Among The Stars

by Robin Banks

I’m having the time of my life. We only stop when we have to get back. It’s just as well that we do, really. We’ve got nowhere to stash our gear and Tom’s gotta be clean in case he gets searched. I’m starting to feel overloaded. Getting caught with this much loot could land me in the shit.

  We get back to the show as quickly as we can without looking like we’re running. I go straight to my bunk to empty my pockets and put everything out of sight, just in case. I’m seriously buzzing, happy as can be, until a knock on the door nearly makes me crap myself. I’m not expecting anyone. Thank fuck, it’s just Alya.

  “Did you have any joy finding boots?”

  “Nah. We tried. Shop wouldn’t serve us.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah. Ask Tom. Maybe it was the wrong part of town. We just went to the first place we found.”

  “That blows,” she sighs. “Why are the things that happen around you never straightforward?”

  “I dunno.”

  “I can try and take you guys somewhere tomorrow.”

  “Nah, we’ll be ok. We can try a different part of town. This place is massive. We’ll find somewhere. Do you want your credit back?”

  “No. You can hold on to it.”

  “There’s a lot of it.”

  “I trust you.” She smiles and walks off.

  I feel bad then. I know she’d be disappointed if she knew what we’ve been up to. Maybe she wouldn’t trust me anymore, but that wouldn’t be fair. Not really. I would never steal from her. Tom wouldn’t either, unless things were really bad. I’m sure it would never come to that.

  We spend the rest of the week doing more of the same. In the mornings we work as hard as we can to finish as soon as we can, get cleaned up, hit town, and help ourselves to stuff. We don’t have much of a system, which is fine. It doesn’t really pay to work like that. You’ve got to take your opportunities as they come. When you push your luck trying to make something happen, that’s when shit goes wonky.

  Sometimes it hits me how dodgy the game we’re playing actually is. If we get prosecuted it’s goodbye circus, goodbye emancipation, hello prison. When you look at the value of what we’re nicking, it’s not really worth that. Nothing is. I’m not sure Tom gets it. Sometimes I wonder if he just doesn’t care so much. He’s only the decoy. He’d have to really fuck up for them to nail him. I’d never squeal on him. The circus may still throw him out, though: nothing that reflects badly on the show is tolerated. Then again, if I got myself arrested they couldn’t really afford to lose Tom as well. Maybe it’s not that he doesn’t calculate risk; maybe he only calculates his own.

  I know it’s not fair for me to think shit like that about him, but sometimes I can’t help it.

  By the time our stay draws to an end, we’re doing great. We’ve been eating better than ever before. I swear I must have grown another inch in a week. That’s ok, though, because we now have clothes that actually fit us. We can’t wear most of them yet, which is a bummer. People on show know that we get paid shit, so we can’t suddenly go around in brand new gear. It’d look suspicious as hell. We’ve got them, though, and we can start wearing them over time. We’ve also got some small bits of tech and stuff. We couldn’t nick anything bulky, but we still did ok. In a few weeks I’ll be able to give Alya her reader back.

  Things are looking up for us. We got around to finding boots, too. We found them early on and picked them up on our last day. We didn’t want them to suck up our bail-out credit, but they ended up helping. It’s a wonder how much you can pocket while you’re buying bulky, expensive things. I made sure Alya got her change and I’ll pay her back as soon as I can. Maybe I can sell off some of the stuff we swiped.

  I’ve been having a great time. The best part of it is that Tom and I are a team again. It’s just like in the old days. I’m glad it’s over, though. It’s risky as hell and it’s starting to feel too easy. I’d be bound to slip up.

  I’ve been so busy and so buzzed over our little adventures that I’d forgotten about everything else – my problems with people on show, Alya’s heartbreak, our worries about mud, and all the rest. It all hits me when we finish our pull-down and get on the ship. The everyday crap of the world hasn’t gone away. It was there all the time, waiting for us. I understand why Tom gets fucked off at life and people sometimes. He’d like to be buzzing all the time. I don’t know if I would. I’m not sure it’s healthy.

