Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (12 page)

I got off One Eye, slow because I could feel the ground vibrating with her excitement. Came to her side and kneeled down there, touching the dirt that covered her and then the ground itself.

That metallic thing was under there, the piece of her ship, and I could feel the small remains of another of her kind. Not much left, maybe a finger or toe. Whatever else had been taken away with shovels. I could still feel the deep grooves they’d made that day in the dirt.

“Rabi.”

“You didn’t show me the other before.”

She showed me now, this other being, her lover, her Sherri Lynn. Color blinded me, while a sensation like hair being brushed backwards made my skin go bumpy. I wanted to throw up and I wanted to cry, because this feeling was familiar. I tasted Vara’s longing—bitter. She wanted to be taken away in shovels as this one had been.

Vara’s dirty fingers curled into my shirt sleeve and I shook my head. “Can’t put you in this ground,” I whispered. “You’ll die.”

She knew exactly what she was asking here. There was no hesitation in her eyes or her mind. Her hand tightened in my sleeve and she bent to her knees, as if they’d grown too watery to hold her.

“Not going home is already like death.”

The truth in that hit me hard, so hard that I saw it then—a clean green orb hanging in the heavens. The cool of an alien wind brushed over my arms, made my hair stand at attention. An alien sun sank into a topaz sea and all around me, birds that were not birds whirled and cried. I tried to breathe, but could not. Couldn’t take breath until Vara stopped touching me.

I breathed, but the image of the place did not leave me. I could see the flowers and the pollen on the flowers, and the small bugs embedded in the stems. I could see a structure, not like any house I knew, but it smelled friendly and tasted like love. I opened my mouth and took it whole and as I swallowed, Vara’s excitement rippled over me and tasted like smashed berries.

I focused on that small house and its taste. With Vara’s small hand in mine, I could nearly feel the door, and it seemed to move under my fingers. Swinging inward, it revealed to me a room with a fire and a tall, tall figure, and I knew this was Vara’s family. Felt it as though it was my own.

When I looked at Vara, her face was smooth, like someone had pulled a sheet of pale plastic from chin to forehead, sticking a finger in to leave a mouth hole. Vara’s hand wasn’t a hand, either; no hand like I knew. Under her vaguely human cloak, she was nothing I understood, nothing I could understand without a hundred lifetimes to do so.

But I could understand the things in my head. Family and warmth and water and bright skies lit by a shining star. I thought about those things, about those things through Vara. I thought about Vara, about her under that bright sky, pale toes in the golden water. I pictured her there and she giggled as though she already were.

She began to melt in my hands, pale sugar water running into the red dirt. Her mouth was still open in a dark O, her eyes wide with surprise—was it surprise or fear? Oh, it was fear. It stabbed me hard in the chest and I tried right then, tried so hard, to stop her from vanishing. Was it going wrong? I didn’t know. Couldn’t know.

“Vara,” I whispered, but that had never been her name and her alien mind did not recognize it.

Once a thing goes, it goes. She was becoming a lost thing to me and no matter how I tried to hold her together, she still slipped through my fingers. She was going somewhere I could no longer find her, a place I could not even imagine without her guidance. She was cold and wet and then nothing at all. I felt an indistinct, lingering sense of her, a shimmer of warmth wrapped up in smashed berries. Then, nothing at all.

The cold began to seep through my trousers and I became aware of the light across the horizon. It had stopped snowing and the sun was coming up.

I guided One Eye out of the small depression and we kept moving east. Would have been easy to ride back to the train, but I couldn’t go back, not now. Not going home is already like death.

Sherri Lynn was shoveling snow from her walk when I saw her two days later, her nose reddened from the cold, a green hat mashed over her pale hair. She looked up at the sound of horse hooves on the cold ground, stiffened when she saw it was me. I got down, but didn’t come any nearer.

She extended her hand, slow and shaking, and I placed my own within it. Sherri Lynn’s mind was now dark and cloudy. It was a blessed darkness and I loved the things I could not see.

“Coleman,” she whispered, disbelieving.

That voice was familiar, warm with an uneven edge. I squeezed her hand and she whispered once more. I vanished into her voice, into the memories that flooded her, that flooded me. Familiar, haunting places, that tasted like love and marmalade.

