Dancing in Dreamtime
Page 11
“Not the elephants!” Orlando hollered.
The shuttles glided relentlessly onward, erasing the beasts with sweeps of the melters. Mooch did not slow down, her knees tight around the swaying neck.
Orlando dragged himself into the wheelie and rolled in pursuit. The people who had been riding the belts or strolling in the plazas when the beasts broke out had all fled into buildings. Awestruck faces gazed from every window.
The air tingled from the melters. Here and there a paw or tail escaped the annihilating rays and lay among the rubble like discards from a costume shop.
“Don’t hurt the child!” Orlando screamed, his voice drowned out by the whine of engines.
The pilots vaporized every last creature except for the lumbering elephants, then briefly held their fire. The shuttles hovered a few meters above Mooch’s head like blind fish that had blundered into the air. Then one by one they picked off the outriding elephants, until only hers remained. Still she kept on, leaving Orlando farther and farther behind.
“Mooch!” he screamed. “Give it up, child!”
Far down the avenue he could see the elephant lean its vast, wrinkled forehead against the wall of the city. The beast reared on its hind legs and slammed against the translucent dome, reared and slammed, while Mooch held on to the flapping ears. The city’s very foundations seemed to shiver from the blows. The girl stared ahead, as though trying by the force of desire to pierce the barrier and see, beyond a stretch of ocean, the lost green hills of Oregon.
At last the melt-beams sliced into the elephant’s heaving buttocks and hacked through the spine and knocked out the legs, and down Mooch tumbled, still clinging to the huge gray ears.
Wheeling along, the stiff leg thrust forward, Orlando barged through the crowd of medics and Overseers and buzzing onlookers to where she lay. She was sitting up, dry-eyed. When he reached for her, she sagged into his arms, but did not make a sound, her quivering jaw firmly shut, as if she had caught some rare bird of grief in her mouth and meant to keep it safe.
Waking later that night to the sound of clinking tools, he rose from bed, scrabbled for the crutches, and hobbled through the darkened shop. He found the girl leaning over a workbench, where a ropy monster was taking shape. It was made of flexible conduit, and looked like an enormous snake. Where the fangs would be, she had mounted one of his diamond cutting-wheels.
“Mooch, you know we’re forbidden to make any more beasts.”
“It’s not a beast,” she said.
“It looks like a python. Big enough to swallow you.”
“It’s just a machine. A tool.”
He fingered the cutting wheel. “A tool for what?”
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll drill above the water line. I don’t want the city to spring a leak.”
The misery swelling in him felt so enormous he imagined his skin tearing. “Mooch, there’s ocean out there.”
“It’ll be water-tight,” she explained, slapping the conduit. “And I’ll install a motor and propeller.”
“But even if you make it to shore, you’ll never survive in the wilds.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Child, you can’t go!”
She turned on him a look so dark it was as if two holes had suddenly opened in the roof of the city and the fathomless night were staring in. She said, “Are you going to stop me?”
Orlando retreated from her glare, lay down again on his bed, but could not sleep. The clink of tools played through the empty hours. The sound made him think of teeth clacking against bone, and he remembered his father telling him that wolves caught in traps would gnaw through their own legs to get free. After lying awake the rest of the night, thinking about Mooch and wolves and the numberless ghosts of wild things, he decided to let her go.
The Circus Animals’ Desertion
Alone in his minibus after tucking the beasts in their lairs for the night, Orlando Spinks was stitching a tear in the lion’s mangy hide when the monkey sidled in to announce that the lion itself had vamoosed.
“Without its skin?” said Orlando, forlornly raising the shabby pelt from his lap.
“You got the number on that ticket, chief,” said the monkey, which picked up slang from street kids.
Orlando closed his eyes and thought about the skinless lion slouching through the spick-and-span avenues of Oregon City, its naked chassis gleaming in the fluorescent light, the wires in its belly snarled like spaghetti, computer chips encrusting its forehead like jewels. Blinking his sad eyes open, Orlando asked, “Where did it go?”
