The Half-Made World

by Felix Gilman

  “How shameful for us if that’s true!”

  “He died. Someone shot him. Doesn’t matter who. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s something to think about, isn’t it? Something to think about. I’m not a stupid man, Doctor.”

  “Of course not, Mr. Bond.”

  Her husband, the late Professor of Natural History, Doctor Bernhardt Alverhuysen, had indeed resembled Mr. Bond in size—though beneath Bond’s fat there was muscle, and Bond was sunburned where Bernhardt had been pale, and he was physically deft and sure-footed where Bernhardt had been clumsy. In fact, there was only the faintest shadow of a resemblance. Why did Bond remind her so of Bernhardt? Perhaps precisely because he was so different from all the men she’d known in Koenigswald; deep in alien territory, she sought out whatever traces of the familiar she could find.

  Bond’s arrogance, rudeness, and self-certainty reminded her of Bernhardt, too. And his lecturing—Bond had seemed taciturn back in Burren Hill, but out in the silent open spaces of the trail, he loved the sound of his own voice. Plants, weather, business, how to ride a horse and mend a wagon. He turned out to be surprisingly well informed and passionate on the industrial processes for which their cargo of bones were intended. Bernhardt had liked to talk philosophy. Bernhardt had had something of a romantic side, though deeply buried under bluster; did Bond?

  What she had told Bond was true. Bernhardt had died of a heart attack two years ago, at the dining table, in the middle of a peevish diatribe on Faculty politics, during the soup course.

  He’d been much, much older than her. She’d met him almost the very day she’d emerged from the Institute at Tuborren, where she had spent the greater part of her adolescence in treatment for shock, and certain related nervous conditions, arising out of the tragic death of her mother—a topic she most certainly did not intend to discuss with Mr. Bond. She’d been a pale, wan, sheltered little thing, uncertain of her place in the world—and Bernhardt been a great and substantial authority in his field, who had found her pretty.

  She’d been very fond of him, albeit in a distant, irritated sort of way, and had mourned him for an appropriate period; but afterwards she rarely missed him.

  It was a point of professional pride for Liv that she never deceived herself as to her own feelings.

  Bond sounded out those feelings one evening as they rode together beneath the cedars. He stared fixedly at the path ahead as he spoke, and he somehow managed to be rude and coy at once—

  “You won’t find a husband in that hospital of yours, Doctor.”

  “I’m not presently looking for another husband, Mr. Bond.”

  “None of us have forever to wait, Doctor.”

  —but she was touched anyway. “It’s a big world, Mr. Bond. Sometimes it seems as if we might have forever.”

  He was silent for a long minute. Then he said, “It does. Sometimes it does.”

  They talked about politics and history for the rest of the night.

  “That’s Conant,” Bond said. They came down a steep hillside, and a blazing sun was behind them and they cast long shadows. Spread out below was a little town in the bend of a river. Its walls were painted white, and it gleamed like a scatter of diamonds. The colors of nature around it were lurid, wild: the trees were brazen, the river muddy gold, the sky lush violet.

  “Not much of a town,” Bond said. “But you’ll get a horse there, and you and your big feller can find someone who knows the way to Gloriana.”

  “I think I know the way.” She shielded her eyes against the sun and looked south.

  “I guess you do.”

  She could see it for miles, across the grasslands. She’d never seen anything like it, but there was no doubt what it was. The black spires, the smoke. Gloriana, easternmost Station of the Line.

  “Watch yourself, Doctor. Some things are worse and weirder than Hillfolk.”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE NET

  What left Kingstown the next morning was not, as Lowry had imagined it might be, any small or secretive adventure into enemy territory. Conductor Banks’s Expeditionary Force consisted of 420 men; a commensurate number of troop trucks and staff cars; seven Heavier-Than-Air Vessels of both the rotary-wing and the ornithopter variety, lightly armed and stripped for scouting; eight Ironclads; two trucks containing wireless telegraphy equipment, one of which was redundant in case of emergencies; one truck containing five fixed guns; one truck containing mortars, rockets, noisemakers, gas; three trucks containing nothing but fuel and food; six trucks containing canvas, concrete, wire, and other parts and materials for the construction of a Forward Camp; and that wasn’t even mentioning the clawed and treaded earth-moving machinery that went ahead to clear mudslides and deadfalls, to widen narrow roads not made for the Line. The expedition roared into the hills like a chain saw, in a haze of dust and noise.

