The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  The Akilas had been lucky to arrive with the very first wave of refugees, before Swirling really knew what was hitting it, when it had still been possible to find lodgings in real lodging houses. Their opportunist landlady had doubled their rent three times since then, but they had a roof over their heads, which was more than thousands less quick off the mark could say. That was Crispin’s doing. It was he who’d perceived the need for haste, and convinced Mickey of it. Without Crispin’s bad temper and nonstop goading, Mickey knew he would have slid, as Fumia and so many others had, into the stunned lassitude of the bereaved. It was mostly due to Crispin that they’d left Okimako at all. Crispin had bullied Fumia into pulling herself together when Mickey had despaired of her; he’d anticipated prices going through the roof before the crunch came, and taken it on himself, without telling anyone, to trade handfuls of the family’s heirloom jewelry for two months’ provisions and a short-haul truck of dubious leagueage; already the object of Fumia’s bitterness as a result of that venture, he’d accomplished what he must have thought would be a coup de théâtre by somehow, miraculously, finding Ashika and bringing her to them like a battered bouquet. She’d trailed in behind him chewing the tip of her tail, tear-stained and bruised, yet with an unfamiliar dark flash in her eyes. Maybe Fumia had seen that, and been daunted. At any rate her reaction, far from gratitude, had been to burst into tears and rail at Crispin for not finding Zouka, too. She wasn’t moving a step until her baby sister had been returned to her.

  “Ask him to bring Mother back from the dead while you’re at it, why don’t you!” Mickey had shouted.

  That had been the last time he participated in their rows, though not the last time he took sides.

  He wouldn’t have blamed Crispin for decamping at that point. He still didn’t really know why the half-breed had stuck around. It couldn’t have been altruism. But his commitment to the whole family had certainly gone beyond the call of friendship. The truck had got them to Swirling before its daemon gave up the ghost, but it had been a hellish journey. Fumia and Ashie’s cautious pleasure at being reunited had soon dissolved into disagreements over a future that was uncertain at best, and they’d cried and argued and vomited themselves sick all along the Orange Highway. With nothing to do except watch the refugee trains fall behind on one side and the river on the other, they must have been experiencing their bereavement at a new, unbearable intensity—and what more natural than that they should take their grief out on each other?

  But Crispin hadn’t seen it that way. He’d refused to let them alone. Several times a day he’d left Mickey to juggle the whipcord, steering wheel, and gearshift one-handed so that he could climb into the back of the truck and try to reason with the girls, telling them how lucky they were to be alive, telling them how bright their future would be if they only made up their minds to try. Et cetera. These upbeat lectures always ended with him losing his temper. Mickey could hear him shouting even over the grinding of the road under the tires. He would clamber back into the cab, practically foaming at the mouth, informing Mickey that he had a pair of pampered babies for sisters, and he didn’t know why Mickey put up with it, or why he himself did either for that matter. It would serve Fumia and Ashie both right if they were made to walk to Swirling!

  But perhaps his entreaties had had a residual effect—on Ashie at least, Mickey thought with a twinge of pain—for once settled, they’d achieved a precarious routine, the minimal requirement for continuity. Ashie, with astonishing initiative, had recruited several girls and was running a minibrothel out of their lodging house. Demand exceeded supply, and she was doing a roaring trade, having neglected to tell her “gay-girls” that the accepted rate in Okimako had been ten times what they were getting. All of them, both refugees and locals, had been destitute until she took them under her wing; they adored her for the few coins she let them keep. Her enterprise seemed to satisfy Crispin that the family had been “seen right,” the condition under which he’d said all along he was going to leave them to get on with it.

  Now he’d kept his word.

  Mickey had hoped that when the time came, someone would give way to emotion. Fumia shouldn’t have been able to resist getting in a few parting digs; he’d hoped vaguely that he himself would fall victim to an attack of indiscretion. (His worst indiscretion, still so recent, ached like a pus-filled wound that needed to be opened.) But it had been as if they were coworkers parting at the close of a day—secretly relieved to be shot of each other, united one last time in the resolve to waste as little breath as possible.

