Sideshow: Tales of the Galactic Midway, Vol. 1 Read online

  “Are they all from your world?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “There are thousands upon thousands of populated worlds in the galaxy. They come from some of the others.”

  “Each of you is from a different world?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Including Mr. Romany?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this the prelude to an invasion?” I asked, surprised that I could remain so calm while embracing so frightening a thought.

  Mr. Ahasuerus laughed softly. It was a hideous sound.

  “Have I said something funny?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “I laugh only so I will not cry. Haven't you figured it out yet, little one?”

  “I guess not,” I admitted. “Why are you here?”

  “We are sightseers,” he said bitterly. “We travel the galaxy, visiting those planets that have not yet joined a community of worlds.”

  “You're tourists?” I repeated unbelievingly.

  He nodded again. “We masquerade as a sideshow so to draw the least possible official attention to ourselves. It allows us to observe a cross-section of the populace without revealing our origins or upsetting their political and religious structure.”

  “This same group goes all over the galaxy?”

  “No. We never accept an applicant who differs too greatly from the dominant life form of the planet that we are to visit. Hence, every member of this particular group breathes oxygen, all but two have mastered at least a rudimentary knowledge of your language, and without exception all can eat the same food you eat with very little damage to their systems. When I realized that no native race had blue skin I decided not to display myself. I also had some trepidations about allowing Amphrawse—the one we billed as the Sphinx—to appear.”

  “He seemed the oddest,” I said. “Except for yourself.”

  “I know,” said Mr. Ahasuerus. “But he had saved his money—or what passes for money on his world—for almost three years in order to visit your planet for two weeks. In his single-minded pursuit of his goal he had broken up his—how may I phrase it?—his family unit, which carries far more serious consequences to him than to a native of Earth. How was I to tell him that he must remain in hiding during our stay here?” He paused for a moment, as if recalling the Sphinx's pleas and appeals. “I am glad that he had nothing to do with our present circumstance. It was a poor decision on my part, for it endangered the others.” He sighed. “The mind discerns and decides, and the heart vetoes. It is a very inefficient system.”

  “It seems to be universal,” I said.

  “Not entirely,” he replied, casting a glance in the direction of Thaddeus’ trailer.

  “Even him,” I said.

  “You delude yourself,” hissed the Human Lizard, who had been listening to us. (I don't mean that he hissed in a dramatic sense; rather, that his voice was so sibilant that nothing he could ever say would sound like anything but a hiss.)

  “He treats me decently,” I said defensively.

  “You have very lax standards of decency,” said the Human Lizard.

  “What do you know about it?” I said irritably. “Thaddeus gave me a job when everyone else laughed at me. He's the only person who treats me like a human being.”

  “Is this how human beings treat each other?” replied the Human Lizard.

  He was incapable of intonation, so couldn't tell if it was a sincere question or a sarcastic one.

  “He's got a lot of people to feed,” I said. “He's got a lot on his mind.”

  “Why do you continue to defend him?” said a voice from behind me. I turned and saw Alma standing just inside the doorway.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her.

  “I just heard that we have a new girl in the show,” she said with open hostility. “I thought I'd come over and find out about it.”

  She walked through the tent until she came to the Three-Breasted Woman, who was sitting huddled on a chair with a blanket around her. Alma reached out and pulled the blanket away before the Three-Breasted Woman could shrink back out of reach.

  “Goddamnit!” she said. “How the hell are we supposed to compete with that? Why don't you stay with the freaks where you belong?”

  The Three-Breasted Woman stared up at her in terror, and Mr. Ahasuerus walked over.

  “She does not speak English very well,” he said gently, interposing himself between the two of them.

  “Then how the hell did she convince Thaddeus to let her out of the freak show?” demanded Alma.

  “It was not a matter of choice,” said Mr. Ahasuerus.

  Suddenly Alma's whole attitude changed. “You mean Thaddeus is making her do it?”

  Mr. Ahasuerus nodded.

  “Does she know what she's getting into?” said Alma.

