A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  “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. European 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 Englishmen ran counter to type. Unhampered by Germanic guilt or Japanese 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 outdone 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.

  Achino-uchi, by contrast, was still a traditional House of Ecstasy. Mickey hadn’t found it necessary to reorganize on account of Daisuke’s foreigners—but he now did a sideline in boys. This had always been his plan once he claimed Achino-uchi 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. Daisuke 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 Englishmen? 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 English 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 Significance’s physicians possibly—nothing to be—throw your only chance away—no use, no point, no—chance: Rae, Rain, cousine—dammit, what did Fumie do with my fountain pen?

  there’s 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 Macpherson had seen enough construction for one day, they got into Crispin’s motorcar, a Nogame Exupresu with a typically sleek heavy Kirekuni design and a Renault 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 Macpherson, who professed to have seen worse in the course of his hardscrabble-bootstrap raising in the Wild Wild West. Soon the American 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 Exupresu’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 masterslave 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, Macpherson shifting impatiently in the seat beside him, stiffening as they overtook a bright yellow Supaido whose driver, a rich Lamaroon landown
er from the looks of him, was driving far too fast in first gear, the engine saeaming in protest), nothing selected motorists. Anyone could learn to drive without even understanding cars. Someone in France 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 Nogames and Akusas and Supaidos and genuine French Renaults. 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?” Macpherson interrupted his thoughts. “Can this heap handle the grades?”

  The American 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, Yamauchi had said this morning. They all are. Fob him off with stories of—of—

  Daemons? Crispin had suggested.

  Yamauchi 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 English 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 balls, 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 American grinning, teeth gleaming, wet little eyes squeezed close in to the bulbous petrified chicken-head of a nose. He’d been nursing his JOHNNIE WALKER 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! That won’t play in Peoria. Now 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 Banks Macpherson, 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.”

  Macpherson 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. Genius, that’s Stonewall Jackson, boy; that’s Shakespeare, that’s Edison, that’s Morse. Not no nigger on no island inna middla no Pacific! 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.

  Macpherson 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 morelike me—who survived because we were resisting our own talent all along.”

  “Ya forgotten how to speak English?” Macpherson inquired pugnaciously. “Huh? I said, what about those hills?”

  Crispin looked at him and said in an alloy of German and Japanese, “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!” Macpherson upended his bottle over his mouth, drained it, then shook his head regretfully.

  Americans are easily horrified, Yamauchi 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 San Francisco and Los Angeles; yet they either do not know about, or are incapable of acknowledging, their sanctimonious “secular” 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 Yamauchi thought it necessary to remind him? All too well, he 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 Yamauchi’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 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: Yamauchi 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 Japanese, he had talked his way into Yamauchi’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 Nips kneeling on a clever little metal contraption, their eyes squinting with schemes. Yamauchi 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 Japanese.)

  It had worked, for a while. The governor and the secretary’s rivalry had remained almost friendly until that incident with the Finequ
eliis and the American 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 prominendy flaunted in the homes of various minor officials…) Now Minami was making unpleasant noises, forcing Yamauchi 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 Yamauchi in Okimachi. These were empty threats. Before Minami had a chance to bring any actions anywhere Yamauchi 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 Yamauchi’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 Yamauchi 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 Macpherson?