Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (13 page)

“Like what, you shiller,” I said. “A whole friggin’ police unit all decked out in alkie and shiny new bribes?”

He shrugged and said, “I’m trying to help. The bigger the big fish, the more the small fish need a hook.”

“Not a bad turn of phrase,” I said, lying. “You get that from looking into the water all damn day? What I need is Quin.”

Shadrach snorted, said, “You
are
desperate. An invite to Quin?” He wouldn’t meet my gaze directly, but edged around it, edged in between it. “Maybe in a million years you’d build up the contacts,” he said, “the raw money and influence.”

I turned away, because that stung. The robbery stung, the not-being-able-to-sell-the-art stung.
Life
stung. And stunk.

“Easy for you, Shadrach,” I said. “You’re not a Living Artist. I don’t need an invite. Just give me the address and I’ll go myself to beg a meerkat. Anything extra I do on my own.”

Shadrach frowned, put on a more serious face, said, “You do not know what you are asking for, Nicholas.” I thought I saw fear in him—fear and an uncharacteristic glimpse of compassion. “You
will
get hurt. I know you—and I know Quin. Quin isn’t in it for the Living Art. He’s in it for other reasons entirely. Things
I
don’t even know.”

By now I’d begun to break out in the sweats and a moist heat was creeping up my throat, and, hey, maybe I’d had too much on the drug-side on the way down, so I put a hand on his arm, as much to keep my balance as anything.

“For a friend,” I said. “For Nicola. I need a break or I’m going to have to go below level and live out my days in a garbage zone.” (And look where I am today? In a garbage zone. Talking to you.)

Bringing up my sister was low—especially because I owed her so much money—but bringing up below level was lower still. Shadrach still had nightmares about living underground with the mutties and the funny people, and the drip-drip-drip of water constantly invading the system.

He stared at me, white-faced, the knuckles of his hands losing color where they clutched the rail. Did he, I hoped, see enough of my sister in me?

But I’m not heartless—when I saw him like that, the hurt showing as surely as if they’d broken up a day ago, I recanted. I said, “Forget it, my friend. Forget it. I’ll work something else out. You know me. It’s okay-dokey.”

Shadrach held me a moment longer with his gray, unyielding eyes and then he sighed and exhaled so that his shoulders sagged and his head bowed. He examined his stick-on sandals with the seriousness of a podiatect.

“You want Quin,” he said, “you first have to promise me this is a secret—for life, god help you. If it gets out Quin’s seeing someone like you, there’ll be a whole bunch of loonies digging up the city to find him.”

Someone like you
hurt, but I just said, “Who am I going to tell? Me, who’s always borrowing for the next holo? People avoid me. I am alone in the world. Quin’s could get me close to people.”

“I know,” he said, a bit sadly, I thought.

“So tell me,” I said. “Where is it?”

“You have to tell Quin I sent you,” he said, and pointed a finger at me, “and all you want is to buy a meerkat.”

“You that budsky-budsky with Quin,” I said, incredulous—and a little loud, so a brace of Canal policemen gave me a look like
I
was luny-o.

“Keep your voice down,” Shadrach said. Then: “Go west down the canal-side escalators until you see the Mercado street light. There’s an alley just before that. Go down the alley. At the end, it looks like a dead-ender because there are recycling bins and other debris from the last ten centuries. But don’t be fooled. Just close your eyes—it’s a holo, and when you’re through, there’s Quin’s, right in front of you. Just walk right in.”

“Thank U, Shadrach,” I said, heart beating triple-time fast. “I’ll tell Nicola that you gave her the time of day.”

His eyes widened and brightened, and a smile crossed his face, fading quickly. But I knew, and he knew I knew.

“Be careful,” he said, his voice so odd that shivers spiraled up my vertebrae. He shook my hand. “Quin’s a strange . . . man,” he said. “When it’s over, come and see me. And remember, Nicholas—don’t—don’t dicker with him over the price to be paid.”

Then he was gone, taking long, ground-eating strides away from me down the docks, without even a goodbye or a chance to thank him, as if
I
was somehow tainted, somehow no good. It made me sad. It made me mad. Because I’ve always said Shadrach was Off, even when Nicola dated him.

