Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (18 page)

Jessica Reisman

Grey patted Franche the polar bear on her broad back, leaning against her side as he ran a diagnostic between a handscan and his internal link; he then shot the record through that internal link to the bear’s permanent file. The bear’s coarse, thick ruff of white-wine colored fur glistened under the glow of the show’s biolumes, strung about the counterfeit forest of the fairway.

When the Vostrasovitch Clockwork Animal and Traveling Forest Show shut down for the night, they partially rolled up the forest and did maintenance on the clockworks and the rest of the aging operation.

Clockwork, of course, was misnomer, nostalgic anachronism. All the creatures in the show were biomechanical, masterpieces of art, technology, and science.

Rare few real animals still lived in the world, and most of those were human. The few bio-preserves, where efforts were made at preserving and recreating something of the lost wealth of nature, were heavily guarded strongholds that few humans ever entered. World government controlled the work strictly; speciation not sanctioned by the government was illegal. Too many powerful interests had agendas dictating what flora and fauna to focus on developing, agendas based on who would profit most from that development.

The only purely biological fauna Grey had ever seen were insects: the locusts that had overrun the last wheat fields in his childhood, the perpetual gnats, and cockroaches.

He figured their clockworks were better than the legendary real things anyway. Franche would never try to eat him, or hurt him with her great clawed paws and teeth. She didn’t need much in the way of energy, and put no strain on their very limited food supplies.

“Grey.” Rubov stopped beside him, carrying a toolbox. “Going to run some tests on the ambients. Tell your mother, when she comes by for her closing check,” Rubov squinted at the time through his internal link, “in a few ticks, that I’ll get to the tank problem next.”

Grey peered over Franche’s back toward the offside of the forested fairway, where the rolling tank garden that grew most of their supply of fresh food sat, along with the show’s trucks and spot-habs. There were always tank problems. He shivered a little in the chill, stomach grumbling around the usual end-of-the-day hollow. “What do you think is wrong with the ambients?”

Grey was so used to the breeze in trees, bird song, and animal sounds that made up the background ambient of the show that he was rarely aware of it on or off, but it had cut out several times that day and their customers—townies, rover cabals, and nomads—had definitely noticed.

Rubov grunted, shifting the toolbox and wiping a hand over his face, grime set into the creases of his age in a delicate tattoo mapping. He stomped away with only the grunt for answer.

Franche ran through her system maintenance checks as she did every night after a show, accompanied by a low grumbling. Grey listened with half an ear. The grumbles were part of the system check function set into all their biomechs; changes in tone or frequency indicated potential issues before they made it into primary systems. A good handler knew the sound of each biomech’s check vocalization better than the sound of their own breath, a language repeated over and over. Even with the occasional warning signals, it was a limited vocabulary. Raised with Franche, Grey had known the entire repertoire of her vocalizations before he fully mastered speaking in complete sentences himself.

Franche offered no surprises—down to the rip in her hide at right shoulder haunch that he’d mended five times. He checked it now, fingers sifting down through thick fur to find it still holding from the last patch-up. The bear finished her grumbling check with a click of blunted teeth and went into shut down: the illusion of breath, of life and volition in muscle and eye all stilled. Franche became a statue, like one of the taxidermy animals in museums and roadside galleries. Grey found this routine comforting, as known and trusted as his mother’s frowns. He crumpled the handscan and shoved it in a pocket of his coveralls as his mother came toward him from among the trucks and spot-habs.

“All right with Franche?” She opened with this question as she reached their little pavilion. She always opened with this question at the end of a show. She put the same question to each of the five handlers responsible for the show’s main attractions: a leopard, two wolves, a long-eared, long-legged black tail jackrabbit, a red lemur, and a polar bear. She always started with Grey and Franche.

“All good,” Grey gave the answer she most liked to hear. While there was no variation in his mother’s question, in his answers, of course, there was—more and more as the years went by and time wore away at the great white bear, just as it might have at the genuine article, Grey liked to think. “Rubov says he’ll get to the tanks soon as he has a go at the ambients.”

She frowned, the lines of her face falling into the expression familiarly, and nodded. Her dark hair was tied up in a green scarf; hard muscles showed in her arms, age and work in her hands. Something surfaced in her eyes, like a turn of light in brown water.

