Here twisting stairs clattering beneath niagaras of pounding feet. There dim corridors, endless as roads, running into vaulted passages that grew silent as they left the tenanted areas. And there, at the end, corroded doors opened upon cavernous spaces shrouded in cobwebs, home to the beetle and the fly, where bindings were only templates of green mold and pages had turned to inscrutable powder. No matter. All that was here was also in Files, incorruptible.
May thy golden towers rise …
Brannigan: glorious with the names of former scholars who had risen to untold heights: the Chairman of the Council of worlds; the Emperor of Eltein; the Goddess-elect of Vamie; the Virgin Inheritor of Rham….
As a beacon for the wise….
Brannigan: whose emeriti had stood in glittering rows along the Halls of Tomorrow, preserved in impenetrable vitreon, awaiting the day the Great Question would be answered. They were to have been raised then, from senescence into eternal youth.
Immortal may thy children be….
Lost. All lost except the Great Question itself. Gone, Brannigan. Gone the towers, the libraries, the teachers, the students. Gone the hope, the pride. Gone as all the galaxy is gone, down the gullets of the Hobbs Land Gods, leaving only …
The Great Question, the Only Question, still to be answered by this remnant at the end of the star-wheel, this tiny spark against the long-dark:
WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE DESTINY OF MAN?
On Earth, success followed success for Mulhollan’s Marvelous Circus. Despite Sizzy’s adjurations of modesty and humility, Nela and Bertran sometimes felt they were indeed the main event. Sometimes they were sure the whole circus focused on the freaks in the sideshow tent where the attraction was the people themselves. Other attractions were only tricks, as when a monkey pedaled a bicycle or a bear juggled a barrel or someone did three somersaults between the trapezes. But in the sideshow, no matter how professional their act, it wasn’t the tricks or the sparkle that mattered. It was they, the sideshow artists, who were the show, what they were and suffered. It was their oddity that brought people in.
“Turtledove writes that he is terribly proud of us,” said Nela. “We have been reviewed in The New York Times.”
“It isn’t easy, being a jackplane,” Bertran admitted with a wry grin. “But we’re getting good at it!”
Even so, oddity alone would not satisfy the audience once it had seen. Once the spectators had sated their curiosity about whatever peculiarity had piqued them, many of them lingered, looking for something more. Nela learned to recognize that searching stare fixed on her, on Bertran, that perusing eye that caught her own and asked recognition of it. And when she nodded or smiled, acknowledging the unspoken question, the viewer nodded too, as though saying to himself, herself, Why, she’s like me, he’s like me, no matter what they look like, they’re like me after all. It was the oddity that brought them in, but it was the humanity that let them go again.
“If they wanted only difference,” Nela explained her thought to Bertran, “they’d go to an aquarium. Or to a museum, to see a collection of fossils. They’d seek out spiny creatures, things with many legs, aliens, weirdnesses, but they don’t go there, they come here, where the strangeness is people, because it isn’t the strangeness they’re really looking for, but the fact we’re people, no matter how we look. It’s the identity under our skins they want to assure themselves of. Now, I wonder why that is?”
It seemed to Nela there had to be a reason. Something beyond mere curiosity. Something, as she sometimes thought, intended.
Bertran agreed it was the humanity behind the freakiness the audience wanted to see. However, he said, though most of them went away afterward chattering and relieved, some of them were strangely silent, as though the humanity behind the barker’s chatter had not been enough. “They’re looking for something they don’t find,” he said, wondering what they were looking for. Something more meaningful or knowing. Some definition, perhaps, of what humanity was, a definition that had to be sought in sideshows because the answer could not, never would be found among ordinary, everyday mankind.
“Turtledove believes that people are seeking an oracle,” Nela said. She often quoted Turtledove as saying things she herself felt or thought but, for some reason, did not want to have to defend as her own opinion. “People want a seer.” Though she wasn’t sure, she thought this might be true. People wanted someone to drop key words in their ears, the revelation they needed right then; help, surcease, pity, forgiveness, hope—the secret of existence. They were looking for all those things in a sideshow because they hadn’t found them anywhere else.
The audience didn’t get any of that. Not help nor hope. All it got was a moment’s wonder, a wink of complicity, plus magical rings, disappearing scarves, and patter. “Which is all we’ve got to give, Nelly,” said Bertran. When he said it, he believed he spoke the truth.
It was during the third European tour, ten years after the twins had joined the show (Turtledove, they told one another, had just won an international violin competition and had fallen in love with a girl named Sylvia Syllabub who played the bassoon), that Bertran and Nela met the Alien. The circus was performing in Rakovnik in Czechoslovakia, in a building constructed for year-round performances of circuses. Bertran and Nela had just left the sideshow after the last performance. The rest of the artists had
