Mechanique (9 page)

34.

Most government men are not an accident.

Every so often, there’s a soldier in the ranks who happens to be standing after all the rest have fallen; there’s a rich young man maneuvered into place by those who have plans for him; there’s a bureaucrat who happens to keep out of the pit of vipers long enough to grow befuddled and white-haired and become a minister of something without really trying. But most true government men are hungry for it; most government men make plans; most government men are born, not made.

When a particular young boy goes to the circus, and forgets to clap at the tumblers or the strongman because he is wondering if they could be of any use to him, he is a government man.

(While he watches them, he thinks of an agile militia; a way to prepare convicts before he puts them to labor; a body for himself. Government men are never too young to worry about dying before their work is finished.)

Later, his mother will ask him why he didn’t enjoy himself. He will lie that he did. She will believe him; he is an excellent liar.

Later, after battle, he will lie awake inside the rubble of a bombed-out building, staring at the sky and waiting for rescue, and think how he could leap over the walls if only he had a skeleton of springs.

Later, he forgets the circus. The war swallows everything at regular intervals, and makes the world start again from nothing; even a clever young man has to pay attention if he’s going to scrabble out of the wreckage and keep his head through the next government.

(There are ways to do this. He finds them all.)

Later, he will rise. He will grind peace out of the ashes of little battles, and make alliances with the ones he cannot defeat.

He resurrects factories whenever he can spare the men to guard them. He fences off land for the prisoners to farm. He collects books and singed half-books in his capital city; he thinks that someday there would be merit in a school. He steals enough gasoline to travel, and wherever he goes he brushes off the ruins to make use of them however he can. He listens, and plans, and works in increments to make a world in his image.

People let him build it. It’s tyranny, they know, but it’s no more than they would do, if they could.

He comes back to the circus.

He watches without seeing; he makes plans. The circus goes on around him, without him. If you asked him what their faces looked like, he wouldn’t know.

(The little boy at the circus didn’t notice Panadrome’s music, the pinkish lanterns, the spangled costumes. Government men aren’t carried away with any spectacle but their own.)

A man and a woman step into the ring. She has one eye; he lifts her into the air with one hand. She grips his wrists and fights him, touching her head to the backs of her knees, wrapping her legs around him like a disease.

Once, she fixes her eyes on the government man. The glass one is unnerving; the real one burns.

He does not remember this. This thing was not here before.

Without knowing why, he sits back in his seat as if the tent is plunged into darkness and he cannot remember the way out; as if someone has held a mirror up to him.

(Those with great hunger are born, not made.)

35.

The night the strange woman crashes, Elena finally utters a name that fits—“Poor bird,” she says, and they get gooseflesh, knowing they’ve heard Bird’s real name for the first time.

Ying goes first, shouting (Ying always did worry), and the others slide down one by one. None of them look at Elena, except Fatima, who goes down just before Elena and who glances at her every few feet down the rigging, as if she’s waiting for the strike and the drop.

Elena goes to a flatbed to stretch, alone; the last thing she needs is a pile of stupid questions on top of everything.

She’s walking back across the camp when Stenos comes out of Boss’s workshop.

His shirt is black with blood, his face smeared and clotted red like he’s been at a carcass.

Something inside Elena turns over, dark and consuming; he has the bones, she thinks. He’s one of us, finally.

Desire hits her so suddenly that she recoils, presses away as he passes, in case he can see it on her.

But he’s not looking at her—his eyes are empty and glassed over (she feels sick and wild), and he walks past her without stopping. The blood runs off his arms like stage paint.

She knows whose blood it is. She knows what has happened to her copper bones and the fragile skin.

Why this moment should horrify her, she doesn’t know. It’s not as if this is the first night she’s had to live through after someone has fallen to the ground.

At last, she thinks that winter, when she sees Stenos coming for her. On its heels comes the thought,
He’s not one of us
, but it’s a truth that gets swallowed in her hunger.