  My buzz disappears completely as we approach our new site. The dip we’re going to be building up in doesn’t seem that deep, but the four bubbles around it are massive. They look huge against the sky and totally blot out the horizon. I’ve never seen bubbles this big. No wonder Jameson was so keen to get us here: we should be packing people in. It all feels bloody eerie, though.

  “Ominous.” I say it out loud without meaning to. Alya gives me a weird look “What? That’s the right word, isn’t it?”

  “Definitely is, for this site. I don’t like it. Not a bit.”

  “Looks dry enough though, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. We’ll just have to hope that it stays like that.”

  2.

  Aside from the fact that I startle myself every time I look up to see the bubbles blocking up my sky, the build-up is unremarkable. The week starts well, too. The first two shows are packed, which means that the artists are happier than usual, which makes everything easier. People’s moods are really contagious here. Good or bad, they spread, amplify, and spiral. Maybe people just got over their collective huff at having to leave Thalia. Maybe I’m not as sensitive to everything because I’ve got Tom back. Either way, things seem to be easier on show. We all start to relax.

  The rains start the evening of our second day. We’ve just finished settling the animals for the night when I hear it. It sounds like thousands of fingers tapping on our portabubble. We all go out to have a look. It really is raining. Water is falling right out of the sky. It’s amazing and frightening at the same time. It makes me feel very small. I look at the rain fall in the yellow light cast by the bubbles besides us until I can’t bear it anymore. I need to go somewhere where I can’t hear it, somewhere where nothing reminds me of how fragile everything we have is against the might of the world around us, but there isn’t anywhere. Even in my bunk, with the music on, I can’t stop hearing it.

  When the power cuts out the rain seems to get even louder, to push itself even harder against my consciousness. I’m tired enough to fall asleep for a while, but at some point in the night the rain gets so loud that it wakes me up. It’s not just falling. It’s throwing itself at our bubble, the only shield between us and the cosmos. It sounds angry, maybe because I’d managed to ignore it for a while. I can’t tune it out. It reverberates in my head.

  It takes me a while to grasp how fucking shit-scared I am. I’m not used to fearing anything but people. This is a different kind of fear. It runs deeper and I can’t think my way out of it.

  The rain lasts just long enough that I think I’m about to lose it, to run out of the bunk and the portabubble and just keep on running until I find somewhere safe from it, then it slows down. The banging turns into tapping, then into a gentle murmur that calms me down and finally sends me to sleep.

  When the power alarm wakes me up, I expect the world to be different, but it isn’t. The wagons, the stables, the ATRs, the big top in the background, all the markers of my world are still there, unaffected. I’d half expected them to have been washed away in the night. Then I see the ground; or, rather, I don’t see it. I see a shimmering, uncertain surface where the ground used to be. Water. The ground is covered in water. It looks too beautiful for words and terribly, terribly wrong.

  I climb down my steps and right down into it. It’s not that deep: it only comes halfway up my foot. It feels weird against my boots, but not unpleasant. It’s cold, though. I’m glad we got kitted out for it.

  I kick the water around for a bit, because I can. It looks really pretty as it shimmers through the air. I stop when I mana
ge to splash my trousers. Yeah, it’s definitely cold. A load of it right in the crotch is no fun at all.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” Alya’s peering out of her ATR.

  “Not sure. How did the water get in? It rained outside the bubble.”

  “Seepage. Water moves through the soil.”

  “I don’t get that.”

  “That’s because you’re curious enough to want to know the whys and hows of things, not just the whats. I’ll dig you up an article. I’m hazy on this. It’s not much of a problem on a torus or a ship.”

  “It’s this what you were worried about? It doesn’t seem too bad.”

  “We’re higher up than the big top. We’re higher up than anything; I made damn sure that we got the highest spot. Gods know how deep it is everywhere else. And this is probably not all of it, either. We parked ourselves at the bottom of a drain.”

