A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  “Yes,” Crispin whispered, unable to take his eyes off the Founding Sister’s impassive face.

  “Then say farewell.”

  Cloud swept forward, and Crispin flinched from the revolting fragrance of her physicality, but she just tucked something into his breast pocket—her fingers hot even through the fabric—then turned, took her daughter’s hand, and started down the street. Fanny made a brave, funny little face at Crispin over her shoulder and gave him a thumbs-up she couldn’t have learned in the Enclave.

  He watched until the darkness swallowed woman and girl. Then he looked at what Cloud had given him. It was two hundred-sen notes: presumably the rest of the seven hundred she’d been prepared to bid for Mickey. As he tucked it inside his shirt, inside the envelope with Millsy’s letter—the first paragraphs of which he’d read this morning, and learned no more than Saul had already told him, the invitation couched in the coy formal vocabulary of diplomatic Kirekuni—he felt an inexplicable urge to laugh. He still wasn’t at liberty to escape. The red city clutched him, sucked at his feet, as if he’d stumbled into some weirdly urbanized jungle vale he’d missed on his first trip into the interior. He felt trapped, oppressed by sentient walls that surged back up in a hail of mortar every time he feinted to get out. Every brick bellowed its outrage in the voice of someone seeking reparation for an injustice.

  He hurried around to the far side of the building, where Mickey and Rae, the eccentric cousins who between them had trampled his heart, faced each other in the rain. As he neared them, he heard them politely regretting everything that had happened since they first met each other in ever more stilted Ferupian, a language whose vocabulary of euphemism was varied and outlandish enough to rival Millsy’s formal Kirekuni. He remembered how, in Lamaroon, he’d used to worry about having lizard pretensions. The spectacle of the unemployed pimp and the actress manqué speaking a language not their own, the only one they had in common, allayed all his fears; a weight seemed to crumble off his shoulders. He said jovially, swinging his umbrella at them, like a policeman’s baton, ” ’Ere, ’ere, wot’s all this?”

  Rae turned to him with a facetious moue, falling instantly into character. “Officer, I be’s just a poor gel, I an’t done nothing wrong!”

  “Well, this looks like an ’ighly suspicious sichuation,” said Crispin in a transport of joy. The envelope prickled his chest delightfully. Mickey looked distressed. Crispin laughed. “But I really couldn’t care less. I’m getting out of here.”

  4 Marout 1900 A.D. 9:19 A.M.

  Cype: twenty miles north of Kherouqe

  Kasuya Iguchi, the retired SAF commander who’d chosen to take his chances on the Oceanic frontier of the New World rather than pursue political opportunity in Okimachi, lived north of Kherouge, an hour’s drive through the garden suburbs and up the coast. When Crispin and Mickey arrived early the next morning in a motor-taxi, Crispin breathed a sigh of relief. The commander hadn’t been exaggerating his aspirations to modernity. A tarmacadam airstrip ran for a quarter mile along the inland side of the road. At the distant end bulked a hangar large enough to house a whole squadron. Iguchi’s house stood on the crest of a rocky point. At its door a dark green motorcar idled in the rain.

  A groundsman dressed in a replica SAF rigger uniform emerged from the side door of the hangar and watched as Crispin and Mickey got out of the taxi on the track leading up to the house. Crispin had taken the precaution of visiting half a dozen different notion shops in Kherouge in order to change Cloud’s hundred-sen notes. Now his pockets were jammed with cigarette boxes, half of them containing the real thing and the other half packed so full of small-denomination coins they didn’t even jingle. The battered gray taxi U-turned and chugged back the way it had come, belching fumes.

  Beyond the hangar, the desert lay brown as a cur dog in the rain. Though the flat was mangy with rocks, you could have set a plane down almost anywhere. The fact that Iguchi had bothered to lay tarmacadam proved he saw himself as a serious entrepreneur. Crispin had thought he was the first to incorporate the Western paving substance in his blueprint for the Redeuiina Airport; but either Iguchi had had the idea first, or else he really had been watching the developments in Lamaroon and, as he’d boasted at the Sibelye-Enkhoupistas’, intended to match them, forestalling Yamauchi’s scheme to monopolize the as-yet-nonexistent industry of civil aviation.