  “None of us do,” replied Mr. Ahasuerus.

  She turned to me. “And you let him do this, you evil little man!”

  “How could I stop him?” I said.

  “All right, goddamnit!” she snapped. “I'll go talk to him myself!”

  She turned on her heel and left.

  “Will she succeed?” asked Mr. Ahasuerus softly.

  I shrugged. “I don't know.”

  “What will happen if she doesn't?”

  “Let's worry about that when it happens,” I said, not wishing to think about it, but thinking about it anyway. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, even if Thaddeus made her go through with it. After all, she acted like a hootch dancer anyway. Maybe she was a stripper on her home world. Maybe she could even put on a show that would shock Alma.

  I asked Mr. Ahasuerus what the Three-Breasted Woman did when she wasn't touring the galaxy.

  “She is a ... I don't know your analog word for it. She participates in her religion.”

  “Like a nun?” I asked.

  “What is a nun?”

  I told him, and he replied that that pretty much defined what she was.

  “Is she—uh—sacrosanct?” I asked, fumbling for the proper word.

  “I don't understand.”

  “Celibate?”

  He didn't know that word either, but when I managed, with much blushing and even worse stammering than usual, to explain it to him, he nodded and said that it was his understanding that all active practitioners of her religion were celibate.

  “Oh, brother!” I muttered.

  He must have sensed my distress, because he fell silent. After a few more minutes of unsuccessfully trying not to think of what lay in store for a celibate nun in a meat show, I trudged over to the Man of Many Colors, who was lying very still on one of the cots, while the Human Lizard and the India Rubber Man took turns rubbing his wrists vigorously and mopping sweat from his forehead.

  “What's the matter with him?” I asked.

  “Exposure to the cold,” hissed the Human Lizard.

  “But the rest of you were exposed to it,” I said.

  The Human Lizard turned and stared at me with his dead eyes. “In case it has escaped your notice, may I point out that we are not all alike? He comes from a hot arid land, hotter even than my own world. When he is healthy he glows a livid red; when tired, a bright green. He has the capacity to change colors from red to yellow to brown almost at will. But blue is the death color. As it grows paler, he grows weaker; when it vanishes, so too will his life.”

  “Then shouldn't we move him closer to the heater?” I suggested.

  “Would you throw a drowning man into the desert?” replied the Human Lizard. “Or would you remove the water from his lungs? We must make him well, not hot.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

  He merely stared at me again, and then turned back to the Man of Many Colors.

  I walked back to my chair and sat down, feeling absolutely useless. It was not an unfamiliar feeling.

  I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew Alma was standing in front of me, shaking me by the shoulders.

  “
What is it?” I said, blinking my eyes. “What's happened? Did he die?”

  “Who?” she said, confused.

  “The Man of Many Colors.”

  “How the hell would I know?” she said hotly, and I could tell by her face that she was terribly upset about something. “But you can tell the one with the three boobs that she can stay with the freak show.”

  “I'm very glad to hear that,” I said.

  “Bully for you.”

  “Why are you crying, Alma?”

  “He had another one of the fucking locals in there with him!” she snapped.

  “I'm sorry,” I said. I pretended to have more difficulty getting the words out than was true, so I wouldn't have to say anything else, because I couldn't think of anything else to say.

  “Doesn't he care about anything, Tojo?” she said, tears streaming down her face. “Doesn't he know what he's driving me to do?”

  “I don't understand what you mean,” I said.

  “I mean that everybody needs a certain amount of human affection,” she said, wiping her face with a crumpled piece of Kleenex. “Everybody needs warmth, and comfort, and to know that they're wanted.”

  “But not everybody can have it,” I said softly.

  Suddenly she looked down at me as if she had heard me for the first time.

  “Oh, Tojo, I'm sorry! I didn't mean—” She stopped in mid-sentence, leaned over, and kissed me on the cheek. “Oh, God!” she muttered, straightening up.

  “I hope he dies!”

  She turned and left again, and this time I knew she wouldn't be back.

