Cyber Circus Read online

  The air dusts with spray as she mounts the low wall and steps daintily around it. At each prism, she angles her umbrella under the flow, sending water spurting over the heads of the crowd who hoot in delight and sway to the pipe of the calliope.

  Coming full circle, she swings the umbrella upside-down, places it on the water and steps inside. Few among the marks hear the soft click of a pressure pad or understand the revolving magnet patched onto a slim track. Instead, it is an apparently cognisant umbrella that conveys its beautiful cargo about the ring.

  She casts off her soaked pantaloons. Men whoop and whistle. Her undergarment is of the same wet ribbon as her drenched corset.

  The umbrella glides to the centre of the ring. As the lights dim further, she appears as an hour glass silhouette. But the transformation goes further. She is suddenly alight. Her mouth shines, as do the outlines of her breasts, each nipple visible between the slats of her ribbon top, and too the curve from hip to inner thigh and the plump of each buttock.

  The song of the calliope is replaced with a discordant clang that gathers pace. Faster and faster the umbrella twirls to the guttural music. And she is a light cell, a blur of shine-shot neon. Colours grease the air in her wake.

  * * *

  “Ask me, the wolf bitch can’t hold a candle to our Desirous Nim” whispered Earl in the glowing dark. “Helluva show.”

  Pig Heart stared at the impression of Nim’s form left behind by the light trails. She was seductive in the way a pin-up in a peepshow pamphlet gave him something to jack off to. But she didn’t speak to his essence like Rust. While Nim was all about erotic suggestion, Rust was a force of sexual nature, incapable of manipulation or artifice. Her desires came from instinct, which was how on several occasions now, she’d crawled into his bed and pinioned him, her louse-riddled hair spilling onto his naked chest. Their rutting had a bleak urgency, which was not to say it was without sentiment. He’d found himself longing to join her in her nest, to taste her bloody mouth, while there’d been a suggestion of need in the tug of her hands at his jowls, in her drinking him in.

  “Nim’s a crowd pleaser,” he muttered. “Me? I don’t get the appeal of a whore all lit up with directions for awkward Johns.”

  “No?” Nim’s neon pinwheel reflected in Earl’s pupils. “Each to their own, hey, Mr Swine Heart. I’m just eager to get our girl back in the stable she bolted from. Mr D’Angelus, though, he’s taken a fancy to the wolf girl. Seems we’ll be depriving Herb of two attractions this evening. And since you were the man to direct our eye here, you get a few extra dollars.” Earl took the band from around a fat bank roll and fanned the notes.

  Pig Heart didn’t move, not even when Earl pressed the notes into his hand. Regret burnt inside his chest like a brand. Not only did D’Angelus intend to re-secure Nim but he had his sights set on a new pet, Rust. The pitchman rubbed a sore spot at his brow. What in the devil’s name had he unleashed upon her?

  Nim concluded her act and Earl slipped away, leaving Pig Heart alone with his frantic thoughts. There was no way he could take on D’Angelus’s men – grunts with rock rifles slung over their shoulders. At best, he’d maul a couple before they took him out with their impromptu ammo.

  He raked a hand through the spines at his head. He could warn Rust, but how’d he explain without admitting his part in Nim’s betrayal? The money they’d paid wasn’t enough for him and Rust to run away on. Hell, it’d buy them temporary shelter with a desert caravan at best. But maybe that would do for the time being.

  Lights blazed. The Scuttler children rolled into the ring like balled woodlice. Pig Heart’s gaze darted off to the outskirts of the tent where D’Angelus and his gang appeared distracted by the Scuttlers’ clown antics.

  Sweat oozed down the rough matting at Pig Heart’s back. He despised the wolf girl for putting herself in the way. At the same time, he was infested with need for her.

  He slipped behind the stage curtain. Backstage was littered with debris: boom trampolines – skins stretched to varying degrees of tautness so each produced a different note when bounced on – alongside sooty fire rings, stage flats painted to resemble cacti, sandships and tunnellers, coils of hemp rope, lighting rigs, and the huge gilt wagon that housed the hoppers. Down the left side ran a wall of flimsy curtaining designed to separate off the dressing rooms from the frantic energy of backstage. Right of him were the crew’s living quarters, rows of tin-rib cells packed in tight against one another and, hard ahead, the steaming lift rig leading to the three platforms above.

