Bread and the Circus

Chapter 1   You ever get the feeling that maybe your life’s gone completely out of your control?  You feel all clammy somewhere in the region of where your heart’s supposed to be, breathing suddenly becomes a struggle, and your muscles turn to an extra-wobbly sort of jelly.  Right now that feeling’s pretty strong for me as I look around the mostly-empty waiting room of the Circus recruitment office, smelling the stink of sweat and urine that’s soaked into the puke green walls.  With fusion power so cheap these days, you’d think they’d have figured out how to make something better than stark white lights that alternate between flickering and buzzing, but I guess it’s a universal, time-spanning rule that if you gotta go to an office, you gotta be annoyed by the faulty light fixtures.   There’s a whole sheaf of paperwork on my lap right now.  That and a pencil.  I wish I’d brought a book or something, because once I finished up all the forms, I haven’t had anything else to do, and the boredom is starting to get to me.  Of course, if I’d brought a book there’s the danger that somebody around the neighborhood might’ve seen me, and then word would get around that I’m a nerd.   The absurdity hits me pretty quick, of course: I’m about to sign up for the opportunity – nay, the privilege – to go and get killed in front of a pan-galactic audience, and here I am, worried that people might think I’m an egghead!   Yeah, I shoulda brought a book.  Something written by an Earth author would’ve been best, especially if the author was British.  If you’re gonna read in English, nothing beats an oldschool British author.  Kinda a shame that Great Britain’s been depopulated for years now.  Same thing with most of Earth, actually.  But, like old Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.”  Us Humans have a way bigger playground to mess up now anyway.   Nothing left to do but peoplewatch, I fixate on the one guy still left in the waiting room, besides me of course.  He’s the pudgy sort, no chin to speak of, still wearing glasses in this day and age, where surgery to fix your peepers is so cheap, you’d have to be something deeper than dead broke to still be wearing traditional lenses.  That, or exactly the sort of bookworm that I’m worried my friends will think I am if they ever caught me with my nose between pages: so obsessed with literature that you’d rather buy books than food or shelter or basic surgical upgrades.   Then the receptionist up at the front is calling out the guy’s name – something so nondescript it doesn’t even register for me – and it’s just me in that awful room, all alone with my thoughts.   Oh well, at least there’s still a window.   Actually, the view’s not so bad here.  It’s not an especially nice part of town, all the better to be available to the lower classes that usually sign up for the Circus, but it’s pretty high up, away from the grime and stench down below.  And I mean high up, like, tilt your head a little and you can see clouds brushing around the next couple floors above.  A little more and I’d need oxygen gear!  Up here I can watch the flying cars: toys for the rich, since they’re the only ones who can afford the auto-navigation equipment that makes it possible to use one of those things without crashing into stuff in the chaos of the city.  You never see a flying car down where I live, just three stories up from the deadbeats at Rock Bottom.  Sometimes you can hear ‘em when the weather’s just right and the wind’s not blowing too hard down the canyon of buildings, and you tilt your head out of Dad’s bakery at just the right angle.   Then I look down.  Guess I’m not gonna get the chance again, so I might as well.  After I sign up, my chances of ever seeing home again are firmly wedged somewhere between the general vicinities of slim and none, so why not live a little, take stock of where I’ve been, right before I get on with going to whatever’s next?  Looking down, I can’t help but be grateful I’m not afraid of heights, or I might have had some serious problems right then.  Seriously: nosebleeds for everyone!  There’s all the city laid out, building on building, built up to the heavens like natural rock formations.  From what I’ve heard in school (what little you get down where I live), the cities on our planet are built like animal preserves, except with people instead of critters, cramming everybody all in one place so the rest of the world’s ecosystem doesn’t get overtaxed like it always did in the days before we all got organized properly.  Seeing how I’m so far up right now I can’t even see the streets at Rock Bottom, I’m willing to believe it.   The whole place is an artificial mountain, erected to honor its builders.  And there are piles of dead bodies down at the bottom, at least in my mind’s eyes.  Sacrifices to the people who pretend to be the gods of this…   “MaKayla!”   That is a commanding voice!  I’m at schoolroom attention before I even realize I’m doing it, turning and walking toward the receptionist’s desk, paperwork in hand.  The receptionist is a sharp-faced Blid, her hawklike eyes boring a hole right through my head as she snatches the papers away.  At least she takes her eyes off me when she starts to scan through the documents, which lets me break out of the spell of authoritarian command she’d cast with her presence.  Blid are like that: they’re these little, yellow-scaled guys with birdlike heads.  They’re not all that strong, physically, so they make up for it with a whole lot of moxie.  From what I’ve heard, they’re also cowards, and the reason they founded the Pan-Galactic Republic was because politics are a great way to avoid having to do anything for yourself.  Not that I wanna find out if it’s true right now, not with ol’ beakface already glaring at me again.   “Third door on the right,” she snaps, slapping a nearby big red button as though it’d insulted her firstborn, before she got to work shoving the papers I’d handed her into a big envelope, not really paying me any more attention.  