The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  The road meandered up wooded hill and down leafy dale. The cart, laden high with wedding gifts and city-bought goods, lurched with crashing deliberation in and out of potholes. Crispin detested being a passenger. He had nothing with which to occupy his thoughts but fruitless speculation on their destination, and equally fruitless attempts to understand Yleini’s conversations with her mother. The two women didn’t speak the trade patois of Redeuiina, but a longer-winded, more liquid language. He could grasp words and phrases, never the gist. If asked, Yleini would instantly translate. But it would have been absurd for her to interpret every exchange. And he wasn’t even sure when she did translate that she was telling the truth. She and her mother huddled so close together on the box seat, as if they were the lovers, while he sat apart. He realized on the fifth day that he suspected her, his wife, of lying to him; and, appalled at himself, he asked for no more translations.

  But he still had the instincts of a soldier. He couldn’t help feeling that he’d overextended himself—failed to secure an escape route—ventured rashly into enemy territory—and with whom for backup? A girl he’d only known for half a year, who was daily blooming, like a hothouse flower, into inexplicability.

  He had to trust her, had to believe in her goodwill.

  That appalled him, too; that she had by some Likrekian sleight of hand accomplished the feat of making him dependent on her.

  “I shouldn’t have given you white tulips,” he said once, bitterly. It was the last dimness of twilight. They were momentarily alone outside the totem hut where Mme. Scaame had retired to rest. “Should have given you black roses. Sign of the witch.”

  Her skin appeared to have absorbed the moisture that hung heavy in the air. The scale-markings were practically invisible, her brows so cottony-wet they seemed on the point of saturation. If he touched her, her color would rub off on his fingers. “But I still have the tulips,” she protested. It broke his heart how careful she was to use her “citified” voice when speaking to him.

  “You have a ring now.” He picked up her hand and let it fall again. “You don’t need flowers.”

  “Everybody needs flowers.” Unselfconsciously, she insisted, “Flowers are representations of our souls, made ideal, made beautiful; that is why we give them as gifts of love. We’re really giving our souls.” She glanced around, then, inspired, reached up to the roof of the hut and plucked a tiny white blossom from the creeper that grew there. She kissed it and presented it to him.

  Staring at the tiny, fragile bloom between his fingers, Crispin could no longer restrain himself. “What unmitigated, sentimental tripe you talk.”

  “Oh, I love how you tease!” She giggled, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him.

  But he knew the next morning that he had hurt her: uncharacteristically, she remembered the exchange and reminded him of it. She had the boys lift down her trunk and, digging in it, showed him how she’d preserved those six tulips in the creases of her wedding dress, each one carefully folded in a meat-pie wrapper.

  “Did Madame Yamaxi teach you how to do that?”

  “No, I do,” Mme. Scaame said, watching.

  “When we get home,” Yleiini said, “I’m going to have them preserved in resin.”

  It was not clear what she meant by “home.” Redeuiina—or the Scaame diin? Crispin stretched his arms, getting out the cramps. The sky was cloudy. Without warning his body broke out in a cold sweat. He thought in frustration, If I just turned around—

  The temptation was incredible.

  Almost as great as the fear which kept him from succumbing to it. But he’d been through this before. The memory came to him unbidden: the Wraithwaste.

  22 Marout 1897 A.D. Lamaroon: the interior: Scaamediin

  But the next day the sun came out, and deafening choruses of birds sang.

  And the next day, as they zigzagged up yet another hill, the trees suddenly gave way to fields of tall plants.

  Yleini screamed, and stood up on the seat, pointing.

  “We’re here! Look! Look!”

  “You’ll fall!” Crispin grabbed her by the waist. A powerful floral scent blew on the wind. The tall plants had tiny white flowers; when the wind gusted, all the fields turned green, like velvet stroked the wrong way.

  “I didn’t even know we were nearly here!” Yleini screamed, on tiptoe. “I was too busy enjoying the sunshine! Mama, why didn’t you tell me?”