“I wish you could have heard the real thing,” she said, looking up into what was left of the holomech forest, a convincing illusion of holographic bark and leaf on a springy, collapsible scaffold framework of trunk and branch.

Grey followed her gaze. “What?”

She gestured with one hand and then snapped the hand into a fist. “Real life. A mourning dove call, song birds, wind in the leaves of a real wood, the creaking of tree branches, crickets. Real life that doesn’t flicker on and off at the whim of an old generator powered by photovoltaic paint and spit. Actual birds, Grey . . . ” She shook her head. The show had no flighted birds; biomech birds had a shorter operational duration than the mammals, the mechanism of flight a source of endless malfunction.

Grey leaned back against Franche, squinting up at the night sky beyond holomech leaves. “The world’s still real, mom—the sky, the earth. We’re real. Anyway, I’ve heard wind plenty, and there are for damn sure lots of insects left.”

“Our animals aren’t—there’s a difference, Grey. You don’t understand, don’t know what you’ve missed.”

He shrugged. “I know the real things could be dangerous and needed more land and resources than we could spare them. And anyway, since they’re gone, or as good as, isn’t it better if I don’t know what I’ve missed?”

His mother’s gaze strayed over the still polar bear and she shook her head again, her eyes tired. “ . . . but can they suffer?” she said softly.

“What?”

“It’s a quote. Look it up,” she said, moving on to check with the other handlers in their pavilions.

As she went, the ambients came on, a susurrus of breeze shifting leaves, spiked by the occasional bird song, rose, fell, rose again, then cut off abruptly. Grey found himself more than usually aware of the sound of the empty night that remained.

In the deep of the night the wind picked up into a hard driving rush that scoured earth and anything in its path with dust and debris. It scratched and clattered and whined at the outside of the pavilion, the structure’s side panels, raised during the day to gather power through their photovoltaic-painted surfaces, sealed down for the night. Grey, waking, listened to the wind that sounded like it was punishing the earth. Franche was a reassuring bulk beside him, still and breathless, but warm from soaking power through the conduits to the pavilion’s solar cells.

He lay awake for a long time, listening to the wind.

In the early morning, the predawn light a solemn husk already cleaving from the day, Grey stretched and rubbed at dry eyes. He remembered the wind in the night and knew there would be cleanup before the show opened.

He cracked the pavilion’s door and a coating of dust sifted to the ground. Gritty dunes and eddies covered everything.

A light went on in the canteen tent by the tank truck, a small square of light in the dust-smudged dawn. Still rubbing at his eyes, Grey headed for breakfast.

Hours later, gritty from cleaning up the wind’s leavings but without time for more than a quick sluice with tepid recyc water, Grey opened the pavilion, raising all six sides. Franche stood as he’d left her. Disconnecting the bear from the power conduits and stowing them, he brought her out of downcycle as crew unrolled the fairway and the forest sprang into life around them. Franche’s servos warmed up and the bear stretched front and back, growling and roaring.

All the animals did their warm-ups: the wolves howled; the leopard leapt from ground to pavilion roof and back; the red lemur tossed a ball back and forth with his handler; the jackrabbit’s ears turned as she leapt and ran, the morning light making blush-veined hollows of long black-edged ears.

Custom was slow, people from the nearby town with their children, a few lone nomads. The day was already hot, the sky beyond the holomech trees a dingy glare, and the landscape to be glimpsed beyond the show’s boundaries dry and barren. The ambients kept up their cocoon of breeze in trees, bird song, and occasional rain sounds. Franche roared and stood on her hind legs, towering over children and then bowing down to let them pet her. The older adults, those old enough to mourn the real thing, touched the bear with a sorry reverence that had always annoyed Grey. He preferred the children—they found only joy in Franche.

As the afternoon sloughed into dusk and the biolumes glowed to life among the trees, the tenor of the custom changed, families replaced by more nomads, rover cabals, and adult townies in groups. The show sold alcohol at night, pouring it from the barrels in which they fermented it into patrons’ personal cups or, for an extra fee, crude starch cups that began disintegrating after one drink. The lights picked out the bony white of birches and silver-brown of larch trees. Franche’s coat glowed under the spectral illumination.

