Quin's Shanghai Circus Page 2

  This was exactly what I had expected from Quin.

  To both sides, glass cages embedded in the walls glowed with an emerald light, illuminating a bizarre bunch of critters: things with no eyes, things with too many eyes, things with too many limbs, things with too many teeth, things with too many things. Now I could detect an odor, only partially masked by the cleanliness: the odor of the circus I had seen as a kid — the bitter-dry combination of urine and hay, the musky smell of animal sweat, of animal presence.

  The cages, the smell, made me none too curious — made me look straight ahead, down to the room’s end, some 30 yards away, where Quin waited for me.

  It had to be Quin. If it wasn’t Quin, Quin couldn’t be.

  He sat behind a counter display: a rectangular desk-like contraption within which were embedded two glass cases, the contents of which I could not I.D. Quin’s head was half in dark, half in the glow of an overhead light, but the surrounding gloom was so great that I had no choice but to move forward, if only to glimpse Quin in the flesh, in his seat of power.

  When I was close enough to spit in Quin’s face, I gulped like an oxygen-choked fishee, because I realized then that not only did Quin lean over the counter, he was the counter. I stopped and stared, mine eyes as buggee as that self-same fishee. I’d heard of Don Daly’s Self Portrait Mixed Media on Pavement — which consisted of Darling Dan’s splatted remains — but Quin had taken an entirely different slant that reeked of genius. (It also reeked of squirrels in the brain, but so what?) Portrait of the Artist as a slab of flesh. The counter itself had a yellowish-tan hue to it, like a skin transplant before it heals and it was dotted with eyes — eyes which blinked and eyes which did not, eyes which winked, all watching me, watching them.

  Every now and again, I swear on my slang jockey grave, the counter undulated, as if breathing. The counter stood some three meters high and twenty long, five wide. In the center, the flesh parted to include the two glass cages. Within the cages sat twin orangutans, tiny but perfectly formed, grooming themselves atop bonzai trees. Each had a woman’s face, with drawn cheekbones and eyes that dripped despair and hopelessness.

  Atop the counter, like a tree trunk rising out of the ground, Quin’s torso rose, followed by the neck and the narrow, somehow serpentine head. Quin’s face looked almost Oriental, the cheekbones pinched and sharp, the mouth slight, the eyes lidless.

  The animal musk, the bitter-sweetness, came from Quin, for I could smell it on him, pungent and fresh. Was he rotting? Did the Prince of Genetic Recreation rot?

  The eyes — a deep blue without hope of reflection — stared down at the hands; filaments running from each of the twelve fingers dangled spiders out onto the counter. The spiders sparkled like purple jewels in the dim light. Quin made them do undulating dances on the countertop which was his lap, twelve spiders in a row doing an antique cabaret revue. Another display of Living Art. I actually clapped at that one, despite the gob of fear deep in my stomach. The fear had driven the slang right out of me, given me the normals, so to speak, so I felt as if my tongue had been ripped from me.

  With the sound of the clap — a naked sound in that place — his head snapped toward me and a smile broke his face in two. A flick of his wrist and the spiders wound themselves around his arm. He brought his hands together as if in prayer.

  “Hello, sir,” he said in a sing-song voice oddly frozen.

  “I came for a meerkat,” I said, my own voice an octave higher than normal.

  “Shadrach sent me.”

  “You came alone?” Quin asked, his blue eyes boring into me.

  My mouth was dry. It felt painful to swallow.

  “Yes,” I said, and with the utterance of that word — that single, tiny word with entire worlds of agreement coiled within it — I heard the glass cages open behind me, heard the tread of many feet, felt the presence of a hundred hundred creatures at my back. Smelled the piss-hay smell, clotted in my nostrils, making me cough.

  What could I do but plunge ahead?

  “I came for a meerkat,” I said. “I came to work for you. I’m a holo artist. I know Shadrach.”

  The eyes stared lazily, glassily, and I heard the chorus from behind me, in deep and high voices, in voices like reeds and voices like knives: “You came alone.”

  And I was thinking then, dear Yahwah, dear Allah, dear God, and I was remembering the warm fuzzies and the cold pricklies of my youth, and I was thinking that I had fallen in with the cold pricklies and I could not play omnipotent now, not with the Liveliest of the Living Arts.

  And because I was desperate and because I was foolish, and most of all, because I was a mediocre artist of the holo, I said again, “I want to work with you.”

  In front of me, Quin had gone dead, like a puppet, as much as the spiders on his fingers had been puppets. Behind me, the creatures stepped forward on cloven hooves, spiked feet, sharp claws, the smell overpowering. I shut my eyes against the feel of their paws, their hands — clammy and soft, cruel and hot, as they held me down. As the needles entered my arms, my legs, and filled me with the little death of sleep, I remember seeing the orangutans weeping on their bonzai branches and wondering why they wept for me.

  Let me tell you about the city, sir. Like an adder’s kiss, sharp and deadly. It’s important. Very important. Let me tell you about Quin and his meerkats. I work for Quin now, and that’s bad business. I’ve done terrible. I’ve done terrible things — the deadest and deadliest of the Dead Arts, the cold pricklies of the soul. I’ve killed the Living Art.

  I’ve killed the living. And I know. I know it. Only. Only the flesh comes off me and the flesh goes on like a new suit. Only the needle goes in and the needle comes out and I don’t care, though I try with all my strength to think of Shadrach and Nicola.

  But the needle goes in and…

  Let me tell you about the city….

  Afterword

  I must first confess that I stole the title of this story — it is also the title of a novel by Edward Whittemore, long out of print, that will be back in print this year. The story has nothing to do with the novel, but I liked it so much I had to use it for something.

  Quin’s is my contribution to the new cyber-goth-genetic-poetic horror-myth movement of which I am one of the only practitioners. Like all of my far future tales, it has much less to do with SF than with dark fantasy. Oddly enough I cannot remember how this particular story came to be — only that I wanted to apply to SF the kind of convoluted voice I’d been using in my dark fantasy stories. Once I’d written the story, I saw immediately that it was part of something much larger — basically, that although self-contained, it also contained the seeds of two more sections: one from Nicola’s (the name of my first girlfriend!) point-of-view and one from Shadrach’s (name stolen from Silverberg’s fiction) point-of-view, each section advancing the story. The resulting novel tells the entire tale of the mysterious doings of Quin through their eyes. I’m currently marketing the novel to publishers.

  This is probably the last work I will set in the far future. My series of stories set in the imaginary city of Ambergris has progressed to the point — rather, the history of the place has blossomed into the mid-1900s rather than the Victorian era — that I can now play out my fascinations with genetic tampering and genetic alterations — with biology in general — in that dark fantasy setting instead.

  Š Jeff VanderMeer 1997, 2000

  “Quin’s Shanghai Circus” first appeared in Interzone #124, October 1997.

 

 

  Jeff VanderMeer, Quin's Shanghai Circus

 

 

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