The Darcy Bee

The Darcy Bee

Darcy McFinn crept out of bed early and slipped out of the apartment carrying a backpack heavy with several changes of clothing, a jar of coins, her stepbrother's minicomputer and his entire dime-disk music collection, and fifty dollars she took from his wallet as he slept. He owed her the money, and she'd decided he owed her the computer, which could practically sing and dance and which she was sure he used for the illegal businesses he was in. She took it to get back at him for the black eye that was fading and for years of similar indignities, though she'd always tried to give as good as she got. The circus was in town, in the trampled park beyond the verge of tired trees dusted over by traffic, and she was going to leave with it.
She knew it was there because she'd been awakened in the night by the low growl of truck engines, the dull repeating bell of hooks clanging against metal poles, the snort and stomp of the Miraculous Calculating Elephants whom some said understood the very bend of time and gravity, and the faint but unmistakable smell of bacon frying at two a.m.
The circus came every fall, with animals that no longer lived in the wild and with some that had never lived before anywhere. One of them, the Sanskrit Panda, manifested words in some ancient language on the backs of her paws, on a smooth surface like a large fingernail. The words had no real meaning, particularly since there was only one Sanskrit Panda, and therefore no one with whom she could converse. She'd been placed with real pandas for a while, but did not get on with them at all, the interactive text on the edge of the panda's invisible force-border had told Darcy the first time she had seen the circus, several years ago, when she was eight. Darcy didn't know why they hadn't made the panda manifest English or at least some living Chinese dialect, but the ways of scientists were inscrutable, a fact she'd absorbed in school.
Most of the unique beasts had been saved by animal rights groups, but none could be released into the wild, since there was no wild, and no original habitat. It was found that the creatures were extraordinarily stimulated by travel and by interaction with a variety of people, and so this circus had come about, run by slightly shady folk. A travelling animal museum. No one knew what would come of it. Hardly anyone cared, for that matter. Except Darcy, who had skipped school for a whole week every year to spend every minute at the circus. And no one had really cared about that either, though it was a good excuse for her stepfather to punish her. She knew that they only wanted her at home because of the money she brought in from various agencies just for existing.
Darcy's favorite was a very large fox with snapping black eyes and a tendency to repeat nursery rhymes. Somehow its mouth had been reworked to produce speech, albeit slurred and halting, and perhaps because it sang in English Darcy liked it best. It always sang, in a yipping sort of voice, but those industrious scientists, ever hard at work, had determined that it never sang anything original. It was against the law to tamper with these animals in any way, and the fox's originating lab had been burned to the ground by animal rightists after they had liberated all the creatures inside, so centuries of scientist-hours had perished, and the scientists had of course all gone to ground, so to speak, so they would not end up in prison. Therefore no one knew if the fox was supposed to have been entertainment for toddlers or attention-getting teaching tools sold through online catalogues or spies trained to communicate in coded messages. It did not matter any more. The fox sang.
Darcy reflected, as she hurried past the boarded-up stores on 7th Street in the chilly pre- dawn fog, that she didn't know if she'd still like the fox. She had just turned thirteen and her memories of the fox suddenly seemed quaint and sad and reminded her that she was not a child any more. She was grown up, she had to get away from Tod and her mother who let her stepdad hit her, and she had a plan.
Magdalena, the Spanish Painted Lady was her friend, along with Dan, the Pretzel Fellow from Piterka, which was in Russia. They would help her, and hide her, until the circus left town. She was sure they would. She had always thought she might be like them in some way because before he died when she was five her real father had always told her that she was different. That something had been done to her. Something her mother would never talk about.
Over the years Darcy had noticed that the Painted Lady drank too much from the gin bottle she kept on her dressing table in the damp-smelling tent. Behind her shabby folding screen, always draped with bright clothes, she let Darcy sit and watch the pictures change on parts of her body that the public rarely saw while she got ready for her shows. Dan the Pretzel Fellow swallowed something from a vial every day that he said kept him stretchy, and got in a bad mood if she asked about his past. But they were still her friends.
"Hey!"
It was Tod, two blocks behind her. Darcy broke into a run, her backpack bouncing, Tod's computer stabbing her with each step. He didn't know she understood a lot of the stuff it could do. But it looked like he knew she had it.
She turned the corner that led to the park, scrambled down a hill, and ducked into a storm drain. As Tod pounded overhead, she heard an explosion.
It seemed to come from the park.

Sent By:Kathleen Ann Goonan on Monday, September 29, 1997 at 15:19:47.

