Midway Relics and Dying Breeds: A Tor.Com Original

by Seanan McGuire

  Not long, I was sure.

  “Davo said you want us home after the Portland show.”

  “I would want you before that, my little crow, but we have commitments to keep, and those people paid their deposit for a slice of history. Our troubles don’t give us the right to deny them.” He straightened, a bit of the strength coming back into him. “How is Davo?”

  I hesitated. There was every chance in the world that he had taps on this line, or clever little listening devices creeping up the walls of my tent, ready to catch and magnify any hint of insurrection. It was easy to blame it on the fact that I had refused to marry him, but even then, he hadn’t proposed out of love: he’d done it because he wanted to possess me, because I was better with my hands and better with my voice and better in the eyes of our grandparents. He was a Big Man here. Speaking against him would be foolish.

  But this was my grandfather asking, and I had never lied to him. “He’s getting worse,” I said. “He gives orders that don’t make sense. He sets the younger cousins to tasks that they don’t know how to do, and then he blames them when things go wrong, when they get hurt. I’m afraid something’s going to break soon.” I was afraid that it was going to be me.

  “Ah.” Grandfather shook his head, looking honestly sorry. “There was a time when he would never have been made Big Man, and when you would never have been asked to serve in a show where he was a Big Man. I’m sorry, my dear. If there had been any other choice—”

  But Davo’s father had been a Big Man, and my grandfather’s eldest son. To refuse the title to his son would have been the kind of insult that could tear our family, and our carnival, apart. It’s hard to be a living fossil. Sometimes you have to yield, even when everything you have screams at you to hold the line.

  “There wasn’t another choice,” I said, more harshly than I intended to. “He leaves me alone with the animals, for the most part. He hasn’t come to my tent in over a year.”

  “Ah. The animals.”

  There was something in Grandpapa’s tone that made my blood run cold. “What did Davo say?”

  “He has another offer on your pet. A serious offer. One that’s big enough to … well. Big enough to do a lot of things.”

  “She’s mine. That was what we agreed on when I found her.” Little snuffling thing in the junkyard of a firm that should never have been allowed to play with genes, all lanky limbs and outsized head. I hadn’t known what she was at first—I’d looked up all her vitals later, while Uncle Ren was arguing over her purchase price—but she’d been mine from that very first look. We were kindred spirits, she and I, creatures that were never meant to walk this world, in this place and this time.

  “I know. And what he says he can get for her isn’t worth what it would cost us as a family. But I am not there to protect you, my crow girl, and he can make decisions without me. Be careful. He means you ill.” Grandpapa looked sharply to the side, sighed, and then looked back to me. “I must go. Give my love to Bay.” Then the screen went black as the connection was severed from his end.

  I sat frozen on the edge of my bed, lips and fingers numb with the implications of what he had just said to me.

  “But she’s mine,” I whispered.

  Only silence answered me.

  * * *

  There are people who’ll tell you that we live in a virtually post-money world now, where everything is freely available for the taking, and no one should ever want for anything. They’re right, in a way. No one is hungry when they don’t choose to be, except for maybe the children of people who have chosen a Paleolithic lifestyle. No one sleeps without a roof over their heads unless that’s what they’ve decided to do. Basic medical care is available to everyone. It’s a utopia by twencen standards, and everything would be wonderful if it weren’t a utopia that’s full of humans. And we are still human, no matter how far some people push the limit of what that means.

  Some things will always be for sale. Favors. Information. Specialty goods, like wine or Marcus’s weed, or Seresa’s musicians, who vanished into private parties and museum galas whenever we stopped by a large-enough habitation. It’s the primate in us. It wants ownership, and once it has ownership, it doesn’t want to give it up unless it’s for something it views as a fair trade. Society can kill money as much as it wants to. Barter will endure.

  There was a fad, some thirty years back—before my time—for genegineered diseases, things so bad they’d turn your bowels inside out and send your eyes running down your cheeks like tears. They all started from things that Nature had done, and Nature is a bitch who doesn’t like having her toys played with by the wrong people. Some of those bugs got out. Not many, not the ones where the kill rate was so far out of control that they would have created a post-money economy, largely by creating a post-human world, but enough of them that they could linger in the fringes of the population like weeds, sprouting up every now and then and destroying someone’s garden.

  The disease that was killing Grandmamma was one of those. It had been built from a dozen different sources, but the nastiest was something called the Hendra virus, which killed its victims in a variety of ways, all of them racing against one another to deliver the final blow. It was a horrible, brutal way to die, and the nastier strains had burned themselves out decades ago. The ones that were left were rare and hard to cure, making them a nasty surprise for people who wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time. Grandmamma had what the doctors considered a “mild” case. It was destroying her lungs, her heart, and her mind, but it was difficult to transmit between humans, and everyone at the Bone Yard had been immunized after she got sick.

  It wasn’t a standard immunization. Talk about closing the barn door.

