Midway Relics and Dying Breeds: A Tor.Com Original (2 page)

“Ansley.” Bay emerged from the space between two wheel-wagons as she spoke, her brown hair a tangled veil across her brow and eyes. She was a pretty thing, all strong limbs and eyes that seemed too big for her face, thanks to some cunningly engineered bone structure arranged for her while she was in utero. Bay was carnival-born, same as me, but her mother took a few years to “find herself” out among the townies. Don’t know if she ever did “find herself.” She found Bay’s father, and she found some semilegal genetic shell games, and she found Bay. Lost her, too, or maybe left her: Bay fetched up in one of the cars on the Ferris wheel during a high-traffic night when we were camped up near Heddlebrook, putting on a show for the folk who didn’t even know how much they needed one. She was just an infant then, but she came with a mem chip that had all her information encoded on it, even down to the custom modifications on her genotype. That was all we needed to know for sure that she was family.

We never did see Bay’s mama after that. She did what she could for her little girl—she brought her home—and then she was gone. I guess, for her, that was doing the best that she could do.

“Yes, Bay?” I turned to face her, the curry brush still in my hand. Trick riding has been illegal for longer than I’ve been alive, classified as a form of animal cruelty, but owning horses is allowed, and we haven’t been able to bring ourselves to kill the ones we have with kindness. The daughter of a high-strung mustang doesn’t learn to be a wild thing just because you take her out of harness.

Maybe that comparison could apply to Bay as well. She flicked her hair out of her eyes with one hand and said, “Davo wants to see you.”

“Davo wants a lot of things,” I said genially. “I don’t for the most part care about what Davo wants.”

“He says it’s about Grandmamma.”

I froze, the levity dropping out of me like a half-filled balloon dropping out of the sky. “What about her?”

“He didn’t say.” Bay shrugged broadly. “He said to tell you I could finish with the ponies, and you needed to come to his tent right now, because you need to know what’s going on.”

That explained her irritated expression. Bay was a wizard with our twencen attractions, patched and rebuilt monstrosities that they were, but there was little call for a mechanic out here in the woods. Not unless one of the blimps had broken down, and we had a separate maintenance crew for those. And none of that made her even half-qualified to deal with animals.

“All right,” I said, and offered her the curry brush. “The horses still need to be wiped down before you let them loose. Billie isn’t going to move for at least eight hours, but they should get a chance to stretch their legs while we’re stationary.”

“I don’t see why,” she grumbled, and moved past me to take up the grooming duties where I’d left off. I watched for a moment—not long enough that she would take offense at being spied on, just enough to be sure that she remembered what she was supposed to do—before turning and walking into the forest, toward the distant sound of camp.

*   *   *

Even the densest forest has a surprising amount of open space hidden among the tree trunks and the underbrush. There are natural clearings formed by the competing roots of the towering giants that grow stretching ever toward the sun, and there are the unnatural clearings, places where old pollution and the toxins of a near-forgotten world have blighted the soil. Even those will be gone in a few decades, as remediation reaches them, but for now they provide a valuable stopping point for people like us, cutting our way through the land while trying to minimize our impact. If someone who passes this way tomorrow can tell that we were here, we didn’t do our jobs correctly.

We run on tradition as much as we do on solar and biodiesel and good, honest sweat. Youngest cousins are coddled and carried, learning the ways of the rope and the road until they’re old enough to start earning their keep. Younger cousins are the wild things of the midway. They range in age from seven to seventeen, and they work as hard as any of us, even if most of them aren’t doing anything more than unskilled labor. Above them stand the cousins, no modifiers needed, who manage the complex systems that keep us all in business, like me with the animals, or my cousin Carrie with the Ferris wheel, which she could probably take apart in her sleep if she felt the need.

And over us stand the Big Men, whose word is law.

Not everyone will be a Big Man. It’s inherited as much as earned, based on a complicated balance of skill and seniority and what your parents once did for the midway. Davo became one of the carnival’s Big Men when his father retired to the Bone Yard up near Portland. Uncle Ren offered to let me retire with him, even though I’m twenty years and two children away from earning my place in the Bones, but I refused. Everyone would know it was because I was getting special treatment, and because once, I had turned down my cousin when he asked me for my hand. He’d known that Davo would make things hard for me now that he was going to be a Big Man and I was still going to be myself. Uncle Ren had been trying to save me.

He didn’t understand how much I loved my charges within the carnival, the horses and the mules and Billie—maybe especially Billie, who would be mulch and gene frags by now if we hadn’t come along exactly when we did, if my Uncle Ren hadn’t foolishly believed that gene-cruncher when he swore that an adult female Indricothere would be no bigger than a bull elephant. I’d already accessed the network data on her species, seen recreated and simulated footage of their herds walking proud across plains that existed before mankind figured out how to come down from the trees. I’d already been in love. There was no way that I could leave her behind, not even to protect myself from the world of pain that I was walking into. So I’d taken her care onto my own shoulders, and there it had remained as she grew, giving me the kind of loyalty that only comes from big dumb herbivores just smart enough to know that it’s good to have a clever keeper.

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.