The monkey turned its palms toward the ceiling and hoisted its shoulders. There was a faint whining of motors, a gritting of metal on metal, and the monkey froze midway in its shrug.
“We’re getting old together.” Orlando sighed. He was feeling more rheumatic than ever. This news about the lion only made his joints ache the worse. Opening a door in the monkey’s belly, he fiddled with the controls. When this did no good, he slapped it between the furry shoulder blades, and the monkey finished its shrug. An amnesiac fog dimmed the glass eyes.
“What’s happening, chief?” the monkey said.
“You were telling me the lion’s running away.”
“I was?”
“Yes, you were,” said Orlando wearily, knowing he was losing the tug-of-war with entropy. He could almost see the circuits unraveling in the monkey’s brain. “Now please go back to the trailer and keep watch on the others.”
There were not many others to watch—the kangaroo, anteater, musk ox, boa constrictor, crow, and twin pandas. These seven, plus the monkey, were all that remained of the three dozen beasts he had constructed for his Spinks Animal Circus. One by one they were leaving him, slinking away in the night. Where could they possibly go? He imagined the grizzly bear shouldering its way onto the pedbelts among the commuters with their briefcases, the python coiling its great length into elevators, the elephant blocking the doorways of shuttles at rush-hour, the gorilla swinging from balcony to balcony. None of them had ever been caught and returned to him, even though his name was clearly stamped on the control panels. He was afraid to ask the Overseers for help, because he had run afoul of the authorities several times already—and all on account of Mooch.
Now Mooch was a sore point for Orlando. In fact, she was several sore points. He had encountered her eight years earlier, back in the glory days when he was engineer of beasts for the Oregon City Disney. When he came upon the girl, her top half was stuffed inside the jaws of his principal lion, the predecessor of the lion whose tattered skin Orlando was now holding in his lap. Rescued from the rubber teeth, the girl began scolding him for having made the animals so prissy and jovial.
“They ought to be wild, like in the old days,” she said, “so they could eat people.”
“If Lion was wild,” Orlando pointed out, “you’d be well chewed by now.”
“If this bag of gears was alive, I wouldn’t be fool enough to stick my head in his gullet.”
Her name, she said, was Mooch. “Rhymes with pooch. An old name for a dog. You ever heard of dogs?” She lived at the Serenity Orphanage, where she had been dumped as the fruit of a genetic experiment gone wrong. “Shoot artificial sperm into an artificial egg in a synthetic womb and—shazam!—you get a baby without parents.” At birth her orange hair stood out from her scalp in unruly curls. Her eyes were a startling green and turned up at the corners like the eyes of a fox. Her ears were shaped like teacups and her nose was vanishingly small. Despite her peculiar looks, she might have been adopted had she not begun talking when she was four months old, and walking a month later. She spooked everybody who came shopping for a baby at the orphanage. As soon as she could hack the digital locks, she began escaping. But the cops always brought her back. Now age twelve, she would be stuck there until she turned eighteen. To her way of thinking, the ancients had been a good deal kinder when they dumped orphans on a hillside for the wolves to raise. Now, if somebody would take cus
tody of her—some old man, say, with a steady job and a clean record—the orphanage would be glad to get rid of her.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, surveying the disney, “I wouldn’t mind staying here, helping you out, livening up this place.”
Orlando knew right then he was in trouble. He had never found the nerve to ask a woman to live with him, and had never been permitted to breed, so he had no offspring and no mate. The children who came to romp through the disney set up currents in his heart like the motions of fish. At night he had only the machines to talk with. He often wished that the stuffed animals he had inherited from his grandfather, the taxidermist, would climb down from the walls of his workroom and rub their shaggy flanks against his knees.
So when Mooch popped out of the lion’s mouth and offered to let him adopt her, Orlando promptly, if unwisely, agreed. The orphanage had him filling out forms for six weeks before they surrendered the girl into his care. He framed the certificate that declared him to be Mooch’s guardian, and hung it on the wall of his workroom between a moose head and a swordfish.