  If Davo said that he could find a buyer for Billie who was willing to offer enough—enough favors, enough appointments with specialists who couldn’t normally be reached, enough of everything that the family thought we needed—no one would fault him for taking the deal. And if that deal fell through after it was made, well. At least he’d tried, right? That was part of his job as a Big Man. Trying.

  I hadn’t been aware that I was crying until I reached up and felt the hot dampness of my cheek. Angrily, I wiped the tears aside, grabbed my pillow from the bed, and stood. I was going to sleep with Billie tonight. Davo could do what he wanted to me, but I’d be damned before I let him hurt her.

  * * *

  Morning woke me with birdsong and the distant sound of the camp being torn down, filtered by the trees between me and most of the camp. I blearily raised my head, bracing my palms against the wide sweep of Billie’s skull as I peered down from my high platform at the cousins who scurried even now between the ponies and the mules, getting them fed, getting them into harness. I yawned, sinking back down into the tangled nest I had made for myself from the hair atop the Indricothere’s head. Feeding and tack were jobs for younger cousins. I might not be a Big Man—I might never be a Big Man—but I had status enough that I hadn’t overslept. Not quite, anyway. Judging by the angle of the sun and by the timing of our Portland show, it was time for me to start moving.

  Billie continued to methodically chew her latest mouthful of the local foliage as I tucked my pillow under my arm, kissed her ear, and finally swung myself hand over hand down her side to the ground some twelve feet below. She didn’t so much as flinch as I suspended my entire bodyweight from fistfuls of her hair. Knowing Billie, she might have not even realized that I was there.

  Everyone was too busy tearing down to acknowledge me as I walked back through the camp to my tent … and paused, looking in bewilderment at the open flap, at the footprints in the mud. “Hello?” I called, feeling instantly foolish.

  No one answered, and after a long moment of holding my breath, I stepped forward, pushing the flap aside.

  I didn’t have many possessions, and what little I did have was usually stored in the howdah on Billie’s back, since there were many reasons for me to need a change of clothes without havin
g the freedom to leave my position. What little I did have was strewn around the tent: the blanket thrown to the floor, the mattress liner pulled askew and stomped on, the screen curled at the edges where someone had tried to pry it loose.

  We were supposed to be more respectful than this. We were supposed to leave one another’s temporary homes alone, because all homes were temporary if you didn’t share them with the love and consideration of your family. I looked uncomprehendingly at the mess, petty as it was, as I counted slowly to ten. Then I turned and stepped out of the tent, pressing my thumb against the tag that would cause it to collapse again. In a matter of seconds it had been reduced to a small square sitting in the forest mud. I turned my back and walked away from it. One of the cousins would pick it up, read the tag, and return it to the pile. That wasn’t my job, and hadn’t been for years. That was for the best. Right now, I would have been tempted to discard it in the underbrush, and let the local constituencies hit me with a littering penalty.

  Bay was already in position atop the howdah when I made my way back to the loading area. She looked tired. “Where have you been?” she demanded.

  “Do you want to know, or does Davo?” I asked.

  She turned her eyes away.

  “I thought as much.” I settled onto the bench, leaning back to visually check the ropes before pulling up the small display screen built into the side of the howdah. Both visual and virtual data confirmed that the knots were tied, the ropes were in position, and we were ready to make tracks for Portland.

  You can’t drive an Indricothere the way you do a horse. They’re too big, and their skin is too thick. I tugged on Billie’s reins as hard as I could—barely hard enough to catch her attention—and shouted, “Opre, Billie! Opre!” As always, my words were followed by a moment of stillness as she considered my request with her ponderous herbivore’s mind. Then, finally, she began to move forward, letting the pull of the reins guide her. She had been with me for most of her life. She trusted me to steer her truly.

  I will never fail you, I thought, and held fast to the reins as the carnival began to move once more.

  * * *

  We chewed up distance and spat out dust. Not as fast as a carnival might have traveled once, when it relied on fossil fuels and roads instead of well-worn paths and the strength of hands, but fast enough that it always seemed a little bit like magic. From deep forest to Portland in the passing of a day, in the single wink of the sun’s eye—magic.

  Sometimes I wonder if that was the true crime of the twencen world. Not destroying the environment or overpopulating the planet or anything else like that. But they forgot that every day they lived was filled with magic and with little miracles, and they needed to be punished for what they chose not to know.

  Cyclists passed us as we traveled, some of them craning their necks to catch a wide-eyed glance at our little procession at the expense of their own safety. The travelers lucky enough to have private aircraft small enough to fly within our airspace pressed their noses against the windows and stared. The younger cousins swarmed up the portage ropes and along the decks of the storage balloons, waving their arms and whooping and hollering like they thought the people inside those planes could hear them. People who could afford planes of their own could afford most anything they wanted, including rarities like the last traveling carnival on the West Coast. More than one night’s engagement had been paid by folks who’d just happened to pass by while we were on our way to someplace that they weren’t intending to be. We didn’t even need to worry about flying a flag or showing unified colors: when you’re the only local example of a dying breed, word gets around. They’d find out who we were quick enough, if they decided to spend their time looking.