They have no time—they’ll be missed—and he drags his kisses against her open mouth so hard she can feel his teeth.

After all this time lifting Bird, he’s stronger than he looks.

(“How could you do that to her?” he breathes into her neck, pressing her against the wall. “How could you do it?”

She makes fists in his hair, wonders if she’s doomed to be surrounded by fools.)

Afterwards, he steps back from her, watches with dark eyes as she smoothes her skirt down, pulls back her hair.

“You have powder on your leg,” she says.

He brushes his pants with his palms until the white is gone.

When he says, “Don’t tell anyone,” she makes herself wait a moment before she shrugs and says, “Of course,” as if she’s doing him a favor, as if it’s his privacy she wants to protect.

(What is she, an animal?)

36.

I thought the government man would come out at the end with Boss in hand, barking his orders to have us all taken away. Jonah thought so, too, so much that he and the crew were quietly packing the trucks, and after every act the dancing girls and the jugglers were shuttled off to their trailers, to prepare for flight. By then the rain was pounding down, and I calculated who was safe by how many yellow umbrellas had floated from the back of the tent to the yard and back.

Ayar put up a fight the moment Jonah told him, standing at the back door of the tent.

“What, so we should run like dogs?” He grabbed an umbrella from the waiting crewman and marched across the muddy yard under a little pool of yellow. “Don’t be stupid. We do as Boss says.”

Jonah matched him step for step, despite Ayar being more than a head taller. “Ayar, we have to think about ourselves.”

“Ourselves without Boss?” Ayar snapped. “Easier said than done, Jonah.”

Jonah flinched, and Ayar tried again. “She said there’s nothing to fear. We’ll look like fools if we run.”

“Just because someone says there’s nothing to fear doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run,” said Jonah.

That stopped Ayar in his tracks, and for a second the two of them stood in the middle of the yard under the yellow toadstool of the umbrella, with the rain coming down around them like it was going to wash them away.

“I hope you’re right,” Ayar said, and went into the trailer, where I knew he would change into his regular clothes and come out to save anyone he could.

Jonah looked calmer after that, though even from where I was sitting Ayar’s words had sounded mournful, as if he was convinced that they would be dead without Boss. Seemed foolish to me; who would challenge Ayar and live?

I thought about Ayar’s clockwork spine. Would Boss have made him imperfect, so he would have to come to her for repairs? Did little breakdowns happen no matter what she meant to do?

(I was closer than before, by accident; only because I was waking up. I was no closer to understanding anything about what Boss had done. You can never know someone else’s reasons. You barely know your own.)

When Bird and Stenos went into the tent, a single umbrella hovering over them (he carried her), I couldn’t take it any more. I left my post and slid my way around the camp to the trailer where the aerialists lived.

I knocked on the door. “Ying? Is Ying in there?”

Fatima opened the door and stepped aside. I thought it was to invite me in, but then I saw Elena and knew Fatima had moved just so Elena could get a look at me.

“What’s happened?” she asked.

It was the least rude she had ever been to me, so I must have managed to look important despite myself.

I had wanted to talk only to Ying (tell her to forget the troupe and get in the cook truck with Joe and drive out already, keep going, hide and wait until there was a new government that didn’t know her), but looking at Elena I said, “The government man is here. Boss is putting on the full show. He’s seen everything.”

Penna gasped. Nayah and Ying stood up, like there was something to be done.

Elena said, “Sit down and be quiet.”

They obeyed.

Elena crossed the trailer in five long steps, and a moment later she and I were outside on the rickety stair that hovered just above the ground, half-covered by the roof. I wobbled and was sure I would fall any moment. She stood with one foot on top of the other, arms folded, looking out over the camp like she didn’t even notice the narrowness of the ledge we were standing on.

“What did Boss say?”

“That there was nothing to fear.”

Her lips were a thin line, and, suddenly brave, I took a guess and asked her, “Is this the first government man who’s done this to us?”