Thinking back on his year with the girl, as he did now while mending the lion’s pelt, a year of wonders and miseries, Orlando still could not bring himself to regret a minute of it. First she had persuaded him to make the beasts more natural, which meant smelly and shiftless. When this failed to impress the visitors, she urged him to make the beasts vicious. He was one of the first victims of this new regime, getting a leg broken in the alligator pen. While he was recuperating, Mooch programmed the beasts to attack anybody who put a foot in their territory. When the Overseers tried to shut the place down, four agents were mauled, and in the hubbub Mooch rode an elephant out through the gates of the disney, leading an exodus of beasts down the shocked avenues. Every last beast was vaporized. Only the girl was spared. While Mooch and Orlando were awaiting trial, she built a drilling machine, bored a hole through the wall of the city, and escaped. Waking up to find her gone was the worst pain he had ever felt.
The Oregon City Disney was torn down while he sat in prison. In its place rose feelie-farms, eros parlors, game arcades, a thousand-and-one delights. Orlando spent the three years of his sentence fixing gadgets for the warden and thinking about Mooch. The warden tried to get him to stay on past his allotted time and live rent-free in her guest room, since she had a houseful of appliances and one gismo or another was always breaking down. But Orlando wanted out. “If you ever change your mind,” said the warden, sorry to see him go, “come back here and I’ll put you to work.”
He would need work, all right, since the authorities had confiscated his meager savings and auctioned off his possessions to pay for the damage wrought by Mooch’s beast parade. Only his grandfather’s collection of stuffed animals, protected under the law as family heirlooms, had been saved for him. When he crammed these moldering trophies into the minibus which he had bought with his prison-leaving bonus, there was barely room enough inside for his bed, stove, and workbench.
The city gave him a job repairing robocops. Although he frequently bungled his dealings with people, Orlando was a wizard with machines. Within a few months he was foreman of the maintenance crew, and had a private shop where he could tinker in his off hours. First he built the lion, in memory of Mooch. Next he built the monkey, rigging it with all the smarts he could program into it, so he would have somebody to talk with during his lonely hours. Then he went on to construct a rhinoceros, a gorilla, the two pandas, a Komodo dragon, an abominable snowman, a unicorn, a griffin—every beast, in fact, for which his grandfather’s taxidermy collection provided suitable materials.
He left the monkey running all the time, for the sake of its chatter. The other beasts he fired up only one or two at a time, because there was so little space for them to do their tricks inside the bus. “Not room enough to swing a cat in,” his grandfather would have said. Certainly not room enough for a gorilla to beat on its chest without hammering dents in the neighboring animals. As soon as he had saved enough money, Orlando bought a trailer to hitch on behind the bus, then a second trailer and a third.
“You ought to take that show on the road,” advised his assistant, also an ex-con, who was angling for the foreman’s job, “and see what you can milk out of the rubes.”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” Orlando replied.
He painted SPINKS ANIMAL CIRCUS in scarlet on the sides of the bus and three trailers. He furnished the trailers with grass-colored rugs and plastic trees and inflated stones, to give the effect of wildness. When everything was ready, he quit his job at the robocop shop, charged up the bus with a six-month supply of electricity, and set out to astonish the populace.
The populace—chiefly gawking youngsters and hawking oldsters—was intrigued, if not astonished. When the yellow bus and blue trailers rolled to a stop, loudspeakers blaring with circus tunes, a skeptical crowd gathered. The spindly, whitehaired man who climbed down from the bus and announced himself in an age-cracked voice to be Orlando Spinks, ringmaster, did not promise to be much of a showman. But once he got cranked up, hooting and hollering about the wonders of his mechanical beasts, he wasn’t half bad. He wore white boots, white tuxedo, white top hat, and purple bowtie.
