Sideshow (41 page)

Some, mostly old ones, fearful of change, chose to stay, but none chose to have their babies or daughters stay. Mothers and daughters stood in argumentative clots, pushing and dragging at one another. The Houses of Retribution opened their doors and their inhabitants poured out. In the Houses of Retribution only a few remained behind, old women all, those who had ruled the others with their canes. In the Courts of Removal the departing women picked up all those still living and carried them along.
In the houses of the town, where women were kept in their so-called bowers, windowless cells emptied themselves down hidden stairs to high-walled gardens, and over those walls into the night. No one saw the women go. It was almost as though something hid them, preventing them from being seen. Here and there locked doors stood between women and the outside world, doors to which women had no keys, but the doors opened long enough for the women to come through, then locked again behind them.
Here and there in the gardens women crouched, weeping, waiting until the gate was locked once more with themselves inside. These were too frightened to go. These would rather die than take action themselves. Passivity had gone too deep.
Those who went, went in darkness, first to the banks of the Fohm, then westward along the river to the great wall that separated Thrasis, westernmost of the provinces, from the unknown lands beyond. The wall stretched from the depths of the river as far to the north as any man had ever gone. It had been there when the first settlers came. There was no way around it or under it or over it. Still, as the women waited silently, the wall began to fall, stone by stone sliding silently down from the top, stone by stone piling at the bottom, stone by stone heaping up to make a giant stairway over which the women could clamber. No sound as they went, no sound as they climbed, tugging one another from above, pushing one another from below, the dozens and hundreds and thousands of them finding their way in the dark as though a way were illuminated for their eyes alone.
As the last of them climbed, a few more came running, weeping, those who had delayed, who could not make up their minds until the last minute, until they thought of remaining here almost alone.
West of the wall they found a road shining vaguely in the moonless night, and the women went down that road, hastening as they could, helping one another along. When all had passed over the wall, the stones rose up once more, stone on stone until the wall stood as it had always stood, massive and impassable. The border of Thrasis was unbreached, secure. Beyond the wall, as the last woman passed, the road furred itself with green grass and herbs and small flowering trees that sprang up like mushrooms. A road reached on before, but there was no road behind. No tracks were left, no trail. There was no way back.
The false light of dawn whispered at the edge of the world. A tiny wind came from the east, betokening, so the early-rising sailors on the
Dove
said, a stronger breeze with the morning. The captain woke and argued with Asner whether it was safe to cross to Beanfields or whether it would be better to do as Jory had asked, avoid the southern bank altogether and head upriver at the best possible speed.
On shore, the tower guards wakened without realizing they had been asleep. They had nothing to report to the guards who came to relieve them at dawn. In the town of Thrasis, men rose and went about their affairs, in no whit alarmed at the silence in the bowers. Women’s quarters were
usually silent. Women with any sense did not attract attention to themselves.
A single early-rising buyer came to the tower nearest the river to obtain a breeder as a manhood gift for his son. He was accompanied by a vizer of the Prophet, and they strode self-importantly through the outer courts and into one of the smaller sales halls. A day before the old women who worked as inspectors had been instructed to examine certain women, previously selected by age and appearance, to be sure they had been properly cut and sewn as children to guarantee their purity.
The small sales hall was empty. The vizer strode into the nearest corridor, bellowing, only to be greeted by vacant echoes. There was no one in the tower except a few old women cowering in an upper room. He ran out of the place in frantic haste, and there followed a great consternation of guards and officers and men galloping this way and that. Not only was the one tower virtually empty, but so were all the towers. Not only the towers beside the river, but many of the bowers in the houses of the city as well. Not only in the city, but in the palace of the Prophet himself, and in the countryside where in remote and hidden areas invisible forces had sped women on their way. Even in the most distant parts of the province, the story was the same. In all Thrasis there were only a few hundred women left, many of them old.
A boat was sent out to the
Dove
, and a vizer, encountering Danivon, who had risen early to put together materials for his rescue effort, demanded to see the person who had invaded the towers the day before. With all the rest of the party, Jory came forth, looking old and frail and a little half-witted.
“You wanted me, my son?” she asked, the words intended to be provocative, which they were. In Thrasis, only men had sons.