Her heart seemed to stop within her. Through her mind's eye flashed memories of the Circus Folk--the Sanskrit Panda, the Ringmaster with the Thousand Voices, the Song Fox. Each of them was utterly still in the eye of her mind, though they came together in a single movement, like images in a diorama, or a round robin. Each of them could see her, but as though departing, in a "train." She had heard of trains. She waved.
Tod was gone, or too silent to sense.
She stuck her head out of the storm drain, and stared into the inverted cup of the sky, which was purpling slowly into its assigned dawn mode. Pterodactyl phantoms sped in every direction from the sun to stitch the edges down. Darcy waved automatically, then cowered. Tod might be hiding in the covert, or he might not have been chasing her at all. He may only have been giving her a wryneck halloo on his way to work, which would have been almost as bad. Right now, within the coigns of the city, he might already be on his dark horse, fit for the day's ride to the edges of the world to gather in the slain.
Fortunately she had not alarmed her clothing, and was able to creep silently over the crest of the small hill, from which point she could see the vast translucent circus tent. It had been breached, clearly; fumes shot into the open air; screaming--of which she had hardly been conscious--continued to be generated by the external vendors.
But Tommy the Fire Engine was already on the scene, and had begun to coat the lesion with analgesic foam. For the moment, it was all right, the Circus was intact, as were Darcy's chances of escaping into the rest of the world. She slipped closer.
"Hi," she said to Tommy. "You are a fine and efficient Fire Engine."
Tommy's headlight eyes furred, blinked.
From deep inside, he whirred a greeting.
She slipped around his polished metal carapace, past a deactivated, button-eyed Sheriff clutching an Animal Rights Bible in one immobile Long Arm, through the airlock and into the Circus.
A Miraculous Calculating Elephant extended a prosthesis, which Darcy inserted gratefully into one socket, while carefully--though only for show--giving Tod's minicomputer access through another. Obediently, she updated the bend of the world, the doppler shift of the Moon, the unendingly pious reiterations of gravity norm, even though she did not need the Elephant update, nor any help from the tiny sanctioned mind within the synth block. She was good at remembering, after all. The reiterations sang down the lines of her blood, the bend turned along her axis, she could hear the Moon sink within her.
Some of the smaller creatures had gone into shock from the explosion. But they were being tended to by a couple of demure humans, so Darcy continued inwards to the center of the great tent, where the Ringmaster turned.
She jumped onto one of the small toy horses whose task it was to keep time with the Ringmaster as he spun slowly, particolored, shifting the kaleidoscope of his tongue. At the moment he was singing a round.
"Ah," he said finally, "if it's not my dear dark Darcy, come to dangle hope down. Do, Darcy, do do do."
She ignored him, pressing her knees gently against the sides of the red lacquered horse to steer it towards the far side of the tent. The acrid scents of burning plastic and scorched metal mingled with the odorous warmth of sawdust and, as she drew nearer, the rose-petal talc that Magdalena dusted liberally between her three breasts.
"Ah now darling, don't, ah don't . . . "
The Painted Lady's husky voice cut through the high-pitched whine of alarms and Tommy's droning motor. Ahead of her, through the lifting veil of smoke and golden dust, Darcy could just make out Magdalena's etiolated form kneeling beside something that twitched and gave off showers of crimson sparks.
". . . not yet, someone will be here soon. ah no--"
Darcy's heart beat faster. She slapped the horse's cheek and slid from it, scarcely waiting for it to halt. "Magdalena!"
The Painted Lady looked up, her eyes filled with tears. Tiny mirrors implanted in her cheeks gave back Darcy's reflection, so that the girl could see her own eyes, wide and frightened, and her own hands trembling as she sank beside the small figure moving spasmodically amidst a tangle of oil-stained sawdust and shattered bits of circuitry.
"It was a tick." Magdalena dipped her hand into the folds of her trousers and withdrew a sphere, a tiny translucent scarlet globe with a watery sheen. "It must have been there for a week or more, I heard it in the night but I couldn't find it, they put it behind his ear -"
She held up the gleaming orb and squeezed it. In the dust between them the Song Fox writhed, its liquid eyes rolling wildly as it worked its jaws and whined.
"There were three jolly huntsmen,
So I heard them say," it sang.
"And they would go a-hunting
All on a summer's day"

The fox's head jerked; blood threaded from its muzzle to stain the girl's fingers. Darcy blinked back tears as she stroked its matted fur. "Is it - will it be all right?"
Magdalena shook her head. "Hush," she whispered. She glanced quickly to where the Ringmaster paused in its orbit, its tongue whipping back and forth above its head like a cobra seeking its prey; then lifted her arm so that the voluminous folds of her blouse cascaded down around the fox like a curtain. "Listen -"
Darcy lowered her head, close enough that she could smell the creature's musk, over-ripe grapes and new leather. The Song Fox opened its mouth wide, as though yawning, its tongue unfurling as it sang in a croaking tone.
"All the day they hunted
But nothing could they find
But a ship a-sailing, a-sailing with the wind"

"Darcy!" the Ringmaster's voice rang out, and Darcy felt the cold bite of its will, that steely touch of a construct's consciousnss that always made her think of her stepfather. "Don't, Darcy! Don't, don't, don't."
She shuddered, and Magdalena draped her billowing sleeve over her shoulder. "Can you make sense of the singing, darling?" she asked, her voice low but urgent, "the songs? I can't, and Dan swears the implant's already damaged its retrievals."
"Yes," said Darcy. "I can make sense of them."
"One said it was a ship," the fox warbled, its voice damaged in the world it continued to limn faithfully, though more than half blind. Darcy nudged her fingers beneath its head, to feel a ridge of smooth warm bone protruding from the skull. "The other he said nay / The third said that it was a house / With the chimney blown away "
She withdrew her hand, looked down to see it coated with the same iridescent film that coated the red bead in Magdalena's palm. Abruptly the fox flung its legs out, as though it were going to lunge across the floor. Its black tongue lapped convulsively at the sawdust, then grew still. Darcy stared at it, as though disbelieving; then slowly brought her hand to her face. The oily film gleamed faintly upon her skin. She sniffed it--nothing--and very tentatively brought her hand to her mouth, until her knuckle rested against her lower lip. She extended her tongue, tasting the grammar of her own salt sweat, dry sawdust; and something else, an icy sweetness like marzicaine. Faint as the toy horse's calliope footsteps she could hear the fox's voice chiming in her head.
"And all the night they hunted,
And nothing could they find
But the moon a-gliding,
A-gliding with the wind.

And one said it was the moon,
The other he said nay;
The third one said it was the world
And half of it cut away."

Sent By:John Clute and Elizabeth Hand on Wednesday, October 8, 1997 at 15:36:01.

The next site on the circus's route was Brown Town, in the State of October. That wasn't the name on the signs and the maps, but the name the circus folk used. Darcy had learned that her home was Orange Town, in the State of Early Fall, and that the circus's annual course would end and begin again in the place beyond Brown Town, the city state of Midwinter. She asked Magdalena why the city wasn't called Black Town, and was surprised when her friend hushed her and turned away just like her mother. For the first time, she wondered what one ran away with when one ran away from the circus. The singing in the back of her head, sparking some circuitry that hadn't been connected yet, hinted at one possibility.
It was all very well to be with the circus, but she had to become of it. She was too tiny - though agile and strong for her age and bodyform - to be one of the roustabouts who drove the tent from place to place and corralled it into ballooning up at the sites. The accident in Orange Town, still the subject of much heated debate and exchanges of blame, was generally thought to have been the fault of drunken roustabouts, and several had perished while getting the tent under control. The Ringmaster had calculated that only expert hands would be hired to replace them.
She had the bodyform for an aerialist, but a battery of coordination tests revealed a hitherto unnoticed imperfection in her balance. The Flying McPhail frowned at the read-out, and asked her to reperform some of the tests, clucking that the mechanics must be on the fritz again, but the stubborn imperfection came out no matter how the tests were rearranged. The Flying McPhail, who wore kilts and a sporran though Darcy understood he was a Welshman, asked her if she had ever had any serious augmentation, military-industrial strength. She owned up only to the metalwork all the kids had after their Eleven Plus Exam.
"Not metal," said the aerialist. "This would be a bonding liquid."
"My father said I was special."
"All fathers say their little girls are special, love. Still, you might be."
She would have thought about it more, but Song Fox started up again - passing some rhyme along from Milder to Maulder to Fessel to Fose - and she couldn't concentrate. She was danced away from the Flying MacPhail, out of his caravan, towards the animal cages. Provisionally, until she found her metier, she was assistant assistant animal maintenance anyway. She busied herself.

