Dancing in Dreamtime (16 page)

Jabbing the beasts with poles only upset them, and resulted in the loss of poles. Surrounding the exhibits with energy shields had no effect, nor did he have any luck with neutralizing rays. He was soon at his wits' end.

Mooch, all this while, holed up in her room. Orlando had to work alone, muttering to himself in a fury that gradually changed, over the course of the week, to despair. He scarcely slept. On the appointed day, the Overseers turned up at the gate and blared through a bullhorn to be let in. There were six of them, big hulking bruisers, with meltguns and truncheons dangling from their hips. In their silver uniforms and mirrored helmets, they towered above Orlando, who met them in his wheelie, the game leg jutting before him in its cast like the masthead on a ship. “Gentlemen,” he pleaded, “I haven't quite whipped things into shape. If I could have just a few more days . . .”

“You've had a few days already, Mr. Spinks,” the lead officer growled.

“I don't think it's wise, just now, to go—” Orlando began.

The officer cut him off: “We'll decide what's wise and what isn't, Mr. Spinks.”

“But, sir—”

“Shut up and keep out of the way.”

When Orlando still protested, the officer waved his gloved hand. One of the Overseers grabbed the handles of the wheelie and shoved Orlando roughly against a ticket booth.

Holding his breath, Orlando watched them divide into three pairs and scatter among the exhibits, their helmets gleaming, truncheons in their fists, meltguns swinging.

Soon the first scream tore through the disney. Within minutes, four of the six men came staggering back to the gate, their jumpsuits torn and bloody. They dumped Orlando on the ground, hurled the wheelie aside, and pounded him with truncheons and questions.

“I don't know
how
they got that way!” Orlando cried, wanting even then to protect the child. “It just seemed to happen! I lost control over them!”

Meanwhile the lead officer was shouting instructions into his wristphone, summoning riot control. Soon a flight of shuttles would glide overhead, melters would spew their vaporizing beams, and everything Orlando had made would turn to mist.

He writhed on the ground and wailed. A boot landed in his ribs, on top of the old fracture, and other boots were drawing back to kick when suddenly one of the Overseers yelled, and they all took off running for the street.

Wincing with pain, Orlando sat up to watch them go, then snapped his head round and stared back down the main aisle of the disney. A tide of beasts came surging toward him, snakes and leopards and ostriches, lumbering gorillas, monkeys shuffling arm in arm, a pride of lions and a family of dragons, one-eyed monsters and monsters with two heads, pandas and camels and goats, and right at the front was a phalanx of elephants, and perched atop the largest of these, like a diadem, sat Mooch.

The ground shook from the thud of feet. Orlando scrambled into the ticket booth to keep from being trampled, and the flame in his ribs made him whimper. “Mooch!” he bellowed. “Stop!”

She did not speak or wave or even look his way as she went riding out through the gate.

Just then shuttles appeared overhead, melters zinging. Orlando shielded his eyes and blinked up at the sleek machines. The pilots cut down the laggards at the rear of the troop, then started blasting their way forward through the ranks.

“Not the elephants!” Orlando hollered.

The shuttles glided relentlessly onward, erasing the beasts with sweeps of the melters. Mooch did not slow down, her knees tight around the swaying neck.

Orlando dragged himself into the wheelie and rolled in pursuit. The people who had been riding the belts or strolling in the plazas when the beasts broke out had all fled into buildings. Awestruck faces gazed from every window.

The air tingled from the melters. Here and there a paw or tail escaped the annihilating rays and lay among the rubble like discards from a costume shop.

“Don't hurt the child!” Orlando screamed, his voice drowned out by the whine of engines.

The pilots vaporized every last creature except for the lumbering elephants, then briefly held their fire. The shuttles hovered a few meters above Mooch's head like blind fish that had blundered into the air. Then one by one they picked off the outriding elephants, until only hers remained. Still she kept on, leaving Orlando farther and farther behind.

“Mooch!” he screamed. “Give it up, child!”

Far down the avenue he could see the elephant lean its vast, wrinkled forehead against the wall of the city. The beast reared on its hind legs and slammed against the translucent dome, reared and slammed, while Mooch held on to the flapping ears. The city's very foundations seemed to shiver from the blows. The girl stared ahead, as though trying by the force of desire to pierce the barrier and see, beyond a stretch of ocean, the lost green hills of Oregon.

At last the melt-beams sliced into the elephant's heaving buttocks and hacked through the spine and knocked out the legs, and down Mooch tumbled, still clinging to the huge gray ears.

Wheeling along, the stiff leg thrust forward, Orlando barged through the crowd of medics and Overseers and buzzing onlookers to where she lay. She was sitting up, dry-eyed. When he reached for her, she sagged into his arms, but did not make a sound, her quivering jaw firmly shut, as if she had caught some rare bird of grief in her mouth and meant to keep it safe.

Waking later that night to the sound of clinking tools, he rose from bed, scrabbled for the crutches, and hobbled through the darkened shop. He found the girl leaning over a workbench, where a ropy monster was taking shape. It was made of flexible conduit, and looked like an enormous snake. Where the fangs would be, she had mounted one of his diamond cutting-wheels.

“Mooch, you know we're forbidden to make any more beasts.”

“It's not a beast,” she said.

“It looks like a python. Big enough to swallow you.”

