“I wish they would take my advice and hoard the profits they are making now, instead of frittering them away on luxuries,” Vo whispered.
“Why?” Crispin found reserves of social finesse somewhere within himself. “The market isn’t going anywhere. All they can do in the future is make more money.” Saying this felt like an intellectual triumph; he felt as if he had just coined the bon mot of the decade.
“You were not listening to me earlier,” Vo whispered. “As I told you, the crop is dependent on my grandfather’s innovation—without protection such as we have installed, the jungle would never tolerate these fields; they would be overwhelmed by the native ecology in a day. And the innovation only became possible halfway through my grandfather’s life; and I would swear that by the turn of the century, it will be inconceivable again, for different reasons. You must have a certain concentration of genius to keep off the vermin, and to a lesser extent the weather, without killing the crops. Nowadays more daemons than ever before are flocking to the bait. I have lowered the proportion of splinterons in the fertilizer. But it seems to make no difference—the beasts have grown used to coming here. I reckon that sometime within the next few seasons we will see the yield diminish—and then dry up.” He shook his head. “And then what of the diin? Will the daemons flock to the ladies’ cauldrons, in hopes that splinterons will still be cooking, even when we’ve stopped making fertilizer? I have warned them to keep the pots covered, but... I wonder what we have set in motion, my fathers and I.”
The harvest continued at the slow pace of a water ballet.
“But you don’t know what this...this increased concentration...is due to,” Crispin said absently, not sure whether he was asking a question or promising an insight. He was watching the men work. They had stripped to the Redeuiinan trousers they wore in the fields, much more practical than checktooth robes. Their upper bodies dripped with sweat, but only from the heat, not from exertion. Painstakingly, like children gathering bouquets, they snipped the daze stems off at ground level and carried them to the three piles into which they were sorting the flowers by quality. They did not talk. They moved as if entranced. They laid the enormous posies on the ground and took long drinks from their waist canteens. Now and then one would light a joint and take a couple of puffs before carefully extinguishing it and putting it away. Sometimes one would turn aside to urinate in the stubble. No haste, no wastage.
Crispin wondered vaguely why they’d never invited him to work alongside them. Not even Kiichi had suggested it. Thank goodness. Not for the life of him would he want to make his living like this. Talk about mindless toil. In the sunlight the Lamaroon men’s hairless, scale-patterned bodies glistened like the water bubble of daemons that had hung above Niili’s head. One hovered above Crispin’s and Vo’s heads now, doubtless drawn by Vo’s dematerialized seven, who pressed close. The confabulation was like a sign pointing down into the stems saying, Genius plays here. Why didn’t the Scaame men see it? Because they weren’t genius players. Not having endured Vo’s training, nor Crispin’s fluky ordeals at the hands of the cosmic arsonist, they remained blind to the interconnection of supernatural and mundane. Everyone was part of the picture, but only tricksters could see the whole, with eyes outside. And if not for Orpaan, the poor little Wraith child, if not for the brats who’d killed him, Crispin would still be a mollusk! It was all about sight. And as he understood this, his first ever lesson in trickery, he suddenly understood the reason he and Yleini could never have a meeting of minds. She came of a tradition in which men systematically annexed women’s birthright—and as she accepted the traditions of her people she tied the blindfold over her own eyes. Once he’d admired her, and her countrywomen, for their complicitousness. But now he found their passivity appalling. They were rugged-hearted creatures of babble and bone. They boiled daemons alive but couldn’t feel them screaming, because they’d signed away their natural sensitivity.
A coin cannot exist without its flip side, but they didn’t understand that, and so they had no more appreciation of reality than they had of daemonology. Content with the frisson of eating marinated splinterons, content to leave genius to the menfolk, they existed on neither side of the coin but somewhere off the map, in the noisy limbo of transience and emotion.
“No one knows,” Vo whispered. “No one knows. Perhaps it is something to do with the war. But we get no news.”
