Ruby and Munruf immediately fall for one another and their mutual affection melts the heart of the kid’s father, a rebellious-minded factory worker, who gives the boy permission to break the law against owning pets. Within a few days, the mother and even Munruf’s sister, a dainty fifteen-year-old, get over their initial distaste and join Ruby and Munruf on the carpet, rolling around and letting her lick and snuffle them as much as she likes. But then comes the difficulty of getting rid of the crap, preventing the spread of other unfamiliar odors, keeping the dog out of the tiny family garden, and muffling her every bark. Nosy neighbors start to ask leading questions, and soon some Biodiversity Custodians begin to appear in the neighborhood, something unheard of. On top of all that, it’s impossible to hide the asphyxiating feeling that comes with keeping a strange body locked up inside, and Munruf’s father begins to fear for his family and his job as a sheet worker at the bamboonium plant. No doubt attracted by the strange atmosphere that shrouds the house, one night, a fat, long-haired man in an olive greatcoat knocks at the door to offer a deal. Among the animals that populate the homes of the lawbreaking wealthy and traffickers of fauna, canines are highly prized for their rarity. However, the brotherhood represented by the fat man is, he says, committed to giving animals an occupation, restoring their bond with humanity, and promoting shared amusement. The brotherhood is from an Indigenous community to the west of the island, where they pass down the proscribed belief that people can learn from the inner calm of animals. They’re well enough hidden and armed to protect and promote their cause and they pay more than the traffickers. To Munruf’s despair, the father agrees: not for the money but for the good of the family. A couple of days later, a pair masquerading as ventilation technicians sooth Ruby’s whines with expert caresses. They put her in a box of spare parts and load her into a van. The fat man sends the head of the family a neural message with a road map and a time, along with a perplexing thought: “Not many domestic animals survived cohabitation with the savages; the fact that dogs are still clinging on shows how tough they are.”
The boy Munruf is distraught; he pays no attention to the smartbooks at school. His father takes him to visit Ruby in her new life. They have to do the last stretch on foot. A couple of leagues outside of a settlement is an abandoned orgelium mine. Men and women with vibration cannons under their coats guard the entrance to the tunnel, which leads to a cavern over which hangs a sign: THE GREAT RING OF ENTERTAINMENT, where one pays an entrance fee. It’s a tournament day and there’s a sizable, rambunctious crowd chewing on candy while they trade, buy, and sell rabbit’s feet, spiked collars, muzzles, crow feathers, and minorco skin caps. The games begin with a battle between semi-organic cherpies that peck and kick at each other while the crowd bellows and throws tarbits into the arena. Eventually one tears the other apart, but it too suffers a deep wound, revealing a crystalline gash and gut wiring. After the mess is cleaned up, a parade of real animals appears, masked and covered in olive cloaks. One’s muzzle begins to tremble in great agitation. Munruf squeezes his father’s hand. All but two of the animals then exit the arena. The pair left behind are uncovered. They’re both dogs: one looks like a lion; the other is Ruby.
A triangle sounds. Provoked by the noise and commotion, the combatants face off, growling and jumping at each other before drawing back. Munruf starts to mumble as though he’s praying, or giving instructions. He refuses to leave and won’t even let his father cover his eyes. But the puppies barely nip one another: their hearts aren’t in the fight. They indulge in a series of harmless feints before tiring themselves out. They grow so weary that people stop betting. The fiasco draws a shower of scorn from the audience. The dogs sit down. Ruby pees. Munruf leaps into the ring to sweep her up and they nuzzle. Before the heart-melting scene can go any further, the mistress of the ring orders dog and boy out of the arena. Munruf’s father is taken to one side by the fat man, who demands money to let the dog go. The father glances at his joyful son, no doubt trying to weigh up his options: should he leave the dog there, where, as harsh as it might be, she’ll at least have a profession and experts to protect her? Set her free even though she won’t last long? Take her back home and put his family at risk? But it turns out that the animal-loving brotherhood aren’t very expert, or much of a safe haven. In fact, they’ve already been defeated. Evidence of this comes when a troop of men and women in multicolored cloaks burst athletically into the cavern, point a needle gun at the fat man, and subdue the crowd. An old man with a crooked smile who until now has been hiding in the bleachers stands up and comes over to talk to Munruf’s father, ignoring the fat man. He introduces himself as Dun Aires. The group isn’t a sect, and they aren’t motivated by religious belief; they come from the southeastern hills where their ancestors, he says, strove to provide animals with an