  Striding past the milling pitch crew, Pig Heart leapt up onto the rig as it began a fresh ascent.

  “Howdie, Pig Heart.”

  “Got a light, boss?”

  Two of his pitch crew rode the rig alongside him. Kid with a beltful of dried rat carcasses – exterminator by trade, Pig Heart suspected, forced into carnival labour by the recent sandstorms which had taken out the year’s glut of land vermin. Also, a red skinned Jeridian with a ladder piercing of two-centimetre-long steel strips down her throat.

  It was the woman who touted the smoke stick. Pig Heart tossed over his match book, snatching it from the air seconds later when the Jeridian tossed it back. The lift rattled to a halt at the first of three platforms that were bolted onto the side of the tent above the living quarters and that were supported by a great exposed ribcage of iron scaffold.

  “Catch ya later, boss.”

  “Thanks for the light.”

  The exterminator and Jeridian strode off into the partial dark of the first platform – the mess hall.

  An iron lever as tall as man’s hip drove the rig. Pig Heart yanked it towards him. In a burst of steam, the lift continued its assent, past the second platform that housed the ornate carcass of Herb’s personal quarters with its green silk shutters and lingering stench of incense. Up to the third level, the zoo. He stared out across the great hull of the Cyber Circus tent as the rig climbed. Backstage took up one third of the interior. Beyond lay the vast circus ring and, at the far end, the sprawling calliope – a great pulsating mass of sponge, copper filigree and air pipes – with its narrow balcony, spiralling steps and boiler tucked in beneath.

  From that distance, the tumbling scab balls of the Scuttler children looked as small as roo rats. Yup, when it comes to Cyber Circus, we’re just amoebas crawling over the skin of the thing, Pig Heart thought to himself.

  The rig reached the third platform, known affectionately as ‘the zoo’. Pig Heart stepped off and made his way down the central walkway. Either side were stalls, sectioned off from one another by a patchwork of corrugated iron sheeting. That high up in the tent the air was fresher and tinged with the earth scent of purple sage lining the beasts’ beds.

  To his left, the stalls were dedicated to livestock. Roo rats bickered in their city of interconnected pipes, ramps, scratch posts and dust baths. Their nutty flesh served the soup pot well. Next door were giant tortoises, the meat of which was fried in spiced oil or dried into thin gnawing strips, the shell made into bracelets or trinket boxes for sale during pre-show parades. Next were the wrinklenecks, shoulders hooked and feathers ruffled like Jeridian medicine men, and, after, red horned goats that tore at dry grass in wall-mounted mangers.

  To his right, every stall was occupied by clothhods. The creatures stayed in the shadows, necks looped back to allow their long muzzles to rest in the folds between their broad shoulders. One moved to drink from a high trough. Keratin hoofs swished through the strewn sage.

  The larger beasts were housed to the rear. Where the hoppers’ wagon was usually located, the floor was littered with calcium deposits; the giant nymphs wept milky bile from their ever churning mandibles. Rust’s wagon was parked alongside.

  I hear the wind making music in their wings, she had told him. Gore at her lips. Lice in her hair.

  One side of Rust’s wagon faced out from the wall and was masterfully carved with jewel coloured mouths and eyes that served as the face of the circus during pre-show p
arades. It also provided Rust with privacy should she desire it. Of course, she wasn’t really quarantined to the zoo, but free to come and go as she pleased about the tent. But she preferred to keep to her own. As Pig Heart understood it from the brief moments she was more woman than wolf, she’d crawled from the ruins of her parents’ desert dome when it and her entire family were lost to one of the great dust storms. The lone survivor, she had found shelter with a pack of cave wolves until she reached puberty. Only when hunters shot dead the alpha-female of the pack did she skulk back to her own kind, furred, spit-jawed and fit only for the circus.

  I bring you freaks, strange people, weird people, and some that aren’t people at all! Herb’s patter. Pig Heart grabbed the banister and swung up onto the step at one end of the wagon. He prepared for her backlash; Rust hated to be disturbed, which was how some young grunt off the pitch crew usually got stuck with the task come show time. The rush of claws coming at him through the bars made him flinch in spite of himself.

