The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  The nights were worse. The troop carrier labored loudly.

  Leaving aside his personal fears, Crispin was irrationally afraid that if he stopped listening to the daemon, if he stopped encouraging its faltering will, it might lose heart altogether and strand them in the middle of the Raw. He resolved to stay awake all night.

  But a resolution is merely a resolution when you’re very tired. The next morning he woke with a jolt to see the other boys sitting up, their uniforms rumpled, questioning each other with their eyes. The truck had stopped. Apparently the old daemon had made it to its destination, after all. Outside, hoarse voices shouted over the roar of the wind.

  “No use hanging about, here we are,” said one of the four recruits, and they all slipped out from under the tarp that had been serving as a tailgate. Crispin followed more slowly. In the entrance of a vast barn, the officer who’d ridden in the truck cab was haranguing two tired-looking men in camouflage-patterned fatigues. Inside the open doors of the barn were two airplanes, the first Crispin had ever been close to. He took his place in the line of recruits. The machines were gigantic and weather-beaten. They looked as if every piece of them had been replaced at least once. One had a broken propeller: a fellow in black fatigues was standing on a ladder replacing a blade. The other was broken open below her nose, flaps hanging down as if she were laying an egg. A pair of human legs and feet showed beneath the flaps.

  The scene was a far cry from the dance of the dragonflies a thousand feet up. But to Crispin it was even more thrilling. It was all he could do to yell his name without a trace of emotion. A short, dark man in a leather jacket strolled around the barn. As he went inside to talk to the riggers, he saw Crispin—not the line of recruits, as Crispin well knew by this time, but Crispin in the line—and he checked. His gaze sought Crispin’s and held it. Then he went into the barn.

  But Crispin had seen his face. Intelligence itself; and the hands, the confident, nonchalant walk.

  Was he a pilot? Crispin wondered as the officer rounded on him and lambasted him for staring. Did they all look like that?

  Later he was to realize that that had been Flight Captain Anthony Vichuisse himself. Although one can almost never remember the first time one sets eyes on a dear friend, or an enemy—there is usually only a haze of early impressions—with Vichuisse it was different. The moment when Crispin first locked gazes with the man who was to be his benefactor remained crystal-sharp in his memory.

  Avril—Okandar 1893 A.D.

  The Raw: Pilkinson’s Air Base II

  Crispin’s greatest fear had been that his coworkers would detect his lack of military experience. But he needn’t have worried. No one asked where the new recruits had come from, let alone what sort of training they’d had. Just as soon as they could be issued fatigues and shown their lockers in the ground crew’s barracks, they were thrust into the brutal routine of the ground crew. For a couple of weeks it was nothing but manual labor and carrying slops and falling into their bunks at night. At last Lieutenant Holmes, leader of the day shift, got around to testing their skills. He ordered each of the five to diagnose a daemon that was acting up. The other four had no idea how to begin, and were summarily assigned to older riggers who would show them the ropes. Crispin assessed the problem in a matter of minutes. The daemon was a thirty-foot beauty, and she was dying for the very simple reason that her cell had been made about a foot too narrow. After additional oak planks, dearly obtained, had been hammered onto the ends of the cell to enlarge it, and the daemon was made to clamber back in, her fury flowed out at Crispin like a proof of his ability.

  He grinned at Holmes. His hands were sweating. He had been afraid—needlessly—that two weeks of toil had made him forget the trick of getting inside a daemon’s head. But he had feared the same thing before, and been wrong. if anything, this time the empathy had come more easily.

  Holmes squinted at him. “Civvy handler, were you?”

  “Truck driver, sir,” Crispin said radiantly.

  “What on earth’d ya want to join up for?” Holmes asked testily, and made Crispin second-in-command of the night shift.

  That was the first day of a horrible half-year.