  “How bad is it going to get?”

  “I have no idea. Depends on how deep the water gets, how long it stays, and on people not churning up the soil.”

  “Or we’ll get mud?”

  “Yeah.”

  The water rises all day long. We roll the crates into the stables and put the animals inside. They’re not happy, but at least they’ll be dry. Everywhere we walk becomes a mess of dirt and water. Walking the same path churns it up. Walking a different path churns that up too. The water around us is no longer shimmering: it’s a brown-black soup that sucks at our feet, trying to hold us down.

  The soup follows us wherever we go. At lunchtime we wreck our kitchen. We try not to, but we can’t help it. I’m soaked and freezing so I change my clothes. All I achieve is getting my bunk filthy. The new clothes get wet and dirty in no time.

  Alya joins us after lunch. “No shows today. They dug a trench around the big top to keep it dry, but it didn’t work. Everything is flooded. The props are soaked. The changing room got flooded and half the costumes are trashed. Oh, and some bright spark opened the storage compartment underneath the girls’ bunk to see if it was still dry.”

  “Was it?” asks Tom.

  “Yeah. It isn’t now, though.”

  “Why are we still here? Why don’t we just leave?”

  “You ever tried to take off in a ship that’s standing in a pool of water, with soggy ground underneath it?”

  “Nah.”

  “If the water is reaching the engine vents, the engine is not going to run and that’s that, so that’s two of our ships out anyway. And even if it doesn’t, if it’s just below it or you’re just on boggy ground, it’s not a good idea. I’ve never seen anyone actually try it, but I know the theory. You might manage to go up, or you might churn everything up underneath you and bury yourself in a hole instead. Way our luck has been, I wouldn’t attempt it. But it’s not my call. None of this is my call.”

  “Brilliant. So what are we going to do?”

  “Wait till the water goes down. Try and stay dry.”

  “I’m already failing. My feet are soaked.”

  “I thought your boots were waterproof!”

  “It came in over the top.”

  Alya rubs her face. “This is an unmitigated disaster.”

  “It’s only a bit of water, isn’t it?”

  “Tell me again next week.”

  “It will be gone by then, won’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody does.”

  When the water starts to go down, it does so way slower than it came up. We can tell that it’s going down by looking at the dirty brown marks it left on everything, but that fails to cheer us up.

  Everything is a struggle. Just walking around has become a mission. Although the water is lower, the soil underneath has turned into mush. Tom lost his boot twice walking through the stables. He picked his foot out of the mud and his boot stayed behind. He had to stand barefoot in the cold, dirty sludge to retrieve his boot. It didn’t much matter, anyway: he was wet already. We all are. We’re constantly wet and dirty. Everything is wet and dirty. We’re managing to keep the animals dry, mostly, but that’s about it.

  My hands have gone really weird. I’m getting odd wounds everywhere the skin pulls or bends. I know I’ve not cut myself – I would have noticed that. The skin is just splitting for no reason and the splits keep getting bigger. When stuff starts to ooze out of them, I show Alya.

  “Shit. This looks bad, kid. I’ve got some gel you can put on to stop it getting infected, but you really ought to give them time to heal.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Doing nothing. Staying warm and dry and not using your hands until the sores are closed up.”

  “That’s not terribly practical.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Try to keep them dry and clean, at least, ok? If you get mud into those cuts, they could go bad.”

  “I’ve been trying to keep dry all along. It’s not really working.”

  She looks furious. I know she’s not furious at me, but I still don’t like to be the cause of it. “Ok. At the end of each shift, come see me. Or I’ll come see you. I can clean them up. It might stop them getting worse.”