One by one his beasts lumbered down the ramps from the trailers, ambled onto the sidewalk, and did their turns. Bears sat up and begged, lions roared, elephants chomped bales of seaweed, dragons blew smoke rings, rabbits did cartwheels. “All authentic!” the ringmaster yelled while skipping among them, prodding the beasts with his whip.
But no sooner had the sidewalk show begun than the white-suited ringmaster was herding the beasts back into the trailers and crying, “See the whole show inside! Tonight at eight! Tickets only a hundred C’s!” When no one stepped forward to buy a ticket, he lowered the price to ninety—then eighty, sixty, forty—all the while bellowing, “Wildness on stage! Animal secrets revealed!” Only when the price dropped to fifteen, and the ringmaster in despair began climbing into his bus, did a few people step forward to buy tickets.
These rare customers later reported to friends that there wasn’t much more to see at the inside show than they had already seen for free on the street. The liveliest part of it was the skin-and-bones ringmaster, this Orlando Spinks, who cavorted among his sluggish beasts, balancing on a zebra’s back, wrapping himself in a boa constrictor, making a tiger dance. The audience yawned. The more they yawned, the more frenetic the ringmaster became, revving up his beasts until they twitched through their routines in seconds. When the rhino thrust its horn through the trunk of a plastic tree and stopped dead, as if shot in its tracks, and the wolf began gnawing on its own hind leg, shorting wires and producing a billow of acrid smoke, the audience stood up. “Wait!” the ringmaster yelled, “there’s more to come!” Ignoring him, the customers shuffled outside to find juicier entertainment elsewhere.
Orlando loaded up his bedraggled menagerie and drove the caravan to a new neighborhood. There he met with pretty much the same reception. “My kid’s got fancier dolls than that!” somebody might yell during the tease performance on the sidewalk. “When’s the show gonna start?” somebody else might yell halfway through the gala performance inside the rented hall. It was discouraging. People had no eye for art, and even less of an eye for nature. On his first swing through the precincts of Oregon City, Orlando earned just enough to pay for recharging the battery on his bus and restocking his larder.
Early in his second season, a heckler cried, “Is that all they do, jump around and growl?” Orlando shouted back, “Did you expect them to juggle? Do backflips? Tell jokes?” After weeks of such heckling, and after wrestling with his conscience, Orlando reprogrammed his beasts to perform such foolishness and worse. The pandas now played duets on the organ. The cheetah’s spots and the tiger’s stripes now blinked on and off like neon signs. The dragon swooped through the air, puffing smoke. The orangutan sped about on a motorcycle. With its long snout, the anteater tossed rings at the unicorn, which ca
ught them on its horn. And so, in one way and another, all three dozen beasts were turned into buffoons.
Even though the audiences grew, attracted by these antics, Orlando took little joy in his success. Mooch would despise him for what he had done to the animals. She was a great believer in wildness, and a terrible scold about dumbing down nature. His ears burned from imagining what she might say about these shenanigans.
“There’s grumbling back in the trailers, chief,” the monkey reported to him one night during that second season.
“How can there be grumbling? They’re all turned off.”
“I hear what I hear,” said the monkey sagely.
Limping back to investigate, still wearing his white ringmaster’s tuxedo, which was beginning to fray, Orlando placed an ear against each of the trailers in turn, and sure enough, through the aluminum walls there came a low rumbling.
“What are they saying?” he whispered to the monkey.
“You got me, chief.”
“Who turned them on?” The monkey shrugged. When Orlando flung open the door of the first trailer, a hush fell over the beasts. “What are you all chattering about?” he demanded. No answer, only a heavy shifting of limbs. Angry and more than a little frightened, he rushed down the aisle throwing switch after switch until every beast was stilled. “You keep a sharp eye,” he told the monkey, “and if anybody comes messing around with them, give a howl.”
“Right you are, chief.”
Later that night the tiger slipped away, the first of his animals to desert him. Swearing that it never saw the great cat slink off, the monkey advised, “You want things watched, you ought to build a dog.”
“I might just do that,” Orlando threatened.