The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  “You can’t give up now,” he insisted, feeling simultaneously desperate and put-upon. What right had Crispin to get fatalistic?

  Crispin leaned against the corner of the cliff. “Did you know humans can eat daemon meat? Don’t look at me like that. I did, once. We could survive quite a long time on the splinterons, and if it dies, that should be enough to get us to the plains.”

  Mickey couldn’t tell whether Crispin was joking. “We don’t have enough water.”

  “No.” Crispin looked up at the sky, exhaling smoke. “Stars’re coming out, look.” His voice was thoughtful. “Mick, d’you ever find yourself forgetting things that weren’t all that long ago, accidentally on purpose, like?”

  Mickey flashed on Izigonara’s 20th, hearing catcalls when he walked by the gunners’ barracks. Miki...miki-noko. They made it sound like night birds, trilling in falsetto. If you didn’t know what they were saying, you wouldn’t have understood. Birds. Or cats. Miki...He frowned at Crispin, wondering what he meant. Significant, a man could lose his mind over that face! Crispin looked even more exotic now than he did in daylight—almost like a full-blood Lamaroon. The lips did it. Wide, perfectly defined, and in the gloom you couldn’t see that they were cracked from the wind. A man could lose his mind—or his heart—

  “Don’t stare at me like that!” Crispin threw away his cigarette and pushed himself upright. “Why don’t you do some thinking for yourself for a change? I’m not a hero! Never have been, not, and never will be! So don’t look at me like I’m going to come up with a way out of this!”

  Maybe not, but you’re still my hero, Mickey thought. He shook his head, half-smiling, and retreated a couple of paces defensively.

  “Say something, dammit, or I’ll have to say it for you. The way you look at me...” Crispin shook his head. “Did you hear that? I’m getting to be as bad as you! Reading shit into people!”

  Mickey had never known anyone less predictable. Was that what goodness was? Unpredictability? Because for some reason he couldn’t disabuse himself of the belief that Crispin was good.

  “But you were right about Burns. And I never saw it. Didn’t see it until it was on top of me. Queen, I was so blind!”

  Mickey said aloud, “Have you considered that maybe what you call blindness is a function of goodness?”

  “If so, I’ll pass!”

  “So do you think you were wrong to trust Burns?”

  “Hasn’t that been made abundantly clear by now?”

  “Well, no. Materially, yes, I suppose so.” Mickey glanced around at the dark canyon, and out to the west. Night concealed the foothills utterly. “But morally you were right to trust him, and he was wrong to betray you.”

  “The bloodsucking double-crossing half-breed,” Crispin said halfheartedly. “And you’ve dodged the issue of whether we were both wrong in the first place.” He was silent for a time; then, just as Mickey wondered whether he’d fallen asleep, or fallen off the side of the mountain, his voice wandered out of the darkness again, so deep and bitter Mickey’s skin tingled. “I’ve had it up to here with morality, Mick. I’ll tell you something. I was thinking in terms of morality, too, even at the time. I saw myself as being in the right. Vichuisse was in the wrong, simply because he was incapable of effective leadership. I was acting on behalf of all our men. I was selfless, I didn’t want the commandancy, I just wanted justice for the regulars and for all the friends I’d lost to his incompetence; I was a crusader, dammit!” He laughed unpleasantly. “In other words I was a fool. Don’t say anything!”

  Mickey closed his mouth. He had indeed been about to protest, but it was merely an automatic reaction.

  “It was personal from the word go. You were right about that. But you don’t know how long it had been going on. It was personal from the day Vichuisse first picked me out and made me a pilot. It was personal from the day I was arrested in Shadowtown. Those Intelligence bastards! They tell you you’re fighting for Ferupe and for the Queen and for honor and glory and so damn on and so forth, but that’s a load of daemon shit. It’s all schemes and strategies and power plays whether you’re a slop boy or a general. You against me, me against you, man against man, man against woman...My mistake, my transgression, was buying into Burns’s scheme. I should have seen where things were at right from the beginning. Every man for himself is where it’s at—and as for honor; it’s just as much a scam as the pension, because ninety-nine percent of those poor sods back on bases won’t ever get within spitting distance of it. And I’m not having none of it from now on.”