At dinner Crispin wondered, rather wildly, why he’d never noticed that the reason the men’s conversation late in the day always turned brutal was that they were all stoned to within an inch of their lives. The tapir spitted, head and all, over the pit in the center of the hearthhut blushed fetchingly. The reed mats of the walls had been rolled up and firelight spilled into the “street,” along with various Scaames. They lounged in groups, self-segregated by age and gender. This was the high point of the day. The women flirted with each other while the men watched appreciatively. The Elders waxed sentimental as they slurped firewater and watched the nearly full moon rising. The hearthhut was aboil with daemons. As Vo had said, they haunted this spot like dogs under the dinner table.
Interconnection!
I’ve got to get the fuck out of here, Queen.
Crispin’s abdomen felt bloated and stiff. He couldn’t eat. His eyes wouldn’t open all the way. He couldn’t think more than a few minutes ahead.
He certainly didn’t mean to commence hostilities with Yleini that night, but they ended up having the fight that decided everything. It decided everything because, as it was later proven, the whole diin heard their voices carrying through the darkness. A few people heard the chink-chink of Yleini’s wedding ring flying down the street; and everyone heard them scuffling and whispering and, at last, laughing as they searched for it. People thought the whole thing was a tremendous joke on the order of watching lemurs mate. They no longer thought it so funny after they learned what Crispin and Yleini had decided, in the end, after hours of lovemaking.
I am on Tom Tiddler’s land
Picking up gold and silver.
Try and catch me if you can
Gold, gold and silver.
— Traditional
New Friends and Old
30 Marout 1897 A.D. Cype: Zhisye-on-Sea
On a spring night in a Cypean fishing town, Millsy broke the news to Saul Smithrebel. He’d been carrying the letter around for weeks. Boone had dated it the tenth of Jevanary, and who knew how the situation might have worsened since then? Cypeans tended not to bother with news of the war, and Millsy couldn’t, in all fairness, blame them. No matter who ruled in Kingsburg, Cype’s envoys would still have to fawn for handouts. And mightn’t everyone here be getting a secret kick out of standing by while their pompous, overprotective neighbor tasted the medicine of subservience it had doled out for so long?
If they did, they took care not to gloat in the presence of Ferupians. The rural towns Smithrebel’s showed in cared for no news but the results of local shrikouto competitions. Shrikouto, a gladiatorial game, combined elements of sport, dance, endurance test, martial art, and beauty contest. Both men and women played at the professional level, where loss generally meant death. Ever since Saul hired a foursome of top-notch duelists—the Human Knives—who faked slaying each other night after night, the circus had been pulling in record profits. This was the ringmaster’s excuse for having stayed in Cype for almost three years. But Millsy suspected that in addition to Saul’s fascination with the east, he had caught the Cypeans’ fever for their national pastime, and wouldn’t hesitate to transform the Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show into a traveling shrikouto demonstration if that meant Smithrebel’s could tour Cype indefinitely, in the roseate languor of desert days and the skin-crawling cool of seashore nights.
Considering the circumstances, it was just as well they’d left Ferupe. But Millsy worried about Saul’s motives. The ringmaster’s out-of-the-blue decision to take the circus into Cype had been only the first manifestation of a desire, it seemed, to lo
se himself or transform himself, big top, performers, elephants, tigers, trucks, bag and baggage, and all. A good many of his employees had decided (with ample cause) that he had turned the corner from eccentricity into craziness—and given notice. Only Millsy knew that the change in the ringmaster dated from the dreadful day in the Apple Hills when, for the sake of the circus, he had dismissed his only son from his employ. How quickly Saul had regretted that decision! It wasn’t so easy, after all, to choke off one’s emotions in the name of good business practice! But when Saul finally went to Valestock, Crispin was nowhere to be found. He’d vanished in the time-honored manner of circus people, completely, leaving a trail of warrants and mentions on police commissioners’ wanted lists.
And Millsy feared that Saul’s long haul into the east wasn’t really a pilgrimage of expiation, but a misguided quest to replace the son sent packing—not with another boy, but with something else Saul could hold as dear, which wouldn’t betray him. The man was piling obsession on top of obsession! Because you had to remember, there wasn’t just Crispin, there was Crispin’s mother Anuei, the Balloon Lady, who had also died because Saul had treated her with the sadistic callousness he reserved for those he loved. Millsy pitied the ringmaster even as he thought in disgust, What kind of man allows his common-law wife to work as a sideshow courtesan? What kind of man overworks his son to distraction and then fires him? It was masochism, of course, but so misguided! And Saul still failed to realize how selfish he’d been. All he knew was his own loss, his own desperation.