  Mickey watched a convoy of laden carts clatter downhill. A dozen people, whose tattered, once-stylish clothing identified them as Okimakoans, perched on top of sacks, clutching bundles of possessions. Going back upriver, for better or for worse, or because their current plight couldn’t get any worse... Hesitantly, tasting it as if it were a stone in his mouth, Mickey turned over his plan to do the same thing. He was pleasantly surprised by a resurgence of enthusiasm. Now that he had decided to take Fumia with him, it felt right somehow. In any case, it was the necessary next step in picking up the pieces, and now that Crispin had left he was free to get on with it. Crispin had said crudely that going back to Okimako would be like fucking a dead whore. But Crispin was wrong about that, as he’d been wrong about so many other things. Mickey hadn’t bothered to tell him he’d already booked passage on a tramp turbine for the coming Freeday, the eleventh. But he’d felt guilty. The next day he’d gone back to the wharves and booked passage for Fumia, too. He knew immediately it was the right thing. Ashie he was proud of, Ashie he adored, Ashie he trusted to stay alive if he left her on her own; Fumia was (oh, Fumia... ) a different story. The loss of Saia and Zouy had gone straight to her core. She had been somehow emptied.

  Ashie, busy with her fledgling business, couldn’t be expected to look after her older sister all day. Never even mind that if she revealed that Mickey had said Fumia needed looking after, there would be the row to end all rows.

  And besides (yes, Akila, lie to yourself, you’ve become quite an expert at it, haven’t you?) a return to Okimako might be just the thing to revitalize Fumia. The sight of Dragyonne Street in ruins might galvanize her to salvage what they could from the rubble. Despite her patent lack of interest in Ashie’s enterprise, her business sense couldn’t have vanished into thin air—could it? There wouldn’t be very much left of their neighborhood, of course, and what there was had probably by now been picked over. All the same, Mickey anticipated being one of the first former residents on the scene.

  He was constantly aware of the paper that had grown soft from being kept day and night next to his skin, sewn to his undershirt. It was the most important of the documents that Crispin, at Ashie’s insistence, had saved from the offices of Akila-uza and (selectively, Mickey felt certain) bequeathed to him. It was his mother’s last will and testament as the head of the Akila family. She’d drawn it up when Mickey was still a child, and, touchingly, refrained from altering it even when she received word he was missing in action. It made the house, the business, and every last one of her possessions over to him.

  Not to Fumia. To him.

  It made no mention, of course, of the subsequently purchased apartments next door.

  She can live there, he thought guiltily. I’ll make it beautiful for her.

  She shivered in his arm and began to pull away. Seized by a pang of guilty tenderness, he kissed her hair.

  “Don’t, Yoz: it’ll look like we’re provincials.”

  He said nothing, but put his arm through hers anyway, and was rewarded by the sight of a smile tugging at her mouth.

  “Let’s buy some things for Okimako,” he suggested, filled with the premature, unreasoning desire to make it up to her. “Now you’ve decided to come, you’ve got to be properly dressed.” To parade through the ruins. He squinted at the shopfronts. “There has to be somewhere in this hellhole that sells dresses. Have you seen anywhere on your... ah... explorations?”

&nbs
p; “No,” she murmured halfheartedly.

  “Don’t be silly.” They wove between hawkers, locals, and blank-faced paupers: entire families, Okimakoans all, too despondent even to beg. The street opened to the wide road that ran the length of the Heights. “I know you don’t go in the parts of town where it’s mostly refugees.” At least I hope you don’t. “But there had to be some sort of commerce here before the trash from the city poured in, didn’t there?”

  “That way,” she said in a small voice. “There’s a stretch that is—marginally respectable.”

