Circus of the Grand Design (23 page)

"Well met, William, how passes the night?"

Lewis recognized the brassy voice of the raincoat woman, their hotel guide.

"You there, one of the traveling players, are you not?" the guide asked. She took the stool beside his. "I found much to enjoy in your showing."

"Thanks." Her voice jarred him. He hadn't come to the bar to talk, but as a representative of the circus he supposed he
needed
to be friendly.

"I am called Abigail," she said. Up close, he could see that her yellow jacket wasn't for rain protection. It had more the look of a lab coat, made from a supple material with a dull sheen. "What part did you play? I did not spy you during."

"That was me on the mechanical horse, with the armor and the sword. In the helmet you can't see my face."

"The horse—you must bless your fortune, even if you are not the one."

The one? Now even the people he met outside the circus talked like Dillon. "I love riding the horse," he said. "But it's not what you think it; this kind of thing is all about illusion, like in a magic show."

"Well, it shines with splendor regardless."

Dillon would be proud of how he had diffused her interest. The way she looked at him though, she knew something about the horse, and he needed to find out what. He would keep her here, talking.

"I must return to my toil. Good fortune to meet you." She swiveled her stool around and slid off. "Be virtuous," she said, and left.

~

In the morning a band of light crossed the floor. Lewis had left the curtains open to allow the sun to enter freely. How he missed the sun, so distant when the clouds covered the train windows. He should ask Perry about the clouds. No doubt something to do with the spaces between the orbiting spheres. He wanted to believe Perry's theory. He needed to believe something. Considering everything he had seen so far. And he liked Perry.

He sat up. Before the sun woke him, he had been dreaming, something...now fading, the horse...Cybele. In the shower he remembered: another flying dream. This time he sat on the horse, with Cybele behind him, her hands clasped over his stomach. She told him a story of a man who left home in search of his lost love. Was he that man? He had never been satisfied, not in all the places he had lived. Now he was ready. He could stop moving, help raise their children. Everyone was having children, first Desmonica and János, Gold and Leonora...why not he and Cybele? Could Cybele
have
children, or just induce them in others?

Some of the crew were in the breakfast room, a cavernous space designed to look like a farmhouse kitchen, with long, rough-hewn tables and benches, and cast-iron implements hanging everywhere. A painting of George Washington hung in the center of the main wall. When he sat down, he found that the tables and benches were all colored plastic, not wood at all.

"Some swell place," Gold said. "No meat. No juice."

"You don't think of nothin' but your damn stomach," Leonora said, but she smiled.

Gold touched her still-flat belly. "I'm thinking of yours dearie, and what's inside it."

Lewis again recalled his dream. He wanted this, the innate joy of giving life and watching it grow.

Barca walked into the dining room toward them. The hostess stopped him and pointed to a section on the far side of the room. Barca pulled himself taller, as he had done when meeting Lewis. The hostess stepped back, then Barca relaxed and walked to the other section. Lewis looked at his companions, but no one else had noticed.

The others left; Lewis sat, eating little. Barca had sat down with a family in the other section and was gesturing with his hands, as though telling a story. Barca's companions, like Barca, were dark-skinned

Perry entered. He pointed toward Lewis, and the hostess waved him over.

"You see Barca over there?" Lewis said. "He came in, and they wouldn't let him sit with us."

"We have to follow the dictates of the locale," Perry said.

~

Everything possessed multiple sides, multiple viewpoints. Lewis knew that, knew especially how that applied to their particular situation as visitors. It bothered him, this separatism, but he didn't know what to do. What if he had left the circus in a place like this? Maybe he would go to a library, see if he could figure out where things diverged. But what was the use, other than intellectual pursuit? He wasn't planning to stay and try to change things here.

This city they were in, where was it? He had never asked Dillon where they were when they stopped. The force that moved them also numbed them to their surroundings—that must be what kept the other circus people from questioning things.

He was special though, he noticed things from the start, things the others didn't.

