“Just keep her steady,” said Jaxx, adding softly, “Where the prayers fall, the spirits lead.” A Sirinese proverb. Because just then he’d got the strongest whiff of their prey. And, yes, there it was, floating in the sky off to the west! The circus blip, candy coloured lights streaming from it like a welcome flag.
* * *
The stowaway climbed the steps to Herb’s private quarters. Of all of the circus’s interior she had encountered so far, the pustule was the most fantastical. Composed of the same fibrous green as the bulk of Cyber Circus, the pustule sat in its own egg cup of brass filigree, with five ornate steps leading up to a circular door. A pumpkin palace, she decided, hollowed out to house a fairy or a shrivelled nimblejack.
She knocked gently – and was relieved when the sound went unanswered. The handle was a brass gnarl. She tried it. The door clicked open. She stepped inside, and instantly imagined this was how it would feel to step inside an emerald. Pendulous gas lamps hung about walls, exuding a rich green glow. In the centre of the room stood a brass bath. Pipes wreathed around it, concluding in four flower-shaped spouts. A rustic patchwork of clothhod hides lined the floor.
To one side of the room stood a desk with a thick brass writing slab, numerous drawers and letter slots, and an inkwell. The accompanying chair seemed to grow up out of the floor, plush and faintly tumour-like.
On the opposite side of the room was a second round door – leading to a water closet perhaps – and a small stove in one corner, the chimney of which rose up and through a hole in the upper storey and presumably kept on rising. In between these main fixtures, one wall was decorated with tiny clockwork counters, a brace of heavy iron levers, and a large glass globe. Inside floated a rubbery green organ with flesh tubes running off of it. It reminded her of a specimen kept in a jar. She peered in at the thing, mesmerised, leaping back as a thin covering retracted in the centre of the organ, revealing a great eye of dull green glass.
A sound – like something rolling over the metal floor grid outside – caught her attention. She froze. Waited. Nothing intruded.
Relaxing, she felt a new awareness of her filthy skin under the sackcloth robe. She’d sweated in the act of coupling with the Sirinese, kept up that heat while crossing the salt plains to Zan City. Arriving just ahead of dawn, she’d come upon the circus in its last half-hour of slumber and slipped inside. Traversing the huge circus ring, she’d seen the rigs and unlit spotlights craning overhead like long thin birds and, way up, a trapeze, the swing of which seemed to keep time with some underlying rise and fall of breath.
Backstage had been curtained off by a large steel screen. She’d laid her hands then ear against it. Had she heard a faint heartbeat? Unable to progress further, she’d wandered the circus ring once more, only to hear the hushed arrival of strangers at the tent’s entrance. They had come in, strange elfin folk. A pig man and a red-skinned Jeridian woman, doing their best to carry a girl who sparkled with living colour. In their wake came a HawkEye soldier. Thin as a reed. Magnificently tall. He appeared worn out in every way, from the faded frockcoat he wore to the angry adjustments of his bloody eyepiece. His emotions too – she sensed those were awkward and weary.
Approaching the steel screen, the Jeridian had left the girl in the pig’s care to work a key into the lock. The screen drew back on well-oiled runners and the small gang made their way backstage.
She’d followed at a distance, through the mess of props and stage flats to a drop of flimsy fabric serving as a wall along one side. She’d watched them slip behind the gauze, their outlines dancing behind the curtain like outsized shadow puppets.
As dawn broke, and the crew began to yawn and scratch and rise, she’d been the first to use the lift rig. No one noticed her step out onto the second level where Herb’s private quarters were housed, or when, finding the ringmaster already risen and absent from home, she’d slipped up the brass stairs and through the circular door.
Now she took a long deep breath, inhaling the scent of brewing coffee from the canteen below. It wide-eyed her slightly. But her shoulders and feet still felt world-weary from her travels. It didn’t seem so very strange then to twist the stopcock and have steaming, greenish water glug out of the flower faucets. The temperature inside the room rose a few degrees; she luxuriated in the noise and feel of the piping water. When the tub was full, she closed off the stopcock and undressed, her robe and grotesque mask things to be shed.
She fed a toe into the bath, stepped in and lowered herself down with a pleasurable gasp. The green water immersed her. She slid below the surface.
