The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  Yes, well, in Creddezi it’s a pun, sort of—

  I can’t show you a letter from him, nor hair nor hide. Now that I’ve thought of it he may well deluge me with letters. I wouldn’t put it past him. But so far I haven’t anything tangible to show for the interest he’s taken in me, unless you count various scars picked up along the way, like this one here from falling down a garbage chute. But he’s a real, live man. He’s not normal, not by any stretch of the imagination, because somehow, a long time ago, he discovered the secret of immortality; I’m not sure he has a body anymore, but his personality is like that of a shriveled old playboy who takes his frustration out on everyone in sight because the girls won’t stand for his nonsense anymore. If I knew where he was to be found, I’d make it my life’s mission to kill him. You say this sounds like the delusions of a paranoiac: well, my dear, as you’ve so often told me, I am paranoid, but I’m also a rational bastard, and Mr. Nakunatta is the one and only eccentricity of logic I’ve kept in my rulebook, which ought to be enough to make you at least think about what I’m saying. And if you do, you’ll understand that logic and Mr. Nakunatta are mutually exclusive propositions. They’re both limited. But no one can get away from either of them. As human beings we all choose to pride ourselves on our faith in either one or the other. In both cases our faith is founded on trust. Especially if we’ve placed our bets on Mr. Nakunatta. We treat with him and curse him all on the assumption that he’s never going to show his hand never force himself down our throats—put himself about flagrantly maybe, because he likes doing that; but always as puppeteer, never out in the open. Well out in the open is where he’s come with me. This isn’t the first time he and I have had dealings. But I thought he’d decided to leave me alone. Wouldn’t you know it, I’ve even started seeing things during the day again, like I used to when I was in the airforce. (Oh, I never told you about that did I.) But no symbolic flames this time, it’s incomprehensibility made flesh, metal, sight and sound and smell, he’s force-feeding me the hard stuff now—like Reality Stir Fry, blood sauce not optional, no more dramatic foreplay, here’s the real thing and if you can’t handle it, no one’s stopping you from committing suicide or taking up bureaucracy—oh, sorry, I tried that already (and still hanging in there even though it hasn’t helped matters in the slightest but I suppose there’s always overseas to be considered, and maybe you’re right, darling, to worry about my having been the one to think of the air service, because although I told Yamaxi and myself it’s just because I hate the sea and I’d rather fly, and we might as well make money off something as long as we’re doing it and the idea appealed to the Little Governor’s instinct for beating everyone else in the internationalization game, in the back of my head there’s a voice saying, “You may not be able to run away from your devils but you can give it a bloody good try”)—

  Who am I kidding?

  A sense of futility came over him. All he had was images and concepts impossible to verbalize without flattening them into clichés.

  I considered writing a book of accurate prophecies, he imagined telling her, like that Ixtaran fellow, whatever his name was. I bet he sold like hotcakes in his day. I’d love to make money off of old Nakunatta. But in order for my prophecies to make sense they’d have to be after the fact. Like I saw the Fire of 1212 coming, but until it actually happened I thought I was seeing the end of the world, and even now I’m not sure what I did see. So for all I know—I mean I think there’s going to be a war within the next twenty years that eats up continents, that’s worse than the Kirekune-Ferupe Problem and the Sino-Creddezi War combined, but for all I know it could just be a mingy little border conflict between two pinhead Red Forest states you can’t even pronounce the names of because if you put a fly under a magnifying glass, it looks like a monster...

  Yleini....

  Crispin sank back onto the pillows. Yleini switched on the lamp. “Look, I can’t stand it any longer,” she said with a sort of abstracted harshness, as if she didn’t really feel the desperation her words implied. “Is it Jionna or is it Michika? Or someone else altogether? I hope you’ve at least had the sense to stay away from the lower classes. Since the foreign sailors started coming, the whores have all got this revolting new clap. I’ve seen them. Their eyes go runny and their gums bleed and they get sores in their snatches.”