From his hotel room window he could see a wide river, and across it, clusters of ruined buildings. The hotel appeared to be close to the water. He decided to walk out to the sunlight and explore the town.

But outside the hotel wasn't outside. A translucent roof, about four stories above him, stretched across a concourse to a building opposite. The hotel must open into a giant shopping mall. He would have to walk through the mall until he found an exit.

He wandered down the concourse, stopping to look into store windows. Maybe he would buy something for Cybele, a nightgown. At a bookstore he stopped and looked for Oblong Henry titles. Sitting on a bench outside the bookstore, he watched passersby. A number of men and women wore yellow smocks similar to Abigail's, so many that he began to think of it as a uniform. Non-smocked wore more varied outfits, shirts with high collars, colorful jackets, skirts. He saw a mix of racial types, including dark-skinned. None of the dark-skinned people wore the yellow coats.

~

A blond-haired woman wearing a smock passed. Her face...Martha? Without thinking, he rose and followed. She went into a kitchen implements store. When they were together, Martha had never cooked. He paused outside. If this Martha didn't know him—did that prove Perry's theory? He entered the store, walked to where Martha stood at a rack of cast-iron pots.

"These look great," he said, fingering the handle of a stewpot. "Could make a great paprika chicken in this." One of
his
Martha's favorite foods.

She walked away without acknowledging his comment. Cold—just like his Martha. But
not
his Martha. If his Martha saw him now, after Are No, after leaving...she wouldn't have walked off.

How could he ever leave the circus? Anywhere he went, he would risk meeting himself. But people
had
left. Dillon must be able to tell when a sphere was similar enough to one's origin, similar enough to allow someone to leave. Maybe when they entered a sphere with a counterpart, they took over the life of their counterpart. The whole concept was so preposterous...multiple worlds, multiple versions of people? The knowledge could drive a person mad. The others, at least, were spared from the threat of madness. Their ignorance kept them sane.

Was Dillon insane?

Lewis spun around, bumping into a pregnant woman, and hurried out of the store. Farther along, the concourse opened into a vast space filled with green, an indoor forest with a domed roof high above, as large as the domed stadium built in the city where he grew up. He pondered the distant roof. The space
was like
a stadium, encircled by balconies instead of seats. Furniture dotted the balconies: chairs, benches, tables. An "outdoor" café stood at the edge of the woods, beside a bed filled with red, white, and blue flowers. A path led into the woods, with a plaque marking the entrance: "Let peace, descending from her native heaven, bid her olives spring amidst the joyful nations; and plenty, in league with commerce, scatter blessings from her copious hand!"

Once beneath the spread of branches, Lewis forgot about the distant roof. The woods looked so natural, leaves, rocks, scattered trunks of fallen trees. Had the roof been built over existing woodland, or had the woods been planted later? If the latter, a good deal of time had elapsed.

A man and woman holding hands passed from the opposite direction. Both wore the yellow smocks. They smiled and nodded to him. A chipmunk darted across a fallen tree.

The path split, marked by another inscription, "Here, where the hand of violence shed the blood of the innocent..." He chose the left and soon came to a grassy area at least a hundred yards wide. Several dozen people moved through the meadow, walking dogs, throwing balls. Others lay on blankets beside picnic baskets.

He wanted to ask someone why this domed park existed, why life here appeared to be centered indoors, but as Perry said, they had to follow the dictates of the locale. Questions would draw unwanted attention. Passing a trio of jugglers, two women and a man, he wondered what Gold would say about this group's skill level. Probably sneer. He climbed onto a rocky outcropping for a better view of the park, and there was Gold, approaching the other jugglers. Gold pulled out three balls, yellow, green, and blue, and began to juggle.

Two people stopped to watch, then a few more. Some wore the smocks, others didn't. The people scattered around the meadow were grouped by smocked and smockless. He wished he knew more about the social structure here. The smocks gave everyone an appearance of same-ness, making it hard to distinguish individual features. He saw one smocked man talking to a couple of non-smockers. One of the non-smocked was small, about Perry's size, and wore a dark-colored round hat with a narrow brim; the other man was about the same height as the smocked man, but heavier, with dark hair and a full beard.