  “Good!” He was jollying her along like a small child. “Then we’ll take a little stroll before going back.” The Heights ran like a raised backbone the length of Swirling, from the rocky point between the rivers where the provincial gentility lived, from whose back gardens you could look down on the vast muddy whirlpools of the Swirling itself, to the beginnings of the Orange Highway. On either side of the spine crooked streets descended chaotically to the wharves, where Swirling’s life began. The warehouses and barge yards stood on silty soil reclaimed from the river. The Heights were reputedly the only part of town not awash in mud when the rainy season came. The Akilas’ lodging house lay low on the other side of the ridge: from its windows you could see the Yellow, a much faster, angrier river than the Orange. Mickey didn’t intend for any of them, not even Ashie, no matter how she fussed, to be there when the rains came. That wasn’t much more than a month off, but right now he felt like a balloon released from its string, full of possibilities.

  “Let’s celebrate, Fumie!”

  “Celebrate what?” She bumped him with her shoulder, coltishly. She was cooperating, and her smile warmed him. “Getting rid of our Lamaroon Genius Player?”

  “Ssssh. One doesn’t have to have a reason, does one?”

  “Don’t get prickly, Yoz!” He sensed a glimmer of her old austerity, but immediately she was terrifyingly coy. “I will tell you that I was walking here yesterday... I like to walk here: it gives me a feeling like home, with the carriages and the motorcars, and all the women trying to look cosmopolitan, just like the leisured Dead, and all the nasty little urchins, and—and everything... and anyway, I saw a little flyspecked shop.” She bit her lip. It was a mannerism that had been common to all four siblings: Mickey wondered if on him it looked as deliberately childish. “With a little flyspecked window...”

  He steered her in the direction she had glanced. “Don’t tell me, show me.”

  “It was so perfectly in the mode it must have been an accident,” she whispered. “These provincial seamstresses wouldn’t know fashion if it stared them in the face. But, oh, such a happy accident... ” She sketched skirts with her hands. In a low, passionate whisper, she said, “I could have cried wanting it.”

  “Is this the place?”

  He maneuvered her through the door. A curtain of veils whispered over their faces; an attendant hovered in the shadows. He smelled lavender, strong enough to overpower the river-stink that pervaded every establishment in Swirling.

  “Yozi.” Suddenly irresolute, she tugged at his sleeve. “We can’t afford luxuries...”

  She was better already. A week ago she wouldn’t have demonstrated any comprehension of the importance of money. To soothe her, he jingled the mix of coins and precious gems in his pocket. Crispin’s parting gift, delivered privately last night along with a monologue on the importance of resource management. The half-breed hadn’t sold all the Akila jewels, after all, but kept some back as insurance against exactly this sort of foolheadedness.

  “My sister would like to see the frock in the window,” he told the attendant. “I suppose the seamstress is on the premises? Yes? A similar design can be made to fit? We require it as soon as possible, for a trip we’re making—”

  They rush-ordered the dress, in a shade of fawn Fumia chose as a compromise between beauty and sensibleness; the shop turned out also to cater to “gentlemen,” and so they bought, ready-made, a scarf for Mickey. It was the height of extravagance considering he hadn’t any good clothes to wear it with, but it eased Fumia’s conscience, which was enough. As they left the shop he toyed giddily with the idea of actually wearing it on the ship. At the neck of his workaday tunic it might look interestingly rakish. A finger in the face of wretchedness, vulgarity, and pain.

  The overcast sky showed no hint of where the sun might be, but he knew it wasn’t yet noon. No doubt Ashie expected their parting from Crispin to take most of the day. He suspected she hadn’t come because she feared she would break down and cause the scene all of them dreaded: she’d been more attached to Crispin than she admitted. He couldn’t bear the thought of returning home early and facing her. Besides, now Fumia was floating on the euphoria of her purchase, giggling and chattering, and he was reluctant to let the veneer of normalcy dissolve. I can have another few hours, at least, with the sister I used to love, not the bitter harpy I’ve come to know.

  “Lunch,” he announced, and led her into a tea shop. It proved to be the laughable epitome of faux gentility. A girl with too much kohl around her eyes and a ribbon on the untattooed tip of her tail stumbled several times as she recited a list of specials. Lunch would have been prohibitively expensive. Pretending it was what he had wanted all along, Mickey ordered green tea and sweet bean-paste pastries, and watched the girl’s diaphanous sleeves trail on the plates as she served them.