“Where are the women?” the man screamed at her.
“What women?” she asked innocently. “I have no women here except those who came with me. What women?”
“Our women! The Prophet’s daughters. Someone has stolen them!”
“A thief does not steal what is worthless,” Jory said. “The women of Thrasis are worthless, so it is said by all the prophets since earliest times. Why would anyone steal what has no value? Probably they simply ran off.”
“The guards did not see them go!”
“Well, the guards watching this ship certainly didn’t see them come out here. Why are you yelling at me? I didn’t take them.”
Baffled, the officer made certain threats, then forgot them in a momentary fit of confusion during which he seemed to hear the voice of something huge and invisible telling him not to be silly. When he was ashore, he remembered his former concerns, but only foggily. He reported that the people on the ship knew nothing of the disappearance. Certainly the women of Thrasis could not be aboard the little ship.
“What have you done?” whispered Danivon to Jory. “What have you done, old woman?”
“I’ve been right here on the ship all night,” she said innocently. “Haven’t I, Cafferty?”
“Right here,” agreed Cafferty.
“All
the women are really gone?” demanded Danivon.
“Most all, I should think. It really will make very little difference in Thrasis. Aside from making a few minor adjustments in their sexual habits, the men will hardly notice the difference. No more sons, of course, but that’s the way of things sometimes. The universe is no guarantor of sons. And likely there’d be none anyhow, once those things from Derbeck get here.”
“Where did the women go!” Danivon demanded.
Jory shrugged. “What choice did they have. East is Molock, they wouldn’t have gone there. North is the waste, a great desert of stone and sand and predatory serpents running all the way to the sea. South is the river, and I doubt any Thrasian woman ever learned how to swim. West is the Wall….”
“Which leaves?”
“What would you say? Underground, perhaps? Unless they flew away.”
“Boat ho,” cried the lookout. “Boats. Boats ho.”
In midriver a scattered fleet of tiny boats was using the light breeze to make its way upstream. Turning his glass upon them, Danivon saw they were full of Murrey folk with a few Houm scattered here and there. “Where are they going?” he demanded.
“Upstream,” Jory commented, her eyes wide with pleased surprise. “Obviously. Away from Derbeck.” She went to the railing and called across the water. “Why have you left Derbeck?”
“… Chimi-ahm …” came the faint reply. “… eating all the people….”
“They can’t do that!” shouted Danivon. “They can’t leave their province!”
“They are doing it,” she cried. “On their own. All by themselves!”
“Boarmus won’t stand for it!”
“Boarmus may have other things on his mind.”
“Council Supervisory will have an army of Enforcers down here at once.”
“I think not, Danivon. If the things we saw along the river are stealing our folk here in Panubi and eating the people of Derbeck, what may they be doing in Tolerance? Boarmus is probably very busy! Or dead.”
He had no answer for her. He took no time to think of one, but threw up his hands and started for one of the small boats. “I’m going ashore and taking the flier Zasper came in,” he said.
“Do you have any idea what you’re going to do?” Jory asked.
Danivon replied, “I can set down almost on top of the place Fringe was taken. I’ve got weapons that should be able to sterilize the area….”
“Sterilize?”
“Well, Boarmus told Zasper it might be a kind of network, and if I melt the surrounding area, the network should melt with it, shouldn’t it?”
“What if the network is keeping them alive, and we wreck it,” asked Zasper mildly as he came to join them. “What if the cavern they’re in needs air or water, and can’t get it without the network.”
“By the rules and the covenants, Zasper, you’re infuriating! What if she’s injured? What if she’s sick? What if we wait and wait and don’t get there in time. We can all play at what if!”
Zasper nodded slowly. He had to admit, Danivon was right. “The flier’s big enough for two,” he said. “I’m going with you.”
Curvis waited, thinking Danivon would say no, Curvis would go. Curvis didn’t want to go, but he didn’t want Danivon to go off with Zasper, either. Danivon merely nodded at Zasper, however, one short jerk of his head, and stalked off to rummage among the baggage he’d assembled at
the rail, looking for something he’d just thought of, or, perhaps, merely doing so to put an end to conversation. Curvis, left behind, found himself angry at being ignored.
