
“I don’t.” He felt a sudden spurt of anger at her assumption. Why should she believe he always knew what she meant! He didn’t. Sometimes he didn’t care! “I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean. When we were with the circus, I read about a group of seamen and their captain who were captured by a country hostile to their own. The hostiles confined them, tortured the captain, humiliated him, eventually sold him and his men back to their own country for ransom. Of course, the hostiles felt that when they’d humiliated the captain, they’d humiliated his country, which was very satisfying.
“The point is, after his return, the captain confessed that he and his men had prayed every day that their country would end their pain and wipe out their humiliation by totally destroying the city where they were being held, where their captors were. They were eager to die if it meant they would be avenged. They felt death was preferable to confinement, torture, and humiliation. The captain wrote, ‘It is better to die than be used by evil for evil’s purposes.’
“Emotionally, I think I’m on the side of intervention. Nela, however, seems to feel differently, and on this world—”
“On this world,” interrupted Curvis in a furious whisper, “the question does not arise. We do not think of provinces as ‘evil.’ We do not think of death or torture or human sacrifice as ‘evil.’ That is simply the custom in certain places, and intervention is always wrong, no matter who is being saved or for what or who or what is being risked! We intervene only to maintain the status quo!”
The twins were silenced by his vehemence. His seemed to be the last word on the subject. They fell silent, closed in by the dark that hid everything except the stars and the deeper blackness of the banks whenever the
Dove
came close to one shore or the other as it tacked upstream. The ship’s progress was made up of long diagonal runs followed by laborious changes of direction. The silent thoughts of those along the
rail were accompanied only by the humming of the wind among the shrouds and the rattle of the sails when they came about on a new tack. Then, as they approached the southern shore, Jory took a deep breath, almost a sigh.
“There,” she said softly. “Along the bank. As I suspected.”
In moments they all saw what she did, a line of luminescent blotches moving along the southern bank, staying even with the
Dove
as it made its slow way upstream. Those at the railing blinked, to be sure they were indeed seeing something. Jory shivered uncontrollably. Asner put his arms about her.
“What’s the matter with her?” whispered Nela.
“She’s frightened,” said Asner. “And so am I.”
“Of those?”
“We’ve seen something like them earlier tonight,” he reminded her.
“In Derbeck,” commented Curvis. “Before Chimi-ahm appeared. The shapes in the smoke.”
Hearing the alarm in their voices, Fringe left the unconscious girl and returned to the rail where she was joined by Danivon. They peered at the southern shore, trying to make sense of the featureless blobs.
“Ghosts,” said Danivon, remembering Boarmus’s message.
“No one said anything to me about ghosts,” said Curvis, annoyed once again.
Danivon shook his head, though he had no doubt these were what Boarmus had warned him against. The elder Luzes came to rejoin the group, peering at the blobs, taking what comfort they could in the company of others as they watched the strange pursuers. Though not large, at least not at the distance they were being observed from the ship, they were numerous, moving with deliberation. No barrier prevented their progress, no copse of trees or swampy morass, not even lofty ramparts of stone, several of which reared against the stars as they moved upriver. The shapes kept precisely even with the ship, slowing when the wind fell, speeding when it grew brisker, growing more numerous the farther they went.
Curvis found this persistence menacing though he refused to admit it to himself. “Perhaps they are something sent from Tolerance,” he suggested. “By Council Supervisory.”
“No,” Jory replied, turning to put her back to the rail. “I rather imagine your Council would be as surprised at them—and as frightened—as I am.”
“I’m not frightened,” Danivon snarled. “Why should I be?”
“You should be because you’re not a fool, no matter you are a cockerel who crows before he thinks,” she whispered. “You say Boarmus warned you about ghosts. What did he mean?”
Danivon muttered, “I don’t know what he meant.”
“Ghosts of whom?” asked Asner, peering through the darkness at the flapping forms, now so close they could be seen as separate things with definite edges rather than mere blotches of pale fire. “Or of what?”
After a long moment of staring silence, Jory turned toward the others, her eyes gleaming in the dim light from the wheel-house as she fixed them with a percipient gaze, cocking her head to one side. “Have any of you heard of the Arbai?”
