The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  Crispin sprang for the plane and clambered into the engine cavity. Mickey heard him banging the hatch of the cell closed. Then he dropped to the ground and struggled to lift the belly flaps into position. Mickey hurried to help. Between them they secured the flaps and scrambled back as if they expected the Blacheim to explode.

  Nothing happened.

  Mickey wiped sweat out of his eyes.

  It was like closing an egg back up on a monstrous infant who has cracked its shell and ventured out to view the world, not yet realizing its own capacity for destruction. The wind sang mournfully over the canyon. The sun hammered down. A soft groan came from the Blacheim. It was as if the aircraft itself had given voice.

  Crispin sat down hard on a rock. Mickey nearly jumped out of his skin. “Water! I need water! Whiskey would be better, but I don’t suppose there’s much chance of that.”

  Mickey went to the Blacheim for the canteen. Behind him he heard Crispin throw something away into the rocks with a grunt of effort. He turned in time to see it bouncing into a crack: a cracked circle of silver that could only have been the daemon’s collar. He handed over the canteen mutely. Crispin drank for several minutes, his teeth chattering against the wooden lip. Mickey didn’t dare to rebuke him. At last he put the canteen down and fumbled for a cigarette—one of their last. The moaning came again from the Blacheim, louder.

  “Are we going to have to put up with that all the way to Okimako?” Mickey said. “Damned unnerving.”

  “Fair exchange for getting the whore airworthy at all, I think!” Crispin said breathlessly. “Mick, light this for me!”

  As Mickey handed over the lit cigarette, Crispin’s hand knocked against his. The half-breed captain was trembling, Mickey realized, like a man who has just returned from an engagement with the enemy—one that ended in catastrophe. He steeled himself to ask, “How did you do it?”

  Crispin shook his head and frowned dazedly. He was looking sicker every minute. “I didn’t think I would be able to.”

  “You took its collar off. I thought only trickster women could do that. I mean, not that they take their collars off; they put them on—” Even a Kirekuni knew that. “But—”

  “You must’ve thought I had a death wish. I should have warned you. But I was afraid I’d jinx it. Besides, I didn’t want to get your hopes up if it was no go.”

  “It would have been a lot less of a go if you’d got yourself killed.”

  Crispin didn’t take offense. “I know it was a risk. But...I knew it was going to work. Sort of.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve ever—”

  Crispin laughed. His laugh sounded rusty, like the daemon’s. He turned his head aside and coughed wetly. Mickey expected the phlegm to sizzle, the sun was that hot on the bare red rocks. “And if I ever do it again, you can box me up and address me to the loony bin. It was sickening. Nauseating. Like climbing into a sewer and drinking. Whatever the essence of a daemon is, it’s...it went right through me. Like poison. Enough to make me nearly puke the very minute I touched him.”

  Not it. Him.

  “And the worst of it was after I knew I was going to go on with it—had to go on with it, or he would have killed me—I got used to it. You know how when there’s a horrible stench, after a while you stop noticing it or like mess grub, an acquired taste. Or like booze. You don’t like it, the first time you taste it when you’re a kid. Or maybe perverted sex—I don’t know personally, of course, but I imagine that when you do things that are unnatural, it feels good but you know it’s fucked-up, all at once...it was like that.” He shook his head. Lines that Mickey was sure had not been there before ran from his nose to his mouth.

  “When you say perverted sex,” Mickey said, “what are you talking about? I’m trying to figure out what you mean.”

  Crispin squinted at him. He opened his mouth and started to speak. Then he shook his head again, smiling faintly. “Making do, you mean? Like fags? Whatever gave you the idea I was talking about that? I mean really fucked-up stuff. Stuff neither you nor I have ever done.” He paused. “Well, I have, now. And I’d starve before I do it again. Or die of thirst. I don’t know how the fuck they do it.”

  “How who does it?”

  “The trickster women.”

  He won’t tell me the truth about anything, Mickey thought. He sat cross-legged, gripping his knees. His head ached, and he wanted water, but they had to conserve it now that Crispin had drunk so much; because what if the daemon had a relapse, what if Crispin’s gambit had been a heroic failure?