* * *
“A mermaid.” Rind nosed at the tiny window. The glass was thick and densely entwined with brass piping, restricting the view.
“Nah, a nimblejack fresh out the grave.” Tib’s eyes were bright buttons. “I seen it moving. Smooth it goes. Not rumble tumble like me and she and thee.”
The second girl, Ol, made a queer pop-pop sound as she crept down the roof, beetle-like. “It’s a Saint. Come to catch sinners and chew down on their bones.”
“We’re good ‘uns. Let’s leave it be,” whispered Rind. She clattered away from the window and rolled off a short way. Unfolding, she snouted the air for any indication of danger.
Ol was less timid. “I ain’t hiding in my shell. I got a blessing owed me since them up in the heavens let Papa breed us this way. The Saint needs to say he’ll take my soul on up when I die. Other two of yous as well if he’s willing.”
“You’s gonna roll on in there and ask it of the one that’s bathing?” Tib became edgy, tipping back onto the base of his shell, segmented limbs waggling. He lifted his face, jabbed out a stubby pink tongue and nodded. “Steam’s in there and the stink of soap shavings.” Fascination drew him to the steps towards the circular door. He stretched a pincer towards the handle.
“Mermaid’ll dazzle you with her shine,” Rind hissed. She put one leathery foot onto the first step however.
“First sin you’ll be judged on is prying where bogey noses ain’t wanted,” chimed in Ol. She followed his lead though, pushing ahead of Rind.
Tib turned the handle and pushed open the door. Each child blinked, grew accustomed to the light and hobbled forward.
“Hello, my beautiful boneless children.” The woman soaped her naked breasts with Herb’s washcloth, bathing in the ringmaster’s tub as if she was no less of a fixture in the house than the stove, desk, or mechanical motherboard.
FIFTEEN
The sleep of a HawkEye was a ragged, bruising experience. To the government who had commissioned the thirty HawkEye, each in charge of their own platoon, it seemed wise to keep their metalmorphosed soldiers on constant alert. With no facility to close down the implant, the HawkEyes entered a world of endless sight – something only the Saints should be blessed with, so the religious element of Humock had complained. And certainly it did seem the HawkEye acquired the perspective of gods; the eyepiece granted them the ability to process visuals in seconds, to zoom into 1000° degree magnification, and to access multiple views on impulse. But hardwiring the soldiers’ brains into a state of eternal visual stimuli was not without consequence. Far from retaining their elite status beyond the Civil War, HawkEyes turned drunkard, addict, lunatic and suicidal. In the past three years since he’d joined Cyber Circus, Hellequin had never encountered another like him, and he was glad of the fact. The mess of hardwiring in his brain might dull his emotions, but it never entirely erased the suffering. Meanwhile, the resultant sleep deprivation served to exasperate the condition.
Slumped in a chair alongside the bed where Nim lay sleeping, Hellequin dipped in and out of consciousness. He dreamt of his parents’ farmstead, his family out on the porch. The land around the house was desolate, but the family smiled and waved. Hellequin felt a rush of half-emotions as his mind played snapshots from his past. Collecting peckers’ eggs as a child, hand-in-hand with his mother. Soothing his twin brothers with spoonfuls of clothhod curd. Tearing the ribbons fro
m the sisters’ hair ahead of church. Feeling his father’s disappointment like a gob of spit to the face.
And he was in his lung basket suddenly, staring down at the farmstead as he shot the flare to give the order. Soldiers spilt in from all sides and they brought with them the great lime dust guns designed to raze the Soul Food crops to the ground in minutes. Except, the dust drifted on a sudden, freakish gust of wind. He saw his family wave on, flesh melting off their bones like dripping wax.
“ Mi smo victorios!” he cried. Asenath’s cry of victory.
“Hellequin.” The voice was soft. It bled inside his mind, closing off the fantastical nightmares and bringing him back around. While his natural eye blinked, the HawkEye implant fed in its compound spread of images – the fold of Nim’s knees as she sat up, legs slung over the edge of the bed; the tentative placement of one of her hands over the fabric which bandaged her rewired arm.
She put her hand to her throat. “Is there water here?”
