The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  It had been Yamaxi’s idea to extend their plans for a commercial air service into Slux. The idea had been Crispin’s to begin with. Now it belonged to the colonial government. Yamaxi was a vocal proponent of the new internationalism, though not because he considered himself a forward thinker: his particular bureaucratic genius wasn’t for grandstanding but underhanding, it wasn’t for altering the status quo but getting around it, and as a rule the only personal touch he added to the Okimako party line was the imbuing, perhaps intentional or perhaps not, of all Lamaroon’s internationalist projects with an air of illegality, even seediness, which showed in the personalities of the foreign business partners he handpicked from the masses crawling out of the woodwork. All of them were Slux with the exception of a Throssomi and an Ixtaran, who together operated a cargo-shipping line in the lower islands, and that pair was sleazier, in person and in business practice, than all the Slux put together. The Throssomi, a pathetically down-at-heel aristocrat whose Throssomi sounded so different from the Slux dialect Crispin had learned that at first he couldn’t understand a word of it, had gone pub-crawling in the Yard and been arrested by the Disciplinarians for insulting a prostitute and attempting to molest a perambulator. After that, Yamaxi invited only Slux businessmen into his domicile.

  It had quickly become transparent to Crispin that the reason Slux and Kirekunis got on so well (and had been getting along well, in secret, for the better part of two decades if you could believe the rumors) wasn’t just because Kirekunis saw, in the Slux obsession with morality, a reflection and validation of what they considered one of their own national characteristics. It wasn’t even, as cynics said, because the Slux’ cultie-like reciting of prayers to their God and their multifarious saints proved them in the Kirekunis’ eyes primitives, thus justifying the lizardly conviction of global superiority. The reason was, and most people in Redeuiina couldn’t see the forest for the trees, because both Kirekunis and Far Westerners lived by the rules of a deeply entrenched social hierarchy unquestioned by anyone at any level of it; they in fact, whether they knew it or not, needed such a hierarchy in order to function with any efficacy at all. And Macafryan, force-fitting the Likreky into his personal hierarchy, had classified probably Crispin and certainly Yleini as “jumped-up niggers,” “sidekicks to the white colonials.”

  This wasn’t a guess on Crispin’s part, these were phrases gleaned directly from a diary the Yamaxis’ new maid Saami had found ill concealed under Macafryan’s pillow, and brought downstairs for Yamaxi’s and Crispin’s delectation while the Slux was at dinner at Redeuiina Provincial Secretary Moriyama’s house. They’d had quite an evening of it until the new doorman, acting as lookout, gave the alert. The diary revealed not just Macafryan’s private, pungent opinions of Redeuiina, which he called a “teeming, bestial city in the anus of the world,” but a good many clues to Macafryan’s plans to go Yamaxi one better in the finessing of contractual perks and quirks and man traps. Yamaxi had drooled with delight. As soon as he was free, he instructed Crispin to call on every respectable Kirekuni household in the city until he found somewhere for the Slux to dine the next night, so that Yamaxi would have more time to copy down everything relevant and post it to Okimako.

  One despised the Slux; one was amused and repulsed by them; but one couldn’t find it in oneself to hate them properly, not for long, because they all shared a touching naïveté, which was as beguiling as the limpidity of children.

  The hoes began to swing again in staggered slow motion. Macafryan heaved a sigh of self-congratulation.

  Like all foreigners, the Slux found the concept of daemonkind (and the lands where there had once been daemons, and the people to whom daemons had once belonged) both fascinating and terrifying. On discovering that there was nothing in Lamaroon which could be described as “supernatural,” the foreigners couldn’t decide if they were relieved or disappointed. Crispin told them that in his opinion, the epithet had been wrongly translated: in the days when daemons existed, they hadn’t been “supernatural” in the sense of witches or ghosts; they’d just been work beasts, of a different provenance from mules and oxen. Subternatural was what the word should have been.

  And Crispin, like everyone in Oceania, had taken them for granted until the world turned and changed under his feet. But in the arid lands on the Far Western side of the seas, there had never been any daemons. Amazing but true! Bound to their corporeal forms, daemons had either not been able to cross the ocean, or simply not cared to. And now the sales representatives of the arid lands had pushed their way in, cracked Oceania like a safe with the lock picks Significance had handed them, and fingered through its secrets only to find that there were no secrets anymore, they’d all died yesterday. But we have some very nice skeletons we can sell you at a bargain twice if in return you will ship us a gross or two hundred gross of your marvelously efficient, magnificently soulless diesel engines so that these aircraft will fly again, carrying private legal safely-checked cargoes these days naturellement, and speaking of aircraft we will now finally disclose to you the specifications necessary to build them, if return you will not ask too many questions about how ours used to stay up in the air with only a handful of silver-wire cables in the engine cavity—

  “The myth of daemonology,” Macafryan had written in his diary, “is nothing but a fabulous hoax perpetrated upon us for reasons known only to the Oceanians.” In public, the Slux contemptuously spurned all attempts at discussion of their national differences, as if the distinction between supernatural and subternatural mattered no more than whether one put milk or lemon in one’s tea. But Crispin thought Macafryan was still curious.