  Mickey had an idea Crispin was not speaking to him at all, but he couldn’t let the captain’s tirade pass without comment. “I never had any ideals,” he said. “I didn’t join the Disciples because I was a patriot. It was because someone had broken my heart, and I never wanted to see him again.” The minute he said it he could have kicked himself.

  But Crispin didn’t even seem to have heard. “No more of it! Whoever is without ideals, he’s got a head or two on his shoulders? And, Mick, that shit about virtue you were spouting a while back? Seems to me it all boils down to goodness being the same thing as having more illusions than the next man. Which is a fair definition of stupidity! Hah!”

  Mickey gathered his thoughts, which had scattered like pigeons from a rooftop. “That’s beside the point. What interests me is the question of what you’re proposing to substitute for illusions. If, mind you, they are illusions, which I still don’t buy.”

  “You’ll buy it soon enough when we start fighting over the last drink of water,” Crispin said.

  Mickey chose not to have heard that. “Answer me that. If goodness is an illusion, then what’s behind it?”

  Evil. He waited to hear it. But Crispin was apparently not angry enough to fall into that trap. Mickey heard him shifting against the cliff, ten feet away in the darkness. “I don’t know. Honestly, Mick, I don’t. Whatever’s left, I suppose.”

  “And that is?”

  Silence.

  “Crispin!”

  Scratch, and the blue spark of steel on stone. The tip of a cigarette glowed orange. As Crispin drew on it, his face leapt out of the darkness, and the smoke showed up as a white visible cloud. “Something that isn’t any of your business, Pilot.”

  Crispin had pulled rank. Mickey heard his voice come out clipped. “Might as well sleep while it’s dark, mightn’t we, sir? Time enough for talk tomorrow.”

  “Time enough for fuck-all tomorrow,” Crispin said. “I’m getting that kite in the air if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “With or without me, I presume,” Mickey said angrily. Not since he was a child had he walked out on a contretemps: he’d always been the one left with the sentence half-finished, the conciliatory gift still in pocket, watching the door swinging, in the ringing silence peculiar to the ten seconds after a parting blow. But now he spun and walked down the canyon, his ears buzzing with hatred. Halfway to the aircraft, he turned and shouted, “Maybe there is something to be said for being dragged up in a circus! It gives you quite a way with words!”

  “Oh, I wasn’t putting my mind to it,” Crispin called after him, sounding completely unperturbed. “If I had been, you’d have known! And anyway, I don’t do my fighting with words, unlike some people!”

  Crispin must have heard, and taken in, what Mickey had involuntarily said about having his heart broken. Mickey could think of no other reason for him to have turned so horrible. He must have thought Mickey was leading up to something. It’s one thing to guess about a person (and within the boundaries of taste, Mickey had never tried to hide anything) and quite another thing to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Child! he told himself, dropping to the ground against the wheel of the Blacheim. The canyon was cold, although mercifully sheltered from the wind. Dust bit his nostrils, making him sneeze. The wind hooted over the top of the canyon, that mournful five-note song of aloneness. Nearby, tiny feet scribbled on rock. Child! Now how do you face him?

  But Crispin ha
d been known, among other things, for his skill at jollying up disheartened regulars; and that was what Mickey still was, and Crispin was still a captain. After giving him an hour to cool down, Crispin crunched back to the Blacheim and kicked him in a friendly fashion. He chatted with apparent ease of mind as he passed blankets out of the airplane. “I’d never have thought of bringing these. I’d have counted on making it over the foothills before I got tired enough to need them. Good thing I brought you along, huh?”

  Mickey said none of the things he thought of in response. He grunted and took the blanket, along with a single swig of water and a dry biscuit Crispin called a “midnight snack.” By this time the night was pitchy. Mickey lay still, listening to the small scrapings and fumblings as Crispin took off his boots and rolled himself up in his blanket somewhere on the other side of the wheels. It made Mickey feel unpleasantly vulnerable to be lying right under the enormous, wrecked double tires, where the plane would roll over him if it shifted even a fraction. As he wriggled around to lie alongside the wheels, under the belly of the Blacheim, he heard Crispin’s voice, so near that he started up in a panic and thrust his fingers into Crispin’s face.

