The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  But outside the door of the hut farthest uphill, that stood off a little from the others, two figures sprawled immobile. One bulked as big as a winter-coated bear; the other was doll-sized, with twigs for limbs.

  “Vo and Urzhii look like dem could swing some company,” Kiichi muttered.

  Crispin’s heart sank. Vo and Urzhii were the least presentable members of the family. Everyone danced attendance on them while making fun of them behind their backs. Crispin had never been able to make out why the father and son were hilarious, why the Scaames derived endless mirth from mocking their supposed buffoonery. Both were tricksters: Vo an accomplished genius player with a string of seven at his beck and call, Urzhii a ten-year-old son he was training. Vo had been married, but his wife had died three years ago, and his two daughters taken away by other women. Crispin shaded his eyes and looked uphill. The sun washed over the hillside, making the flat smooth slates of the doorsteps reflect like glass. The wind carried off the heat. From the direction of the fields came a cheer. The men had probably got the fertilizer duster working. Crispin wondered if the fertilizer had any effect beyond the psychological. The Scaames said they bought it in Redeuiina by the sackful, but they eked it out with thirty parts of, as far as he could tell, plain old earth. But perhaps the very earth here had mind-altering qualities—nothing was impossible—perhaps it collaborated in the people’s lawlessness, their desperate, desperately smug pursuit of the leisured life.

  Vo raised a large, gnarled hand and waved.

  “Took you long ‘nough,” said the child Urzhii shrilly, squinting up at Crispin, his mouth open. The Scaame youngsters, unlike the children of the stockades in the jungle, had been raised in fresh air and sufficience, and since healthy children are the most beautiful creatures in the world, their beauty excused a host of sins also endemic to healthy childhood. But poor little Urzhii, who didn’t even participate in the other children’s naughtinesses, inspired only repugnance. Sores covered his skinny, stooped body. Age lines crisscrossed his forehead. He and his father, shunned like outcasts and revered (Crispin supposed) for their “art,” answered their family’s mockery the only way possible: with silence. This was the first time Crispin had been addressed by either.

  “Where’s yer genius? Eh?”

  Crispin’s shadow lay over Vo’s knees. The shutters of their hut banged in the wind. He felt an intrusive awareness of the valley at his back—the monkey hoots rising from the river bottom—the last scraps of morning mist drifting like smoke—the vast emptiness that filled that trough between the hills boiling up, amassing at his back, teetering like a wave.

  Vo lumbered to his feet and held out an enormous hand. When Crispin shook it, a shock leapt up his arm. Flexing his tingling fingers, he frowned. Was the man a daemon in human form? “He doesn’t have any genius,” Vo said to Urzhii, his eyes still on Crispin. “He’s a dabbler.”

  “I’m not,” Crispin protested. “I’m free to choose whether I want snake-bats trailing me everywhere I go—aren’t I?”

  Urzhii giggled—a horrible sound—and scrambled to his feet and went into the hut. He moved just like an active ten-year-old.

  “If I was a philanthropists’ society or a charitable worker ...” Crispin used the Kirekuni phrases for which Redeuiina patois had no equivalents, not expecting Vo to understand. “I’d have a bone to pick with you, M’sieu Scaame!”

  “I take it you have a bone to pick with me even as it is; otherwise, why are you here?” Vo said, in Kirekuni. “Yet if I may first be allowed to defend myself, the manner in which I bring up my son is, as I have often to remind the good ladies of this diin, your mother-in-law not least among them, my business and no one else’s.”

  Crispin made an inarticulate noise. Vo’s bloated bulk didn’t render him laughable, or even give an illusion of softness. The rolls of fat mounting to his earlobes, the braceleted wrists, the man-tits pushing their way out of his open shirt, seemed to have been carved from wood or even some dark, diamond-patterned stone. The eyes flashed. “Rahr me speak jungle?”

  “Whatever—whatever you’re most comfortable with, m’sieu,” Crispin managed.

  “Then I daresay it will be more expedient to use the language of the colonials. While genius playing is a Likreky art, and we named the rose, and named it more aptly I think than have any other people, we never bothered to count the petals. The lizards, so dogmatic, dare I say neurotic, did that for us. I apologize for having no knowledge of your native tongue, which surely has the most complete terminology of all—Man-From-The-Land-Of-Daemons.”