Off to one side of the desk, a door slid soundlessly open.  Not wanting to have that gaze on me again, which carried the uncomfortable feeling of being back in gradeschool and getting called on by all the teachers ‘cause they wanted to embarrass me in front of everybody, I hurried on through, and ducked into the door she’d indicated before the big door behind me had even fully closed.   Huh, guess examination rooms look the same no matter where you go.  The place is roughly square, and has lots of cabinets, and a few weird machines I don’t even begin to understand, and a padded examination table with a sheet of clean white paper stretched out over its surface.  There’s a couple chairs too, but I ignore them, preferring to look at the various posters on the wall, detailing the anatomy of six different species of alien (and Humans too!) in the most intimate detail, no clothes, no skin.  Given the option, I’d always rather be on my feet, doing something, than sitting down, itching for action.  Guess that’s why I never did get that scholarship Mom and Dad wanted me to net, the one that woulda meant I’d get a shot at escaping the dead end that is Third Level: not enough patience.   Not enough patience to just wait around and try to live down there either, apparently.  No, Mac, you didn’t wanna do the safe, smart thing, did you?  You had to ride the ‘vators up here, and sign up for…   There it is: the Poster.  It’s the same one that first caught my eye down on Third Level, a big, bright-colored deal complete with three-dimensional effects.  There’s the Ringmaster, with his big hat and strange makeup.  The makeup’s got some sort of nanotechnology in it, they say, which is why it keeps changing while it’s still on his face.  There’s a Vrorbeast, tentacles flailing – those are always popular attractions.  There’s a small army of the robots they use as cannon fodder, a plethora of strange and ominous shapes, every one filled with the portents of death.  And, of course, there’s a collection of the latest celebrities in the background of the poster, all of them made famous by surviving the challenges of the Arena, and then demonstrating that they had talents besides luck.  Nobody in the whole wide Republic gets to be a celebrity these days, not anywhere from movies to music, unless they’ve survived the rigors of the Arena.  That’s just how important the Circus is for gaining recognition, for obtaining fame.   Me, I’m not aiming to be a celebrity or anything like that; I’m way too boring.  I just wanna make some cash so my family can get off of Third Level and move someplace that doesn’t smell bad whenever you step outside of Dad’s bakery.   Turns out, for once, I didn’t actually have that long to wait.  Guess if you make it past the tedium of the waiting room, then you’ve proven you’re serious.  Huh, now that I think about it, maybe that’s why that room was so awful in pretty much every way: they were weeding out the ones who weren’t into it.  Well, me, I’m into whatever it takes to get ahead.  Anything that doesn’t make me feel too dirty about myself, that is: I may not be a goody-two-shoes, but I’ve got some self-respect.   When the door opens, turns out the doctor is not an especially welcome sight at all: it’s a Vlok, her white labcoat doing nothing to conceal the bruise-purple skin of her vulturelike head and disturbingly long hands, clasped before her like a praying mantis’ forelegs.  She’s taller than me, but it’s pretty obvious that she’s trying not to be intimidating.  At least that’s what I guess, based on the smile on her face, an expression that’s halfway between reassuring and nightmare-inducing.   “MaKayla Carlscrown?” she asks me with that strange accent all Vlok have, probably a result of having a fleshy beak instead of proper lips, glancing down at the touchpad clutched by the fingertips of those freakishly long hands of hers.   “Just Mac, if that’s all right.”   She looks me up and down, and the look isn’t at all what I expected.  I mean, if you’re looking at something that might as well be a humanoid vulture, evolved from a race that really were scavengers back in their ancient past, you’d probably guess that the creature in question would have this sort of predatory, half-starved way of approaching the whole universe, and you in particular.  Not so with my new Vlok buddy, though: she gives off this impression of being friendly, but cautiously so, as though she’s perfectly well-aware of how the other sapients in the Republic view her kind of people, and has to fight the stereotype.  I guess I can respect that kind of attitude, actually.  After all, being Human for too long in the wrong parts of the galaxy can be enough to get you lynched.   “Mac, then,” she says, nodding agreeably as she taps the pad with her thumb.  “I’m…well, you can call me Doctor Salvee,” she states with a nod.  “It’s simpler for your mouth, I think.  Now, if you please,” she motions to the examination table, and I hop up, taking a deep breath as I brace myself for the standard pad-down to come.   “If I might ask, Mac,” Doc Salvee begins while she’s setting up the scanning machines right behind me, “what made you choose to sign up to join the Circus?”   “The Arena,” I answer right off, no hesitation; I was only going to go through with this if I made sure not to have any second thoughts until it was well and truly too late to turn back.  “They pay out really good money to survivors.  And to the families of those who, well…you know.”   “Ah,” the Vlok woman states knowingly, and there’s whole worlds of expression in that simple word.  “So you aren’t an actor?  A singer?  A dancer?  Perhaps an aspirant to literature or poetry?”   “Nope,” I reply, tensing slightly as I feel those oversized hands on my back, feeling her feeling me (and Vlok can find out stuff about you that you wouldn’t believe just by touch).  “I’m just planning on fighting it out until I can’t compete anymore.  Or until I make it through my first Season, whichever comes first.”   “You do realize,” Doc Salvee asked, withdrawing her hands to make some notations on her pad, “that casualty rates for the Arena regularly run into the high eightieth percentile?”  Then she looked at me, really looked at me, and her face showed all the sorrow in the universe.  “Of course you do.”  She sighed, her shoulders slumping.  “Of course you do.  You’re smarter than most of the people I sign off as fit for the Circus.  I can tell that just from looking at you.  I’ll bet you know how to read books, too, not just the basics of literacy like most.”  Her smirk was wry when she saw my expression at her observation.  “No, I won’t tell anyone.  I know the stigma attached to being smarter than the people with whom you associate.  The giveaway was how you were looking at the posters when I came in: they weren’t just a source of bored observation for you; you were reading them, absorbing the information on them with a certain…eagerness,” her sharp, pointed tongue flicked out, and I had to suppress a shudder, “that only a creature like myself might properly understand.”   Turning once more, Doc Salvee went to the machine and glanced at the screen on its front.  Nodding after only a few moments, she turned back to me.   “What if I told you that you couldn’t go?” she asked me suddenly, eyes intent on mine.  “What if I said that you were unfit, unwell?  What would you do then?”  She took a step closer to where I was sitting on the exam table, crossing just a little too much into the boundaries of personal space for my comfort.  “The Circus is a death sentence, Mac.  People die in the Arena, eaten by monsters.  They die in the dressing rooms, stabbed or bludgeoned or poisoned by the jealous.  And even if they survive all of that, they die inside after what they have to do in order to get ahead.  Their souls die, even if their bodies keep walking around, going through the motions of life and love and laughter.”   “That last one won’t happen to me, Doc,” I told her, and I didn’t flinch when I said it.  “Like I said, I’m just here for my family.  Baby Wok’s just turned six, and he needs real schooling, not that public stuff that barely gets you anything.  Mom needs out of that dead-end job where she has to tap data into machines for twelve hours a day, my big brother Alonzo just a few stalls over, checking her work for the errors that could get her fired, or him fired if he doesn’t catch them in time.  I’m the only girl, the only one that gets a room all to herself, and I’m tired of being the ‘special’ one, always put on a pedestal like I’m something I’m not.  I wanna help my people get ahead, and I don’t see any other way to do it but this one.  I blew my last shot at a scholarship just yesterday, and if you’re down on Third Level, and there’s nobody willing to pay your way, there’s no way to get out and go up unless it’s big.”  Then I smirked, a smirk she returned as the tension that had been building in the room suddenly dissipated.  “So I’m gonna go big, or go bust.”   “You know how to fight?” she asked me, c*****g her head in a way that was so very birdlike, I had to work not to smile and maybe show off how condescending we Humans can be sometimes.  Instead I nodded.   “Dad taught me,” is what I said instead of smiling.  “He taught all of us.  When he wasn’t busy in the bakery, he spent all the time he could training us, just like he’d learned from his dad, and his dad before him.  Kinda important to know how to fight when you’re so close to Rock Bottom, after all.”   “Ah, an ancestral style,” Doc Salvee stated with a nod of approval.  “My people do not tend toward such martial matters – a very real reason why there are so few of us who ever join the Circus – but I can respect them in others.  And I do.”  She shook her head, then tapped the pad one more time.  “You are cleared, Mac.  A clean bill of health.  Here,” she turned the pad around and held it out to me, and this time I didn’t feel the need to suppress a flinch at the nearness of those freakishly long hands of hers.  “Sign at the bottom with your finger, please.  If you’re sure about this, the door at the end of the hall opens out onto a landing pad.  The ship waiting there has all the applicants who passed the physical.  Just get on board, and the grand adventure begins.”  Hope still on her face, she c****d her head to the other side as she peered at me over the pad while I signed it.  “Or not.  You could take the door marked ‘Exit’ instead, and live a nice, safe, boring life on Third Level instead.  After all, where there’s life, there’s hope, as we doctors often say.”   “I appreciate it, Doc,” I replied, and meant it, as I got to my feet.  “But sometimes there’s things you’ve just gotta do.”   Leaving Doc Salvee in my wake, I strode down the hall with all the teenage confidence I could pretend to muster.  Of course I didn’t actually feel any of it, but it’s appearances that matter most in these things.   Beyond the door was a landing strip, stretching out away from the city, far enough away from where its takeoffs and landings might cause damage.  While I’m not afraid of heights, all the same, I didn’t look over the edge of the strip.  I mean, no sense tempting fate, right?  Instead, I focused on the big old spaceship squatting like a toad in a hole at the end of the strip, its engines already glowing with the power needed to propel it past the blue-grey sky above, and into the inky black beyond.   At the base of the still-lowered entry ramp was a skinny Wisp, his small body actually clothed (a rarity for Wisps, who were furry enough that nobody really noticed if they went n***d) in the uniform of an official of the Circus, red and black and gold.  When I got close, the Wisp gave me a wink of one of his massive, dark eyes.   “Welcome aboard!” he called out to me over the roar of the engines as they began to reach launch readiness.  “Now get in, or get left behind!”   What else could I do after a speech like I’d given Doc Salvee?   I got aboard.