The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  “Over we go,” Crispin said.

  “I don’t advise it.” Mickey’s arm was hurting.

  “You don’t, don’t you? Well, I’ve had just about fucking enough. If you think I’m backtracking again, you’d better have another think,” Crispin said angrily, ungrammatically. He started toward the crags of garbage. Mickey drew breath to argue, then followed. The pain throbbed in his upper arm, his shoulder, and his head, but most of all in his fingers. It was like the sensation of blood returning to a limb that has gone to sleep, multiplied a hundred times. Would it be like this forever? Feeling a limb that wasn’t there, feeling agony in it? He had heard of the phenomenon before, but never believed in it. Maybe the cauterized stump was calling to its lost extremity, the putrid alive-dead flesh Crispin had said he’d thrown into the river with a stone tied to it.

  So perhaps the pain would lessen as the stump itself healed. Or at the very least he’d learn to stop trying to take hold of things with the nonexistent hand. That might be easier here, where being left-handed didn’t brand you as a faggot at best, a criminal at worst. They slogged across the dump, reaching the other side amazingly unmolested. Now the shacks were larger, with glass-fragment windows and real doors; but the city rock beyond dwarfed them. Suddenly a premonition told Mickey there was someone behind him. He spun just in time to escape a knife thrust that would have taken him in the kidneys.

  Behind him Crispin let out an exclamation, and Mickey heard a loud, horrible hiss like a cat’s as his attackers came at him again, one from each side. He had a brief, crazed impression of suntanned faces, dark hair flying, and gold-trimmed clothing. Their tiptoe lunges wouldn’t have worked if they’d been Ferupian—they’d have lost their balance—but their whipping tails counterbalanced them. Mickey’s knife had sprung into his hand, but he was too late—all he could do was throw himself out of reach. Dropping the knife, he fell backwards into a flip that should have taken him onto his hands and back up onto his feet—but one hand couldn’t do the work of two, and his momentum took him over hard into the dust. The ground impacted his injured shoulder agonizingly and he was still rolling. The left side of his body smashed into a wall, which creaked and bowed alarmingly. With the last flicker of consciousness he thought that the whole structure might settle down on him; he used his tail and his hand to push himself out of its shadow into the sunlight—and into blackness.

  He couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds when Crispin dragged him to his feet, “It’s all right. Didn’t even have to pull my gun.” He was panting. “Here’s your knife. We’d better make a run for it.”

  “What—” The stump of Mickey’s arm throbbed, and he nearly blacked out again. Desperately he summoned strength. “Uemiel! Where is she?”

  Crispin whistled. Mickey had a blurry glimpse of one Dead man lying facedown, looking really dead now, and the other sprawled on his back in a puddle of blood, with Uemiel nibbling daintily at his neck; then the daemon left her kill and bounded ahead of them. Dizziness overwhelmed Mickey as they took a corner at speed. He staggered, and Crispin grabbed his arm. The daemon frolicked ahead, her chain jingling, and looked over her shoulder to see if they were following. Mickey thought he saw a doglike, tongue-lolling grin on her face.

  Raised voices came behind them.

  “Which way?” Crispin grunted, speeding up.

  “We’ve got to—go to ground—”

  “Are you mad? We’d be turned out in five seconds.”

  Mickey made a frantic attempt to think. “Then—west—to the river. It’s a good area over there, or better than here anyway—they mightn’t come after us—”

  “West? They’re coming from that way.”

  Mickey’s head was roaring. He made an attempt to pull free. All he wanted to do was sink down in the dark somewhere and die.

  “Oh, shit, bear up, can’t you!” Crispin gasped.

  “Gotta slow down—”

  “All right, all right, we’ll make for the river! I hope to the Queen you know what you’re talking about!”

