The Half-Made World

by Felix Gilman

  She woke and washed her face with water from the jug. There was no mirror, so she looked blearily in the window for her reflection; and she screamed. The jug fell and shattered and cut her bare foot but she hardly noticed, because the white face suddenly at the narrow window pressed up against the glass and—

  For a moment the face had reminded her of that madman’s face from her most terrible memories, that face as it came running through the willows, and she had been transported back to childhood. But that face had been round and sweating and spectacled, and this was angular and jagged; and the eyes were ruby red; and though the killer’s face had been pale, it was nothing next to the inhuman chalk whiteness of the face at the window; and what hung around that face was not the green branches of the willows, but a filthy black mane of hair.

  It was one of the men of the hills, she realized, one of the aboriginal people of the West, who had lived in the land when it was still formless and unmade.

  The expression on the face was solemn, still.

  She calmed her breathing. Her foot started to sting.

  She was in her underclothes—but then the figure at the window was apparently naked, under his mane, and it seemed silly to stand on ceremony. She said, “Good afternoon.”

  He reached out a hand. The arm—beneath that black mane—was long, stick thin, and oddly articulated. The fingers were like a necklace of bones. With one black fingernail it began to tap on the glass.

  Perhaps the expression was not solemn, exactly, but simply unreadable—stiff as a crudely carved statue. Now she noticed that his jaw and the protrusions of his throat were quivering, as if with tremendous excitement. She wondered if he was able to speak.

  The black fingernail drummed a rhythm on the glass. It was not simple tapping; it had the quality of music, or language, or ritual. It grew quickly faster and faster and more complex, and a second nail joined it, developing surprising polyrhythms. Then it stopped; then it began again. The red eyes continued to watch her. The sound was oddly lovely. A song, always repeating. She stepped closer to the window. The finger struck a hard beat, and the glass cracked—

  She shrieked and jumped back. In the same moment, a big man in a white shirt came into view and struck the Hillman on the back with a stick. “Hurry up! Move on! You leave her alone!” He yanked on the Hillman’s chain and dragged him stumbling away from the window. “Sorry, ma’am.” He tipped his hat. “Won’t happen again.”

  They moved away, and the rest of the Hillfolk gang came into view, half a dozen of them, and almost at once she lost track of which had been the one at her window.

  What had he wanted from her?

  The golden pocket watch ticked quietly on her bedside table, where it sat on top of her copy of the Child’s History and beside her flask of nerve tonic. She picked it up, more for comfort than for anything else, and was shocked to see that the whole strange communication had taken place in a matter of moments. It had felt like hours.

  Negotiations with Mr. Bond went poorly.

  He was a big man, aggressive, with a bald and sunburned head and a boxer’s body stuffed into braces and a sweat-stained shirt, and he looked entirely out of place sitting at a desk in a little warehouse office doing bookkeeping, but that was how Liv found him. He barked:

  “Don’t need passengers. Going to be a hard trip. Where do you think you are?”

  “Yes, Mr. Bond, everyone tells me the journey is dangerous. That fact has been more than adequately impressed upon me. I can pay.”

  He named a sum that was quite outrageous, and when her face fell, he laughed.

  “They say you’re a doctor—know anything about horses?”

  “No.”

  “Can you set a broken bone, at least?”

  “I’m not that kind of doctor, Mr. Bond.”

  “Then we don’t need you.”

  Maggfrid was waiting outside Bond’s warehouse. He looked so downcast when he saw Liv’s face that she laughed and impulsively hugged him. “Smile, Maggfrid! Mr. Harrison says good things come to those who keep smiling.”

  She’d read Harrison’s pamphlet in her hotel room that afternoon. It didn’t take her long—the print was large and the thoughts it expressed simple to the point of vacuity. It was titled Samson Smiles’ Commonplace Book, Or, The Book of the New Thought. Mr. Smiles himself, pictured in black-and-white on the frontispiece, was a well-dressed and muttonchopped gentleman whose face bore an expression of almost holy serenity. His Commonplace Book consisted of short repetitive maxims on the virtues of confidence, enthusiasm, perseverance, self-help, and moral character. Hope is the mother of success, for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles. Liv had found it inane. The world smiles on a man who smiles! Was this what passed for thought out here? Seize the day! Was this what passed for religion? The world is what we make it.

