Читать книгу The Cyberkink Sideshow - Ophidia Cox - Страница 5

Chapter 1

The sun had not yet set when Constable Sylvia Price parked the police van on the concourse and got out to release Max from his cage in the back, but much of the heat had at last gone from the sweltering July afternoon. As she locked the vehicle, she glanced up to take in the red-streaked sky, the sparse clouds uplit by the sunset looking as pink and sticky as the discarded candy floss littering the pavement.

Sylvia looped her wrist through Max’s leash as she synced herself to him and tried to adjust her uniform, which clung unpleasantly to her every sweaty crevice. The day crowd was dispersing, kids shrieking, youths laughing and swearing on their way home. The litter was everywhere: candy floss, burger wrappers, half-finished polystyrene boxes of chips. Chewing gum. Damn stuff did horrible things to dogs’ paws, and the last thing she needed was for Max to step in it. Filthy buggers.

She gave Max’s lead a gentle tug after plotting a course through the rubbish. “C’mon, lad.” Predictably, he pulled away from her at the first lamppost they passed. A rank odor and a torrent of information at once hit Sylvia through the animal’s interface. Six different dogs had urinated there in the past hour. Sylvia smiled, despite the phantom stench filling her nose. She’d always thought it ironic that sniffer dogs had been interfaced to humans to facilitate tracking down and identifying substances, whereas being interfaced to Max she’d unwittingly learned the signature smells of all manner of dog-related business. It made her wonder exactly who was serving whom.

The main path led down into a patchwork of show gardens. On the left the honeysuckle-garlanded coils of a great serpent rose from a sea of blue and purple pansies. The creature looked to have been sculpted from a wire frame stuffed with earth and coir, from which the flowers grew. Over on the right, water trickled around a perspective-defying Meccano guttering construction like something from an HC Escher drawing. Beyond these a maze had been laid out in ten-foot sunflowers. A garden of genetically modified nasturtiums sprouted a sign explaining they were made as a school project. Each petal bore colorless blobs of letters spelling the name of someone who had died as a result of information terrorism.

Max panted in the evening heat, tongue spilling loosely over his white teeth. The German shepherd sweltered under his thick tan-and-black coat. Sylvia swigged the bottle from the holder attached to her belt, but the water left her mouth dry. No, it wasn’t her. She paused to let the dog drink from the water feature. He continued to pant even after he’d slaked his thirst, water dripping from his muzzle and leaving dark spots on the path where he walked.

The little monorail train rattled overhead as they came to the landscaped open area, paths winding around an army of sinister orange wire-figure sculptures. Cultural regeneration, the government called it. It would be here only for the summer of this year, then all the attractions of the Garden Festival would leave, never to return again, the land sold on for development.

A Ferris wheel towered on the horizon, behind the clutter of the Garden Festival’s myriad attractions. The observation cars would probably have air-conditioning. Sylvia tried to imagine being cool. Summer had been hot and dry so far this year.

To reach the attractions, they had to cross a water garden of lily ponds surrounded by chili plants burgeoning with multicolored fruit. Fast-food stalls and trailers scattered the lawn on the other side. Gaudy signs stood up on the slope: The Museum of Electricity, The Interactive Lifestyle Experience. Sylvia couldn’t see Pikesley objecting to such wholesome and educational stuff, but here and there walked people in small groups, against the flow of the day’s youth exodus–adults dressed as though they were on their way to a heavy metal concert. One of them, a tall woman with kohl-rimmed eyes and long, black hair, glanced at Max and Sylvia as they passed.

A rollercoaster car stood inert at the end of its track, its queuing post empty. The Haunted Manor was likewise deserted. Sylvia presumed the implied ghosts were still there. Virtual Arcade. That one looked like it was still open, although its trade had died down. Behind the window, she discerned the form of a man standing entranced by the heavy headset he wore, reaching out with gloved hands and turning slowly.

Cyberkink Sideshow.

