The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  “This rascal here,” Wigglesworth said, returning his attention to the conversation, “known each other since forever, couldn’t believe my eyes in Sinoa at the ambassador’s wife’s birthday ball, Whaley! I said. If it isn’t Wank-In-The-Woghouse Whaley minus his hair! He answers to Whaley, Blubber, Woghouse, or even Wanker if you catch him off guard. I assure you you won’t be out of place.”

  And he cast a searching eye at Mickey as if to see who, exactly, was inside the lizard costume. They must have been prepped. It was always easier when Daixo sent Mickey the sort of men who would have sought out Kirekune’s brothels on their own, eventually. Mickey mustered a smile and beckoned them to follow him into the raging darkness. Dust from the construction sites downhill whipped into their faces. The palace complex had been the only site in Okimako undamaged by the Fire of 1212. Wigglesworth wouldn’t stop talking. Even the moon baring itself at them, low over the northern wall of the courtyard, wasn’t enough to shut him up.

  “What a beautiful night it is. A good night to get in an airplane,” Mickey said.

  Wigglesworth interrupted his own monologue. “What? What? Fly d’you mean? In the sky? That your hobby, then? Doesn’t seem logical that it works, do you know, but then again, sometimes I think that in the Far East, logic and illogic change places, simply get up with a minimum of fuss and change places!” His laugh was a bray. “Now, of course, they’re talking about building ‘em at home.”

  “My airplane is very logical,” Mickey said. “At a certain speed the pressure of the air flowing under the wings is enough to counteract the force of gravity acting on the plane’s mass.”

  Wigglesworth hesitated, then doubled over with laughter. He spluttered, “Whaley, I’d rather deal with Significance than the bloody Sinoese any day! Tails or no tails, at least this lot has a sense of humor, what? what?”

  Mickey laughed again, to prove to Wigglesworth that he’d assessed the Kirekuni race correctly.

  Blythe-Frye rumbled, “Pity about these blackcoats running all over the shop. Weren’t half so many last...this time last year. I’m afraid I find it rather disgusting. Then again, they must be endured, eh? City’s in a bit of a flammable state. Recovering from regrettable incident. One has to keep the commoners in line in case they do themselves a mischief.” He addressed himself to Mickey. His eyes glowed red in the moonlight. “Expect where we’re going, in your logical airplane, there aren’t so many blackcoats, are there? I expect things are a good deal more fun, eh?”

  Mickey seized eagerly on the opening. “Very, very fun. Where we are going, the difference between lawful and unlawful resolves into the difference between pleasurable and not pleasurable.” It was another of his stock lines, and it applied to Ashie’s Swirling just as well as to his Okimako. Blythe-Frye’s eyes glowed even brighter, and Wigglesworth jerked, mouth opening and hands flapping, but they had reached the courtyard gates, and Mickey excused himself to explain to the nearest Disciple. As the man examined his pass the wind wuthered under the stone arch. The light from the lanterns flickered only halfway up the walls. These had borne high reliefs of Significants past and present, but had recently been chiseled clean. A small change one could pass off as a vagary of architectural fashion, except that Greater Significance had made the decision to eradicate the carvings. In a lull in the wind, Mickey heard a confirmation of his worst fears for Okimako’s future, and the world’s. “That Lord Shusuxo, eh, Woghouse?” Wigglesworth was muttering. “What a bloody faggot. I know it’s the pot calling out the kettle, but he is. What a foppish little imbecile. I kept trying to get to the point, gently you know, then a little bit more directly, but he kept fiddling with his cravat with his tail, one knot after another...wouldn’t look me in the eye. I finally got him to come out in the open, of course. I may have been too reckless, I mean, erhmm, with the estimates, but I had to make it sound attractive, Woghouse, if the rumors are to be believed he’s the one who matters around here as far as we’re concerned, the only one we have a hope of being introduced to at any rate. I think I made a good impression.”

  The Disciplinarian was consulting a list of foreign names transliterated into Kirekuni characters. Mickey closed his eyes and saw Fumia’s face. She wore her grimace, nose and mouth scrunched up as if she were perpetually searching for the right words to communicate the secret of her inaccessibility. She fluttered like a moth in her mysterious discomfiture.