  I walked over and told Mr. Ahasuerus that the Three-Breasted Woman would be staying with the other aliens.

  “Perhaps there is a germ of decency in him after all,” said Mr. Ahasuerus.

  “Perhaps,” I said, though I knew it was far more likely that he had merely agreed to get rid of Alma and avoid a prolonged scene in front of his latest bedmate.

  I fell asleep again, and didn't wake up until Gloria and one of the other girls brought in some breakfast—hot dogs and coffee, as usual—and the aliens began waking up.

  Then, at about nine o'clock, Jupiter Monk walked in, leading Bruno the Bear by a short chain. Bruno was wearing a muzzle and pulling a huge portable toilet behind him, and Monk guided him to a corner where the straw was stacked. Then he unhooked Bruno's harness, wheeled the toilet around so that the door was facing us, and stood back, hands on hips, to admire his contribution.

  “Don't all rush up to thank me at once!” he said in a loud, irritated voice.

  “I'm sure everyone is extremely grateful,” I said. “On the other hand, I don't think you have to worry about people rushing up to thank you as long as you've got Bruno with you.”

  “Bruno wouldn't hurt a fly,” said Monk, slapping the bear on the head while ducking a vicious swipe of the animal's paw. “People, maybe,” he added with a grin.

  “I thought we didn't have any toilets,” I said, trying to keep Monk between Bruno and myself.

  “There weren't any available,” corrected Monk.

  “So how did you get this one?”

  “I won it from the Rigger!” laughed Monk. “I just hope he freezes his cock off pissing in the snow!”

  “You won it? How?”

  “I suckered him,” said Monk, looking inordinately pleased with himself.

  “No one suckers Diggs.”

  “Well, he takes a special kind of suckering, that I'll have to admit,” said Monk. “He's such a devious bastard that he's always looking for the angle. I gave him a straight bet, and when he couldn't figure out the catch, he finally put up the toilet against two hundred dollars just to find out what the answer was. Don't worry about old Rigger, though; if he doesn't turn into one funny-looking snowman, he'll make a couple of thousand dollars off his learning experience.”

  “What was the bet?” I asked him.

  “I bet him that I could name a Triple Crown race in which half the field went off at odds-on. Well, right off the bat, he said it was Man O’ War's Belmont Stakes, because there were only two horses and Man O’ War paid something like one cent on the dollar. But I told him no, it wasn't a sucker bet, and that it was a field of six.” Monk paused for effect. “Well, this drives him batty, because the way the tote board figures the odds, it's impossible for more than two horses to go off at odds-on, and even then the rest of the field would all be fifty-to-one or more. So he rants and he raves and he refuses to bet, and I leave his trailer, but I know it's going to keep eating away at him until he figures it out. He knows there's an answer, because I'm willing to put up two hundred bucks on the spot, and it's driving him crazy. He even calls a couple of bookies, but they tell him it's impossible, and that drives him even wilder. Finally he can't stand it anymore, so he tells me to come over and pick up the toilet, but he's gotta know the answer.”

  “Was there an answer?”

  “Sure,” grinned Monk. “Bold Ruler and Gallant Man were both odds-on in the 1957 Belmont Stakes. Field of six.”

  “But that's only two,” I pointed out.

  “Just what the Rigger said. But there was another horse in the field called Bold Nero. By himself he would have been about a trillion-to-one, but he had the same owner as Gallant Man, so they ran as an entry. One owner, one betting interest—so he was odds-on too. If you listen real carefully, you can still hear the Rigger screaming foul.”

  “Well, we thank you for the toilet,” I said.

  “You're welcome. It may seem to all assembled here that I'm preoccupied with shit, but actually I'm just working out the foolishness of my youth.”

  “I don't understand you,” I said.

  “Go spend a winter capturing Kodiak bears on the Klondike and you'll understand my obsession with the comforts of home,” he said with a laugh.

  “Anyway, I'm glad to have been of help. I've been saving that little bet to pull on Diggs for two years; I guess I found the right time for it.”