  Mme. Scaame chuckled. In between fits of hilarity, she choked out orders for the exhausted boys to break into a run. As they picked up their pace, Yleini succeeded in breaking free of Crispin’s arms. She jumped over the side of the cart, skirts flying. “I haven’t been back for six years!” she shrieked as she darted ahead. “I bet they won’t recognize me!”

  Crispin frowned. If it came to a choice between clattering up to the diin in this undignified conveyance and following his wife, there was no contest. He slid down and pursued her. But she was full-blood Lamaroon, light-footed, and he couldn’t overtake her. The track led on and on between the plantations of green. Crispin slowed to a jog. At one point he thought he heard a machine of some sort, a thresher maybe. Finally the fields opened out and he fell to a halt. There was no stockade, just a hillside scattered with huts and fenced gardens. From among the huts he heard shouts of joy.

  He’d left the cart far behind. To the right, he could see all the way across the valley. The opposite hillside was so far away that the tree cover blurred into an unvariegated mass of green, broken only here and there by threads of water. He found it difficult to believe they’d just come down it. But the sun told him that that was indeed north. And it was a lifetime further back to the city. Despite the brilliant sunlight, a haze hung in the valley, giving everything a static look, like a painting. The pain in his side, however, told him it was real.

  30 Marout 1897 A.D. Lamaroon: the interior: Scaamediin

  He’d resigned himself by now to losing his job, but he couldn’t resign himself to losing his wife, too, and so he pretended not to recognize the fait accompli with which she had presented him. Otherwise, he would have left for Redeuiina as soon as he realized what was going on. The Redeuiina of memory was a mecca of culture where the norms of civilization, rather than senseless tradition, governed society; every night, under prickly blankets, he dreamed of humdrum routines like going to work and having a drink with his mates the way a sick man might dream of health.

  He was a half-breed, and he was supposed to be speechless with gratitude that a real Lamaroon diin was embracing him. The speechless part was easy. Pretending not to see the trap he’d walked into was less so. By the second day it was all clear. He’d been hoaxed, foxed, and minxed six ways to the Queen’s birthday, and it was already too late to wriggle backward or talk his way free. Yleini had brought him here, banking on his being impressed by the jungle and by her family—as indeed he had been, though less favorably than she probably thought—and now she was prolonging their stay and meant to go on doing so until, Crispin thought, he himself was meant to wonder aloud whether there was any real point in going back to Redeuiina now? Then Yleini would cover him with kisses and tell him the whole family had been waiting for him to realize that he’d been accepted. He was one of them, now.

  Oh, what a clever kitten she was!

  And neither she nor her family was leaving his assimilation up to time and chance. The Scaames’ campaign to Lamaroonify him was so intense he felt as if he’d been plunged into boot camp. The day after they arrived, everyone tramped into the jungle on a monkey hunt. Crispin couldn’t figure out why they were netting the creatures alive instead of simply shooting them. He found out at supper, when the poor apes were tied in a row under a trestle table with their heads sticking up through holes. With much festivity, the Scaames cracked their skulls with specially designed pliers, removed the hairy fragments, and scooped the brains onto serving platters. The monkeys’ jaws had been tied so that they couldn’t make any noise. But they threshed horribly. Crispin almost vomited
right there at table. Maybe the Scaames realized they’d gone a bit too far too soon, for the activity scheduled for the next few days was tamer: the building of a new hut from springy, sap-oozing branches and green liana. All the young men ho-ho-huuuhed! and steady-nowed together under the guidance of Elder Wuiin, in the hot sun. (Elder Wuiin had a sunshade with poppies printed on it.) What camaraderie, what rewarding toil! Unfortunately, Crispin had been reduced to making his living with his muscles too often to be capable of enjoying physical exertion for its own sake. He would far rather have taken his ease.