  “Your Kirekuni is better than mine,” Crispin said in honest awe.

  “No, I am out of practice. If truth be told, I am glad you finally deigned to converse with me, if for that reason alone.”

  “But there was another reason,” Crispin said, wincing.

  “The proverbial bone.”

  “I meant to ask you—m’sieu—”

  “All of them”—Vo gestured sadly at the diin—“come to me with their questions, and their answers. There’s no need to hesitate. I shall not think it out of line. Since you have taken up residence among them, you are entitled to their privileges.”

  “But if I was one of you—of them—I would already know. I wouldn’t need to ask.” Crispin was finding it difficult to recall his conversation with Kiichi. It seemed to have taken place long ago, in another land, in a timescape glued together by sticky tedium where he had, without noticing, allowed his private angst to close over his head, blinding him to all tactility save that of sex, which did not count because every touch landed like a blow because it was so heavy with implications; every orgasm jerked the knot tighter...

  Now he had stepped into a realm of harsh sun and shadow. It embarrassed him to remember his own obsession with one-upmanship.

  Urzhii came out of the hut, preceded by a humanoid daemon almost his size. The two struck a Tweedledum and Tweedledee pose, arms around each other’s shoulders. “I absolutely can’t stomach cabbage again,” the daemon said fretfully in Kirekuni. “Look, it’s obviously broken, you’ll just have to get a new one. Ow, Mama, you’re pulling! Owowow!” It grinned—rolling both lips back to reveal golden gums—and added more calmly, “You’m have wis luck wit dem tapirs den Starhunter, but you still owe I fifty sigils, and see me no see de half by end a week me tear off you fucking balls, a some men keep dem promises.”

  “Urzhii,” Vo said wearily.

  The daemon vanished and the child sank to the ground, frowning, both hands clasped over his abdomen as if it hurt.

  The sunlight washed against Crispin’s back like a tide of stinging jellyfish. “You’ve got daemons in the fields, haven’t you?” It came to him in a flash, he’d blurted it out before he doubted his intuition. “That’s why the dazeflower grows so well. The daemons keep off everything else—I mean aphids and rabbits and weevils and—and whatever else would eat it otherwise. For all I know they keep off storms, too.”

  “Oh, well done, well done, Man-From-The-Land-Of-Daemons. See, you did not require my help at all.”

  “No need to be sarcastic! I’ve never encountered your—uh—methods before.”

  “Quite an innovation, eh?” Vo’s gaze swept over the green squares, so neatly marked off by hedgerows. On the other side of the fenced-in vegetable gardens attached to the backs of the huts, the dazeflower ended in an abrupt, razorlike line. The plants towered so tall and spindly it seemed as though just one, on its own, would have fallen over. “Not my innovation, however. My grandfather’s.”

  “But how is it possible? I’m a genius player of sorts myself, m’sieu, as you know, but I’ve never heard of anything like this!”

  “Perhaps it will make you feel better to know it would not have been possible before my grandfather’s time. It was he who devised the original gimmick.”

  “Splinterons!” Crispin guessed. “That’s how you attract enough daemons to have the effect of keeping off the vermin!”

  “He’s starting to g
et it,” Vo said, looking down at Urzhii. The boy did not move. “He understands Kirekuni, more or less, although he refuses to speak a word of it,” Vo added to Crispin.

  The wind slackened momentarily, and a wave of white swept across the fields.

  “The fertilizer!” Crispin snapped his fingers, delighted. “The splinterons must be tiny beyond belief, to look like crumbs of earth! How do you catch them? Do your daemons do it for you? How do you make them stay materialized without storing the fertilizer in oaken barrels? They keep it in ordinary cloth sacks, I’ve seen it!”