  I can’t play guitar. Well, I could, but it would hurt like hell and I’d end up oozing all over it. I’m fucked off to be the only one with this problem. The guys’ hands are perfectly fine and they work as hard as me. It makes me feel weak, although they’re not doing all that well either. Tom started coughing a couple of days into the flood and Kolya started the day after. Maybe there was something in the water, or being constantly cold and damp has weakened people, because at least half the show is sick with it. That’s what I heard, anyway. We don’t really see people these days. The ones who are ill don’t go out unless they have to, and the ones who are well don’t want to risk catching something.

  I don’t blame them. Tom’s cough is not too bad, but Kolya’s is awful. I’m sure I caught him coughing up blood a couple of times. He hasn’t told Alya, I’m sure of it. She would have done something about it. I wonder whether I’ll have to go behind his back and tell her. I don’t want to break his trust, but I don’t want him to end up in a med bay, either.

  Alya keeps popping in and out of the stables. There isn’t any work she can do, anyway, and staying around Jameson is not a safe option. He seems to have decided that our situation is a deliberate slight against him, and that the correct response is to bellow about everything and nothing at whoever is around him. I don’t get it.

  “Alya, this is all his fault. He decided to ignore professional advice. Why is he taking it out on people?”

  “Because he can. That’s how he self-regulates. He uses people to unload his bad feelings. Then he feels better.”

  “But everyone feels worse. It’s not fair.”

  “So what? Fairness is not a value he subscribes to. Everyone beneath him, which is pretty much everyone, is here for him to use as he sees fit.”

  “And he doesn’t feel bad about it?”

  “Not a bit. He sees that as the natural order of things.”

  “I don’t understand how you can work for that guy.”

  “I just don’t care enough about him to be hurt by his tantrums. When he starts shouting, I see that as a reflection of his own internal mechanisms. It has nothing to do with me. Why should it affect me? Now, when he makes some foolish decision that gets us in the shit, that I do care about. I’m worried about our situation. I’m worried that he’s not going to stay rational enough to manage it. But all I can do is make sure that I’m rational, that I’m unaffected by his moods. Oh, and that he doesn’t realize that. It wouldn’t do to let him know that.”

  “Better you than me.”

  A couple of warm days make the water level drop faster. Most of the ships are out of the water now, although the ground underneath them is still soft. Everything in the portabubble is getting wetter, though. Water droplets appear on a lot of surfaces, even surfaces that are nowhere near the water. The stable ceiling is wet and dripping. I read about this kind of thing in the article Alya gav
e me but I hadn’t quite believed it. I couldn’t fit it in my head that something like water, something heavy that falls down, can also rise up. It’s cool to see it in real life, but I still wish it wasn’t happening. It’s making it even harder to keep dry.

  When it happens, we don’t hear it. We hear a lot of screaming, but that’s way after, when enough people have spotted it and someone has been brave enough to tell Jameson. We’re kind of immune to screaming by now. There’s so much of it going on that we just ignore it. We don’t find out what actually happened until Alya comes over.

  “The big top split. A great big dirty old tear right over the bandstand.”

  It takes me a while to process what she just said. Even then it doesn’t make any sense. “What? How?”

  “Water. Water has been condensing everywhere. We think that enough of it dripped and accumulated on the big top to make it sag. The bandstand poked a hole in it, and the whole thing just tore up.”

  “I thought it was pressurized!”

  “Pressure-tight, yes. It is. Well, it isn’t now, with a hole in the top of it, but it was. It gets tested regularly. The damn thing is supposed to keep the public alive if the portabubble fails. We’re the first circus to get rained on in over two-hundred years, though. I guess they didn’t plan for this kind of eventuality. I don’t know. Nobody does. Something went terribly wrong and we don’t know how or why. Nobody has used the big top for days, so nobody saw it happen. People just walked in and there was light coming through the roof.”

  “Now what?”

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds. It can be repaired and we have insurance. But until it’s fixed we can’t do shows.”

  “Insurance?”

  “You give a company credit every month and if something bad happens to you they give you more credit back.”

  “Like betting? You’re betting that bad thing are going to happen?”