Sheri S. Tepper - Sideshow

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Tepper, Sheri S. - Sideshow
SHERI S. TEPPER
Sideshow
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Tepper, Sheri S. - Sideshow
Table of Contents
● Chapter 1
● Chapter 2
● Chapter 3
● Chapter 4
● Chapter 5
● Chapter 6
● Chapter 7
● Chapter 8
● Chapter 9
● Chapter 10
● Chapter 11
● Chapter 12
● Chapter 13
● Chapter 14
● Chapter 15
● About the Author
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Tepper, Sheri S. - Sideshow
heaven longing ape
angel who stumbles
blind light bearer
who falls and fumbles
worshiper of error
seeker after truth
hurting and aging
lover of lovely youth
wild beast raging
craven and brave
freak of fashion
and custom's slave
puppet of passion
lowest and loftiest
a sideshow gape
god's fool, nature's jest
heaven longing ape
"MAN" Koi Bashi
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ONE
1
Humanity was saved from certain destruction when, on their wedding night, Lek Korsyzczy informed
his wife that their first child was to be a son. Certain intelligences (the Celerians, actually) established
later that this was the event setting causation in motion. It happened at around one o'clock on an October
Sunday morning during the 1990s, common era. Lek made the remark as Maria was about to get into
bed with him, his voice slightly slurred from the wedding champagne, but with nothing tentative or
doubtful in it to indicate that Maria had any choice in the matter.
Maria thought he sounded like a builder, like one of the customers at the lumberyard where she worked,
matter-of-factly ordering framing timbers. She gave her new husband a thoughtful, rather troubled look.
"Leksy, I think that just sort of happens how it happens, you know? Like my sister Judith, the one
married to the plumber, she had four girls before she had Buddy."
Leksy shrugged. His heavy shoulders were covered with large orange freckles and a pelt of fine, red-
blond hair. Maria had already decided he would have to wear something with sleeves when they made
love, because his fur tickled. She was sure, ticklish as she was, they would start doing it and she'd start
laughing, and laughter, so her sister Judith had informed her, was never a good idea then.
"They don't tell you how ridiculous it is," Judith had confided in the rest room, after five glasses of
champagne at the wedding supper. "The nuns sure don't tell you. The priests
don't tell you. They go on and on about sin, but nobody says how ridiculous it is. And then there you are,
doing this silly thing—oh, don't get me wrong, it can be fun—and you start thinking what it must look
like and you want to laugh, and let me tell you, don't! That's one time you do not want to laugh. You
wouldn't believe how bent out of shape some men can get!"
So, now, looking at the tickly pelt of hairs on Leksy's shoulders and arms, almost to the wrists, Maria
knew she'd have to take steps to avoid laughter. "I mean," she told him, "I wouldn't want you to get your
heart set on a boy right away, or anything."
"You don' unnerstan'," he told her, hiccuping slightly as he slid completely under the influence of, the
multiple toasts he had drunk. "I got it all work' out with the Blessed Virgin."
"You what?"
"I got it all work' out." And with these words Leksy's eyes fell shut as his mouth opened to emit a tiny
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snore. It was only a raspy breath, a mere puppy gargle so far as snores went, but it was definitely a
snore, not something else. Not lust, for example. Not passion.
Maria sat looking at him, not sure whether she wanted to laugh or cry. It was kind of like a dirty joke,
him falling asleep that way. "There was this guy, see, and he drank too much at his wedding and that
night his new wife stayed in the bathroom a long time, so he fell asleep before anything happened,
see. . . ." Not that she'd been in the bathroom that long! On the other hand, his being asleep gave her a
little tune to think about what he'd said, that he'd worked it out with the Blessed Virgin. It didn't exactly
surprise her. Well, it did, but then it didn't. Lots of things Leksy did seemed kind of surprising at first,
but not after you thought about them. The whole Kor-syzczy family was religious. No, pious. That was
the word. Maybe a little more pious than was good for them. Who else did she know besides Leksy who
had five sisters who were nuns and three older brothers in holy orders. Holiday dinner at their house was
like a convocation! And they were all the time dragging religion into everything, like God was watching
every breath you took! Like your whole life was bugged for holy!
Maria was tired and just a little bit drunk herself, which meant queasy in the stomach, because she
couldn't drink, not really. Whenever she tried, she either threw up or passed out.
She decided to have a nice long hot bath and not worry about it. It wasn't romantic of Leksy to fall
asleep that way, but their marriage would probably get off to a better start if he slept off the champagne.
And she'd enjoy things more if her stomach was settled down. They'd both be better off for a little sleep.