**************
She had noticed them first when the circus reached Brown Town. In the bustle and organised chaos of putting up the tent and setting up the stalls, they alone had nothing to do. They were regular humans, tough-looking, middle-aged men, with drab black vests and old jeans, hard-faced, always smoking or jacking-up. Sometimes, if asked, they deigned to put a battered boot on a guy rope, but they were mostly left alone. Darcy guessed they might be the roustabouts disgraced after the explosion, but none of them had living bandages or burn tattoos. She didn't like them, though she knew she was being unfair. They reminded her too much of her stepfather.
When she asked Magdalena who the lazy bums were, the Tattooed Woman laughed.
"Why, Darcy darling, those are the clowns!"
That made her look again. She had seen them in the ring so many times, falling on their bums, piling into and out of crates, making rude noises, pantomiming mad wrestling matches. Out of their clown suits and make-up, they weren't whole.
Violating ASCAP copyright, Song Fox cut painfully into her mind, screeching Cole Porter's "Be a Clown."
For the first time, the nonsense seemed to be genuinely directed at her, to be telling her something she should actually act on. But she wasn't sure. When Song Fox stuttered through "Four and Twenty Blackbirds," it wasn't a recipe. It must be a coincidence. She thought Song Fox was barred on some basic level from using copyright material, though. To sing "Be a Clown," even the three words of the title, violated a fundamental parameter of the animal's enhanced existence. It must mean something.
That evening, before the first performance, she went purposefully to the clowns' dressing tent. The men, who were playing some laser-tag card game, were outside, turned by a sudden dispute over the rules into two hostile factions, alternately restraining and encouraging their champions in a fist-fight.
"Bozo," said one, bloodying another's nose. "Fucking Bozo."
Darcy slipped unnoticed into the tent. The empty clown costumes, many-colored and crawling with ticks, hung from a rail, empty happy fleshfaces like deflated balloons attached to the neckpieces. All the faces had exaggerated smiles and sad eyeholes. She was drawn to the rack, and felt the thick material, the bonded living matter of the faces and hands, and the smooth synthetics of the body-costumes.
"What are you doing, squirt?"
For a moment, as her heart clutched, she thought it was Tod. The tone was exactly her stepbrother's, as was the vicious neck-pinch grip.
She was turned round. Her captor was a young man, about Tod's age, and with Tod's meanness about his dark eyes, but he was not her stepbrother. He was one of the clown men, probably the youngest of the bunch. He wore a T-shirt ripped down the sides and laced with surgical suture, and one of his ears was gone, replaced with a mechanic with a fin. Tucked behind the fin, which seemed just for decoration, was an unlit cigarette.
"You're the fox girl?"
Darcy nodded.
The clown man's upper lip curled.
"I stay away from the animals."
Darcy expected Song Fox to pop into her head, as it often did when mentioned. There was only an echo in her skull.
"What's your name? Patsy?"
"Darcy."
"You should be a Patsy. We need one for the act. Last one wore out. Drowned in a pie. Got big laughs."
The clown man let her go.
"I'm Half-Pinch," he said. "My Dad's Pinch."
Half-Pinch stood by a particular costume. The face was a little like his, but bigger, bloated, thickly banded with reds and greens and topped by a mauve Huron nine inches high.
"Soon, when Dad goes to Happyland in Black Town, this'll be mine."
The costume's arms rose, empty arms reaching out to Half-Pinch. The ticks and bugs inside gave it motion. Even the floppy face changed expressions.
Now, Song Fox sang again. It took her seconds to recognise the song. Then she laughed.

Sent By:Kim Newman on Thursday, October 16, 1997 at 10:53:55.

"What's so funny?" said Half-Pinch.
She quoted the song. "Like clowns deserting a sinking circus, their loving ways will always shirk us --"
"That's not funny at all," said Half-Pinch.
"You're all runaways, aren't you?" said Darcy. She thought again of Tod. She belonged with the animals, Tod with the clowns. The circus, like the world, was always cut in two. Perhaps that was the secret -- perhaps each thing was halved and halved again, half a world and half a circus, half a fox and half a girl, half a song and half a dream. She should look at halves now -- what would half a clown be? Half a man and half a costume, of course. In Half-Pinch she was already looking at half a clown.
"Chase-aways is more like it," said the clown. "Every circus is packed with them."
"You and your dad? Your mom chased you away?" The fox was feeding her impressions, she knew. And the effect on the clown was instantaneous. He grew crestfallen, collapsing into a shape like that of the draped costumes.
"That's a long time ago, kiddo," said Half-Pinch, falsely cheery now. Ticks had crawled up his cheeks to drink at the tears gathering in the corner of his eyes.
The ticks behave so differently here, she thought, fingering the Nano-grooming Tick-Comb in her pocket. They loved and supported the clowns, but hated the animals. She left the comb there in her pocket, hidden.
She'd stopped being afraid of the clown now. Another song rose in her, and this time she opened her mouth and let it sing through her, though it was in another language:
" -- il posteriore facie de la luna --"
"What's that supposed to mean?" snorted Half-Pinch in a cheerful way, plainly grateful to be distracted from his wallow. "The Ass-Face of the Moon?"
"Something like that," she said. She laughed again and danced away, back through the parted curtain of the tent-flap, out into the night, where the boozing clowns were back at their card-game. Then past them, back to Magdalena's tent.