Sylvia jerked her head back to read the sign again. Victor R. Maynard’s Cyberkink Sideshow. This was it. A long queue led up to a giant striped circus tent. A gleaming fiber optic rope outlined the queuing space, running along waist-high posts that resembled giant neon dildos with bulbous heads and ribbed shafts. Sandwich boards placed at intervals along the queue displayed nefarious testimonials. The Greatest Sideshow on Earth. The most depraved exhibit of human sexuality to ever be permitted on tour. Banned in thirteen countries.

People looked away and a lad glared at Sylvia through a faceful of piercings as she pushed her way to the front of the queue. Two bouncers wearing tight leather shorts and jackboots guarded the entrance. Both were heavily tattooed.

Sylvia held up her police ID. “I’m going to need to inspect your premises.”

One of the bouncers folded his arms and pushed up his lower lip while he scrutinized the ID. He patted Max on the head before stepping out the way. Max was inordinately interested in the bouncers’ sweaty shorts, and Sylvia had to pull him away as she passed into the tent. She salivated and swallowed as she walked on, trying to lose the ghost scent.

The great space the tent enclosed was already packed with people serried upon tiers sunk into a depression in the ground. Judging by the length of the queue outside, Sylvia calculated there’d be people turned away. A low barrier at the bottom tier separated the crowd from a center ring with a sand-covered floor and various wooden stages. From the main pole supporting the structure depended batteries of speakers and eight screens arranged in an octagon to face the audience from all sides. Technical staff with black t-shirts swarmed over the equipment, loud crackles and shrieks ringing from the audio system.

It would be best to check now, before the event started. Sylvia stepped down to the first tier and gave Max the thought-command to search. She could tell immediately that these spectators weren’t in favor of the police presence. Feet were shoved into her ankles as she climbed between the seats. People made disgusted faces at Max when he sniffed them. Some of them smelled of cannabis. She would leave them be. It would be injudicious to throw the book at them. She was here to get to the bottom of a much more serious accusation, not stir up trouble. While the general public didn’t approve of the sideshow, they didn’t much like the police either, and it wouldn’t help public relations if the headlines told of the police disrupting the takings of an independent business and mass arrests for petty offenses. What she was looking for was more serious drugs, and the telltale electronic signatures of any information contraband or illegal gadgets.

She managed one lap around the tent, but she wasn’t getting anywhere. Down in the center ring the black t-shirts were finishing up and it looked as though the show was about to begin. Sylvia climbed back up to the upper tier and found a seat up against the tent fabric wall.

A human figure clambered up onto a stage above where a drum kit had been set up. The person’s body was covered in long, flaxen hair, like an Afghan hound. It took its seat and began a drumroll.

The lighting in the tent dropped, and a loud, excited cheer broke out in the darkness around Sylvia. The strident notes of an organ reverberated, and Sylvia instinctively looked up to the high ceiling where the pole supported the tent’s roof and the ganglion of wires spread there like jungle vines. When she looked back to the ring, the velvet curtains that concealed the performers’ entrance had parted, and a spotlight stabbed through the shadows to illuminate those who emerged.

A wide figure wearing a Boy Scout uniform trotted into the arena, followed by two others, thin, masked, and in bondage harnesses. The skin that showed between the gaps was covered in hair, but despite this they both had narrow waists in proportion to their hips, and substantial yet fuzz-covered breasts protruding between the leather straps. The first figure held up his hands to rapturous cheering from the audience. He was very fat, and shorter than the other two, the hat obscuring his features. His legs appeared oddly smooth and hairless, and Sylvia couldn’t tell from this distance whether he was a man or a boy. The main screen above the entrance changed to focus in on him, and now she saw from the face under the brim of the hat that he wasn’t a boy, but a man in his early thirties.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” He held up a hand to quiet the throng.

The audience booed and laughed. The main screen showed the man’s expression change to mock offense. “Whores and bastards!” he barked into the microphone, his voice becoming shrill and fierce. Applause and noisy laughter broke out. “It’s my delight to announce the opening and to cordially welcome you all to what I hope you’ll all agree is the greatest freak show on Earth!”

His voice had a nasal timbre and a slight Oxford accent, not at all the sort of voice Sylvia would have expected from someone introducing live pornography. She found herself fixating upon his thick legs as he spoke, her gaze wandering up over his knees to his broad, shapely thighs and his shorts, which strained at the waistband where his belly overflowed. Flesh bulged voluptuously under the yellow fabric of his shirt.