  “Rust! It’s me. I gotta talk to you. I gotta let you know somethin’ and we ain’t got long, baby.”

  Eyes pulled up to the bars. Wet, black, spider-lashed.

  “Pig Heart.” She touched her tongue to a corner of her mouth. “Is it here to rut with me?”

  Pig Heart shook his head. He was used to her distanced treatment of him. For Rust, the only creatures she truly associated herself with were those in the adjacent stalls and cages. He, on the other hand, was still an unknown. An ‘it.’

  The spider eyes ate him up. “What’s it want with me then?”

  “Rust. I gotta tell you. There’s men among them marks down there. Bad men. Want to cage you for real. Want to let other men rut with you without your will or say so. I ain’t the sort of mucker to want that to happen. I’m putting it to you now...”

  He shut off midsentence, hearing the rattle of the lift rig alongside the muffled noise from the main tent area. The lift didn’t ascend to their level, presumably having conveyed a fresh batch of pitch crew to the mess hall. Pig Heart returned his attention to Rust.

  “I got money. Not much but it’s enough to get us part passage on a desert caravan. Maybe we’d get as far as Zan City before they dump our asses.”

  “Zan City is a nest of blood worms. The bare-man, Herb, says it often.”

  Pig Heart scrubbed at his bristled head. He was sweating profusely. How long until D’Angelus and his men invaded backstage with their rock rifles? How long until they strong armed some poor grunt into showing them the lift rig that led to the zoo?

  “Yeah, Zan City’s a hole. One you and me can get lost in.”

  She put a hand through the bars and batted his cheek. “And why’d I come with it? Why’d I leave my stink bed?”

  “The men, Rust. Saints almighty, Rust, the men!” The pitchman was slopping spit now. His borrowed heart swelled and flabbed.

  Rust swung open the door to her cage. Her face was a breath’s distance from his in an instant.

  “Wolves don’t run to Zan City when the lion tracks us over the dunes or when the storm comes and we have to take to the caverns if hoppers swarm there or not. The bare men cannot tear me from my stink bed. I will claw out their eyes, bite the skeletons from their flesh.”

  “But they have guns, Rust. Rock Rifles. They will take you down just enough to keep your mauled body fit for rutting. We got no choice, baby. They’re coming for Nim and they’re coming for you.”

  The wolf girl cocked her head. “Nim. What do the bare men want with Nim?”

  “They want her back, Rust!” he spat in her face. Had her time with the wolves sent the girl stupid? She seemed unresisting to her fate, like an exhausted jackrabbit in a trap. And still she eyed him with that liquid gaze.

  “Nim smells happy now. She smelt sad when she came, but she likes it here. You will tell her about the bare men too.”

  “I can’t, Rust. No time. Besides, she’s got Hellequin for a shadow, whether she wants him or not.”

  Rust thumped at an ear with the back of a hand, chasing an itch. “The HawkEye.” She seemed to roll the words around in her mouth, tasting their texture. Her gaze flicked past Pig Heart’s shoulder. “It says there’s bare men coming for Nim and me.”

  Pig Heart sensed a presence behind him. His breath stuck in his throat and he slowly turned around.

  The HawkEye stepped from the shade. He held two squirming roo rats by their tails in one hand, a blood stained mallet in the other. Striding down the walkway, he unfolded an extra couple of vertebra. His grip slacked on the roo rats. The creatures fell to the floor and scampered back to the seeming safety of their roo rat city.

  “D’Angelus has located Nim then. I wonder who helped him do that.” In the centre of Hellequin’s steel eyepiece, a bud of amber light strengthened.

  THREE

  D’Angelus tossed aside the glowing nub of his smoke stick. He adjusted the angle of his trekker hat. “Come on. I’ve seen enough.”

  Earl wore his disappointment like a child deprived of sweet root. “Nim ain’t going nowhere, boss.” His gaze wandered back to the ring where the Scuttlers propelled themselves from one tent pole to another in a great clanking of giant pincers. “Nimble little vermin,” he snorted and, tucking his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets, rocked back on his boot heels and chuckled. He glanced at D’Angelus. His face drained of pleasure.

