Macafryan wasn’t finished. “An’... an’...genius players! I posit to you, I posit to you that there ain’t an’ never were no such thing. Cause if they were such su-per-lative brains, they’d still be around, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t they! Show me a live genius player, then!”
Crispin stared over the wheel, easing the car along just a mile per hour or two above stalling.
Macafryan rubbed his forehead with the heel of one hand and muttered, “What the hell I ever did ta deserve a nigger-boy nursemaid that won’t even talk when ya try ‘n make conversation; just a bit a friendly conversation; gotta treat ‘em like they’re as good’s yourself; just trying ta get a bit a give-’n-take goin’...”
“The genius players are nearly all dead,” Crispin said, in Lamaroon this time.
“What the hell I ever...”
Crispin switched into Ferupian. “I’ve met a couple who survived because they protected themselves with silver; and a couple more—like me—who survived because we were resisting our own talent all along.”
“Ya forgotten how to speak Throssomi?” Macafryan inquired pugnaciously. “Huh? I said, what about those hills?”
Crispin looked at him and said in an alloy of Yanglo and Creddezi, “There’s nothing in them now except dope farmers. But if there were, if there were still daemons in the world, I would tear the gorgon out of the engine of this ‘heap’ and have it sit on your lap and spit in your face and then claw the fried-egg alcohol-poached eyes out of your loaflike head.”
“Well? We gonna go there or ain’t we? It’s gettin’ dark. Hurry this thing up! We’d be makin’ better speed on foot!” Macafryan upended his bottle over his mouth, drained it, then shook his head regretfully.
Slux are easily horrified, Yamaxi had said. They obey their laws as they obey their priests. None know better than I what a large percentage of our yearly crop goes straight to Sahorlidun and Logorlibo; yet they either do not know about, or are incapable of acknowledging their sanctimonious government’s hypocrisies. On no account must you take him anywhere near the mountains. We are likely to have a hard enough time as it is—Significant, do you remember when the elders of the Finequelii diin pulled their cart up to my front door and came to find me while I was engaged with our old friend of “Itz a Blitz”—that poor, bright-eyed fool who wanted us to turn the interior over to coffee plantations! The governor lost control of himself again and a high-pitched cackle escaped; he twisted his moustache and upper lip hard between his fingers, punishing them, his eyes dancing.
Why had Yamaxi thought it necessary to remind him? All too well, Crispin remembered averting disaster by shoving the little coca-nuts out of the door, getting rid of them so fast that they threatened (emptily, as everyone knew) to apply for patronage to Tomichi Minami, Secretary of the Interior, who was Yamaxi’s main rival in the struggle to control Lamaroon’s secret exports. Poppies, dazeflower, cocaine, khat, nizhny, hashish; the small businesses run by diins such as Yleini’s family had not only, thanks to Far Western chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, survived the deaths of their trickster security chiefs, they’d multiplied and diversified. On his maiden flight in the Gorgonette, Crispin had ventured only a little way over the jungle before he ran low on petrol. But he had seen the telltale squares of lighter green on the hillsides. Poppies, dazeflower, coca, khat, nizhny, hashish: Yamaxi had become a millionaire six times over, though most of the money was prudently invested in pyrite mines in the north of Kirekune, and not even his wife knew the real depth of the pockets she spent her days digging into.
But Minami knew. A sharp young civil servant from Okinara with fluent Creddezi, he had talked his way into Yamaxi’s confidence and then decided he wanted a piece of the pie, too. No doubt if you ripped open his coat, you would have seen a neck on a stick held aloft by five or six Creddezi men kneeling on a clever little metal contraption, their eyes squinting with schemes. Yamaxi had seen his own mistake too late, and enjoined Crispin not ever again to let him be so gullible in this new era of loyalties taken more lightly than love. Crispin had had trouble convincing him that keeping Minami sweet would be easier than replacing him. (You had to remember the Creddezi.)