The ringmaster continued. “If my sideshow’s reputation precedes it, which it usually does, most of you may already have heard about our notorious fully interactive main event, which will be opening tomorrow evening. In the meantime, tonight, we would like to offer you a select sample of the entertainments we have on offer. Before the events begin, we do have some rules that we do ask you observe. We merely ask that you do not intrude upon your fellow members of the audience and that you do not engage in copulation or frottage of any sort while you’re seated, and we also ask that you do not throw objects at our performers. So, without further ado, I’d like to welcome the first act! Please give a very warm welcome to our leprechauns!”

Spotlights raced between the curtains and the stage. Riverdance music began, and a host of midgets or dwarves–or whatever the current politically correct name might be for vertically disadvantaged men and women–clad in green rushed onto the stage and began to tap dance. As the dance went on, the midgets started stripping off their clothes and flinging them about the stage, pairing up and cavorting together, until the dance deteriorated into an orgy on the stage floor. The spectators laughed and clapped in time to the music.

Sylvia looked away in embarrassment, finding only other members of the audience. Not wanting to make eye contact with them, she looked down at her feet and at Max where he curled against her ankles, rubbing the soft fur between his ears with her fingers.

At last the leprechauns’ shameful display ended, and they picked up their clothes and bowed and exited the stage to rapturous cheers.

The ring lighting dimmed once more, and a single spotlight sought out the remaining figure of the ringmaster. “So, whores and bastards.” He turned slowly as he spoke so as to address the whole audience. “You’ve seen some dwarves. What would you say if I said I could show you an elf, too?”

The audience answered with a questioning murmur.

“In that case, you might like to look up there.” The ringmaster pointed to a place close to the central pole, in the rigging above him. The spotlight left him and followed his direction up until it came to a stop, illuminating a lithe figure: a petite, small-breasted woman wearing a lot of green leather straps around her torso that covered nothing, thigh-high patent-leather boots, elbow-length gloves and a green felt hat with a fur trim and a dangling tassel.

The little woman bent over backward until her hands touched the wire she was balancing on directly behind her heels. She flipped her legs nimbly over her waist and straightened. In this way, she made her way down the length of the wire to a gantry on the other side, where a pair of horizontal bars was installed, of the sort gymnasts use in the Olympics. The woman began to swing on the bars, occasionally throwing her legs open and flashing her bald vulva at the crowd. Sylvia started and glanced about at the other members of the audience, thrown into self-consciousness. If they’d noticed her reaction, it wasn’t apparent. All of them seemed mesmerized with watching the act. Did all these men expect normal women to behave like this, not to have hair…down there? Did the women here go home and try to emulate this sort of behavior?

At the summit of the final swing, the woman flew off, tucking up her arms and legs as she rolled head-over-heels twice, before uncoiling to grab a trapeze and sail across the room to another pair of bars on the opposite side. After spinning on the bars a little longer, she raised herself vertically on her arms before squaring her shoulders and lowering her hindquarters, so she was balanced upright with her hands gripping the bar, the muscles in her arms knotted and trembling. She curled her back and spread her legs apart, bending her face toward her crotch to sink her tongue between her own labia.

Sylvia was too incredulous to feel shocked or look away this time. Here was a woman performing cunnilingus on herself, in front of an audience, balanced on a bar twenty feet away from the ground. Were these people desperate for money and unemployable in any other career not quite so debasing? Or did Victor R. Maynard, whoever he might be, pay so well it made it worth it?

After maintaining this posture for about ten seconds, the woman unknotted herself and stood gracefully on her toes. She took off her hat, waved it flamboyantly, and bowed to the applauding throng. The spotlight dropped back to the ringmaster on the sandy ground below.

“Thank you to our lovely elf. And if all women could do that, I don’t know why on Earth anyone would have need of men anymore.” The main screen showed him run his tongue over his lips suggestively. Most of the women in the audience laughed. Most of the men booed.

