The Daemon in the Machine
Page 33
Crispin looked away, touched by pity. “It wasn’t mutual.”
“I am aware of that. In fact I am used to it.”
“What it all comes down to is, the proof is in the pudding, isn’t it?” Crispin felt so sorry for the genius player that he was almost reluctant to say what he now understood. “And I’m the pudding, aren’t I? When I didn’t accept Yamaxi’s offer, I showed I was untrustworthy after all—and your theory was proved wrong.” Beiin’s stake in the smuggling expedition wasn’t material, after all, or only incidentally so—it was a matter of his beliefs. In order for him to live with his conception of himself as the last great genius player, an anachronism, the past he embodied had to be a noble one, his profession inherently moral. Otherwise, he would not be a tragic figure but a mere casualty of history. Crispin winced to imagine the agonies he must be going through now, having inadvertently placed the burden of proof on another. Beiin must be having to restrain himself from getting down on his knees and beg Crispin to act as the genius-player hero he needed to believe he himself was. “I regret having to refuse again. But...” Oh, let him off easily, let him off easily! He racked his brain. “I plan to stay in Lamaroon—for some time. I have—I have become affianced.”
The words, though untrue, filled him with pride. Memories of Yleini’s warm dark flesh, of her wet mouth and her wetter sex, flooded through his brain. I could make it the truth—and all that would be mine forever. I can make her laugh. I can make her want me. Last night’s stormy scene notwithstanding, she loved him. He would have been slow to believe it on his own—but everyone who saw them together confirmed what she herself told him at night, in their narrow bed in the room scented with incense, when the contrast between their skin tones wasn’t so readily apparent and they fitted together as if the jigsaw puzzle of the world had only ever had two pieces.
Partly to distract himself, partly out of an urge to ease the despair he saw reemerging on Beiin’s face, he said: “And anyway, you know, I’m not a real genius player, so I don’t really count. I wasn’t born this way. I got my—my powers—in an accident, and I didn’t realize for years that I even had them.”
“Neither was I born a genius player,” Beiin said in violent tones. “Neither was any man. Such are the tricks nature plays on us.”
“Meaning?” Crispin asked uninterestedly.
“Surely you are aware that only women are born genius players? Yet because, as a sex, they allow their actions to be determined by their emotions rather than by reality—and because there is also the issue, unignorable even in modern times, of menstrual derangement—they cannot be allowed to develop their powers. Instead, male children must undergo training. The colonials consider this barbarous, of course. They discourage it in the name of civilization. And they allow women to monopolize their daemon industry!”
Crispin remembered Millsy persuading him, at the age of ten, to touch an uncollared daemon. Beiin’s father must have done the same thing to him, over and over and over, until the occult-sensitive nerves all over the boy’s body were dead. It sounded like the ultimate barbarism. They were walking along the waterline. The waves drew the pebbles out in rattling surges. The wind spattered them. Crispin bent to pick up a handful of smooth, wet stones and hurled them into the waves. Turning, he said with forced cheer, “But we’re not likely to alter the state of civilization just by saying what a pity it is, are we? I have to be getting home; I’ll take you to meet my...”
He broke off at the sight of Beiin entwined in all four of his daemons, their tails wrapped around his torso like spined pythons, their heads, doglike and reptilian at once with their lolling forked tongues, seeming to sprout from his neck.
“You wanted to know why I took the job on Jiharzii’s ship, and subsequently became interested in Devi’s venture?” Beiin’s voice came from within the layers of wings. “When I am not employed as a handler, I have no source of income. I cannot remember how long it has been since I ate a hot meal. Possibly since I dined at the Yamaxis’ last. I detest the silver art—but no one needs a genius player, not anywhere in the wide world, and I am tired of making my living by inspiring fear. It is a poor life, and not conducive to the development of a routine, to say the least! And Okimako was always where my luck was. Now I am stuck on these unlucky islands until the Ferupian expedition sails. If it is postponed for much longer, I shall be destitute.”