  “Oh—I know,” Mickey said, gasping. In a succession of hazed, unsummoned images, he remembered nights on the reeking promenades with a bottle of rotgut, serenading the Dead girls who clustered giggling at the drug dealers’ booths, who were completely different from their new city counterparts in that they were obviously aware of the “young gentlemen’s” admiration and amenable to their advances. From the point of view of Mickey’s friends, they were a perfect compromise between the girls they would marry someday and the cheap whores whom their dignity wouldn’t let them patronize. The slippery feel of female flesh, down on the sewage beaches in the summer night... He’d used to go through with it only to take his mind off the misery of hearing Shuizo doing the same thing ten feet away. The girls’ breasts and stomachs and bottoms were as squashy as oiled bread dough. (Shuizo was nearly seven feet tall and so thin that the muscles on his arms and thighs protruded like bundles of wires.) It was so hot. Sweat locked flesh to yielding flesh. In Mickey’s memory the girls were a series of faceless blancmanges whose spongy insides received his thrusts passively without clutching, without responding.

  It was so hot. He became dizzy and bumped into Crispin every time they skidded to a halt. Again and again they took evasive action, backtracking and ducking between huts, vaulting grandmothers who were taking the sun, bursting through packs of children, scattering pebble games. Mickey thought they must surely have lost their pursuers by now but you couldn’t discount the obsession that Dead men had with revenge, an obsession which fractured the entire City and usually deflected their murderous tendencies from strangers. To the Dead, homicide in the course of robbery wasn’t murder, just a roll of the dice that could go either way, and if Crispin and Uemiel had only seen off their would-be muggers they would probably not have been pursued—but they had killed them, thus disturbing the precarious interior balance of the pauper town. In a street that emptied as fast as if an invisible plug had been pulled, Crispin shoved Mickey stumbling against a wall and turned to face five men converging from three different directions. All five had their hair pulled back and wore the same gold-trimmed tunics as the original two attackers. They came on slowly. “Get out of the way, Mick, dammit!” Crispin shouted as he aimed and fired at the first of them.

  Mickey started to draw his knife, but he had sense enough to realize he would be more of a liability than a help: he was too befuddled to fight. He scrambled inside the nearest hut and crouched in the dark while screamers wailed and gibbered outside, and the dying men made the hideous noises that dying men make. The outcome wasn’t really in question—with a daemon gun against knives, it couldn’t be—but he listened anxiously. A woman and a half-witted adolescent boy cowered behind him, hugging each other. What must it be like to live with this sort of thing happening outside your front door every day? Wouldn’t it make you blasé?

  Perhaps it didn’t actually happen all that often. The pair seemed much more frightened than he was. He turned and smiled at them. The woman started in terror, but the boy smiled back, eyes half-closed, drooling.

  The noise stopped. Crispin stuck his head in at the door and said, “All right, come on out. I didn’t mean to push you out of the fun like that.”

  “I couldn’t have shot straight anyway,” Mickey said as he ducked out into the sun.

  “Yes, well, thanks for staying put then.” Crispin touched his forehead to the woman and boy inside the shack and straightened up. “All’s well that ends et cetera—”

  “Come on, there’s always more of them, and you’re out of ammo,” Mickey said. The tableau of new death disgusted him. Pooled, splattered, trickling blood shone bright scarlet in the sun. It had got on Crispin’s clothes and face, as well as on the walls of the nearest huts, making him look like an employee in an open-air slaughterhouse.

  Crispin scooped up Uemiel’s chain and yanked her to her feet, away from the surfeit of delicacies over which she was flitting. “Wasn’t much fun a
nyway, not a fair fight. Queen, what a mess!”

  Mickey kicked the nearest body. It rolled onto its face. A screamer trapped suddenly beneath it squawked, then fell silent. Mickey guessed it was eating its way out through the abdomen. He wondered for the first time why the little daemons’ shrunken stomachs didn’t burst as they fed on their kills. Maybe they did, and that was why you never saw fat, satiated daemons waddling around a battlefield after everything was over. What a tidy, vicious technology it was!