“Now then.” The ringmaster paused to consult a card before throwing it away. “I shan’t say anything about the next act. You can make up your own minds about it.” He pivoted on one foot, turning his back on the audience for an instant as he ushered forward someone behind the curtain. Sylvia once more found herself drawn to stare at his legs, fascinated by the rounded shape the mass of his buttocks made inside his tight shorts.

Egyptian-themed music began to play. The curtains opened and two women danced forth. Both had olive skin, straight, shoulder-length black hair cut level over the forehead, thickly kohl-rimmed eyes and huge breasts that bounced as they cavorted. They wore only colorful sarongs slung low around their hips. Probably this would be an exotic dance with an ancient Egyptian flavor.

A long, thick object reared from the ground, instantly changing from sand-colored to a dark amethystine sheen, and both women screamed. “A snake!” one of them wailed, and the two clung to each other as the snake advanced, another snake rising from the floor behind them. The two snakes began to wind their bodies around the women, coils glistening and pulsing with the motion of powerful muscles beneath the scales, binding the dancers with their backs together while they screamed and feigned feeble attempts to fight themselves free.

They must be genetically engineered snakes. That color change must come from an inserted gene, probably originating from a chameleon. The main screen showed a close-up of one of the women’s trembling bosoms protruding from between coils, a snake head peeking down from the corner, black tongue flickering. The snake had a tiny gem in the center of its forehead, just above the eyes. A mind interface. Someone was controlling them.

“Someone please help us!” one of the women shouted. The curtains parted once more, and there stood a tattooed man wearing a linen kilt, his head and body shorn. In one hand he carried a carved music pipe. He strode forward on the sand, raised his flute to his lips, and began to play.

The snakes responded, slackening their coils, although this was obviously little to do with the music and very much to do with the matching gemlike object on the flute-player’s forehead. They slid away from the women and began to dance with the man, rearing and swaying their bodies in tune to the music, tracing circles around him, and rolling into knotty writhing tangles while changing color all the time. After playing for a few minutes, the musician tucked his flute into the waistband of his kilt and stood still, and the snakes came to him and climbed onto his outstretched arms. They returned to their amethystine coloration and he held them aloft while the audience applauded.

Both women went to the man and sat at his feet on either side of him, and they reached up to the waistband of his kilt. It flopped to his ankles, and a gasp rippled through the audience. Sylvia stared. The man had two penises. They protruded from the nest of his pubic hair like a pair of pythons, bowed together at the heads. The main screen changed to show a close-up, and she realized that in fact his original phallus had been circumcised and surgically split in two down the length of the urethra.

The two women each took hold of one half and greedily thrust their faces into the man’s groin. He stayed in the same position, holding up his snakes, while his face twisted into an ecstatic rictus and his shoulders and thighs started to tremble. When he came, it spurted out of the cleft in the middle of his groin and onto the women’s chins.

He raised his snakes once more, the women rose from the floor of the ring, and all three of them bowed to the applause of the audience before turning and leaving the same way they’d entered.

The noise died away when the ringmaster raised his hands. “Now then, for our next act, I’d like...”

The rasp of an old car horn interrupted him. He turned to face the entrance as an old Volkswagen Beetle, painted with garish chartreuse and magenta flowers, roared through the curtains. A pair of buttocks painted with a smiley face was pressed up against the back window. The doors opened and five clowns fell out. One of them wore a giant purple phallic rubber nose and a wrinkled skinhead wig with droopy rubber breasts hanging down on either side of his head like bloodhound ears. He ran at the ringmaster with a raucous yell and shoved him backward so he stumbled down on the sand. Another clown wore a pair of trousers with a large rigid hoop sewn into the waistband, held up by bracers, but when he walked the sway of the trousers revealed he wore no underwear, and had painted clown makeup on unmentionable parts of his anatomy. One wore a quilted, hooded suit and snow boots, the sort of attire people wear when traveling in the Arctic Circle, only the crotch was cut out of it. The fourth–the one whose backside had first been presented–wore his costume upside down, with his legs in the sleeves and his arms in the legs, hands in a pair of shoes and feet inside a giant limp-fingered pair of white gloves, his head a nondescript lump where his rear should be and his bottom protruding through the neck hole. The last clown wore not very much at all, aside from an orange curly wig and matching pubic hairpiece with an oversize pair of shoes and a lot of makeup.