  Lowry found the noise an enormous comfort. If he kept his eyes down and didn’t look at the horizon, he might still be safely at home.

  Lowry had had one and only one face-to-face encounter with Conductor Banks, as the expedition gathered on the vast tarmac fields just outside Kingstown’s fortifications, shortly before it was due to set off. He approached the window of Banks’s staff car and waited patiently until the window at last wound down, and Lowry’s reflection was replaced by Banks’s face. As it turned out, Banks was a man of about Lowry’s size, little more than Lowry’s age, and with much the same sort of drab shapeless round-spectacled ghost of a face—except for the tracks of exhaustion and stress that invariably came with high command in the Line, which were more deeply cut on Banks than they’d ever been on Lowry.

  Banks’s lap was buried under a heap of reports, which he was studying through reading glasses. Large sections of text were blacked out.

  “Yes?”

  “Sub-Invigilator (Second Class) Lowry, sir.”

  “Right. Right. One of the advisers. The experts. The intelligence people.” Banks took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Do you know what we’re doing here, Lowry?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, sir. No, sir—I bet you fucking don’t. I don’t. Why should you? What’s your expertise in, Lowry?”

  “The enemy, sir. The—”

  “Who isn’t an expert in the fucking enemy, Lowry? What do you think we do all day? Let’s see—Can you talk to the Signal Corps, Lowry?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve worked with Signals—”

  “Good. I can’t make head or tails of any damn thing they say. I understand artillery, wheels and motors, fuel, supply lines, fortifications—not Signals. Report to S-I First Morningside, who’s another so-called expert all the way from Archway. He’s responsible for intelligence here and is acting in the absence of clearer orders as my second. Assist him with the Signals.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Lowry, come here. Lowry.”

  Lowry leaned closer.

  “Are you here to spy on me, Lowry?”

  “No, sir. My orders are to assist you in any—”

  “Four hundred and twenty of us. Another two thousand coming behind, Lowry, but no time to wait or fully mobilize or organize. Precipitous action. Seize and control each shitty little town in a patch of worthless red wasteland. Form a net, a circle. Why? It must be done immediately. No answer. Precipitous action; thirty years of service and never known precipitous action. Deliberation is what we are, Lowry, deliberation and control. Someone somewhere’s in a panic. A blunder? Maybe. Not mine. Not mine, Lowry. I do my duty. Forwardprogress! Right into the wasteland if that’s where it’s going, not my business. Not my blunder. I don’t complain. Tell them that, Lowry.”

  It could be advantageous to Lowry’s career to be taken for an informant for higher authorities; on the other hand, it could be dangerous to lie. He therefore stayed silent.

  “Get to work, Lowry.” Banks grunted with effort as he wound the window up.

  Sub-Invigilator (First) Morningside assigned Lowry to ride in the back of the Signal Cor
ps’ second truck, alongside the backup telegraph machinery and the senior officers of the Expeditionary Force’s Signal Corps. A Subaltern thrust a stack of files into Lowry’s hands.

  The files were hastily prepared. The machinery was all brand new. Brass sounders and copper wires and bulbous vacuum tubes were still polished and glittering. Rows and rows of keys rattled with what sounded like enthusiasm as the truck bounced and rolled down dirt roads.

  The senior officers of the Signal Corps were named Scale, Ditch, Benson, Collier, and Porter. Lowry introduced himself curtly, then sat in silence on the hard wooden bench and read the files.

  THE “HOUSE DOLOROUS”: INTRODUCTION

  As of Year 292 at the latest, reports place the General, see principally B.140.1–B.140.310, at a hospital on the farthest northwestern Rim, known as “The House Dolorous” aka “The Doll House,” hereinafter “The Hospital.” See C.12.21.iv–x. These reports are considered of uncertain but generally actionable reliability. See C.12.34.iii.