  “Well, they wouldn’t have sat me next to him, would they, if they didn’t expect some sort of an understanding to be reached?”

  “Can’t assume you’ve got one on that basis.”

  “Oh, for all you know you might have been seated next to the Significant himself, Woghouse, you were so busy chatting up that piece with the snake-charmer chignon on your right! And blushing quite prettily she was! Wouldn’t have minded a bit of that myself: leg of lamb isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but show me a man who doesn’t perform better for a little harmless flirting to gussie up his ego, and I’ll show you a monk!” Wigglesworth produced a braying haw haw haw. “And after an hour or so of Shusuxo and his cravat, I would have flirted with a monk!”

  “Thought you did that without provocation.”

  “Only when they’ll allow me. For a moment there, though, I almost thought Shusuxo was...”

  “They want ‘em back tomorrow night,” the Disciple told Mickey, putting away his list. Mickey ground his teeth in exasperation. He’d wanted to hear what else Wigglesworth had to say about Shusuxo, who was one of Greater Significance’s favorite pawns. “Sundown. Sharp.”

  “Your wish is my command,” Mickey told him. Repocketing his pass, he nipped to the fading edge of the lanternlight, squinting across the outer plaza unofficially known (since the Fire of 1212) as the Square of the Human Barricades. The car was idling in the mouth of Summit Street. Mickey waved. For once, Gaise hadn’t fallen asleep: he eased the long black Rydro XV closer, engine chugging, tires clicking across the smooth paving stones. Mickey beckoned the Throssomis. “The night awaits, gentlemen!” He laughed.

  “So it does!” Wigglesworth sang exuberantly, clapping his hands. “And what does it hold? Pray do tell!”

  “Before we get into the car,” Blythe-Frye said, and laid a heavy hand on Mickey’s shoulder as he was turning.

  “Oh, don’t worry, you can tell me in detail as we drive along.” Mickey would have given a good deal to remove that piece of red meat from its possessive place on his shoulder—and from its owner’s wrist. “My chauffeur is ‘in the know’ as I believe you say! He is as much family as my sister, who will be your hostess tonight.”

  “Ah, aha.” Wigglesworth leaned in toward Mickey. “I’m not sure you understand exactly how we intend to spend a night on which we have, ah, cause to celebrate. Of course if it is—ah—possible we should like to. We—ah—we, like you, have a hobby, ha, ha! We were told that anything would be possible, but of course we understand the nuances of, ah, hyperbole—”

  “Anything!” Mickey spread his arm and tail. “May I assure you that the hotel in which you will be lodged caters to all desires. We are, in fact, in the business of desire—if you take my meaning, gentlemen!” Seeing lubricity in their eyes, he hurried them into the car. There he spread his arm along the back of the seat, behind Wigglesworth’s shoulders. “To the airport,” he said to Gaise for effect, then took a deep breath and transformed himself from guide into sexual confessor. Far Western minds worked differently from Kirekunis’ minds, as a tangled string came undone differently from a tightly wound ball: although their fantasies were, as a rule, conventional, they sweated in agony while confessing to them, as a Kirekuni would sweat over confessing to murder, perjury, or treachery.

  But these two Throssomis ran counter to type. Unhampered by Yanglo guilt or Creddezi shame, they competed to enlighten him about their “hobby,” fish-face on one side, wine fumes on the other. Perhaps they had managed to strike their deal with Greater Significance: they could have matched egos with any pair of nobles, and out
done them in condescension. Their conviction of cultural superiority extended even to their perversions. It was just as well Mickey was taking them to Swirling, for Ashie specialized. She gloried in catering to every obscure obsession.

  Akila-uza, by contrast, was still a traditional House of Ecstasy. Mickey hadn’t found it necessary to reorganize on account of Daixo’s foreigners—but he now did a sideline in boys. This had always been his plan once he claimed Akila-uza for his own: a touch of personalization. But like his desertion from the SAF, it had caught up with him, whipping around like the tail of a giant scorpion. Daixo had apparently come along incognito on one of those early sting-inspections and got a taste of what Mickey liked, and chewed that intelligence over, and processed it through Significance’s Machiavellian system of stomachs. And soon after that, Gaise had appeared.