Crispin didn’t know what to say. Was Beiin trying to shame him into changing his mind? It wasn’t his fault Beiin insisted on lonely pride at the expense of his standard of living. But of course the genius player did not know loneliness. Physical discomfort, and possibly boredom; but he could no longer conceive of the uniquely human emotions. All sympathy for him would be misplaced.
Crispin shook his head. “I’m sorry. It’s just not on. 1 wish you the best of luck, but—” He held out his hand, keeping out of reach of the lashing wings. “I’ll buy us all a take-away meal, and you can come eat with me and my fiancée. Yleini.” He smiled. The sea wind blustered at his back, and the wind of daemon wings gusted in his face. Beiin peered suspiciously from between the daemons’ heads, like a child wondering whether or not it was safe to come out of hiding. “That’s her name,” Crispin said radiantly. “Yleini.”
Beiin refused the offer of a meal. He was in a prideful huff. Crispin dropped him off at his lodgings with relief. There but for the grace of Significance go I! He’d felt sorry for the genius player when he saw his landlady make the sign of the evil eye at his back; sorrier still when he saw the cold, sparsely furnished little chamber where Beiin was living. You had to count your blessings. And to think Crispin himself had been on the verge of throwing away the one thing that could save him permanently from Beiin’s fate!
The Yard was still awake. Men and women chatted on doorsteps and gathered around hole-in-the-wall shops and at the doors of pubs. Itinerant musicians competed to claim the night air. Smiling at sweethearts walking hand in hand, with the indulgence of one who has no need to envy, Crispin was struck by sudden terror: What if she thinks I’m not coming back! What if she’s left? What if she’s gone home to her mother?
He quickened his pace. Reaching the mart, now a vast, littered expanse of stony mud like a circus lot after teardown, he found the shopfront he wanted and knocked on the shutters. After some time they cracked open and light flooded over him. Terein’s face hung ghoul-like above his lantern. “Curse you, half-breed. Can a man not even screw his wife uninterrupted? You had me thinking it was the blackcoats.”
“I need flowers for my girl.” Crispin smiled. “Come on, Terein; give me a deal, and I won’t tell the Disciples about those pot-o’-gold plants you’ve got in the back.”
Grumbling, Terein let himself be cajoled into allowing Crispin behind the shutters. Fresh and dried flowers stood on head-high racks. Mindful of Mrs. Terein’s querulous inquiries from upstairs, Crispin hastily decided the hothouse-forced fresh flowers were too expensive, then changed his mind and bought them anyway: six white tulips.
“Those are for deaths in this land,” Terein said.
“What?”
The merchant laughed. “You’re as white as the flowers there, boy. I’m only fooling.”
“Fuck you, Terein. I’m asking her to marry me.”
Then the old Lamaroon refused to accept payment for the tulips, no matter how anxiously Crispin pressed him. The pastry cook on Salvation Street would not accept payment either. In fact, on hearing the news, he grabbed the tart Crispin had been about to buy out of his hands and stuffed it back on the shelf. He strode between the ovens to the back of the bakery, pushing his sweating apprentices out of the way, and seized a sponge cake from the cooling racks. “This is the food of the angels, boy. No; someday you’ll do a thing for us.” And the vintner next door, a cranky man who despised the power he wielded over his countrymen, replaced the local white Crispin chose with a bottle of imported sake.
“Good luck,” he said enigmatically, his eyebrows wriggling.
She slept tangled in the sheets, wearing the nightgown she had never taken out after their first few nights together. It was a castoff of Mme. Yamaxi’s, a foam of white lace. As the wick of the lamp flared, she stirred and frowned. He wanted to kiss her then and there. He stood over the bed, waiting for her to wake.