  Crispin gazed blearily across the room. Every line of her body revealed hope against hope: maybe this time—if she pretended she wasn’t interested in his problems, if she got inside his guard by attacking him rather than pleading with him—maybe this time, he would tell her the secret sorrow burning in his breast! She knew there was something he wasn’t telling her. She was perceptive enough to see that. But a steady diet of romances and after-tea conversation with colonial matrons had narrowed the horizons of her imagination. Once she’d run through the names of all the women they knew who were mildly attractive, she was stumped. And he hated listening to her run through them yet again, but he couldn’t tell her that she was on the wrong track, because she would be furious to know that her suspicions weren’t as private as she thought, and he couldn’t have reassured her with a clear conscience anyway, because although he wasn’t having an affair, he wished he were.

  Moths walked across the ceiling. Staring up at them, he thought of an opening salvo that might punch a few new holes in the eternally reprised, terminally boring argument, holes through which they’d maybe be able to see daylight; and fired it; when her face lit up with vindictive satisfaction, he knew he’d missed. She wriggled, then held still, waiting for him to come up with something truly inventive.

  —Grey, Like...”Grey Death”? So, Rope...where’ll I

  find this “death”?

  —In the machine shop, most likely.

  —Yozihisa Tagami

  Feel No Pain

  21 Devambar 1899 A.D.

  The Significant Empire of Kirekune: Okimako: the old city

  Mickey glanced at his watch in the moonlight. As he shook his sleeve back over it, the heavy silk caressed his skin: the dry slither of a snake on rocks: a tiny explosion of sensuality, a point of light contrasting the darkness of his misery, like the cold wind ripping his hair, the hot tear forming in the corner of his left eye, the blurring of the few lights below in the city.

  He was waiting for the Throssomis to emerge from Significance. Missionaries usually got courteously chucked out by midnight. But these were investors. Significance had become Greater Significance, a veritable internationalization machine. Mickey had never been allowed farther in than this courtyard, but he didn’t need to see Hiroxi Significant on the dais to know that his most pessimistic predictions of 1213—1897, he corrected himself—had come true. Greater Significance, in its full-speed-ahead rebuilding of Okimako as well as its expansions into the formerly private sphere, operated according to the military principle of expedience, not the noble principle of beneficence. The nobles themselves had either to play catch-up or tacitly accept obsolescence. Ordinary businessmen like Mickey had never had a chance.

  Greater Significance had an eye like a gunner, and its hands lay as heavy on his shoulders as the treads of a tank, squashing him into the mud. His past had well and truly caught up with him. Mickey felt trapped between his creditors, his family, his crimes, and the Disciplinarians. The books looked the same however long he cooked them: Akila-uza was going under. He could cut corners and buy on credit and take loans on the strength of the establishment’s good name, but ultimately nothing would make any difference. Just to stay alive, he had to be the soul of courtesy and hospitality to the foreigners whom Significance regularly billeted on him, whose expensive tastes were ruining him. These ruddy merchant-farmers, these sausage moguls, these sharp-nosed nobles. For all their pomp and snobbery, they tended to squeamishness. They only ever wanted fat little girls with their tails bobbed. They wanted everything just like it was at home in the Far West, and morning coffee in bed, too.

  And Mickey couldn’t afford to se
rve them coffee, black tea, tea with milk, green tea, Bloody Marys, only the usual—sausages, potatoes, croissants, buttered rolls, filled bread, bacon, porridge, actually you might as well ask for the moon, my dear monsieur—just two raw eggs and an orange, what do you mean no oranges? What will the Board of Certffication have to say about that? There was no Board of Certification and there had been no hotel until Greater Significance seized on Yozitaro Akila as the man to provide good old-fashioned hospitality to foreigners whose letters of recommendation branded them middle-class. Merchants, aristocrats, missionaries, or of unspecified profession, they were less important to Significance than the diplomats They prudently confined to the palace, more respectable than the black marketeers and opium dealers and “tourists” who, although they, too, had their business in the old city, had to find their own accommodation somewhere out of Significance’s sight and reach. Significance wanted the Far Western investors in reach. And Akila-uza wasn’t just in reach, it was under Their thumb, so it was also the ideal lobster pot for the pestiferous missionaries They wanted an eye kept on. Mickey had to be that eye, too.

