The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  Butch felt sure there was a daemon, or several, behind him. He had a superstitious conviction that smoking charred daemon tobacco, especially at night, caused living, dematerialized daemons to draw around like moths to a flame. Daemon tobacco gave an unsatisfying high like poor-quality dazeflower; it owed its popularity to its availability. Apparently the Wraiths had known forever that when you burned daemons in a bowl carved of amberwood, the smoke made your mind sharpen and your body relax. The secret was only now osmosing through the disorganized, nervous, ill-provisioned troops. Some infantrymen at the tail end of the retreat had apparently stumbled on a bunch of Wraiths getting high, and pinched them until they squealed. David Burns had taken to daemon tobacco like a snake to tall grass. Nearly every evening, seized by some mysterious and misguided impulse of generosity, he tramped through the Waste to Temporary Base 19 to share his supply with Butch and Captain Edgar Thoraze. Inevitably, he talked treason. Coming from someone else it would have been so much hot air. From Burns, Butch knew it was different.

  The Wraith-blooded commandant was different from every other officer in that way: uniquely, dangerously. Butch had prayed (foolishly, he now knew) that Burns’s ambitions had been humbled, or at least put on hold, by the fall of Cerelon and the helter-skelter rout. But now that the retreat had inexplicably stopped, and the QAF officers’ brief had changed from rearguarding the whole army to just baby-sitting their own men, everyone had ample time to think. And Burns with time to think was Burns with thoughts of treachery. Not satisfied with the murder of Vichuisse, the Wraith-blood seemed to be aiming higher and higher in search of a target on which to fix his dizzily wheeling sights.

  Temporary Base 19 was a strip of sandy soil in what had once been the heart of the Wraithwaste. Butch’s and Thoraze’s squadrons had been sitting there for far too long. Emthraze’s and Burns’s squadrons were encamped in Temp Base 20, a mile off through the pines. None of them, nor any of the other QAF captains within a twenty-mile radius, had been briefed in a week. At night they heard strange birds singing and trucks rumbling by on the war road. Splinteron shortages limited them to one patrol a day. Their surroundings—the shimmering pine trees, the occult iridescence that swirled like morning mist around your knees at dawn—inspired a combination of boredom and fear that had very quickly reduced battle-hardened regulars to squabbling children. Truancies occurred so commonly Butch had given up cracking down on them. The latest slew of desertions had maimed his squadron to less than half regulation size. The remaining men were mostly the types Butch thought of as lifers: triple-pension gamblers, his least favorite sort of pilot at the best of times. When they weren’t sleeping or preparing daemon tobacco or smoking it, they played endless guessing games about where HQ was, what HQ was doing, why there was no word, why the ground retreat continued apace but only at night, while they steamed here.

  Butch himself would have liked to refrain from such pointless speculation but found himself constantly engaging in it.

  The airstrip at Temp Base 19 had been cleared by a labor detail of infantrymen who were long gone by the time 102 and 145 Squadrons arrived. They’d left the area littered with fallen logs and hacked-off pine stumps. Just landing the kites had been a job and a half. Butch and Thoraze had had to set their own exhausted pilots to work clearing off the runway. The men groused, and Butch lashed out at them. These days no one had the time, energy, or leeway to do his job properly. The most you could expect was lick-and-a-promise and a communiqué now and then. They should be grateful they hadn’t flown here from their last temporary base (which, he would later learn, had been engulfed by the Kirekunis hours after they pulled out) to find nothing cleared at all—just a sea of dead trees.

  “But, Captain, it’s the lack of respect I mind,” Lieutenant Dearkin had grumbled. “The earthworms ought to at least give us respect. We held the lizards off while they got out of Cerelon—and we paid for it, didn’t we! Fucking night-crawlers! They’d be anchovies on toast if not for us!”

  “If you don’t like the way the infantrymen treat you, don’t fucking well visit their encampments, Lieutenant!” Butch shouted, deliberately missing the point; aware also that it was hypocritical of him to warn the men off visiting the infantry camps on the war road, since he himself eavesdropped avidly when they returned with whatever news (or more often, rumors) they had scrounged up.