  She’d tried to think of something nice to say about it, should Harrison ask; she’d decided she could more or less honestly say, “Charming!”

  Now she walked with Maggfrid through the town and watched the teams of men at work, digging up their town, rerouting its streets, erecting new walls, and driving new canals, all of them sweating and red-brown with mud, and she thought: The world is what we make it. The notion was at once intimidating and encouraging.

  “Smile, Maggfrid! We’ll find a way.”

  She walked down by the bend of the river, where half a dozen men swung their picks in ditches, waist deep in muddy water. The river was slow, placid and sleepy—hard to imagine danger waited along it. It was meant to be peaceful, she thought. It—

  “Fuck are you smiling at, lady?”

  She started. One of the workmen had lowered his pick and was watching her with a vicious grin.

  “You want to get down here with us? You want to get wet?”

  Another of them laughed and shouted, “Harrison sent us a whore! Come on, get down here.”

  The chant went up: “Harrison sent us a whore! Harrison . . .”

  She turned away. “Maggfrid, come away. Back to the hotel—”

  Maggfrid let out a tremendous bellow of rage and leapt down into the ditch. Muddy water splashed and the diggers fell back in shock as Maggfrid reached out and struck the first man to speak hard on the side of the head. He tore the pick from the hands of the second man and hit him in the gut so that he doubled over in the water. He wrestled with a third man and a fourth; they thrashed in the mud and he threw them aside. The shaft of a spade hit his back with a terrible dull smack and he didn’t seem to notice. Roaring, he held a man’s head under. . . .

  “Maggfrid! Maggfrid! Stop at once. Maggfrid, please!”

  At the sound of her voice he stopped. He turned to her with an uncertain smile on his face. “Maggfrid, that’s enough.” She held out a hand to him, and he pulled himself dripping and filthy out of the ditch. The other men crawled away, moaning. “Oh, Maggfrid. You’re not a violent man. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you here, Maggfrid. Oh . . .”

  She heard a slow clapping behind her. She turned to see Mr. Bond, shirtsleeves rolled up, clapping as he came briskly down the hill. Two of his employees followed behind him.

  “This one yours, Doctor?”

  “Yes, Mr. Bond. This is a friend of mine, and a patient. I apologize for any injuries to these men, if they were your men, but they—”

  “Fuck ’em. Not mine. Harrison’s. Your big friend got a name?”

  “His name is Maggfrid.”

  “He gave them what for, all right. One hell of a show, that was. He’s a fighter, your friend.”

  “He’s not a fighter, Mr. Bond.”

  “Strong, too. Fierce. I could use a man like that when we go west.”

  She shook her head. “He’s not a fighter, Mr. Bond.” He could have been a fighter, she thought; he could have been a monster. He had been prone to rages when she’d first found him. Years of work had made him gentle.

  Bond looked Maggfrid up and down. “Well, why don’t we let him decide that?
”

  Maggfrid met Liv’s anxious eyes, then looked away. Then he smiled broadly and nodded his great head.

  “Maggfrid,” Liv said, “Are you—?”

  “Course he’s sure,” Bond said. “Excellent.” Bond clapped Maggfrid on the shoulder. Big as Bond was, Maggfrid towered over him. A great eager-to-please smile split Maggfrid’s white moon of a face. It made Liv uneasy. But she saw no alternative.

  Bond rubbed his hands together. “Let’s talk about your fare, Doctor.”

  “First let’s talk about my friend’s wages, Mr. Bond.”

  “That’s the spirit, Doctor. Let’s talk business.”