  How had he dared to hope his record had vanished with the SAF? He’d bobbed and smiled and offered drinks to the Disciplinarian sting-inspectors, believing himself safe, out of reach, believing himself astute. Then Daixo had come to the front door, all alone in last summer’s heat, gangly and deferential in his New World-style suit and hat. A quiet word if it’s not too much trouble, Monsieur Akila...

  Upstairs Fumia and the girls rested in their bowers, waiting out the middle of the day.

  And of course Mickey had said, yes he’d said, he was the man for the job, no trouble at all. He was sweating under his fine silk tunic and jacket and over-vest that told the world he was one of the richest men in the new city that had reclaimed itself, pride intact, from the rubble and the disgrace and terror of the Fire which hadn’t catalyzed the transformation racking Okimako but been only a symptom of it, Coincidence’s little contribution to the fin de siècle, helpfully making everything obvious. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? Daixo sat at the kitchen table in the half dark with his hands clasped before him and recited the charges that could be brought against Mickey for his desertion from the Significant Air Force in Fessiery of the 1209th Year of the Lizard, 1893 by the Far Western calendar, when he had attained the rank of Wedgehead and did willingly cooperate with his captors, subsequently conspiring to treachery against Significance. The words fell like drops of water on the flags, and Mickey kept on being polite.

  Playing the hotelier was numbing and exhausting. The gay-girls, upcountry flowers to the last petal, wouldn’t serve meals or do any task they suspected might be the province of maids (and you couldn’t get a real maid to work in an establishment so widely known to be a holding-house for Significance: all the employable women in Okimako had better offers every day now that Society had come back to life, offers not sodden with rumors of foreign corruption) so Mickey was not just major-domo and host, but chef and waiter and doorman and allais, a multiplicity of roles he found utterly humiliating, and all of them had to be characterized with a servility that was slowly but surely eroding his dignity, his strength, and whatever ambition he had left at this late date.

  Well, tonight he wasn’t taking anyone to Akila-uza. He’d even told the gay-girls to turn away clients with appointments—and there were few enough of those nowadays. The new city knew Fumia was unwell; Mickey didn’t want any of his bill-paying regulars to see or hear her on a night when it had taken three people to wrestle her upstairs. More to the point, on her bad days, her hearing became so sharp that she could detect doors opening and closing all the way at the bottom of Dragyonne Street. And if she were to hear men she knew unburdening themselves to the gay-girls, when she saw them next she would insult them so incisively they would never come back.

  She’d learned to pick the lock of her room.

  Mickey had tied her in a chair once, fastening the specially ordered restraints himself, and after five minutes he’d relented. He couldn’t bear the sight of her ratted hair swinging as she strained at the bonds, her teeth showing, foam, her eyes rolling. The next day, when she “recovered her composure,” she penned him a delicately remonstrative note of reproof and hand-delivered it to his room at five in the morning. She snuggled into bed beside him while he read it. Gaise, hiding in the wardrobe, nearly choked laughing. Gaise didn’t take Fumia seriously.

  On her good days, she reigned as queen bee, sex kitten extraordinaire, holding court in her bower, cat’s-cradling the household into a cocked hat. Mickey would countermand her orders later. His attempts to disillusion her only had the effect of making her go shopping.

  And tonight Fumia and her composure were wandering at opposite ends of the fields of madness. And so, once again, Mickey was going to have to impose on Ashie, who had escaped to Swirling only to be put on the spot all over again by the wonders of modern transportation. Taking these extreme risks with Daixo’s charges always made him nervous. Daixo’s contact with the foreigners after Mickey brought them back was minimal, and so far he hadn’t caught on. But there was potential for disaster.

