Cyber Circus

by Kim Lakin-Smith

  She shook her head vehemently. “I volunteered, Lulu. Those men down there, they stole time from me, and other stuff. I’m here because I want to be. Understand?”

  The ladyboy nodded and sucked a corner of his handkerchief.

  Nim took the lead. “I want you to destroy all but one bit of the rubber silk. Secure that last length over the side here. I’ve a use for it.”

  When the ladyboy looked dumbfounded, Nim took one of his delicate hands in hers. “Get me that strand before the bastards yank us any lower.”

  Lulu swallowed, his Adam’s Apple betrayed. His mouse-like eyes drank Nim in. “A valet doesn’t desert his mistress. Even when she opts to flee. You and me, Nim. We’re never gonna be free of our bondage to D’Angelus until the day we break that fucker’s skull open.”

  The ladyboy disappeared over the side. Nim heard the roar of the flame hose. Her heart punched in her chest. She heard the whistle of rock ammo, listened for Lulu’s scream as the bullets struck. But the roar of the flame stayed constant.

  She said a silent payer, to whom she’d no idea. The Saints? Crusted divinities from a time period when things still grew in the ground and when Soul Food referred to a lovingly prepared meal and not the diseased plant feed which had spoiled the land. Likewise, she’d no capacity for the spirit beliefs of the Sirinese, harbouring enough ghosts of her own. Or the blood voodoo of the Jeridians. Although she had a taste for their murderous instincts.

  Rock ammo speckled the sky. The sound of the flame hose ceased. Nim felt the twist of dread in her gut. What if the ladyboy hung below from a tangle of silk, belly popped by a rock slug? Was it worth risking her neck to a bullet to peer over the side?

  Nim’s riding skirt pooled about her knees as she crouched. She brought her chin to the very edge of the roof, where the brass vein wove around the circumference like a rose stem. The ladyboy’s face appeared directly opposite hers; she felt a surge of panic followed by blind relief.

  Lulu clambered over. His shoulder was bleeding where rock shot had smashed the flesh off the bone. He dragged a thick rope of rubber silk onto the roof.

  “I’ve torched the root. The rope’ll still stretch and bind for you though. So what now, my darling?”

  “Now we fight free of the devil.”

  A minute later, and despite Lulu’s protest, Nim had the rubber silk tied around her waist. Where she’d split the weave in two, she knotted it up over both shoulders and behind her neck.

  “Thank you, Lulu.” She tossed him her umbrella. “We’ll be out of here before you can count the rings on your fingers and bells on your toes.”

  She leapt en pointe and began to circumnavigate the fat brass vein. Faster and faster she ran, looping the fantastical rubber silk around the metal rim. She tried to forget the rock rifles. What was the point in D’Angelus pursuing her if only to have her gunned down? But he could instruct his snipers to inflict a superficial wound, or shoot out her footing and have her dangle off the edge, tangled in the silk and helpless.

  Nim stepped off the edge, feet pointed in that beautifully contorted way of the dancer. She was plummeting then, and the sensation was as sweet as it was terrifying. Nothing could contain her. Not even air. But then the rubber silk whipped tight and she was spinning around the side of the circus in a wide arc. Grabbing hold of the silk rope with both hands, she tensed her arms to gain control over the swing.

  Strength had been built into her. Years of drawing water from the well as a child, and playing punchbag for a father who came home vomit-soaked and drunk on Jackogin. She circled the underbelly of the ship, and she saw them – two gobs of rubber silk. Enough to keep Cyber Circus tethered while fresh gobs were released from the tremendous clanking burrower below.

  Rocking out beneath the ship, back out and then in, she built momentum like a pendulum. She reached over her shoulder, extended the hose of her flame thrower backpack, aimed at the parasitic bundles and fired.

  * * *

  Hellequin stalked back and forth before the glass wall, his steel eye telescoping in on events below.

  “For the love of the Saints!” spat Herb, doing battle with the ship’s wheel, his face shiny-red as a jewel fruit pip. “Hellequin, do what you soldiers do best. Stick your nose in where it ain’t wanted.”

