The only thing missing was the presence of the masses. And such was his degradation that he was no longer aware they were missing. Since his collaring he’d forgotten the dissolution into the unconscious. He didn’t remember that entity greater than the sum of its parts that alone gave uncollared daemons, through their linkage to it, any claim to the power of thought. Elektheris no longer remembered that other daemons existed. In light of this, it wouldn’t be far wrong to say that he’d stopped being a daemon himself. Sequestration from his family, his kind, had effectively lobotomized him.
When, after that long respite, he was once more spurred to flight, it was an awakening to a nightmare. The air became thin. His lungs hurt, his body hurt; all he knew was that he must press on to escape this agony to which through long inactivity he had grown unaccustomed. But then he simply couldn’t go on anymore. It wasn’t a matter of choice. It was a matter of being drained.
He’d come within a hairbreadth of total extinguishment when the one who understood took off his collar.
He stood upright in the sunlight. His tongue, though he was not entirely aware of it, was loosened. He was on the verge. Instinct whispered that he was free to relinquish consciousness—to be again—if he would.
But the one who understood, to whom Elektheris was infinitely, unconditionally obliged, had a need. He needed Elektheris. And Elektheris’s joy at being needed, at being loved and wanted, brought him to the decision—though it was more of an acceptance—that giving up had been a matter of choice. He could just as well choose to go on.
He was turning to clamber back into his housing when the forgotten instincts reasserted themselves. For the space of an instant he was free. But in that instant, the awareness of duty took over and returned him to “himself”—to the crooked, aged, aching body which was as much his prison as the cell in which he sat, gibbering, weakly pulling his fingers through his tangled hair.
The hatch slammed shut. He wasn’t aware he had been tricked. He was aware only of the desire to help the one who had been kind—and that was as forceful a motivation as his old desire to escape captivity. In the cause of kindness he now accepted captivity as his lot, the burden only he in all the world could bear.
Never, perhaps, in the history of trickery has a daemon come so close to being human. But humanity is vulnerable. Although Elektheris was willing, he was old, and he didn’t know how weak he was. He flew for a day and a night. Then his heart burst, killing him in a second and half, in the air above Somebai Province in eastern Kirekune.
5 Maia 1896 A.D.
Kirekune: Somebai Province: the Eastern Plains of the Chadou
“Well, we’re fucked now,” Mickey said.
The corpse of the daemon lay before them, ten feet of yellow skeleton laid out across the ruts left by the Blacheim’s long, graceful landing. Once again they’d had to bring her down gliding without power. It was too much. Mickey felt sweat collecting in the creases of his body under his uniform. He had an impulse to kick the corpse. It was midday. It was exactly what he’d dreaded. He wished he’d voiced his fears earlier, so that now he could say, “I told you so.”
Crispin stared at the corpse, looking calm and thoughtful.
Mickey drove his hands into his pockets. “I don’t suppose your miraculous powers extend to bringing the beast back from the dead.”
“Don’t be so Queen-damned pessimistic. There’s a town over that way.” Crispin jerked his thumb southwest. “Can’t be more than five miles.”
Mickey had seen the place from the air—a dozen miserable huts scattered alongside a ford in a river. And he knew the Chadou. “What do you suggest we do—walk over there and say, excuse me, our daemon’s died, do you by any chance have another? I told you, there’s—”
“There’s a daemon in that town,” Crispin said. “It’s an—I mean, its name is Uemiel.”
“The only way that could be is if Disciples had commandeered hospitality there,” Mickey said sharply. “There’s no reason for there to be any of them here. We’re a hundred miles south of Chadou Imamako.” As he spoke the Kirekuni name he had consciously to prevent himself from dropping into the language. “And anyway, we would have seen them from the air.” He visualized troop carriers like the one he himself had ridden to war in, boxy enclosed vehicles as black as tar. The smallest Disciple daemon vehicle was bigger than any Chadou house.
“Doesn’t matter. Uemiel is there, and we’re gonna get her. That is, I am. ‘Cause I’m not going to feel safe until—” Crispin took a breath, stopping himself. “You don’t have to come.”
