The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  After the Kirili finally closed they had spent all night dancing at a ballroom down in the Fugue—the low city—where no one would recognize them. As the sky started to lighten, turning the streetlamps the same orange as the river two miles down through stone, they took a rickey back to Dragyonne Street. He helped Fumia, Ashika, and Zouka, all a little drunk on wine and staying up all night, down from the rickey and hugged them for the last time. They blew kisses as they retreated backwards, bumping into each other. (“Ow, Ashie, that was my tit!”—“Sssh! Yozi can hear!”—“Yoz! Yoz!”)

  The door closed gently behind them. He executed a sharp about-face and walked off down the street. His hobnailed boots rang on the cobbles. Here on the priciest edge of the licensed quarter that extended uphill as far as Fleur Street, where private residences far outnumbered businesses, not even the draycarts got moving before dawn; but he could hear the voices of costerers from the Urba Downhill. And Okimako, the great beast, was never really silent. He would have to walk all the way to the depot to meet his troop. He had spent every last penny of the cadet’s pay he’d saved, and refused to let his sisters give him rickey money. A man had his self-respect. (And anyway, how would it look to the rest, back at the depot, if he came driving up in style like the son of the woman whose son he was?)

  At the end of the street he couldn’t resist turning to look. He half hoped to see his mother’s face in one of the attic windows. The attic was supposed to be Uncle June’s apartment, but the whole family spent enough time up there that June got no privacy. And if any of the gay-girls needed to watch the street, they co-opted his sitting room as a matter of course. Mickey-then-Yozi scanned the whole height of the housefront. But it was still too dark, and Dragyonne Street was too long. He would never know whether in fact Saia had been watching.

  In his mind they were all frozen in time. Saia, too, standing in the hall, dazzling in jewels, her face as hard as her long-gone sister’s in the Hasegale portrait that hung behind her. But of course—“Ashie must be twenty now. Marriageable. Zouy’s still only seventeen...”

  But of course by now they might all be dead or bankrupt or worse.

  For the first time the possibility became real to him; and the weight of four years and ten months thudded down on speculation like a portcullis, crushing it, severing those long-cherished memories like a limb, setting them adrift in the limbo of endangered things. His arm throbbed. He worried the scabs with his fingernails.

  “If we don’t amputate now, someone else is going to have to later!” Crispin said in an unaccountably angry tone.

  References to his injury made Mickey impatient and nervous. “It’s not hurting half as much as it was.”

  “That’s because it’s fucked.” Crispin leaned across—Mickey’s pulse quickened, a physiological reaction like flinching when something came at your face—and patted his hand. Then he pulled back. “Nerves’re dead. Completely dead.”

  Mickey looked down. Crispin had stabbed one of his improvised fishhooks deep into the back of his hand. “Ow!”

  “Shut up. You didn’t feel a thing.”

  The unpleasant truth, which he wasn’t going to tell Crispin, was that he hadn’t been able to feel anything below the elbow for days. His forearm had become a red-and-yellow-webbed log. The hook shone in the moonlight like a little silver worm standing with its tail in the air and its head buried in his hand.

  “Just proving a point,” Crispin said.

  “What do you know about surgery? If you—if you ... amputate... what if you can’t stop the bleeding?”

  “If I don’t give it a try, it’ll kill you eventually. I know that much.”

  The throbbing seemed already to have progressed to Mickey’s head. He stared out at the river, a chiaroscuro border for the robe of grass that covered the plain on the far bank. Night and day it remained the same. He and Crispin would leave, and they would remember it as a prim summer waterway, never cold and raging.

  He gritted his teeth and ripped the hook out. Blood came with it, black in the moonlight. It smelled. He threw the little silver thing in the water. “Waste of a good hook.”

  “I can do it tomorrow if you want. Best to get it over with.” Crispin’s voice was soft, almost apologetic. “Pity we don’t have anything to get you drunk on first.”

  “The SAPpers do it without getting drunk, so I should be able to. They think avoiding pain is for faggots. And women.” He laughed again, thinking of his mother and sisters. “That’s a good one.”

  “I’d hate to lose one of my hands.” Crispin looked at his big palms.

  “Oh, it’s not that!” I have to stop laughing. He’ll think I’m mad. He shook silently. “I won’t be crippled, not by Ferupian standards anyway! But doesn’t it strike you as ironic that I’ve flown combat for years without getting scratched, and now I’m going to lose my arm because of a fucking bandit in my own country?”

  “Almost as ironic as it is to handle daemons for eleven years by means of ignorance, and then to lose it all at once, to lose your nerve, because suddenly you know a little,” Crispin said bitterly.

  Mickey smiled up at the moon. “What are you talking about?”

  In the old days there had been a moon-viewing festival on a certain day in autumn when the reaper’s moon first rose, full and red, over the farms of the Western tribesfolk who had driven the Chadou out of the fertile lands along the northern rivers. The custom had been established long before they grew tall and pale and refined and built cities, and now only the nobles of Okimako still practiced it. They climbed to the tops of special towers in the old city where (it was said, spitefully, by nouveaux riches who had never seen the moon in any sky uncontaminated by city lights) they viewed it through Sinoese-crafted telescopes. It was white now, a single tooth in the sky’s black gape.