  “Ouch! No, it didn’t hurt. No, I just wanted to know...” Crispin stopped.

  “Sorry.” Mickey lay back down, carefully. His bruises hurt, but he had slept on less comfortable things than bare rock before, and at any rate he was so exhausted he would probably have slept like a baby on a bed of nails.

  Crispin said, “Um, I’m aware that you and Vichuisse were...I mean, after that awful scene in my office—”

  “I remember,” Mickey said shortly. Two days before his death, Vichuisse had paid a call on Crispin, and requested Mickey’s presence in Crispin’s office, whereupon he had blithely and inaccurately reminisced about the pseudo-relationship they had had in the Lovoshire Parallel. Mickey had wanted to turn into smoke and drift through a crack in the wall. “What is it?”

  “I know it’s intrusive of me to want to know, and you’re welcome to punch me in the nose if you’re offended. I just wondered...”

  “If it was by my choice?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Of course you wondered that. Never mind that the fact that it wasn’t should have been obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes in his head who doesn’t think anyway that all Kirekunis are born sexually perverted.”

  “I don’t think that,” Crispin said with unexpected definiteness.

  “Good!”

  “But—then, why did you go along with him? If you—you weren’t attracted to him?”

  “Why did you? Different currency, same transaction.”

  “I—” Crispin stopped, and gave his lion cough of a chuckle. “All right. Score one for you, Mick.”

  “Morality aside, some men are better off dead.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s usually the other kind who end up that way,” Crispin said in a voice that could have been hostile, or regretful, or nothing in particular. Mickey wished he could see his face. But the low-slung blackness of the Blacheim above them blocked out even the faint light of the stars. The remark had had a ring of finality; neither of them said anything else.

  (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

  And I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow at morning striding behind you

  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

  The Lower Air

  3 Maia 1896. A.D.

  Kirekune: the western foothills of the Raw Marches

  Mickey paced up and down the canyon in the blazing sun. He knew moving around was making his chances of sunstroke much worse: he should sit down in a fragment of shade and wait. But if he stopped moving, he would look at Crispin. He could go sit at the mouth of the canyon with his back to the Blacheim. But then something would go wrong. Crispin would get hurt—Mickey couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t got hurt yet—and Mickey wouldn’t be on the spot, because he had a weak stomach.

  His fingers trembled on the grip of Crispin’s daemon pistol. The screamers in its cartridge sent flashes of pain and anger up his wrist. “Here, just in case,” Crispin had said without explaining. His gaze had flickered up, down, and around; his voice wandered. “But don’t use it unless you’re in mortal danger. I mean that. You could do for me. If there’s anything worse than an angry daemon, it’s an angry daemon with a screamer in its hide.”

  Mickey hadn’t guessed even then. And he hadn’t dared to ask. Crispin’s manner was too strange. Since they woke, while they breakfasted on biscuit and water, he had been distracted and abrupt, as if during the night he’d remembered something important he had to do.

  How could Mickey have guessed? No daemon handler who valued his life would risk a gambit like this.

  Mickey stopped, facing the mouth of the canyon. The foothills seemed to stretch away forever, peak and valley, shimmering in the heat. Dust skirled across the slope at his feet. Nothing alive moved. In the QAF, some confusion persisted as to whether the Raw had got its name after the chopping down of the Wraithwaste began—or whether the Raw Marches had been called that to begin with, and lent their name to the battleground after it became appropriate. The latter has to be true, Mickey thought. These mountains are nothing if not raw. Surely even the snowlands, even the steppe of central Cype and the deserts of Izte Kchebuk’ara, even the unknown lands to the Far West could be no more desolate than this.

