The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  “It’s not even possible!” Boone tipped his head back to survey the workings of the machinery. “The mills are welded shut. We feed them through traps in the mesh.”

  Millsy felt exhilarated, as if he had shared in Boone’s triumph. And as a handler, he had shared in it. It was the triumph of mankind over beast: pure, intellectual, and visceral at the same time. Inevitably his thoughts went to Crispin. This was the joy to which he wanted so badly to introduce the boy when he got old enough. He felt that Crispin had an aptitude for it. Just as, long ago, Boone must have felt that Millsy had an aptitude.

  Boone was explaining some difficulty they had had in the construction of the shaft. Millsy could not make himself pay attention. Exhibitions like this were not routine to him, as they were to the comptroller. The episode with the whip had left his heart beating fast. A voice whispered in him: This is all that there is in life. The rest is words on the wind; what does it matter if they are sweet or bitter? This is the essence.

  (Crispin, my child... )

  And love, after all, the fast-fading cynic within him whispered superciliously, is just another form of control.

  It was insupportably cold in Christina Gregisson’s parlor. The Royals themselves seemed to emanate the chill—as if they were frozen stiff in their layers of draperies. They did not react to the conversation around them, except to flicker an eyelid when the company laughed. They were not dressed in the fashions of the court; instead, they had swathed themselves in what looked to Millsy’s unaccustomed eye like landscape paintings torn out of their frames. The courtiers who fluttered around them, proffering cakes, finger-goblets of wine, conversational sallies, seemed small and thin as sprites—men and women both, for the fashions for women this year were body-hugging sheaths that would have caused a scandal in the streets of any city in Ferupe.

  Only the boldest courtiers actually dared to address themselves to Melithra, Athrina, Sathranna, or Dorthrea. The rest stood in the corners gossiping, slewing their eyes every five seconds toward the center of the room where the painted hillocks brooded.

  Millsy’s dulled aesthetic sense could not help equating the exquisite fragility of the parlor with beauty. He had been speechless ever since he came in. Common sense told him that none of them even knew who he was. Yet fear pounded maddeningly inside his skull, and every time someone offered him a cake he hesitated. He hated himself for it, but he hesitated.

  He had been a fool to come!

  But he had been so hungry for a glimpse of the Royals. And here they were. The women cousins. He had forgotten how unsatisfying they were, these women cousins. He remembered the Queen as far grander than any of them. Her skin was almost as dark as Crispin’s. Strange, Millsy had often thought, how although the non-Royal ladies powdered their skin to make it whiter, among Royals darker skin meant purer blood. The court ladies’ rejection of their rulers’ standards of beauty had something not quite dignified about it. He could not help thinking of the women of Smithrebel’s. Not Anuei Kateralbin, but the animal trainers like Mrs. Lee Philpotts, who feared and loved her smelly tigers so much.

  There was a reek of daemons in the room. They roiled unseen about the Royals, worming their way in and out of the stiff folds of their drapes. Millsy knew that nobody besides himself and the Royal women could sense them. The tiny porcelain cup between his fingers glowed with warmth, but cold hung like a miasma over the room, whitening the air. Of course they were hundreds of feet underground; but that alone did not account for the chill.

  Daemon braziers burned at the feet of each Royal. Green tea steamed as it issued from the spout of the samovar over which Christina presided, her wit brittle, her voice strained. Yet when Millsy glanced at the little gatherings of courtiers, the women were surreptitiously rubbing their bare arms, the men cracking their knuckles. It was almost impossible to remember that outside, overhead, up in the world of dirt and vulgarity and death, summer was in full force. Could the chill, Millsy wondered, be psychosomatic? It certainly wasn’t produced by the daemons. He knew of no medical condition which would cause such symptoms. Therefore, it must be all in his head: a function of the extreme, unreasonable case of nerves which had overcome him the minute he entered the palace this second time.

  And yet it wasn’t just him.

  He must try to join in the conversation. It would take his mind off the cold, and his fear. Yet he knew that if he tried to make repartee, he would betray his own redundancy. Anyhow, he was terrified of the courtiers. The kisses Christina had given him on his arrival, and the questions she had asked, had been so sincere that despite himself he got quite flustered. In the world of Smithrebel’s, because of the close quarters in which everyone lived, reticence was valued almost as highly as patriotism, and Millsy did not have to throw up any false fronts. No self-explanations were required, and so he gave none—whereas in the half hour he had been at the tea party, he had already had to offer prettified accounts of himself to the Royals and to half a dozen other people whose eyes flickered away from him while he spoke.

