The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  “—any ideas?” Crispin’s voice crackled through the tube.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I said I don’t think there’s any way we can land here! Do you have any ideas?”

  Mickey grabbed the speaking tube close to his ear. “Why do we have to land?” He wanted Crispin to say it. He glanced down through the slipstream at slopes and miniature cliffs, crags and dusty red gullies reduced by height to deceptively shallow wrinkles.

  “Why d’you think? I can keep her in the air maybe another fifteen minutes.”

  Mickey had thought his terror glands deactivated by exhaustion and nervous overload. He’d been wrong. “I don’t want to die!” he muttered aloud, “dammit, not now—”

  “What? What? Speak up!”

  “You couldn’t fit a motorbike down any of these valleys!”

  “Well, the daemon’s senile: I might be able to convince it this crate is a motorbike...” Crispin’s voice wandered: he must be mentally wrestling to keep the daemon from giving up altogether.

  “I’ve lost it!”

  Curiously enough, the Blacheim felt steadier now that she was gliding. The altimeter needle plunged—800 feet; 700 feet. Crispin cursed steadily into the speaking tube. Mickey saw it then, some way behind them. A triangular valley. It looked like an open vise, but no one would have thought of landing on that rampart-construction site behind the Ferupian lines either, would they? “Bring her round,” he said, rapping on the tube to get Crispin’s attention. “A hundred-eighty degrees. Think you can manage it?”

  “Bring her around? Where to?” Crispin howled. “Best bet’s to try and hold the glide and take our chances on the slopes!” But even so he was bringing her around in a tight banking curve, raising the starboard aileron and lowering the port one just a little so that the Blacheim swooped gracefully back the way she had come without losing unnecessary height. Mickey didn’t take his eyes off the dials. “Don’t overshoot! Do you see it?”

  “A fucking hang glider couldn’t land in there!”

  “Any other ideas?”

  Mickey heard a short dry crackle, which, after a moment, he identified as laughter. “All right, say your prayers!” He knew better than to speak again. Their lives depended on Crispin’s manipulation of the plane. From this low the valley looked reassuringly wide. The question was whether, as the tall rock cliffs drew closer together at the eastern end, it remained wide enough to provide a long enough taxi. The instruments showed the tail wind as a frightening thirty knots. Mickey had a horrible vision of both the Blacheim’s wingtips plowing into the sides of the canyon and the fuselage tearing like the body of a butterfly with its wings ripped off by a capricious child. He wanted to close his eyes, but he remembered Crispin saying yesterday evening as the sun set over the Occupied Raw, setting grass and trees and aircraft all on fire: If nothing else, I want to see my death coming and spit in its eye—

  His hands checked his harness. He could hear the wind singing over the rocks, a thin loud bell-like sound that wavered up and down a scale of four or five notes, distinct from the roar of the Blacheim cutting through the air. The aircraft entered the mouth of the canyon at precisely the same moment as the landing gear touched rock. Mickey caught his breath in awe. There was at least fifty feet clear off either wing. Touch; bounce, bounce, touch and rip of rubber tearing away; scream of brakes and the clank of the wing flaps snapping down. “Sweet Queen,” Crispin gasped into Mickey’s ear. “I’m gonna fuck it up—it’s gone...”

  Mickey said nothing. He knew they were safe. That very first touch had installed in him a sense of security. Scream, shriek, plunge, and halt. The starboard wingtip was six inches from the cliff.

  2 Maia 1896 A.D. 11:30 P.M.

  Kirekune: the western foothills of the Raw Marches

  “Out of the frying pan into the bloody Queen’s Birthday bonfire.”

  Crispin exhaled a white plume of smoke, staring out from the mouth of the valley over the seemingly endless expanses of the twilit foothills. Now they were west of the Marches, day lasted longer—the sun couldn’t just duck below the mountains, it had to trace a long, excruciating descent to the horizon. This high up, the air wasn’t hot as Mickey had expected, but dry. The sun and wind leached every drop of moisture from the body. He had seldom been gladder of nightfall.

