Midway Relics and Dying Breeds: A Tor.Com Original

by Seanan McGuire

  As a Big Man, Davo got a big tent. It was expected that one day, he’d fill it with wives and brother-husbands and children, assuring his line’s dominion over our family business. In the meantime, it was just a huge, ostentatious thing, squatting mushroom-pale and bloated on the forest floor. Our tent walls were made of a synthetic silk compound, one that opened up when it encountered unyielding resistance, folding itself around whatever blocked its way and using that obstacle to provide additional support. Today, Davo’s tent encompassed five pine trees, their tops emerging proud and straight from the top of the fabric, which was anchored a good ten feet off the ground. No one needs that much headspace. You could run a trapeze in there and not feel like you were risking your performers. But then, Davo’s ego has always made demands that the rest of us were then expected to fulfill.

  The tent flap was open as I approached. I stopped a few feet away, clapping my hands in lieu of ringing a bell, and called, “Cousin, I’m here. Bay said that you wanted to speak with me?”

  “Come inside.”

  There is very little in this world that I wanted to do less than I wanted to be alone with Davo. He would never touch me—his parents taught him better than that, and his fear of my temper means that their lessons have been reinforced on more than one occasion—but that doesn’t make spending time with him any more enjoyable. Still, he was the Big Man. I sighed, reaching up to adjust the kerchief that covered my hair, and stepped into his tent.

  The carnival runs as clean and old fashioned as possible. If something can be handmade or run off of crank-power, that’s the way we go. If we do it right, people who step onto our midway should feel like they’re moving into a candy-coated vision of the past, before climate change and peak oil and the collapse of the old social models changed everything. There’s not much you can sell in today’s world. Too many people are self-sustaining, happy to synthesize everything they could possibly need, willing to swear that fake wine and fake beef and fake potatoes are just as good as the real thing. But you can’t synthesize a carnival.

  You wouldn’t have been able to guess any of that by looking at Davo’s tent. Stepping through the door was like moving out of our artfully colored past and into the steel and static of the present, where nothing is forgiven, and everything is forgotten as quickly as it possibly can be.

  Plasteel seals clasped the points where the tree trunks pierced the tent canopy, draping interior silk tubing to prevent the smell of forest from polluting the sterile, perfumed air of the tent. A platform covered the ground, raised on tiny, stilt-like legs that would ostensibly keep the tent and its occupants from damaging the forest floor. Davo didn’t care about that. He cared about keeping his precious feet from encountering moss, or—God forbid—the dreaded mud. Most of our tents had windows. Davo’s didn’t. Instead, flexible flat screens had been placed strategically around the room, streaming data, streaming news, streaming everything except for the real world, where we were really standing, right now. Hell, if he could have gotten away with a full-scale sensorium electronica, he would never have needed to see us at all. His physical surroundings were no better—his furniture was solid, ostentatious, more like the things you’d find in a permanent home than the things you’d find in the rest of the camp.

  He’d always been like that. When we were kids, I honestly expected him to leave the carnival for one of the major city-settlements, Portland or Vancouver or even someplace far off and exotic, like Kansas City or Cleveland. Not the Cascadian daughter cities or one of those seasteads. Nothing like that for Davo. He liked roots, and the rest of us liked living without them. It was a contradiction that wasn’t going to bend forever without breaking. I just hoped that he was going to be the one to break, rather than breaking the carnival on the hard edge of his desire.

  That was why I’d always known I couldn’t marry him. He would have made me his first wife and greatest trophy, and stored me in the Bone Yard for safekeeping, the first root he could really pin to ground. That life wasn’t for me.

  Davo himself was sitting in one of those big, solid chairs, a mug of something thick and brown in his hand. He didn’t offer to share. That would have shown too much hospitality, and consequentially given me too much power over him.

  “Bay said you wanted to see me, cousin,” I said, folding my hands and bowing my head to show respect. He was the Big Man here. I was just a visitor in his home. All the honorifics and family ties in the world wouldn’t change the fact that if he wanted to, he could ruin my life.