*********
She forgot Half-Pinch's giddy mistranslation of her song until the next day, when she went to retrieve Tod's computer from where she'd hidden it in the straw of the Calculating Elephant's cage. The Elephant was on its side, quivering in some dream, blocking her access to the hiding place, its reek like armor, and as she contemplated its vast crenellated skin she thought, The Ass-Face of the Moon, that's it exactly. It described the Elephant's hide.
And the fox chimed in with a riddle: "How could an Elephant possibly Hide?"
As if hearing the fox's voice too the Elephant shifted and shuddered, not waking, but in dream-segue. Her way to the baffles of straw was made clear. She dug out Tod's computer and sat with it in a pallet of straw beside the stinking, quaking Elephant. The computer had grown tiny limbs from its long exposure to the animals, with furry knuckles and useless opposable thumbs too distant from its fingers. Panicked and distraught, it tried to claw her, and she had to spend a long while soothing it with gentle hands and cooing voice before she could boot up.
When the spheroids appeared on the screen she began shifting them in and out of place, letting one loom larger, hiding another behind its twin, altering the spin and wobble of a third. The game came so naturally to her. She was astonished at how she'd let Tod control these adjustments until so recently. These fine-tunings of the world, of the gossamer nets of gravity and orbital decay that yearned to be done and rewarded her with so much calm in the doing. But perhaps it was only her proximity to the Calculating Elephant that made her touch so light, her recalibrations so effortless. Perhaps the Elephant was really doing the work. It twitched and murmured like a world beset by earthquakes.
"A talent for eclipse," sang the fox as she played. "Eluding and elision/ reluctant in revision/ but thriving in their midst/ no reason for running/the moon's no more cunning/they'd rather be out sunning/but living in eclipse."
"The circus is larger since you've come, girl," said the Ringmaster from behind her. She'd been asbsorbed in the work and hadn't heard him enter the cage.
"Always half in eclipse," whispered the fox.
"Have you tried to circumnavigate the circus recently?" the Ringmaster continued. "Can't be done anymore. "We left OrangeTown for BrownTown and took Orange with us. We're that big now."
"It's not me," she said.
The Ringmaster only nodded at the tapping of her fingers on the computer and smiled. The computer's little fingers stroked and grasped at hers, goading her to continue.
"Soon there won't be anything to run away from, or to," said the Ringmaster.
She didn't answer.
"I met your brother this morning," said the Ringmaster. "He's fallen in with the clowns."

Sent By:Jonathan Lethem on Tuesday, October 21, 1997 at 10:42:19.

The fingers growing from the computer pinched Darcy's palms sharply. She gasped and rubbed her hands together.
"Not welcome news, eh, Darcy, my girl? said the Ringmaster, his tall top hat reflecting in her screen as he bent closer. "But as you know, there's room for all." He cleared his throat and switched to a soft, wheedling voice, the voice of her mother when she wanted Darcy to run out for cigarettes. His kaleidoscope tongue muted to gold-green stripes as she watched him lick his lips in the mirroring screen, as if looking at what was happening gave him a hunger. "And what's this we're working on?"
One of the furred hands blanked the screen. The Calculating Elephant's groan shook the frail translucent walls; her trunk thrashed wildly, narrowly missing the Ringmaster, and she belched forth awful fumes. The Ringmaster retreated, holding his nose.
Darcy rebooted and the elephant calmed, re-linking. Without hesitation Darcy changed one of the values of the spheroids. Gradually, they all transmuted from sunset-red to gold-green stripes. "That's what," she said.
But the computer was no longer safe here. The tiny hands typed "Help us, Darcy." Then they pulled the lid down and folded themselves atop one another in a cupped, meditational mien.
Darcy tapped the nano-comb in her pocket. Next she ought to groom all her animals. She had quite a little box of the swarming ticks now. But there was no time. She had to talk to Magdalena, whom she had not seen in days. Her dressing room had disappeared or maybe she just didn't remember exactly where it was. She slid the computer into the large pocket of the old army coat she wore in the constant chill of the tent, which was the chill of Brown Town, of bare trees, of swift early twilights.
Darcy found Dan stretched out thin and long, his limbs bent sharply to fit onto the bunk, his torn clothes splashed with neon laser tag paint. "The clowns," he said mournfully. "They can be cruel. I should know better than to gamble with them. I do not return to my original form any more and they find it quite amusing to tie me into knots. Something has been wrong ever since you came, Darcy."
"I'm sorry," she said. Maybe the new color scheme of the spheroids would help, though that was doubtful.
Dan's smile was quite thin. "It is not your fault, kiddo. Now that I think back , I believe it may have started when you would least suspect a thing like this, when we were in Green Town in the State of Early Spring, with cherry blossoms so heavy on the trees that they reminded me of home and made my throat ache. I realized that the moon was not waxing when it should. I could not tell if anyone else noticed. We are always so busy in Green Town. The children love us there. It is a frenzy. Frenzy is the word?
The lines of his face were so distorted that Darcy felt an ache too. His ears drooped like a hound's. "Where is Magdalena?"
Dan ran his fingers through his thick white hair and pulled out a tick that was larger than most, a tiny golden orb. He handed it to Darcy and she cupped it in her hand. "What is this?"
"What does it look like? A bus token of course. I won it from the clowns. This caused them much irritation. Please do not bother me any more, kiddo. Maybe we are in Black Town now and do not know it. I wish to mope now in private. Mope is the word?"
Darcy never left the big top. After passing aerialists spinning through the air from swing to swing, she found she was walking on a street. Four stories above her a man balanced on a high wire strung between two brown brick buildings. The sky--or the roof of the tent, so far it seemed like sky--was gray, and the chill in the air threatened snow. Two gargoyles perched on a nearby wall, and flexed their wings as she passed. She heard footsteps behind her and turned. It was Half-Pinch.
"Hey, can I go with you?" he asked.
"You can try," she said.
On the corner ahead next to an open air market where the vendor's breaths puffed out white in the chill Brown Town air, she saw a sign that said Bus Stop. She remembered buses. At least she thought she did.
A man was standing on the corner. His song became clear as she walked the last few steps to where he stood, tapping out the time with a stick.
"Won't you please put a penny in the old man's hat?
If you haven't got a penny
A ha-penny will do
If you haven't got a ha-penny then God Bless You."
She felt in her pockets but there was only the comb, the orb, the computer, and the tightly closed box of ticks.
East of the sun and west of the moon, whispered the song fox in reply. West of the moon. The west is the best. Westward ho!
"What's he mumbling about?" complained Half-Pinch, coming up close behind her, and the fox words faded.
"That's what I'm trying to find out," said Darcy. A red cabriolet drawn by two ostriches approached and stopped for her. She put the tick into a hole on its side that said FARE PLEASE and the door slid open. Darcy climbed in and it slid shut, catching Half-Pinch's finger so that he howled. The ostriches took off at a fast gait, leaving Half-Pinch cursing, and rounded a corner.
The ride went on for a long while. There seemed no end of the circus. Sometimes there were blocks of brownstone buildings where children stopped playing stickball and watched with sullen faces as the cabriolet passed. A few minutes later they circled round a ring where Darcy thought she saw exact doubles of the animals in her care, the pathetic face of the Sanscrit Panda as it stared autistically at its hands; and maybe even . . .that flash of red! She leaned out the window. But no. The song fox lived in the outer world no longer.
It may be half a world, and it may be in eclipse, she reflected. But it seemed as if the circus was repeating and repeating itself, spewed down some new space where there was room for time to splice again and again. What had Tod been up to with his games? Had she interrupted something important? A color--it was like a color--deep within her mind fizzed, like a firework fountain. She remembered the balance problem, then. There was some connection.
The fox sang But when you're only halfway up/you're neither up nor down.
The ostriches stopped suddenly at the corner of Bailey and Ringling. She opened the door and debarked into a street filled with the smell of beet soup and dark bread baking. She climbed the steps of 3-7-11, right in front of her. The heavy door creaked when she opened it and she walked down a dark hallway with peeling wallpaper and knocked on the door that inscribed, beneath a large star, MAGDALENA, THE PAINTED LADY.
Magdalena cracked the door open. "Oh, Darcy darling! Come in! What took you so long?" She'd only grabbed a netted shawl to answer the door and was naked to the waist. Through the shawl Darcy saw that Magdalena's breasts shone with many small half-moons against her brown skin. The room smelled of a kerosene heater.
"What's happening, Magdalena?" she asked, as the Painted Lady poured herself a large glass of whisky and snuggled onto a couch where it was plain she'd been lying for quite some time, wrapping her patchwork skirt around her bare feet. Were they still under the big top or not? Behind Magdalena, through a small dirty window, she saw snowflakes falling thick.
"Darcy," said Magdalena, taking a thoughtful swig, "we'll just have to look at the evidence now, won't we?"