“It's just a machine. A tool.”

He fingered the cutting wheel. “A tool for what?”

“Don't worry,” she said, “I'll drill above the water line. I don't want the city to spring a leak.”

The misery swelling in him felt so enormous he imagined his skin tearing. “Mooch, there's ocean out there.”

“It'll be water-tight,” she explained, slapping the conduit. “And I'll install a motor and propeller.”

“But even if you make it to shore, you'll never survive in the wilds.”

“I'll take my chances.”

“Child, you can't go!”

She turned on him a look so dark it was as if two holes had suddenly opened in the roof of the city and the fathomless night were staring in. She said, “Are you going to stop me?”

Orlando retreated from her glare, lay down again on his bed, but could not sleep. The clink of tools played through the empty hours. The sound made him think of teeth clacking against bone, and he remembered his father telling him that wolves caught in traps would gnaw through their own legs to get free. After lying awake the rest of the night, thinking about Mooch and wolves and the numberless ghosts of wild things, he decided to let her go.

Alone in his minibus after tucking the beasts in their lairs for the night, Orlando Spinks was stitching a tear in the lion's mangy hide when the monkey sidled in to announce that the lion itself had vamoosed.

“Without its skin?” said Orlando, forlornly raising the shabby pelt from his lap.

“You got the number on that ticket, chief,” said the monkey, which picked up slang from street kids.

Orlando closed his eyes and thought about the skinless lion slouching through the spick-and-span avenues of Oregon City, its naked chassis gleaming in the fluorescent light, the wires in its belly snarled like spaghetti, computer chips encrusting its forehead like jewels. Blinking his sad eyes open, Orlando asked, “Where did it go?”

The monkey turned its palms toward the ceiling and hoisted its shoulders. There was a faint whining of motors, a gritting of metal on metal, and the monkey froze midway in its shrug.

“We're getting old together.” Orlando sighed. He was feeling more rheumatic than ever. This news about the lion only made his joints ache the worse. Opening a door in the monkey's belly,
he fiddled with the controls. When this did no good, he slapped it between the furry shoulder blades, and the monkey finished its shrug. An amnesiac fog dimmed the glass eyes.

“What's happening, chief?” the monkey said.

“You were telling me the lion's running away.”

“I was?”

“Yes, you were,” said Orlando wearily, knowing he was losing the tug-of-war with entropy. He could almost see the circuits unraveling in the monkey's brain. “Now please go back to the trailer and keep watch on the others.”

There were not many others to watch—the kangaroo, anteater, musk ox, boa constrictor, crow, and twin pandas. These seven, plus the monkey, were all that remained of the three dozen beasts he had constructed for his Spinks Animal Circus. One by one they were leaving him, slinking away in the night. Where could they possibly go? He imagined the grizzly bear shouldering its way onto the pedbelts among the commuters with their briefcases, the python coiling its great length into elevators, the elephant blocking the doorways of shuttles at rush-hour, the gorilla swinging from balcony to balcony. None of them had ever been caught and returned to him, even though his name was clearly stamped on the control panels. He was afraid to ask the Overseers for help, because he had run afoul of the authorities several times already—and all on account of Mooch.

Now Mooch was a sore point for Orlando. In fact, she was several sore points. He had encountered her eight years earlier, back
in the glory days when he was engineer of beasts for the Oregon City Disney. When he came upon the girl, her top half was stuffed inside the jaws of his principal lion, the predecessor of the lion whose tattered skin Orlando was now holding in his lap. Rescued from the rubber teeth, the girl began scolding him for having made the animals so prissy and jovial.

“They ought to be wild, like in the old days,” she said, “so they could eat people.”

“If Lion was wild,” Orlando pointed out, “you'd be well chewed by now.”

“If this bag of gears was alive, I wouldn't be fool enough to stick my head in his gullet.”

Her name, she said, was Mooch. “Rhymes with pooch. An old name for a dog. You ever heard of dogs?” She lived at the Serenity Orphanage, where she had been dumped as the fruit of a genetic experiment gone wrong. “Shoot artificial sperm into an artificial egg in a synthetic womb and—shazam!—you get a baby without parents.” At birth her orange hair stood out from her scalp in unruly curls. Her eyes were a startling green and turned up at the corners like the eyes of a fox. Her ears were shaped like teacups and her nose was vanishingly small. Despite her peculiar looks, she might have been adopted had she not begun talking when she was four months old, and walking a month later. She spooked everybody who came shopping for a baby at the orphanage. As soon as she could hack the digital locks, she began escaping. But the cops always brought her back. Now age twelve, she would be stuck there until she turned eighteen. To her way of thinking, the ancients had been a good deal kinder when they dumped orphans on a hillside for the wolves to raise. Now, if somebody would take
custody of her—some old man, say, with a steady job and a clean record—the orphanage would be glad to get rid of her.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, surveying the disney, “I wouldn't mind staying here, helping you out, livening up this place.”

Orlando knew right then he was in trouble. He had never found the nerve to ask a woman to live with him, and had never been permitted to breed, so he had no offspring and no mate. The children who came to romp through the disney set up currents in his heart like the motions of fish. At night he had only the machines to talk with. He often wished that the stuffed animals he had inherited from his grandfather, the taxidermist, would climb down from the walls of his workroom and rub their shaggy flanks against his knees.