He was already handing her a metal cup. His shoulder pulsed angrily where the ex-soldier, Lars, had stabbed him. Asenath had stitched the wound then charged him with the role of acting bodyguard to Nim. It had made sense. No one could alter his permanent wakefulness. He might as well make use of the condition.
Nim’s hand shook as she sipped from the cup. She stared at Hellequin. “You called out. I thought you were asleep.” She narrowed her beautiful red eyes, scrutinising him. “Asleep is the wrong word, I suppose. But you didn’t seem quite conscious.”
“I have waking dreams sometimes.” Hellequin didn’t care to expand. He gestured to her arm. “That bitch scientist took your arm apart. We made her put you back together again.”
“And then what?”
“Then I cut her throat.”
Nim’s chin jutted. “Good.”
If she was bloodthirsty, Hellequin understood. Nim had been made to feel like a foreign body squatting inside her own flesh.
“We were hoping the only good to come might be if she’d gone and fixed your shorting circuits. That’d help with your act and such.” Hellequin trailed off. He’d no ability to judge the right or the wrong thing to do when it came to Nim. But Asenath had also acted in Nim’s defence, so the crime of having saved her again should prove forgivable.
“We?” Nim went to put down the cup. Hellequin took it from her, placed it down on the side table.
“Asenath, Pig Heart, Rust. Pig Heart got his ticker thanks to that blood worms’ witch. He led the others to us. Good thing too. I wasn’t exactly on track to play hero before they came along.”
“You tried though, I bet.” Nim flexed her hand, a dancer’s movement. Light rippled across her forehead. From beneath her loose blouse and satin bloomers, a neon glow bloomed. She seemed to notice her attire.
“Did you assist me into these?” It was a question without weight. Nim was used to sharing her nakedness.
“Asenath,” Hellequin clarified.
Nim shrugged. Her mouth slanted, almost playfully. “So what’s the story, son of Jackerie, purveyor of Soul Food?”
Hellequin leant forward in his chair. He put his hands together and looked down. For a moment, he could picture himself strapped into his lung basket again a hundred metres or so up. Across the wilting acres, he saw his parents’ homestead and his platoon, invading the territory like termites. As they ran, the soldiers hosed the land with the red counter-agent powder pumped from backpacks. The atmosphere had clouded with the discharge until there’d been nothing to see but blood red miasma.
Hellequin pushed the memory away. “I betrayed my family,” he said stiffly. “For the good of Humock some might say.”
“And what do you say?”
Hellequin stared up, the concentric rings of his eyepiece magnifying her face. He saw a patch of raw flesh at Nim’s lower lip, the concentrated brown pigmentation of a small mole at one cheek.
“I say my father was an idiotic dreamer. Too selfish to see the pain he’d inflict on other folk and on the land, too greedy to care. But he didn’t deserve that switch in the wind that blew the neutraliser over the house and killed him. I lost my momma too that day. Same with my grandmama, sisters and kid brothers.”
Nim’s playfulness evaporated. She nodded slowly. “It hardens the wet parts of you after a time. The tongue, the heart.”
The soldier frowned, twin bone ridges exaggerated like horns.
“Watching your family die,” Nim explained. Her skin glowed with a gentle incandescence. “D’Angelus and his men did for mine.”
Hellequin sucked in his cheeks. That didn’t surprise him given the pimp’s line in disposing of others’ flesh as he saw fit. There was little difference between D’Angelus and Zan City’s blood worms, he thought with dulled anger.
He watched the interplay of light nodes under the skin at Nim’s throat.
“You’re glorious,” he said on impulse.
She laughed then, in spite of herself. “Not a biomorphed freak?”
“No more so than the rest of us.”
Nim cocked her head and stared at him. Really stared, as if studying a still life.
“Why’d you let the bastards fit you up like that? That tick-tocking eye and Saints only knows what stitched into your brain? What made you do it?”
Different angles of Nim overlaid Hellequin’s left cornea. He focused on a wide angle of her face.
“Pig Heart betrayed Cyber Circus and you and Rust. Some might say he betrayed the only family he’d got. In defending the pitchman, everyone thought I’d joined the ranks of the mad HawkEyes who’d gone before me. You included.”
