The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  If thought is life

  And strength and breath,

  And the want

  Of thought is death;

  Then am I

  A happy fly,

  If I live

  Or if I die.

  —William Blake

  Picking up the Pieces

  5 Aout 1896 A.D. Greater Okimako: the Gekizoku

  Somewhere in the suburbs, Fumia sprawled against Mickey, sobbing quietly while the spoils of disaster glided past and the orange light danced on the river. He reassured her over and over in a monotone. He knew she wasn’t listening—he only talked so as not to have to think. It wasn’t working. He kept picturing and repicturing the moment they’d lost Saia. The burning rafters sagging overhead as everyone stampeded; the churning mass of bodies; the instant when sweaty fingers parted. Saia’s face, glimpsed for the last time, haggard with incomprehension.

  He’d been making mistakes ever since he returned to Okimako. He’d come home hopeful, apprehensive, a mass of conflicting loves and loyalties. One by one, his expectations had been destroyed, the wreckage mounting in a pyramid he kept climbing, until last night, standing on top of the overturned trucks in the garbage dump while the rally disintegrated into carnage and conflagration below, he’d witnessed what he thought the ultimate irony. The fires still flickering over the city were far too huge and impersonal to be any such thing, of course: they’d been more like a camshaft zooming at random out of the machine of history, smashing the filigree of failure he’d made of his life. It didn’t dawn on him then, under the bridge, that in doing so they gave him one last chance. For the rest of his life he would regret wasting it—that was irony! But how could he have known? He couldn’t even move.

  Prone on the sand with her head in his lap, Fumia was alternately ripping out the hem of his tunic and stifling her sobs in it. He envied her emotion. He didn’t feel guilt. He didn’t feel grief. He just felt weary. His heart was pounding, his muscles rigid—yet he was fatigued to a point where even the smallest irritations produced a reaction of helpless revulsion: the breeze chilling his skin, the clicks in Fumia’s throat, the footsteps that from time to time pounded on the bridge over their heads. It must have been an hour since they stumbled under it for refuge, but sweat was still starting afresh each minute on his back and upper lip and in his groin, as if his body had fallen into a rhythm of response to emergency over which he had no control. “It’s all right,” he muttered, hands heavy and unmoving on Fumia’s back. “It’s all right.”

  She sat up. He thought she was going to hit him. “How dare you! It’s not!”

  He raised his hand in what was not quite a mockery of the gesture that had, after long hours of evading flame, crowds, and Disciples, become second nature. He did not feel like lying to cheer her up. “There’s nothing to be done, Fumie. We did all we could.”

  “It’s all your fault.” Her fists pressed together in front of her mouth. “If you had come with us to the Mansion tonight, as I asked you to, we would have left before—before—” Fresh tears oozed out of her eyes. “We were waiting for you. That’s why we didn’t leave as soon as we found out what was happening. Mother got it into her head that you would appear and save the day. Frankly I didn’t think you would, but I couldn’t get her to leave, though everyone else in their right minds was leaving. By the time you finally got there we were alone in the middle of a sea of fanatics who thought they were invulnerable.”

  Mickey winced. He didn’t dare tell her where he had been: in the City of the Dead, a passive accessory to the cataclysm, and then in a prostitute’s room in the high new city, spending five sigils per precious minute to be alone with Crispin.

  “I had business to take care of.”

  “You always have ‘business to take care of.’ But I know all about your business.” Her hands flew into her lap and wrung together. In the orange shadows he could see the tears streaming down her beautifully sculpted cheekbones. “It’s exactly the same as it was when you were a teenager. Staying out for nights on end until we were sick with worry, never sending word, never speaking to Mother when you did come home, bringing your affected little lover back with you and bedding him in your room. Shuizo Shiraxi! Did you know he’s married to the oldest Jokoto girl? Was married, they’re both probably dead. I don’t suppose you did know. I don’t suppose you even bothered to look him up. He changed, and you didn’t. So much for the Disciples making a man of you! Zouy”—her voice shook—“Zouy and Ashie and I were scarcely able to believe it at first: the irony was too great. That you could join the Disciples and spend five years at war—five years, Yozitaro, that’s longer than most soldiers survive, I know that, long enough anyone would have thought to knock some sense into you—and return with no more ceremony than you did from the drug dens: bursting in on us in the middle of dinner, penniless, scruffy, and injured, with a pretty-boy you picked up Significant knows where in tow!”

