ON A VACANT FACE A BRUISE
The sounds of the animals drew Tom in. Not the lights nor the music, nor even the smell of food. Not the dolls, for he did not know about the dolls then. Not even the birds, for he did not know about them either. No, it was just the animals, animals in general, the sounds and smells of the animals.
It was a dark night of the sort that seems sacred and perhaps is. He had been tramping along head down, hungry and tired, tramping down a dirt road leading to a town whose name he did not know. He had not seen the lights nor smelled the food yet, but he heard a leopard cough.
The sound stopped him in his tracks. He raised his head and looked around, his fatigue forgotten. A faint radiance glowed behind the hill to his left. He waited, listening.
A pig grunted. He had heard pigs often, and they had been real ones. Leopards, as far as his direct experience went, existed only as digital recordings.
An elephant trumpeted. He walked again, faster now, with longer strides, his head up. A side road appeared to lead behind the hill. A lion roared. After that, all was silence. The sacred stars winked down, unchanged; but it almost seemed that two of Herehome’s circling moons smiled.
There were wagons parked in the fields on either side of the road, many with people sitting silently on the seats. Others stood chatting in small groups. Lanterns hung from every wagon, but rung-oil was expensive, and few of those lanterns were lit. Horses were harnessed to every wagon, scrubby horses that waited in silence for something to happen, for food, water, or sleep, and never thought of freedom.
Tom joined one of the groups for a while, but heard only talk of the weather, and what the weather might do to the price of corn. The odor of horses and horse droppings hung over everything.
Nearer the lights, the breeze was freighted with new smells: sawdust and hay, frying food, roasting peanuts, and a hundred others. He walked faster, his fatigue forgotten.
“Here you are, son!” The prancing figure at the gate wore strange, bright-colored clothes and flourished a long, slender stick with a ribbon at the top. “Just one cred to get in, and there’s lots of free shows. That includes the big one!”
He leaped into the air and seemed to hang there for a moment, mouth and eyes wide, in defiance of gravity. “Just one cred, and you’ll never regret it. Why—”
“I don’t have any money,” Tom said, and the prancing figure lost all interest in him.
The fence was of transparent film supported by steel poles. Touching the film brought a flash of pain, but through it Tom could see milling crowds and high platforms upon which figures far stranger than the one at the gate stood talking. He knew something of fences and walked this one slowly, hoping for a low spot that would let him crawl under.
He found a tree instead. It was on the side opposite the gate, a big white doak someone had been saving until building timber was needed, a towering king among trees—one of whose level limbs stretched above the fence. He knew trees, too, and climbed this one.
It was a show almost better than the circus to sit up there in the dark, seeing while unseen himself. Elephants were lining up to go into the big tent, and the last and biggest had two trunks and four tusks. It raised its huge head, and raised both trunks higher still, and trumpeted again; and for a moment the whole circus fell silent.
Listening.
“Magic,” Tom heard the word before he realized that the voice was his own. “I don’t care if I don’t get a thing to eat here. Magic’s better.”
His voice disturbed a bird higher in the tree. There was a faint moan, like the moaning of a dove.
A naked woman wrapped in a dragon had taken the stage at the tent nearest his tree. The dragon writhed, hissed steam, and a moment later belched smoke and flames. The woman whirled, apparently delighted by her audience’s fear. Mouth to mouth, she kissed it—then wiped her own and said something to the people watching her that made them laugh.
A capering doll, near sister to the showman at the gate, pretended to be angry; her posture spoke louder than any words: YOU OUTRAGE DECENCY!
Leaping into the air, she came to earth in a new position: BEGONE, VILE WENCH!
Copyright © 2023 by The Literary Estate of Gene Wolfe
Introduction copyright © 2023 by Kim Stanley Robinson