  A retching noise interrupted Crispin’s thoughts. He turned to see Mickey doubled over at the side of the track, vomiting up his breakfast of tea-shop pastries.

  “I knew you were drunk when we got you out,” Crispin said. “Never get in a motorcar with a hangover. I found that out the hard way.”

  “So—did I. The day Greater Significance gave me my chauffeured car—I celebrated—auugggh—bad mistake—had to take a gaggle of Germans to see the new steelworks on the East Bank next morning. I was swallowing puke the whole way.” Mickey coughed, wiping his mouth. “New form of Disciplinarian torture. They force you to drink cheap wine under the pretense of easing your captivity. Invidious. Worse than the thumbscrews.”

  “We could go for it right now,” Crispin whispered.

  The sound of a slamming door carried down from the point. Crispin and Mickey looked upward to see Iguchi himself emerging from his house, pulling on driving gloves. He stopped, then waved energetically and hastened down the track.

  “As you can see, we took you at your word!” Crispin called as he slogged through the mud to meet Iguchi. Mickey lagged, scrubbing at his face with a handkerchief.

  “As indeed I meant you to!” Iguchi grinned. Raindrops bounced off his cropped head as if it were a stove top. Even in middle age he sparkled with energy; Crispin would have hated to serve under him in his youth. “I haven’t long! I am lunching”—Iguchi’s voice dropped portentously—“with an American! I hope to bring him here later to prove to him that I do, indeed, have a fleet of aircraft, and that they do, indeed, fly. These New Worlders are skeptical of all our technology. More than seventy years of recorded aviation history is not enough to convince them, simply because they did not see it with their own eyes!”

  “We don’t need convincing, of course,” Crispin assured him. “But we have been looking forward to seeing your fleet.” He added hopefully, “If you’re pressed for time, I’m sure your man can show us around—”

  “Poppycock! Tommyrot! What an insult!” Iguchi cried. “I would never be able to hold up my head again if I deserted two of my fellow veterans for a foreigner—Texas oil magnate though he calls himself!—and at any rate, our appointment is not until one. Now you are here it is unthinkable that you should not see my collection.” He turned to the servant who had slithered up behind him. “Houshe, put the car away—and tell Alexa to have drinks ready at…say…eleven.” He winked at Crispin and Mickey. “Have you ever relived your past, gentlemen? I suspect not. Let me warn you, it is thirsty work!”

  Just how right Iguchi was, Crispin didn’t realize until he understood that the retired commander’s house was no more and no less than a three-floor museum of memorabilia, and that this self-appointed historian of a century’s air war didn’t intend to miss the opportunity to show off every last one of his acquisitions. He would brook no demurrals, however polite. Seventeen rooms housed seventeen collections, each named after a particular make of aircraft. The exhibits, labeled to demonstrate their historical connection to that aircraft, ranged from propeller blades to empty screamer barrels to bullet-holed flying helmets to strategic documents dating back to the beginnings of the war a century ago, when infantry clashes all across the Chadou plains had promised a swift, thrilling outcome. Later documents spoke in subdued language of the deadlock—prolonged for so many decades that entrenchment expenses gave generations of treasury secretaries aneurysms, and civilians on both sides ignored the war except when they were conscripted, and no one acknowledged that Ferupe was slowly, slowly being forced to give ground. Not documents, but grisly mementos taken from Shadowtowns and abandoned HQs, t
old of the Kirekunis’ decision to put their money on projectile guns, and the resulting forward thrust that Mickey and Crispin had witnessed from the losing side, and Iguchi from the winning.

  Iguchi’s commentary was at once offhand and disarming, skimming from kill tallies to nutshell lives of inventors. It was also extremely patriotic. Crispin hated to think what would happen if the SAF commander found out he and his guests had been shooting at each other. Luckily he didn’t require them to share anecdotes of the good old days in the SAF, which Mickey could possibly have improvised but Crispin couldn’t have invented to save his life. After a while, Crispin understood that Iguchi’s passion wasn’t patriotic nostalgia at all: it was the technology of flight which had incidentally developed during the war. He’d allotted equal space in his collection to Kirekuni and Ferupian aircraft. He seemed most preoccupied, if anything, with the monoplane design of the later Gorgonettes, their centrally strutted wings, sensitive elevators, and the gyroscopic torque of the engine that had permitted their fierce, instantaneous turns. He insisted that despite the superiority of the KE-122’s triplane design, the future belonged to monoplanes; he alluded mysteriously to “having improved upon” the Gorgonette.