  Doesn’t he trust me in the least? Resentment throbbed in him like a furnace.

  Crispin laughed mirthlessly. “I always told her they were coldhearted bitches! Anyone who could do that for a living. And they would have denied to the last gasp that they stole everything they knew from the Wraiths. I’d bet a double brandy they would. Lie between their teeth.”

  “Let’s get you into the shade,” Mickey said, standing up. “You’re not in any condition for us to try taking off now.”

  “Queen knows.” Crispin placed the palms of his hands against the rock, pushed, then sank back. Mickey helped him to his feet and led him down the canyon into the shade of an overhanging rock. He fetched a blanket and arranged it behind him. Crispin leaned back with a sigh. “Thanks. Now I know why Millsy looked the way he looked. He told me it was because of trickery. I took him at his word, but I never really understood.”

  “That’s the third or fourth person you’ve mentioned I don’t know,” Mickey said. “Either you want me to know about them, in which case you can tell me your life story, I’m all ears, or you’re rambling. And if you’re rambling, it’s—it’s—you’re acting as if you’ve gone round the twist. I don’t know what you just did to the daemon; I don’t know what the daemon did to you. It’s a complete mystery, and you’re not putting my mind at ease talking like this.”

  After a minute Crispin said, “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Mickey stared at his boots. A stone lizard scuttled out of a crack between his feet, and away into the sun.

  “Do you remember what I told you about accidentally-on-purpose forgetting things? Well...when I remembered what I had to remember to—to trick Elektheris, a lot of other things came, too. I was bursting with it, that’s all. And I tend to forget you and I haven’t known each other for as long...well, for as long as weird shit’s been happening to me.” His tone had changed back to normal. “Tell you about it sometime.”

  Mickey leaned back against the overhang. Gratitude suffused him, bringing tears to his eyes. At the same time he hated himself for being such a pushover.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Crispin said with a familiar touch of impatience.

  The stripe of sky that Mickey could see beyond the overhang, over the other side of the canyon, glared as white and bright as a sheet of lightning fizzling low above the mountain. The air smelled of dust and crackled with static. The daemon—Elektheris—gave tongue again, loudly and despairingly.

  Maia 1896 A.D. 9:20 P.M.

  Kirekune: the western foothills of the Raw Marches

  “It’s in the blood,” Crispin said later in the evening.

  The sky glowed purple, and there was little wind. The air wrapped around Mickey like a hot, prickly blanket, scarcely breathable for its freight of electricity.

  “In the blood.”

  Mickey stared out into the twilight. They were standing at the mouth of the canyon, by unspoken consent keeping as far away from the Blacheim as possible. There would be no sleeping under the belly of the aircraft tonight.

  “In whose blood?”

  “Mine, evidently. I’ve half suspected for a good while now that it might have gotten in.”

  “Gotten in?”

  “Yes, well...” Crispin sighed. “D’you mind if I don’t go into detail?”

  “If you’re worried that I’ll think worse of you,” Mickey said, “don’t. Whatever you did in the past, it doesn’t matter.” He stared ou
t at the calm violet masses of the foothills, hearing his voice tremble with traitorous emotion. “I could never think badly of you.”

  Earlier in the evening, he’d started up the Blacheim. Just as Crispin had promised, the daemon was now cooperating. The transformation engine had purred, as sweetly as an orchestra of pan pipes. Mickey backed her up and turned her carefully around in readiness for takeoff at first light. This proof that Crispin had accomplished what no one should have been able to filled him with awe and with an intense yet timid curiosity.

  Crispin laughed. “I can see I’d better clear things up a bit or you’ll be thinking I have a criminal record as long as the Raw! It’s nothing so terrible, really. Just that I let someone die. Or rather, he died, and I couldn’t do anything about it.” He sat on a tall boulder, gripping his ankles. It was a comical pose for a man so big. “After we got clear of the Wraithwaste.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Oh, Queen, never mind! It was me and—and this girl—and this kid, a Wraith. A Shadow, that is. About six years old. We were on the run, and we were bloody well starving to death. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have let us all die in there first. But I was just a kid myself. Somehow or other we made it to the western fringe and stumbled straight into Pilkinson’s Shadowtown. I had no idea where we were. I didn’t know jack shit about the war. I walked straight in there as if I owned the place.” Crispin shook his head at his youthful folly.