  They started for the end of the street, Crispin and Uemiel were so blood-bespattered Mickey found it difficult to look at them. “We’ll have to off someone else to get you some clean clothes, won’t we?” he said more nastily than he meant to. Crispin blew out breath in exasperation and quickened his pace, leaving him behind. They had come near the river district in their flight and the huts were tall and solid enough to qualify as houses. Mickey could no longer see the city rock above the roofs, but he could hear the Orange: a liquid shuffle like thousands of wet feet on stones. He understood that Crispin had kept him out of the fight at least in part because he hadn’t wanted him to betray his conscience. And that generosity shamed him into silence, because he could not locate its counterpart in himself. He found it as hard to forgive Crispin for such messy, cold-blooded killing as he would have found it to forgive himself for the same thing. And that was precisely because he loved Crispin. He wanted to be able to absorb Crispin, and his morals and his behavior, without instinctively rejecting a single thing.

  No, that’s not it, he realized suddenly. He wanted his family to be able to absorb Crispin.

  I’ve been, he thought, evaluating him for how long now? in terms of what they’re going to think of him.

  Disgusted with himself, he jogged a few paces to catch up. Crispin smiled sideways. He looked so fatigued—like a foot soldier fresh from some mythological battle, or perhaps still in character from a stage play on the hill—that it was hard to believe there wasn’t something else wrong with him besides combat weariness. And of course there was. A million things he would never divulge.

  The street opened into the promenade pretentiously dubbed The East Bank, which was jammed with horse-drawn carts, man-drawn rickeys, Dead women with parasols, and Dead men in long, billowing summer robes. The breeze reeked of sewage. No one gave Crispin or Mickey a glance, despite their raffish appearance, as they blended into the flow of pedestrians moving downriver. Even from here they could see the black cavern where the Orange entered the rock. A couple of people looked curiously at Uemiel, wondering perhaps whether pink monkeys were a new fashion up in the new city, and if so where they could get one.

  “Blessed Queen,” Crispin said softly. Mickey followed his gaze to a café whose tables spilled out into the street, protected from the traffic by a low wrought-iron fence. The tall drinks did indeed look inviting. “What a pity we’re penniless.”

  “I’ll show you where we can change those Ferupian coins. You still have them, don’t you?”

  “Is it around here?”

  “No, in the new city...where my family lives. Shouldn’t take too long to get there. I know the way.”

  Crispin nodded. “How’s your arm?”

  “All right,” Mickey said. In fact, since he had fallen on it, it was hurting worse than ever. But the pain seemed to have drowned out the pins-and-needles phantom-limb sensation. They crossed the street, riskily, to the boardwalk. The Orange looked even less pleasant than Mickey remembered: an undulating snail trail through the houses, netted with bridges, its liquidity revealed only when someone threw something in. Everything vanished beneath the oily surface without a plop, save bodies, which bobbed downstream in a veritable parade, buoyed by little floats colored to serve as advertisements, pathetic in their bravado, for whichever crew of poor men had put that particular corpse there. Crispin’s face wrinkled with concentration. Of course, this was an entirely new world for him. He frowned as if trying to comprehend the language spoken around him: a near-impossible task, for Okimako slang had little to do with the formal dialect Mickey had taught him. That was spoken in the old city and the more upscale parts of the new.

  Complete acceptance wasn’t love. It didn’t have anything to do with it. Complete acceptance was a Dead girl lying on a spread robe that would never be the same again after its contact with the sewage-colored sand, under a creaking pier that blocked out the stars, five feet from the viscous water that had already witnessed so many unspeakable acts that one more could make no difference.

  27 June 1896 A.D. 11:30 A.M. Okimako

  Crispin and Mickey entered the rock in a crowd of Okimakoans streaming along the broad rock ledge which continued beside the Orange after the boardwalk left off. Moving out of the sunlight was a relief. A cool river breeze blew through the tunnel; the loose, huge coats of the Dead men and the pale skirts of their women bellied like the sails of a thousand ships that had scorned the Orange and chosen instead to bob along on the dry land on either side. The scene had an oddly sensual effect on Mickey. The thump of the demogorgon-driven waterworks pumps vibrated through his feet. He knew the pumps were hidden behind the walls close by, sucking the Orange down through its bed and up again for the consumption of the city. The steady rhythm seemed somehow to ease the throbbing in his head. He turned to Crispin and asked with a sense of virtuousness, “How’re you holding up?”