  He usually permitted himself to use his tail in the lighting of cigarettes, but after glancing at Crispin, he struck the steel on the rock with his right hand, awkwardly. The Queen’s Air Force had cured him of left-handedness. As a result, he’d probably be clumsy for the rest of his life; maybe it was just as well that looked to be a very short time. He said, “You’re talking as though it’s hopeless.”

  “If you can see a glimmer, you have sharper eyes than I do.”

  Mickey glanced back into the gully. The Blacheim stood on its torn-up wheels at the end of the canyon like the ungainly flying bomb box it was. A mystery how it had ever taken off in the first place.

  “That daemon’s a lost cause. Good night, Gramps. We can while away our last days composing its eulogy.”

  They had both tried talking to it and got no response. Mickey had poked his head inside the engine cavity and removed the hatch of its cell, expecting a lash of power to blind him—but nothing happened. Through the silver mesh he saw it crouching cramped, a giant in solitary confinement, hands hanging over wrinkled yellow knees, head sunk to scaly chest. Judicious poking with a silver screwdriver had made it snarl, but when he pushed a wriggling splinteron through the feed hole in the mesh, it hadn’t reacted, allowing its intended prey to scramble freely about the cell and even swing on its long, matted black hair.

  “You can’t give up now,” he insisted, feeling simultaneously desperate and put-upon. What right had Crispin to get fatalistic?

  Crispin leaned against the corner of the cliff. “Did you know humans can eat daemon meat? Don’t look at me like that. I did, once. We could survive quite a long time on the splinterons, and if it dies, that should be enough to get us to the plains.”

  Mickey couldn’t tell whether Crispin was joking. “We don’t have enough water.”

  “No.” Crispin looked up at the sky, exhaling smoke. “Stars’re coming out, look.” His voice was thoughtful. “Mick, d’you ever find yourself forgetting things that weren’t all that long ago, accidentally on purpose, like?”

  Mickey flashed on Izigonara’s 20th, hearing catcalls when he walked by the gunners’ barracks. Miki...miki-noko. They made it sound like night birds, trilling in falsetto. If you didn’t know what they were saying, you wouldn’t have understood. Birds. Or cats. Miki...He frowned at Crispin, wondering what he meant. Significant, a man could lose his mind over that face! Crispin looked even more exotic now than he did in daylight—almost like a full-blood Lamaroon. The lips did it. Wide, perfectly defined, and in the gloom you couldn’t see that they were cracked from the wind. A man could lose his mind—or his heart—

  “Don’t stare at me like that!” Crispin threw away his cigarette and pushed himself upright. “Why don’t you do some thinking for yourself for a change? I’m not a hero! Never have been, not, and never will be! So don’t look at me like I’m going to come up with a way out of this!”

  Maybe not, but you’re still my hero, Mickey thought. He shook his head, half-smiling, and retreated a couple of paces defensively.

  “Say something, dammit, or I’ll have to say it for you. The way you look at me...” Crispin shook his head. “Did you hear that? I’m getting to be as bad as you! Reading shit into people!”

  Mickey had never known anyone less predictable. Was that what goodness was? Unpredictability? Because for some reason he couldn’t disabuse himself of the belief that Crispin was good.

  “But you were right about Burns. And I never saw it. Didn’t see it until it was on top of me. Queen, I was so blind!”

  Mickey said aloud, “Have you considered that maybe what you call blindness is a function of goodness?”

  �
�If so, I’ll pass!”

  “So do you think you were wrong to trust Burns?”

  “Hasn’t that been made abundantly clear by now?”

  “Well, no. Materially, yes, I suppose so.” Mickey glanced around at the dark canyon, and out to the west. Night concealed the foothills utterly. “But morally you were right to trust him, and he was wrong to betray you.”