  CHAPTER 6

  KINGSTOWN

  Lowry looked out the window once on his journey west from Harrow Cross to Kingstown, and regretted it immediately. He was used to the Southeast, and the lands around Angelus, where the Line’s grip was strongest, where the landscape was properly shaped by industry. Out on this farthest western extremity of the Line, there was nothing to be seen for a hundred miles across flat plains and rolling red hills but meaningless empty sky and dirt. A formless land, waiting to be built. The matchstick figures of a pack of Hillfolk loped along a ragged hillside and lifted their heads as the Engine passed by. . . . Awful. Lowry shuddered, closed the blind, sat in the gloom of his passenger car, and waited.

  He had nothing to do. The work of the Engine went on around him, and he was not needed. He was left idle as any civilian. He hated idleness. Twice an hour, his thoughts switchbacked from sweaty-palmed nervous hope—because he might be traveling toward some unexpected, unimaginable promotion—to despair—because he might equally well be traveling to his own court-martial, for any one of the countless sins of which he was, he didn’t doubt, entirely guilty.

  After a while, he removed a volume of the Black File from his suitcases and passed his time studying it: the names and faces and the modus operandi and the long, long lists of crimes of his enemies, the enemies of all civilized people. . . . He told himself this study was useful work, but in fact he just found that the fog of self-righteous loathing that rolled over him whenever he opened the Black File soothed his nerves.

  He’d never visited Kingstown Station before. However, the Station’s physical and hierarchical organization was almost identical to that of Angelus Station—as one would expect, since both were designed according to the same principles of efficiency and good order. The two Stations, though they were thousands of miles apart, differed only in that Kingstown’s outer ring of fortifications was rather thicker than Angelus’s, and bristled with a gteater density of barbed wire and machine guns—but of course, this was wild, unsettled country.

  He quickly found his way to the relevant Desk where he was assigned a room and a temporary office, which was identical to the one he’d had back in Angelus.

  He waited to be summoned.

  They came for him at midnight. Two Privates of the Army of the Kingstown Engine banged on his door, waking him from dreamless sleep. When he answered the door, they turned smartly on their heels and disappeared down an unlit corridor, gesturing for him to follow. He did. Their boots echoed dully down the concrete hallways.

  A midnight summons almost invariably meant court-martial, or more often discipline without formal process, and so he didn’t even bother to ask the two Privates where they were leading him. They probably didn’t know, anyway. He trudged along in dismal silence, preparing himself for the worst, reminding himself that the Line’s wisdom was greater than his own.

  They led him into a windowless room, and left him there.

  The floor was gray tile. At the far side of the room was a steel table. Behind that were three chairs and an electric lamp. Behind the chairs and the lamp, there was another door.

  Presently three uniformed persons came through that door and sat at the chairs. Two of them were men. One of them was, Lowry guessed, a woman. With the light at their back, he could not make out their insignia or rank. Their faces were unremarkable, except that one of the men had only one ear, and their expressions told him nothing.

  He folded his hands behind his back to stop them shaking.

  One of them said, “Please sit, Lowry.”

  He looked around. There was nowhere obvious to sit.

  “Sit, Lowry.”

  Slowly, not sure whether this was the proper response, he sat cross-legged on the cold floor.

  “Do you know why you’re here, Sub-Invigilator (Third Class) Lowry?”

  He stared blankly at the tiles. “I submit myself to the judgment of the Line.”

  “You don’t know why you’re here.”

  “I’m sure there are reasons. I have not been informed of them.”

  One of them grunted and made a note on a piece of paper.

  The one Lowry thought was probably a woman said, “You have a long service record, Lowry.”

  A pocket of stubborn pride surfaced in him, like stomach acid, and he said, “I believe my record of service is exemplary.”

  “It’s adequate,” she said. “No more.”

  The one-eared man said, “Repeated indications of pride.”

  “Inappropriate sympathies,” said the other man. A deep and monotone voice.

  “Blunders,” the woman said, “Leading to the loss of men and matériel, and the slowing of progress.”