The Hermaphrodite Twins–for want of anything better to call them–had rushed over and helped the ringmaster back to his feet. He pushed into the milling clowns, shouting indignantly. The first clown snatched the mic from him and shouted “Cunt!” through the ring’s sound system and blew a raspberry. The clown juggled the mic, with several phallic batons, while the ringmaster tried to grab it back. Brass band music played and the clowns started to fight, using desserts for ammunition. One of them somehow trapped his testicles in the steel jaws of a rattrap and ran about shrieking. The ringmaster tried to break them up and slipped in a pile of red jelly. He and the Hermaphrodite Twins eventually managed to round up all the lewd clowns, including the one who was by now behind the car with his knob stuck up the exhaust pipe, and force them back into the car.

The audience thundered with laughter, reminding Sylvia of nothing more than the crowd frenzy she’d experienced when she’d been on duty at Leicester City’s home football games. This was stupid and Sylvia felt embarrassed watching it, but these people were entitled to their entertainment, and she needed to keep an open mind. She’d never really got why people liked to watch two teams kick a ball up and down a muddy field either, but it was consensual and didn’t hurt anyone, and this was the same, so she needed to stop thinking like this and treat it in the same way. Because it was. And that was okay.

As the clowns drove away, the ringmaster put the mic to his mouth, and his lips moved, but the sound didn’t seem to work. He looked at the thing in his hand and realized it was one of the clown’s batons, much to the crowd’s amusement.

“...before I was so rudely interrupted,” the ringmaster continued as he picked up the real microphone from the floor, “I was about to introduce our magician.” He paused, frowning. “I hope there’s no one here who’s under eighteen. You see, our next act, although he is a magician, he’s not the sort of magician you’d want at your kid’s birthday party...”

The circle of light on the ringmaster fled back to the curtain, where it jerkily followed an elderly man in a royal blue robe patterned with pictures of planets. He carried an orange toolbox painted in the same pattern, on a slow walk toward the stage. Clonking music suggesting decrepitude played.

He grumbled querulously to himself as he climbed arthritically up the steps and set down his box. He turned his back to the audience and bent over the box, and immediately he let off a great slack-buttocked thunderclap of a fart that caused his gown to billow out behind him. Laughter and cries of disgust spread outward from the audience who were seated directly to his rear.

Great. Flatulence humor. Sylvia rolled her eyes. This at least she could handle.

“It happens, when you get older!” He turned to the audience, throwing out his arms as though to absolve himself. “Speaking of being old, I’m going to do a magic trick for you all in a minute, but I need a piss first.” He pulled up his robe and dangled his manhood over the audience, who screamed and flinched, raising arms defensively over heads.

“Now this isn’t right,” he mumbled to himself. The main screens showed that he appeared to be slowly pulling what looked like a piece of white string out of his urethra. As he teased out more and more of what appeared to be an endless length, he wound it around the fingers of one hand and laughter rippled over the crowd.

“Don’t laugh!” He stopped pulling out the string to aim a glare and an accusing finger at the spectators. “It’ll happen to all of you some day!”

The end of the string finally came free. It had a bath plug attached to it.

“Wondered where that had gone.”

The audience laughed and made ugh noises. Well, Sylvia thought, it had to be a sleight of hand. That thing couldn’t really fit up there, so it was silly of them to be disgusted. The conjuror twirled around and pulled a bunch of orange lilies out of his anus, which he hurled up over the audience where it exploded in a shower of confetti. Then he stood still and let forth a long fart that inflated his robe and increased in volume, until with a loud crash one of the midgets from the earlier act fell out beneath him and rolled from under the hem of his robe, swearing and shouting. He vomited a string of colored flags and shot streamers out of his sleeves and a small firework out of his bottom. He left the stage to a mixture of applause and groans in equal measure. Sylvia wondered if he might have had a different response if he’d been younger, or perhaps female, and had done exactly the same act.

The ringmaster was already out and announcing the next act as the magician shuffled away. “From one kind of magic, to an altogether different sort!” he shouted. “Whores and bastards, I give you Marvin the incredible Electrosex Wizard!”