  Not that he had much time to think, these days, about Macafryan or anyone else. Because one day in the early autumn of 1897, right after the Ferupian calendar had been outlawed and the Kirekuni calendar that had briefly taken its place been retired in favor of the New World version, he’d woken up and realized he was rich beyond even his unrealistic ambitions.

  And that was the cosmic arsonist’s doing, too.

  A man whose underlings spoke of him as Master Hungt sat in state in a drawing room in a house which wasn’t his, whose owner his followers had disembowelled earlier in the day. While the dead man’s servants danced attendance on him, Hungt stared into space, and seethed, and schemed. And the men and women in his ragtag army-cum-sect-cum-mobile-refugee-camp loved him so much that tears welled up in their eyes. Hungt whom the dream shrouded in the red haze Crispin had come to understand meant a suicide, intended to overthrow the tottering dynasty whose grip on his country weakened every day. He believed so deeply in himself, and as a result radiated such charisma that Crispin was surprised he hadn’t succeeded. But he couldn’t have, because the vision had that milky brown quality that came from looking back into the past, and if Hungt had managed to do more than ransack a few cities, the reverberations would certainly have been felt outside Sinoa.

  But then (the dream gave Crispin dismissively to understand, lingering on Hungt’s face with fascination) he had been a madman anyway.

  That had been Hungt Chü, leader of an attempt to overthrow the central government of Sinoa that had failed when it too fell prey to inertia. The ten or fifteen minutes the dream had shown Crispin had been dredged up from a time when the rebellion was still young, thirty or forty years ago. Crispin deduced this from costumes and mannerisms. The dreams were never explicit. He had to put two and two together with what he already knew of the lands they showed him, and with historical fact gleaned from the Far Westerners in Redeuiina. Judiciously picking their brains enabled Crispin to situate the dreams in history, always provided they’d happened already. This amateur-detective approach didn’t work for the high-speed montages of future events Mr. Nakunatta had been favoring recently. Technology-recognition was Crispin’s only hope of dating those, but even when the machines and gadgets looked halfway familiar, he could only hazard a guess that it would happen within a couple of decades, and that it had a 50 percent chanc
e (or so, based on the historical dreams) of changing the world. Also the near-future dreams tended to have the color leached from them, leaving only black and white and gray, like the daguerreotypes the Ixtaran had given the Yamaxis. The far-future dreams, although they came in vivid technicolor, looked even stranger, due to the refraction effect which made everything—humans, furniture, clouds, highways full of trucks and cars—into faceted solid crystals, shedding rainbows from knife edges. Airplanes, birds, and people falling from high windows trailed multiple, fading copies of themselves. And there was the disjunction effect that chopped scenes of life up into confoundingly truncated glimpses, sometimes seen from odd angles, sometimes as if through warped glass, sometimes slowed down to underwater grace, sometimes speeded up to amphetamine absurdity. Sometimes the transitions between scenes made sense. More often they didn’t. People’s voices were the only things that sounded normal—but usually there were no voices at all, just a clashing race between heavy percussion and repetitive clips of melody that might be Mr. Nakunatta’s idea of music or his idea of a joke. And even when Crispin heard voices, he couldn’t understand them, because in his visions of the future, his dream ability to comprehend whatever language was spoken (and remember the words and idiom patterns, not in translation, but as strings of alien intonations jingling in his mind; the first few dreams, set mostly in parts of Slux and the Throssomi Empire, had benefited him in a way the fatester surely hadn’t intended, by aiding his studies of Throssomi; he was now working on Creddezi, Sinoese, and Yanglo)—but in the future this ability didn’t apply. Instead, night after night he found himself suspended, like a fish in a waterfall, in a torrent of foreign slang, some of which sounded like Throssomi or Kirekuni, but not any dialects he knew. After a while it became unbearable. The incomprehensibility of fifty years from now (a hundred? two hundred? three?) beat at him like violence, bowed him, depressed him to the point where he longed to escape but couldn’t.

  As: the windows of a lozenge-shaped car imploded to the hacking coughs of guns

  a man in a business suit slowly closed the door of an office and took a handgun out of a safe behind a map hanging on the wall and shot himself dead

  children with the glamour of impending genius clinging about them sat gaping at flickering bright windows

  a shift in the wind wafted clouds of poison back over the breast works and trenches of the army which had deployed it (Near future, Crispin thought, horrified, it had to be, because he understood warfare conducted by infantrymen sallying and shooting at each other across no-man’s-land, he’d seen—and barraged with splinterons—similar breast works; and so, according to Mr. Nakunatta, within his lifetime there was going to be another vast war that chewed up the earth and tore down forests and devoured ten thousand men at a single bite)

  and amid the feet of metal-and-glass towers that shot up into the clouds like man-made Jack’s Beanstalks, a group of boys shot a man in the stomach, but instead of stealing his money they gathered around him and recited poetry that sounded, since Crispin couldn’t understand it, like strings of numbers, and all the people scurrying by glanced at the fallen man, then away

