Installed in the cockpit of Wanda-Sue, the glass hood left up to provide airflow, Jaxx concentrated on tracking Cyber Circus. Having shaken off the haze of his strange slumber, he felt newly invigorated. Loudest of all was the flight path of Cyber Circus. He could taste it on the air – rancid, caramelised.
“Take us south-east,” he told Das.
“Yes suree.” The navigator pressed the steering rod away from him and, reaching to flip a couple of valve switches, enveloped the cab in steam. Wanda-Sue got hot under the collar and bucked as if straining against a dropped anchor.
Das glanced back. D’Angelus slumbered under his trekker’s hat. He glanced over the other shoulder at Jaxx.
“You know the dusts getting up, dontcha?” The navigator’s voice sounded anxious. “We wanna dive below when we can, but this part of the Stretch is the crust above the old Rongun mines. Tales of swarms aplenty around these parts.”
“Just keep her steady,” said Jaxx, adding softly, “Where the prayers fall, the spirits lead.” A Sirinese proverb. Because just then he’d got the strongest whiff of their prey. And, yes, there it was, floating in the sky off to the west! The circus blip, candy coloured lights streaming from it like a welcome flag.
The stowaway climbed the steps to Herb’s private quarters. Of all of the circus’s interior she had encountered so far, the pustule was the most fantastical. Composed of the same fibrous green as the bulk of Cyber Circus, the pustule sat in its own egg cup of brass filigree, with five ornate steps leading up to a circular door. A pumpkin palace, she decided, hollowed out to house a fairy or a shrivelled nimblejack.
She knocked gently – and was relieved when the sound went unanswered. The handle was a brass gnarl. She tried it. The door clicked open. She stepped inside, and instantly imagined this was how it would feel to step inside an emerald. Pendulous gas lamps hung about walls, exuding a rich green glow. In the centre of the room stood a brass bath. Pipes wreathed around it, concluding in four flower-shaped spouts. A rustic patchwork of clothhod hides lined the floor.
To one side of the room stood a desk with a thick brass writing slab, numerous drawers and letter slots, and an inkwell. The accompanying chair seemed to grow up out of the floor, plush and faintly tumour-like.
On the opposite side of the room was a second round door – leading to a water closet perhaps – and a small stove in one corner, the chimney of which rose up and through a hole in the upper storey and presumably kept on rising. In between these main fixtures, one wall was decorated with tiny clockwork counters, a brace of heavy iron levers, and a large glass globe. Inside floated a rubbery green organ with flesh tubes running off of it. It reminded her of a specimen kept in a jar. She peered in at the thing, mesmerised, leaping back as a thin covering retracted in the centre of the organ, revealing a great eye of dull green glass.
A sound – like something rolling over the metal floor grid outside – caught her attention. She froze. Waited. Nothing intruded.
Relaxing, she felt a new awareness of her filthy skin under the sackcloth robe. She’d sweated in the act of coupling with the Sirinese, kept up that heat while crossing the salt plains to Zan City. Arriving just ahead of dawn, she’d come upon the circus in its last half-hour of slumber and slipped inside. Traversing the huge circus ring, she’d seen the rigs and unlit spotlights craning overhead like long thin birds and, way up, a trapeze, the swing of which seemed to keep time with some underlying rise and fall of breath.
Backstage had been curtained off by a large steel screen. She’d laid her hands then ear against it. Had she heard a faint heartbeat? Unable to progress further, she’d wandered the circus ring once more, only to hear the hushed arrival of strangers at the tent’s entrance. They had come in, strange elfin folk. A pig man and a red-skinned Jeridian woman, doing their best to carry a girl who sparkled with living colour. In their wake came a HawkEye soldier. Thin as a reed. Magnificently tall. He appeared worn out in every way, from the faded frockcoat he wore to the angry adjustments of his bloody eyepiece. His emotions too – she sensed those were awkward and weary.