Leksy would probably wake up in an hour or two, and then they could do what he'd been self-
righteously keeping them both from doing for the past six months since they'd gotten engaged.
The bath helped. Afterward she lay down beside him, expecting he'd wake up pretty soon. Several times
during the night, she came out of a doze, thinking he was about to, but he only snored that same puppy
snore and snuggled more deeply into the-pillows. Along about four o'clock, she fell soundly asleep, and
when he finally reached for her, around seven, she couldn't rouse herself and wasn't really aware how
annoyed she was with him until she heard her own response.
"Don't," she said sharply. "I'm too sore." Judith had warned her about that.
"Sore?" he asked stupidly, looking at her bleary-eyed. "Sore?"
"I think you ought to have more consideration, Leksy," she said. "I'm not used to this, and four times is
just too much all at once." And she turned over with a little secret smile and went on sleeping, leaving
her husband to puzzle, then grin, then chortle as he got up and went in to take a shower. That small
happening continued the chain of consequences that had begun with Lek's announcement and would
culminate with the arrival of the Alien and the saving of the planet Earth, for, as Maria's eldest sister
Sizzy had been fond of saying, you just never know.
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That small happening also became a marital sandbag for Leksy, part of the accumulated grit any two
people rub off each other that ends up reinforcing the family levees against the outside world. Maria
didn't realize that's what it was. She had meant it as a joke, not a shibboleth, and she didn't think twice
before sharing the story with her sister Judith. Sometime later, Judith told her husband about it, and a
year or so after that, during a drunken party, her husband told a guy he worked with, and a couple of
years after that, the man remembered it during a fishing trip and told someone else. The town was a
small one on the U.S.— Canadian border, the kind of town where everyone knows everyone, and though
the story
wasn't one of those knee-slappers that move like wildfire, it was a sort of amusing anecdote that hung
around in people's minds and got retold from time to time. It took almost seventeen years before it got
back to Leksy.
Meantime, it was business as arranged for and sanctified, which, by the end of the honeymoon, had
pretty much settled into the pattern it would occupy in their lives for the foreseeable future. Nothing
fancy. Leksy had a horror of anything fancy. Fancy was stuff whores did. Fancy was stuff you could go
to hell for or get AIDS doing. Mouths were for kissing only, and hands could be used discreetly at the
beginning only, and the rest of it was up to the parts designed for the purpose, provided the one was
securely inserted in the other before anything went bang. So said Father Jabowsky, and so Leksy
believed because that's the way he had done it every time he'd done it, and he hadn't had any complaints.
Of course, his mostly willing though often drunken partners hadn't been asked for-critiques.
It never occurred to Leksy to inquire whether Father Jabowsky was giving him good advice. Father was
father, so it was the right advice, necessarily. The priest was almost seventy-five; he firmly believed that
Vatican II had been a hallucination; he still said Mass in Latin whenever he thought nobody was
listening; and he had never, even as a boy, felt in himself the slightest sexual urge, a fact he mentioned
from time to time during premarital counseling sessions with a kind of quiet pride. Father Jabowsky took
marital sex on faith, the same way he took transubstantiation. The church said the sacrament was there,
so it was there, even though Father couldn't see it, smell it, or taste it. You could tell it was there from
the effects. Grace on the one hand. Babies on the other.
Maria rather wished Leksy had another confessor. She thought she knew a lot about sex, mostly from
watching Oprah and Donahue, and though she found her relations with Leksy generally satisfying, she
would have liked a little more variety. Maybe, she told herself, when Father Jabowsky died or retired,
she could ask the new priest to talk to Leksy. Judith said some of the younger priests had actually
studied about sex and were able to counsel about it intelligently. In the meantime, however, Maria
amused herself by teasing tek about "the way he did it on their wedding night." Whenever they made
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love, and he asked if she'd liked it, she said yes, but
she wished he'd do it the way he'd done it on their wedding night.
Leksy couldn't admit he didn't remember. A few times he went so far as to say he couldn't remember
he'd done it any different. To which Maria merely smiled an enigmatic smile that drove him crazy
because he got to wondering what he'd done, and whether it had been something maybe, you know,
perverted, only it couldn't have been because whatever it was, she'd liked it!
Aside from the teasing, Maria didn't worry about it much. The main thing was to get pregnant, and
people got pregnant in the missionary position as well as any other.
Except that she didn't. After six months, she went to the doctor for a checkup. The doctor ran tests and
filled out a long questionnaire and asked her to have her husband come in for a sperm test. Maria tried to
explain about Leksy, who wouldn't submit to a sperm test in a million years, while the doctor muttered
something about ritual and superstition and being back in the Dark Ages.