  “More tea, Martha? More tea, Frederic? No? Gift, surely you—”

  “No, no.” Millsy’s voice came out husky. He cleared his throat. “Christina, did I forget to compliment you on that rosette? It is quite exquisite.”

  Her hand flew to her throat. She giggled. “You have an eye for fine craftsmanship?” Like most court ladies, she never tired of compliments, bland or clever, sincere or otherwise. The thing at her throat looked like a full-blown, perfect yellow rose, one petal edged with brown, but from the way it weighed down her neck ribbon, Millsy knew it was metal.

  “I was given it by Melithra on my twenty-fifth birthday—last year!” The courtiers on either side of her chuckled indulgently. It was hard to remember that Christina was in fact forty unless you looked at the tiny lines in the masklike white around her mouth and eyes. “Of course I always wear it. Melithra!” She raised her voice. “Gift admires the rosette you gave me... ” She whipped back to Millsy, a forced smile on her mouth. “If you won’t have any more tea, then surely a pastry!” She picked several from the platters on the low table before her, arranged them on a saucer, and thrust them at Millsy.

  “Really, no,” he began, but, she had already turned away from him. “Frederic!” she commanded. “Come over here and tell us again about your expedition to the south! Do they all look like my Kchebuk’arans, or are some of them moderately civilized? I am speaking of the people of the countryside, of course... Naftha is a perfect paradise, but then it is in Ferupe. Has anyone else been to Giorgio’s in Naftha... ?”

  Millsy’s gorge rose as he stared at the assortment of microscopic pastries on his napkin. In order to keep their figures and simultaneously stick to a schedule which included four to seven meals a day, lady courtiers ate nothing that was not miniaturized. Baby chickens and quail eggs, fillets of minnow; wild strawberries, infant vegetables; doll-size scoops of sherbet, chocolates like bits of gravel. It was not a fad but a serious etiquette. If the food at a “mixed” party did not come in two sizes, the host was severely censured. What could be concealed in these dabs of flour and sugar? Should he choose cowardice or possible death?

  He shook his head angrily and looked up.

  The subject of the south had been a failure. Christina was frantically trying to entertain the Royals.

  “And has your little Poche recovered from his canker, Dorthrea? We were all so concerned for the poor creature!”

  Dorthrea turned her head, slowly. Millsy was surprised that the raised collars of her drapes did not crackle.

  Silence fell over the guests: the Royal was actually going to speak! “The dog is quite well.”

  Her voice was the grind of rocks falling. Her skin was sallow and lusterless, like that of her sister and her cousins. Her hair was a garden of china flowers. Beneath that hallucinatory mass, her eyes looked like rain puddles.

  The Royals were not beautiful.

  Once the Queen had spoken to him. And she had said—


  “My bowels are about to move,” Royal Aunt Melithra said suddenly. “Perhaps I will go home.”

  Far off, through the ground, Millsy heard the subsonic roar of the factories. The birds in the cages hanging from the ceiling were silent, their feathers puffed up in the presence of the daemons. Christina’s voice rose high and gay over the silence.

  “Well, of course, Melithra, if you are not feeling well, the last thing I should—”

  The only light in the room came from the gas fixtures around the walls. It was yellowish, unhealthy. The tea in Millsy’s cup had gone cold. He had not drunk a drop. He, too, would have to leave soon, or he would be sick; however, he probably wouldn’t have to excuse himself. The Royal’s announcement of her discontent meant the party would be over as soon as decency permitted. Knotting his fingers in his beard, Millsy stared at the curlicues of pastry on his knee, his heart pounding.

  That night the trucks of Smithrebel’s rolled out of the Guarze vacant lot. Millsy sat in a costume closet in the back of Daisy 3. He had left his pet daemons in the props truck so as not to frighten Crispin. If he had been a trickster woman, or a Royal, he could have forced them to stay invisible. But he was imperfectly trained.