  “Yes, the bait is splinterons, and my seven catch them for me”—Vo made a sudden, sinuous movement with his heavy shoulders—“but when they bring them to me, they are brightly colored and of various sizes. You would recognize them then, but not after the ladies have had their turn. We boil them over a slow fire, then chop them and dry them. We mix them with earth and, as you have seen, spray the mixture on the fields. It brings the daemons swarming. That was my grandfather’s genius, and it has now been copied widely in these mountains; but it was my father’s idea to experiment with various recipes. He was quite the gourmand. When I was small, we traveled to Kirekune—where Urzhii and I plan to travel as soon as his training is complete—”

  “It be complete, Papa,” squeaked Urzhii from the ground. Vo, glancing at him, smiled in a way that made Crispin realize all the smiles he’d directed at him were about as real as masks.

  “We brought back spices from all over the world. But the daemons proved most fond of a Likrekian combination, a hot-pepper sauce flecked with goats’ cheese. They cannot resist splinterons that have been marinated in it. In fact, sometimes I suspect the ladies of sneaking tidbits as they simmer the mixture!” Vo chuckled.

  “Yummy,” Urzhii said, rolling over onto his stomach and nuzzling the earth with his head.

  “And your contribution to this—ah—grand culinary tradition?” Crispin said, more than a little flabbergasted.

  Vo shook his head. He seemed about to say something self-deprecating; then he bent his brows at Crispin and his voice tolled out, suddenly threatening. “It surprises me that as a Ferupian, and in your words a ‘genius player of sorts,’ you did not detect the unnatural concentration of daemons in the daze fields?”

  “I—ah—”

  “Forgive me, but I begin to wonder whether your genius playing `of sorts’ is no more than handling. I have seen nothing that proves you are a ‘trickster.’ ”

  Crispin felt pinned by the genius player’s directness. It was an approach he’d become unaccustomed to, living among the Scaames. He stammered out the first thing that came into his head. “I thought you knew—automatically, like—that you could sense—”

  Vo laughed. “Whoever told you that? I have heard the theory before, but it is a myth with no basis in fact whatsoever.”

  “That’s odd,” Crispin said. “I was told—in fact, I thought I saw it proved—by a friend of mine, a Myrhhean. Beiin, his name is, Beiin Sugothelezii—d’you know him?”

  “Sugothelezii!” Vo roared. He kicked Urzhii, not hard. Though the boy’s fingers and feet were twitching, he appeared to have gone to sleep. His body shimmered as if in a localized heat wave. “Did you hear that? This man is a pupil of the Last Great Genius Player!”

  “You’re implying he isn’t,” Crispin said skeptically.

  “Oh, no doubt the fellow is skilled! But he is quite, quite, mad. Off his rocker, I believe you say. All genius players are sometime travelers—it is a tradition, dating back to the days when each of us divided his time between many villages—but Sugothelezii never stops traveling. He is never satisfied with his reception. He is convinced he is a personnage of the first order, an artiste, and he is eternally in search of that place where he will be understood. Of course, I haven’t seen him for ten years, but I take it his delusions have not yet been shattered!”

  “What about his theory? His grand theory, I mean, the end of trickery, the death of genius?”

  “Ah. Now that is the one point—you have hit on it—on which Sugothelezii and I are unfortunately in concurrence.”

  Crispin held his breath. Like déjà vu, he was struck by the familiar, tantalizing feeling of being within a whisper of that eternally elusive truth that would elucidate every mystery in the world. A blind man, he knew there was a door somewhere in front of him. He dared not even fumble for it in case he made a mistake. Vo peered at him and rather than whispering the secret, said quite loudly: “So you are an associate of his. In that case, your ignorance needs no explanation.” His gargantuan face wrinkled; he seemed on the point of dismissing Crispin altogether.

  Disappointment pricked Crispin. “There’s so many daemons everywhere in this Queen-damned jungle, how the hell am I supposed to tell where there’s a few more than in other places?” he almost howled. “I know fuck-all about genius playing!”

  “So I had gathered,” Vo said sadly.

  “Unlike you and Beiin, I never got taught shit! I can’t tell! And I never bothered to go bust my ass in the fields, anyway! Why the hell should I when no one’s making me? It’s not that often I get a chance—I’ve got a job in Redeuiina on the docks!” He clamped his lips shut. He could have wept for frustration.

  Urzhii sat up and looked blearily around. Vo glanced down, and at that moment Crispin knew he had utterly forgotten him.

  “How is my son? Are they quiet?”