Sent By:Kathleen Ann Goonan on Thursday, October 23, 1997 at 16:49:26.

"Evidence?" Darcy questioned. "Of what? Has there been a crime?"
"That's all too likely," said the Magdalena. "But who is the criminal, and who the victim?"
Darcy tried to think, but the Fox was singing too loud.
" ... sumer is icumen in, lhude sing cuckoo ..."
She tried to think of a muzzle, and shut off the noise. It was a Moment, like wobbling upright on her bike for the first time or mastering a magic trick. This was something she knew how to do.
"It's me," she said. "The fox is part of me. Something from it joined with something in me."
Magdalena nodded. "You're special all right."
"I'm just a girl who wanted to join the circus."
"There's more to it than that. Why did you want to come?"
Orange balloons were floating up through the snow. A distant band played 'Entrance of the Gladiators' on tubas and kazoos. It was the circus's national anthem.
"It called to me. The sawdust ..."
"The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd?"
Darcy laughed, then realised it was an old joke.
"I don't think you really ran away, love. I think you came back."
Darcy held her head. She was dizzy. Thinking about her father -- which she had been, for no reason she could understand - always set her off balance. Something was uncoiling in her mind, springing up around the silent fox, erecting itself like a big top. Numbers flashed, counting down. A package opened, cartoon paper uncurling.
A voice, not the fox: "Darcy darling daughter, if you're accessing this as you approach menarche, then I am either dead or disappeared. I'm profoundly sorry. Your mother is an admirable woman in many ways, but you take after me. I have given you something, more than the genetic heritage most fathers bequeath their daughters. You should not feel lonely, for you aren't the first generation of your kind. But you are special. Some of that I can take credit for. But much of it is down to you. A help package will be made available, to guide you through the learning process. But first you must take to heart this above all things ..."
There was a lurch in her head, and the voice cut off.
"Darcy darling daughter," it stuttered again. "Darcy darling."
It was the fox's voice now.
"Darcy Da Da, Darcy De De, De-Dit-Dit-Daught, De-Dit-Dit-Dad."
She was on the point of falling over. Her arms windmilled, as she clutched the air for balance. Magdalena looked at her, mouth open in astonishment.
"It is you," the Painted Lady said. "The evidence pointed that way."
Darcy had to sit down. She shut the fox up, and reached for the Daddy package.
The message ran again. She was struck with disappointment, realising only now that it was just some kind of recording, inscribed on her brain. As the speech ran, she hoped it would not cut off this time. "But first you must take to heart this above all things ..."
Silence. Nada.
"What happened to me? Just now?" she asked.
"I don't know, but I fear it was my fault. Years ago, maybe ten years, a man came to the circus, with his daughter. He wasn't the type you see. He didn't like the show, thought the clowns cruel and the freaks pitiful. But he saw through the little girl's eyes. Your eyes. It was your father. He left you with the animals for a minute or so- - the first of the foxes, and the panda - and talked to me, made me promise him a strange thing."
"I don't understand."
"Me neither. He, your Dad, said you'd come back, probably without him. You've changed since then, but I thought I knew you at once. I wasn't sure, though, not until just now. I've been working up to it for days, fulfilling the promise. There was another runaway girl, one of the equestriennes. I tried the, what did he call it, trigger phrase, on her, and nothing happened. Except she broke her leg two weeks later and had to choose between leaving the circus or being transformed into a human duck for the geekshow."
"Trigger phrase? Like a computer codeword?"
"I don't know, love. Your Dad was clever. I'm just an old carny."
"The roar of the greasepaint ..."
"... the smell of the crowd."
Darcy waited. Nothing happened this time. No more messages.
"Are there any other triggers? Phrases? Signs?"
"If there are, your Dad didn't give them to me."
She tried to think. Her mind was a big empty space, just starting to buzz. She had been through some manner of conceptual breakthrough, and was capable of all manner of new things. It was just that she didn't know what they were. It was as if she had been given a starship all fuelled up and ready to depart for Alpha Centauri but had no idea of how to switch the thing on. She wasn't looking for more triggers. The next thing she needed was a key.
There was a clatter in the hallway. Darcy turned round, looking through the still-open door of Magdalena's room. Someone was running off, tumbling down the stairs. She looked down at the dusty floor, and saw fresh footprints overlying her own tiny, timid steps. The feet were eighteen inches long and shaped like flattened peanuts. She recognised clown shoes.
"What's up?" Magdalena asked. "What's happened?"
Darcy knew something had been stolen.
How did she know? The fox had told her, but not in words.
It took her a few moments to notice what was missing. A letter, pulled off the door. A letter T.
Magdalena writhed. She was like a big fat snake, shedding her skin. Her tattoos were unpeeling in purple and orange swathes, like dying leaves. They had been some sort of interlacing of flat tick. The ordinary skin under the old tatts looked pink and baby-new. There were trickles of blood.
Magdalena shivered once, and began howling.
Darcy looked at the changed sign.
MAGDALENA, THE PAINED LADY.
Altering the spelling had changed the world, or so it seemed. It wasn't very clownlike. It was a verbal trick, a linkage of word and image, and they were more in the line of physical business, bendy pool cues or sloshed buckets of water. This was the sort of cruel, complex play on words which, accompanied by a few sharp jabs of a screwdriver, she expected from Tod. He liked playing with words, and relished the fact that his name meant Death in some oldspeak.
Darcy didn't know how to help her friend. She inhabited a skin of pain as she had once inhabited a skin of paint.
If she could only put the puzzle of her brain together properly, she could do something.
And then the clown came through the door with a gun. Darcy's heart clutched and Magdalena tried to get in front of the girl. The gun discharged a puff of yellow smoke.
A flag popped out of the barrel and unfurled.
BANG! was written on it.
Magdalena laughed, and the flag went off, shooting like a dart into her doughy chest, transfixing her heart. She turned grey and fell.
'Dying is easy,' said the clown, in a voice she recognised. 'Comedy is hard.'