  He was free to do so, more or less, when it came time to weave the floor coverings for the hut. The women settled into the communal hearth-hut with their babies, sheaves of grasses, and jugs of gaifruit juice; Crispin anticipated being ignored, pretending to work, and having a good long think. But out of some primitive concern for his pride, Yleini’s cousin Kiichi took the day off from the fields to keep him company, and while the women’s fingers flew as fast as gossip, Crispin had to answer Kiichi’s questions about “foreign.” Every totem villager along the route had asked him the same things—and Crispin now understood that none of them cared two sticks about the answers. It was all just hospitality to the outsider. This time was the worst yet, for Kiichi was Crispin’s own age and he spoke Redeuiina patois well enough that Crispin could tell he was intelligent. Yet he, like the others, took it as a matter of course that Crispin had to be jollied along like a child.

  Crispin had expected many things of Yleini’s jungle-dwelling relatives. Stupidity—incomprehensibility—savagery—nobility. After meeting Mme. Scaame, he had added “a sense of humor.” But he hadn’t expected their dominant characteristic to be this overweening pride that amounted, as near as made no difference, to a superiority complex.

  A few days later it was revealed that the hut he’d helped build was for his and Yleini’s own use. A glance at Yleini’s face told Crispin she wasn’t surprised; she looked at him as if he were a child who has been given a birthday present it didn’t ask for, holding her breath to see whether he would be pleased. As a kind of test for her, he overplayed his gratitude to the point of hamming it up. But if she got the point, she concealed it. Now the cat was out of the bag, the trap was sprung. The Scaames had made it clear that they expected the Kateralbins’ stay to be long-term. But Yleini made not a single reference to the fact that this hadn’t been their original plan. To judge by appearances, she thought Crispin welcomed the change just as she did.

  He never considered actually asking her. They’d stopped having the long conversations they had in Redeuiina. Gender determined the daily schedule of everyone in the diin to the point where their only time alone together was night, and then, in the new hut that still smelled of sap, they tenderly, ritually renewed their acquaintance with each other’s bodies. Now that their only mode of communication was sex, they harmonized better on a physical level than ever before. When Crispin was inside her he heard himself spewing words of love. She responded by caressing him almost reverently. In the moonlight that crept in around the door, he could see her eyes wide and flat, like the eyes of an animal caught in headlights. Sex acted as a drug, nightly reestablishing his need for her, proving the rightness of their union; he almost succeeded in convincing himself that sex was what marriage was about, and as long as the sex was good, the whole thing must be written in the stars, in the earth, on the face of the moon.

  But he still wanted to take her back to Redeuiina. That was where he belonged, he felt sure (now that it was too late): in Redeuiina, the one place in the world where it was possible for a man like him to achieve anonymity. A job, a girl, a roof over his head—without knowing it, he’d had exactly what he’d always wanted! And the kind of jewel-waistcoated, servant-employing, business-owning prosperity he’d dreamed of in the QAF wasn’t out of the question, either, now he came to think about it! He’d neglected his connections of late; but time healed all wounds—and according to Beiin, a little butter on the right paws could smooth over worse insults than he’d delivered to Governor Yamaxi. The governor after all, was a businessman in his own right, and a reasonable man.

  Crispin goaded himself daily with grim oversimplifications. Ten years, twenty, thirty; my whole bloody life depends on getting her out of here as soon as possible! There’s just one problem, and that’s her! No, two problems! Her and about seventy miles of jungle!

  His initial confusion had caused him to barricade himself in politeness to the point where explaining everything would be far more troublesome than making a getaway in the dead of night. The catch was that no matter how he chose to effect their escape, he first needed to get Yleini on his side. And how was that possible when they no longer talked?

  To take his mind off the humiliating impasse, and with an idea of learning who, besides her mother, could order her around, he mounted a private campaign to find out just who really ran the whole happy-go-lucky clan. All 118 Scaames apart from a few wives were related. Nominally the eight Elders were in charge, but these grizzled men and women seemed too doddering to make any real decisions. Who masterminded the hunts, the infrequent delivery trip to the coast, and the cultivation of their cash crop, dazeflower? Finding this out proved harder than he’d expected. The Scaames might pretend to be baring their lives and traditions to him, but when it came to oiling out from under the magnifying glass, they were world-class slitherers. The challenge frustrated and excited him; slowly his campaign became more than just a means to an end.