After a moment’s silence, Bertran replied, “We know only what Fringe and Curvis told us. It was an Arbai Door we fell through on Earth and arrived through here.” His eyes were fixed on the ominous shapes. “The Arbai spread such Doors about, and there was a great plague that would have wiped out humanity had we not closed the Earth Door in time.”
“An extinct race, Fringe and Curvis said,” said Nela. “And Celery also said something of the kind.” She could not take her eyes from the shore where the things were now hopping over something she could not see: like toads, laboriously, but with no slowing of their forward motion. “Celery said the Arbai were about to be, or already were, extinct.”
Jory said, “In my travels I learned something about the Arbai. It was the Arbai who discovered that time and space flow back and forth through wormholes among the universes to keep the energy density constant. As you have remarked, they were the inventors of the wormhole Doors, which make distant points adjacent by going outside our space and coming in again, a concept that human engineers have adapted and—so they claim—improved upon. Eventually, the Arbai became preoccupied with questions of morality. They, like Nela, had always believed that interference with other races was wrong, but their reasoning was quite different from hers. They believed interference was wrong because they had no concept of evil. Their language had no word for it. They could not perceive it when they saw it.”
“They’d have made perfect Enforcers,” snorted Nela.
“Not really, no. The plague that killed them was purposefully
directed against them by creatures all of us here would call evil, but the Arbai could not see it and thus had no defense against it.”
“That must have presented them with a dilemma,” said Bertran, nervously watching the shore. The ship was coming very close, and he felt his anxiety increase with every ripple that fled beneath the hull.
“A dilemma indeed,” Jory remarked. “Most of their race had already died before they knew the reason. The few remaining chose to put all the energies they had left into what they thought of as a moral solution to the problem. They decided that the ‘problem’—which they did not call evil—had arisen out of the inability of disparate creatures to completely understand one another, so they withdrew to a distant place and built a communicator.”
“An Alsense machine?” Curvis asked, almost distracted from the approaching shore by this revelation. “The Arbai created the Alsense machine?”
Asner shook his head, answering for her. “No, an Alsense is merely a contextual device that compares speech patterns to a library of such patterns, establishes similarities, extrapolates possible meanings, then refines these from continuing utterances. Among languages based on common thought systems, an Alsense serves well enough….”
Jory interrupted. “The Arbai did better than that. They built a true communicator. An empathetometer. A meaning
feeler.
With typical understatement, they called it the Arbai Device.”
Danivon said, “How very interesting.” He fidgeted, approaching the rail, then stepping away from it, finally blurting, “Shouldn’t we be coming about? We’re getting very close to the shore.”
“I’d noticed that,” said Asner. “Perhaps the captain wants to get a better look at those things.”
“Better in daylight,” whispered Nela. “I think. Though spirits can’t cross running water.”
“Is that so?” asked Asner.
“In our time it was said to be so. In fairy tales. Evidently it’s true here, now.”
They fell silent as the ship drew ever closer to the shore. “There’s the reason we’re coming so close,” said Asner, pointing upstream where a foam of white showed dimly. “There are rocks midriver. The captain is coming as far as possible to
port so our next tack will bring the rocks on our starboard side.”
“You were speaking of the thing the Arbai invented,” said Danivon from a dry mouth. “Are you implying there’s such a device here on Elsewhere?”
Jory tore her eyes away from the bank where the shapes danced and jittered, seeming almost to extend themselves onto the surface of the water. “How could there be? If evil results from a lack of empathy (which the Arbai believed), and if evil is included in diversity (which you Enforcers seem to believe), then wouldn’t diversity also result from a lack of empathy? In which case, the presence of an Arbai Device here on Elsewhere would have destroyed all diversity long ago.” She gave him a distracted look and turned back to the rail. Bending and twisting, the flattened luminosities oozed outward, becoming elongated, stretching themselves into tentacles.
“Why are we discussing Arbai Devices?” demanded Bertran. “Has it something to do with these … these things?”
“I was only thinking,” said Jory. “That I’d like very much to understand what they are and why they are following us.” She laughed, without amusement. “Quite frankly, I was wishing we had the Arbai Device, here and now!”