A nerdy, plump young man in thick-framed spectacles and a heavy metal t-shirt, and a tall, blond-haired woman with a huge bosom next took the stage. Their act was centered around the man tying the woman to a table and sticking electrodes into her various orifices while she made irritating chimp noises that Sylvia presumed were meant to be interpreted as enjoyment. Sylvia couldn’t watch it. It was objectifying of the woman to make a spectacle of herself like that, to let the man do it to her in public. What if people watching it thought this was normal, that they went out expecting to get it from relationships, or feeling pressured to do it? The giant surgical steel dildo reminded her in a way the other exhibitionist’s bodies hadn’t of her own failures with the last man she’d tried with.

Why had Pikesley had to send her on this one? Why not one of the others? Just because they were all married and had children and it would be considered indecent and inappropriate for them to investigate suspicious activity in this sort of environment? Did the people with whom she worked mutter and speculate behind her back? Did they suspect her inadequacy? She’d always feared they did. It was the air they had when December invariably came round, and one of her colleagues would, as always, ask her if she intended to bring anyone as a guest to the office party. She’d only heard fragments of conversations about her. She knew some of them suspected her of being gay and in denial. Others more likely merely suspected her of being some sort of prude with a Victorian attitude to sex, from the way she fell silent whenever conversation descended to bawdy jokes and is-this-normal marital discourse. Perhaps Pikesley had thought it a right fine joke, sending her on this job.

The audience was applauding. Sylvia looked up from Max, who she’d been staring at to try to keep her mind off what the performance had made her think. The nerd and the buxom woman bowed and left the stage. The spotlight returned to the ringmaster.

“As for our next performer, well, he has no name, not that anybody knows. Some say he sought revenge on those who destroyed him and left his body a ruin, that he hunted them down and killed them in cold blood. Some say his injuries were caused by wild animals on the loose in Birmingham. Some say what was done to him gave him sight beyond sight–the sight to see into the very soul of his fellow men...”

The ringmaster paused to reflect, leaning back on his heels and thus pronouncing the curves of his waist and backside. “All we know is he’s a bionic man.” The ringmaster bowed slightly, and gestured with an opulent motion of his arm to the curtain, where a spotlight illuminated a figure who strode at a steady pace toward the stage. Unlike the other actors, he was fully clothed in a formal suit and tie. Where the left arm emerged from the cuff, steel gleamed in place of flesh. The man’s scalp was half covered with an artificial material. Black glossy plastic and harsh metal bulged from his eye sockets.

The main screens changed to show the man’s face. The skin that remained on his head was rutted with scars and the rough irregularities of skin grafts. His nose was missing entirely, replaced with two Teflon slits that closed and opened with each breath. The apparatus protruding from his eye sockets and the rigid mask of the transplanted skin on his face made his appearance utterly inhuman. When he spoke, his voice was a sibilant murmur, dry and harsh as the winds in the desert.

“Come with me, and I shall show you the dark places I see,” he hissed. “The bleak shadow world the human eye does not penetrate.”

The screen changed, to show an eerie green monochrome rendition of ranks of strange people, staring with sinister gleaming eyes. With a start, Sylvia recognized it as what must be the bionic man’s view of the audience.

As he turned to pan his vision over the entire seating area, not one person made a sound. Everyone stared at the creepy image on the screen, and an uncanny worry came over Sylvia that she might recognize herself in this distorted vision. Although it seemed ridiculous to fear such a thing, nevertheless she did, and yet she could not look away.

The bionic man’s vision changed to infrared, the bodies of the audience becoming blobs of bright heat. Then it changed again, to a grainy grayness that showed the shapes of their bodies under their clothes. A murmur of unease spread across everyone.

The screens faded to black, and the bionic man bowed once and wordlessly left the stage. All the lights dimmed.

For a moment, the audience seemed confused. Uneasy conversation broke out. A few began to laugh. The laughter spread, slowly turning into applause.

The main spotlight came back on, focused once more on the ringmaster, who raised his arms to a loud roar of approval. A movement somewhere above him caught Sylvia’s attention. Some sort of equipment was being lowered from the gantries.