“Of course I will,” Mickey said a half second too late. And then, because he couldn’t help it: “Safe?”
“In the middle of nowhere. Alone.”
“I know what you mean,” Mickey said. What he wanted to say was: You’re not alone. He stared at the calm face, the eyes wide-open despite the blazing sunlight, the incongruously hunched shoulders. He shivered. Crispin had never looked anything like this when he had been a QAF captain. Then, to Mickey looking up from his lowly station as a regular, he had seemed a god. Now he was merely a giant, hounded by something Mickey couldn’t understand. His uniform was creased and stained. He was slipping—a fact that Mickey had been trying to deny since the afternoon they killed Vichuisse, when Crispin had suffered what Mickey now thought of as his first lapse. Could that really only have been a few days ago?
Last night, after a twelve-hour flight over the foothills, they had slept on the open plain. Mickey had been roused in the middle of the night by Crispin’s furious, incomprehensible cries. Crispin was tossing and kicking in his blanket. His face was screwed up as if in pain. From time to time the horrid, high-pitched babble coming from his lips resolved into words. Mickey deduced that in the dream, he was trying to find someone and they were both in fearful danger. But it was no normal nightmare. Or if it was, Mickey had never heard of even battle-shocked combat pilots having nightmares so vivid. He couldn’t get back to sleep. He sat up, huddled in his blanket against the cold, debating vainly whether or not to wake Crispin. Morning came before he decided.
What he hated most about the Ochadou Plains—apart from the beastly provincials, which went without saying—were their extremes of temperature. Three years ago, on his greentail journey to the air base at Chadou Imamako, all the recruits had frozen at night (part of the toughening-up process, said their corporal, who rode in the heated cab), and during the day they had suffered near heatstroke. The troop carrier juddered so hard as the driver launched it blithely over the bumps in the road that they lost all sense of direction. Several of them had passed the entire journey in the corner which the already emergent hierarchy among them had allocated to those too weak to swallow their vomit. Mickey hadn’t been motion sick. That was the last time in his career as a Disciple, he thought, remembering, when he hadn’t been stuck firmly at the bottom of the unofficial hierarchy. The official hierarchy, of course, had been a different story; his proficiency in the air, no less surprising to him than anyone else, had earned him pilot’s wings and the rank of Wedgehead, which his flightmates had seized on as an excuse to hate him even more.
This morning he’d pleaded insomnia, and Crispin had taken the first shift at the whipcord. Thus it was that Mickey was in the pilot’s seat later when the daemon died in his hands. The sudden mental vacuum had nearly sucked him in.
“If you’re set on it, we’ll have to wait for dark. But I warn you, stealing anything from the Chadou, let alone a daemon, is ill-advised.”
“I wasn’t aware it was your place to criticize my strategy, Pilot,” Crispin said irritably.
“Sorry. Captain.”
“However, waiting for dark seems only sensible. In the meantime, I’m going to burn this stinking object”—he kicked the daemon’s corpse—”and I don’t care who sees the smoke. There aren’t any Disciples about, are there, and we can handle anything else that comes along.” He smiled. “Huh?”
Called upon to prove his fortitude, Mick
ey threw himself into the task of clearing a space in the thigh-high grass with a will. The sweat dripped down their backs and their faces even after they stripped to the waist. The grass was extraordinarily hard to pull up, but it had to be done—Mickey knew how real the risk of a fire was. Every year between Maia and Sevambar, a steady stream of news on the latest tracts of plain burnt poured into Okimako. There usually weren’t many deaths—the population of all Eastern Kirekune, excluding army and air bases, was less than half that of Greater Okimako. And the Chadou of the deep plains had more than one reason for building beside rivers.
An hour later, as the daemon smoldered in the cleared circle, Mickey straightened up from pulling the tangled grasses out of the Blacheim’s landing gear to rub his aching back. He thought he saw the low roofs of the village far away across the grasses. Smoke rose in thin twists from it. Good sweet turf smoke—he could imagine the smell—so different from the foul fumes coming from the daemon corpse. (“We shouldn’t have cleared the ground so close to the plane,” Crispin had said, his face zebra-striped with soot. “I had no idea the motherfucker was going to take so long to burn.”)