  He sat hunched in the dark as the trucks chugged through the streets of Guarze and Jaxeze. Little by little, they pulled free of the capital. Millsy could picture the half-mile-long convoy passing the gasworks, the Kingsburg Granaries, and nameless twenty-four-hour factories from which poured the noise of daemons in torment. At last the flattening of all outside sound told him they were on the northbound road. During the hours of daylight, ox-carts, dog-carts, private daemon limousines, police cars, foot travelers, men on horseback, and army trucks all vied for space, sometimes spilling across the hedges into the fields that bordered the road, reducing crops to mud. Now the road belonged to big game. Dump trucks, short-haul lorries, eighteen-wheelers bound cross-country for Naftha, Grizelle, Gilye, or Kotansburg, semiarticulated tankers full of natural gas; Smithrebel’s trucks were merely the jesters of this powerful crew. The noise of the daemon-powered engines blended in Millsy’s ears into a spine-tingling hum, as if a choir five hundred strong were voicing one endless note.

  The winter clothes hanging in the closet swayed against his face. He inhaled a moth, and coughed. The vibration of the transformation engine went through his bones.

  Long before he had ever thought of becoming a truck driver, as a twenty-year-old courtier, he had stood at the edge of the northern road and watched the stream of behemoths pour by. His fine silk hose had been sopped with dew. His suede boots had been ruined. (In those days he had tried so hard to be fashionable, despite his long stork’s body that could not wear tight clothes without looking skeletal.) He had lost his hat. He had—if he remembered correctly—been wild with grief over some boy.

  And yet—and yet—

  The daemon of Daisy 3 was lulling him into a trance, all the way from the other end of the truck. He was in danger of falling asleep if he didn’t rouse himself. Feeling like an old man, he extracted himself from the costume closet and passed along a dark gangway until he reached the nook behind the tractor where Anuei and Crispin made their home. Seven square feet to contain the debris of two lives. A chilling thought.

  “Hallo!” he called, falsetto, and in a blurry voice, as if she had been sleeping, Anuei said:

  “Come in.”

  But she was not sleeping, but mending clothes, while Crispin, as was his wont, clambered quietly around the room. Anuei’s kind heart and clever fingers meant she got saddled with a lot of other people’s sewing. In his present state of mind, Millsy did not dare to speak to Crispin. He pretended that he had come to visit Anuei. If she was not fooled, so much the worse for her, but this afternoon had left him with a desperate zeal to maintain the proprieties.

  Despite his good intentions, it did not take him long to work around to the subject which, he now realized ruefully, was his only subject. Daemons.

  “Should you like to be able to command daemons some day?” he called to Crispin.

  The little boy was hanging upside down from the clothes rail, half-naked, his thumb in his mouth, like some overgrown wingless fruit bat. His toes were on a level with the cages of Anuei’s exotic birds, now covered with cloth, which swayed from hooks in the underside of the horizontal partition in the truck.

  “Make them come to you, I mean? Should you like that? You could play with them, have them fetch things for you... ”

  “You are terrible with children,” Anuei said. “Never offer them anything they don’t need.”

  “I’d like that,” Crispin said. His eyes shone like wet black stones. “D’you have some daemons with you right now, Millsy?”

  “Don’t build cloud castles for him!” Anuei said.

  Millsy knew what she meant. I’m warning you, Millsy! But because she did not say it explicitly, he could ignore it—just as everybody else ignored what she meant. That difference between Ferupians and Lamaroons was the cause of Anuei’s failure to influence Smithrebel’s as the ringmaster’s mistress should have.

  Millsy took a deep breath and concentrated on ignoring the tragedy in her eyes. “Crispin, come down from there, and we’ll have a game of cards—you, your mother and I. I’ll show you a new shuffle.”

  “Don’t wanna.” Crispin flipped around on the pole so that he was hanging with his face to the wall. His cutoff shirt slipped down around his shoulders.

  Millsy hitched himself closer to Anuei and murmured, “He has an aptitude. Look at the way he listens to the engine.”

  “He’s always done that.” Anuei bit off thread.

  “Exactly! Don’t you see—don’t you see? If I started training him now, he would become so outstanding a handler that not even his father would think of making him into an aerialist!”

  “Not so loud!” Anuei almost shrieked.

  Millsy held up both hands to calm her. “He doesn’t understand.”