Sent By:Kim Newman on Monday, November 10, 1997 at 16:56:30.

"Tod," she whispered. The word was a bone stuck in her throat. "You--"
"Shut up." He slid past, crouched, laid a finger beneath Magdalena's jaw; then turned to Darcy. "You have no fucking idea what's going on, sibling. You never did."
His face seemed oily, like a French horn. He sank back onto his haunches and pulled a bottle from his pocket, brown glass transfixed with a cartoon skull and crossbones. "Here --"
The smell of cartoon whiskey filled Magdalena's room as he took a long pull and handed the bottle to Darcy. She hesitated, then did a motion of drinking. Her gaze flickered back and forth between Magdalena's still form, which had begun to collapse like a zeppelin whose history-track had terminated, and the toy-like pistol cradled in her stepbrother's arm.
They sat for a long while, silent, at home with each other, which made the colours still. It was the first time she could remember being with Tod like this, without his hurting her, or shouting, or just watching as though she were about to fail some test, and the cage he had constructed to entrap her would close; and whirl her away from the centre, and no direction home. The whisky illuminated her face, which glowed like a map. Beneath its patina of clown-white and rouge, the contours of Tod's own home face softened.
"You've been walking about the world, Darcy," he said, waving his hand in a vague circle. "And here you are. Still recognizable, I guess, though you sure have become illustrated. So tell me. Where have you been and what have you seen?"
The Song Fox sang Mappemondes R Us within Darcy's head, the computer made a worried sound--a ticket a tocket--inside her pocket.
But it was time to begin.
"That's right, Tod," she said, her voice thick, skin as dense as ice. "I have run away from home. I did so because of the sea-sickness, the nausea I was feeling; it had begun to invade. I was dizzy, I could not keep my balance. I know now there's something wrong in the world when I feel seasick. Does that sound proud? That's why I abandoned you, let you continue to announce routine deaths to the human folk, keep the tale straight. But I joined the circus and followed the road around the seasons and came back here.
"And you know what? You know what? I think all of them -"
She gestured at the bright walls of Magdalena's room, Magdalena's grey form sloughing into the sawdust, like the Hindenberg becoming Newark.
" - the ones who aren't human folk. . . I think they're all really great, they lit up my life. But they're - they're figments, Tod. I think they're something made up, all of them, except you and me and Song Fox and maybe the Ringmaster. Except for you, I think I'm alone. Because -"
She spoke very slowly and carefully, her tongue curling around the words as though she could taste them.
" - they're all half. They're nothing but halves. It's like they're lit by bulbs, and they glow like tattoos. That is what going around and around the world has taught me, Tod. They're light and we're cords. It's given me a sense of gravity. That's a joke, Tod." She looked over at Magdalena, the Painted Lady's body reduced to a curled tarpaulin wisp. "She's a Chinese lantern. A shadow puppet--"
"Good," said Tod. He nodded approvingly, raising the bottle to her. "Now maybe we can begin to sort this journey out. As you have just said, all the circus folk are partials. Chinese lanterns, as you put it. They can be turned off. Like this--"
He spread the fingers of one hand, a magician introducing a new trick. Suddenly there was no light in the world: no Magdalena, and only the sound of Tod breathing.
"--but it is better if some of them remain lit--"
And the world returned.
"--because there is a job to do."
The Song Fox chortled in her head:
In and out, above, below,
Nothing but a Shadow-Show,
Players in a box
(The Box)
Whose Candle is a sun
(The Sun)
And round and round we Phantom Funnies go,
(Hello).
Is that enough to make the Garden blow?
(No!!!!,
Asks Fox).
Darcy nodded. "Right, Tod," she said softly as the room spun, "I thought you'd never get around to asking. Never get around to admitting it. All these guys, all these bulb guys inside the maya, they've kind of fucked it all up, haven't they? Cause when I walked around the world, out of the State of Early Fall and up and around, the nausea only increased."
She swallowed, the memory of sickness overtaking her; and closed her eyes. She whispered, "We're way off course, aren't we? Because I know who I am now. I'm an orrery, aren't I, Tod? And I feel really, really sick."
Inside her pocket, the computer moaned and grew stigmata in the guise of a compass.

Sent By:Elizabeth Hand and John Clute on Friday, November 14, 1997 at 10:24:03.

"That's right," said Tod.
"Then I haven't run away at all," said Darcy. "I've been running the show instead of running away."
"You could say that."
"I've never been outside. I'm a system of levers and pulleys, and when you're that it all responds to you." She felt the bitterness of this realization. "It all comes out of you. Any spark you see is struck off your own soul."
"Sometimes a tick is only a tic," said Tod, smirking.
"What I wanted mustn't have been the circus at all," said Darcy. "The circus was just my way of failing to step outside my own pinwheels and levers, this global mechanism of me."
"Now you're getting it," said Tod.
"I should have run away to join the surface."