  The rest of the riggers understandably resented Crispin’s having been placed in a position of authority without his having proved himself. After a month or so, he would have given anything to be demoted. But it was not to be. As Holmes had implied, none of the other riggers had had anything to do with daemons in civilian life; Crispin had a reputation to live up to. The other riggers’ attitude toward the daemons was mistrustful and fearful at best, sadistic at worst. To them, Crispin’s gentler approach proved that he was a sissy. In order to refute this assumption, he would have had to talk louder, boast bigger, walk with more of a swagger, and curse daemons more creatively than anyone else. For several months, during which he irretrievably damaged his reputation among the ground crews, he refused to walk the walk or talk the talk. Gibes, raspberries, and racial slurs followed him around. But he pretended, burning inside, that it didn’t matter. He was still of the naive opinion that doing one’s job was the important thing.

  But the night shift was a closed community. There was no escape. One was either hated or liked; there was no such thing as keeping to oneself. Smithrebel’s had been no preparation: the backdrop of the circus was a tapestry of new faces and new places. If you didn’t want to get up close and personal with your fellows, you didn’t have to. And Crispin’s unique status—as a circus baby, a truck driver, and a performer—had enabled him to remain an outsider, a changeling without friends of his own age.

  Here, he was constantly reminded he was an outsider, and derided for it. He thought he was slowly going crazy. For three months he hadn’t seen daylight. The night shift got up late in the afternoon, when sunset was already blazing across the sky; they went to sleep at dawn. The advantage was that they didn’t have to work in the blistering heat of the Raw summer. The disadvantage was that they had very little contact with the pilots or the rest of the ground crew. The airplanes in the hangars were their children. Gleaming glass and scrubbed floors were their pride. The work was not hard, once you got used to it, and they had the first, best helpings of the rations they prepared for everyone on base. On their rare days off, they knew no greater pleasure than consuming brandy until they were woozy enough to sleep for twenty-four hours straight. They were really just military janitors. Crispin would have gone crazy if not for the demogorgons in the Gorgonettes he tended. Their sugary hatred fortified him every night. It kept him on his toes.

  He knew now that his hope of becoming a pilot had been a greenie’s dream. The transition from groundsman to flyer was simply not possible. He might know the cockpit of a Gorgonette as well as Flight Captain Vichuisse himself, but in the night shift world, Gorgonettes existed only on the ground. Crispin’s one remaining ambition was to do his job better than anyone else. In this, he surprised in himself a streak of perfectionism. Lieutenant Biggins, the boss of the night shift, said the shift had not been so efficient since he could remember. With Crispin and Greengage, the oldest man on the shift, sharing the duty of checking all the daemons on base, and the rest of the shift getting the maintenance work out of the way, all of them were generally finished with their duties by 3:00 A.M., and had the rest of the night to sit around smoking and waiting for the patrol to return. In the event that a victorious (or more often defeated) mission limped in late, the shift would spring into action and have the planes taxied into the hangars, the daemons fed, and repairs under way in less than an hour.

  Crispin thought he gave his orders with the right touch of no-nonsense discipline. It stunned him when he found out that the shift considered him stuck-up and demanding.

  “Shit,” he said to Biggins. “What am I doing wrong? I don’t fucking like ordering people about. But I’ve gotta do it. And nobody’s gonna pull their weight if I stop yelling at them.”

  Biggins considered him from the other side of a tire they
were changing. “Can’t pretend you’re comfortable doing it, then,” he said. His eyes were kind. When Biggins was killed a year and a half later in a fire-strafing attack, Crispin, although they had long since lost touch, felt genuine grief. “They know you’re not being real, Kateralbin. That’s why they think you’re stuck-up. I’ve been with this squadron since before you were born; I’m for the triple pension, me; but I’ve learned a thing or two. You gotta come down off your high horse, lad.”

  “Real,” Crispin mused. “Mmm.” The jack slipped, and he almost lost two fingers. “Damn it!”

  He had to keep his past a secret if he was not to throw away the gift that Colonel Sostairs, back at Chressamo, had given him in return for Rae: anonymity. If the night shift knew he had come from Chressamo, life would be unbearable. So how was he to share the reminiscences about Home by means of which the riggers got to know each other?