  Last night Lieutenant Dearkin had deserted with half his crew. Even before Butch summoned the squadron for roll call this morning, he’d seen the gaps in the ranks of battered Gorgonettes poised at the fringe of the forest, as if they had just burst clear of the trees.

  The QAF had held the Ferupian retreat together while everyone, civilians and military, pulled out of Cerelon in an orgy of panic and packing. In extremis, the air force had perfected its role as the army’s protective shell. But now—although the ground troops continued to retreat in a covert manner, the trucks and troop carriers traveling east under cover of darkness, without headlights—the air force seemed to have been decommissioned. Butch’s standing orders instructed him to lead patrols, but not to venture into Kirekuni airspace. Since the Kirekuni front lines had bulged to enclose all of the Raw and a good fifty miles of the Wraithwaste, this limited him to a range of about thirty miles. He and his crews cruised in the summer sun, conserving their daemons, over the endless stream of vehicles—stalled as if they would never move again—that was the war road; over untouched hectares of forest; over gangs of soldiers industriously chopping down trees in random locations. As the patrol swung north along the new front lines, along the new no-man’s-land of mutilated pines and burnt-out vehicles, in the west they saw Kirekuni troops making a far better organized attempt to clear the land of its remaining stands of trees. This antlike logging continued as far as the eye could see. It looked suspiciously like make-work. If Butch had taken a guess (which he did, privately and often) he would have opined that the Kirekuni generals had not anticipated receiving orders to halt their advance any more than the Ferupians had anticipated it. Yet neither he nor Thoraze nor Burns or anyone else could come up with any reason for this strange respite—or any scenario in which it lasted much longer. The war machine would grind into gear again, and the blood-dimmed tide would wash over the rest of the Wraithwaste, too.

  “Whichever way you look at it, seems to me it’s going to be the lizards getting the lion’s share of credit for anything that happens from now on,” Butch said gloomily, vocalizing his thoughts.

  “Tch! Pessimism,” Burns said.

  “Realism. I’m not going to throw my life away in some bid for personal glory—if that’s what you mean. That’s not how I can be of best service.”

  Burns looked up from turning his pipe to the firelight. “Of service to who? The Queen? Ferupe? It’s not about Ferupe anymore. Ferupe is history. You’ve admitted as much yourself. So what’s left? That’s up to us. We have to salvage what we can from the wreckage. Pretending otherwise, to my mind, only masks a lack of courage.”

  “Hardly a matter of courage when we’re not even flying missions.”

  “That isn’t the kind of courage I mean. What’s needed now is intellectual courage.”

  “Wha-a-at?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Burns said craftily. “All I mean to say is that we’ve got to keep our wits about us.”

  “Kateralbin kept his wits about him, if anyone did,” Butch said angrily. He needed to be angry to mention Crispin. “And look what happened to him!”

  “Kateralbin? An idealistic boy. He lived in a world of his own devising that never existed, and never will. You and I, on the other hand...” Burns nodded several times, sagely. A night breeze blew a thread of smoke into Butch’s face. Butch coughed and spat. He was keenly aware of the darkness all around them. Not for the first time he regretted setting up the camp in such a way that it was only safe to build fires in the center of the cleared area, far from the airplanes, far from the tents where the regulars were sleeping. Stones and twigs littered the coarse sand�
�he and Burns and the slumbering Thoraze might have been in the middle of a desert, or on a beach, bivouacking beside a vast silent sea.

  “The whole army’s in chaos,” Burns said harshly to the embers. “Air force gave what it had to save the earthworms’ lives, and now we’re fucked. HQ is out of touch; decimated; demoralized; Queen knows. These last few weeks must have proved even to you that the QAF is finished. What’s needed now is people who can think for themselves. People who aren’t afraid to act boldly. People who don’t let morality take precedence over expedience.”

  “I trust HQ,” Butch lied. “They’ll be in touch any day now, I should think. What’s to be gained by betraying them to the lizards? I presume that’s what you’re getting at.”

  At the bald accusation, Burns blinked, but denied nothing. A cold shaft pierced Butch’s stomach.

  “What’s not to be gained?” Burns s. “At the very least, a fat purse and instructions to spend the rest of one’s days in darkest Eo Ioria... which I, for one, would not object to...”

  “Or a knife in the back!”

