Mechanique (3 page)

8.

The Circus Tresaulti travels a wide circuit. These days there aren’t the sort of borders there used to be, so anyone with the courage and the means can cross from ocean to ocean.

It’s decades before they return to a city, where a new generation will come and watch the circus and roll their eyes at anyone who says that it’s the same, it’s just the same.

(Most people don’t live long enough to see the circus twice. These are ragged days.)

9.

The war brought the world to a halt.

There were the bombs and the radiation that cleared out whole cities, but that passed. What was worse were the little wars that drove everyone back behind the makeshift walls of sudden city-states, too locked in stalemates to step outside, to step forward.

But the government man has, at last, managed to create a city that functions (a long time coming, he thinks whenever he looks out on the market in the town square, the only legitimate market he can remember). He knows the roads are open and the world is wide; now he can start to stretch out his fingers over the landscape, along the roads, just to test his reach.

It’s slow and careful going. Too fast and you falter, he knows; he saw it in his predecessor, just before he came to power.

He knows, however, that he can succeed at last. He has lived long enough to take the measure of this world; this world hungers for any man of vision who can drag it up out of the mud.

The government man is on his way back from a city in the east, in the back of his black car newly painted with his crest, when he sees it.

The government man has the car pull over. He gets out and picks his way over the last of the debris into the city; he studies one of the posters plastered to a crumbling concrete wall that might have been part of a building, once.

It’s tinted in rich greens and black and cream (he could see it from the road, he knew at once what it was), and he looks at it for a long time, peering at the faces inside the cameos. He frowns and taps the bottom corner of the poster absently; then he’s back in the car, and the driver is pulling back onto the dirt road.

(The government man has plans to fix what’s left of the pavement, when he has enough reach to hold out his hands and touch the ocean on either side.)

The paste on the poster still smells, so he knows they can’t be far away. There are two cities between them, maybe. Maybe three.

The government man’s heart races, and he rests an open hand on the empty seat beside him, like he needs the balance.

The duo acrobats are new, he thinks. He doesn’t remember them from the first time; he looks forward to a pleasant surprise, when he sees the circus again.

10.

Stenos was a thief when Boss found him.

You’d think he was too tall to be a thief—he stood a head taller than Boss, and she’s almost six foot—but he was skinny for a guy with broad shoulders. Usually by the time they get that tall they look like Ayar, with muscles like bricks, but not Stenos. He looked just like anybody, right up until he jumped five feet in the air to catch some edge on a wall that looked perfectly smooth.

Boss had caught him trying to sneak wallets from the rubes during the aerialists, just as people were standing up to applaud, so they wouldn’t notice until they sat down that something was gone.

She disappeared into the workshop with him, and we all stood around like a pile of idiots. I stood around mostly because I was afraid Stenos would never come out again and I’d have to carry the body out.

Boss doesn’t allow stealing, not from anyone.

We barter for tickets—we take blankets and oil and sides of meat we can’t identify, shoes and coins and peaches so hard you crack them on the trailers—but we never take more than a show is worth, and we never lift anything from the rubes once they’re in their seats.

Whenever anyone asks why, Boss says, “It’s good business. I want to come back here someday.”

She took Stenos into the workshop, and when they came out they pretended she had blackmailed him.

“It was the circus or prison for me,” he said, and Boss walked him around the camp introducing him, saying, “Look what I’ve caught us.”

But one look at him and everybody knew he joined up because it was better than sneaking around under bleachers and hoping that desperate people had anything worth taking. He looked well and truly worn out the day he fell in with us. He would have died in another year of working alone.

That first night he shook my hand as he passed.

“Stenos,” he said after a beat, like he wasn’t used to giving the name.

(I don’t know what his name was before he came to us. Maybe it really is Stenos; mine’s really George. Maybe each of us has been wearing their real name all this time, with nobody else knowing. Wouldn’t that just be the way?)

“George,” I said. “I’m a barker.”

“Acrobat,” he said. “Someday. I suppose.”

I laughed. “Me too, someday, I suppose.”

He looked me up and down, and then he let go of my hand as he said, “You’ll do well if you try.”