"Well, since I can't find anything obviously wrong with you," he said at last, "next time you have
intercourse in the morning, come on in as soon afterward as you can. We'll take a smear and try to
determine from that."
Which meant waiting until the next time Leksy had a weekday off, so they could stay in bed almost until
the doctor's office hours, and then pretending she had an appointment with the dentist to explain her
rushing off, even before breakfast. And it turned out useless, after all. "Enough sperm to populate the
planet," grumbled the doctor into his microscope. "All flapping around like trout."
So another six months went by, and still no pregnancy. Leksy's relatives were beginning to look at her
funny. Father Jabowsky came right out and asked her during her confession if she was using birth
control, which made Maria very upset with him, and she called him something—well, not him exactly,
she just said people who suspected things like that had dirty minds—so he ended up loading her
penance. That certainly wasn't fair. He was the one with the nasty uncharitable thoughts.
After that, she stopped going to St. Seraph's and started going across the parish line to Holy Redeemer.
A lot of the younger people did, so that was all right. Even Leksy knew that, and he didn't say a word
about it.
She had the doctor repeat the tests when they'd been married a year and a half, even going so far as to
have him look at Leksy's sperm again, just to be sure. By this time she was so upset she spent almost an
hour crying in the doctor's office.
"You're trying too hard," he told her. "Relax."
Relaxing wasn't exactly what she was able to do. Leksy kept at her and kept at her. She told him he was
wearing her out, but he said marriage was for babies, so until she got pregnant, it was his moral duty to
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keep at it and there was no sin involved. Besides, since she'd quit working at the lumberyard—Leksy
had thought maybe it was her job that kept her from getting pregnant—she could always take a nap in
the afternoon. Leksy wasn't worried. He had it all worked out with the Virgin, and nobody was accusing
him of using birth control.
At the end of two years, Maria was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
"Three and four times a day," she said. "I can't even turn around if he's in the house or he drags me into
the bedroom. I like sex, Doctor, or I used to, but this is getting ridiculous."
"There's this new drug," he told her. "Ovitalibon. Made by one of the big European drug companies, just
recently released for use in this country. I've used it with some success in situations like yours, cases of
unattributable subfertility."
"I've read about those drugs," she said. "Women pregnant with nine babies, like a mama dog with a
litter. All of the babies die. Or they have to abort some to let the others live. Leksy wouldn't do that in a
million years. He'd leave me first."
"No, no," the doctor huffed, making pursey little lines around his mouth. "By this time I'm well aware of
your husband's religious hangups, Maria. No. That's a different drug you're talking about. Ovitalibon
doesn't do that. It does slightly increase the incidence of twins, but it doesn't cause multiple births. In
fact, we're not entirely sure how it works."
By which Maria understood that the drug had probably been invented for some other condition entirely,
then had been found to have fertility effects, but nobody knew why. Just like the birth control pill had
originally been invented for infertility. Watching Donahue kept her well informed, though it had also
made her slightly cynical.
"You're sure it won't give me like five or six babies all at once."
"I'm sure," he said. And he was. About that.
The drug was miraculous. Within two months she was pregnant. As soon as she was sure, she told
everyone and peace descended like a dove. She told herself peace came exactly like a white-winged
dove. Fluttering down. All soft and cooing. Leksy let her alone. Her relatives let her alone. For the first
time since their wedding, she got a full night's sleep. For the first time since their wedding, she found
herself ecstatically, totally content.
Everything, so says Jordel of Hemerlane (whom you will meet in due time), is connected to everything
else. Time imposes no limitation on this rule. Everywhen is connected to every-other-when. Tit floweth
from tat, tut floweth from tit. Past, present, future, are not disparate things but a continuum, a recoiled
helix of interconnections in which time no more serves to sever than does distance. Here and there are
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not separable. Now and then are not divisible; Everything burrows through the myriad wormholes of
reality to become part of everything else. Time and space are coiled like some unimaginable DNA,
pregnant with both possibility and certainty. In this multidimensional womb, separation is a fiction, all
things are adjacent, and twentieth-century Earth snuggles close against the warm cheeks of the planet
Elsewhere. . . .
. . . Elsewhere, at the far end of an attenuated galactic arm, surrounded by a clutter of cosmic debris.
Elsewhere, lit by one middle-sized yellow sun and accompanied by a scattered handful of heavy little
planets and moons. Elsewhere, which had been set up—so said Council Supervisory—as the last refuge
of humanity from enslavement by the Hobbs Land Gods, that botanical plague that had swept across the
galaxy over a millennia before, bringing, so it was said, slavish conformity in its wake.