  “I’ll send in our guys.” Earl deposited fresh leaf in one cheek. “You want it to go softly or us to mess things up back there?”

  D’Angelus eyed the crowd. “No need to cause a ruckus. We don’t want to ruin the show for these good folk.” He showed the tics of his teeth. “Softly does it. We want to keep the merchandise pretty.”

  Earl strode away, signalling his men to move off to the stage curtain.

  D’Angelus stayed behind. Knowing the wolf girl would spit, claw and buck in his bed that evening sent a crush of blood to his groin. As for Nim, she’d be enjoyed in a dark room where her erotic circuitry would guide many hands.

  He stared at the clowning freak children with their claws and hoary shells and shrunken heads. Would that he had been born such, without the weight of his desires!

  * * *

  Rage congealed behind Hellequin’s ribs and the internal clockwork of his steel eye. He sensed it not so much as direct emotion as a neural thickening. Nothing was as it had once been. The sucker bolts, bores, griplines and proton flasks that acted as spark plugs were hardwired into his brain, a process which meant he couldn’t recall the depths to which he had once felt fear or anger or obsession. But he knew how emotion amassed and at that instant, it was locking his fingers into fists and stiffening his jaw.

  Pig Heart’s nostrils twitched. Hellequin saw the tiny movement as a widening of cartilage around breath.

  “By the Saints, Hellequin, we gotta get these broads outta here.”

  There wasn’t time to debate it. Nim’s scream cut through the tent. From his high chair at the far side of the ring, Herb heard it and felt a patch of dread open inside. D’Angelus threw back his head and drank in the sound. Rust flinched at the door to her wagon. Hellequin broke into a charge towards the lift rig.

  “They’ve got rock rifles,” he heard Pig Heart call after him. No matter if they had the burning spears of the Saints themselves, he would fill the air with their death cries.

  He pulled up short of the rig. Steam continued to rise at the far reaches of the tent, which told him that Herb was keeping the calliope in action and choosing to go on with the show. The marks’ ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ assured him that the hoppers had been set grazing in the centre of the ring. Soon the handlers would whip the beasts into flight and the crowd into terrified, maniacal applause.

  Oiled to keep its motion down to a low purr during show time, the lift rig would still produce enough noise to alert those below to his assent. Hellequin opted to feed his hands around the fat steel cords of the steam winch and use his boot heels for grip. He slid down, taking in a pa
noramic view of backstage.

  A Jeridian woman by the name of Asenath was secured, a blade pressed to her throat. Two more of the crew were on their knees, rock rifles pressurising their spines. Meanwhile, D’Angelus’s men behaved like raw recruits on sentry duty at some dead outpost, talking softly and shifting from one boot to the other as if bored by their responsibilities.

  Hellequin reasoned that unless they had cutting tools strong enough to slit the hide of the circus tent, the grunts would have to bring Nim through backstage and smuggle her out past the marks. Perhaps they’d brought a flask of Dream Juice for the purpose? Or perhaps they’d simply gag her and apply a rock rifle to her back. Either way, Hellequin saw no need to intercept the men below. He needed to get into the dressing rooms behind the silk curtain.

  Keeping to the shadows, he eased over and under the crisscrossing scaffold where it fed behind the tented dressing rooms. Lamplight shone up through the silk; three men moved below. Hellequin guessed they’d been tasked with delivering their charge direct to the bossman. But even a hard hand like D’Angelus could not compete with the bewitchment Nim put men under. They had her at a grotesque angle between them, her nakedness betrayed by the flow of neon beneath her flesh.

  Hellequin’s head jerked, neurons misfiring. Memories flashed over his steel retina - staring down from the safety of his lung basket, a bird’s eye view of a flaming farmstead below. His HawkEye homing in on the maul of weathered hands on young flesh. Out in the open. Where screams brought no one running.

  The memory snapped off. He refocused on the tented silk below. Nim was silent, the acts the men enforced on her all too familiar.

  His lens flicked right. He had noticed the figure approach of course.

  “Whadda we do, HawkEye?” It was Pig Heart. The pitchman had slunk along the scaffold, his bulk belying the dexterity which allowed him to tread the upper gangplanks without ever disturbing the crowd below.