I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t feel like asking. I made myself scarce so as not to give him any more passes at me. I gave him a week until he was screwing Elena. Mean finds mean.

On his way to the trucks he passed Bird, who was dressed for her night’s training on the trapeze. Stenos and Bird both slowed down as they passed, looked one another over, and shrank back like a pair of fighting snakes; they passed on without any other sign of recognition.

(I should have known what it looks like when people are fighting over something precious; that, for sure, I should have known.)

The year Stenos joined up, I got permission from Boss to try out for the trapeze after the girls had finished practice.

“Sure,” Elena said when I told her. She was sitting on the trapeze like a girl on a swing, feet curved like a pair of sickles. Maybe they were frozen that way after so many years. Maybe it hurt her to walk flat-footed on the ground.

She passed back and forth overhead a few times, lazily; she was on the trapeze just for fun.

“What do you want me to do?”

She shrugged and pointed. “You take that one, I’ll take this. Jump, and I’ll catch you.”

She was grinning, and I shivered.

After a long time I said, “Maybe I’ll just stick to tumbling,” and she swung back and forth above me, laughed like a handful of nails.

Some people think Bird fell. I never have.

Stenos didn’t talk much. He carried lumber and strung up canvas and kept to himself. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he never sat with us in the tumblers’ trailer—he was as bad as Bird for keeping away from the rest of us. (Even Elena sat at the night fire, for God’s sake, and if she was on fire none of us would piss on her to put out the flames.)

He wasn’t my idea of a friend. He seemed to be waiting for something better all the time.

(I feared he’d take my place in the tumblers and leave me out in the cold; it was my biggest worry, then.

You don’t see as far as you should.)

I should have paid more attention; Alec fell when I was very young, but you’d think something like that would give you a sense of who was out of their mind.

But I was still young, and Fatima was so lovely in the firelight when she smiled, and the tumblers told me they’d give me a name of my own someday, and what did I know that I was a fool?

How was I to know he had seen the wings?

11.

This is what the wings are like:

They arch just over the wearer’s head when they are closed; they brush the calves of a tall man. When they are open, they are wider than a man is tall, the primary feathers half again as long as an arm; the tops of the arches nearly meet.

Of all the mechanical pieces in the Circus Tresaulti, Boss has taken these into her heart. Here there is no iron cage, no grinding supports. The ribs of these wings are made of bone. (The dead don’t need them any more, and what should she do, let them go to waste?)

She has wrapped them in brass so they shine, and so that no one thinks too long about what makes these wings seem so warm, so real.

Each feather is jigsawed and hammered and smoothed so thin that when it strikes another feather it rings out a clear note. She has constructed them so that, when the wind passes over them, it rings out a triumphant G major seventh. (She knows the chord by heart. She had a life before the drill and the saw; she was the first of them to leave her name behind.)

The gears are small-toothed, and the edges burned with a smoky pattern that looks like the shadow of leaves. (She thought, a long time ago, about adding jewels to look like water drops, but Alec laughed and said, “They’re flashy enough already, don’t you think?” and shook himself like a bathing bird until their bedroom filled with the sweet, clear notes.)

Though they have knobs of gears that attach to the shoulders, though it takes hours to set the joints so the nerves and muscles can move them, everyone sees the wings are not really a machine. They are art; they are skill; they are proof that the world has not abandoned beauty.

Alec was handsome, and had the air of a man who knew he was destined for great things. As soon as Boss saw him she knew what a find she had come across. When Alec was alone in the tent, she approached him and spoke, which is all it has ever taken for her to draw someone in.

Not that any of the rest of them would know it; most of them came looking for her. Alec was the first one of them she ever chose. (The only one, until Stenos, lifetimes later.)

It was for Alec she made the wings.

It was the only gift she ever gave him; it was the only gift she has ever given to someone without a new name attached, the only gift she’s ever given without killing someone first.

With the wings on he was more than whole, and felt it. He dropped from the ceiling and basked in the applause, in the wondering gazes, in the sharp intake of breath when people saw what he was.

He was magnificent. Until.

When Boss ran out from behind the curtain and saw the mess that had been Alec, the wings were bent from the impact, and it looked as though he had tried to cover his face, as if he were shy; as if he no longer wanted to be seen.

