The Daemon in the Machine
Page 13
“My, oh, my, Mick, what have we been up to? Slipping back into the bad old ways?” He wiped the water from his eyes. “How childish of us.”
Both beds were disarranged. That was not surprising: the Akila women wouldn’t dream of invading their brother’s privacy even in the name of housekeeping. Crispin stumbled to his own bed and fell back on it without so much as taking off his boots. After a moment he realized that the pillow was warm. He reached over and felt the one on the other bed. Cool and fresh, although artfully wrinkled, like the sheets. He flopped back, oddly touched. “I would if I could, Mick,” he murmured to himself. It was the truth. No one would make a fiercer ally, a trust-worthier informant, or a more loyal friend than Mickey. And how badly Crispin needed an ally, an informant, a friend! If only the jackass wouldn’t set his price so high. I can’t be that to him, and he knows it, so why doesn’t he face reality. As long as he’s behaving like this I can’t trust him, I can’t even speak to him for fear he’ll go wild on me. Blessed Queen.
From the other side of the wall, he heard the plaintive metallic note of the instrument called a lo-lute. A girl’s voice rose over it, trilling. A tidal wave of loneliness—the inevitable sequel, perhaps, to the break with Uemiel—washed over him. He opened his eyes wide, his fists clenching by his sides.
On the window ledge a spiked rail of flames flickered.
They didn’t go away until he sat up and put out his hand to them.
He dared not sleep, then. Neither did he dare open his eyes again. He lay rigid in a private blackness, thinking furiously, while the heat of the day increased and sweat sealed his clothing to his skin. By the time a knock on the door summoned him to lunch, he had resigned himself to what he felt to be the least of the evils between which, it seemed, he had to choose.
The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own ... stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude?
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Leave the String Alone!
15 Joie 1896 A.D. 3:00 P.M. Okimako: the old city
In the afternoon, post-siesta, the Haverhurst market in the old city was at its busiest. Daemonmongers’ banners splashed color on the old stone shopfronts; fly-by-night trinket sellers, refreshment vendors, drug dealers and street performers clogged the streets. Mickey was deaf and blind to all of it. Despair shuddered through him like fever chills, competing with the aftereffects of last night’s nizhny for his attention. On his right Fumia and Crispin walked together, Fumia twirling her parasol, Crispin swinging the cumbersome silver cage that held his new daemons. Now and again he would stoop into the shade of her parasol and murmur something that made her giggle outright. Mickey could not bear to look at them, yet he found himself constantly glancing sideways, analyzing their behavior in a vain effort to convince himself he was seeing things. Saia marched with her arm thrust rigidly through his own, her chin raised, glaring about as if daring someone to laugh. She carried no parasol and wore a gown in a style and color that had been modish the last time he was in Okimako. He guessed that for her, unfashionableness had become a mortification, a sly way around Fumia’s prohibition on the wearing of sackcloth. Whenever she passed an egregious display of baubles, or a crude street comic, she would shake her head and mutter in her terrible Ferupian: “All shall pass. All shall be destroyed, save the Children of the Dynasty. All shall be destroyed!” And she would stare pointedly at the offender, as if she expected him to hearken and convert on the spot.
It was this new egomania, barely disguised as religious fervor, that of all the changes in her saddened Mickey the most. She had always had a touch of the schoolmistress about her; her tongue could go from sharp to honeyed within a single breath. But once those sharp edges had all been on the outside. Now they were turned inward. Her zest for life had been replaced by censoriousness. She no longer had any interest in the gay-girls, or even in her own children, except insofar as they responded to her proselytizing. On his return Mickey had expected to be greeted either with tears, kisses, and forgiveness—or with cold fury such as she had vented on him when he first joined the Disciples: “You are not my son. From now on, this house is forbidden to you.”
But she had looked into his face with an utter lack of emotion, even a lack of surprise, and uttered her verdict: “He has returned that he too may be enlightened, that our family may Wait together. The Queen is benign. Tomorrow he will offer his name to Prince Yatsifari at the Forty-Eighth Mansion.”
“You have to understand; she’s been through so much,” Fumia had apologized later, when the siblings were alone and a little drunk. Zouka had insisted on opening a bottle of champagne and inviting some of the gay-girls over for an impromptu celebration. Crispin had been invited to participate but instead retired to the bedroom Zouy had vacated for him and Mickey, clutching Uemiel as if he thought one of the gay-girls would take her away from him. Later Mickey had heard him tiptoeing past on his way out. By the small hours the champagne had all been drunk and Mickey, Zouy, and Ashie sprawled on the second bed that had been hastily moved into Ashie’s room. Zouy lay with her head in Mickey’s lap; Ashie leaned against his shoulder. Fumia knelt primly on her heels on the other bed. “No one could be expected to shoulder as much responsibility as Mother has, forever,” she informed her brother.