  “The bloodsucking double-crossing half-breed,” Crispin said halfheartedly. “And you’ve dodged the issue of whether we were both wrong in the first place.” He was silent for a time; then, just as Mickey wondered whether he’d fallen asleep, or fallen off the side of the mountain, his voice wandered out of the darkness again, so deep and bitter Mickey’s skin tingled. “I’ve had it up to here with morality, Mick. I’ll tell you something. I was thinking in terms of morality, too, even at the time. I saw myself as being in the right. Vichuisse was in the wrong, simply because he was incapable of effective leadership. I was acting on behalf of all our men. I was selfless, I didn’t want the commandancy, I just wanted justice for the regulars and for all the friends I’d lost to his incompetence; I was a crusader, dammit!” He laughed unpleasantly. “In other words I was a fool. Don’t say anything!”

  Mickey closed his mouth. He had indeed been about to protest, but it was merely an automatic reaction.

  “It was personal from the word go. You were right about that. But you don’t know how long it had been going on. It was personal from the day Vichuisse first picked me out and made me a pilot. It was personal from the day I was arrested in Shadowtown. Those Intelligence bastards! They tell you you’re fighting for Ferupe and for the Queen and for honor and glory and so damn on and so forth, but that’s a load of daemon shit. It’s all schemes and strategies and power plays whether you’re a slop boy or a general. You against me, me against you, man against man, man against woman...My mistake, my transgression, was buying into Burns’s scheme. I should have seen where things were at right from the beginning. Every man for himself is where it’s at—and as for honor; it’s just as much a scam as the pension, because ninety-nine percent of those poor sods back on bases won’t ever get within spitting distance of it. And I’m not having none of it from now on.”

  Mickey had an idea Crispin was not speaking to him at all, but he couldn’t let the captain’s tirade pass without comment. “I never had any ideals,” he said. “I didn’t join the Disciples because I was a patriot. It was because someone had broken my heart, and I never wanted to see him again.” The minute he said it he could have kicked himself.

  But Crispin didn’t even seem to have heard. “No more of it! Whoever is without ideals, he’s got a head or two on his shoulders? And, Mick, that shit about virtue you were spouting a while back? Seems to me it all boils down to goodness being the same thing as having more illusions than the next man. Which is a fair definition of stupidity! Hah!”

  Mickey gathered his thoughts, which had scattered like pigeons from a rooftop. “That’s beside the point. What interests me is the question of what you’re proposing to substitute for illusions. If, mind you, they are illusions, which I still don’t buy.”

  “You’ll buy it soon enough when we start fighting over the last drink of water,” Crispin said.

  Mickey chose not to have heard that. “Answer me that. If goodness is an illusion, then what’s behind it?”

  Evil. He waited to hear it. But Crispin was apparently not angry enough to fall into that trap. Mickey heard him shifting against the cliff, ten feet away in the darkness. “I don’t know. Honestly, Mick, I don’t. Whatever’s left, I suppose.”

  “And that is?”

  Silence.

  “Crispin!”

  Scratch, and the blue spark of steel on stone. The tip of a cigarette glowed orange. As Crispin drew on it, his face leapt out of the darkness, and the smoke showed up as a white visible cloud. “Something that isn’t any of your business, Pilot.”

  Crispin had pulled rank. Mickey heard his voice come out clipped. “Might as well sleep while it’s dark, mightn’t we, sir? Time enough for talk tomorrow.”

  “Time enough for fuck-all tomorrow,” Crispin said. “I’m getting that kite in the air if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “With or without me, I presume,” Mickey said angrily. Not since he was a child had he walked out on a contretemps: he’d always been the one left with the sentence half-finished, the conciliatory gift still in pocket, watching the door swinging, in the ringing silence peculiar to the ten seconds after a parting blow. But now he spun and walked down the canyon, his ears buzzing with hatred. Halfway to the aircraft, he turned and shouted, “Maybe there is something to be said for being dragged up in a circus! It gives you quite a way with words!”

  “Oh, I wasn’t putting my mind to it,” Crispin called after him, sounding completely unperturbed. “If I had been, you’d have known! And anyway, I don’t do my fighting with words, unlike some people!”

  Crispin must have heard, and taken in, what Mickey had involuntarily said about having his heart broken. Mickey could think of no other reason for him to have turned so horrible. He must have thought Mickey was leading up to something. It’s one thing to guess about a person (and within the boundaries of taste, Mickey had never tried to hide anything) and quite another thing to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Child! he told himself, dropping to the ground against the wheel of the Blacheim. The canyon was cold, although mercifully sheltered from the wind. Dust bit his nostrils, making him sneeze. The wind hooted over the top of the canyon, that mournful five-note song of aloneness. Nearby, tiny feet scribbled on rock. Child! Now how do you face him?