He got to his feet, towering over Nim, and started to pace. Aware of the throb of his newly stitched shoulder, he rested his hands on the back of the chair. “I know what it’s like to betray family, both blood and platoon. I tried to warn my father ahead of the assault. He wouldn’t let me set one foot on the porch. The Guard though, they heard of my attempt to play both sides, and they had their own unique punishment for the crime of being Jackerie’s son.” He tapped the HawkEye implant with a fingertip. The amber lens flinched.
“You mean you didn’t choose to become a HawkEye?” Nim looked aghast.
“Twenty years hard labour at Zan City Prison or submit to the biomorph procedure. So there was a choice, yeah. A lousy one.”
“Did it hurt?” Nim stood and reached a hand towards him. Hellequin clutched her wrist on instinct. He released her. As if working out the planes and angles of him, she felt about the steel HawkEye. “Like acid on a wound, I imagine,” she answered for him.
“What about the madness? Do you know when that will come?” Her hand traced the bone ridge above each eyebrow. Hellequin tensed at the sensations she stirred in him.
“Approximately fifteen years after the Daxware’s activation. The weaker soldiers went first. The stronger ones held out a year or two beyond that.”
“So you must be one of the stronger ones.” Her hand was at his hairline, fingers teasing in. His eyepiece stole small pieces of her – her tongue’s tip at a corner of her mouth, the swell and ebb of breath across her ribcage, heat at her temples.
“I’m strong enough to protect you from further pain.” Hellequin spoke like a soldier. And he meant it that way, in part.
“Without pain, there would be nothing left for me.” Nim’s hands went to her hips. Neon blazed from the heart of her. She softened though as he stayed silent, applied both hands to his face, and worked its angles with the caress of each thumb.
“Death will be a friend to both of us,” she said wistfully.
“Not I.” Hellequin saw her small capture of breath as he disagreed. “I’ve witnessed enough death in all its fine and nasty detail. Layers upon layers, a great stinking jigsaw taking up my mind. I want to see light, masses of the stuff, until it’s all that fills my eyes.”
The clutching in the pit of his stomach was as close to real rage as Hellequin could muster. Rage at D’Angelus for his pursuit of them. Rage at
the surgeon at her attempts to manipulate their flesh. Rage at Nim for making him so enthralled by her.
She reached for him then, pushing up onto tiptoes, her hand sliding around his neck. He allowed himself to be guided and lowered his face to hers. Their mouths met, pressed and parted. He moulded his tongue into the soft wet of her inner cheeks. The HawkEye mechanism was a slow pulse of movement. He pulled away and fed on every frame of her – the river of colour beneath her blouse, her pupils blossoming. She sat down on the bed. Her fingers opened the tie at the neck of her blouse. She eased the garment up and over her head in one well practised movement.
“I told you, I do not intend to collect on your debt,” Hellequin told her, though the hardness at his groin told him otherwise.
“Am I to take you against your will?” Nim moved awkwardly into the centre of the bed. Her bandaged arm restricted her ability to ease down the pantaloons she wore.
“Help a girl out, can’t you?” she shot on the cusp of angry tears.
Hellequin sat on the edge of the bed. He took his bowie knife from his belt and laid it on the small table. Moving gently, a tin man in fear of rusting, he helped Nim out of her clothes.
“Look at me,” Nim demanded. Hellequin had retracted his eye’s zoom to give Nim her modesty. “See me now,” she told him, and he glanced up, taking in the creamy skin, the spill of breasts, each long thigh, the triangle of down in-between.
She grasped one of his hands and guided it over her like a wash rag. Under her will, his hand passed from the bud of each nipple to her secret, swollen places.
“I’m underneath the lights,” she told him.
He unbuckled and stooped over her, arms braced either side of her head. His frock coat had been discarded, bathed in his blood. The wound to his shoulder was an angry web of stitches. Beneath it, the regimental tattoo of the HawkEye branded him like any other member of a flock.
He eased inside Nim, his breath stolen by the encompassing heat of her sex around his. “Is this where you are?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and tugging her down, and himself further in. “Are you in the darkness?”
Cyber Circus Page 13