And now he was embracing shrikouto and the Human Knives, fawning over those androgynous beauties, all of whom would of course eventually slip up and die in the ring—he was wading deeper and deeper into a real compost heap of obsession—fermented grief—a poisonous muck—
Millsy didn’t bother to check his appearance in the mirror. He’d already packed his bags and would pick them up after he took his leave of Saul. His passage on a fishing boat was paid in advance all the way to Kherouge. Everyone knew Millsy spent nothing on life’s small pleasures, but they had no idea how much cash he’d saved thereby. He folded Boone’s letter into his silver card case, to be produced if need be, and left. The hateful jewelry he had taken to wearing jangled as he clambered arthritically down over the tailgate of the truck where he now had his own living quarters. Luxurious for one man, yes, but in comparison to a suite in the underground fortress...
Kethely, Sonalia, Birys, Galianis, and their new friends buzzed fretfully behind him like a swarm of bees, dematerialized, unable to come too close to his silver arm cuffs, rings, belt ornaments, and boot chains.
He couldn’t lie to himself, not this late in the game. Part of the reason he was going back had nothing to do with Boone’s letter. It wasn’t even due to his unwillingness to get tangled in Saul’s instability. Part of it was his hope that the phenomenon he called the Crowd had to do with Cype—something in the air, something in the emotionally supercharged climate of the land of shrikouto—and that back in Ferupe, he would be free, or at the very least spurned by the Crowd in favor of that country’s trickster women, who were more powerful than he by factors of ten and twenty.
Purple sky, an early-evening breeze. Seagulls argued between the parked trucks. Dizzily, weaving like a drunk, the unwilling cynosure of genius ambled over to the midway.
Once Gift Mills had been ambitious. But when he first experienced the splitting into five dozen of his soul, fear had paralyzed him, and he’d known that despite his blood curse, his forte was not and never had been the occult. He wanted no part of the new understanding that had mysteriously arisen between himself and daemonkind. He was middle-aged. He would rather struggle to trick his little stable of familiars as best he could, he would rather give the whole thing up for a bum lark, than play master—or as it was coming to feel, slave—to the flock that towered invisible over his head. He hadn’t had the strength of character to hold himself together when his frail perceptions had become braided with those of the hundred, two hundred, three hundred daemons who had appeared out of nowhere—three months ago was it, or four, not all at once though, in ones and twos at first, then dozens. In the last couple of weeks their numbers had doubled—a fan club of daemonic strangers who had made straight for him and stuck, like pins to a lodestone. They all wanted a piece of him. If they descended on him again, he would die. He knew this: he wasn’t just queasy in the face of opportunity. True, he had felt egomania threatening, felt the lure of immense power (if I could but harness it), but the main danger was physical. Several times, before he hit on the idea of armoring himself with silver as a stopgap solution, he had nearly been suffocated or clawed to death alone in his quarters, buried under a squirming, adoring mound of furry and reptilian and avian bodies.
They had an animalistic genius for perceiving, knowing, everything about the natural world. Through their eyes he had seen the currents of the wind like color-coded rivers, the cynicism behind people’s smiles, the skeletons of rocks, the decaying cells in the skin of his own hand. It was their knowledge of the principles of movement that gave them their telekinetic and kinetic powers. But he was a self-taught weakling, and rather than try to share that knowledge, he would return to the superficial world he’d sworn to forsake forever.
We were at war for a hundred years and learned to live with the never-ending reports of deaths, losses, and retreats (Boone had written in a hurried yet still flowing hand). We learned a myopia that has, in summing up, damaged our national spirit—fatally? The business in the Raw took care largely of itself; and because it was draining the country so SLOWLY, almost IMPERCEPTIBLY, of its lifeblood, we were able to delude ourselves that this was normality. Our fathers interested themselves once more in their sordid little careers—as if the whole world were not at stake—and our generation copied their example. Your own failed negotiations with the Significant represented Lithrea’s last flicker of interest in the proceedings Ethrew opened with such vigor. Your dismissal from court was symbolically more meaningful than any of us realized at the time. Now matters have worsened.