She looked at me, surprised, like I was an infant who had suddenly mastered human speech.

“No,” she said.

“What happened, before?”

Elena pressed her crossed arms into her chest until the metal groaned.

“I have to get ready,” she said. “Some people don’t have the luxury of running around banging on doors and worrying people for nothing.”

“So something happened,” I said, but she was gone and the door was closed behind her. Inside, she was snapping at the others to either powder their legs properly or join the dancing girls, who didn’t care if you looked sloppy.

I met the government man on my way back from the aerialists’ trailer.

He and his bodyguard (who held a black umbrella over the gentleman’s head) were coming out the front entrance. I was surprised—we were only half-finished—but too relieved to see him leaving to wonder at it.

“Did you enjoy the show, sir?” I called. “You’re going too soon! You haven’t even seen the Grimaldi brothers yet, and the aerialists—”

“Does your master always look for lunatics?” the government man asked, too sharply. His steps were careful over the mud, but he was in a hurry to be gone.

I realized suddenly that he meant Bird. He had seen Stenos and Bird; their act had run him right out.

Bold and stupid with glee, I said quite seriously, “That’s what happens to some, sir. No predicting how the madness will come upon you.”

He shot me a look Elena would have been proud of, and then he was gone, down the crest of the hill where (I saw as I followed) the black car was waiting for him.

I ran, slipping, to the back of the tent, where Stenos was walking out toward the camp, Bird tangled against him.

“He’s gone,” I said, my relief as overwhelming as my panic had been. I embraced them, my arms circling Bird and just reaching Stenos. Bird accepted it like a statue accepts it; after a moment, Stenos patted my shoulder.

I pulled back and explained what had happened. I stopped short of telling them Bird’s madness had driven him away. (I wasn’t a fool; if she didn’t kill me for saying it, he would.)

Bird said, finally, “How soon do you think he’ll be back?”

I blinked. “He’s gone,” I said, as if to a child.

The pair of them looked at me so pitying that I took a step back, excused myself, and went to the main entrance, where I could thank the rubes as they left, where I couldn’t see Bird if I tried.

37.

You’re quick to leave the tent when the aerialists have finished.

What is there to keep you? After the last applause, the magic is already over, the tent shrinking around you until you can see the bare bulbs again, the worn-through canvas, the bits of mirror glinting like sharp glass eyes. You leave your beer glass under the bench (or smuggle it out under your coat), and you gather the people you came with, and you wander out through the mostly-empty yard on your way home.

Now the boy in his brass legs seems sad, waving goodbye as if he’d like to follow you. Sometimes there are a couple of dancing girls, swaying halfheartedly to imaginary music. But most likely you are alone in the dark, and your shadows walk ahead of you like they’re anxious to be gone, until you’re far away from the circus.

It unnerves you, and you don’t know why.

By the time you get home you are tired, and on your way you have passed the shabby walls around your city and the sharp-smelling lemongrass growing through the cracks, and just ahead your house is locked up tight waiting for you—things that remind you of the real world, things that annoy and welcome and shake away the creeping unease of some dark circus yard.

By the time the door is shut behind you, you are thinking again of how joyful the tumblers seemed, how fast the jugglers tossed the torches back and forth. You talk about the aerialists—some of them, under the makeup, seemed even pretty. You joke at dinner, tossing rolls back and forth over the table.

Everyone will laugh and pass the rolls high in the air and clap along, until someone starts whistling the sharp-note tune from the circus act.

Then someone (you) will say, “Stop it, I’m hungry, pass me one,” and the trick will suddenly settle down, and the meal will take up again. The joke never lasts after someone reminds you of the music.

It’s one thing to see a mechanical man, but the Panadrome ruins the meal for everyone if you think about him long enough.

38.

Panadrome was an accident.

Boss had been an opera singer.