  Be real. It was impossible.

  As it happened, his luck changed not by any doing of his own, but by his rotation to third-in-command of the day shift.

  The day shift consisted of twenty men as opposed to eleven. The work varied more, and was more demanding. As a result the riggers had less time for petty rivalries. Soon Crispin realized that so far he had only seen the very worst that military life could bring out in men. The day shift, only dimly aware of his reputation as a civvy handler, treated him with indifference rather than distrust. For the first time he was able to become friendly with some of the other men.

  And it was a relief to be on a normal schedule again. The mere sight of the sun—even though it was now the cruel orange autumn sun, under which men and trees withered alike—filled him with exuberance.

  Not that he spent much time out in the sun. He commonly spent up to twelve hours a day in the crudely built hangars, working with the Gorgonette daemons on which the efficiency of the squadron depended. He could not have said what drove him to work until his fingers were numb. It was a compulsion far more demanding than love for the poor, hateful giants. Something to do not just with the power under his hands, but with the autumnal crackle that had come in the air, and with the whole, bitter, wind-flattened sweep of the Raw. Something he was catching from the day-shift men and from the pilots, who commonly had to be helped out of the cockpits, they were so drained. The awareness, finally, that he was in the middle of a war. Us versus them! For the first time in his life, he was part of an us. A tiny but essential part of Ferupe’s defense machine.

  Maybe his newfound enthusiasm for life was the thing that attracted Vichuisse to him. Crispin’s first sight of the captain remained clear in his memory. But for the life of him he couldn’t remember the first time the captain spoke to him. Had Vichuisse been pointing out the damage to his beautiful, metal Cerdres 500, stumbling with weariness as he circled the craft, Crispin two respectful paces behind? Had they encountered each other in some less orthodox setting? “Good work, Kateralbin.” “Thank you, sir!” At first, Crispin had not hated the captain. “Keep it up.” And Vichuisse might have touched his cap to the tall, shambling groundsman.

  Crispin knew only that before he had been on the day shift a month, it seemed as if he and the captain had always been acquaintances. Whenever their paths crossed, Crispin was aware of Vichuisse’s eyes on him. A couple of times he found humiliating little gifts on his bunk: chocolate or brand-name cigarettes. Such things could have come from no one else. It was this last which made him seek out old Biggins, on the night shift, and ask in a roundabout, embarrassed way whether it was possible Vichuisse was looking for a boy. Everyone knew that the captain’s last favorite, a lieutenant named Savoy, had been transferred to another squadron by Westanthraw himself, commandant of the Lovoshire Parallel: the liaison had become too public.

  Biggins eyed Crispin in a way that made him flush. “It’s not that.” He reached out and rubbed Crispin’s shaved head affectionately. “You numbskull.”

  “People are noticing,” Crispin said, trying to defend himself. “Pretty soon everyone’ll think it’s that, even if it isn’t—and as far as I’m concerned, it never will be!”

  Biggins put his spatulate, broken-nailed thumbs to his lips. “If it was a matter of keeping your job, would you?”

  “No! No... I don’t know,”

  “Well, it isn’t,” Biggins said. “I may not see the captain that often, but I hear the stories, same as everyone else, and I’ve looked in on him from time to time, just to see his face. Could’ve stabbed him in his sleep as he lay slumped over his desk in that pretty-pretty office, me, a dozen times.” Crispin stared in surprise. “And I can tell you he’s not that easy a man, not so easy to make out. You’re jumping to conclusions, Kateralbin. It’s something else he wants from you.”

  “But what’s that?” Crispin begged.

  Biggins shrugged. “Damme if I know. Your tangle, not mine, m’lad. You’re not on my shift anymore.”

  And with that Crispin was left with no other choice than to try to confront Vichuisse. The gossip was getting to be more malicious than joking. If the shift decided he was a favorite of the captain—the captain!—he would lose the few friends he had.