  “Pilkinson’s Shadowtown. That’s only about twenty miles from Pilkinson’s Air Base II.” Mickey rubbed between his eyes. His head was aching again. “All this time I had the idea you came from... I don’t know... a long way away. Kingsburg... Naftha...”

  “You thought I was recruit scum.” Crispin smiled. “It’s worse than that, my lad. We were arrested the minute we got into Shadowtown, of course. I was taken to Chressamo, and from there I was sort of decanted into the air force.”

  “Chressamo!”

  “Starting to change your mind now?”

  Something in the way Crispin said this made Mickey think he actually cared what the answer was. He looked sharply at him. As night gradually swallowed the canyon it had become difficult to make things out, but he thought Crispin was smiling. “I was only—” He swallowed. “That’s where they took me, after I was captured. And told me, in a roundabout way, that I had the option of being put to death or changing sides.”

  “Not a hard choice, was it?”

  “For a real Disciple it would have been easy,” Mickey said, remembering Ju, who had not even waited to be given the option of deserting. Ju had been haunting Mickey for more than three years now. In life he had been laughably arrogant and gullible; but death had transformed him into an immortal model of Disciplehood whose example Mickey resented because he could not live up to it.

  “Mick, did you—when you were in Chressamo did you meet a man named Sostairs? A colonel?”

  “I don’t think so. I may have. I wasn’t told any names.”

  “Damn,” Crispin said slowly. “They must have been much surer of you than they were of me. I guessed it even at the time, but...Queen, my life must have been in the balance. Hanging by a thread.”

  Mickey decided to ignore Crispin’s surely unintentional slur on his integrity. “But what happened to the—the girl and the Wraith?”

  “Brrr.” Crispin shook himself. “It’s getting cold. I hate this fucking altitude. Well, I lost my head and started fighting the soldiers. Orphan—that was his name because he was one—he ran out into the street. There were some Shadow kids there, you know what nasty violent little bastards they—they’re just human rats. Orphan had these daemons. Big ones that followed him everywhere. One of them popped out of the air and started terrorizing the Shadow kids, and the brats ganged up on Orphan and banged his head on the ground. I thought he was dead when I got there, but he can’t have been, quite. I was...” Crispin paused. “The soldiers were all over me, or I would have chased those little assholes and taken it out of their hides. I had my—my face on Orphan’s face. There was blood.”

  Mickey held his breath. He had a sense that the crux of the business was coming.

  “On my mouth. Do you see what I mean? And besides, I was all bruised and cut...”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You numbskull, it’s in the blood! Orphan had the ability to trick daemons. Wraiths do—men and women.” Crispin paused. “It’s the only explanation I can think of. I know I’m not a trickster. Someone tried to teach me when I was younger, and it was a total disaster. So all I can think is...a few drops of his blood getting mixed up in mine must have...done it. It can’t have been six months after that when I first started thinking of names when I was coercing daemons, soothing them and so forth. I hoped it was my imagination. But for a while now I’ve had the feeling that if I wanted it to be part of—of what I do anyway, all I had to do was reach out and—and take it.”

  Mickey shook his head. It sounded fantastic. “Wraiths are the same strain of people as the Chadou. And the Chadou don’t have a reputation for trickery?

  “But they don’t live in the Wraithwaste. There are no daemons in the plains—so you say, and I see no reason not to believe you—no, I’ve thought this all out, Mickey. It’s nothing to do with race. I mean, Ferupian and Kirekuni trickster women are the proof of that. I think it’s to do with the Wraithwaste itself—living there. It does something to people. I can remember... The gift is in the blood, but I think originally, however long ago—before there was ever a Ferupe, when the Wraiths had their own kingdom—trickery came from the Waste itself, kind of soaking into them?