alternative to aimless wandering or servitude. The smiling Dun Aires runs a clandestine circus. Munruf doesn’t trust him, and tucks Ruby under his hoodie. The father looks dreamy, like he’s recalling someone else’s faint memories of a circus, but the man’s friendliness and careful diffidence convince him to let him make his argument. The captive audience grows restless. Dun Aires isn’t just speaking to the father anymore, but starts gesturing at everyone like a salesman making a pitch. Those old enough to remember, he says, know how their lives lit up once a year when the circus carriages rolled into town. In the big top, amid all the fanfare and bright lights, humans and animals schooled in many arts shared roles in amazing demonstrations of skill, hair-raising grace, elegance, courage, strength, and character, delighting audiences from seven to seventy. But just as it misunderstood the real needs of the respective species, the law also discredited shows based on skill and danger. It didn’t only bring an end to the practice of animal wrangling but also the Amazon, the acrobat, the tight-rope walker, the clowns, the dancers, and the animals themselves, who knew perfectly well when to follow a command and when to disobey it. Is someone today brave enough to bring the pleasure of these spectacles back to the viewing audience? Are audiences now too timid to indulge in that pleasure? The crowd goes silent. Dun Aires takes Munruf’s father to one side; he tells him that in contrast to wargs and raptors, the intelligence of dogs has been enhanced by centuries of evolution and they’re very sociable. The father agrees to give Ruby to him. Munruf refuses. As they struggle, Ruby starts to bark and the boy screams so loud his father gives him a slap before dropping his hand, shocked at his own failure of compassion. Dun Aires puts his arm around them both, soothing their ire and shame, and places Ruby into a wicker basket. The puppy calms down, and father and son leave. On their contrition-filled league walk back across the tundra, the approaching sound of rotors tells them they’ve left just in time. They look behind them to see a hawkopter containing an unidentified special forces detachment descending on the mine where the Great Ring of Entertainment is housed. However, the group in gaudy attire has already made their escape on flywings.
Back at home, Munruf languishes without his dog. The absence has upset the previously warm family routine, which feels as hollow as the hole that has mysteriously appeared in their tiny garden: it has no visible bottom and is surrounded by a mound of subterranean material. In addition to earth, the mound consists of clay alumina and foundation dust, and gradually grows bigger while the father struggles to work out what’s making it. The cavity would appear to symbolize that the home is missing something. During this period of reassessment, Munruf’s mother tries to draw a line under recent events. She says there’s no point arguing, that’s life, there’s nothing anyone can do about it. But from where he’s looking, Munruf can see a cloud of mist gathered around the hole in the garden and, from where we’re looking, the audience can see that Munruf is now a sad little boy when he wasn’t before. Just as we suspect that the melancholy is becoming too much for the family, one morning they are greeted not by a neural advertisement but a printed pamphlet someone slipped under the door during the night. In elaborate black text against a yellow background, it reads:
THE CIRCUS HAS RETURNED! ITS FESTIVE SPOTLIGHTS WILL ONCE MORE ILLUMINATE GALLOPING OVISTIA, DUROBÓ THE LASER MAN, THE SPARROWS OF THE TRAPEZE, CLOWNS, ILLUSIONISTS, FEROCIOUS WARGS, AND THE LEGENDARY PUPS OF DANCING LAKE
It warns that this is a rare opportunity and contains a date, time, and directions. A footnote adds: Memorize this information! This text will self-destruct two hours after it is touched. Munruf hasn’t seen much paper in his life, but when this page bursts into flames he doesn’t mind. It’s exciting, rather, as though the magic of the circus had come into his home and burned away some of his sadness. When, the night before the outing, the father asks him whether seeing Ruby again won’t re-open the wound, Munruf says that he can’t wait to go. The next day, the four of them take a bus to a minor river station. An hour later, they’re getting off a launch on the dock of a riverside village. The hills containing the housing modules are crisscrossed with paths. They take one, almost entirely overgrown with thickets of eubermia, up a hill, down the other side, wade through a stream, and enter a wood. They come out into a clearing at the back of which, lit up by fairy lights and surrounded by camouflaged, lightweight carriages, they find the big top staked into the clay-rich earth. Music can be heard from inside. Children, parents, and grandparents appear all around. Standing in front of a curtain, someone who looks just like Dun Aires, their face covered in talcum powder, keeps up a constant stream of chatter as he sells tickets. Arrayed along the boards that circle the ring, we see faces bursting with expectation: this will be something they’ve never seen before. The music box plays a drum roll and a fanfare: “Galloping Ovistia!” announces