Quin’s Shanghai Circus

Jeff VanderMeer

Let me tell you why I wished to buy a meerkat at Quin’s Shanghai Circus. Let me tell you about the city:
The city is sharp, the city is a cliche performed with cardboard and painted sparkly colors to disguise the empty center—the hole.

(That’s mine—
the words
. I specialize in holo art, but every once in a chemical moon I’ll do the slang jockey thing
on paper
.)

Let me tell you what the city means to me. So you’ll understand about the meerkat, because it’s important. Very important: Back a decade, when the social planners ruled, we called it Dayton Central. Then, when the central government choked flat and the police all went freelance, we started calling it Ven
iss
—like an adder’s hiss, deadly and unpredictable. Art was Dead here until Ven
iss
. Art before Ven
iss
was just Whore Hole stuff, street mimes with flexi-faces and
flat media
.

That’s what the Social Revolutions meant to me—not all the redrum riots and the twisted girders and the flourishing free trade markets and the hundred-meter-high ad signs sprouting on every street corner. Not the garbage zones, not the ocean junks, not the underlevel coups, nor even the smell of glandular drugs, musty yet sharp. No, Veniss brought Old Art to an end, made me dream of
suck-cess
, with my omni-present, omni-everything holovision.

Almost brought
me
to an end as well one day, for in the absence of those policing elements of society (except for pay-for-hire), two malicious thieves—nay, call them what they were: Pick Dicks—well, these two pick dicks stole all my old-style ceramics and new style holosculpture and, after mashing me on the head with a force that split my brains all over the floor, split too. Even my friend Shadrach Begolem showed concern when he found me. (A brooding sort, my friend Begolem: no blinks: no twitches: no tics. All economy of motion, of energy, of time. Eyee, the opposite of me.) But we managed to rouse an autodoc from its wetwork slumber and got me patched up (Boy, did that hurt!).

Afterwards, I sat alone in my apartment/studio, crying as I watched nuevo-westerns on a holo Shadrach lent me. All that work gone! The faces of the city, the scenes of the city, that had torn their way from my mind to the holo, forever lost—never even shown at a galleria, and not likely to have been, either. Ven
iss
, huh! The adder defanged. The snake slithering away. When did anyone care about the real artists until after they were dead? And I was as close to Dead as any Living Artist ever was. I had no supplies. My money had all run out on me—plastic rats deserting a paper ship. I was a Goner, all those Artistic Dreams so many arthritic flickers in a holoscreen. (You don’t have a cup of water on you, by any chance? Or a pill or two?)

I think I always had Artistic Dreams.

When we were little, my twinned sister Nicola and I made up these fabric creatures we called cold pricklies and, to balance the equation, some warm fuzzies. All through the sizzling summers of ozone rings and water conservation and baking metal, we’d be indoors with our make-believe world of sharp-hard edges and diffuse-soft curves, forslaking the thirst of veldt and jungle on the video monitors.

We were both into the Living Art then—the art you can touch and squeeze and hold to your chest, not the dead, flat-screen scrawled stuff. Pseudo-Mom and Pseudo-Dad thought us wonky, but that was okay, because we’d always do our chores, and because later we found out they weren’t our real parents. Besides, we had true morals, true integrity. We knew who was evil and who was good. The warm fuzzies always won out in the end.

Later, we moved on to genetic playdoh, child gods creating creatures that moved, breathed, required attention for their mewling, crying tongues. Creatures we could destroy if it suited our temperament. Not that any of them lived very long.

My sister moved away from the Living Art when she got older, just as she moved away from me. She processes the free market now.

So, since Shadrach certainly wouldn’t move in to protect me and my art from the cold pricklies of destruction—I mean, I couldn’t go it alone; I had this horrible vision of sacrificing my ceramics, throwing them at future Pick Dicks because the holo stuff wouldn’t do any harm of a
physical nature
(which made me think, hey, maybe this holo stuff is Dead Art, too, if it doesn’t impact on the world when you throw it)—since that was Dead Idea, I was determined to go down to Quin’s Shanghai Circus (wherever
that
was) and “git me a meerkat,” as those hokey nuevo westerns say. A meerkat for me, I’d say, tall as you please. Make it a double. In a dirty glass cage. (Oh, I’d crack myself up if the Pick Dicks hadn’t already. Tricky, tricky pick dicks.)