There was already a war, of course; there was always war. But a good war was like a good spice, and flavored everything. That season the ticket sales of the opera had soared, as the government men named it one of the things the barbarian enemy did not respect. Their people had not thought to respect it either, before, but it’s amazing what a government man can do.

The opera managers made the season a dark, lush one, the sort of thing to stir the deep pride of a nation at war; they lined up
Three Soldiers of the Green, The Sorcerer, Queen Tresaulta, Haynan and Bello.

Boss was an alto; she sang the nurses, the witches, the kitchen cook. Her closest claim to greatness that season was as the handmaiden of Queen Tresaulta.

Annika Sorenson, the Queen, sang the final aria on the wide staircase of the palace set, descending slowly as her emotions built, until it would be time for her handmaiden to rush forward from behind the great pillar and press a knife into her lady’s hands, so that the queen might stab herself and thwart the captors who had sought to use her.

Their
Queen Tresaulta
was a powerful production; it had been advertised as the performance of Annika Sorenson’s career, and Boss was beyond disputing it, as much as they all disliked Annika.

Annika was the sort of visiting soprano who demanded that air conditioning be turned off backstage to preserve her throat, as if she’d never been a chorus member shoving herself into a costume in a muggy basement room. (She never had been; a voice like hers spent no time in the chorus.)

The conductor, a stout gentleman just beginning to age, took to drinking after rehearsals. A few weeks before the opening, Boss had come across him in the prop room before rehearsal, sneaking drinks out of a bottle. When he saw her, he gave her a half-defiant, half-sheepish smile.

“My family’s vineyard. Early spring, red. Only two years old.” He sighed. “I should have stayed there. I don’t have the heart for making music no one appreciates until a war breaks out.”

She took the bottle and drank.

“It’s not a good year,” he apologized.

“Tell me about it,” she said, and he laughed.

That night, Annika Sorenson was spectacular.

She exceeded even the audition that had gotten her the contract, exceeded the performance tape the opera managers had passed to various governments as part of the invitation to the Summit. That night she sang as if only the notes held her together. By the last aria, the audience was entranced down to the last man, warding off gooseflesh, leaning forward so as not to miss a note.

Her voice echoed off the chandeliers, rolled through the domed ceiling and out the doors. When she fell quiet (after “for this stone hall I lived,” as wavering Tresaulta recovers the bravery to kill herself and spare her kingdom from disgrace), the entire hall was silent, rapt.

It was so quiet that the whirring whistle of the bomb was audible for a moment before it reached them.

There was just enough time for Annika to glance up and fix Boss an annoyed look, as if Boss had timed some fireworks on the roof to ruin Annika’s evening.

Then it struck.

There are some things Boss knows.

Boss knows that great events have a spirit of their own. Government men speak of it when they hold rallies in beautiful places lined with their soldiers, but they do not think it is true. Greatness seldom reveals itself to government men.

Boss knows the reason some cities fall after the Circus Tresaulti has passed through is because the life of a city flickers and trembles when they are near. Then Tresaulti departs, and the life of the city tries to follow and cannot; even the buildings stumble and fall, become lost. When a city has no greatness, its will is gone; then a city is nothing but a maze of shells that are only stone and steel and—soon enough—dust.

She does not know why it is that some cities have a greatness that allows them to stand, and others crumble less than a hundred years after the circus has passed there. (She tries to save those cities when she can by putting Tresaulti out of reach, as if the spirit of the city might not be offended if it can’t see them. “Might not be a good crowd,” she says. “We’ll camp farther out.”

No one suspects another reason; by then, each of them has been driven away from things often enough.)

Boss woke inside a cylinder.

She didn’t know what had happened (the bomb—she ached when she remembered) or where she was (trapped inside the pillar). She struck out. The pillar crumbled and peeled under her hands, and she choked on the fine, sour powder as she dragged herself out of her prison as if she was hatching from an egg.