“You’ve been a marvelous audience and thank you so much for coming. We’ve been working hard to get our main event up and running, and we should be open for business tomorrow as planned. For now it’s time to bid you farewe–”

His voice cut short as the Hermaphrodite Twins, who had been moving stealthily up behind him, each grabbed an arm and hoisted him up. The microphone landed on the floor, transmitting a muffled thump through the loudspeakers. A thunder of laughter surged through the crowd. One of the twins snatched the ringmaster’s hat and spun it away like a Frisbee with a flick of his wrist. As the two of them stretched his arms up and manacled his wrists to the apparatus overhead, his ruffled, straw-colored hair and the expression of apparently genuine panic on his face made Sylvia start. Was this really only an act? What were they going to do? Sylvia’s pulse quickened as she once more found herself studying the shape of him. She wanted to see him be humiliated, see him helpless and in their power and unable to predict what they intended to do, and her own reaction shocked her. Max stirred uncomfortably at her feet, sensing the change in her mood from the bleedback through her interface to him. He’d been castrated as a puppy and had never felt the sex urge. He didn’t understand. She tried to think, tried to look away, but she couldn’t, and she was riveted on the scene below and what was about to happen.

One of the twins got hold of the ringmaster’s shirt at the back and tore it off him, leaving the startlingly white flesh of his chest and stomach quivering with the sudden motion. An electric charge of excitement jumped up Sylvia’s thighs. The two lifted up his feet and slid his shorts down, over his hiking boots, before tying up his legs by slings under the backs of his knees. A third sling went behind his shoulders and under his elbows.

Now he was suspended facing the ceiling, legs and arms spread wide, fat and naked apart from his woggle and hiking boots and the woolly socks crumpled around his ankles. His stubby, semierect phallus slumped against the mound of his stomach, its base buried in the soft pad of fat covering his groin. Something gleamed with a dull metallic luster on its tip. Sylvia strained her eyes to make it out...some kind of piercing by the look of it.

The twins removed the codpieces from their bondage uniforms while he hung there, his breathing loud and rapid through the ring’s main speakers, a slight whimper apparent with each exhalation. Both twins had sparse, close-cropped pubic hair and very small phalluses. Or they might have been very large clitorises–it was hard to tell where the line between the two might fall.

A twin withdrew something from a pouch at the back of his harness, six inches long and white, with an irregular knobbly shape. It glistened with lube. He knelt between the ringmaster’s chubby thighs and lowered the head of the object toward the dark, tight area under the coarse skin of his scrotum.

The ringmaster’s whimpering rose to become loud cries as the object sank into him. The screen displaying the close-up shot showed the twin was wiggling it with a rolling circular motion as he pushed it deeper. The second twin stepped forward to straddle the ringmaster’s face and began to fondle the man’s chest and biceps. His noises became muffled and mingled with slurps and sucking sounds as he wrapped his lips around the twin’s glans.

His body began to tremble, rattling the harness. Sylvia stared, mesmerized by the quivering and rippling spreading over him. Semen was ebbing from the tip of his dick, lots of it. It pooled in the space between his groin and thigh and dripped to the sandy floor in a thick string, and yet it continued to spill from him and still he continued to shiver and convulse and cry out in orgasm.

When he finally stopped, he hung there replete while the Hermaphrodite Twins pulled the dildo out of him and unstrung him from the harness. He bowed low to the applause of the crowd. The Hermaphrodite Twins bowed in turn, and with a last hail of, “Thank you!” from the ringmaster, the three of them left through the curtains.

Sylvia looked about herself, at people who gathered their things and expressed regret that it was over, as though this was a perfectly normal and very enjoyable evening event. All she could do was stare at the fat man’s jiggling buttocks as he exited the ring. What had just happened made her feel so many conflicting things she couldn’t separate them from the confusion. Why couldn’t she treat it the same way she handled the football matches? Sylvia didn’t even like sex. Sure, she liked men and she liked being intimate, but whenever she’d got to the point of penetration with anyone, it had hurt, and she’d lost her libido immediately. That she felt something when she watched this made it even worse. It was like being poor and watching rich people flaunt their money.