  “Your damn pony nearly destroyed the Ferris wheel today,” he snapped.

  I bit back the retort that sprung, fully formed, to my lips, and struggled to count to ten before I said, “Billie was following the charted path. The treetop clearance is the responsibility of the air crews, not the ground crews. Cousin.”

  “If she didn’t pull so damn hard, she wouldn’t have snapped the portage rope, and we wouldn’t have had this problem,” said Davo. “We’d be fifty miles farther on, instead of stopped here for the night.”

  “Everyone was getting tired when the rope snapped, and I’m still not sure it was the bearing strain from Billie’s pull that broke it,” I said, in a measured tone. “We need to examine the whole rope for signs of fray and wear in the fibers. I know nanoweave isn’t cheap, but if we keep using monowire fill with a nylon exterior, we’re going to continue having breakage issues.”

  Davo leaned forward, a dangerous gleam coming into his pale brown eyes. “So you’re an engineer now? Have you been taking courses in the datastream at night while you were supposed to be sleeping? Lack of rest is a safety hazard all on its own, you know, and we can be fined for things like that.”

  As if that had ever once stopped him from ordering double shifts while we were on the move, or prevented him from rousting the younger cousins from their beds when there was scutwork to be done. He wasn’t the road’s only Big Man, but he was the one who ran the show between locations. “I haven’t been taking courses, no, but I know my rope,” I said. “I was air trained before I settled on a ground position, and I can tell the strength of a piece by the way it fits my hand. We’re using substandard rope. We have to expect the issues that come with using substandard rope.”

  “We don’t have to do anything,” said Davo. “You have to control your damn pony, and I have to make some financial decisions to make up for this wasted day. You’ll get better about driving that thing, or you won’t be driving it at all anymore. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, cousin.” My fingers itched to find out what his throat would feel like as I strangled him. I kept my hands folded primly in front of me, hoping he wouldn’t notice the stress-whitened skin of my knuckles. “Bay said—”

  “Bay said what?”

  The urge to strangle him grew stronger. “She said you needed to speak to me about Grandmamma.”

  “She remembered that, did she?” Davo leaned back in his chair, looking at me coolly. Sometimes I wondered if those eyes of his were capable of warmth. “Grandpapa called while we were in transit. He would have called you, but animals can be so unpredictable, don’t you think? It was better if you weren’t distracted.”

  Meaning that our grandfather had called me, and that Davo had jiggered my phone commands to redirect the call to himself. It was a cheap, petty trick, and one that he’d been pulling on me since we were preteens. I didn’t have the computer skills to stop him, and he enjoyed stealing things from me. Even if they were only voices pulled from the air, they were still mine, and that meant he wanted them. “What did Grandpapa want?”

  “For you to learn some patience and your place, but he’s going to be waiting a long time.” There was no venom in the barb; he was going through the motions, taunting me because the situation called for it, at least in his grasping little mind. “Grandmamma is doing worse. We’re to come home after the Portland show.” The Bone Yard was only an hour’s portage outside Portland if we were moving full speed. There was no point in cancelling the
show when we were that close to home, not when the night’s take could mean a change in the situation.

  I knew that, even as I knew that it was not, had never been, my call. The air in the tent still felt colder, like something had just died there. “Oh.” I wanted to rage at him. I wanted to shake him until he understood how inappropriate it was to keep playing his little power games while our grandmother was sick and dying and far away. All I could do was stand there like a good little cousin, waiting for him to dismiss me. There was nothing left for us to say to each other. We had used our words up long ago.

  “You can go now,” he said, jerking his chin toward the door. “I have no more need of you.”

  “Thank you, cousin,” I said, and turned, walking briskly away before he could change his mind. Once the airlock-like tent flap was sealed again behind me, I allowed myself to breathe out and unclasp my hands.