The bear rumbled as Grey rubbed her energetically about the neck and ears.

“How do you make her nose wet?” The question came from a little girl in clean, patchy clothes.

Grey glanced around for a parent. There were few other children left on the fairway and those were all accompanied. The little girl touched Franche’s broad black nose with one finger, and then reached a small hand to the fur above one of the bear’s liquid dark eyes.

“She’s built that way,” Grey said.

“I held a real bear once,” the girl said. She looked around, lips pursed worriedly. Grey followed her glance to a tall man speaking with Grey’s mother. The girl lowered her voice and continued, “A black bear cub. Its nose was wet and cold. Your bear is very good, but the real one was squirmy and . . . ” She rubbed her nose. “He licked my face and smelled good; his claws scratched my arm and he cried out when he got hurt.”

“A real bear cub?”

The girl nodded at the dubious tone in Grey’s voice. “He died, though. He wasn’t made quite right.”

The man who’d been speaking to Grey’s mother called, “Anna!” crooking an arm, and the girl ran to join him.

The man and little girl disappeared among the trees and other groups of people. A little while later, as Franche sat on her great hind quarters and licked a plate-sized front paw, Grey’s mother joined him with a preoccupied frown on her face.

She touched Grey’s hand. “Here, after we close tonight, go into the town, this location. That man you saw me with—?” Grey nodded, “will meet you. He may have something for the show.” The location came through his link at her touch and Grey nodded again. “Just check it out and let me know. I’m not sure it’s anything we can use—he may be a bit of a crank, but you never know. It’s a public place, and though Chernitown’s a pit, it should be safe.”

“What does he have?”

“Something—real, he says.”

“That’s illegal.”

His mother nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“Mom, we don’t need a ‘real,’ illegal animal—one that could hurt someone, carry disease, that would need food and water!”

“Just go check it out.”

“For fuck’s sake—why?”

“Because, Grey,” she snapped, angry and tired and intense, “there might be some worthwhile—some
real
—work to be done.” Her anger subsided on a breath. “Just go and see what he has; it’s probably nothing but a con. He probably has some biomech programmed for pain response or something sick like that.”

Chernitown huddled gloomy in the night, its only illumination that of floating biolume globes here and there and the day’s stored sunlight glowing in photovoltaic paint on old buildings and roofs. Like most such towns, this one was the remnants of the past with several tank gardens at its center, the water reclamation system a spiraling hedge of pipeline and machinery around it. The rest was a gallimaufry of buildings giving into the badlands rolling away in all directions. That was much of the world now, humans gathered in enclaves scattered like stars in a light-bleached sky. Satellites connected them all through the world link, but travel was hard, sometimes brutal and deadly, and only nomads, rover cabals, and groups like the Vostrasovitch show did it at all, and then only among clusters of tank towns.

Grey found the meet location through link: a stillery at the outer edge of one of the reclamation arms. The bar banked up against a towering elbow of copper pipe, the distilling works parasited into the pipes’ seams and bolts. Colored biolumes hung from grids of smaller pipe and a hodgepodge of tables and chairs surrounded a space for dancing. Music came from cheap interface speakers hooked into the world link.

He ordered vodka—distilled from corn grown in the tanks—at the bar and leaned against it. The festive atmosphere and warm, frankly sexual glances from a young man down the bar and a woman dancing nearby made him wish he was here on his own, rather than on his mother’s business. Mostly he stayed away from the towns they set up near, because it was safer. He’d gone into a few, to meet his needs as he got older, but found the roving cabals offered easier options.

Now he regretfully turned down the subtle invitations with a smile and shake of his head, focusing instead on the vodka—harsh but warming—and a piece of art hanging above the bar, a set of holoboxes cobbled together out of spare bits and parts. It depicted, in an infinity frame-within-frame that drew the gaze ever deeper, a rich, painted jungle scene with a tiger crouched in thick foliage, its jaws clamped over the neck of a water buffalo. The water buffalo’s one visible eye was wide, the tiger’s snarl fierce, blood staining crimson on the fur of both animals. It was beautiful and horrible. Grey shivered, looking at it, an uncomfortable feeling ticking over like a clock within him. In his head, he heard again his mother’s words from the day before:
. . . but can they suffer?