  It was as good as an order to Hellequin. He exited the bridge and strode down the narrow gangplank where pitch crew leant over the side, firing off rock rifles as well as their own makeshift missiles; dried dung-cakes from catapults and splinters torn off the frames of old scenery flats and fired from short bows. He even saw the oilskin liner from the zoo dung dump set alight and tossed overboard.

  “We got a boatswain on board?” he demanded.

  “Yep’um,” grunted a man with the dust handler’s stoop. A worn-in type. Hard working.

  “Can you disconnect any methane pipes around here?”

  The boatswain batted his hands off one another and gestured towards the fat bottomed end of the ship, located off down a walkway behind the backstage lift rig. “Majority feed out via the engine room. But there’s a couple up here we can unhook.” The man squinted. “Thinking of giving our friends down there something to complain about?”

  Hellequin nodded. He walked off down the gangplank. Inside the minute, the clank of the boatswain’s pliers and the rip of brass panel work echoed through the hull.

  He paused on the gangway and stared over one set of railings. The expanse of the main tent gave out onto empty air and the burrower below with its skirts made up of D’Angelus’s men. Hellequin’s amber lens took in fingers at the flintlock of a rock rifle, the pump of kinetic muscle as a huge Sirinese worked the winch to wind the circus in. He was distracted by the appearance of a rope of rubber silk that dropped away from the ship, threads thrashing at its severed end. The rope landed in the dust below with a tremendous whip-crack. Seconds later, he saw a second rope swing in under the ship. His steel eye focused in to see Nim hanging in a makeshift rubber silk harness, flame hose retained on a short blue lick of light.

  “No!” Hellequin threw himself against the rail. The boatswain had done as asked – the unscrewed methane pipes hoisted off their brackets and directed at the gaping hole below, their streaming gases set alight. Except Nim wasn’t meant to swing in at that instant, her safety rope of rubber silk scorched by flames from above. Now she hung suspended under the ship, a drop of flesh on a fraying line.

  The pitch crew panicked and yanked up one pipe by its lagging, a stream of flames burning up the side of the hull. Cyber Circus bucked. Struggling to rein in the makeshift weapon, one man was crushed hard against the rail then flung over as the pipe flailed. The man dropped away through the open hull, clawing for a handhold.

  Hellequin didn’t stay to watch the fire fighting.

  * * *

  Nim heard the voices of D’Angelus’s men below. There was laughter, and comments made in a filthy tone she recognised. She was suspended in the remains of her harness at a savage angle, head lolling, spine bowed. It was impossible to even attempt to reorganise her limbs and climb up. She hung under the ship by a sliver.

  Lulu appeared at the edge of the roof, one arm extended down in a desperate bid to reach her. Counting off the seconds before the last thread snapped, Nim prayed the fall would kill her. Don’t let me be preserved in any way, a new attraction for D’Angelus’s sicker clientėle. Her aching body rotated.

  The angel, when he came, had faded blue wings. He leapt between the circus guide ropes, spectacularly fast, phenomenally accurate, propelling off each to catch the next with strong momentum. Swinging down, around and underneath, he scooped her up into a solid grip. At the same instant, Cyber Circus broke free of its weakened bonds. They rose in an incandescent whirl, light streaming off Nim’s skin in neon blues and pink and orange.

  She looked into the face of the angel. He was flesh and metal.

  * * *

  The ship melted away at the horizon.

  “I can’t take Wanda-Sue und
er Zan City. That devil’s playground is built on a solar strip.” Das ran his hands down his sunken cheeks, adding to the smears of oil there. “Ain’t a burrower in existence can take on salt laid that thick or the sea of brine beneath.”

  “Indeed there isn’t. So it looks like I’ll be following the Spirit Man philosophy today.” D’Angelus glanced across at Jaxx. The Sirinese was slick with sweat from winding the huge winch.

  D’Angelus stared back out at the drifting speck. “Cyber Circus is welcome to entertain the masses of Zan City. Meantime, we’ll cross the solar strip and make our way beyond. Herb’ll never double-back. Lose all that tasty revenue by turning up at pitches he’s just worked? A showman like Herb would never do that.” Rotating his hat’s brim between his fingers, D’Angelus settled his mind to the fact. “Yeah, I go with your philosophy, Jaxx, and trust we will encounter that merry troop again before too long.”