Boss does not know when that change happened in him. She was not looking at him when she might have seen it; she assumed he would be happy to be perfect.

In the warehouse, after they had carried the body out, she closed the wings, locking the joints, lacing tight the ribs to hide the copper petals as much as she could.

They are almost the same as any other bundle of pipes and scrap in her workshop. Half a dozen performers have joined the circus since; none of them has given the wings a second glance.

But if you are as single-minded as Bird, or as hungry for glory as Stenos, then you see them.

If you are like them, then when you enter the workshop there is no pile of scrap, no steel table wiped almost clean of blood. There is no terrifying rack of drills and ratchets, no coils of cord to lash your bones back in place. There is no Boss to inflict her will on you, to build you up and wake you with a new name and a body she knows will look good at the center of the stage.

For you, the world narrows to a single point as you step inside the workshop. (This is what happens when you take a step; you are moving closer to something you want.)

For you, the workshop is only the roof that has been pitched over your waiting wings.

12.

The knife thrower was a soldier in the last great war.

“Unofficially,” he says, which sounds like he was a resistance fighter, but truly means he was on the wrong side when the dust settled and the other government was in place.

He has an answer ready, though, when people ask him where he learned to throw. “There were lot of rats in my neighborhood,” he will say, and laugh.

His assistant’s name is Sarah (he thinks; she changes it a lot). She hardly speaks—she’s a little simple—but she’s thin enough that it’s almost impossible to actually strike her with a knife no matter where on the wheel you aim, so he pays her enough from his takings to keep her around. His knives get awfully close to the skin, sometimes; he doesn’t want to imagine what might happen if his next assistant is tubby.

The Circus Tresaulti is camped two miles outside town the day he decides to audition, so he loads the wheel and Sarah in the truck, and drives out into the hills until he reaches the camp.

The camp is a half-circle of two dozen vehicles fanned out behind the tent, vans and trailers and painted wagons lashed down to truck beds. He unloads the wheel carefully—paint is hard to come by if something chips—and Sarah, and pops on the top hat he’s managed to protect from two wars since his soldiering days (the hat collapses, so he can strap it to his back and carry it anywhere). By the time he has the hat on and Sarah is all strapped in, the circus folk have made a little audience around the wheel.

He starts with the patter; he doesn’t believe in wasting time.

“Ladies and gentleman,” he calls out, “prepare to enjoy a feat of death-defying dexterity!”

“We’ve all enjoyed them,” says the brass-covered hunchback, and the strongman says, “You can tell because we’re not dead yet.”

There’s a ripple of laughter among the watching crowd that the knife thrower does not like.

“For the owner of the Circus Tresaulti, I will give my finest performance,” he goes on (no use wasting all his rehearsal). He gives the crowd a quick scan; he sees the tall, slender man who looks like a leader and nods curtly. The man raises an eyebrow, half-smiles, nods back.

The knife thrower clears his throat and throws five knives, one by one, near Sarah. It’s child’s play for him; it’s just a chance for him to make sure the blades are balanced. The first round can go on for ages if the crowd claps after every knife, but this group is just staring at him, so he gets it out of the way.

After the first round he collects the blades from the board, spins the wheel, and walks five paces. Then the knives fly from his hands all at once, thunkthunkthunkthunkthunk into the wood. The last knife slices through the end of Sarah’s ponytail and pins the lock of hair to the board.

Silence greets the big finish, and the knife thrower looks at the tall owner and squints, not understanding.

After what seems like an hour of quiet, a fat woman emerges from the crowd like a puddle of oil. She walks past the knife thrower without looking at him, straight to the board.

“You want a job?” she asks.

Sarah nods.

The woman waves her hand as she turns to go, and a boy jogs forward and starts to undo the straps.

The knife thrower warned people off the Circus Tresaulti every night of the run. “A pile of thieves,” he said. “They took my assistant! They’re a den of tricksters!”

It didn’t stop anyone from going. The knife thrower knew because he bought a ticket every night—you have to check out the competition—and the tent was always full.

People have no loyalty; that’s what it is. That’s the real pity.