It had worked, for a while. The governor and the secretary’s rivalry had remained almost friendly until that incident with the Finequeliis and the Slux owner of Itz A Blitz, Inc. (And a rash of less dramatic could-have-been-catastrophes involving shipping costs that shouldn’t have appeared on records made available to foreigners, interior-liaison men who should have been kept out of sight, luxury too prominently flaunted in the homes of various minor officials....) Now Minami was making unpleasant noises, forcing Yamaxi into gloves-off interviews Crispin had watched through peepholes, warning him that if he, Minami, wasn’t allowed total, free access to the “agricultural product” coming out of what was, after all, his sector, he would bring actions against Yamaxi in Okimako. These were empty threats. Before Minami had a chance to bring any actions anywhere Yamaxi would have him demoted, fired, or framed for the very crimes he aspired to commit. But the vulture-robbery of three undercover shipments in the last month was no empty threat. Nor was the attack on a group of Yamaxi’s real aides (those who assisted the governor in his other business of running the Colony of Lamaroon, as one of whom Crispin masqueraded when there were foreigners about—young lizards still wet behind the ears, worldly in a clumsy, terrified fashion, who wouldn’t admit any knowledge of the governor’s personal investments)—two of whom had been killed, and their companion stabbed three times, as they walked through the high town late at night. The single survivor said the knife men had been Lamaroons, but such a bloodlessly planned-through double murder had Kirekuni fingerprints all over it. And there was only one Kirekuni in Redeuiina who would have dared.
Was that what Yamaxi had been trying to impress on Crispin this morning? That he, too, had at last begun to take Minami seriously? And what did that have to do with Macafryan?
The Slux was rooting under the seat, grunting with effort. “Gawd damn—”
“Can I be of any assistance?” Crispin said.
The Slux straightened up. “You ain’t got no liquor under there. Always keep a bottle in the auto, thass my advice, never know when you’re gonna want it.” He brooded for a moment; then sighed and shook himself, squinting at the hills, which bulked so close they filled half the twilit sky. “Looks like we’re almost there anyways.”
“We are not going to the hills, Mr. Ted.”
Up ahead, a gap in the hedge! Crispin slowed the Exupresu to a crawl as they passed it, then slammed the gear shift into reverse and threw his weight behind the wheel, spinning the car backward, crashing it through the branches jammed haphazardly across the gap. The Exupresu lurched as the rear tires hit clods hidden under the wheat stubble. Clouds of fumes surrounded them. Macafryan sputtered, “Like hell we ain’t—”
The engine stalled and died.
“Now what’ve you fuckin’ done!” The Slux blew out an aggravated breath. Crispin, trying to coax the engine back to life, glanced over and saw Macafryan’s little eyes glittering with drunken exasperation. Only a fool would succumb to the temptation to see the Slux as a figure of comedy. Macafryan was more dangerous than he looked, not least because of that concealed six-shooter.
“Hang on,” Crispin said, and dived for the starting crank, jumped out of the car, and raced around to the front bumper.
“Get out of the way,” Macafryan called.
“This will not take more than a couple of minutes!” Crispin went down on one knee and cranked for dear life, hardly able to see what he was doing, driven wild by his inability to sense the diesel engine—all he could do was try this and that, he had no mental operator’s manual. “Keep your hair on!”—a phrase he’d learned from one of his previous Slux, to which Macafryan replied with a string of obscenities.
The Exupresu hiccuped, shuddered, and said, Raa-aarh. “Thar she blows!” Macafryan shouted joyously, and then with sudden fury, “D
int I tell ya gerroudova way!”
The engine hung fire, then turned over steadily. Crispin edged around to the driver’s side, clutching the starting crank, eyeing Macafryan. The Slux hunched over the wheel. Gears crunched together hideously.
“Dunno ‘bout you, but I’ll go where I want to go,” Macafryan shouted grandly. “Can’t keep no secrets from Josie Macafryan’s boy.”
“In the name of the Significant, man!” Crispin wrestled with the door. Locked! He reached over the top and felt for the catch. Macafryan smacked his hand with the wooden butt of his gun. Pain slashed up his wrist and two fingers went numb.
“I’ll not have niggers tellin’ me what to do!” Macafryan bellowed self-righteously.