Shadrach and Nicola. I’ve had relationships, but never the Big One. Those loving young lovers strolling down by the drug-free zones, those couples coupling in the shadow of the canals, they don’t know what it is to be desperately in love, and perhaps even Nicola didn’t know. But I thought Shadrach would die when she left him. I thought he would curl up and die. He should have died, except that he found Quin, and somehow Quin raised him up from the dead.

What does Quin do, you ask? (As if
you
have the right to ask questions knee-deep in garbage. But you’ve asked so I’ll tell you:) Quin makes critters. He makes critters that once existed but don’t now (tigers, sheep, bats, elephants, dolphins, albatrosses, seagulls, armadillos, dusky seaside sparrows) or critters that never existed except in myth,
flat media
, or holos (Jabberwocks, Grinches, Ganeshas, Puppeteers, Gobblesnorts, Snarks) or critters that just never existed at all until Quin created them (beetleworms, eelgoats, camelapes).

But the
best
thing he does—the Liveliest Art of all, for my purposes—is to improve on existing critters. Like meerkats with opposable thumbs. His meerkats are like the old, old Stradi-various violins, each perfect and each perfectly different. Only the rich could procure them, through influence mostly, not money, because Quin didn’t work for money, it was said, but for
favors
. Though no one could guess
what
favors, and at what cost. Rumor had it Quin had started out assisting state-sponsored artificial pregnancies, before the fall of government, but no one knew anything concrete about Quin’s past.

So I daydreamed about meerkats after Shadrach left me. I imagined wonderful, four-foot tall meerkats with shiny button eyes and carrot noses and cool bipedal movement and can-I-help-you smiles. Meerkats that could do kitchen work or mow the atrophiturf in your favorite downtown garden plot. Even wash clothes. Or, most importantly, cold cock a pick dick and bite his silly weiner off.

This is the principal image of revenge I had branded into my mind quite as violently as those awful neuvo westerns which, as you have no doubt already guessed, are my one weakness: “Ah, yessirree, Bob, gonna rope me a meerkat, right after I defend my lady’s honor and wrassle with this here polar bear.” I mean, come on! No wonder it was so hard to sell my holo art before the pick dicks stole it.

But as I headed down the alley which looked quite dead-endish later that night—having just had a bout of almost-fisticuffs (more cuffs than fisties) with a Canal District barkeep—I admit to nervousness. I admit to sweat and trembling palms. The night was darker than dark—wait, listen:
the end of the world is night
; that’s mine, a single-cell haiku—and the sounds from the distant bright streets only faintly echoed down from the loom ‘n’ doom buildings. (Stink of garbage, too, much like this place.)

As I stepped through the holograph—a perfect rendition that spooked me good—and came under the watchful “I”s in the purple-lit sign,
Q U I N ’ S S H A N G H A I C I R C U S
, I did the thrill-in-the-spine bit. It reminded me of when I was a kid (again) and I saw an honest-to-greatness
circus
, with a
real
sparrow doing tricks on a highwire, even a regular dog all done up in bows. I remember embarrassing my dad by pointing when the dog shat on the circus ring floor and saying, “Look, Dad, look! Something’s coming out the back end!” Like a prize, maybe? I didn’t know better. (Hell, I didn’t even know my own Dad wasn’t real.) Even then the genetic toys I played with—Ruff the Rooster with the cold eyes I thought stared maliciously at me during the night; Goof the Gopher, who told the dumbest stories about his good friends the echinoderms—all produced waste in a nice solid block through the navel.

But I have let my story run away without me, as Shadrach might say but has never said, and into
nast
algia, and we wouldn’t want that.

So: as soon as I stepped into the blue velvet darkness, the doors sliding shut with a
hiss
behind me, the prickly feeling in my spine intensified, and all the sounds from the alley, all the garbage odors and tastes were replaced with the hum of conditioners, the stench of sterility. This was high class. This was
atmosphere
.

This was
exactly
what I had expected from Quin.

To both sides, glass cages embedded in the walls glowed with an emerald light, illuminating a bizarre bunch of critters: things with no eyes, things with too many eyes, things with too many limbs, things with too many teeth, things with too many
things
. Now I could detect an odor, only partially masked by the cleanliness: the odor of the circus I had seen as a kid—the bitter-dry combination of urine and hay, the musky smell of animal sweat, of animal presence.