  All he required Crispin and Mickey to prove was their knowledge of mechanics.

  “And where do you think this came from?” he repeatedly inquired, with a fierce, blinking grin that looked like a facial spasm.

  Crispin, like Mickey, could have identified most of the components in his sleep. His life had depended daily on Ferupian-made replacement parts, and when bits of KEs turned up in loads of salvage, he’d spent hours brainstorming ways to fit them into his crew’s birds. He responded cursorily when the lighthouse grin flashed at him.

  Somewhere on the second floor of the museum, he realized that it had probably never crossed Iguchi’s mind to test his and Mickey’s credentials as SAF veterans. They came recommended by Jice Sibelye-Enkhoupista, and so Iguchi accepted them at face value. His pop quizzes were really tests of their potential as business associates. In this part of the world, SAF veterans were rare; SAF veterans who hadn’t gone completely to pieces after the war ended, rarer still; SAF veterans who had built successful careers must have been practically mythological creatures.

  In Iguchi’s mind, civil aviation was the gold mine of the coming century. He frequently expressed a belief that Significance had charged him, and his fellow veterans, with the duty of cornering the profit opportunities created by internationalization—just as they had cornered the political opportunities created by the annexation of Ferupe: a postvictory variation on the theme of conquest. Crispin had somehow forgotten that Iguchi knew him not as a distressingly persistent old flame, nor as a disappointment of an only son, nor as a friend who was trouble on two legs, but as the brains behind the Redeuiina Airport. An ache of longing for Lamaroon spiked into him. In Lamaroon that was all he had been. His life, if unconventional, had been delineated by obligations as clear-cut and emotionally easy as glass shackles.

  It terrified him how close he was to breaking down. He envisioned black motorcars jouncing up the point, their engines inaudible over the crash of the surf below; inaudible, too, the soft, respectful knock at the door. He and Mickey had slept in a warehouse near the docks, breakfasted in Ghixtown, and left before daylight. But such ruses had never before thrown Mr. Nakunatta off the trail. In his mind, Mr. Nakunatta and the Mimes and the Disciples had become one. It’s just a matter of time—

  Ordering himself to get a grip, he searched his memories of the months he’d spent as a rigger for mechanics’ esoterica.

  If he convinced Iguchi that he, too, thought it possible to commute the past into profit, then Iguchi would trust him.

  At last Mickey, probably unable to stand listening any longer, said with a laugh, “Thirsty work indeed! Gentlemen, I beg to remind you both that we, unlike the marvelous machines of which we speak, are just flesh and blood, in need occasionally of refreshment!” Crispin noticed then that his mouth was parched from talking at the speed of a KE-122’s 2000 dp engine. They were in the attic: it was the largest collection room, running the length of the house, and as such properly consecrated to the KE- 111, that scrappy, proud watchdog of the stalemate. Iguchi rang for his maid. They sipped mimosas while reclining in vintage cockpit slingseats. Large windows gave onto an ornamental iron balcony, beyond which stretched the watery horizon.

  “The oranges are from southern Izte Kchebuk’ ara,” said Iguchi.

  He had abandoned his former effervescence and watched Crispin with bright, birdlike curiosity. His scrutiny had an odd naivete: he was like a child watching a friend who has eaten a bad egg, waiting to see if he will explode.

  “We should like very much, after all this, to see the living jewels of your collection,” Mickey said rather desperately.

  The sea rolled like a tangled gray sheet underneath which slept an uneasy giant.

  “No longer living,” Iguchi said complacently.

  “No longer in the least incalculable,” Crispin agreed. The alcohol was sending him into a sort of trance. He had hardly slept an hour last night; his nerves had been terrible, and, besides, bales of cloth made a surprisingly hard bed. “The New World engines set unforgiving parameters. When the fuel’s gone, it’s gone.” He remembered cruising at a lazy 80 mph over the rag-rug agricultural terrain of the Lamaroon coast; the dark hills trembling before him, blurred by wind; the needle wobbling just above zero; the belated, resentful panic that had forced him to turn back.