  He chose a time toward the end of the shift, when most of the men had left the hangars. On days when Vichuisse was not flying, he often came into the hangar anyway, late in the afternoon, as if his kite was a mistress whom he could not neglect. Crispin contrived to save the Cerdres 500 for this hour. It was a couple of weeks before Vichuisse arrived on his own. But finally Crispin found himself face-to-face with him over the smooth bulge of the Cerdres’s windshield.

  Crispin was standing on a stepladder; Vichuisse was on the ground. Deliberately, Crispin climbed down the ladder. Something in his manner must have told the captain that things were not as usual. The captain remained still, with a mocking smile on his face, as Crispin walked around the nose of the Cerdres and saluted. “Evening, Captain!”

  “Evening, Kateralbin. How’s my love?”

  Crispin blinked twice. Then he realized. “She’s doing good, sir. Props running smoothly now. You shouldn’t have any trouble.”

  “Was there something else, Kateralbin?” Vichuisse said, still smiling.

  “There was.” Crispin looked down at the captain from his greater height. For some reason Sostairs’s tale about the QAF squadrons’ height requirement flashed through his mind. He shoved his hands into his pockets. It was a gesture of extreme disrespect. Vichuisse stiffened. “Why did you have those things left on my bunk, Captain?”

  Later he would wonder if his forwardness had in fact pushed the captain to decide what he wanted of Crispin. It must have been so. There was no other explanation for the way things had turned out.

  “You’re a smoker,” Vichuisse said easily. “Nothing worse than going without a cigarette when you want one.”

  “True, sir. But that’s not it at all,” Crispin said stubbornly.

  Vichuisse glanced around. Only his eyes moved; the smile remained fixed. There were eleven other planes in the hangar. Their props moved lazily in the wind that blew through the huge open doors. “Have you ever flown, Kateralbin?”

  “Never had the chance.”

  “Would you like to?”

  Would he? Suddenly he was choking on old, half-decayed dreams. But of course Vichuisse was only ragging him. “I haven’t the training, sir.”

  “Why should you need training? You’re so much brighter than the rest of the boys. Brighter than a good many of my pilots, even. Don’t you think so?”

  “That would be presumptuous of me, sir!”

  “But you think so. Don’t you? You think you’re better than the rest of us.”

  The captain was already accusing Crispin, instead of Crispin accusing him. Such was the inertia of the hierarchy. With an effort Crispin recovered his self-possession. He met the captain’s gaze. “I firmly believe I could fly a loop as well as any of them. ‘Cept maybe yourself, of course.” The minute the boast was out he wanted to take it back. But Vichuisse was
smiling hugely now as if he had got what he was after.

  “Could you? Could you, really? Well why don’t we find out?”

  “But, sir—”

  “No buts!” Vichuisse spun around. He was walking briskly toward the doors, and Crispin had to follow. His blood pumped with anxiety as he followed the little, trim figure out of the hangar—the doors ought to be closed, but obeying Vichuisse was more important—and across the muddy beginning of the runway, past the second and third hangars, to Hangar Four, the smallest, which stood right beside the barracks. Here the ground crew kept planes that needed complete rebuilding, or which were awaiting replacement daemons. Vichuisse gestured for Crispin to open the big doors. Trying not to grunt with effort, he heaved them wide and propped stones against their sills. Wings and beaks and bright eyes waited in the shadows inside.

  Pilkinson’s Air Base II was in the middle of a vacant stretch of plain. All that saved it from complete exposure to the enemy was the scattering of pine forest around the barracks. Many times Crispin had heard the pilots grousing about the short runway. It seemed that if your kite was a few pounds overweight, or you didn’t lift off in time for some other reason, you got tangled in the trees before you could gain height. Indeed, the pines down at the far end of the runway were so badly damaged that it must have happened many times. They stood like splintered matchstick sculptures against the violet twilight.

  “Your machine,” Vichuisse said with mock gravity, indicating the interior of the hangar.