  Crispin let out a weird, sobbing cry, and Mickey wheeled. The Blacheim cast a shadow as black as a tarred box. He couldn’t see what was happening. He forced himself not to run. Crispin had warned him not to make any sudden movements or noises. The cry came again, softly, like a moan of grief—or pleasure—as he got closer. Crispin and the daemon were still on the ground where they had been before, but now they were locked in a tight embrace. No—Crispin was embracing the daemon. It knelt with its head in his lap, its arms around his waist, and he was hugging it, his face pressed to its sallow naked back. As Mickey watched in horror, it stirred and cried out once more.

  He blinked. Daemons couldn’t speak! Daemons...

  It was jabbering now in a low voice. Some of the gibberish sounded like real words—Mickey could have sworn he caught “sir” several times. How could he have mistaken this voice for Crispin’s? It was low and harsh, rusty with disuse. Occasionally it broke octaves higher. Crispin stroked the vile creature, kissed its back, kissed the bright red weals on its neck. His every motion bespoke tenderness. Mickey nearly gagged. At one point Crispin raised his face; Mickey made shift to rearrange his expression before he saw that Crispin’s eyes were bright and blind.

  A cold sweat broke out on his palms. Paranoia whispered that this must be some secret, extreme form of coercion that all Ferupian daemon handlers knew, that had been maliciously concealed from him all the time he was flying in the QAF. Maybe that was why he’d been so clumsy with Gorgonettes. But maybe even if he’d known of it, he couldn’t have done what Crispin was doing! Maybe it was alien to his very race? After all, Ferupe was the empire of the occult, the land of the pallid-faced people who lived side by side with the daemons that shimmered in copses and hovered around lakes. Everyone in Okimako believed that—and although Mickey knew intellectually that it was nonsense, not even flying in the Queen’s Air Force had entirely broken him of the myth. The sheer availability of daemons in the Ferupian Raw had in fact reinforced it. In Okimako, a daemon scarcely bigger than a screamer would fetch a hundred sigils—and the Ferupians’ casual neglect of their daemons, the profanity with which they spoke to them, when indeed they did speak to them, fascinated him. What did they know, that they could afford to treat priceless gorgons like field mules?

  In all of the new city where Mickey had grown up, the hustling, bustling middle-class heart of Okimako where conspicuous luxury was the stamp of prestige and every last sigil was counted twice over, there
were exactly three demogorgons: one in the gasworks, one in the waterworks, and one to power the climate control in the monolithic Disciplinarian Police Headquarters. Private daemon transportation was unheard of. Only the Disciples had the finances to operate daemon trucks, tanks, and jeeps. Everyone else relied either on dray beasts, rickeys, or (if they could afford it) the diesel-powered automobiles which had been invented in far-off Ixtara. The last Mickey had heard, a motion to outlaw these based on their smelliness and noisiness was on its way to the Significants. Kirekunis lived in a world they could see, taste, touch, and evaluate. What did they know of daemons?

  At the same time Mickey’s brain told him this was nonsense, that what Crispin was doing, no other man in the Ferupian army had ever dreamed of. They were afraid of their daemons! That was why they cursed them and mistreated them! A pilot would have to be crazy to take his daemon out of his airplane—

  and take off its collar—

  Mickey sweated, gripping the revolver so hard that his wrist went numb from the screamers’ spikes of malice. He was afraid to draw it, afraid to move.

  After a long time, he couldn’t have said how long, Crispin disentangled himself from the daemon’s embrace and ducked out into the sunlight. The daemon followed him. Unfolded to its full height it towered over Crispin, even though its back was stooped and its legs bowed. It was a skeleton draped with sagging yellow skin. Its black hair tangled to its knees. Mickey was faintly shocked—he could not have said why—to see that it was male. It shaded its eyes against the sun with an appallingly human gesture.

  Crispin reached up to pat it on the shoulder. He gestured toward the Blacheim. The daemon gibbered. Its voice lilted up at the end as if in a question. Crispin nodded. Mickey watched openmouthed as the daemon stooped voluntarily back under the airplane and poked its head up inside the engine cavity. It paused there in the shadow. Then there was a shimmer, as if it were turning into water, and it liquefied upward.