But you’re probably asking how a Living Artist such as myself—a gaunt, relatively unknown, and alone artiste—could pull the strings and yank the chains that get you an audience with the mysterious Quin.

Well, I admit to connections. I admit to Shadrach. I admit to tracking Shadrach down in the Canal District.

Canal District—Shadrach. They go together, like
Volodya
and
Sirin
, like Ozzie and Elliot, Romeo and Juliard. You could probably find Shadrach down there now, though I hardly see him any more on account of my sister Nicola. That’s how I met Shadrach, through Nicola when they shared an apartment.

You see, Shadrach lived below-level for his first twenty-five years, and when he came up he came up in the Canal District. “A wall of light,” he called it, and framed against this light, my sister Nicola, who served as an orientation officer back then for peoples coming above ground. A wall of light and my sweet sister Nicola, and Shadrach ate them both up. Imagine: living in a world of darkness and neon for all of your life and coming to the surface and there she is, an angel dressed in white to guide you, to comfort you, to love you. If you had time, I’d tell you about them, because it was a thing to covet, their love, a thing of beauty to mock the cosmetics ads and the lingerie holos . . .

Anyway, ever since the space freighters stopped their old splash ‘n’ crash in the cool down canals, the Canal District has been the hippest place in town. Go there sometime and think of me, because I don’t think I’ll be going there again. Half the shops float on the water, so when the ocean-going ships come in with their catch and off-load after decon, the eateries get the first pick. All the Biggest Wigs eat there. You can order pseudo-whale, fiddler, sunfish, the works. Most places overlook the water and you can find
anything
there—mechanicals and Living Art and sensual pleasures that will leave you quivering and unconscious. All done up in a pallet of Colors-Sure-To-Please. Sunsets courtesy of Holo Ink, so you don’t have to see the glow of pollution, the haze of smog-shit-muck. Whenever I was down, there I would go, just to sit and watch the Giants of Bioindustry and the Arts walk by, sipping from their carafes of alkie (which I don’t envy them, rot-gut seaweed never having been a favorite of mine).

And so I was down, real down (more down than now, sitting in a garbage zone and spieling to you), and I wanted a talk with Shadrach because I knew he worked for Quin and he might relent, relinquish and
tell me
what I wanted to know.

It so happened that I bumped into Shadrach in a quiet corner, away from the carousing and watchful eye of the Canal Police, who are experts at keeping Order, but can never decide exactly
which
Order, if you know what I mean, and you probably don’t.

We still weren’t alone, though—parts merchants and debauched jewelried concierge wives and stodgy autodocs, gleaming with a hint of self-repair, all sped or sauntered by, each self-absorbed, self-absorbing.

Shadrach played it cool, cooler, coolest, listening to the sea beyond, visible from a crack in our tall falling walls.

“Hi,” I said. “Haven’t seen you since those lousey pick dicks did their evil work. You saved my skin, you did.”

“Hello, Nick,” Shadrach replied, looking out at the canals.

(“Hello, Nick,” he says, after all the compli- and condi-ments I’d given him!)

Shadrach is a tall, muscular man with a tan, a flattened nose from his days as courier between city states—the funny people gave him that—and a dour mouth. His clothes are all out of date, his sandals positively reeking of antiquity. Still thinks he’s a Twenty-Seventh Century Man, if you know what I mean, and, again, you probably don’t. (After all, you
are
sitting here in a garbage zone with me.)

“So how’re things with you?” I said, anticipating that I’d have to drag him kicking and screaming to my point.

“Fine,” he said. “You look bad, though.” No smile.

I suppose I did look bad. I suppose I must have, still bandaged up and a swell on my head that a geosurfer would want to ride.

“Thanks,” I said, wondering why all my words, once smartly deployed for battle, had left me.

“No problem,” he said.

I could tell Shadrach wasn’t in a talking mood. More like a Dead Art mood as he watched the canals.

And then the miracle: he roused himself from his canal contemplation long enough to say, “I could get you protection,” all the while staring at me like I was a dead man, which is the self-same stare he always has. But here was my chance.