Approaching the steel screen, the Jeridian had left the girl in the pig’s care to work a key into the lock. The screen drew back on well-oiled runners and the small gang made their way backstage.
She’d followed at a distance, through the mess of props and stage flats to a drop of flimsy fabric serving as a wall along one side. She’d watched them slip behind the gauze, their outlines dancing behind the curtain like outsized shadow puppets.
As dawn broke, and the crew began to yawn and scratch and rise, she’d been the first to use the lift rig. No one noticed her step out onto the second level where Herb’s private quarters were housed, or when, finding the ringmaster already risen and absent from home, she’d slipped up the brass stairs and through the circular door.
Now she took a long deep breath, inhaling the scent of brewing coffee from the canteen below. It wide-eyed her slightly. But her shoulders and feet still felt world-weary from her travels. It didn’t seem so very strange then to twist the stopcock and have steaming, greenish water glug out of the flower faucets. The temperature inside the room rose a few degrees; she luxuriated in the noise and feel of the piping water. When the tub was full, she closed off the stopcock and undressed, her robe and grotesque mask things to be shed.
She fed a toe into the bath, stepped in and lowered herself down with a pleasurable gasp. The green water immersed her. She slid below the surface.
“A mermaid.” Rind nosed at the tiny window. The glass was thick and densely entwined with brass piping, restricting the view.
“Nah, a nimblejack fresh out the grave.” Tib’s eyes were bright buttons. “I seen it moving. Smooth it goes. Not rumble tumble like me and she and thee.”
The second girl, Ol, made a queer pop-pop sound as she crept down the roof, beetle-like. “It’s a Saint. Come to catch sinners and chew down on their bones.”
“We’re good ‘uns. Let’s leave it be,” whispered Rind. She clattered away from the window and rolled off a short way. Unfolding, she snouted the air for any indication of danger.
Ol was less timid. “I ain’t hiding in my shell. I got a blessing owed me since them up in the heavens let Papa breed us this way. The Saint needs to say he’ll take my soul on up when I die. Other two of yous as well if he’s willing.”
“You’s gonna roll on in there and ask it of the one that’s bathing?” Tib became edgy, tipping back onto the base of his shell, segmented limbs waggling. He lifted his face, jabbed out a stubby pink tongue and nodded. “Steam’s in there and the stink of soap shavings.” Fascination drew him to the steps towards the circular door. He stretched a pincer towards the handle.
“Mermaid’ll dazzle you with her shine,” Rind hissed. She put one leathery foot onto the first step however.
“First sin you’ll be judged on is prying where bogey noses ain’t wanted,” chimed in Ol. She followed his lead though, pushing ahead of Rind.
Tib turned the handle and pushed open the door. Each child blinked, grew accustomed to the light and hobbled forward.
“Hello, my beautiful boneless children.” The woman soaped her naked breasts with Herb’s washcloth, bathing in the ringmaster’s tub as if she was no less of a fixture in the house than the stove, desk, or mechanical motherboard.
FIFTEEN
The sleep of a HawkEye was a ragged, bruising experience. To the government who had commissioned the thirty HawkEye, each in charge of their own platoon, it seemed wise to keep their metalmorphosed soldiers on constant alert. With no facility to close down the implant, the HawkEyes entered a world of endless sight – something only the Saints should be blessed with, so the religious element of Humock had complained. And certainly it did seem the HawkEye acquired the perspective of gods; the eyepiece granted them the ability to process visuals in seconds, to zoom into 1000° degree magnification, and to access multiple views on impulse. But hardwiring the soldiers’ brains into a state of eternal visual stimuli was not without consequence. Far from retaining their elite status beyond the Civil War, HawkEyes turned drunkard, addict, lunatic and suicidal. In the past three years since he’d joined Cyber Circus, Hellequin had never encountered another like him, and he was glad of the fact. The mess of hardwiring in his brain might dull his emotions, but it never entirely erased the suffering. Meanwhile, the resultant sleep deprivation served to exasperate the condition.