“Yes, after the life she’s had, you can’t really blame her for turning to some kind of solace, can you?” Ashie’s eyes brimmed, and her fingers dug into his knee. Her head butted a gentle rhythm against his shoulder. “And religion’s better than drink, or some kind of awful pharmaceutical, isn’t it?”
“Much better.” Zouy rolled her head on his thigh as if she could not get comfortable. “I mean, religion’s not fatal.”
“It was fatal for Aunt Saonna and her husband and baby,” Mickey reminded her.
“Oh, yes, about them,” Fumia said, at the same time as Zouy protested, voice rising:
“But you don’t understand, Yoz! I feel like you’re not forgiving her! But if you’d seen what we have, you would. After June died—Significant, it was awful. I mean, it was awful for all of us. But Mum—Significant! I never knew she minded about him so much! Her face was bright red for days—she—”
“But they used to argue all the time,” Mickey said. At the same time, he remembered how he and Fumia—this tall, elegant woman whose embrace had felt like a thing of form only—had once regularly got into screaming, hair-pulling fights.
“June and Mother quarreled because they knew they couldn’t possibly lose each other,” Fumia said repressively. “She was his reason for living. He was her helpmeet. And I daresay she never really realized just how much he did around here. I certainly didn’t. He took care of all the accounts, you know.”
“Fumie does them now,” Ashie put in loyally. “She’s so particular. The girls can’t slip so much as a new ribbon past her.”
Fumia winced. “At any rate, it was after June’s death that Mother first went to the Forty-Eighth Mansion. That was last spring.”
“How—how did he die?”
Fumia shrugged. Ashie lowered her head. It was Zouy who answered at last, her eyes closed, her face turned petulantly into Mickey’s shoulder. “He was found in M’selle Kachia’s bed. Died in the act; Kachia should have known better, considering the state of his health. We would have fired her, of course, but by the time we found the—the body, she’d already gone.”
“With a ruby necklace that Lord Giyomo-Chi had given to M’selle Lioko,” Ashie added.
Mickey shook his head. “Poor June!”
And yet he’d half expected them all to be dead or otherwise unreachable. Three out of five wasn’t bad, was it, considering? When the door had first opened on the unfamiliar face of the allaise (who, later, on discovering his identity,
had ill-humoredly introduced herself as Mme. Kezaki), he had been ready to give up the quest then and there. Better never to know than to know the worst! Only stubbornness and the fear of Crispin’s contempt had made him keep going. At the last moment, in the kitchen, just before mutual recognition bound them together again, to the worst, to the real, he’d had another chance to back out; and by then he’d wanted to, more than anything, never mind what Crispin might think of him. But he hadn’t moved fast enough. So here he was.
He still wasn’t entirely reaccustomed to the sight of the female animal. The soft pale curves of his sisters’ faces and bare arms awed him. Every time he looked at them their beauty staggered him all over again. How had nature created such perfect forms? The candlelight gave their flesh an impermeable vegetable sheen. The few hairs on their forearms stood out like the short fine bristles on cucumbers or marrows.
Speech animated Fumia’s face.
“Mother likes to go to the early service on weekends. Since she refuses to take rickeys anymore, we have to walk to the old city. It means waking at five. We’d better get to bed; I had, at any rate.”
“You don’t mean you’re going to go?” Mickey said, taken aback. “Do we all have to go?” He’d thought Saia’s new obsession was merely an eccentricity, to be humored with lip service, but by no means indulged.
Zouy sat up and patted her hair. “One of us usually goes with her,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “You never know, she might not come back otherwise.”
“Don’t be silly!” Ashie cried.
Mickey saw the tiny lines in Ashie’s forehead and around her mouth: lines of worry and stress and embarrassment.
“Your friend doesn’t have to come, of course,” Fumia said. “But as far as you’re concerned, I think it would be wise.”
“But—but I mean, honestly...” Looking around at them, he realized argument was fruitless. He had stumbled against the limits of their kindness. His (and by association, Crispin’s) place in the house depended, however absurdly, on his cooperation with Saia’s stipulations. His tally wasn’t three out of five, it was zero out of five.
“In the war,” he said, “if someone kept leaving base, we used to cut back his rations so he’d be too weak to go anywhere. Or if he was a repeat offender, we’d shackle him to a post outside the mess. Once we even cut off this fellow’s ear—but he wasn’t a truant, he was a kleptomaniac. His hand would have been more logical”—and of course, their eyes went to his stump—“but he still had to be able to fly his KE...” He smiled at their horrified faces. “Just a suggestion.”
They laughed, but not quickly enough.
