Free Midway Relics and Dying Breeds: A Tor.Com Original by Seanan McGuire

 
    The trouble began a long time before it finished, but it felt like it first started when the westward portage rope snagged on a tree. That wouldn’t have been the end of the world—you float your equipment through a forested area, you learn to expect a little snag-and-tag from the landscape. The Greenies would rather we skirted our balloons higher to avoid branch breakage, but there’s no way to do that without burning more fuel and sacrificing maneuverability, which is more trouble than it’s worth. Besides, all the forests we have to contend with are the fast recovery kind, eucalyptus down NorCal way and pines and scrub fir in Cascadia. A few broken branches are nothing to trees like that, and the kind of damage we were apt to do fell well within the acceptable tolerances for our license. No big deal.
    Thing was, the westward portage rope was attached to Billie’s harness, and Billie, for all her advantages as a draft animal, is about as smart as damp moss when it comes to things like “noticing external stimuli.” She’s a genework Indricothere that my Uncle Ren and I bought from a fly-by firm about six years back—a sort of precursor to the rhinoceros, and one of the largest land mammals ever to walk on the planet. When she put down her foot, the ground shook. There were no predators that could take her down and no threats that she recognized as worth giving a damn about, all of which combined to mean that there wasn’t much that could distract her from the essential task of eating her way through the foliage of the world. All nine tons of her continued plodding relentlessly forward, her massive teeth stripping branches as she walked. Her grazing license typed her as a firebreak, preventing fires by clearing out all the dead stuff before it could go up. It was more than halfway true, and it hadn’t caught us any trouble yet.
    Her harness shook as the westward portage rope pulled, until the vibrations traveled all the way to the howdah on her back. The bench swayed alarmingly, causing my cousin Bay to flash me a look that was half terror, half accusation. The kids seated on Billie’s neck kicked her, to no avail. The Indricothere lumbered on.
    My radio crackled. I unclipped it from my belt, already knowing what I was about to hear. “This is Ansley. You’re a go.”
    “We’ve lost steerage and we’re about to snag the Ferris wheel on a treetop,” snapped the voice of my cousin Davo. “You want to stop your pony?”
    “She’s not a pony. She’s an Indricothere.” I knew better than to correct him. Somehow I just couldn’t stop myself.
    “Don’t care. Make her stop before she breaks something we can’t afford to repair.” The radio crackled again as Davo hung up on me. I said a bad word, clipped it back into place, and shoved Billie’s reins at Bay, who was only riding with me because she didn’t like being cooped up inside the howdah with the rest of the laydown team. “Here. Take her.”
    Bay looked alarmed. Coward: I would have been thrilled to be given control of a giant prehistoric monster when I was seventeen and trying to prove myself with the carnival. Now I was just twenty-three and tired of dealing with younger cousins who didn’t have any flexibility in their spines. “What should I do if she tries to go somewhere I don’t want her to?”
    “Go there,” I replied promptly. “You don’t think we can steer her, do you?”
    Bay was still staring at me in horror as I grabbed the belay rope and swung myself down to Billie’s side. The hair there was thick and coarse, almost a foot long, and perfect for using as a handhold. After clipping the belay rope to my belt next to the radio, I pulled myself hand over fist along Billie’s neck, knocking younger cousins aside as I made my way to her head. The kids laughed, catching themselves with fistfuls of Billie’s shaggy hair as they let me pass. They knew the pecking order here, and that they rode on Billie at all thanks to my good