  “‘Ad a few winks,” Urzhii said drowsily.

  “Not nearly as many as you should have, I believe.”

  Crispin kicked the packed black earth.

  The genius player took Urzhii’s hand and raised him to his feet. “But they have quieted! You are doing well.”

  “‘M hungry.”

  Vo looked back at Crispin: is there anything else or will that be all?

  “Well, thanks for setting my mind at ease,” Crispin said with vicious sarcasm.

  Vo’s laughter contained not a trace of mirth. He sounded like a man at the end of his tether, a man on the verge of a breakdown. “No, I thank you,” he said, and Crispin could hear the emotion roiling, barely suppressed, behind his voice. “It is always pleasant to speak Kirekuni. Its precision is refreshing—although you manage to make it less formal, even, than the Redeuiina patois.” He turned and led his son inside.

  Crispin whirled around, his arms wide. “Fuck!” he whispered to the deep blue heavens, “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  A woman looked out from the hearth-hut, down the hill in the diin. Seeing him, she lifted her hand in greeting and ducked back inside.

  “Yes, it’s me!” he shouted after her. “The crazy half-breed! The Man-From-The-Land-Of-Daemons who doesn’t know shit about daemons! It’s me all right!” The wind carried away his voice. On the roof of Vo and Urzhii’s hut, a lapidary whipped-cream cone: the genius player’s seven daemons, tails interlaced, dragon heads tossing, tongues flickering, flanks rippling. Here and there a single scale caught the sun like a mirror. It was one of these flashes that had drawn Crispin’s attention. Had the living sculpture been there all along?

  Vo reemerged. “Now,” he said as if their conversation had never been interrupted. “My boy is sleeping. It is his habit to take a nap in the middle of the day; he says he is hungry, but unless he gets some more sleep, he will be too tired to eat his lunch.” He crooked a finger, and the daemons rose up from the roof with undaemonic deliberation, as stately as eagles, flapping their leathern wings in unison, hissing like a set of pipes. They settled heavily onto the ground at Vo’s feet. With their wings folded they looked like reptilian dachshunds. They lapped eagerly at the air. Crispin gritted his teeth.

  In the dazeflower fields, the heady scent of the flowers was so strong that every time Crispin took a breath, he could feel himself getting stoned. The myriad daemons present made themselves so apparent with their rainbowy bending of the air that if Crispin had ever bothered to come in here on his own, without the distraction of the Scaamediin guided tour, he would have
detected it. They approached the place where the Scaame men were spraying fertilizer, cutting directly through the fields. The earth crumbled loose under their feet. The dazeflower stems, leafless almost to the point where they branched out into gigantic, sparse flower heads, swayed around them like seaweed in a dim sea of daemons. They tunneled through the thorny hedges on hands and knees. Whenever they had to speak, they whispered.

  Holding their breath, they crouched as Yleini’s uncle Niili strode past, making way with his arms like a swimmer, his head just above the flowers. Pollen clouds rose, and Niili turned his face aside, cursing. A sack of fertilizer hung across his back. By squeezing the bladder connected to it he puffed small black clouds in among the stems, at chest level: first left, then right. Crispin caught a puff in the face and wasn’t able to exhale in time; he thought he was going to pass out.

  Its in the blood...

  in the lungs...

  In the silent redness he heard Vo’s whisper. “Stand up, man. Look.”

  And doing as he was told, blinking the tears away, swaying, he wondered why he hadn’t noticed the shimmering, dense confabulation of daemonry following Niili across the field. It looked like a gigantic soap bubble wobbling over the oblivious man’s head. Despite his dizziness, he was aware that his perception had somehow twisted and gained a new acuity. Rather than just seeing, he was looking at the whole field with the eyes of a trickster. From hedge to hedge, from jungle perimeter to the diin, the dazeflowers shimmered like mirages. It was the flowers, and it was the air above them—it was the daemons. So many beasts, large and small, abounded here that they looked like transparent smoke flowing, gathering, misting away, sinking low in eddies like water.

  Later, Vo took him to spy on the men in the northeasternmost field, who were harvesting the first of the crop. The flowers piled on the stubble seemed to seethe like heaps of hamstrung green animals.