  The fussy little tables were all full, the curtains drawn against the street. It was the ideal place for an unburdening of hearts, a bridging of the gulf between brother and sister that the Fire of 1212, far from closing, had widened. They had to talk about the future. Every day for a month Mickey had been taking the long route around the subject, maneuvering by guesswork. The Fumia sitting across from him he was at a loss to treat except as a child—but this was, must be, only a shell the real Fumia had created to protect herself from their straitened circumstances. Inside she was the same as ever. All he had to do was make the right joke and she’d pop out like a snail, curious-eyed.

  He knew to his shame that if he couldn’t recapture the empathy he remembered, he would end up taking the ignoble, easy way out: letting his love for her diminish into tolerance, as of a burden.

  The only way he could think of to get through to her was to share something. And the future was a prospect they ought to be able to approach as equals, in a materialistic, businesslike fashion.

  But Fumia, unprompted, started talking of the past. Mickey could only listen. His head started aching, and he lit a cigarette, the first he’d smoked in a week. He’d given them up as a luxury—but today a pretense of solvency had already been established, and he might as well enjoy it while it lasted.

  The last five years, as he already knew, had been pivotal to his sister’s life, and all that time he’d been fighting for his own life in another world altogether—the Raw. He could hardly remember the people she mentioned—save of course for the two constantly recurring characters whose ghosts, as the afternoon wore on, he had to concentrate harder and harder on staving off from the table. He reached for more tea and the paper inside his undershirt rubbed against his left nipple with a familiarity bordering on the obscene.

  9 Sevambar 1896 A.D. 5:40 P.M. Swirling: Mme. Dunni’s Peerless Guesthouse

  “I think I’m going to take a nap.” Fumia smiled, her eyes crinkling. “I’ll tell you all about my new dress at supper. You don’t mind waiting, do you, Ashie?”

  “Not at all.” Ashie bit her lip.

  They stood on the landing outside the suite of rooms Ashie had appropriated for her minibrothel.

  “I’ll see you in an hour or so. It was a lovely day, Yozi; I had so much fun.” Fumia gave them both a flirtatious little wave. Then she picked up her skirts and mounted the stairs. On the floor above, she and Ashie shared one room, and Mickey shared another with a refugee from Okimako, a broken-down elderly nobleman whose money Mickey was managing, with scrupulous honesty, on his behalf. It wasn’t much trouble, because the baronet
spent twenty hours out of the day sleeping behind the curtain Crispin had helped him rig up. Crispin had shared the room, too, through last night. Mickey dwelt with relief on the prospect of having it more or less to himself now.

  Crispin no longer had noisy nightmares—but the silences had been worse. The somnolent baronet’s presence was both a boon and a curse in that they were never explicitly alone.

  Good riddance to bad rubbish, Mickey thought robustly. He grinned at Ashie. “Holding up?”

  “Crispin?”

  “Is far enough away by now that I don’t think we need worry.”

  She nodded reluctantly, doing him the favor of not pursuing the subject. Her gaze lingered on the dark elbow of the stairs around which Fumia had vanished. She looked at him and started talking about the new girl she had hired on trial. As she spoke, her voice grew more animated, and Mickey felt himself beginning to unwind. Just a little something was what he needed, a little something that would nudge him into a state of perfect contentment. “Ash, have you any dazeflower?” he interrupted her presently.

  “Yoz!” She tch’ed. “It’s the middle of the afternoon! Wouldn’t you rather have tea?”

  “I’ve been drinking tea since noon.”

  “The more shame on you then. Indulgence upon indulgence.” Her eyes sparkled.

  “The devil’s in me. Come on, love, I know you have some.”

  “Oh, all right, I’ll share. Just promise me you won’t make a habit of it.”

  “I promise, Mother.”

  “Oh, be quiet.” She giggled and led the way into her “sitting room”—actually the first in a string of adjoining bedrooms. After the dark landing it seemed full of brightness, but in reality the afternoon had grown dim, and little light penetrated the artfully swagged sackcloth at the windows. The connecting door was closed, and from behind it he could hear suspicious noises.