  But Crispin had been known, among other things, for his skill at jollying up disheartened regulars; and that was what Mickey still was, and Crispin was still a captain. After giving him an hour to cool down, Crispin crunched back to the Blacheim and kicked him in a friendly fashion. He chatted with apparent ease of mind as he passed blankets out of the airplane. “I’d never have thought of bringing these. I’d have counted on making it over the foothills before I got tired enough to need them. Good thing I brought you along, huh?”

  Mickey said none of the things he thought of in response. He grunted and took the blanket, along with a single swig of water and a dry biscuit Crispin called a “midnight snack.” By this time the night was pitchy. Mickey lay still, listening to the small scrapings and fumblings as Crispin took off his boots and rolled himself up in his blanket somewhere on the other side of the wheels. It made Mickey feel unpleasantly vulnerable to be lying right under the enormous, wrecked double tires, where the plane would roll over him if it shifted even a fraction. As he wriggled around to lie alongside the wheels, under the belly of the Blacheim, he heard Crispin’s voice, so near that he started up in a panic and thrust his fingers into Crispin’s face.

  “Ouch! No, it didn’t hurt. No, I just wanted to know...” Crispin stopped.

  “Sorry.” Mickey lay back down, carefully. His bruises hurt, but he had slept on less comfortable things than bare rock before, and at any rate he was so exhausted he would probably have slept like a baby on a bed of nails.

  Crispin said, “Um, I’m aware that you and Vichuisse were...I mean, after that awful scene in my office—”

  “I remember,” Mickey said shortly. Two days before his death, Vichuisse had paid a call on Crispin, and requested Mickey’s presence in Crispin’s office, whereupon he had blithely and inaccurately reminisced about the pseudo-relationship they had had in the Lovoshire Parallel. Mickey had wanted to turn into smoke and drift through a crack in the wall. “What is it?”

  “I know it’s intrusive of me to want to know, and you’re welcome to punch me in the nose if you’re offended. I just wondered...”

  “If it was by my choice?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Of course you wondered that. Never mind that the fact that it wasn’t should have been obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes in his head who doesn’t think anyway that al
l Kirekunis are born sexually perverted.”

  “I don’t think that,” Crispin said with unexpected definiteness.

  “Good!”

  “But—then, why did you go along with him? If you—you weren’t attracted to him?”

  “Why did you? Different currency, same transaction.”

  “I—” Crispin stopped, and gave his lion cough of a chuckle. “All right. Score one for you, Mick.”

  “Morality aside, some men are better off dead.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s usually the other kind who end up that way,” Crispin said in a voice that could have been hostile, or regretful, or nothing in particular. Mickey wished he could see his face. But the low-slung blackness of the Blacheim above them blocked out even the faint light of the stars. The remark had had a ring of finality; neither of them said anything else.

  (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

  And I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow at morning striding behind you

  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

  The Lower Air

  3 Maia 1896. A.D.

  Kirekune: the western foothills of the Raw Marches

  Mickey paced up and down the canyon in the blazing sun. He knew moving around was making his chances of sunstroke much worse: he should sit down in a fragment of shade and wait. But if he stopped moving, he would look at Crispin. He could go sit at the mouth of the canyon with his back to the Blacheim. But then something would go wrong. Crispin would get hurt—Mickey couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t got hurt yet—and Mickey wouldn’t be on the spot, because he had a weak stomach.

  His fingers trembled on the grip of Crispin’s daemon pistol. The screamers in its cartridge sent flashes of pain and anger up his wrist. “Here, just in case,” Crispin had said without explaining. His gaze had flickered up, down, and around; his voice wandered. “But don’t use it unless you’re in mortal danger. I mean that. You could do for me. If there’s anything worse than an angry daemon, it’s an angry daemon with a screamer in its hide.”