Dun Aires. The young woman riding upside down in the saddle, her legs bare and her torso covered by her fallen frock coat, is impressive enough, but no more so than the trot of the black palfrey parading with such svelte vigor around the ring. It is so wonderfully bestial that the audience can’t decide whether to applaud or rub their eyes. Some smoke like chimneys, others gorge on their candy, barely even chewing, others just inhale the scent of the horse and this is just the beginning because then comes a tamer with a vibralash who persuades a yellow warg, after plenty of roaring, to stand on its hind legs and give him a hug. Then Merasju the Magician cuts Froto the Clown in two and he runs around the sand like crazy, looking for his other half. Troy the marmoset joins the chain made by the Sparrows of the Trapeze. There may be too many acts; some make you feel a bit sorry for the performers, while in others the humans don’t command the stage very well; and the music box, for want of a proper orchestra, starts to grate a little. Smiles freeze on faces. The older members of the audience have eaten too much candy. Then Dun Aires, gesturing this way and that, asks for a round of applause to greet the Pups of Dancing Lake. Of course, it’s not the lake that dances but rather a mixture of humans and canines who, to the beat of a pleasant merigüel, come in two by two and form a circle that then folds in on itself, and begins to flow in different directions, gradually disintegrating into smaller strands that mingle with one another and diverge like tangled fragments of writing, twigs floating on a lake. If the act is referring to a specific legend, it’s not obvious. But Munruf doesn’t care. In the middle of this crowd of calligraphy is Ruby. She’s wearing a patterned cloak, a cap, dark glasses with turquoise frames, and, although you barely recognize the hind legs tensed with the effort it takes to stay upright in heels, her pointy nose is unmistakable and already beginning to twitch moistly at the scent of her friend. But she doesn’t move her head. Concentrating on the music, she walks forward three paces, stops, repeats the movement, and on the sixth beat walks back, just three paces, as though to pick up something left behind or help a wounded comrade, as though she really were in the water, riding one wave and then the next, getting a little further each time. It’s incredible. The entire family is open-mouthed, but Munruf has his head in his hands. His eyes are gleaming, either with tears or amazement, and from the rhythmic pacing of the little dog, his unblinking gaze rises to the roof of the tent, then up to the sky. It follows the curve of the heavens and then plunges downward back into the earth while the image of Ruby fades into the darkness of an underground tunnel. The boy emerges from this inverted circuit with an inquisitive expression. He scratches his head. The experience was so powerful that he missed a part of the show, but it doesn’t matter—it appears to be winding down. Both humans and beasts look a little tired. The merigüel slows. Eventually it fades entirely so that Dun Aires can repeat, “Ladies and Gentlemen: the Pups of Dancing Lake!” and the audience claps loud and heartily while Munruf’s family look as though they’ve come to the conclusion that although the routine undeniably has an element of humiliation for the animals, it’s also brilliant, and overall they’ve enjoyed themselves. They’d be even happier if, now that the dancers are waving and leaving the arena, they didn’t feel a knot in the pit of their stomachs. They must feel empty, otherwise Munruf’s father and sister wouldn’t hurry to intercept Dun Aires to ask when the next show will be. Unfortunately, Dun Aires doesn’t know yet. He leaves the tent with them, points to the trucks, the artists and guards milling around, and says that they’re already packing up. They’ll be leaving at midnight. They can’t run the risk of being caught by a Custodian Brigade, a gang of animal traffickers, or both together. The disappointed family asks when they’ll be back. Dun Aires spreads his arms like a triumphant politician. Wait for the flyer, he says. They can trust him. If there’s one thing that circuses do, it’s return.
They too go home, their heads down, bereft, brow-beaten by a range of conflicting sensations, but Munruf is more lighthearted. “What did you think?” his father asks. “I don’t know, Daddy. It’s very professional, isn’t it?” The mother says that Ruby has taught them about life, green fields, the desert and, at the end of the desert, trees again. Munruf nods, distant, like he’s still mulling over the passage from the sky down into the earth. When, after a difficult journey back, they get home, he goes straight into the gardenette, crouches by the hole and feels inside. After perfunctorily washing his hands, he seeks out an illustrated smartbook. He shows one of the drawings to his father, pointing to one image in particular, and asks if he knows what it is.
“Yes, son, it’s a mole, an industrious little creature that digs holes under the ground.”
Munruf taps the drawing with a finger. He’s done thinking. He’s so excited that he almost drops the smartbook.
“Of course, Daddy,” he says. “You see? It’s a mole, I’d better let him stay hidden.”