Crispin punched the Slux in the face. His knuckles contacted teeth, saliva flew, and the big, heavy head snapped back. Grunting, Macafryan shook himself. He was too drunk, Crispin realized in horror, to be stopped by a mere blow. “Now willya get out of m’ fuckin’ way or am I gonna hafta—fuck—” And right then, some sixth sensitivity to danger—whether acquired in the QAF or in Okimako or on the Slow Expresses or at some point during the years of tedious wrongdoing afterward—made Crispin throw himself bodily backward into the thorn hedge just before the bullet from Macafryan’s gun whined through the air where he had been.
The fall, awkward as it was unplanned-for, left him momentarily stunned. Half-conscious, he felt the Exupresu grind magnificently into gear, lurch up onto the road, and bump away with a flourish of loose mudguards. Four or five seconds later, bleeding from a hundred jagged tears, thorns sewing his clothing to his skin, he staggered out to the weeded center of the road.
He stopped and listened. In the utter silence of the countryside, he could hear the chudder of the Rydro engine fading.
To reach the hamlet of Dumadiin the Slux wouldn’t have to know his way. This road would lead him there by default. He would, in fact, have to turn off along one of several unappetizing little side roads to go anywhere else. In Dumadiin they rented mules, guides, ox carts, and probably their own daughters to anyone willing to pay. They would find the spectacle of the drunken foreigner a tremendous joke, but they would encourage his desire to explore the hills as tenderly and firmly as they would encourage a child to take its first steps. Their livelihoods depended on their asking no one’s motives; the color of a man’s skin mattered not one tenth so much as the color of his money.
Oh, Yamaxi was going to love this!
Birds startled out of sleep settled rustling and twittering back down into the thorn hedges. Crispin rubbed his numb right hand and, for lack of a better plan, started to walk back toward Redeuiina.
In the end he was lucky. The old Lamaroon man in the yellow Supaido hadn’t been a rich landowner. He was the owner of a garage in Redeuiina, one of the fabled master mechanics, and this very day he’d driven one of his cobbled-together-from-parts fleet of motorcars out to see his daughter, who had married into a dairy-farming diin in the lee of the foothills. It was rumored to be their proximity to the jungle that gave the milk from their goats and cows a unique flavor craved far and wide. Crispin learned this, and much more, after the old mechanic picked him up about two miles down the road from the place where Macafryan had made off with the car. The mechanic was so nearsighted he never turned the car into the bends until it was almost too late; but myopic or hyperopic, he would have known if another car had passed him in the last half hour. Macafryan had vanished without trace. By the time they reached Redeuiina, Crispin had learned all he ever wanted to know about dairy farming, with details of the family relationships of the old mechanic’s son-in-law’s clan thrown in, and a few anecdotes (far more interesting to Crispin) of the garage trade; in return Crispin volunteered amusing stories of his job as dogsbody for a physician in the Yard.
You wouldn’t believe the complaints some people imagined they had! He didn’t have to make anything up: Yleini’s women friends made a hobby of being ill, and back when she and Crispin had actually talked instead of using each other for target practice, she used to relate their tales of woe to him with a straight face. She found their delicately half-described maladies fascinating. In fact, he thought she was rather in awe of her friends’ expert management and exploitation of their own vulnerability. That at least would be one explanation for why she overcompensated by making herself so emotionally vulnerable.
The old mechanic dropped him off in the middle of the Yard. As the sunshine-colored car bumped away into the night, Crispin ducked inside the building where he’d said he lived; slumped against the wall of the dark stairwell, breathing the smell of babies and wet washing and refried beans and feces; then exited and started to walk “up the city” (as Yard folk said), going willingly toward the lion’s den, going to stick his head in the lizard’s mouth.
The autumn night was chilly and the wind smelled of dead things, but that was just the smell of the sea. Crispin had come to detest the sea, not in and of itself (he freely admitted it was useful, he’d even give you necessary) but because of all the things it had come to represent.
Yleini appearing behind Neiila, shoving the maid out of the way; Yleini on the threshold, still dressed despite the late hour in a beige tea-gown, her hands over her mouth, gaslight flooding from behind her down the front steps.