Her eyes opened. “Fuck you, Crispin!” she blurted. She struggled into a sitting position. “I told you I never wanted you to—oh, my mother; my mother, my ancestors; you’re the limit, I can’t stand it; I can’t—” Her hand came up as if to push him away; then it sank with a strange graceful slowness to the sheets and she bowed her head. He dropped to one knee, ignoring the voice inside his head that mocked the sentimental cliché. When he tried to speak his throat was clogged. He cleared it.
“Will you—Yleini, I want you to be my wife. Will you?”
She looked at his empty hands, eyes darting. Queen! A ring! Of all the things to forget!
He made an apologetic face and gestured to the table. “I’m a novice at this, I’m afraid. I brought you some presents—but the symbols are hardly the point, are they? You do understand what I’m tying to say? You do understand that I—”
“Tulips,” she said distractedly. “How beautiful. We’ll have to put them in water. I bet they cost you a week’s pay. And what’s that? A sponge cake? That was silly, you know it won’t keep.”
“I love you,” he told her, with a feeling of having failed. “Will you marry me?”
Her brow furrowed low over the tawny-sparked eyes.
At last she screamed loudly, a long despairing ululation like the first note of a song, and threw her arms around his neck.
Five minutes later a knock came at the door, and an elderly woman’s voice demanded to know what was wrong.
Crispin and Yleini didn’t answer. They were covering each other’s mouths, giggling uncontrollably.
A little later Crispin extricated himself from their postcoital embrace and moved naked across the room to turn the lamp down. Food for the angels the sponge cake might not have been, but washed down with sake, it made prime fuel for their erotic exertions. He thought he was exhausted. But a couple of hours later he woke up again and discovered he was too tense to go back to sleep. He sat up and lit a cigarette.
The moon had risen, and its light lay in a square on the coverlet. Yleini wasn’t snoring anymore. He stroked her hair, then fished the letters from under the mattress and held them up to the window, squinting at the words he already knew by heart.
Rae had been plagued by daemons. She still was, he thought. Nothing in her letters implied it. He was just making a guess based on her dispirited yet still self-righteous tone. Ferupian and Kirekuni women—mainlands women—were all plagued by daemons. Plagued by daemons, or, more precisely, by the knowledge that they all received somewhere along the line, that they alone were capable of tricking the occult beasts. It made them arrogant—and fearful, lest they should find themselves called to take up their inheritance. Rae, having come in contact with real trickster women, and having briefly accepted her so-called inheritance, was an especially good example.
Lamaroon women were different. They didn’t care that they were born tricksters. They willingly left that area of expertise to their menfolk, and their generosity—or humility, whichever, you wanted to call it—resulted in a warmth combined with down-to-earth practicality that Crispin had never encountered in a woman before. He looked down at Yleini. When she slept her cheeks were even rounder, her lips pouted. Let her think, if it warmed her heart, that she’d inveigled him into marriage; he knew it was the other way around. The fact was that his old charm had worked again. It had come back to him. And to have successfully deployed it against a woman of his own homeland! That proved—didn’t it?—that he’d finally mastered the knack of being normal.
He reached down and stealthily stroked her cheek, then her throat. He had half a mind to wake her up and make love to her again. She was always most ardent when she’d just been waked from a deep sleep. He was about to kiss her when he remembered the letters.
The flimsy papers crushed easily. He wadded them into a small, hard snowball, dragged on his cigarette so that it glowed, then held it to them. A little flame started up. Brown edges ate smoothly into the papers, revealing the honeycomb interior of the squashed ball. It was a third gone—a half—
He swore aloud and dashed it, smoldering, against his knee. It went out easily against the bedcovers. Furiously, he stuffed the half-burnt wad back down the side of the mattress where it had been for two months, then flopped down beside her again. Gritting his teeth he reached for her, hugging her close. Her eyes opened, and she pulled away just long enough to whisper a few words; then she wrapped herself around him.