The cages, the smell, made me none too curious—made me look straight ahead, down to the room’s end, some 30 yards away, where Quin waited for me.

It had to be Quin. If it wasn’t Quin, Quin couldn’t be.

He sat behind a counter display: a rectangular desk-like contraption within which were embedded two glass cases, the contents of which I could not I.D. Quin’s head was half in dark, half in the glow of an overhead light, but the surrounding gloom was so great that I had no choice but to move forward, if only to glimpse Quin in the flesh, in his seat of power.

When I was close enough to spit in Quin’s face, I gulped like an oxygen-choked fishee, because I realized then that not only did Quin lean over the counter, he
was
the counter. I stopped and stared, mine eyes as buggee as that self-same fishee. I’d heard of Don Daly’s Self Portrait Mixed Media on Pavement—which consisted of Darling Dan’s splatted remains—but Quin had taken an entirely different slant that reeked of genius. (It also reeked of squirrels in the brain, but so what?)

Portrait of the Artist as a slab of flesh. The counter itself had a yellowish-tan hue to it, like a skin transplant before it heals and it was dotted with eyes—eyes which blinked and eyes which did not, eyes which winked, all watching me, watching them.

Every now and again, I swear on my slang jockey grave, the counter undulated, as if breathing. The counter stood some three meters high and twenty long, five wide. In the center, the flesh parted to include the two glass cages. Within the cages sat twin orangutans, tiny but perfectly formed, grooming themselves atop bonzai trees. Each had a woman’s face, with drawn cheekbones and eyes that dripped despair and hopelessness.

Atop the counter, like a tree trunk rising out of the ground, Quin’s torso rose, followed by the neck and the narrow, somehow serpentine head. Quin’s face looked almost Oriental, the cheekbones pinched and sharp, the mouth slight, the eyes lidless.

The animal musk, the bitter-sweetness, came from Quin, for I could smell it on him, pungent and fresh. Was he rotting? Did the Prince of Genetic Recreation rot?

The eyes—a deep blue without hope of reflection—stared down at the hands; filaments running from each of the twelve fingers dangled spiders out onto the counter. The spiders sparkled like purple jewels in the dim light. Quin made them do undulating dances on the countertop which was his lap, twelve spiders in a row doing an antique cabaret revue. Another display of Living Art. I actually clapped at that one, despite the gob of fear deep in my stomach. The fear had driven the slang right out of me, given me the normals, so to speak, so I felt as if my tongue had been ripped from me.

With the sound of the clap—a naked sound in that place—his head snapped toward me and a smile broke his face in two. A flick of his wrist and the spiders wound themselves around his arm. He brought his hands together as if in prayer.

“Hello, sir,” he said in a sing-song voice oddly frozen.

“I came for a meerkat,” I said, my own voice an octave higher than normal. “Shadrach sent me.”

“You came alone?” Quin asked, his blue eyes boring into me.

My mouth was dry. It felt painful to swallow.

“Yes,” I said, and with the utterance of that word—that single, tiny word with entire worlds of agreement coiled within it—I heard the glass cages open behind me, heard the tread of many feet, felt the presence of a hundred hundred creatures at my back. Smelled the piss-hay smell, clotted in my nostrils, making me cough.

What could I do but plunge ahead?

“I came for a meerkat,” I said. “I came to work for you. I’m a holo artist. I know Shadrach.”

The eyes stared lazily, glassily, and I heard the chorus from behind me, in deep and high voices, in voices like reeds and voices like knives: “You came alone.”

And I was thinking then, dear Yahwah, dear Allah, dear God, and I was remembering the warm fuzzies and the cold pricklies of my youth, and I was thinking that I had fallen in with the cold pricklies and I could not play omnipotent now, not with the Liveliest of the Living Arts.

And because I was desperate and because I was foolish, and most of all, because I was a mediocre artist of the holo, I said again, “I want to work with you.”

In front of me, Quin had gone dead, like a puppet, as much as the spiders on his fingers had been puppets. Behind me, the creatures stepped forward on cloven hooves, spiked feet, sharp claws, the smell overpowering. I shut my eyes against the feel of their paws, their hands—clammy and soft, cruel and hot, as they held me down. As the needles entered my arms, my legs, and filled me with the little death of sleep, I remember seeing the orangutans weeping on their bonzai branches and wondering why they wept for me.