  The Scaames interested him. Anuei Eixeiizeli might have been a Redeuiina girl, but as Yleini had said in one of her moments of axiomatic ecstasy, everyone came from the forest. The question was: why were the Scaames primarily farmers, rather than hunters? And how had growing dazeflower—which could only be exported illegally, at least to Kirekuni-controlled lands—enriched them to the point where their lifestyle included city-bought conveniences ranging from a fleet of Kirekuni daemon plows to iron cookware to picture books that the children could not read, for which they made up their own stories to go with the illustrations?

  Finding out about the dazeflower was the easiest part. The Scaame men were too proud of their enterprise to keep it a secret. Apparently the climate of the jungle was just right for the tall leggy plants, which had played a part in Likreky mystic rituals since time out of mind. But the Scaames used it not to limn the pathways of their minds but to line their pockets. Their transition from totem villagers to prosperous farmers had occurred only two generations ago, when some canny Elder found out about the continental market for mind-altering pharmaceuticals. Now the fields were producing at full capacity, and every autumn the men reclaimed more of the hillside from the jungle. Every so often a delegation of Scaames would accompany the precious bushels to Redeuiina, and deliver them to the smuggling lords entrenched in the colonial government, who served as distributors and law-avoidance consultants in one.

  That, incidentally—as Crispin learned from Kiichi—was how Yleini had entered service at the Yamaxis. Even at fourteen his future wife must have been stunning. Mentally Crispin plumped out her body, changed her wary look to one of trusting innocence, dressed her in a girl’s short checktooth wrap, and perched her on top of a cart among crates of fruit, the finishing touch on a display that said, We’re just poor mountain folk come to gawp at the big city! He envisioned that cart clattering along the streets of Redeuiina’s respectable high town, pulling up at the Yamaxis’ door—and shuddered. He could see it all too easily from the governor’s point of view. He’d never asked Yleini about the original terms of her service; now he decided he didn’t want to know. He disliked Yamaxi more than ever, and became determined to screw the Kirekuni over as hard as possible if—when—he got back to Redeuiina.

  As far as the dazeflower itself went, he was able to testify to its high quality. Yet he couldn’t help feeling, as he had the very first time he saw them, that there was something unnatural about those velvety fields. It was still only Marout! Hot weather might have c
ome early to the mountains, but all the same, the trees were only just now putting out all their leaves. How had the Scaames managed to grow their plants to head height already? In a week or so they would begin harvesting. Did the fields yield twice a year? Was that possible? He knew nothing about farming. Smithrebel’s circuits had had little to do with seasonal cycles, except inasmuch as they avoided them: Saul would have loved, if it were possible, to hit all the high points of the year, one after another, fleeing winter from climate to climate. Crispin’s ignorance had never bothered him until he found himself unable even to guess how the Scaames had got nature to cooperate so amicably with their bid for prosperity. He asked Kiichi point-blank, but the other just shrugged. “It the weather. It good. When it good it make I happy. And when me be feeling good, dem flahrs know it an’ey do their dance, dem.”

  “I’m just curious, man,” Crispin said in disgust.

  Kiichi turned away. All the Scaames had that trick. If they didn’t want to continue a conversation, they would just walk off, without considering it rude.

  “If you and I were in Redeuiina, you wouldn’t last long without watching your back better than that,” Crispin called after him only half-jokingly, squinting into the sunlight.

  Kiichi didn’t look around, but he did hunch his shoulder in the direction of the top of the diin. It was noon, and no one was outside. All the women, Yleini included, were daydreaming in the communal hearth-hut halfway up the “street,” braiding each other’s hair, playing with the toddlers, weaving checktooth cloth, smoking daze, and watching the covered cauldrons that simmered there day and night. When there was no special project requiring their help, they lived as luxurious and aimless an existence as concubines. The Elders were sitting together, as usual, in one of their huts. Every day they made mystical symbols over the threshold and locked themselves in to perform “rituals” and “meditations.” Crispin suspected these involved a lot of firewater, dazeflower, and as much gossip as the women’s less pompously styled get-togethers. The men were in the fields. Kiichi had just come back to fetch a wrench to mend a jammed fertilizer duster.