  EIGHT

  The sky was a brilliant blue. Below, the solar strip endured in powdery, still white silence. Dots of movement betrayed the whereabouts of desert tinkers – nomads peddling the contents of patched water bladders, and who travelled the solar strip on sleds pulled by clothhods. The only other sign of life was a large shadow moving determinedly towards the scab of an island. Cyber Circus, her engines set to a low purr as if loathed to disturb the hush of the landscape. Heading for the brown hem of Zan City, where the cacti grew tall and fat.

  “Mother of all Saints, I hate Zan City.” Relieved from his post at the ship’s wheel by a member of the pitch crew, Herb was nonetheless keen to oversee their docking and sat pinched into a chair at the front of the bridge. “Give her a wide berth,” he called back to the navigator, who turned the wheel accordingly.

  The ship curved around the vast salt column, a lookout tower left over from the civil war. Herb nipped his nose between two fingers and peered down. “They cram the mothers in,” he said softly as they passed over hundreds of lump dwellings. The island looked diseased.

  “We’re a day ahead of schedule. What if there’s another troop occupying the showground?” Lulu sucked his bottom lip. While Herb had felt need for a chair, the acrobat had settled amongst the faded floor cushions in the viewing bay. The shock of earlier events lingered in the slight shake of his hands. Every so often, he took a sip from a beaker of Jackogin.

  “There won’t be. Only Cyber Circus got acts queer enough to appease the Zan City temperament,” said Herb with bragging emphasis. “Plus, this close to Hamatan, with the dust storms hotting up? My guess is we’ll have a clear run at it.” The ringmaster fed his chubby hands under his armpits. He nodded, as if reassuring himself of the fact.

  No one replied, not Lulu, the navigator at the wheel or the Jeridian stood in the doorway... although she wanted to speak. Asenath’s kohl-rimmed eyes flicked between the lookout towers and lump houses, the sprawl of the souk and the colossal salt walls of the prison. She’d no desire to return to Zan City. Things always got ugly.

  Asenath kept her thoughts private. Instead, she pointed to a small hill and said, “The pitch site, boss.” She raised an eyebrow at Lulu. “No other tent in residence. Seems we’re in luck.”

  * * *

  Salt. The ritual purifier. Funeral offering. Manna from the Saints. In Zan City, it was the absorber, desiccating all inside its sour ribcage. A small city which seemed to know its days were numbered, Zan oozed salt from every pore – the rag curtained windows of lump dwellings, the patchwork of stone that made up the sidewalks, the prison walls that rose up into the sky.

  There was no relief. Hellequin knew that much from a day spent amongst its cacti when he’d headed up his platoon. Having secured the services of a desert tinker to repair a tear to his lung balloon’s envelope, he’d let his men wander the souk. By the time it came to leave, one soldier had already got himself maimed in a bar brawl. Another never returned. “The sirens of Zan City drained his blood,” was the whisper, inviting the dirty reply, “His cock more likely.” In those days, Hellequin had made no allowance for missing men. He was the HawkEye – a role which made him lieutenant as well as lookout. The rest of the platoon? Just muscle with guns. Forgetting the lost soldier at once, he’d taken to the sky in his mended lung basket and steered the platoon away from the city, back out across the solar strip.

  Five years on, Hellequin was grateful for Zan City’s bleak nature and overpopulation. D’Angelus was unlikely to follow them here when he could wait it out on the outskirts and not have to bother with Zan’s inhabitants. Plus, if they turned the show around quickly, they could earn the water they needed to fuel the boiler and be back in the air before the sun rose on a new day.

  The flap of the circus tent had been hooked aside, letting in the blazing daylight. Hellequin watched Herb strut out of the tent, the thumb of one hand tucked in a waistcoat pocket, trailing his hat with its extravagant plumage in the other. A gang of bare-chested Sirinese approached, clubs in their fists and bodies which had been carved, stitched and re-carved. Prison wardens.

  Lesser men might have faltered, but Herb crowed his ballyhoo and looked to all appearances like a djinee granting wishes. Meanwhile, the pitch crew ran outside to peg down guides ropes which whipped either side of Herb in a motion that was almost protective.