  Crispin was silent; Mickey said anxiously, “Darling, you know sometimes you have to just laugh!”

  Crispin gathered in his fishing line and stood up. Mickey started to protest; then he was arrested and distracted by the sight of Crispin as he stood, impossibly tall, stretching his arms against the sky, the moon hanging between neck and shoulder like an earring. The huge hands laced together and the palms pushed skyward. The moment flowed instant by instant and Mickey felt the pressure eddying, swirling in all the wrong directions. He had severed himself from the past and the future; was the present, too, going to flee in confusion?

  “I didn’t mean it!” he said.

  “I’ve had enough for tonight.” Crispin jumped to the bank.

  “Don’t go!” Mickey had to force himself to sit still. He wanted to get up and jump to the bank, catch Crispin, drag him back, pull him into his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” Crispin said, sounding strangled, and turned away. Mickey rested his chin on his good hand, staring sightlessly at the river. His arm throbbed dully, but he was no longer thinking about it.

  I love him.

  And he knows it.

  And he doesn’t want to know.

  Nothing more needed to be said. It had all been said. Without a fracture the pressure had drained away.

  A few tears of passion oozed out of his eyes. The passion had no name. Or rather, it had so many they drowned each other out.

  He found himself relishing the thought of tomorrow’s operation simply because it would necessitate a certain amount of physical contact between them.

  He found himself drawing the character for Cri on the rock, using the blood that was still trickling from the gash on the back of his hand.

  It was too much. It tipped real emotion over the edge into caricature. He was in too deep to shake it off so easily, but all the same he laughed at himself and rubbed out every trace of the letter. Then he curled up to sleep near the Blacheim, inevitably in the daemon’s poisonous mental exhaust, yet far enough from Crispin that, he hoped, he wouldn’t be woken later on. But the pain in his arm, among other things, kept him awake until the muttering and sobbing started; he took his blanket and went to s
leep in the trees, on the slope. He couldn’t stand it.

  19 June 1896 A.D. Kirekune: the Ochadou Plains

  Having slept late, Mickey trailed back to the plane halfway through the morning, carrying his blanket. His right arm hung by his side like a piece of badly carved statuary that had somehow got attached to his body. It ached, with shooting pains. How could it hurt when the nerves were dead? Ours not to question why. Crispin was sitting on his heels by the small fire. Mickey sat stiffly on the grass across from him, feeling rather depressed. Crispin was stropping his knife on a piece of leather. It made a sinister burring noise. Mickey understood that longing and hatred, elation and misery, frustration and pain, could build up only so far; after that they canceled out, leaving—not emptiness, which was another story altogether—but something like normalcy. Right then it seemed like a gift from Significance—the limits of the human capacity for excessive emotion.

  “Breakfast is prepared, I take it?” He yawned.

  “Life’s a bitch, Mick.”

  “Right enough.”

  “And then you curl up in a ball and play dead, but they get you anyway.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I shouldn’t think you’d want any, anyhow.”

  Mickey stared into the fire. Crispin was boiling water on it in Mickey’s helmet. “Nearly forgot. Quite the entertainment we’ve got scheduled.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way.” Crispin glanced up with a half smile, then back. down at his knife.

  “Well, all I have to do is sit back and relax and pray to the Significant you know what you’re doing,” Mickey said, ignoring the twinges his arm was sending him, as if in protest against the harm that was to be done it. “You’re the one who should be sweating.”

  Crispin grinned. “Remember, entertainers are professionals, too.” He’d emerged curiously cheerful from his night of horrors. Maybe he, too, had passed through some sort of crisis, or come to a decision.

  “I only hope you got enough sleep.”

  “I did. Guess why, though.” Crispin looked upward. Mickey followed his gaze. Now he noticed what was different about the morning. For the first time since they had come here, gauzy cirrus clouds covered the sky, serried from horizon to horizon. That was why he’d slept so late, of course. The sun hadn’t wakened him.

  “Little lambs, little lambs,” Crispin said. “But you know what they bring home behind them.”

  “Rain?” Mickey said hesitantly, dreading even to suggest it.

  Steadying the makeshift tripod, Crispin added the knife to the water. Oil and dirt stained the bubbles. “By tomorrow, I think.” He balanced the wooden haft on the edge of the helmet. “If not tonight.”

  Mickey squinted at him, trying to read his face. “Then maybe we should just get out of here as soon as possible. I think I could—”

  “Oh, no, you don’t. It’s got to be done. Unless you don’t trust me.”

  “I trust you!”

  “But, you were going to say, how are we to leave with you out of it?” Crispin suggested.

  Mickey opened his palms and shrugged.

  “Didn’t I get us here? I can get us out of here, too.”

  Mickey’s assumption, based on the fact that they were still here, had been that for whatever reason, Crispin was no longer able to handle the daemon. He’d thought Crispin had suffered some sort of breakdown, and that therefore they couldn’t leave until Mickey was fit enough to pilot the Blacheim. Of course, with only one arm Mickey wouldn’t be able to pilot the Ferupian aircraft at all, now or ever. “I wish you’d just explain,” he said in sudden anger. “It would make things so much easier.”