The daemon’s burning created a haze in the immediate area; and through it Mickey was sure—
But no, he saw nothing. The town was too far-off to be visible. Everything was reminding him of cities and towns these days, that was all, from the sun itself to the mountains to the sunburn on his own cheeks, which, reflected in the glass face of a dial, brought back images of his mother’s rouged gay-girls. He wasn’t developing a sudden leaning toward anthropocentric poesy: nor, after so long, had he become homesick. It was the opposite, in fact. The very struggle to stay alive was bringing him closer to Okimako every minute, and he dreaded arriving there.
There was no guarantee they would ever get to the city, but one had to behave as though they would. And Mickey wasn’t good enough at applying himself to matters in hand to be able to push thoughts of the future out of his mind. Deep down he was worried sick about how long he would be able to stay out of the eye of the law before he had to flee the city again, this time forever. Would it even be long enough to locate his family? And how, in the name of Significance, were they going to greet their prodigal son returning without a scrap of honor or dignity, in the company of a gigantic barbarian they were sure to believe his lover, who would by then, like Mickey, if this daemon-stealing project went off at all successfully, be wanted by the law on both sides of the continent?
Mickey ground his teeth and yanked at the grass. Blood slicked his fingers.
5 Maia 1896 AD. 11:10 P.M.
Kirekune: Somebai Province: the Eastern Plains of the Chadou
And after all, Crispin had been right about there being a daemon in the village. Mickey thought, I can never speak to him again. I just can’t. It’s unnatural. It’s too much.
His throat was cramped with fear. He wanted to laugh. They crouched in the grass beside the cart track that ran upriver from the village. In the middle of the “street”, about 150 yards off, was parked a small, rickety truck hung about with wares. Even in the dark it was impossible to mistake its lumpy silhouette. It almost certainly belonged to one of the trader-peddler-tinkers, richer than their nomadic lifestyle might lead one to believe, who were the only contact the isolated Chadou had with the outside world. No doubt the tinker was even now being entertained inside one of the huts, feted with the best in goat’s meat and barley wine the village could provide.
At least, Mickey hoped that was where he was. Such men traveled with a veritable arsenal of projectile guns, both for sale and self-protection, which they didn’t hesitate to use, and he and Crispin were armed only with Crispin’s daemon pistol. Crispin had also, for some reason, insisted on bringing the welding torch from the Blacheim’s toolkit—a snub-nosed instrument which operated on a spark and a cartridge of butane. Its flame only reached about a foot, and it would be less use than a dagger against an army of avenging Chadou.
“This is better than I was hoping!” Crispin whispered. “I thought it might be in a well or a generator or something. Or even demat—never mind, I know you said there aren’t any. This is good. I know trucks.”
“Are you suggesting we drive it away? They’d be swarming all over us as soon as we started the engine.”
“Queen, no. Those tires couldn’t handle the grass anyway. Why steal the treasure chest when you can just take the pearls and put them in your pocket?”
“You gonna put the daemon in your pocket?”
“Fathead,” Crispin said. “Come on.”
They slipped through the grass, stopping near the first hut. Glimmers of candlelight came from behind closed shutters. Mickey heard people speaking idiomatic Chadou dialect. A pikedog slept nose on paws in front of the door, a four-foot-high aperture in which hung a mat of woven reeds. Mickey and Crispin crossed carefully to the other side of the track, where the grass had been cleared away, leaving the slope down to the river bare and trampled. The pike stirred and whimpered, and simultaneously the voices within rose in a crescendo of laughter.
Crispin gripped Mickey’s arm. “What are they saying? What are they saying?”
“Sssh. Don’t worry.”
“Don’t you start! I mean it!”
“Laughing?” Mickey was nonplussed.
“Speaking Kirekuni! It’s absolute gibberish as far as I’m concerned!”
