Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (44 page)

Pretty good for an old lady English prof, huh?

Everybody knew the IQRA meeting in October (hosted by the podunk portion of the University we work for) was going to have Big Trouble. The IQRA is the International Quaternary Research Association—everything prehistoric
since
the dinosaurs—and it contained multitudes, among which are people in the profession against the retrieval and propagation of extinct species. They were vocal, and because the meeting was also going to have a large bunch of paleo- and archaeogeneticists there too, the media had already started pre-coverage on it—sound bites, flashes of personalities, a fleeting glimpse of the male mammontelephant in the Baltimore Zoo.

You know. Big Trouble.

I know all this because Dr. Bob is the University’s host for this Cenozoic shindig, and is calling me every day or so. Out of nowhere he says, “I got a
fax
from Arnaud. Can you imagine? His circus plays up in Raleigh the day before the conference opens, last show of the year before winter quarters.” It had been two months since he’d eaten the cafeteria out of house and home.

“What did he say?”

“That’s all. I guess he just wanted us to know. I sure as hell won’t have time to see him. I’ll be dodging brickbats, no doubt.”

A week later, Dr. Bob showed up in my office.

“Uh, Marie,” he said. “There’ve been more faxes. Lots more. Something’s up. Want to be an unindicted co-conspirator?”

The news was full of the IQRA; you couldn’t turn on your monitor or TV without seeing people with placards and signs, or Professor Somebody from Somewhere making speeches. I watched some of it, switched over to the Weather Shop. There was a guy yammering on about long-term climatic change, Big and Little Ice Ages; global warming, myth or legend; etc. I ran up their feed and got the forecast: overcast, maybe some mist, 15°, just cool enough for a sweater.

There was a cardboard box on the front porch with a note on it—MARIE: BRING THIS TO MY LECTURE. SIT ON 3D ROW AISLE.—and a wristbadge with STAFF stamped on it in deep holograms.

The place was mobbed. I mean outside. The campus cops had a metal detector outside the front door. City cops were parked a block away, just off campus.

I looked in the box. There was a double-bladed Mixmaster and a big glass bowl.

I threaded my way through the crowd and walked up to the campus cops, bold as brass.

“What’s in the box, doc?” he said, recognizing me and looking at my wristbadge.

I opened it and showed him. “For the mai-tais at the social hour,” I said. He looked at it, handed it around the detector, passed it in front of the sniffer dog. The dog looked at it like it was the least interesting thing on the earth. Then the dog looked east, whined, and barked.

“That ain’t his bomb bark,” said the K-9 cop. “He’s been acting funny all morning.”

“Can I go in now?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. Sorry,” said the main cop, handing me the box once I went through the metal detector with the usual nonsense.

The crowd, barred from coming in without badges, swayed back and forth and shined preprinted laser messages into any camera pointed toward them, or waved old-fashioned signs. A couple of people from my department were in there with them.

Dr. Bob’s speech, “Long-Term Implications of Pleistocene Faunal Retrieval on Resuscitated Species: An Overview,” was supposed to start at 1300, but by 1215 the place was full. Including plenty of people with signs, and, I saw, Professor Somebody from Somewhere I’d seen on the news. The most ominous thing: in the program, the last fifteen minutes was to be Q and A discussion.

It was a big lecture hall, with a wall to the right of the platform leading out to where I knew the building’s loading dock was. The wall blocked an ugly ramp from view and destroyed most of the acoustics—it had been a local pork-barrel retrofit ten years ago. Bureaucratic history is swell, isn’t it?

At 1255 Dr. Bob came in. He went up to the podium. There was mild applause and some sibilant hissing. Really.

“Thank you, thank you very much. Normally I would introduce the speaker, but hey! that’s me!” There was some disturbance out at the hall doors. “I know you’re all as anxious as I am for me to start. But first—a small presentation that may—or may not—shed some light on my talk. I honestly don’t know what to expect any more than you do.” A
boo
came from the back of the hall, loud and clear.