  Mickey focused on the back of Gaise’s head. What did he think of the Throssomis? He had a sideline in condemnations, borrowed no doubt from his puppeteers, and considering that in a year of working for them and for Mickey he’d more or less seen it all, he was surprisingly harsh. He sat stiff and erect, a cigarette clamped in his teeth, not giving a sign that what he was hearing annoyed him, except when a refurbished Disciple truck slid like a stripe of night across his bumper, and he swore and thumped his fist on the wheel. A cold wind, full of particles, buffeted in through the window. They were bumping and bounding downhill through the old city, between black, soggy rinds of houses and an occasional midnight glory spilling light from glass windows, heading for the City of the Dead, that wasteland whose name no longer had to be taken as a metaphor. Soot-streaked columns loomed on either side, with the remains of the old city’s South Gate hanging off their hinges. Gaise swerved around a honeycomb of gray-brick houses that had been newly built down the middle of Rainbow Boulevard 17, and swerved again to avoid a gang of beggars with torches. Looters still worked the old city and the top of the new city, though with decreasing enthusiasm and proportionately less secrecy. In the backseat, Mickey turned to Wigglesworth, then to the implacable, inconceivably depraved Whaley. A moment ago he had known what clever Throssomi innuendo he was going to make, but suddenly all he could think of was his older sister, who this afternoon in the privacy of her bower had taken an ivory pipe from a hiding place he couldn’t find and packed it with brown dust, tamping it with the end of a fountain pen or a barrette or a perfume bottle, and puffed her way elegantly, little finger extended, to a place where she could feel nothing and sense everything. He had been able to hear her breathing all the way down the stairs. As children they’d competed for the mantle of black sheep, but he’d won a clear victory, and what terrified him was the way she was now following his bad example, setting out to efface herself with an awful methodicalness that looked like determination.

  And she had no Crispin to save her by sacrificing himself. Unless the hotelier had one more role to play.

  And when it came to self-sacrifice, Mickey had terminal stage fright. He never stopped marveling at his own cowardice, which remained as lively and shameless as ever. She’s mad anyway—what could even Signcance’s physicians possibly—nothing to be—throw your only chance away—no use, no point, no—chance: Rae, Rain, cousine—dammit; what did Fumia do with my fountain pen?

  there nothing sacred

  breathing hatred

  we have to face it

  no one can take it

  and feel no pain

  —Sade Adu

  Mere Babes in This Business

  12 Sevambar 1899 A.D.

  The Likreky: Lamaroon

  When Macafryan had seen enough construction for one day, they got into Crispin’s motorcar, an Exupresu with a typically sleek heavy Kirekuni design and a Rydro engine, still the most reliable you could get, and drove off on a “relaxing” tour of the coastal lowlands. The roads were no more than dirt-and-stone tracks between fields, but this didn’t faze Macafryan, who professed to have seen worse in the course of his hardscrabble-bootstrap raising in Slux. Soon the Slux man insisted on taking the wheel. A collision, five seconds later, with a thorn hedge and two goats had him quickly maneuvering his bulk back into the passenger seat. Crispin inspected the scratches on the Nogame’s shiny black bonnet, unsure whether to laugh or be angry. He suppressed both impulses and devoted himself to driving. Compared to a daemon, the Exupresu was laughably easy to handle: it demanded nothing of your mind, nothing of your heart. It fatigued you no more than sitting in one place for the same length of time would have. In fact, the greatest danger a motorist faced, as far as Crispin could see, was letting his mind drift. The car worked like a toy: wind it up, switch it on, and away it goes! And it had the same kind of eerie, temporary autonomy as a clockwork mouse. The transformation engine (ah, the bad old days) had stopped running as soon as you let go of the whipcord, you had to coax it constantly just to maintain speed. But you could lash down the accelerator of a motorcar and jump out while it was moving, and the machine would plunge straight ahead, seeming to develop a mind of its own as the unevennesses of the road adjusted the set of its wheels, until it plowed into a wall, or a ditch. Motorcars were peculiarly attracted to ditches. They were alive but imbecilic, like moths that bash themselves time and again into windowpanes. And once they hit something they lay roaring and helpless, like beetles fallen on their backs, wheels spinning.

  One had to resist the temptation—as Crispin also had told himself in the days of daemons—to anthropomorphize them.