  Bruno started getting restless then, so Monk gave him a couple of smacks on the head and led him out, and Big Alvin, who was back on guard duty, started hauling the straw away.

  I checked on the Man of Many Colors. He was still the same pale blue, neither richer nor lighter in color than he had been the night before. The Horned Demon and the Three-Breasted Woman were tending to him now, and after their demeanor convinced me that my help wasn't wanted, I walked over to the table Gloria had set up and had a cup of coffee.

  “An interesting beverage,” said the India Rubber Man, who was standing nearby, also drinking coffee.

  “What do you drink on your world?”

  “I couldn't describe it very well,” he said. “You have no analog words for it.”

  “Can you tell me what your world is like?”

  “It's a world, like any other.”

  “I've never been to any other,” I said.

  “It has people, some good, some bad. We live and die, love and hate, worship and fear. We try to get through each day without causing irreparable harm to those we care for.”

  “But what of its physical features?” I asked.

  “Just props,” he said with a shrug that began at his shoulders and wound up in the vicinity of his boneless toes. “I should have thought that you, of all these people, would find physical features unimportant.”

  “But to see other worlds,” I persisted. “It must be—”

  “They are simply stages. It is the players who are important.”

  “Why did you choose to come here?”

  He shrugged again, in an equally disquieting way. “Because you were here. Because I have never been here. Because I wanted to know what you are like.”

  “Are we very different from the others you have visited?” I asked.

  He shook his head, and for a minute I thought it would twist right off. “No. People are people. They have needs and desires, lusts and fears. I must confess, however, that you are a puzzle to me.”

  “Me?”
/>
  “Yes. Why are you content to let him abuse you?”

  “Him? You mean Thaddeus?”

  “Yes.”

  “He abuses other people, too. Why single me out?”

  “Because they resent him, and you don't.”

  “Do you like appearing as a freak in a sideshow?” I responded.

  “It is an acceptable camouflage.”

  “But you wouldn't want to do it for your entire life?”

  “No,” he said firmly.

  “Neither would I,” I replied. “I have a home here. This is my family. Even the marks treat me as if I belong.”

  “I understand this,” said the Rubber Man. “But why must you stay with Flint? Why not go to another carnival, another sideshow?”

  “Because you don't leave your family just because someone else belongs to a happier one,” I said. It seemed a lot more convincing when I thought of it than when I finally got the words out. How do you tell a man with no bones who is half a galaxy from home what it means to finally have a home?

  The Rubber Man gave me a look that implied that I was even stranger than he had first supposed, and wandered off to join his companions.

  A few minutes later Big Alvin and Treetop took them off to their platforms, and as I heard Thaddeus’ voice filtering back to the dormitory tent I felt a little of the resentment that the Rubber Man had been unable to perceive. But I felt something else, too: I felt the cord that bound me to Thaddeus Flint and his world—my world—with its infinite variety of grotesques. It was a lifeline, it supplied me with comfort and sustenance, and I knew that nothing would ever pry my clutching fingers loose from it.

  And then I thought of Thaddeus, driven by whatever personal devils made him the way he was. We are all prisoners of our needs, and since Thaddeus’ needs were so much greater than mine or Alma's or Monk's or anyone else's, I couldn't help feeling that he was clutching his end of the cord tighter than any of the rest of us.

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  * * *

  Chapter 7

  Within three days the Man of Many Colors was well enough to be placed on exhibit with the other aliens, although Mr. Ahasuerus told me that his colors were nowhere near as bright as before he'd fallen ill. The Three-Breasted Woman, once she understood what Thaddeus had originally planned for her, became much more subdued in front of the marks, and positively virginal whenever Thaddeus was around. The others went through their paces, some bitterly, some with nothing more than resignation. I think they all looked to Mr. Ahasuerus to pull some rabbit out of the hat and free them, but the blue man seemed to have neither the will nor the ability to act. Besides, he was stranded on an alien planet, and I very much doubt that he could have found his way back to his spaceship without asking the locals for aid—and it has been my experience that people will pay good money to gape at an oddity long before they'll help him for free.