  My palms were bleeding from the tiny half-moon wounds my fingernails had made. I keep my nails cropped short, to make it easier to handle the reins. It’s amazing what stress will do.

  That cheap side-market rope wasn’t the only thing approaching its bearing strain.

  * * *

  Maybe I should have gone back to the animals and relieved Bay of her duty, but I was feeling petty and small, and so I left her there. Let Davo relieve her, if he didn’t want her stuck shoveling horseshit all night long. Freedom was rare for me while we were traveling, and so I took advantage of the chance to wander through the camp as it was being established around the roots of the surrounding trees. Little neighborhoods were springing up around the larger tents of the Big Men, most of which were as big as Davo’s but twice as welcoming. Seresa’s tent had walls of gauze and mosquito netting, and at least two of the cousins who worked midway entertainment were inside, the mournful cries of their fiddles sounding sweetly through the wood. Marcus’s tent had thick cloth walls and the doors were often closed, but only to keep the smoke inside: he was a firm believer in the restorative powers of marijuana, and his boys had probably been lighting up the second that the stop was called. Anyone who cared to join them would be welcome.

  For a moment, I hesitated, considering the virtues of going to Marcus’s tent, slipping inside, and letting a haze of sweet smoke carry the day’s bruises away, taking all my troubles with them. I pushed the idea reluctantly aside. Forgetfulness was dangerous, even when it was the safe, sweet kind that Marcus and his carefully hydro-tended pot plants had to offer me. I still needed to pitch my tent, check on Billie, and call the Bone Yard.

  Calling the Bone Yard may have been the most important part.

  There was a time when a show like ours would have traveled by road, burning fossil fuels and leaving a carbon footprint the size of the sky behind us. That gave way to hybrids and biodiesel long before my time, but there are pictures hanging on the walls back in the Bone Yard, and some of the oldest costumes still smell of gas fumes and speed, like they caught the wind in their fibers and just refused to let it go. The highways were all torn out years ago, replaced by railroad tracks and narrow bike trails. There’s a sailboat “road” along the coast, artificial tide baffles designed to keep the little boats out of the undertow without interfering with the local ecosystem. Anything to reduce the damage that we humans can do to these places just by moving through them. Some travelers learned to have smaller feet, to leave narrower tracks behind them. Others learned to fly in private craft and self-powered machines, sparing the earth entirely.

  And then there are those, like the carnival, who took to the air without letting go of the ground. It’s a neat trick, one that requires a constantly shifting balance of teamwork and technology, but it’s worthwhile, because as long as we can walk that razor’s edge, we’re free. We’re barely outside the reach of a hundred laws, and as long as we’re one of very few dandelions operating like this, we’re unlikely to ever have one of those laws really clamp down on us. We move like dandelions have always moved: roots on the ground, and seeds in the sky.

  Cousins waved and called my name as I made my way through the camp, but none of them asked me to stop; they could see that I was distracted, and they were respectful enough to let me hold my peace. Most of the people who flew or rode with us were there for reasons of their own, and those reasons had taught them not to intrude on the private grief of others.

  The boxy cube of my tent was sitting untended on the forest floor near the larger, already erected tent that held the animal husbandry supplies. I pressed my thumb to the tag, waiting long enough for the microsensors to register my identity before jumping back and out of the way. Our tents were rejected milspec, the sort of thing that seemed like a dandy idea on paper, and proved to be more trouble than they were worth once they started rolling out of the replicators and into actual field conditions. Confirm your ID with a tent and watch it unpack like magic, preparing to surround you in all the comforts of home while out in the wilderness! And technically that was true—the tents unpacked themselves, handling the setup process with a speed and elegance that human hands could only envy.