  Billie plodded gamely onward, obeying my tugs on her reins without pause to consider what I might be planning for her. She didn’t understand pasts, or futures. She only understood that I had always looked out for her, and that I would steer her where there were good green things to eat, and no predators large enough to take her on. The fact that there were no predators left in the world that could pose a threat to her didn’t matter; instinct was instinct.

  Throughout the day, Bay sat next to me and watched my work with an intensity that made my skin crawl, occasionally asking questions about steerage that were as unusual as they were unexpected. Finally, an hour outside of Portland, my patience ran out. I turned to her and snapped, “Why the sudden interest? I know you’re not Billie’s greatest fan.”

  “She’s too big,” said Bay automatically, before some instruction she’d been given when I wasn’t around kicked in, and she added, “It’s a little spooky, that’s all. Nothing’s supposed to be as big as she is.”

  I eyed her with open suspicion. Bay looked back at me, her beautifully genegineered eyes wide and guileless the way that natural eyes could never be. For the first time, it occurred to me that Bay was as much Billie’s family as she was mine: both of them were products of labs running as fast as they could to stay ahead of the cutting edge of legality. Bay was an enhanced human and Billie was a prehistoric recreation based on a few cell scrapings, but they shared an origin. Maybe that was why Bay had disliked her on sight. Sibling rivalry is always hard.

  “It doesn’t matter how big she is,” I said finally. “She does whatever I ask her to do, because she trusts me not to steer her wrong.”

  “But you’re a good trainer, right?” pressed Bay. “Whatever she’ll do for you, she’ll do for someone else.”

  “Why would she have to?”

  Bay had played her cards too openly, and she knew it. There was a momentary pause while she considered her answer, finally saying, “Your grandmother. I know she’s not feeling well, and maybe you’ll want to go and take care of her for a while. That’s all.”

  “If I have to go home to help care for Grandmamma, Billie will come with me,” I said, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice. “We’ve done that before, during the off-season. She doesn’t bother the goats or the chickens, and Grandpapa says that having her around does some real good for the local forest. She cuts down on the English ivy and Scotch broom.”

  “She can’t always go with you,” said Bay, almost sullenly. “You’ll have to go where she can’t follow one of these days. So you shouldn’t be nasty about answering my questions. I’m supposed to be here to learn.”

  There was nothing I could say to that—nothing that would be appropriate for the ears of someone who was technically my younger cousin, anyway. Especially not given the way Davo had been looking at her lately, or the number of little errands she’d been running for him. I’d seen their bloodwork and genome recordings. They were as distantly related to each other as Davo and I had been, and our marriage had been okayed by the older generations of our family, even if it wasn’t okayed by me. Bay might be a younger cousin for now, but I had the strong suspicion that she was going to be a Big Man’s wife soon enough, and above me in all the ways that mattered.

  “Then learn,” I said briskly, and shoved the reins into her hands. She was still shouting as I slid down the side of Billie’s neck, stopping myself at the last moment by gathering two large handfuls of the longer hair that grew on her belly. From there, I lowered my feet to the ground, standing easily in the cathedral space beneath the Indricothere’s body, where all other sounds were blocked out by the heartbeat echo of her footsteps on the stony trail.

  We were almost there.

  * * *

  Some professions reinvent themselves with every generation, becoming strange and new to the practitioners and craftsmen who came before. Carnivals aren’t like that. Good ones—and I like to flatter myself by believing that we were a good one—keep everything they’ve ever known, tucking it away like treasure and pulling it out when it’s needed. We build the future on the foundations of the past, and we never let anything go. That doesn’t mean we can’t innovate. It just means we never lose sight of what we’re changing, and why. Without history, a carnival is just a bunch
of booths and shoddy rides standing in the middle of a field, unwanted, unneeded, and unloved.

  We arrived in Portland an hour shy of our scheduled open, which was cutting it close, even for us. We’d been hired this time by a farming collective, working in conjunction with a software seedgroup and a local community center. Our pay was going to be almost entirely in favors, connections, and fresh produce, but that was fine. It was a good bargain, and we’d come away with even more than we’d agreed on in advance once the townies got a whiff of Marcus’s pot or heard Seresa’s musicians play. Everything would go into the common pool and then we, and it, would return to the farm, where it could be put toward the important business of getting us through the off-season.

  The field we’d be using for our performance was a wide, green expanse of wildflowers and hardy local grasses. The forest had tried to reclaim it a few times since the suburb that used to sprawl here found itself razed to the ground, but the grass fought back until it had battled the forest to a standstill, and now here we were, on the edge of a natural midway. The draft animals and ground vehicles hung back, letting the engineering team measure out the space that we’d be using for the show. They moved quickly, their feet barely seeming to dent the grass.

  “Clear!” shouted a voice. The call was taken up by the other engineers, one after the other, until the entire circle had checked in. Then, and only then, did someone push the button that would cause our midway to unfold.