  Yet in a way, handling had been a process of anthropomorphization. You had to think of a daemon as a wayward, cunning, physically strong simpleton, and extirpate your compassion, resist the simpleton’s appeals for mercy. You had to have the mental stamina to keep on seeing through its sly bids for trust, in order not to let a master-slave relationship subside into a partnership such as genius players and trickster women had courted so unwisely. After a while there was a state of mind you entered without even thinking about it, and no one pretended that being able to do that didn’t affect the way you behaved the rest of the time, when you weren’t handling; but then no one pretended it didn’t take a certain stubbornness, a domineering streak, to handle in the first place. The difficulties of learning to work the whipcord weeded out those who didn’t have it.

  No such process of natural elimination (Crispin thought, trailing black smoke as he cruised between fields in which the harvest workers were all taking breaks, Macafryan shifting impatiently in the seat beside him, stiffening as they overtook a bright yellow Supaido whose driver, a rich Lamaroon landowner from the looks of him, was driving far too fast in first gear, the engine screaming in protest), nothing selected motorists. Anyone could learn to drive without even understanding cars. Someone in Ixtara had had a counterintuitive brainstorm, that was what mattered, and when the Exupresu developed a worse problem than an empty fuel tank, Crispin took it to one of the Redeuiina mechanics who had bothered to learn to understand its intricacies and were making their living off it. Some of them had got absurdly rich off the colonial elite’s tendency to crash their Exupresus and Akusas and Supaidos and genuine Ixtaran Rydros. Motorcars were status symbols in Redeuiina (as in Sjintang and Kherouge and Leondze and Naftha), and the more often you took it to the mechanic’s, the more people knew you had it. Crispin would have bet his honor, if he had any, that certain hotheads he knew crashed their cars on purpose.

  “I said, what’s up there?” Macafryan interrupted his thoughts. “Can this heap handle the grades?”

  The Slux was squinting into the wind, pointing at the lower slopes of the mountains that rose ten miles away. The tree-blanketed west faces blushed reddish brown in the rays of the sinking sun—as if autumn had actually succeeded in imposing itself on those mountains that brooked no decay, no nakedness, But shadows lay black in the tree-choked gullies, and Crispin realized he had driven too far. Even if he turned around now, they would hardly make it back to Redeuiina before dark,

  “Nothing of interest!” he shouted over the noise of
the engine, and down shifted to first gear, looking for somewhere to turn around.

  Of course he’ll be curious, Yamaxi had said this morning. They all are. Fob him off with stories of—of—

  Daemons? Crispin had suggested.

  Yamaxi put his hand to his oily little moustache, covering his mouth, the corners of his eyes creasing. And Crispin had been joking—at the time,

  “Demons!” he shouted now. The Throssomi word had a nice sonority to it. “That’s what’s up there! Those evil spirits we could once harness to our wills, which now roam free, stalking travelers, desirous of their flesh!” A rabbit lolloped along in front of the car, then dived into the hedge. At this speed, the reeking exhaust found its way into the open-topped car and into their lungs. Crispin coughed, sneezed, and yelled, “They especially like foreigners ! Even one like myself, they would consider a rare delicacy!”

  “Gawds bails, I’m not as easy to hoodwink as that!” A heavy hand hit Crispin’s shoulder. “Go on with yaself!”

  Crispin blinked to see the Slux grinning, teeth gleaming, wet little eyes squeezed close in to the bulbous petrified chicken-head of a nose. He’d been nursing his bottle all the way from Redeuiina. By now he must have reached a certain, liberating stage of drunkenness and decided to shrug off his sulk in favor of high adventure.

  “No need to waste your breath tellin’ that story again! Demons schmuh-shme-schmemons! I’m not stupid.” He tapped Crispin several times, heavily, to make sure he got the point. “No, sir. No, sirree. I ain’t—I’m not stupid. And I know, like I know my own mother is named Josephine Catherine Macafryan , I know a whole nation ain’t gonna tell an old wives’ tale that’s got no plausabli-plausibility whatsoever.” He paused for effect. “Not without a dang good reason for telling it. And I intend to find out just what that—what that is. Ya hear me.”

  “Because daemons used to be real,” Crispin said sadly, in Kirekuni. “And whether we admit it or not, we’re having a hard time getting over the fact that they’re not anymore.”