  Mickey shook his head.

  “Oh, I know it sounds absurd! Believe me, if I could think of a more rational explanation—but you did ask!”

  “The fact remains, whatever you did, it worked,” Mickey said.

  The wind had fallen, and the stilling of its song over the slopes made the whole mountain seem to be holding its breath. Mickey thought, There’s going to be a storm. He wanted to be away from this place. The valley had become contaminated with the inexplicability of Crispin’s trickery; the rocks and cliffs themselves lacked credibility. Nothing that happened here now could fall within the scope of the laws by which the normal world operated. He wanted to shout aloud and hear his voice bounce back off the walls of the canyon, proof that he existed, and simultaneously he wanted to immerse himself in this two-way current of secrets that violated the established rules of communication between himself and Crispin, he wanted to erase the gap of confidence between them which Crispin’s meager revelations had made even more palpable, as palpable as the tension and the silence.

  “I can’t bloody well breathe,” Crispin said at last, fretfully. “Have you got a cigarette?”

  Mickey felt in his pockets. “One.”

  “Split it?”

  Mickey moved over to the boulder where Crispin sat. They passed the cigarette back and forth in silence. Finally Crispin swung down off the boulder, wincing. “Fucking backache. Getting old.” As Mickey followed him back toward the Blacheim, he said over his shoulder, “Let’s get the blankets and clear off. Whenever I come near her I have this inexplicable urge to let the daemon out. They’re very good at making you feel they’re hard done by. If I start sleepwalking tonight, trip me up, all right?”

  The storm broke in the small hours. Rain lashed the mountain and drove hard down the canyon, turning it into a river. Water surged around the Blacheim’s wheels and swept away nails, tools, and Mickey’s cigarette box. Where they were sleeping on the raised rocks at the mouth of the canyon, they escaped the worst of the flood, but got no sleep and were drenched to the skin. It was no use changing their clothes; the rear cockpit of the Blacheim had been left open, and everything inside was soaked. Squelching and shivering in the pink-rinsed gloom that heralded the sun’s advent over the mountains, they readied the airplane for takeoff. Mickey wasn’t sure whether they should chance it—the rocks were wet
and in some places puddled—but Crispin persuaded him the ruined wheels retained enough traction to handle the speed. Mickey was eager enough to leave the canyon behind that he let himself be persuaded.

  It went unnervingly well. The daemon bellowed with a rejuvenated hunger for flight as they took off amid the first rays of day. Mickey’s reflectors glowed like solid gold hundred-sigil pieces. Twisting in his harness to look at the sunrise, he saw the rim of the orb surging up over the ridges: the biggest gold coin of all. Lances of light shot out from behind the Raw Marches like searchglares from the keep of a many-towered city.

  ...let us now invoke all beings who inhabit the lower air, the shallow water, and the smaller hills, all Fauns and Dryads and slips of the memory, all verbal coincidences, Pans and puns, all that is medieval this side of the grave.

  —E. M. Forster

  It’s All About Survival

  5 Maia 1896 A.D. Kirekune: Somebai Province: 6,000 feet

  But although Elektheris was willing, he was old, and he didn’t know how weak he was. He had served in the QAF, in one shell or another, since the inception of the air force; before that he’d served briefly in a truck carrying troops along the Salzeim War Route. What passed for his memory preserved no distinctions between any of the machines he’d inhabited. He thought of all motion as flight. He knew only the crucifixion of the transformation engine, that cruel harness that followed him like the shackle dragging at the foot of a chain-ganger: the torment of captivity in silver and oak, an irritation so permanent that it had ceased to hurt and had become merely a goad to life when he would a million times have preferred death.

  He hadn’t seen daylight, except through the mesh when he was fed, for eighty-seven years. His will was worn down to a nubbin. He’d forgotten what it was to dematerialize. But during those peaceful years when the Blacheim stood in the scrap hangar at Air Base XXI, superannuated, he’d sunk into a torpor that nearly equaled the immaterial state. To a daemon so extenuated, sloth, perpetuated by regular administrations of food, had approximated the resolution of consciousness into pure genius.