  “I feel short!” Crispin gestured at a man passing toward them, mustachioed and easily over seven feet tall. “Half these fellows could give me a head, no problem—but I don’t mind... When you’re always looking down at people, there’s a sort of tendency to think of them as children, or weaklings. This place could be good for my vanity.”

  “I know what you mean,” Mickey said, remembering his first encounter with Ferupians, after his crash landing behind their lines. To him they had seemed squat, egregious trolls. And how pathetically their behavior—which he had been prepared to admire—had contrasted with their propaganda. There has to be someone who really does embody grace and selflessness and bravery and all the rest of it, what they praise in the anthems, he had decided at last, desperately. And he had actually dared to say: But I never met him until I met you...

  Crispin gave Uemiel’s chain an irritable jerk, and she let out one of her hissing pants, like a cat in pain. The creases of fatigue and stress deepened around Crispin’s eyes and between his brows. “Blessed Queen! I think I just saw a Lamaroon! Look over there!”

  “All the world comes to Okimako.”

  “As evidenced.” Crispin plucked ruefully at his bloodstained tunic.

  We’ll have to do something about that before we reach Dragyonne Street, Mickey thought, if not sooner. The instant they entered the new city there would be the risk, small but real, of someone he’d once known seeing them.

  They turned onto an off-ramp and started to move up into the rock. Tunnels branched into more tunnels, and broad twisting stairs led to caverns where the “bat people” who lived in the nooks had set up refreshment and notions stands. Here and there along the route Mickey decided to take, they had to cross narrow suspension bridges that arched between openings twenty-five feet up the walls of the Vein tunnels. Beneath them, two, four, and (on the Great Lower Vein) six lanes of traffic inched past. A good two-thirds of the vehicles on these limited-access interior veins were Disciple. The trucks’ matte black finish soaked up the light from the gas sconces hung high on the walls. Crispin looked down at the streamlined troop carriers, hulking tanks, and deft motorbikes, pointed out their design strengths in a hushed voice. Mickey nodded, less interested than he was relieved. He had been worried that Crispin, fatigued by the ordeal of flying the Blacheim out of the plains, had lost his enthusiasm for daemons all over again; or that, worse, Uemiel was somehow distracting him. In Okimako, daemons didn’t lurk in every conceivable housing, as they did in Ferupe, but they were certainly the force that kept the city running. Some things remained the same wherever you went.

  And watching Crispin w
atch the traffic, watching him wrap Uemiel’s chain absently around his fist until the little daemon gagged and clawed, Mickey felt reassured that Crispin was one of them. Crispin was as resilient as a daemon; as unstoppable as water flowing downstream. He wouldn’t let Mickey down.

  They didn’t see daylight again until the end of the afternoon. The Go-Nivo Vein opened out of the wall against which the human waves of the Urba Downhill beat in an ever-rising tide of commerce. Traders’ wagons, produce carts, and Disciple cruisers dispersed slowly through the center of the enormous open-air market. Mickey and Crispin emerged down a flight of stone stairs. “Not far now!” Mickey said over the noise. “Can’t be more than fifteen or twenty minutes!” He turned impatiently to Crispin, who was hanging back. “What’s eating you?”

  “I thought we were going to the money changer’s?”

  “Fuck it! It’s just petty change. I want to get home.” He was in a state of nervous energy induced by pain, weariness, hunger, and thirst, but most of all by unbearable apprehension. Whatever the worst might be, he had to know it. He could not put off finding out any longer. Besides, he secretly feared that if they undertook any more wanderings, his strength would give out. “I thought you were the one in a hurry.”

  “I was in a hurry to get to Okimako,” Crispin said. He stood by the back curtain of a baker’s stall, looking up past the wall of uncut stone to the blue sky that was deepening to violet. “Not to get to your house.”

  “My family’s house,” Mickey corrected: better safe than sorry.

  “Yeah. And now I’m here.” Crispin turned in a slow circle, still looking up. “I might just...”