  There was a strange connection between ringmaster and the wondrous beast of Cyber Circus, Hellequin mused – something that often distorted Herb’s eye to the reality of their predicament. As now. The ringmaster squeezed off a handshake from each warden and strode back inside, announcing with a flourish, “We’re on! We can slake this old gal’s thirst with water from a pumping station out back in exchange for a show. But first, they want a full blown ragamuffin parade, and we’re the fellas to give it to them!”

  “I take it the plan to get in and out of Zan City as quickly as possible is abandoned?” Nim stood at the entrance to the ring. Overhead, pitchmen worked to lash the huge iron girders of the tent poles in place. The magnetic paths essential to Nim’s act were exposed in the floor of the ring below; she stepped up onto the rim and walked around the edge, arms folded over her robe.

  Hellequin knew the adjustments of his HawkEye gave away his every glance. He concentrated on the ground.

  Herb got an empty look. “Business sympathises with no man. Woman of your intelligence understands the way of it. And if the marks are dusting off their dimes at the thought of a parade, well, the least we can do is give it to them.”

  “If you hadn’t noticed, Herb, we’re on the run,” said Hellequin. He felt Nim’s exquisite eyes burn into him but refused to meet them.

  Herb snorted. “I notice everything, HawkEye, but nothing’s gonna stop Cyber Circus when she’s rolling. Not the pimp D’Angelus, not a whore peddling herself as something finer, not an old soldier with a headful of wires, not the Devil’s own dust storm!”

  He slung a squat arm towards Nim. “You – get dressed! Parade, rehearsal, and lights up at seven. And you...” The arm swung in the direction of Hellequin’s breast. The soldier looked up, steel eye truncated. “I gave you a slot because all marks like a freak with medals. But your kind go bad over time, and by bad, I mean your skull’s insides turn to mush. Don’t give me an excuse to dump your ass already.” Herb rolled his eyes towards the upper reaches of the tent. “Meantime, since you’re such pals with Pig Heart, you’d best check on his progress. And tell Rust to get ready to take a ride. It’s time to show Zan City the goods!”

  * * *

  Hellequin had witnessed all manner of unholiness in his life. But the rutting of Rust and Pig Heart intruded on the part of him that had known fresh bed sheets once and kid brothers sleeping on his chest and sea air in his lungs. The hoppers watched from behind bars. There was a chaffing of wing cases as they adjusted to his presence. Their churning jaws gave off small ki-ki noises.

  “Herb wants Rust in the parade in fifteen minutes!” Hellequin called. He backed off to the clothhods’ stall and stared through the bars for distraction. The bovines stretch
ed their long necks to eat from high mangers. Their fine limbs swished through the sage.

  “Fifteen’s all we’re need!” Pig Heart choked against a great lungful of air as Rust pressured down.

  Images of Nim danced through Hellequin’s mind. Her ribboned corset, dark with water like the glimpsed areola. Light pulsing beneath her skin. The crest and fall of her hipbones. He forced the thoughts aside.

  “Herb says I gotta check on you too.” Hellequin kept his tone neutral.

  “Bastard Herb.” There was the sound of a tussle and Pig Heart snapping, “Un-cock yourself, Rust! I’ve gotta crawl outta here.”

  Hellequin’s amber lens caught a shadow of movement. He turned around to see Rust slink off to the opposite corner of her wagon.

  “Rust not finished, but still it bucks her,” she spat, hunkering down on her four limbs. “And after I rescued it from the ship’s belly. After I licked the filth off it. After I pissed on its hurt spots.”

  “Aw, come on, girl. It ain’t like that.” Pig Heart levered up onto an elbow, revealing a spine transformed into beaten, raw flesh. The movement seemed to aggravate the wounds anew. With a cry, he fell back and curled in on himself.

  Hellequin’s steel eye played a series of images across his retina like a flick book: the bruising over the greater part of Pig Heart’s body, the disjointed snout, the rip and fold of flesh, the metal splinters at a shoulder.

  “I can ease him,” he told Rust. Striding up to the cage, he saw a protective glint in her eye.

  “Stay out!” she warned with a low hiss. “Rust’s wagon is not for bare men.”

  “I’m offering to help your mate.” Hellequin stared her down.

  “Let the fucker in,” moaned Pig Heart. Deprived of the anaesthetic qualities of sex, the pitchman was clearly drowning in pain again.