Some of the urgency had seeped out of that claim over the centuries, during which time Elsewhere had
remained so inviolate that one might question whether the Hobbs Land Gods knew or cared it was there.
Considering that Elsewhere had been set up and populated in secret, this was not astonishing. Still,
Elsewhere had indisputably been designed as a refuge, and from the moment the first fleeing groups
arrived to settle
provinces of their own, each one was guaranteed the uninterrupted continuance of its own language and
religion and customs and dress and anything else it considered important. Elsewhere, managed by
Council Supervisory, was designed to insure the immemorial diversity of man.
Council Supervisory had made the rules to start with, and they had not changed since.
No province would be allowed to cross its own borders to infringe upon another or to make common
cause with another to infringe upon a third; evangelism across borders was forbidden along with treaties
and alliances; travel<and trade were allowed, within limits; and any and all groups would be welcome so
long as they let one another alone!
If provinces did not leave one another alone, if a Situation arose, Council Enforcers would be sent td
Attend the Situation. Enforcers might go winging or striding or riding some ancient, patient animal; they
might go singly or in groups of hundreds; they might carry simple weapons or a complex
armamentarium. However they went, the Situation was always Attended to. Provinces on Elsewhere
really did Let One Another Alone. If they would not do it on their own, the Council Enforcers made sure
they did it anyhow.
One such Council Enforcer was Zasper Ertigon, who at a certain point in his career found himself in the
city of Molock. The city was the capital of a province also called Molock, on the continent of Panubi,
which was well settled around the edges but otherwise largely unexplored. Zasper had been in the city
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for a few days on routine Council business that was almost concluded. After checking out his vehicle
and while waiting for his colleagues, he'd given in to thirst if not to the pleasure of the company, and
now occupied a tottery stool in a ramshackle shelter near the vehicle park, drinking what passed locally
for ale in company with a local guard officer.
"Goin' home now?" the sweating guard asked him, belching voluminously.
Zasper nodded, holding his breath against the noxious emanation and fingering the thick braid of slightly
graying hair that signified his rank and status. "Back to Tolerance," he acknowledged, meaning the quasi-
city on the polar plateau that was headquarters to Council Supervisory and all its works. "We'll leave as
soon as my colleagues arrive." Actually, the persons he had conveyed to Molock were not colleagues,
that is, not Council Enforcers. They were Council technicians
charged with maintaining the ubiquitous monitors that speckled every province like seeds on a bun, but
it was Council policy that all technicians be escorted by and treated as Enforcers when on duty out in the
field. Zasper wasn't Else-where's greatest pilot and he found escort duty dull; but when ordered to do it,
he did it.
"Ibl'rance your home?" the guard persisted.
Zasper shook his head. "No," he admitted. "I'm from Enarae originally."
"What category's that?" the officer wanted to know.
"Category seven," Zasper replied. Category one was untouched wilderness and category ten was
quintessential tech, so a rating of seven meant only a little better than halfway civilized, which was a
comedown for people who originated in sea-girt Phansure, once home for the galaxy's preeminent
engineers. Or so Zasper had been taught as a boy in school. Molock was only category four. Molock was
primitive and, in Zasper's privately held opinion, barbaric. Enforcers weren't supposed to have private
opinions about provinces, but many of them did.
"What's it like in Tbl'rance?" the guard officer asked.
Zasper drank deeply and stared toward the fireglow of Molock city, ruddy against the overhanging
cloud, trying to come up with something that would be both permissible and inoffensive. When he
thought of Tolerance, he thought of the Great Rotunda, where Council Supervisory policed and
protected the varied remnants of humanity, where the monitors clicked and chuffed and whirred and
now and then beeped, as they had been designed to do, bringing scurrying minions to see what each and
every beep portended. When Zasper thought of Tolerance, he thought of obsessive attention given to
cleanliness, no escape from boredom, and an excess of pid-dly little customs that didn't mean anything.
He also thought of comfort, marvelous food, and quite outstanding drinkables.
But he couldn't talk about that. So, he fell back on geographical details, told in dull generalities, while he
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Tepper,SheriS.-SideshowSHERIS.TEPPERSideshowfile:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...documenten/spaar/Sheri%20S.Tepper%20-%20Sideshow.html(1of390)23-2-200618:08:41Tepper,SheriS.-SideshowTableofContentslChapter1lChapter2lChapter3lChapter4lChapter5lChapter6lChapter7lChapter8lChapter9lC...

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