“I thought you were dead,” she shrieked. “He thinks you’re dead.” Crispin heard the ears of all the maids and footmen below all the area railings all up and down the hill pricking up. He pushed her inside. She melted against him, gasping out a relief too profound for tears. He signaled Neiila over her shoulder and mimed drinking. Neiila knew what he wanted. She tiptoed backward, teeth showing, excited. She was fifteen, and her parents grew opium poppies deep in the interior; when she came to the Kateralbins she’d spoken a scarcely comprehensible patois, but had picked up Redeuiina dialect even faster than she picked up Yleini’s gowns when madame scattered them across her boudoir. With her lithe build and ready smile, she attracted the eyes of all the men who called on business, from liaison ruffians to elderly civil servants with moral codes for backbones, who would clearly have felt far more comfortable getting to know her than her employer. The cycle seemed set to continue.
Crispin held Yleini off by the shoulders. “Who thinks I’m dead? Mr. Macafryan? Is he here?”
“No, he’s not! Oh, Significant—oh, heavens—Gawd dang it to hell,” she swore in Throssomi, and he wondered in a momentary flash of jealousy whom she’d been talking to. “Devi, who else! When you didn’t come back—”
“But—” Why had Yamaxi jumped to the conclusion that something had happened? He couldn’t possibly have known Macafryan was going to get drunk and steal the car. If it hadn’t been for Crispin’s mismanagement of the situation, nothing would have happened at all; and Yamaxi could have had no way of foreseeing the engine’s stalling, Crispin’s losing his temper, the Slux’s shooting at him. Yamaxi had known something was going to happen, though. Had allowed Crispin to take the Slux “touring the countryside” knowing something was going to happen.
Crispin shuddered as he thought of the drunken, stupid, innocent-as-a-baby Slux careening along the tiny, dangerous road at the fringes of the jungle. It had been four hours since they parted—at least—and even then, the Exupresu’s diesel tank had only been a quarter full. Where was Macafryan now? Who’d been lying in wait for him, somewhere along the only road anyone “touring the countryside” would conceivably take?
“Devi set me up.” The fingers of his good hand burrowed into Yleini’s shoulder.
“No, Cris, he—”
“The scheming, oily, two-faced, giggling lizard. Fuck him, fuck him, fu—” Crispin saw Neiila hovering in the door of the parlor. “Excuse my language.” He took Yleini by the hand, pulled her into the parlor, allowed Neiila to set the brandy tray down on the sideboard, then dismissed the maid and closed the door himself, making sure it was locked. His nerves twangled. One oil lamp on a low table illuminated too many landscape oils, too many chairs,
too much brocade, too many folds in the curtains of the windows, too many romance novels in the bookshelves, too many glittery knickknacks on too many surfaces (why, oh why did she think gilt-painted china figurines were the epitome of taste? he wondered not for the first time), too many shadows. Too many shadows.
Yleini hunched over her knees on the edge of the love seat, talking at him in fits and starts of retrogressive explanation.
“So Yamaxi came here about two hours ago,” he attempted to recapitulate. “Looking for me? Specifically looking for me?”
She seemed to stiffen. Then she recovered, and said sweetly, “Why on earth else would he come here? He brought some of his ugly, hideous Yard thugs.” She shuddered. “They wouldn’t take drinks.”
“Drinks,” Crispin repeated, and sitting down across from her, poured brandies for them both. “No, have it, I insist, I can tell you’ve had a scare. Now tell me what he said, as exactly as you can remember.”
“When he saw you weren’t here, he wouldn’t say much.” She brought her head up. Her gown, a pale shade of what she would call ecru, had a stiff low bodice and a valley widened between her breasts as she leaned forward. Why was she dressed so seductively? To receive Yamaxi? “Something about bad news, and he was worried about you, but he said I wasn’t to worry. As if I’d worry!” Her lip twisted, and she said defiantly, “As if I haven’t been hoping and praying, ever since he left, that this was it, that I’d finally be...” She stopped. Crispin winced. He supposed he should at least be grateful that she hadn’t the shamelessness to put what they both knew she meant into hard, solid words.
He downed his brandy in a gulp, picked hers up, and put it in her hand, closing her fingers around it. Her flesh felt so soft and hot that a low-level resurgence of misery washed through him. “Names? Didn’t he mention any?”
The Daemon in the Machine Page 54