  Her voice had risen until Mickey feared it would be audible on the bridge. Grateful that she’d fallen silent, he realized belatedly that she expected a response. It was impossible to respond to such a tirade. “Shuizo was never my lover, Fumie,” he told her. And then, hoping somehow to placate her with the truth: “Crispin wasn’t either.”

  “Oh, I know Crispin wasn’t. He could never have been.” She sneered: “He told me himself. In bed. In between kisses.”

  The scene in front of Mickey’s eyes petrified, imprinting itself forever on his brain. His sister’s silhouette, the geometrical black lines of bridge supports behind her, and behind them the pattern of light the fires across the river cast on the water.

  “He was my lover,” Fumia spat from a great way off. “And if you were curious, perhaps you would be interested to know that he is—was—extremely passionate.”

  “He didn’t. He couldn’t have.”

  “He could and did. Not that it matters now!” Fumia pointed upriver in the direction of the city, whose blazing heights the bridge mercifully concealed. “They’re all dead, burnt to a crisp. Everyone except you and me. And I wish he was here with me now. There: I’ve said it. I wish he’d survived, not you! He had more vitality in his little finger than you do in your whole body!” Her voice trembled.

  She didn’t know the half of it. Her unfairness stunned him. “Why are you telling me if it doesn’t matter now? Why do you—why do you find it necessary to be so cruel?”

  “Cruel? It’s you that’s cruel. Crispin at least would have had the courage not to tell me it’s going to be all right!”

  She started crying again, her hands slack in her lap, an agonized plea limned on her face, in the tears.

  She was right, of course. They were the only two left, alone in a city of frightened animals. Acquaintances, business partners, friends and family all gone. They had been reduced to a state of such psychic destitution that their very humanity was threatened. Wearily, Mickey understood that the onus of preserving that last possession was on him—and that it demanded unselfishness. It demanded the relinquishment of pettiness, undiscriminating revulsion, shivering victimhood, hitting out at whoever was near in an attempt to get back at what you couldn’t touch. In short, it demanded that he rise above human nature. The only acceptable response to an unnatural catastrophe was as unnatural.

  He shifted a little against the bridge support he leaned on and held out his arm and his stump to her. She froze. An incoherent sound broke from her lips. After a long moment she half fell into his embrace.

  He held her awkwardly, one-armed. Thank Significance. Her cold wet cheek sealed his lips.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He’d never heard sweeter words.

  “I’m so sorry, Yoz—I didn’t mean it—I just can’t bear it—”

  She cried sporadically and demanded that he answer questions which were unanswerable. Neither the questions nor the answers were relevant now, but he could see that to her these particular irrelevancies were the stuff of self—and more: the foundation of her chil
dhood animosity toward him that hadn’t gone away, but grown. Why hadn’t he been more responsible as a teenager? (He still didn’t know.) Why had he always assumed he and his sisters were the best of friends, even though he only wanted to see them when he had time? He’d cherished them as symbols of sisters; he had never taken the trouble to find out what they did separate from the dream-hours they spent together in the places he liked to go. Well, after a while Fumia had come to accept that that was the way things were. Since Yozi had no desire to run the business, their mother depended on her to follow in her footsteps, and she was determined to justify Saia’s confidence. It looked at first as though she would be able to. Mickey enlisted in the Disciples and vanished from their lives; the three of them—Fumia, Saia, and Uncle June—kept Akila-uza running like clockwork. Their biggest worry was getting the younger two married. And at that time, suitors for all three girls had come calling every day. When June died, the clockwork kept ticking—but only just. Saia’s decline, as unanticipated as her brother’s death, proved inexorable, terminating in her conversion to the Dynasty, after which she was no longer any help to Fumia at all. A hindrance, rather, with her daily demands to be taken to the mansion. Fumia woke up one day and realized that the entire burden of the business rested on her shoulders.