The room was blessedly empty of daemons, empty of any sound save the slide of flesh on flesh and the suck of mouths, any smell save the aphrodisiac one of sex. Yet under the bed (crumpled under the husk-stuffed mattress) were other ghosts. Devoutly, silently, Crispin thanked the Queen that Yleini wasn’t aware of them, so that he didn’t have to acknowledge them either. She twisted and moaned under him, her muscles spasming as she orgasmed, and he realized with sudden horror that he had just been going through the motions.
She spoke only once before he pulled the lever and the wooden trapdoor opened beneath her. She said, “Here we are again!” Her eyed were still upon them as she fell.
—Peter Ackroyd
Little Stupid
6 Maroat 1897 A.D. 11:07 A.M. Cype: Kherouge: Center City: the Enclave of the Most Patriotic Consecrated Sisters
Excerpt of a letter from Monsieur Yozitaro Akila of Okimako, Kirekune to Mademoiselle Rae Akila of Kherouge, Cype, dated 02 Fessiery, received at the Enclave 06 Marout.
...although your previous letters to her have inexplicably vanished, my sister says you wrote in Ferupian, so I am doing the same. She had to have your letters professionally translated and I suppose you had to, as well, which is tedious. The last thing I want is to inconvenience you in any way, darling! I hope my spelling and penmanship aren’t too terrible; circumstances at one point compelled me to speak Ferupian fluently, and to read a little, but I had little practice in writing and time has passed. Still I can feel it coming back to me. You grew up in Ferupe? It would be interesting to know how you ended up in Cype. Do, do let’s you and I become correspondents, cousin Rae. I know you are probably flabbergasted and not a little put out to find that Fumia has suddenly turned into her odd brother—but I am not so strange as I may sound, please believe me! It has been a rather eventful year here in Okimako: enough to make you think the world is not just standing on its head, but turning somersaults. I wonder if you know about the little shakedown that took place last summer—or perhaps no one knows why we all fell silent. It is possible, after all, that you may open this missive and find that some raving patriot of a loose-cannon censor’s struck out half my words. But on second thoughts, how could Significance have prevented news of the Fire (there it is in good black ink, the Fire of 1212) from getting out? Why would They have bothered anyway?
Forgive me if I get carried away, darling. I don’t have enough paper to make more than one draft, and shall have to send this as it comes to me. M. Jishine, a rather questionable fellow who’s started a luxury import business nearby, expects a shipment of such things as paper,
parchment, ink, sealing wax, et cetera, any day now; but of course, Significance has the veto on what shipments are allowed in, and no one really knows why the Disciplinarians let some through and turn back others. They might well decide that paper is a classified commodity, the very possession of it a temptation to treason. No one has any idea what Significance is doing up there. Half the city has been burned to the bedrock, and so now you can see the palace from the windows of our house. The ruination in between is nearly total, but up above it all there is that unscarred fortress with its banners flying.
All we see of Them are the squads of Disciplinarians They send down to the new city to harass us. This is making the job of rebuilding the family business—I assume Fumia told you what it is—extremely slow. I’ve learned a few lessons, for example not to let the girls sit in the windows at night; but ours is still one of the few buildings in this neighborhood that’s been repaired, and I have a bit of construction going on next door, which is impossible to do unobtrusively, so I’m a sitting duck. To be honest, I think Significance is in need of revenue. The Fire had a devastating effect, obviously, not just on commerce, but on the taxation infrastructure. As long as there are no provincial officials coming in and out of Okimako—and there aren’t, I can vouch for that because they were all either here at the time and got burnt to death, or they’ve been scared off—Significance has no power over the rest of Kirekune beyond the residual fear of Their name. The need to stop the empire from atomizing is what’s foremost in the Significant’s mind (now that presumably the religious influence over Him has been purged), and that’s why He’s so eager to get the war over and done with and get His claws on the Ferupian royal coffers! But the trick will be, won’t it, to get the booty out of the hands of the generals and the nobles who are serving in the field. And I can’t see how Significance will manage that with the handful of Disciplinarians They’ve got here, if the officers choose to do the unthinkable and defy Them.