“Seven o’clock an’ everyone’s having a loverly evenin’!” screamed a circus employee in the costume of a rooster, darting among the tittering Cypese on the midway. “The show starts in one hour ladeezengents, one hour! Seven o’clock and everyone’s gettin’ outrageously drunk! Oooh, look at you, ain’t you a fish! That your fourth, innit? An’ it’s only seven o’clock, lucky seven, loverly seven... ‘Ow old’re you?” The girl in question blushed, ducked behind her boyfriend. The rooster darted its moth-eaten head over the young man’s shoulder and howled in indignation, “You can’t resist the Cock, young leddy, ain’t yer fella learnt you that by now?”
She no longer participates at all in round-table talks with the military men, whose job it is SUPPOSED to be to send orders to the army as it runs helter-skelter from the lizards; and without her the attaches are quite at a loss, never having seen themselves as anything more than mouthpieces for the Royals. I, myself, along with other men and women whose names you would recognize, have attempted to take over their responsibilities, but none of as are trained as strategists, nor do we have the necessary authorizations. At first we thought it would be easy to choke off the lizards’ advance after they thrust—rashly, it seemed—into Ferupe. We were wrong. We have virtually no way of communicating with the scattered divisions of the army—no way of getting news, apart from hearsay from the refugees who are flooding into Kingsburg—but we know the enemy is advancing, laying waste to the country. My country, Gift, and yours. No matter how far you roam with that mud show you call your satisfaction, your duty is to Ferupe, and your place is here.
The light had left the sea. The low, sand-colored buildings of Zhisye-on-Sea straggled down to the shore a mile off, in shadow. Sunset reddened the peak of the big top and the slopes of the hills that spiked up in the far distance, on the other side of the irrigated coastal lands. Millsy smelled spicy fish kebabs. He wasn’t hungry. He heard the hiss of bee
r foaming from the taps at the refreshment stand, where the evening’s first crowd had gathered. He wasn’t thirsty. Dark syrup stained the mouths of the children playing around their parents’ feet; sugar-saturated dough balls and nut-pastries had long ago replaced candy floss and toffee apples as Smithrebel’s trademark treats. To someone else the twilight might have felt cool and clear, the breeze refreshing after the day’s heat, but Millsy felt as if he were swimming in a sea of broken glass. Every movement vibrated pain through his muscles, and at every step he lurched as if a stair that should have been there was not. You haven’t experienced disillusionment until your dearest enemies have let you down.
For, worst of all, the Crowd had changed Kethely, Sonalia, Birys, and Galianis from feys who despite their allegiance to him remained wild, into his would-be best friends. It had always been an uphill struggle to get them to cooperate in the ring; now they wanted him to take advantage of them. They were like loathly little children whose delight it is to give themselves to pederasts. His shows had become breathtaking displays of pyrotechnics—the daemons had had the idea of gripping double-ended torches in their teeth while they did their gymnastics—which had more than once nearly set fire to the big top.
Face it: he needed them to hold themselves aloof. He needed them to be wild beasts, not friends. Otherwise, he could not return their love and must cravenly push them away, and face it: he needed them. He needed them.
It seemed to him as he winced his way through the shattered frenetic air that he noticed the faces of the road companions standing in the booths and at the flaps of black tops for the first time in months. Pinched sunburned faces. Jaws clacking up and down, clattering out the same old chants, with purple descriptions added to pander to the Cypeans’ love of verbosity. Their hands quick and sure on the coins, their eyes just as quick but less sure. Millsy had been so preoccupied with the thickening Crowd that he’d never noticed when the circus completed its metamorphosis from a lazy-daisy carnival of clowns and acrobats and illusions into a hard-core, hard-sell emporium of sensation. Perhaps it was because the transformation had been going on so long. Within the first year, all but a few of the Ferupian roustabouts had fallen prey to culture shock or homesickness; Cypeans had replaced them. This tour, several acts who’d been with Smithrebel’s for decades had given notice of their intention to bail out when the circus returned to Kherouge in six months’ time. Now it was Millsy’s turn. But he couldn’t hang about until Kherouge.
The Daemon in the Machine Page 39