  “What exactly do you have, again?” Mickey said.

  “Two KEs—a 111 and a 122. One Horogazi. A Cerdres. And five Gorgonettes. I have, as I said, been making a special effort to acquire the latter. Aloncietta; Tamuresse; Guzabe; Tashikoro; Faonna; Hiroshi; Wastingele; Mushiko; and Elzabara,” Iguchi enunciated, savoring each syllable.

  “You named them after Significants!”

  The sun pierced through the clouds and turned the rain golden. The mimosa glasses glowed like oranges hanging plump and compelling in the southern groves.

  “Appropriate, no? In my opinion nothing will more significantly characterize the next century than fast transportation—and that means aircraft. My aircraft,” Iguchi added with a laugh that didn’t disguise his hubris. The last phrase was the only one that rang false in Crispin’s ears, the only one that provoked a response from the glittering storm outside the window, for as Iguchi spoke the clouds roiled together again, trapping the sun in the phantasmic snowlands above, which Crispin hadn’t seen for far too long, except in his imagination.

  “Well,” Mickey begged, “might we see them? Might we try one out? The KE-111, perhaps; I piloted the transformation engine version for years and cherish a fondness for it—and—and Katcralbin was my rear gunner!” he finished in a burst of improvisation. Crispin downed his drink, gazing at the windows, watching and listening for the veil to be lifted again. He thought with amazement dulled by alcohol and exhaustion: Surely Iguchi must guess!

  But he didn’t.

  After a tour of the hangar that was much less excruciating, like an aftershock, they climbed up into the refurbished KE-111 so-called Aloncietta. The fact that Iguchi had called his planes after Significants interested Crispin less than the fact that the polysyllabic designations sounded not unlike daemons’ names: an ironic way of making up for what had been lost, something Iguchi missed, too, though he wouldn’t admit it.

  “Can you—erhmm—you are confident in your ability?” Iguchi called up to Mickey, who’d taken the pilot’s seat.

  Mickey shook his fist in the air, then waved his tail like a flag. “A Kirekuni amputee is still the equal of any non-Kirekuni, isn’t that so!”

  Crispin had never heard Mickey joke about his missing hand before. He buckled himself into the gunner’s harness. All the dials in front of him were where they ought to be. “This is a hell of a lot like a two-seater Gorgonette!” he shouted as he put on the helmet Iguchi had loaned him.

  “Why do
you think there was a stalemate?” Mickey called back.

  Iguchi stood nearby in the shadows of the hangar, his groundsman sculling suspiciously back and forth behind him. He heard, and laughed. “Except that the Gorgonettes, of course, had right-handed controls! I expect you had a spot of trouble in training camp, Kateralbin, you who are not of Kirekuni blood—it must have been difficult for you to adjust to the sinister dominance!”

  He doesn’t care what blood I am of. It’s all one to him. “Yes, it took me a while!” he shouted as Mickey started the engine. (He does it as if he’s had plenty of practice, one part of his mind observed suspiciously.) “They used to think I was incompetent! That’s why 1 never made rank!”

  “Then mind and be careful with Aloncietta! She is my—”

  The thunder of the internal-combustion engine drowned out the last words of Iguchi’s admonition. Mickey taxied the KE-111 forward, out from under the gigantic door which had been hoisted parallel to the ground to allow their egress. The machine-gun mounting in front of Crispin blocked his view although the gun itself had been removed (Iguchi’s ambitions were clearly based on the assumption of lasting peace). He could only imagine the black, smooth, glistering runway before them. “Shit!” Mickey screamed as he revved the engine.

  “Too late now, Mick, Significance!”

  “No! She’s a beauty! She’s fucking—oh, fuck—”

  And they were off, bucking into the altered state of existence that was speed. The engine gave tongue. The desert blurred into a brown streak. They reached liftoff velocity several seconds before Crispin’s gut told him to expect it. That hinted at the real power of the engine Iguchi had installed in the old housing. The tarmacadam was so smooth the wheels scarcely caught as they left the ground. Mickey took the KE zooming skyward, then banking back over the runway. Below, Iguchi ran out of the hangar, waving up with boyish enthusiasm. He grew tinier and tinier, diminishing into a lizard wriggling on the ground, as they gained height. The groundsman stood immobile behind him.