  “I doubt it: the lizards have their honor, too, you know. And in a couple of years they’ll have the silver mines in Thaulze and Hernisson. Payoffs will be easier then than assassinations.”

  “I never know when to take you seriously,” Butch said, pleading. He looked down at Thoraze, who was lying on his back beyond the fire, snoring. Thoraze was twenty-two and fierily patriotic, and Butch had not ruled him out as a toady to Air Marshal Thraxsson, wherever Thraxsson might be. Was Thoraze really sleeping? Would Butch be indicted for Burns’s treacherous talk?

  “I’m deadly serious,” Burns said, laughing.

  “Count me out! I mean that, Commandant!” Butch was angry and afraid. “I’ll have no part of it!”

  “ ‘The boy stood on the burning deck, when all around had fled, except a little pussycat, was standing on her head.’ A right fool if you ask me.” Delicately, Burns extracted a short brand from the embers and applied it to the bowl of his pipe. The mouthpiece drifted slowly down from his lips; a white plume issued into the darkness. In the warm summer night, a fire was unnecessary. It was a psychological garrison against daemons, and Butch would have said as much, defiantly, if anyone had asked. But no one did. Everyone was afraid, and everyone was afraid to admit it. Common sense said that this respite from battle would be short. And what would happen when the Kirekuni advance started again? All too easily Butch visualized the apocalyptic worst. Heroic last stands; Ferupian soldiers slaughtered like cattle; Kirekuni encampments in the green fields of Salzeim (so much for the hopeful theory currently circulating that the lizards would outdistance their supply lines); his own squadron harrying the fringes of the invading host, uselessly. The walls of Kingsburg.

  Or would it come to a surrender before that?

  And what was happening in the south? He didn’t have a clue what was happening more than thirty miles away in any direction.

  What would be worse for Ferupe—to cave in or to be crushed?

  All Butch knew was that whatever the Royals and generals and air marshals decided, he would accept. There had been so much uncertainty in his life. But one could relinquish choice itself—that took care of all uncertainty! In the pine-scented daemon-heavy dark, face-to-face with the commandant whose very rank reminded Butch intolerably of his own wrongdoing, it was a bittersweet relief to remember there remained one method of purification, which was fail-safe. A method not of rectifying the wrongs he’d done to others, but of penalizing himself for those deeds, wronging himself to the point of blamelessness.

  Thoraze snuffled and stuffed his face into his crooked arm. Burns kicked him, quite hard. “Wake up and amuse us, you lazy son of a bitch!”

  Butch stood up and walked away.

  16 Joie 1896 A.D. 2:29 A.M. (3:29 A.M. in central Ferupe).

  Kingsburg: the Burg: the Heart: the fortress: the Queen’s bedroom

  All was calm.

  The state bedroom was occupied by, in addition to Lithrea the Second, five whuffling lapdogs, four physicians, three liaisons to the military, two maids, and a macaw on a golden perch which from time to time clacked its beak irritably. The seventeen-year-old maid named Dulcimary wanted to kill it. The physicians, attaches, and maids sat on the edges of folding chairs drawn up around the great bed, straining to hear Lithrea breathe. Such was their state of tension that they had unconsciously begun to inhale and exhale at the same rate as the old woman in the sea of sheets.

  The Queen had insomnia. Every night, after the lights were extinguished in the underground stateroom, one of the physicians sang lullabies (the liaison to the QAF harmonizing soulfully) until his voice gave out. Then the naval attaché would take over. Meanwhile, Dulcimary, Lithrea’s favorite maid, curled up on the vast mattress, cuddling the Queen to give her the illusion that it was because they loved her that they wouldn’t leave her alone even at night, when her pleas for solitude rendered her pathetic in their eyes.

  The Queen had never been fooled. She knew the reason they wouldn’t leave her alone was a combination of terror lest she should die, and ghoulish desirousness to be present when it happened. Even Dulcimary privately wished Lithrea would die. As the Queen’s maid, the girl enjoyed elevated social status, but Lithrea knew she would really rather be attendrix to a noble lady and get to wait at sociales where she could meet and entrap a young count or duke. Despite this, Lithrea took pleasure in the girl’s solid, older-sisterish embrace. If only she could have felt the warmth! Her cousins’ demands on her faculties had desensitized her to the merely physical.