  and a prune-faced woman in a laboratory and a young man in a scruffy hotel room scribbled identical calculations on note pads at the same time on different sides of the world,

  and a black-haired boy shut himself into a toilet cubicle and buried his face in his hands for three minutes and emerged an inch shorter and a stone thinner, with brown hair, and the bones of his face rearranged beyond recognition; no mystery there, he was a Mime, a member of that island race whose biggest secret Crispin had discovered through masquerading as one of them. But judging from the boy’s expensively bland clothing and gold jewelry, the Mimes were on the way to the top, did they only know it

  and a spot of light zoomed across a concrete plain and just as it started to slow down, the scene switched to show a tide composed partly of humans but mostly of dangerous-looking communications equipment, sweeping out of the base of a bulbous tower and down the steps of several gigantic transports that looked like airplanes but weren’t, couldn’t be, because what were those cylindrical excrescences under their wings, and where were their propellers

  and Crispin couldn’t wake up, and he feared he would go mad, and he knew that an inability to deal with the utterly bizarre was just what the arsonist wanted to induce in him. And so he tried not to understand. Just let it wash over you, it’s only a dream. But whatever he did was irrelevant anyway because the rainbow-edged sights and sounds went on and on, with him drowning in the thick of them, until whatever Mr. Nakunatta wanted him to see had happened, or until—who knew?—the fearsome fatester simply got tired of the diversion and went off to find another mouse, or catspaw, or whatever the hell it was he wanted Crispin to—

  awake—

  Tumbling backward through shattering images, he landed in his own body.

  His dizziness wore off, and he became conscious of the soft ghastly commodiousness of the bed in which he lay. He heard himself moaning, felt himself twitching and tossing, and stopped. His embarrassment was so acute, and acutely irrational, that to escape it he yearned to go back to sleep—real sleep this time, the layman’s equivalent of forgetfulness. For perhaps thirty seconds he tried. But the bed remained too big, too spongy, too empty. Drowsiness receded. The absence of hot firm arms and legs twined with his, her defection from physical companionship, was intolerable. It was all he asked of her, and it wasn’t much. He raised himself on his elbow.

  The summer night lay heavy, thick as a preemptive deployment of poison gas. It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the darkness. She sat, as he’d half hoped, half feared, in the window nook with the armchair and the lamp imported all the way from Slux’s East Coast, gifts from Slux visitors that just hadn’t fitted into the intrigues Jionna Yamaxi mounted daily against her home. Yleini had gladly received them as secondhand souvenirs. At twenty-three she had none of the Kirekuni woman’s sense of intrigue, less of her aesthetic perfectionism, but she knew what she liked: anything “pretty” or “nice” or “adorable”—in other words, anything that looked expensive. She made an exception for romance novels, which, though cheap to buy, were all about pretty, nice, adorable things. Often when Crispin woke in the middle of the night she would be poring over one of these acquisitionist’s pornographies. But tonight she’d dispensed with subtlety. Did this mean change was in the air? She perched on the back of the armchair, cheek on fist, her body silhouetted within her chiffon negligee by the moonlight outside the window. He wanted to throw himself at her feet and win her over with kisses and apologies. He wanted to storm out of the room, out of claustrophobic respectability masquerading as the high life, out of Yamaxi’s labyrinth of payoffs and deceptions and looking the other way and looking for the moles and looking out for Yamaxi’s best interests as loyally as any of the aides on the official payroll. Organized crime had a protocol that enwebbed you just as tightly as the civil service that was its selfsame mirror image, and just like the civil service it was dreary and dangerous and stressful, but he could have coped, were it not for the personal deceptions he was forced to propagate. Mirrors within mirrors!

  “Expanding to Slux was your idea. Jionna told me so,” Yleini said. “She thinks you’re brilliant. I wouldn’t be surprised if she wanted to screw you. Significant knows she’s been through practically every other married man we know. The old ones, even. It’s not because she wants them, though; it’s because Devi doesn’t love her anymore, and she wants to get her own back. She’s told me that in as many words. She knows he’s screwing around, too.” Her voice ripened with satisfaction. “But she doesn’t know with who.”

  Okimako adored the private air service project, which They believed to be Yamaxi’s brainchild. A man who didn’t officially exist couldn’t claim credit in Okimako, so Crispin’s involvement had quickly dwindled to the usual: watchdogging the foreign investors, keeping the mirrors far enough apart so they wouldn’t see ref
lected things they didn’t want to know existed. Yleini, once she found out, had disapproved. To her, the project was just another proof that Crispin wanted to leave her. Again, she would always add—as though his leaving her had been a precondition of their marriage, as though he’d gone back on his word.

  “Come back to bed,” he said hopelessly.

  “It’ll be morning soon enough. I’m not tired anymore. I think I’ll wake Neiila and have her brew tea. I don’t suppose you want any.” Scorn entered her voice. “Shall I have her bring a decanter?”

  Actually a drink was just what he wanted, but he shook his head. Do you know (he wanted to say) that I’m being hounded by a thing which has no name, which everyone knows about and which we have over the course of history labeled with a variety of inappropriate epithets, a thing I call ‘Mr. Nakunatta”—