Later yet, alone in the room that still smelled of Zouy, listening to a gay-girl and her client make love on the other side of the wall, he wanted Crispin worse than ever before, longed for him with a lonely, frustrated excess of desire that made him batter his pillow with his fist. He ached inside and out, not just for consummation, but for company—real company! He ached for a dose of Crispin’s refreshing, down-to-earth cynicism. Relief, oh for relief from the physical emptiness of the room and the spiritual emptiness of the house!
But Crispin wasn’t there. It was to be the start of a pattern.
15 Joie 1896 A.D. 3:20 P.M Okimako: the old city
“This is my pitch!” Crispin shouted when they reached the center of the Haverhurst. Several loiterers hailed him. He knocked fists and exchanged greetings with them. They were in the middle of the stall-lined road that ran uphill between the establishments of the most pricey daemonmongers in the city, a road as broad as a plaza, too wide ever to have been intended as a single throughfare. An island of rubble ran down its center, the remains of what had once been a back-to-back row of houses, which the road had eaten away as a river will eat away a tongue of earth. The property rights had fallen to Significance and paths had been cleared through the ruins. Among and on top of the slabs of stone, a circus of entertainers competed for the coins of pilgrims and strollers. Crispin’s “pitch” was in the corner of two walls that stood together at an angle. From one side came the sound of a woodwind combo; from the other, the laughter of a conjurer’s audience. “Seems like you’re going to have a hard time capturing an audience,” Mickey said viciously.
Crispin set down the daemon cage and came over to him. Mickey felt sick. “You’d be surprised. This is where the money is at, here. Your people, I dunno, they must have coin to make candlesticks of. When I was doing this shit in Ferupe—street performance—I got so much harassment, and the takings weren’t even worth it... ’Course, I’ve got a more distinctive act now, and this city is bigger than fucking Valestock... But still, credit where it’s due, I couldn’t ask for better audiences. They lap it up. They lap it up.” He unfastened the placard which had been tied to the back of the cage and set it on the ground. Mickey read the characters and frowned. Saia stared malevolently.
“ ‘Lamaroon Genius Player’ ” Fumia read aloud. Her laugh tinkled over the background jangle of commerce. “But what does it mean?”
“I was going to put ‘Trickster,’ or ‘Magician.’ ” Crispin looked slightly uncomfortable. “But then I talked to this fellow in a bar, a real Lamaroon—a strange, strange man—and he told me that in the islands they call daemons genies. The plural, genius, sounds like the Ferupian word for—for someone brilliant. The coincidence is pure homonymy, but that’s what they call anyone who works with daemons: a genius player. So I just translated it and had it written out.”
“Well, you probably have hit on a winning formula,” Mickey said, hearing spite in his own voice. “There’s nothing they like better around here than exotica.”
“I’ve already made back my investment.”
“And considering how you got the capital in the first place, it’s pure profit, isn’t it?”
Gazing past Mickey, not at the passersby but into the distance, Crispin said with queerly muted irritation, “Blessed Queen! If you only knew!”
“Knew what? I know it’s pure hell for you. So why are you doing it?”
“After you have a smashup, you have to get back in the cockpit, don’t you? It’s the same with this.”
“But this is nothing like flying a plane.” Mickey gestured angrily. “This is piddling. This is trickery.”
“Well, it’s all I’m capable of, all right? I told you.”
Mickey gulped. There were a dozen inconsistencies in that terse explanation. “In that case, I don’t understand why you’re still messing with daemons at all,” he said desperately, aware that Fumia was watching them with too-casual interest. “Find something else that pays! You’re not an unskilled laborer!”
“Apart from daemons, basically I am.” Crispin knelt, fumbling with the catches of the silver-mesh box. “And anyway, I’m fucked,” he said obscurely.
“We will be late!” Saia announced suddenly, glaring at the placard. Fumia looked thankful and hurried to her mother’s side. Mickey was only too happy to take on the role of outrider, allowing Fumia to play escort. Crispin seemed oblivious to their departure: his daemons were crawling out of their cage and up his arms like monstrous dragonflies, fluttering their iridescent wings. People stopped to gape. The show, Mickey knew—he’d seen it before, without Crispin’s knowledge, from the back of the crowd—was pure eye candy. From a Kirekuni’s perspective it might look like magic, but from the perspective of a handler or trickster, it was nothing more than form criminally elevated over function—like skipping gold coins on the Orange for the sake of the pretty ripples. Why was Crispin doing it? He was wasting stupendous amounts of energy. Once or twice Mickey had seen him come in at night. He looked like death and fell into bed after a minimum of polite socializing. Why? It couldn’t be for the money. No guest of Saia’s needed an income.
As the Akilas emerged into the street, Fumia pointed back into the air. Rainbows danced over the ruins, describing stars and flower-shapes whose blurry speed attested to the control being exerted over the beautiful, stupid little creatures.
That was when he’d decided, Might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb, and he’d gone to the house on Rainbow Road for the first time.