  That was the problem. They unpacked so quickly that people could be seriously injured if they stood too close. One of the younger cousins had suffered a broken leg. One of the older cousins had managed to lose a hand. Those were the sort of injuries that resulted from standing too close to an opening tent when it was wrapping itself around obstacles. A closing tent …

  None of us would ever forget Cousin Mae, who had decided that she could no longer live with her life and its contradictions, and had ordered her tent to collapse itself while she was standing inside. The synthsilk was capable of applying far more pressure than the human body could withstand. It was also watertight. Mae died quickly, and she didn’t leave any mess for anyone else to clean up. Knowing her, she would have been proud at how successful a suicide she was.

  The tent finished unpacking itself in less than thirty seconds. Unlike Davo, I had no furniture to move in; just the cot, wall shelves, and comms terminal that were built into the tent itself. I wiggled my toes in the dust outside the door once, like a prayer or a promise to the forest, before I opened the flap and let myself inside.

  * * *

  Supposedly, the entire West Coast has free, reliable connectivity through the cloud, which accounts for the trees and raccoons and robust weather patterns all being considered individuals who have a right to be heard. And that’s generally true when you’re near the heart of Cascadia, or skirting the poppy fields outside of Oakland. They have strong repeaters and self-propagating smart dust there, and they keep the signals flying. With the carnival camped deep in the mossy, damp-aired heart of the forest outside Portland, I had to negotiate with eight different local channels before I could get them to share signal strength and boost my call high enough to catch the attention of a relay satellite. Those are free and reliable, once you can establish a connection.

  The Bone Yard runs on a virtually antiquated VoIP system once a local connection has been made, which is in turn rigged to screamers for those occasions when calls come in and there’s no one in the house to answer them. I sat on the edge of my bed, pleating my skirt between my fingers, and waited for the screamer to catch somebody’s attention.

  I was in luck: I had only waited about a minute when the neutral black screen was replaced by the weathered, well-loved face of my grandfather, Angelo Freeman. He smiled when he saw me, his teeth still white against the brown of his skin, despite his advanced age. Unlike most of the men in our family, he had never smoked, never chewed tobacco, never even taken up drinking coffee. He swore the world was stimulant enough, and that a midway man needed a smile that could outshine the moon. From most people, that would have sounded stupid. From Grandpapa, it sounded like scripture.

  “Ansley,” he said, eyes crinkling at the edges. His voice held all the warmth that Davo’s lacked. “My dearest girl. What moves you to call an old man so late in the evening?”

  “As if you didn’t know,” I said, my smile e
choing his. It was an involuntary response. Even in my darkest moments, my grandfather had always been able to make me smile. “How is Grandmamma?”

  His smile faltered, although it didn’t die completely. “So Davo spoke with you.”

  “He did.” He would have kept the news from me if he could, but being a Big Man didn’t free him from the demands of family. If Grandpapa wanted me to know something, I would know it, although Davo had doubtless put off sending Bay to find me for as long as he possibly could. “I’m sorry he intercepted your call.”

  Grandpapa’s barely perceptible wince told me that I’d guessed right about Davo setting a snoop on my phone. Dammit. “I shouldn’t have called while you were working. I did my turns on the circuit. I know better than a thing like that.”

  “I’m never too busy for you and you know it,” I said, waving his concerns away. “You’re answering everything except for my question, Grandpapa. How is Grandmamma?”

  “Eh.” His bony shoulders rose and fell in a shrug that was half admission of defeat, half exhaustion. “The doctors, they do what they can, and the aunts, they do a little more, but this isn’t a disease her blood knows how to fight. It burns her, and every day she’s a little further gone.”

  I didn’t say anything. I waited. After a few minutes of awkward silence, he sighed.

  “She coughed up blood and froth this morning. She’s been moved out of the Bone Yard and into a hospital clean room, where she won’t have to worry about me when she’s already unwell. She hasn’t infected a one of us, but that doesn’t get to matter now. The virus is most virulent when its host is running out of things to burn. Sixty years my wife, and now that she’s dying, they take her away from me.” For a moment, he looked very small and very frail, a skeleton wrapped in the winding shroud of his own worn-out skin. Not for the first time, I wondered how long he would hold himself to life after she left us.