The Cyberkink Sideshow Read Free

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