Sent By:Jonathan Lethem on Friday, December 5, 1997 at 15:49:27.

Tod's voice lost its sneer as he said, "You don't know what you're talking about." He sounded, thought Darcy, afraid. "Now that you know the truth about yourself, give me the computer. You still have it, don't you?"
Despite all that had shifted in the past few moments, the computer was still in Darcy's pocket. Furry fingers grasped her wrist, guided her hand to the compass stigmata.
A symbol for herself. Telling her, reminding her, of what was necessary.
The stigmata liquid was viscous. It penetrated her skin. Song Fox chanted, within her head
Tic, tok
The game is locked
And nobody else can play
And if they do
I'll take my shoe
And beat them till they're black and blue
"And that's what you did, Tod," Darcy said, jumping up. "You locked the game. And you beat me. With those big clown shoes. But I don't think I have the whole truth. Not yet. I only have half of it."
"What are you babbling about?" said Tod, looking alarmed. "I always said it was a mistake to give things like you emotions."
"You don't have any, do you, Tod? A bit farther along than me, eh?" She laughed. And laughed again, louder.
For the door reappeared, and the corridor, and the sad shell of Magdalena lying empty on the floor. Because she remembered.
She remembered how to make it so.
And more.
She made the corridor, down which to run, and the stairs, down which to half trip, half fall, in her headlong rush from Tod, who ran after her yelling "Darcy! Stop! You don't know what you're doing!"
But he could not undo her with his jokes. He could not stop her by taking a letter from her name. For she was real.
Out in the street she made a rope ladder stretch taut to the nearby sky, and climbed. The ladder shook when Tod jumped on it, like a spider's web when a fly is caught. They climbed, and below, a mob of kids stopped their stoopball game and cheered them on. Lightbulb kids. Maya's dreams.
Or Darcy's. Made to mask the pain.
Before long the rope turned to metal and she was climbing steel stairs that snailed roundward, surfaceward. Surface was in four directions. Center was forever. She'd been going round and round, through the faulty seasons of the circus. Through the circus mind of Darcy. Turning back at Black Town. Tod's shouts echoed from below, but she continued, aching; sweating.
Finally she emerged.
The surface was circular too, but it was clear. And stars were everywhere.
Darcy stared, stunned. For there it was. Black Town. Monstrous chunk of torus gone, infrastructure ragged, a vast curve away. She saw stars where it lacked completeness, burning rivers of light and time.
And half the world cut away.
"They're gone," she sobbed, as Tod emerged from the stairway, panting. "All gone." The people who once lived there. And she remembered:
The circular seasons of the floating world on which they'd lived past knowing. Bright Blossom Town, in the City State of April; Green Town, in the City State of July. Orange Town, her home town, in the City State of October.
And Black Town. Which was the void. The part of the ship shattered. The place where death teased inward.
They'd all circled through the seasons, the towns. Until the insurrection ....
"We've filled the world with half-real beings, Tod, haven't we?" Darcy tried to quell the wildness in her voice. "So many of the things we're supposed to control are . . . ruined." She leaned against the membrane shielding her from space, as if leaning on so many stars. "Parts of it healed, didn't it? Or else we wouldn't be here. But otherwise . . . "
"Give it back," said Tod gently. "I can fix everything again. You know that I'm good at it."
Darcy, dear, don't, whispered the Ringmaster's voice, and she didn't know if it was within or without.
Darcy remembered more. The explosions, while she had been in her cubicle, listening to her favorite Jimi Hendrix song, brought from Earth ages ago. something about a circus mind...
Her father, a general, rushing in, picking her up as she bled, sobbing "I will save you I will save you dear Darcy."
But the only way was to make her a part of the ship. The original Orerry had been installed where Black Town now held sway. He had been, like Darcy, raised and modified from birth to be a guide, machine and human melded. Darcy was not yet ready to take his place. Not fully grown. But the other backups had been systematically destroyed. Except for one, oddly enough.
As long as Darcy lived, though, another could not take her place.
Her brother Tod, for instance. An Orerry by birth, like her. But he could not fully penetrate the data interfaces while she lived. The ship would know, and kill him. He could only keep her from being fully functional. He allowed her the half-life she'd dreamed in for so long. He dared not destroy her completely, for he was not fully vested in understanding, and the ship might then truly tilt and reel, upsetting delicate gravity, gardens, all that was left to give them life. The Ringmaster protected her, through all her dreams. It was all he could do. He loved her. He would do it, and always, keeping brother and sister alive. For he loved Tod too. His love kept the ship in limbo.
And so they travelled on through space, Darcy's earth girl memories ancient by now.
"Give me the computer. The thing we call a computer, in the circus world," suggested Tod. "Trust me. I'm your full brother. It always hurt me that you pretended that we weren't full brother and sister. I can adjust everything. With just a few taps of the keys. You'll feel better then. Remember? You always feel better."
"No, Tod," she said. "We've tried that. I remember that too. You're trying to keep the ship from healing. It can heal, you know. But then you and the others would be brought to trial, wouldn't you? They killed Song Fox, but what you don't know is that he's inside me. And this is his final Song, the song that you've kept from me every time before." She took a deep breath and sang it aloud, in a duet only she could hear fully. Tod rushed to smother her. He was too late.
And all I need is a tall Ship
And the Stars to steer her by.
"You're wrong about me, Darcy!" Tod shouted, but she barely heard him.
The final poem lined up her organic functions, the vibration of the phonemes releasing a certain pheromone. Within her pocket one of the furry half-hands grasped her hand, obeying chemical imperative. A port on her wrist opened. From the computer into her blood--or what passed for blood in an Orerry(TM), one of the most powerful interstellar navigational devices ever created, flowed the configuration of digital DNA that grew her adolescent Orerry connections to adulthood.
The change came in the form of visions for Darcy, images with personal meaning. The language of the Saskrit Panda was absorbed into its rightful place in her hierarchy, the language that made her operating system fully functional and independent. The Miraculous Calculating Elephants were actually her own Bose-Einstein Software (Copyright Swiftworks Inc.). The Circus withdrew from the ships manufacturing and projecting interstices in a kaleidoscope swirl, an unpracticed tuba and kazoo band playing "Be A Clown," and the echo of the Ringmaster's dear, familiar voice exhorting "--Do dangle down hope dark Darcy, do, do..."
Then there was silence. Her dizziness cleared.
The computer gave her hand a final grasp. "It is done," it whispered, and crashed with a surge of jumbled numbers.
Oh Darcy, whispered the Ringmaster General, so sadly, so gladly. It is done.