  Crispin stood up. “I know.” Mickey watched him walk toward the Blacheim, duck under its belly, and into the bomb hold, which was open, its flaps hanging down. Was it Mickey’s imagination or as Crispin neared the aircraft did his motions become somehow furtive? Returning, he tossed something at Mickey. A biscuit.

  “We’re nearly out,” Mickey reminded him.

  “I know.” Crispin dipped his own biscuit in the water in which the knife was sterilizing, lifted it dripping and bit in. “Look”—he paused, chewing—“for heaven’s sakes don’t worry about me.”

  “What if you faint again? And next time, we haven’t landed yet?”

  “Mmm.” Crispin laid the biscuit carefully on his knee and steepled his fingers, avoiding Mickey’s eyes. “Put it this way. Once even the smallest channel of communion is opened up, it’s like inflicting the same—pain—on yourself that you inflict on the daemon. And Queen, what they go through! A lot of daemon handlers think they’re good to their beasts, but they’d give it up and go grow tulips in the heartlands if they knew what they were really doing to their little friends. People think daemons have a high pain threshold, when in fact it’s the opposite. I thought I could make it to Okimako without going under, but—”

  “Well, why do you have to go into communion? That’s what tricksters do, isn’t it? She’s collared and celled—can’t you handle her?” It was unnerving, seeing the giant shrinking before his very eyes, into a human being so close to wits’ end that he was breaking his own rule of secretiveness.

  “But she’s been uncollared once now,” Crispin said in a low voice. “She remembers. And she’s resisting. I can hardly make her go at all. She resists, she fights, she makes it harder all round, and I can feel everything, because they just pull you in!” He shuddered visibly.

  “You should never have uncollared her in the first place, should you?”

  “I know, I know. I lost my head. Do you remember, that stupid dog started barking? I thought they were going to be on top of us at any minute. I thought I had to go for the sure thing.” He paused. “But I’m not even sure it has anything to do with the collar. It might be—me. Communion is a different story. It’s on another plane. I think once you know how, once it’s in the blood, you can’t not.”

  “Oh, dear,” Mickey said.

  “But I haven’t given up hope.” Crispin paused again, for so long that Mickey wondered if he had lost his train of thought in contemplation of the ordeal ahead of him. “I used to know a trickster. A Ferupian man. He—”

  “In the circus?”

  “Where else? The point is he could drive trucks. He was a handler and a trickster. So if he could do it, I should be able to.”

  “You think it might just be a matter of practice?”

  The fire crackled and spat. Overhead, the gray clouds raced, thickening. Mickey shivered in the breeze, imagining how much stronger it must be up there: the clouds were running north, so when they flew southwest, the wind would be in their faces.

  “That’s what I’m hoping. Uemiel’s young and intelligent—she comes from the Iron Hills Forest, is that somewhere in northern Kirekune? But she’s a bitch. Her last owner treated her badly. Say what you will, he got what he deserved. She kept on trying to crash us. I managed her all right, but a couple of times it was a close call . This time, I’m just gonna let her have her head. It might be a bumpy ride, but...” Crispin slowly crumbled his biscuit. “Like I said, I’m hoping it’ll get easier as I go along.”

  You don’t have to put yourself through that for me, Mickey thought. When you come down to it there’s no reason to go to Okimako at all. “I feel awful about this.”

  “Don’t.”

  “If I hadn’t...”

  “None of it’s your fault.”

  “Dammit, I wish you’d let me take responsibility for something sometimes!” Mickey laughed.

  Crispin looked surprised. Then he laughed, too. “All right, if I mess up and you die of blood loss, it’s your fault, all right?” He brushed crumbs off his knees, then grabbed the dagger from the boiling water and brandished it with mock ferocity.

  “Fuck you,” Mickey said, and stood up. Dizziness nearly overcame him. Crispin pointed to the blanket he had spread out on the other side of the Blacheim. Mickey took off his tunic and lay down. Nearby was a pile of torn-up clothing, and a wo
oden slab that looked like the cover of a hatch from inside the aircraft. Mickey crooked his arm on the slab as Crispin told him, and accepted the leather stropping strip in his other hand.

  “You might want to bite down on this. But try to lie still.”

  Crispin was hammering two more leather straps onto the slab, one over the wrist and the other over the biceps of the gangrened arm, fixing them with pegs. Mickey thought he recognized the thick, dark cowhide. Crispin must have cut up the satchel belonging to the late Captain Jimenez that they had brought from Air Base XXI.

  “Just lie as still as you can.”

  “You’ve certainly made your preparations, haven’t you?” Mickey was not touched, or even reassured; he was intimidated.

  “I’m going to take it off right above the elbow.”

  “What’s that for?” Mickey jerked his chin at the blowtorch, which he could just see out of the corner of his eye. It was lying in the grass beside a silver-weave pouch of splinterons.

  “Got to cauterize it, after.”

  Fear slid through him, a curiously low-key invasion.

  And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang,

  With grimful glee:

  “This life so free

  Is the thing for me!”

  —Thomas Hardy

  Lost