The lights went down, and I heard the big loading dock doors rattle up, grey daylight came up from the ramp and—

—in came something:

It was a tall thin man, bent forward at the waist, covered in a skin garment from head to foot. He had a tail like a horse, and what I hoped were fake genitals high up on the buttocks. His head was a fur mask and above it were two reindeer antlers. The face ended in a long shaggy beard from the eyes down and he had two tufted ears like an antelope’s.

In the middle of the face was a red rubber nose. The feet were two enormous clown shoes, about a meter in length, the kind that let whoever’s wearing them lean almost to the ground without falling over.

The hair figure walked around, looked at the audience, and went to the blackboard and, placing its right hand on it, blew red paint through a reed, and left the outline of its hand on the green panel.

Someone booed just as I remembered where I’d seen pictures of this thing before. Some cave painting. Dordogne? Lascaux? Trois Frères, that’s it. The thing was usually called the Sorcerer of Trois Frères, thought to be some shaman of the hunt, among the bison and horses and rhinos drawn and scratched on the walls of the cave 25,000, 40,000 years ago . . .

Tantor and Behemoth walked in through the loading-door ramp.

It got
real
quiet, then.

The Sorcerer picked up a child’s toy bow and arrow and fired a rubber-tipped arrow into Tantor, who backed down the ramp, out of sight of the audience. I could see the shadow of another man there, from where I sat. He was pulling something up over one of his arms.

The Sorcerer mimed being hot, and Behemoth swayed like she was about to faint. The man pulled down his animal skin to the waist, and fired another suction-cup arrow into Behemoth’s hairy side; she backed out of the room.

The Sorcerer took off his costume (except the rubber nose and clown shoes), which left him in a diaper. He played with a small ziggurat, then took the model of a trireme from someone on the left side of the room, then a bishop’s crozier from another (how had I not seen all these props and people when I came in?). Then he put on a lab coat and glasses, came down to where I sat, and took the mixer from me (“Bonjour,” he whispered), and went back to the stage, where someone—Dr. Bob?—threw him a pair of Faded Glory blue jeans with double helixes painted on them (
one
person in the audience actually laughed). He plugged in the mixer, threw the jeans into the glass bowl and watched them swirl around and around, took them out, went to the right stage wall and—an elephant’s trunk, a cloth puppet on the arm of the man whose shadow I watched on the loading-ramp wall, along with those of the mammontelephants—snaked around the corner and grabbed the jeans and disappeared.

The lab-coated figure waited, then Tantor and Behemoth walked back onstage again, their eyes dark as dots of tar, their small double-hand-sized ears twitching.

The man went to the blackboard, picked up the hollow reed, and blew red ocher pigment onto his right hand.

Slowly he held it up, palm toward the mammontelephants.

Tantor and Behemoth bowed down onto their front knees. They curled their trunks up in the same double-curve as those on the elephant statues in the Babylon sequence of D.W. Griffith’s
Intolerance
. And then they gave the long slow loud trumpets of their kind, a sound cutting across a hundred centuries.

Every hair on my body shot straight up.

The lights went off. I saw shadows of shapes leaving, heard a truck start up. The loading door clanged down with a crash, and a spotlight slowly came up, centered on the red outline of the hand on the blackboard.

Then the houselights came back up and Dr. Bob Oulijian was alone at the lectern.

We were at the freight depot with Sir Harry Tusker and Arnaud.

They made ready to load Behemoth and Tantor onto their personal freight car. “
Everybody else
,” said Sir Harry, “goes by truck to winter quarters in Florida.
We
go by train to Wisconsin, the shores of Lake Geneva. We join up with the circus again in March. The girls here get to play in the winter. Me and Arnaud get to freeze our balls off out
there
.” He pointed NW.

Arnaud stood with Tantor’s trunk wreathed around his right arm. He scratched her under the big hairy chin.

“Better load up,” said the freightman.

“West at three hundred kilometers per hour,” said Sir Harry. Then: “Girls! Hey!” he yelled. “
Umgawa!
”

They started up the concrete ramp. Then something—a change in the wind? a low rumble from far away, from the direction of Baltimore? indigestion?—caused both mammontelephants to stop. They lifted their trunks, searching the wind, and let out their long low rumbling squeals.