  In the heyday of their trilateral partnership she, her mother, and June hadn’t needed Ashie and Zouy’s help, so had never bothered to teach them more about running the business than they had absorbed as children. Now the younger two, she thought, weren’t capable of filling Saia’s and June’s shoes. They both said they were willing, but whenever Fumia needed them she knew where they would be: in the brothel itself, associating with the gay-girls—picking up knowledge perhaps, but not the sort of knowledge she wanted them to have. Her little sisters! In the confusion of 1211 she had forgotten about getting them married. Ashie’s engagement had lapsed. Zouy’s suitors, aware of the turmoil in the family, had tactfully stopped visiting. What was Fumia to do? Only a girl herself, she lacked the wisdom and connections to play matchmaker. All her social activity centered around the business. She put off and put off making the necessary calls to matrons, Saia’s onetime friends, who might have been able to aid her. And helplessly, she saw Ashie and Zouy, insufficiently protected from their own environment, changing from blushing daughters of the bourgeoisie into something subtly different. They had an air of worldliness—she couldn’t define it—she shuddered (and Mickey knew what she meant)—they were still desirable, but not to the boys who would once have married them, who now passed them without a nod in the street! It was a tragedy. It was worse than a tragedy. It was a disgrace.

  It was at that point that Yozi returned.

  Fumia thought she was saved, liberated by some magnificent stroke of Significance from the quicksand into which she was sinking. She thought so for about two days.

  She moved in his arm and looked up at him as if to say, It doesn’t matter now—and this time there was no rancor in the assertion.

  Mickey nodded. He knew it didn’t.

  But he felt embarrassed by the multiplicity of reasons she had to resent him. With a man in the household, she should have been able to turn over most of her responsibilities to him. She’d lain awake, alone, at night and thought about how it could have been: she and Yozi together could have made Akila-uza the classiest establishment of its sort in the new city (for a brothel headed by a man automatically had more credibility than one headed by a woman); Yozi could have wangled new engagements for Ashie and Zouy, where she hadn’t been able to; maybe, knowing Yozi, it was too much to expect him to marry, but she could have married—a husband willing to join her family, rather than vice versa, would have been a rare find, but an invaluable asset. She couldn’t, of course, seek matrimony on her own account, but her brother, in the absence of a parent, was qualified, nay, obliged to seek it for her. It seemed that his years in the military had completely blinded him to his social duties.

  Flirting with Crispin, and then making love to him, had been Fumia’s frustrated grab at the possibilities dangling before her, denied her by her brother’s irresponsibility.

  “Did you want to marry him?” Mickey asked, under the bridge.

  Her girlish laughter tinkled, silvery as always. He shuddered.

  “What a thought! A Lamaroon... a Ferupian... a deserter, like you... a daemon trickster... I only slept with him to get my own back at you! You don’t imagine he was my first. Or maybe you do. You never did understand women. How sweet you are! How I love you! How I—how I—”

  She wept, kissing his neck, his chest, like a lover. He was afraid something was wrong with her.

  “Don’t leave me. Don’t ever leave me. I’m sorry for everything, Yozi, I’m sorry.”

  The Orange lapped by below. People were throwing buckets on the fires across the river; the hissing carried across the water. He held her awkwardly in his one arm. “Ssssh. Fumie, I’m here. I’ll do right by you from now on.” Remorse crept in, first a thread, then a tide. “I’m the one that should be sorry. I’ll never leave again. I promise.”

  “Really?” Her eyes were cloudy. “Will you really not leave? I know how independent you are .”

  A tide of affection swamped him. He would have given his life for her. He would have protected her with his body from the cruel world that he’d unforgivably permitted to assault her for so long. The powerful emotion was like a drink of water for his parched soul. Watching the Orange slide by, he felt almost noble.

  He fell asleep sitting up like that, and woke the next morning, at the same moment she did, to find that in the night they’d both been covered with a thin film of soot that blew on the wind like black snow.