  The following report on the Hospital has been prepared in haste and is of limited reliability.

  The Hospital was founded in Year 281 by one Winston Howell II, father of the Hospital’s present director, and former resident of the town of Greenbank, see L.170.6. The Hospital has a very substantial endowment, provided primarily by Howell personally, out of the profits of the various silver-mining enterprises along the western rim with which his family was associated. The Hospital’s name is apparently derived from a romantic poem popular in the southern Baronies, and is of no significance.

  Howell II claimed in a Y285 memoir that he founded the Hospital after a dream in which a number of Hillfolk appeared to him in his office in Greenbank and led him into the hills to the Hospital’s future location. See infra 4. This account cannot be verified. See infra 5.

  The Hospital takes in the wounded from various conflicts over much of the western rim. A number of jurisdictions pay subscriptions to the Hospital to relieve them of their defectives, and this supplements the Hospital’s endowment. The Hospital maintains a strict policy of neutrality, and refuses equally to do business with us or the enemy.

  Its staff have few notable medical qualifications. However, the Hospital claims to be located on a site sacred to a spirit of the Hillfolk, which has healing properties. The extent of those healing properties cannot be verified, but the spirit appears to exist. It is most likely one of the minor aberrations that occur from time to time on the western rim, where human settlement is still recent and the conditions of creation unfixed. Cf. the “Red Plains Dust Devil,” N.7.1, the “White Rock Werewolf,” N.7.3, and the “Logris River Weeping Angel,” N.7.4. Like them, it is likely soon enough to dissipate under the pressure of its internal contradictions. In the mean time, however, it is capable of significant extensions of physical force in defense of the boundaries, personnel, and inmates of the Hospital. According to eyewitness accounts, see infra 10, it remains generally dormant, unless violence is used within its zone of influence, at which point it responds to the perpetrator with overwhelming force.

  In addition, the staff of the Hospital are reported to be intensely conscious of their security and defensive of their neutrality, and while their capacity for physical resistance is negligible, their irrational mindset is likely to complicate attempts at infiltration or negotiation. See infra 6–7.

  In the event that it should be necessary to execute the General (or other inmate), aerial bombardment is advised. In the event that it should be necessary to extract any such individual alive, nonviolent means, though challenging, will be necessary. See infra 8.

  The Expeditionary Force set up a temporary camp two miles south of Greenbank, on a broad expanse of rock and dirt. Weird rock formations towered overhead, fluted and curving like gigantic red flowers. They gave the camp a certain amount of shade from the constant oppressive sun, not to mention high lookout points, but they were hideous, and Lowry would happily have dynamited them flat.

  They circled the trucks. They sent out the Heavier-Than-Air Vessels to scout in a wide radius. They unloaded and set up the fixed guns and the telegraph machinery, which instantly began to clatter and buzz with messages, the gist of which was FASTER. FASTER. CLOSE THE NET.

  Sub-Invigilator (First) Morningside, who turned out to be a thoroughly insufferable prick, tasked Lowry with organizing the distribution of the men of the Signal Corps and their listening devices to each of the towns that ringed the Hospital.

  “Anyone strange comes through town,” Morningside said, “we have to be the first to know.” As if that wasn’t obvious.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Wire this whole slagging wasteland up. Organize it.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Lowry dispatched four men into Greenbank, two into Gooseneck, three into Fairsmith, three into World’s End.

  The little town of Kloan warranted only two sentences in the official files, and a faded and ancient photograph of a street with sad little buildings and some ragged bunting stretched from the rooftops. Something about it made Lowry uneasy, and he dispatched a dozen men to Kloan and made sure they were well armed.

  CHAPTER 9

  KLOAN

  Creedmoor rode hard and fast, north and west out of the Delta Baronies, through the high cold passes of the Opals, north of Jasper City, across the heartland prairies through thick green grass, leaping fences and waterways, day and night. His horse died beneath him. Another was ready for him, tied to a post at midnight in a little town south of Gibson that he never got a chance to learn the name of, because Marmion instantly said:

  —Move on.