There was no room for her to stand; the stairs had blown apart and the ceiling had caved in. The building was nothing now but a maze of painted wood and marble, deep purple velvet and chips of glass from the chandelier, groaning and swaying and doomed for the ground.

She called out, absently, for Annika. (It was just the shock talking; she had already seen the fragmented stairs.) The air was so close that with every breath, a layer of powder coated her lungs.

Panic struck and she shouted for anyone, shoving past metal pipes and chairs and the limp arms of the dead.

(More than the bodies, though, more than the air that was already running thin, Boss trembled because the aria had gone unfinished; because the great moment had died.)

She slid carefully through the wreckage, looking for a place with some light or air, some place that indicated there was a way out. She tried to hum, for company, but gave it up—it took up the air.

She found the conductor on her crawl out from the stage, hoping for a pocket of air in the orchestra pit amid the splinters of instruments. He had been separated neatly from his head and hands by a falling beam; his right hand still clutched the baton.

Absently, Boss tied them into her skirt, kept climbing.

It took her three days to crawl out onto the top of the wreckage.

By the time she emerged, she was dragging pounds of detritus with her; springs she’d picked up without meaning to, gears that fell into her outstretched hands, twists of wire that peeled away from the wreckage as she climbed. She had tied a string of ten piano keys to her belt; she had pulled them free of the balcony wall.

The dome at the apex of the Opera House had been blasted sideways and embedded into what was left of the ceiling. She climbed inside the brass-lined curve and lay back, sucking in ragged breaths. When her panic had faded enough for her to move, she unknotted her skirts and arranged her collection at her feet in a little honor guard of metal bits and body parts. The conductor’s head rested near her left hand, gazing out mournfully at their city, where war had come.

From where she was curled against the cool metal, she could see burning roofs dotting the sky. Occasionally the sharp report of gunfire would float up from the streets, but it was rare. The fight here was over. Now it was just a matter of the new government grinding the old one to death underfoot, and beginning again with the next city in line. The men who would burn through the city would never even look up and think, What a beautiful building that was, with the brass dome and the music; they would never look up and think,
What a pity
.

“For this stone hall I lived,” she sang softly. Her lungs, stretching with the notes, felt like hers again after so many days of struggle. She finished the aria, an octave and a half below Annika’s rendition, so quietly that only the walls of the dome caught the sound. They rolled the notes back to her, tinny but true.

She rested the conductor’s head in her lap and smoothed its hair. “It was beautiful music,” she said. “My compliments.”

She watched the sky go from black to grey; slowly the fires burned themselves out, and the gunfire settled, and finally it was that long hour between night and dawn, and she was alone in the world.

She built Panadrome before she ever climbed down from the roof of the opera house.

There was no sign that she had gained some new power. There was just the worm’s knowledge that if you push long enough, the corpse will give way. She knew only that if you pull up the brass sheeting with the twisted bar you carry, it will curl into a barrel in your hands and you can fasten it tight; that if you find a home for every gear and coil, for every piano key, you can build a home.

(She did not know, yet, how to do any of it the right way—Panadrome’s first set of hands would wither and have to be replaced with ones she fashioned out of silver—but if she had not tried from exhaustion and loneliness and terror, she might never have tried.)

She strapped him to her back for the descent from the heap of rubble that was once the opera house. It took longer than it should have—she stopped, now and then, to pick up wires and joints and the flat backs of the opera chairs, which were useful once the char was scraped off.

When she was on the ground, she put together what remained. She took refuge in the pockets of the outer walls that had been blasted out, and no one with a gun ever looked around enough to see her, working quietly in the grave of the opera house.

At last, she passed her hands over what she had made, and the Panadrome rattled to life. He blinked and flexed his fingers. Tentatively, he touched the piano keys that lay along his right side like ribs. She watched horror and joy and resignation and despair fly over his face.

After a long quiet, he said, “Madam, the piano is not in tune.”

“I can fix that,” she said, and set to work.

(The dead give way before the worm.)