“I wasn’t—” Mickey stopped. The realization made him shudder. He hadn’t spoken his own tongue in years, except softly to himself sometimes, in the air where no one else could hear. He’d prided himself on mastering Ferupian to the point where he thought mostly in that language. Yet it had taken him a mere thirty seconds to relapse. “I’ll teach you,” he offered.
“I don’t want to—all right, yeah, but for now just don’t start! And if anyone comes—Queen forbid—tell me what they’re saying, will you?”
Mickey looked about. They were halfway through the village now, pressed against the wall of a henhouse behind the hut in front of which the tinker had parked’ his truck. From inside the sod-built coop came the soft sounds of birds twitching in their sleep. “Go for it, then. I’ll stand guard.”
“I’ll need your help. I’ve never seen this model—it looks like a Glücken, but it’s too long in the nose, and the axles are so high-set...” Crispin moved out from the cover of the henhouse and flickered into the street. He moved with incredible stealth, his acrobatic training showing. When he reached the truck he turned and beckoned fiercely.
Who does he think he is, ordering me about when this isn’t even his country? Without me he’d be screwed!
That’s the attitude that started a hundred-year war, he rebuked himself, obeying Crispin’s summons. Without him you’d be screwed, too.
If not for him I wouldn’t even be here!
Yeah, you’d be serving your time in the Salzeim Parallel under some other asshole with nothing to look forward to except getting shot down and the end of things.
“Hold this up,” Crispin whispered, hoisting the hood. He extracted a hammer from his pocket, ducked into the engine cavity, whose lip was on a level with their chests, and went to work with the prying end of the hammer. The first nail came out with a screech that cut through the silence like a screamer. Mickey nearly dropped the hood. Nerves! It couldn’t have been as loud as all that; and besides, the night wasn’t really silent. The river added its own theme to the ceaseless, rustling music of the grass behind the houses as it clucked loudly over the ford fifty feet downstream. Far away a loper screamed in the teeth of a grass wolf. The plains might look deserted, but especially in the dark, they were by no means safe. From now on he and Crispin would be wiser to sleep in shifts. And wiser yet to rest during the day and fly under cover of night. Someone from the village might even have seen the Blacheim come down, this afternoon. A party might be on its way to investigate the crash right now!
Screech! The second nail came out.
“Can’t you be a bit quieter?�
�
“No. Is anyone coming?”
“No—oh—”
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” Mickey got his breath back. “Just that dog.”
It was nosing around his legs, looking up at him with a pike’s permanent tongue-lolling smile. He put his hand down to calm it, and a cold wet nose shoved against his fingers.
“Shut it up! Send it away! I’m doing this as fast as I can!”
Screech!
The dog would not go away. “Good boy,” Mickey murmured in Kirekuni. Then, getting a better look at its thin belly, “Good girl, that is. Down now.” His mother had never been one for pet animals, and the gay-girls had no time to care for anything except their looks, but on her seventh birthday Mickey’s younger sister Zouka had pleaded for and received a Sinoese lion dog. When she grew bored with it, it had become Mickey’s. It had died at the ripe age of two under a cart. “There’s a girl.”
“What? What’s that?”
“Sorry.”
Screech!
It had been a mistake to fondle the dog, Mickey realized. The Chadou didn’t treat their animals as pets, and the pike was exhilarated by the unusual attention, frolicking around him, leaping and laughing and trying to put her paws on his chest so she could lick his face. “Good girl,” he murmured desperately, and to Crispin, “Are you nearly done?”
When Crispin’s voice came it had that wandering, inattentive note Mickey dreaded. Fear shot through him. “No-ooo. Not—quite. Mickey...”
“What?”
“I... shit...”
“Crispin!”
“Uemiel...”
Forgetting the dog, Mickey shifted the weight of the hood onto his shoulders and twisted around to grab Crispin’s shoulder. “Name of the Significant!” Fear brought frustration to the surface. “You’re only handling it, not tricking it, you’re acting like a cadet at a training session! You’re stronger than this!” Crispin’s body was rigid. Mickey shook him. “Someone’s coming!” It was the only thing he could think of that might cut through the bubble of persuasion into which the daemon had drawn Crispin.
The Daemon in the Machine Page 4