  “The neighbors!”

  “They can’t hear, Anuei.” Only a few people in Smithrebel’s—Green Sam the chief cook, the elephant-training Philpotts brothers, and Millsy himself—knew the truth of Crispin’s parentage. A secret shared, even among half a dozen, is barely a secret at all—but with Millsy, at least, it was safe.

  “No child’s got an aptitude for slave-driving,” Anuei said in a flat voice, so that for a moment Millsy did not quite understand what she was saying. “Not no Lamaroon child.”

  Millsy rocked on his heels. “What most people mistakenly call aptitude is usually only a matter of early encouragement! And I feel it would be best to encourage Crispin to pursue the grandest of all professions, rather than making him into a mere entertainer!”

  “I’m a ‘mere entertainer’! And I know what you want from my baby,” Anuei said, and for a paralyzed moment Millsy thought she was going to say something which should not be said by anyone. Then he remembered she was not like that. She sat hugely on the pillow of her thighs, on her cushions. “And I can’t protect him all the time—not from you, because you are supposed to be our friend. Or are you? This damn incestuous cesspit!” she spat suddenly. “Traveling monkey show! All I can ask you is not to put him in danger. And because you are my friend”—she stressed the word sarcastically—“I hope that you will respect my wishes.”

  The room smelled of cheap tallow, and those Lamaroon fumes Anuei carried about with her, whose virtues Millsy had heard graphically extolled in the men’s quarters.

  “I cannot,” he said softly. Her eyes were on her mending, through which she jerked the needle viciously. “Anuei” —he knew she could not hear him—“this afternoon I tasted the poison. Henceforth I must push the cup away whenever it is offered to me—even when it is offered by a friend. I cannot.”

  It had taken him the greater part of his life to get the proportions right, but now he had it. From now on he was one hundred percent daemon handler. No more courtier. No more ambassador. No more failure.

  No
more misplaced scruples.

  He had tasted poison, and he would have no more of it. The exhilaration of unrequited love, that obsession which frees the soul from gravity, buoyed him up. He felt as Anuei, the Balloon Lady, must feel when one of the roughnecks tossed her laughing into the air. His soul swelled with his desire for, and his complete belief in his own, altruism.

  Twin tears sat on the shelves of fat below Anuei’s eyes.

  “Millsy! I’m begging you!”

  He smiled in his beard and held a skinny, shaking finger to his lips.

  The truck rumbled on through the night. Cows slept in the fields and tenant farmers slept in their one-room huts, dreaming of circuses.

  The mask fell off the city, and she saw it for what it really is—a caricature of infinity. The familiar barriers, the streets along which she moved, the houses between which she had made her little journeys for so many years, became negligible suddenly.

  —E. M. Forster, Howards End

  A Fragile Heaven

  1884 A.D. Ferupe: Plum Valley Domain

  Rae was nine. She had long, long, long black hair. Tangles didn’t bother her, in fact she nourished her favorite ones with careful additions of burrs and thornbush prickles, and she always wore her hair hanging around her face, even like now, when she was playing down the stream and it kept getting in her way.

  Black water gurgled along the bottom of the weedy gully. Elders and willows threw the summer sun down in shifting patterns. She crouched halfway up the bank, whispering to herself, pushing sticks into oblongs of wet clay. These would be her actors. Nearby lay a pile of scraps of material she’d cut out of curtains and tablecloths and things for their clothes. Dressing them up was her favorite part of the game—she enjoyed it even more than the plays themselves, since Daphne didn’t want to help with the voices anymore. After their initial craze for theaters, Daph had lost interest.

  Rae hadn’t. She was like that.

  She’d made the Prince. Now his consorts. “Sister Moira,” she whispered. She giggled at her own daring, doubling over her knees, shaking silently. Sister Moira was the mother of Rae’s enemy Colm, a towheaded twelve-year-old who lorded it over all the other children because their parents were lower in the pecking order than his. His father was the Prince’s first courtier, and what with his mother being the first consort, you really would think he was the bee’s knees! Rae’s mother, Sister Saonna, was no less than the third consort. If it hadn’t been for that, she suspected Colm would have given her a much harder time than he did. Even so, he pulled her tail every day in prayer. Morning, noon, and night. Her place was right in front of his. There was no escape.