“
Umgawa!
” said Sir Harry Tusker, again.

Behemoth took Tantor’s tail, and followed her up the ramp and onto their private car.

Sir Harry and Arnaud followed, turned, waved, closed the doors of the car, and waved again through the small windows.

In a few minutes the train was gone, and in a few more, beyond the city limits, would be a westbound blur.

Though it was October, and though this was North Carolina, that night it snowed.

Publication History

“Something About a Death, Something About a Fire” Peter Straub. © 1990 Peter Straub. Originally published in
Houses Without Doors
, Signet, 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Smoke & Mirrors” Amanda Downum. © 2006 Amanda Downum. Originally published in
Strange Horizons
, November 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Calliope: A Steam Romance” Andrew J. McKiernan © 2007 Andrew J. McKiernan. Originally published in
Shadow Plays
, ed. Elise Bunter, ACT Australia, 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Welcome to the Greatest Show in the Universe” Deborah Walker. © 2009 Deborah Walker. Originally published in
Sideshow Fables
, Issue 1 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Vanishing Act” Elise C Tobler. © 2005 Elise C. Tobler. Originally published in
SciFiction
, March 2005. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Quin’s Shanghai Circus” Jeff VanderMeer. © 1997 Jeff VanderMeer. Originally published in
Interzone
#124, October 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Scream Angel” Douglas Smith. © 2003 Douglas Smith. Originally published in
Low Port
, Meisha Merlin, 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Vostrasovitch Clockwork Animal and Traveling Forest Show at the End of the World” Jessica Reisman. © 2010 Jessica Reisman. Originally published in
Crossed Genres
, Issue 16, March 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Study, for Solo Piano” Genevieve Valentine. © 2011 Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in
Fantasy Magazine
, May 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Making My Entrance Again with My Usual Flair” Ken Scholes. © 2011 Ken Scholes. Originally published in
Tor.com
, January 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Quest” Barry Longyear. © 1979 Barry Longyear. Originally published in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, May 1979. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” Kij Johnson. © 2008 Kij Johnson. Originally published in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, July 2008. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Courting the Queen of Sheba” Amanda C. Davis. © 2011 Amanda Davis. Originally published in
Arcane Magazine
, Issue 1, Spring 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Circus Circus” Eric Witchey. © 2007 Eric Witchey. Originally published in
Realms of Fantasy
, February 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Phantasy Moste Grotesk” Felicity Dowker. © 2009 Felicity Dowker. Originally published as a numbered limited edition chapbook, Corpulent Insanity Press, 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Learning to Leave” Christopher Barzak. © 2006 Christopher Barzak. Originally appeared in
Flytrap
, May 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus” Neal Barrett, Jr. © 1988 Neal Barrett. Jr. Originally published in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, February 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue” Holly Black. © 2010 Holly Black. Originally published in
Full Moon City
, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Darrell Schweitzer, Pocket, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Manipulating Paper Birds” Cate Gardner. © 2010 Cate Gardner. Originally published in
Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits
, Strange Publications, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Winter Quarters” Howard Waldrop. © 2000 Howard Waldrop. Originally appeared in
SciFiction
, August 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

About the Authors

For the past five years,
Neal Barrett, Jr.
has written a monthly humor columm for Blue Cross’
Life Times
, a publication that reaches half a million readers. In 2007, the works of his fifty years of writing were collected in the Southwestern Collection of Texas State University Archives in San Marcos, Texas. Two of his 2008 stories appeared in
Asimov’s Science Fiction.
Bill Shafer of Subterranean Press has announced plans to publish a “career-spanning” collection of “The Best of Neal Barrett, Jr.” This volume will include works from 1960 through the present. In May of 2010, Barrett was honored at the Science Fiction Writers of America Annual Nebula Weekend in Coco Beach, Florida. He was named Author Emeritus, for “Lifetime Achievement.”