  “Yes,” Lowry said. He didn’t know what incidents they were referring to, but he was instantly quite sure they were correct. His face flushed and he continued to stare at the floor. “I regret my inadequacies.”

  “Very good.” The one-eared man made another note.

  The woman said, “Don’t despair, Lowry. Despair is not productive. Your record is not disgraceful. For instance, you’ve survived an unusual number of encounters with the Agents of our enemy. I understand you have made a special study of their habits. What are your feelings regarding them?”

  “Feelings?” Lowry shook his head. “Dogs. Vermin. Criminals. Scum. I don’t know. I do my job. They have to be put down.”

  She said, “Why?”

  He had no idea how to safely answer that question, so he remained silent.

  “What do you know about their masters?”

  He shrugged. “Monsters. Or delusions.”

  “You’re not curious about them?”

  “No, ma’am. In my experience, it makes no difference which demon they serve, or say they serve. If you need to know their individual peculiarities, their behaviors, you only got to look at the man himself. Or the woman. That’s all you need to get the job done.”

  “Their masters are real,” the woman said. “They are not delusions. The Agents are irrelevant. Criminal flotsam. Any lunatic will do. It’s their masters who are our enemy, their masters who make them dangerous.”

  Lowry shrugged again.

  “And their masters,” the woman said, “are immortal. Killing the Agent, smashing the vessel, only sends the master briefly back to their Lodge. Do you know that term?”

  “I’ve read it.” He’d seen it in interrogation records, in the pages of the Black File.

  “Immortal,” the woman said. “Much like the Engines we serve.”

  The comparison was so shocking, so unexpectedly foul, that Lowry could not stop his lip curling back in a snarl.

  The woman made a note. While she wrote, the man to her left spoke up. “Ever had any encounters with the First Folk, Lowry?”

  The snarl faded from Lowry’s face. He looked up, utterly confused. The question was bizarre.

  Clearly this was no ordinary disciplinary hearing. He tried not to look hopeful.

  “You mean the Hillfolk? No, sir.”

  “No?”

  “No—sorry, sir. Yes. I forgot. Yes. Ten years ago, when we razed Nemiah. There was a nest of Folk in the hills, had to be cleaned out. They were messing with our supply lines. Don’t know why. Stupid of them, really.”

  “You went in personally, I believe.”

  “That’s right. We used noisemakers abovegr
ound, then gas in the tunnels, but someone had to clear out what was left.”

  “Into their tunnels. Were you afraid?”

  He looked from face to face. “No,” said. “They’re only savages.”

  “You’re unimaginative, Lowry. That’s for the best.”

  “Sir—”

  The one-eared man interrupted, “Do you study history, Lowry?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Do you remember the Red Valley Republic?”

  “Yes, sir. A little. An enemy.”

  “What do you know about them?”

  “I was at the Battle of Black Cap Valley, sir.”

  “And?”

  Lowry shuddered, remembering. In the last days of the Line’s war against the Republic, the Engines had determined, in their infinite wisdom, that the situation called for one great final push, to put an end to the Republic’s insolence and to free the Line’s forces for operations on the western front, against the true enemy. This required full mobilization of all possible personnel. The children of the warrens under Angelus Station had been rounded up, packed into locked carriages, transported in the belly of the Engine without explanation halfway across the world, and delivered into hell. Lowry had been attached to a unit that had laid barbed wire, under cover of night, under fire, across the slippery black muck of the valley. He’d been ten years old.

  Lowry said, “I did my job, sir.”

  “Good. Good.” The man pointed to the scar he had in place of a left ear and said, “I was there, too. Does the name General Orlan Enver mean anything to you?”

  “He was one of their ringleaders, right? Dead, I suppose.”

  “No. Wait a moment, Sub-Invigilator (Third Class) Lowry.”

  The three officers put their heads together and conferred. Lowry waited. It seemed unlikely now that they would discipline him; so what did they want?

  The woman said, “Lowry. You are one of thousands who might equally well have been chosen for this task.”

  “Ma’am.”

  “You’re adequate. That’s all.”