“Can’t contain himself, can he,” said Jory. “Fool kid.”
“Scarcely that,” admonished Zasper. “He’s over thirty.”
“I’m over several thousand, and he’s a kid.”
“We were all kids once,” he said, peering into her eyes. He wanted to talk with her about Fringe. About herself. He wanted to know her, and there might not be time…. This might be the only occasion possible….
The question he asked, however, surprised even him, for it was drawn out of him by some ageless glimmer in her eyes.
“What were you like as a girl, Jory?”
“Oh, I was a dutiful girl, Zasper Ertigon. I obeyed all the rules. I bought into subordination and humility.”
“You couldn’t have! You didn’t!”
“Oh, yes, I did. I was a very lovely handmaiden.”
“I believe that.”
“I find it hard to believe, sometimes. Actually, I was like a lot of those women in Thrasis, trying to be contented in my bower and a seething mass of rebellion inside. In my country in my time they didn’t go in for surgical chopping on women, though the custom still prevailed some places on Earth, but psychological chopping was quite common. I was taught to believe things no intelligent person could have believed. And eventually I rebelled against believing—perhaps in preparation for what I became.”
“Which was?”
“A prophetess, would you believe? Me, a prophetess?”
“I can believe that. You have that air about you.”
“Do I? It seems unlikely—looking back.”
He shook his head slowly. “Perhaps not unlikely. Fringe told me you picked her out, lady.”
“True.”
“Since … since we may not have an opportunity to talk again, will you tell me about that?”
“What do you want to know?” she asked, her head cocked to one side, giving her a sparrowlike look.
“I suppose … I suppose I want to know why? Why would a prophetess pick Fringe out. And for what?”
She laughed. It was a quick, uncomfortable little laugh. “Will it comfort you to know?”
He shook his head slowly. “Only you would know that.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “Well, perhaps it would. A parable must suffice, however. Will you settle for that?”
“If I must.”
“Well then.”
“Was a farm woman, once, found a miraculous beast eating the flowers in her garden, and they became friends. Trouble was, getting to know the beast unsuited the woman for less marvelous friendships, if you understand me?”
“Other relationships seemed trivial, perhaps?” he asked, after a moment’s thought.
“Not that so much as—irrelevant. Because, knowing the beast well as she did, she became something a great deal more than merely a farm woman with a garden. What she became was not of her own making, you understand, and she wasn’t always sure of its significance, though her innermost self reassured her it was worthy.”
He nodded. “I see. I think I do.”
“But an important thing is, what she became she could not have become if she hadn’t been suited for it in the first place.” “Aahh,” said Zasper.
Jory smiled. “Well, we all get old, and so did she, and the time came she knew she hadn’t much longer, so she looked about for someone to inherit what she had to leave behind. And, of course, what she looked for in her successor could not be what she had become—which was unique, through no virtue of her own—but what had been in her in the first place. The capability.”
“And what was that?”
“God knows.” She laughed. “I’ve often wondered.”
“Stubbornness?” he suggested.
“Perseverance,” she agreed.
“Contentiousness.” He smiled. “Rebelliousness.”
“Indomitability.” She smiled back.
“Dissatisfaction,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “A lot of that. A certain prickliness, perhaps. Unwillingness to settle for what’s there and obvious when it’s obviously wrong! A mystical sense of purpose. A sense of high duty to perform, without knowing what it may be! A longing for heaven, without knowing what that is, either.”
“Altogether, an uncomfortable person.”
She grinned at him. “So I’m told.”
“So you picked Fringe.” He shook his head sadly. “And now she’s gone.”
“Yes,” whispered Jory. “She’s the best I’ve found, and now she’s gone. And the prophetess is no longer sure of her prophecy, because it was all such a long time ago.”
“If no longer a prophetess, what are you now?”
“You’re full of good questions.” She made a face at him. “Perhaps I am merely a handmaiden again. Perhaps a witch or a ghost, up to no good. When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”
“When I bring Fringe back to you, I’ll remember you promised.” He looked toward the railing where Danivon was still fussing with the supplies and dropped his voice. “He’s not right for her, you know. I know her well enough to know that.”