Cirque d'Ares
an excerpt

Lily loved to watch the heeby-weeby robots set up the chapiteaux dome. Wearing a navy blue skin tight mechanical counter-pressure suit and helmet, she sat on a rock on the Martian surface and watched the main dome for the Cirque d’Ares being assembled. The framework for the chapiteaux (or big top) and the smaller backstage and sideshow domes were set up on the dusty Martian surface just outside a Halliburton dome city at the foot of Pavonis Mons. The half meter long multi-legged robots looked like ants wielding large curved leaves of spun glass many times their size and snapping them into the airtight titanium framework. The dome was a geodesic structure 15 meters tall. The crew of 100 weebies moved so quickly that it took less than three Martian hours to set up all three spaces. The top of the dome was an opaque red and white checker-board of illuminated panels. The sides were opaque white tiles. Once all the panels were in place and the dome was pressurized, the weebys would begin setting up the lighting rig, the bleacher seats, and the rigs for the aerial acts.

Lily (short for Elodie) Pelletier was an aerialist with Cirque d’Ares. She had developed Spanish web, silk, high wire, lyra and trapeze routines. With Leno Koslowski, the patriarch of the Flying Koslowski’s, she had completed a record breaking 100 quadruple spins on the flying rapeze at a performance extravaganza at the EU dome-city of Schiaparelli in Hellas Planitia. She was born on Mars in the French-sponsored Sarkozy dome near Schiaparelli. Her hair was a bright fuchsia pink, just pink enough to not be an unlucky red and a pretty contrast to her green eyes. She wore it in a short cap framing her face with bangs. Standing two meters tall, she was willowy from a regimen of yoga, weight training, and ballet. Her costumes usually matched her hair and had wings under the arms that she would use to glide down from the aerial platform at the end of the performance to the applause of the audience.

Lily figured it would be nearly another hour before she could do any pre-show rehearsal, so she stood and headed towards the airlock for the performers’ track rover. By showtime, an airlock tube would connect the chapitaux dome with the Halliburton dome so the rubes could come in. The airlock tube was a standard sized opening at the Halliburton end but it was twice as big at the chapitaux end to accommodate the red wagon ticket booth.

Back inside, while she waited for the chapiteaux to go up, Lily watched a recording of her silk act, wrapping herself in long lengths of cerulean nanosilk and falling, and thought she looked a little stiff. The hours she spent on the track rover practicing ballet was helping, but she had spent more years concentrating on strength training, a challenge in the light Martian gravity, and she never felt graceful enough. When the routine ended Lily clicked off the vidscreen.

Earlier in the day Doc Mackinnon, the circus’s vet and human doctor, had confirmed her suspicion. She was pregnant, maybe a month along. She'd cornered him in the menagerie track rover after the dust storm. She'd missed her period and her breasts felt tender. The last couple of mornings she'd been too queasy to eat breakfast, and she usually ate like a man twice her size. Doc gave her a little package with a stick. She peed on it in the latrine and brought it back. “You're pregnant,” Doc said.
“Damn,” Lily muttered. “How? I have an implant and so does Mario. Mine’s supposed to be good for another year and Mario just got his renewed a month ago.”
“Dunno, maybe it ran out early. Maybe it malfed. Nothing is 100% effective.”
“Why not? it's supposed to work! That's its job!” Her eyes stung making her blink.
Doc patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. He had to reach up. raised in earth gravity, he was quite a bit shorter than Lily. He was better with animals. They didn’t talk back. “You don't have to keep it,” he said finally.
She stared at him in shock. Lily's parents were descended from French Catholic immigrants. The idea of termination hadn't even occured to her. It was a fairly routine procedure, unlimted by pan-Martian laws, but the practice varied depending on the culture and moral code of individual settlements. In Sarkozy, it was legal, but considered immoral. “I couldn't!” she stammered.
Doc shrugged. He was raised on earth where, even with waves of emigration to Mars, Luna, and the asteroid belt, the human population was bursting the seams of the planet. One child per family, and only with a license, was strictly enforced regardless of religious orientation. “Why don't you think about it for a while. You’ve got some time to make up your mind.”

Lily sat silently in front the the darkened vid screen for a while. She looked at her flat toned stomach under her costume bodysuit made of pink and silver lycra. She imagined her stomach swollen and taut with a baby’s elbows and knees poking out. She imagined trying to balance on the high wire with a huge distended belly. She imagined tumbling through the air unbalanced by the change in her center of gravity. Then she imagined a tiny baby with Mario’s chocolate eyes and her pink hair suckling at her small bosom.

Doc had told her she absolutely had to stop performing for the last three months of the pregnancy and three months after the birth. The idea of a little baby, like the cute twins born last year to one of the Wing Woo acrobat troupe, was kind of appealing but the idea of not being able to fly every day just killed her. She lived to fly. She'd studied gymnastics as a child and auditioned with the circus when she reached majority at 16 (by pan-Martian law). She’d been accepted and adopted into the Flying Kozlowski’s extended family. She'd been with the circus now for ten years and was known across Mars as a star performer. she felt like she was just hitting the peak of her career. Not to mention that Mario’s wife would not be pleased that he was the father. This really was not a good time for a baby. Lily began to cry.