The crowd was rising from their seats, heading for the exits now. Sylvia needed to get after the performers and have a look backstage. She pushed down against the current of exiting spectators, toward the center ring. When she reached the barrier, she hoisted Max up by his harness and lowered him over, before climbing down after him.

She knew Max would pull toward that damp pungent patch on the sand where the ringmaster’s orgasm had spilled over, but that didn’t stop him from doing it. She pulled him on, trying to block the smell and the data shot that came with it.

“Excuse me!” she called through the curtain, and Max poked his nose through the gap in the center. Inside, the performers all seemed to have provided themselves a modicum of decency by throwing on some clothes. Sylvia immediately recognized the ringmaster, clad in a vermilion silk dressing gown. The fabric rippled, clinging to him as he strode toward her, and she thought again of how shameful and ridiculous, and yet how oddly compelling, his act a moment ago had been. She’d never been with a fat guy before. Perhaps it would be different than with other men, or perhaps it would just be another disappointment and a dead end. A curiosity came over her: how might he feel to touch? Soft and smooth, rather than the stringy muscle and rough hairy skin of the other men she’d known.

“Would you mind if I had a moment?” She could already tell from Max’s feedback that the room was clean. It was too small and clear of interfering smells for him not to have detected something by now. “Who’s in charge here?”

The ringmaster twisted his mouth and raised his eyebrows. “That would be me.”

He hadn’t introduced himself. Sylvia really ought to get his name, but a fear nagged at her that he would have some ludicrous porn name that he’d had made official by deed poll, and she could just see Pikesley’s face if she handed in a report with such a name on it. “I’m Constable Sylvia Price.” Sylvia showed him her ID. “I need to inform you that my department has received a number of...suggestions...from members of the public regarding trade or activities involving banned or controlled substances and devices within the locality of this attraction. I’m here to establish whether there’s any truth to these assertions.”

“Did you know,” he said in a whimsical sort of way, “that dolphins are the only animal known to have nasal sex? And that there are more gay giraffes than there are straight ones?”

His voice was almost flirtatious, and he was talking to her, and it was like she was back in school and trying to break the ice for the first time with the object of a crush. Sylvia could feel the heat building in her face. She glanced away from him for a moment, breaking eye contact. Not a good impression to make.

“Just consider that, next time someone tells you that our sideshow violates the laws of nature.”

Leaning on Max’s more robust mental state, she faced the ringmaster again. “You need to understand that these allegations are serious. If we find evidence of drugs, or illicit software, being traded or used in this facility, the police have the power to shut down this operation.”

“Which would be very convenient, for certain people.” He wasn’t flirtatious now. A forceful tone had come into his voice. “You think it’s acceptable to harry us about, on the accusations of people without even the decency to give their names?”

“Of course not. Nobody is accusing you or your employees of anything. I certainly hope I’ll find nothing of the sort, but complaints have been made, and they need to be investigated. It’s in your interests if you co-operate with us. I need to ask you if there is anything you want to tell me that you think is of relevance.”

The ringmaster folded his arms and raised his chin imperiously. “No, there isn’t.”

“Okay, then. Thank you for your time. If you don’t mind, I’d like to leave you my contact details in case something does occur to you.” Sylvia offered him a card with her details.

The ringmaster snapped his fingers and the conjuror stepped up to stand beside him. “Give the lady my card.”

With a flourish and a swish of his robe, the conjuror bowed before Sylvia and produced, or appeared to produce, a business card from his backside. Sylvia took it gingerly between finger and thumb when he presented it to her.

“Oh don’t be ridiculous!” he said. “You don’t honestly think it’s actually been up my arse? It’s just a sleight of hand!” The conjuror stalked away in disgust.

The card simply said:

Victor R. Maynard

Freak

Followed by a mobile number.

“You’re Maynard?”

The ringmaster reached to Sylvia’s breast pocket and took her pen. “Victor R. Maynard,” he muttered, as he scrawled on the card before handing back both it and the pen. “That may be worth something on eBay in a hundred years’ time. If eBay still exists in a hundred years.”

Sylvia turned the card over. It showed a holographic image of Victor R. Maynard in a rather less than dignified state of attire and posture. She quickly turned it back and pocketed it. Time to get out of here and clear her head, at last.