Sent By:Kathleen Ann Goonan on Wednesday, December 10, 1997 at 14:54:50.

It was done.
Queen Darcy, whispered the Ringmaster General within her, we thank you for coming through. We thank you for assuming your proper place.
She continued to swing through configured analogues of space above midship, and the brother thing--its sharp proboscis far more manifest in the cleared "air" than before--chuntered upweb and downweb behind her. He was making a chortling sound.
"Hear that, Queen Darcy!" he bellowed, suddenly closer.
"You're too late," she screamed.
"Never too late for love," crooned the thing through its proboscis, veering into her path.
They entangled.
As they fell to groundlevel his proboscis entered her. She felt the poison enter her system.
She lay on the ground, splayed open. Nausea screwed her upright.
Queen Darcy? whimpered the Ringmaster General.
"Queen Darcy?" mocked the brother thing, the bird of omen, the census taker.
Her stomach was splitting.
"Dance it," he croaked into her ear. "Do the dance of destination, little worker."
Her legs obeyed in six-time. It hurt less to dance.
"Point the way to the queen, little worker," he yelled. He was stamping time, quadruple.
The ship began to sing.
The worker bee, shedding skins by the dozen, danced upon her skins, the labanotations of the dying worker fluttering like sails upon the wind. She danced until her belly left. She danced her heart out. When she was dead, the ship fell silent.

Sent By:Elizabeth Hand and John Clute on Wednesday, February 11, 1998 at 12:33:01.

It was the same every night. Every cycle, rather. She would dance her dance of sacrifice, of struggle. She would die for the machine. They would push on through the big night.
After death, she was always repaired. The ticks were still with her.
This went on for she did not know how long. Years passed. She changed, not just in the flesh-to-machine-and-back-again way, but in more normal ways. She grew taller, more womanly. She worried about being fat, and her complexion. Her worries fought it out on her face and thighs. Being endlessly renewable didn't give her any extra privileges when it came to growing up.
In silence, in space, a small voice - not Song Fox, but Darcy herself - whispered.
'Fooled me once, shame on you. Fooled me twice, shame on me.'
She had thought that almost at once, but now the doubt was louder. If she had gone beyond herself, beyond illusion, to the fulfilment of her purpose, why did she have to wear black fishnet tights, a tuxedo and a top hat? Was that the uniform of a cyborg astronavigatrix? It was more like a ringmistress's uniform. She was willing to concede that the circus was the pretence she had needed as a child. It was a kid's world: big and colourful, frightening and wonderful, trivial but resonant. Running away to join the circus, taking everyone else with her, was a kid fantasy.
Really, she was a responsible person.
A crucial component of a colonial starship, a teenage girl charged with conveying deep-frozen pioneers across the vastness of insterstellar space to be decanted on landfall and spread humanity throughout the universe.
Was that a job for a grown-up or what?
The stricken ship was topographically identical with the stricken big top. All the levers had red globular knobs like clown noses. The corridors had been painted with broad orange and yellow stripes, but now they were all a dull black, with stuck-on glitter stars.
If the circus dream had got her through childhood, what would the space heroine dream get her through? Adolescence. Built into the shipworld was a combination of enormous but unearned responsibility with profound but glamorous loneliness. This was less like a starship than a vast teenage bedroom, complete with posters of lank-haired and depressed teen idols.
Darcy refused to accept it. She had learned to question. It would all change again one day, and she wanted to be ready for it.
After the circus, after the ship ...
She had birthdays. They would be marked. Ghostvoices would sing to her.
Sixteen Candles.
Just Seventeen.
Eighteen and Anxious.
Party Like It's Nineteen Ninety Nine.
Twenty Tiny Fingers.
Twenty-One Today.
Finally, she asked for her present. There had always been songs. But never presents.
Something gave her a key.

Sent By:Kim Newman on Wednesday, February 11, 1998 at 12:37:00.

And she used it.
*************
The old woman nodded at the guests in the ballroom, her ballroom. They were all there: lovers, rivals, confidants, her audience, her network, her charges. They danced and gossiped and sipped from crystal cups the punch ladled from her silver chalice, and it was all as it should be. They might be aging, they might be slightly foolish, but it was as it should be. Here was Dorian Angle, greying and vain, like Don Ameche in Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait, a dandy, really, but noble and fine for that, worth having loved, worth having suffered for. Here was Cloriah Farnish, to whom she'd lost Dorian -- what? a dozen times? -- eyeing her, eyeing Dorian, adjusting her own greying strands coquettishly. There was Benjamin Ellafont, there was Randrew Wringling, there were the twins, Magda and Lina, sweetly overpainted, their lipstick drawn absurdly high past the line of their mouths, and there was Hugh Pinch, crumbs falling from the corners of his mouth into the folds of his absurd cockscomb tuxedo-front. The clown, she thought fondly. And there were hundreds of others filing in to her party, a gallery, a menagerie of personalities, bundles of slumbering sweetness all believing themselves awake when really they were asleep and under the old woman's fond care. If she looked too closely they flickered, of course. They always had, always would, lit as they were from beneath, lanterns dependent on the ship for life and breath. All, that is, except for Tod, her ancient rascal brother. He used a walker now, one specially designed with a gyroscope and ball-bearing assembly, one given him by the ringmaster to preserve his dignity. He held court on the other side of Darcy's ballroom, plotting his ancient schemes, his rebellions, his rejections.
There was nowhere to go, no one to reject, nothing to run to or from.
The floor was alive with ticks, creeping beneath the skirts of the dancers, agitatedly doing their maintenance work. No one saw, no one bothered.
There was nowhere to go, the old woman thought with terrible sadness and satisfaction. There was nowhere to go and she would die before she got them there.
But she would get them there.

THE END
Sent By:Jonathan Lethem on Wednesday, February 11, 1998 at 12:38:12.

Home || Prime Time || Live Science || Machine Dreams || Project Open Book || SF-Fantasy-Horror
Continuum || Antimatter || Mind-Brain Lab || Interactive IQ || Gallery || OMNI Toons
Questions, comments and suggestions can be mailed to the webmaster.

Copyright © 1998 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.