  Her cousins remained with her even when she slept. That was why she could never sleep—not really. That was why she had grown ancient before her time, and weak. That was why she didn’t really care whether she was left alone or not: she was always alone with them. Her feeble requests for privacy represented only the death floppings of her pride.

  They flirted with her across the plain of contained darkness.

  Why did she experience it as a plain when she knew it was a forest?

  Perhaps the darkness has nothing to do with the trees, she thought vaguely.

  The leaks around the edges sucked her toward them. The tracks carved into the plain by her soldiers were gouges in her flesh.

  Her cousins surrounded her, jostling her on and on, leaping and galloping and capering with joy: oblivious.

  One tried, as a rule, not to notice the light the pain the noise at the perimeter. Lithrea’s attention was momentarily captured as brilliance fury damage flared, far away on the horizon, even brighter. But the flare wasn’t connected to anything. It meant nothing. In the chiaroscuro world of her cousins, there was no such thing as reason: there was only darkness—genius—and the glaring pain of genius abused. Lacking reason, the cousins were incapable of seeing gray shades. They were incapable of understanding the concepts of connection and cooperation. That had led, was leading, to their being annexed utterly by the weaker, logical race. Living in a two-tone world of joy and rage, they didn’t see the clerk, arthritic and asthmatic at twenty-six, dragging himself off his pallet to gulp a coffee at the stall on the corner before hurrying to crouch for twelve hours on the high stool; they didn’t understand the laws that equate rapid penmanship with turnip soup; they didn’t see the woman planting her elbows on the dressing table, as careful as a copier of miniatures with her brushes before the mirror (equivalencies: a blow job, a pound of sugar and half a dozen oranges); they didn’t see the infantryman who was fed to the back teeth of fuck-this-for-a-lark resting his elbows on the chassis they were hiding behind, ostentatiously lighting a cigarette, no sleep for three days, all fucking clear I tell y CHOCK! CHOCK! CH (equivalencies: never gave us no idea what we was in for but I do my job no use complaining is it—* * *); they didn’t see the young aristocrat whose sense of responsibility fostered in the same military had just led him to spurn his commandant’s appeal to human sense in favor of giving his life to her (and what was Lithrea supposed to d
o with it? Equivalencies: Kateralbin died because I betrayed him, so all I can do now if I am not to let down my fathers is betray my own * * * oh, Gwennie); the cousins didn’t see any of the members of the choir that only knew one tune and sang it over and over SHOULD I SHOULDN’T I SHOULD I SHOULD

  She was daemon. She was Wraith. She was Royal. She was in every last corner of the world at once.

  She slept, the old-lady fuzz around her lips quivering with each sigh.

  Dulcimary extracted the Queen from her arms with the care of an orchid fancier extracting a plant from the soil. She rolled smoothly off the bed, grinned at the liaison to the navy, who she’d picked out as the most likely of the three military men (she was partial to men in uniform, oh dear!). She put a finger to her lips and plumped herself down on his lap. He buried his head with rapturous relief in the crook between her arm and her breast. The others glanced at them, censorious but distracted. All was calm.

  To...all others younger than myself I say, “Be patient.

  Your future will soon come to you and lie down at your feet

  like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.”

  —Kurt Vonnegut

  Happy on the Streets

  1 Aout 1896 A.D. 7:15 P.M. Okimako: the old city

  The summer continued hot and tense. By and large, Okimako remained quiet, with few outbreaks of the cult warfare and arson that had plagued last year’s nights. The increased presence of Disciples and Disciplinarians in the new, the low, and the old cities seemed to be having its intended effect. Business in the Urbas had hit record lows. Those in the know—by the beginning of Aout, about 90 percent of the population, and most visiting provincials and foreigners—blamed the slump on two things: first, the slacking off in the pilgrim trade brought about by the Significant’s recent deregularization of the mass audiences; and second, the freeze on troop movements in and out of the capital. Another rumor was slowly percolating through the city to the effect that the freeze was neither temporary nor localized. It was connected to something larger. Just what, no one seemed to know. At the moment when news of the war had been its most positive in years, and salons and taverns alike had predicted a victory before next spring, news had stopped coming altogether.