  Mickey belonged to the Okimako Aviation Society, an organization of ex-SAF officers, both noble and common, who’d come home to enough money to keep on indulging their passion for flight in the aftermath of daemonology. They patronized Kirekuni engineers and diesel importers, contributing heavily enough to Okimako’s still-recovering economy that Greater Significance didn’t dare take their refurbished Horogazis and KEs away, or raze their hangars on a pretext. Nonetheless, at Society meetings they all strove to keep from talking politics. Instead they found common ground in memories of the war. Mickey had never thought he’d enjoy reminiscing about his time as a Wedgehead, but on days when he compared past and present and the present came off worst, the Society was his consolation: the only window in his cell. Daixo had warned him that he was not to exploit the Society for subversive purposes. If he ever found out Mickey was disobeying orders, that would be the end of the OAS as far as Mickey was concerned, and possibly the end of Mickey himself, too.

  The wind tore at Mickey’s robe, lifting the hem to reveal his flight boots, threatening to snatch away the left-hand pilot’s glove he stuffed in his pocket. At last the Throssomis emerged along the carpet of light that unrolled into the courtyard when the great doors opened. Both wore black tie with cactus-flower buttonholes no longer intact. They staggered like the walking wounded. Few foreigners—for that matter, few Okimakoans—could survive an evening of Greater Significance without injury to style and/or spirit. This pair, despite the decrepitude of their tuxedos, looked to be in the best of humor. Perhaps they thought they’d struck a deal to their own advantage. Poor dears, the Throssomi, they placed such trust in the binding power of a man’s word, a misconception which a couple of weeks’ stay in Kirekune inevitably redressed—but many obtained what they believed to be agreements sooner than that, and trotted off home jiggety-jog, none the wiser.

  The two men grinned and blinked about disarmingly as the palace doors clanged shut. Mickey took a last drag from his cigarette, tossed it into the closest fountain, and went to meet them. “There you are,” shouted the larger in tones of satisfaction. “Gorgeous night, eh? Eh?”

  The thinner Throssomi glanced about for Mickey’s right hand, saw the dangling sleeve, and seized on his left hand instead with drunken aplomb. “Cyril Wigglesworth, my dear man. I say, what a relief it is to get away from all those military types. We’ve got ‘em at home, too, of course. And nowadays everybody kowtows to them, exactly as you say General X, oh, absolutely Admiral Y, I must say success suits you Major Z, don’t you know, a sort of embarrassed admission of total dependence is the only way I can describe it. Do you know, I’m convinced now that the Queen is dead, poor old Throssom has decided to give up the ghost along with her, I mean after all, what is there left worth living for? That’s why I came East don’t you know? What, what, what?”

  It wa
s a cold night. Cyril Wigglesworth sniffled and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Came East to get away from his harridan of a mistress. Gave her five hundred a year but she wants eight,” the large man informed Mickey importantly. “Call him Wiggly. I do.”

  It gratified Mickey that the Throssomis had the self-confidence to refrain from introducing themselves as walking manifestos of sexual peculiarity. He preferred to be nameless, and he didn’t mind being faceless, but he disliked being taken immediately for a pimp. Even a hotelier was better than that. He decided to be pleasant. “Not at all cold for the time of year! I trust your audience went well? Kirekune is a delightful country in which to do business!” he said, quickly using up half his stock of Throssomi small talk.

  “Demned ungrateful I call it, she’s thirty-five this year, and even if she won’t admit it, her mirror will,” Wigglesworth protested.

  “He hasn’t a mistress. He’s a flaming queen. Bernard Blythe-Frye.”

  “‘Whaley,’” Wigglesworth corrected with a laugh.

  Blythe-Frye would have made three of his companion, and he had chins to go round. His truncated sentences were far easier to follow than Wigglesworth’s torrent of idiom. Mickey judged foreigners by the same standard as he judged Greater Significance—the less trouble to follow, the better; and these Throssomis were simpler than the company clerks who represented the other face of Throssom’s involvement in the East, the men whose cheeks tic’ed with the strain of maintaining their composure, who half killed themselves in order to monopolize every conversation and be witty at the same time, who smelled of too much hair oil and looked sharp out of the corners of their pale eyes, and whose idea of Heaven was immolation between the legs of a generously built woman.