  That horse died, too. Creedmoor thought he might die himself, that his old heart would give out, like a rat shaken in a terrier’s mouth. Every muscle, every joint, was constant agony. Marmion said:

  —Faster.

  Men of the Line might travel that distance in the belly of their Engines, on soft leather seats. No wonder they were so fat! But an Agent of the Gun couldn’t travel by Line, of course—he’d be sniffed out at once, by some damnable machine or snoop or other—and so it was the old ways for Creedmoor, the back roads, the hills, by day and by night. He caught a glimpse of himself in a dusty windowpane once, as he thundered down the Main Street of who-the-fuck-knew where, scattering women and children, and he was shocked by how old he looked, how red and lined in the face, how gray his hair was and how wild and ragged. It wounded his vanity. He always was a vain man.

  —You’ll kill me, old friend. I swear you’ll kill me at this pace.

  —Not yet. Faster.

  He swung wide north around Kingstown Station, though it added two days to his journey, because he feared their spotlights and their search parties and their tollbooths and checkpoints, especially in his rapidly advancing condition of decay and exhaustion. Therefore he approached the Doll House from the east, just north of Kloan, and so he happened to see the posters nailed to trees every half mile alongside the road north of town, which were already fading and wilting like vivid blue-green flowers in the awful heat, but which still cheerfully promised the arrival in Kloan of DR. SLOOP’S TRAVELING EMPORIUM OF PHYSIC AND PATENT-MEDICINES, that very morning, once and once only, special-featuring “PROFESSOR” HARRY RANSOM AND HIS INGENIOUS ELECTRICAL LIGHT-BRINGING APPARATUS. . . .

  —Medicine. Physic. Lights and amusements. A fair. Drink. Showgirls.

  —No time, Creedmoor. Pass the town by.

  —I shall die if I ride another hour without rest.

  —No, Creedmoor. Too dangerous. We believe the enemy is present in this area. You may attract their notice.

  —Fuck the enemy. I need medicine, by which I mean drink. Put the Goad to me if you like.

  —One hour, Creedmoor.

  —No more. On my honor.

  —We will remember this.

  There were few towns out there on the continent’s still-uncreated edge. None were more than twenty years old. Greenbank, which was a ways southwest of Kloan, was the biggest and th
e richest of them. Supposedly—if Creedmoor’s masters had not lied to him, which might or might not be the case—Dandy Fanshawe would be waiting there, worming in among the drifters of its bars and whorehouses. Abban the Lion and Drunkard Cuffee and Keane and Hang-’Em-High Washburne would scout the hills south of Greenbank. Together those five Agents—a mighty force—would be ready to meet Creedmoor once he emerged from the House and conduct him and the General away east.

  There was Gooseneck to the west, which was poor, but it had a bank; and there was also World’s End to the northwest, which was ugly and sickly, but it had a mine.

  And then there was Kloan, which had nothing special, except, apparently, Dr. Sloop and his medicines, and “Professor” Ransom and his apparatus.

  Kloan was a few long straight dirt roads lashed together roughly crosswise, with a lodging house and general store and similar in the dust where they joined; a sprawl of small constructions knocked up out of tin and wood surrounded them. There was a market square with a kind of rickety stage, which was no doubt the most exciting thing for miles around. It was peaceful and dull and drowsily drunken.

  Creedmoor rode in slowly, smiling and nodding. He left his horse at a hitching post and wandered into the market.

  The whole rough mess of Kloan was dressed in sun-faded bunting, strung from the eaves of the big houses, nailed over the doors of lesser structures. All flounced up like a whore’s skirts. Dressed up soft and pretty for market-day—it implied a town where women had considerable say in the running of things, which struck Creedmoor as a promising situation. The idling crowd was composed largely of farmers, but also of pleasant-looking young women. He turned to the young lady next to him and beamed broadly at her and winked. She went pink and hid her pretty face in her fan.