The two non-smocked watched the jugglers, nodding at something the smocked man said. They appeared to be paying closest attention to Gold. Lewis looked away from the men, and spotted Dawn and Leonora walking toward the jugglers from the far side of the meadow. He didn't feel like talking to any circus people, so he slid down the backside of the rock and returned to the hotel.

~

Later, Lewis woke from a nap and took the elevator down to the second floor, where the hotel guidebook showed a cafe. He ordered a cup of coffee and sat in a plush armchair. The performance would be happening soon, but he still had no desire to see his companions. He put his coffee cup down next to a fashion magazine—the cover showed a dark-haired woman with a midriff-length smock laced together over her otherwise bare breasts. He hadn't seen anything like
that
in his walk around the mall and park. In his sphere, fashion magazines didn't match the way real people looked either. The dim light made reading the magazine difficult, but he flipped through the pages, looking at pictures. All the models wore the smocks, though, like the cover photo, the cuts varied. Apparently they were adaptable to the dictates of fashion.

Spheres. Had he accepted that explanation? Martha was here, but not
his
Martha. That much was obvious. Bubbles and spheres—this city, mall-town, wherever it was, existed under a bubble. Artificial like the train, no breezes, no rain, no sun. But the train at least was
his
. This place and its ways, alien and unfriendly. After their performance, he would return to his room on the train to spend the night with Cybele. Though her pull was less insistent here, he felt incomplete without her.

A man entered the café. Lewis recognized him, one of the unsmocked who had been watching the jugglers, the small one with the hat. Odd coincidence that he would show up at the hotel. The man moved to the counter to order. He must be staying at the hotel too. It wasn't that large a town.

The smockless waitress approached to refill Lewis's cup, but he shook his head. Time to prepare for the show.

Aside from the late arrival of the acrobats, the performance flowed smoothly, and when the crew gathered afterwards, Dillon announced that he was taking them to dinner. Everyone removed their costumes backstage like the previous night, then returned to their rooms to clean up. Showered and changed, Lewis sat on a lobby couch near the elevators. Abigail walked by; she waved but didn't stop. He still needed to see what else she knew, but perhaps there would be a chance later, before he returned to the train, to Cybele.

The elevator doors opened and Miss Linda emerged. She glanced around the lobby, spotting Lewis. "I've made a pledge to be sociable," she said.

A smudge of whiteface makeup showed on one cheek and on the front of her maroon sweatshirt. He had become so accustomed to her clown face it was odd to see her without it. Her cheekbones were sharper than he remembered. She remained near him but looked away, toward the hotel's reception area. The elevator doors opened again, discharging more of their group, and she moved behind the couch.

Desmonica flopped down beside Lewis. "I'm a tired momma," she said. "It's got to be a boy in there. János Junior—how does that sound?"

When everyone had arrived, Dillon led them across the vast lobby to the "Colonial Steakhouse."

The interior was similar to the breakfast restaurant, same type of tables, same George Washington reproduction on the wall. The hostess, a cheerful, red-haired woman in a frilly skirt, who talked to their group as if they were school children, seated them in the center of the restaurant, where several tables had been pushed together to accommodate their party. A balcony with smaller tables overlooked the room. Everyone was there but Barca, apparently not allowed to join them even for a private function.

Lewis sat beside Perry, and Miss Linda beside him. Cinteotl sat across the table, between Bodyssia and Brisbane. Lewis had never seen Cinteotl outside his kitchen.

Dillon cleared his throat and stood. "My friends. Now, I know toasts are usually proclaimed after the meal, but I felt we should conduct them first tonight, rather than subjoin." He raised his glass. "I want to say that I have never had with me a more dynamic group than the one present at this table. To us."

"To us," everyone said, and they drank.

Next, Dillon toasted the mothers-to-be, then Brisbane: "Garson says he is coming along nicely."