  He decided to play the part of the Yozi she imagined for a little while, to comfort her, to keep her sane. Weeks later he would realize he’d actually given her tacit permission to slip into insanity—or what seemed terrifyingly like it. But by then it was too late. He was bound to keep being what she wanted him to be. And just as she’d done years ago, he’d already got used to it.

  Perhaps if the two of them had really been alone in the world, the scales of responsibility wouldn’t have stayed so unbalanced. Each would have been to the other what he or she needed. They would have had, of necessity, eventually to share the duties of survival.

  But the context from which they thought themselves torn free came drifting back with the return of daylight, like the charred pages of a book blowing up, down, and finally drifting together in a heap. Picking their way up the river, casting their eyes fearfully over the washed-up bodies around the feet of the bridges, they stumbled on Crispin. He lay curled on top of the corpse of a pakamel, which had split open, spilling reeking fluids; and although his bruises, scrapes, and tidemarks made him look as though he’d been through a mangle, he was sleeping like a baby. His eyes snapped open. At the sight of Mickey, grimacing at the stench, his face lit up with transparent joy. He jumped to his feet and hugged both of them. “Right then! Who says there’s no such thing as luck? Huh?” He sprang back, rubbing his mouth as if trying to hide his delight. “Right then!”

  Fumia turned away, hiding her face. She was crying again.

  And what went wrong then?

  9 Sevambar 1896 A.D. Kirekune: Swirling

  Neither Mickey nor Fumia spoke as they left the wharves. The yells of the sailors and longshoremen, the slap of the Orange against the hulls of the barges, the competing bells and sirens, and the river shrikes grew fainter. I won’t look back unless she does, Mickey thought. And Fumia kept gazing ahead, lips pursed, brow furrowed—so that by the time he looked back anyway, pretending he’d seen an advertisement for cheap upriver fares in a window, it was too late. Warehouses and the twin towers of the wharfmaster’s offices hid the docks from sight.

  He would never know if Crispin had watched them go, or if he’d immediately slung his carpetbag over his shoulder and walked between mountains of cargo and loading cranes to the outermost wharf where the Seabound Slow E
xpresses lay at anchor, a parade of hulks too big to come in out of the current. The Slow Expresses were more like natural phenomena than machines: elephants of the river, quivering on the verge of sentience. They crashed monumentally against each other, holds yawning, gangways scraping back and forth over the wharf. But they were objects, and in the mute, coy language of objects, they begged to be dominated. Mickey resented them, but only halfheartedly, and only because of that fascination they exercised over such as Crispin. In his youth he’d been disgusted at the fetish for gigantism which their existence implied in all Kirekunis—himself, Fumia, and Ashie included—but he no longer bothered to criticize his countrymen for their apparently inborn urge to bite off more than they could chew. People would stick their necks out, lose their heads, run about spurting blood from the stumps, and do it over again until the end of time. The Okimako Fire of 1212 (as people were calling it) had taught him that. And today he was learning it again, the hard way.

  Guilty as charged...

  He climbed the hill toward Main Street beside the silent Fumia, discoursing on their other worries in an attempt to dispel his malaise. Wheels rattled on cobbles. The screamed epithets which passed for conversation in Swirling drowned out the noise of the wharves. Owners’ and dispatchers’ offices rose tall and shabby on either side of the street. A message-boy slammed into Fumia, and Mickey steadied her. She leaned briefly on him. “I’m all right.”

  “Are you sure? That was quite a knock.” He squeezed her one-armed, bending his head until his lips nearly touched her hair. They probably looked like lovebirds, not brother and sister—but what did it matter? At any hour of the day Swirling was a theater of indiscretions, and seeing her relax for a moment was worth any number of catcalls. If only he had two arms so he could hold her properly. A look of perpetual worry had replaced the serenity once native to her features: that was what the Fire of 1212 had done to her. She frowned, glancing down at her skirt. By day’s end the hem would inevitably be black with slurry. Swirling was a filthy swamp, just as one had always heard—and the influx of refugees from Okimako hadn’t done living conditions any good: in a month the city’s population had quadrupled, overburdening the sanitation system to the point of collapse.