The Half-Made World

by Felix Gilman

  “Maggfrid. Come on, Maggfrid. Shall we play a game?”

  She no longer studied his condition—she had accepted long ago it was congenital, and incurable. But he still enjoyed the motions of her analysis—the cards, the questions. It calmed him. He answered her questions with great seriousness, as if he were engaged in a project of enormous importance.

  Why not? It would pass the time.

  Maggfrid got the small medicine bag down from the compartment. Under the calipers and the various vials of brightly colored serums and powders were the cards.

  The apparatus she used for the electric-cure was in the big black case overhead, safely cushioned in rags and old curtains. The applicator needles and plates, and the tongue depressors without which it was not safe, were all in the smaller bag.

  She shuffled the cards and took the first one off the top of the pile. It was made of stiff wheat-yellow stock; it was printed with a complex dark pattern. “What do you see, Maggfrid?”

  “. . . a dog.”

  “Very good. And this?”

  “. . . a house.”

  “Excellent. Do you remember the name of the town we left this morning?”

  “. . . ”

  “It was called Gloriana, Maggfrid. But never mind. No, don’t look so sad. Let’s look at this card again, shall we?”

  Time passed and outside the cabin the day wore into evening, though the monotone electric light inside never changed. At last Maggfrid slept, tired by his efforts. She tapped out three green smoky drops of her nerve tonic into a glass of water and soon she joined him, her bright hair lolling on the black of the seat back.

  The Engine rushed endlessly on, never stopping, seemingly never swerving—though in fact, Liv knew from the maps she’d studied that it was curving in a wide arc south and southwest through the lands of the Line and then west out into the wild lands. Green hills gave way to sage and rust red. If the stories were true, then ahead of them in the dark untamed hills of the night waited Agents of the Gun. Liv wasn’t sure whether to fear them or not—she could hardly believe that any man could assault or even slow that dreadful Engine on which she traveled, no matter what sort of spirit or demon they’d trucked with.

  The Engine obliterated space, blurred solid earth into a thin unearthly haze, through which it passed with hideous sea-monster grace.

  The noise waxed and waned but never ceased. The chatter of pistons and hammers; low and sad moaning of steel under stress; the grinding of gears and the hiss of steam. The Song of the Line. What were they singing to each other? Orders and plans and schemes, no doubt. They planned in terms of leagues and multitudes. They sang to each other all across the continent.

  Periodically Liv checked her golden pocket watch. It didn’t work; it had stopped entirely soon after she boarded the carriage. She had no good idea how much time was passing.

  She opened the blind and saw that they were passing through the foothills of gray and white-capped and distant mountains. They rushed through dark pines. She closed the blind. When she opened it again—an hour, two hours later?—the mountains were gone.

  Liv wrote in her journal. Maggfrid closed his eyes and listened; he seemed to find the scratching of her pen soothing. He had a touching faith in science. His brow twitched.

  I am aboard the Gloriana Engine, in Compartment 317C. Sometimes I am too excited to read, and at other times I am dreadfully bored. None of the other passengers come to talk to me. There is none of the camaraderie of a sea voyage, or of Mr. Bond’s caravan. And I dare not intrude on them. It would seem sacrilegious, somehow.

  The food is quite appalling. It tastes of ash and coal and dust.

  What did the Engine look like? I saw it on the Concourse, but only in shadow, and besides, the memory fades. I cannot quite express it in words. I might try to sketch its machinery, as I have sketched in these pages the neuron, the cerebellum, the pituitary gland—but to do so, I think, would miss its essence. I can say that it was long, very long; it was four, five men tall. It was jet-black and it smoked. It was plated with extrusions and grilles and thorns of iron that might have been armor, and might have been machinery, but which in any case made it rough, uneven, asymmetrical, and hideous. It reminded me somewhat of the ink-blot tests devised by Professor Kohler. It reminded me also somewhat of storm-clouds. From the complex cowling at the very front of the engine two lights shone through the gloom and the smoke of the Concourse. The light was the gray of moths’ wings or dirty old ice.

  The carriages behind the Engine stretched out into the distance until the smoke and shadows of the Concourse swallowed them. I could not count them. A mile or more of carriages. Each journey of this thing carries the population of the town of Lodenstein back and forth across the continent. This world is mobile.

  And the Gloriana Engine itself is more than a century old. It features prominently in a number of ancient battles recounted in Mr. General Enver’s Child’s History. Its physical form was destroyed once, by the forces of its adversary, in 1800 or thereabouts. It returned. The black coal dust that gathers in its upswept corners, that I breathe in as I write this, is ancient dust. For all that time this machine has run in its tracks, back and forth, across the countless miles. What is my own journey in comparison?

  The lights went dim. The seats stretched with a groan of rust out into bunks. Liv closed her journal. The lights went out. In the darkness the Linesmen’s black boots clanked through the corridors. So many of them! And all so much the same. Massing for war, or business, or some mysterious and complex project. She’d overheard them talking in the corridor outside; many of them would be disgorged at Ravenbrook, birthed back into the solid and sunlit world . . .

  Morning light streamed in through the cracks of the blind, making visible all the cabin’s dust and dark slow-settling soot.

  Liv pulled back the blind. They were racing across white salt flats that gleamed like a mirror; running like a black line across new paper; smoke tumbling from them like spilled ink.

  Mountains in the distance again. So much distance. Habitations and cultivation became fewer and fewer as they went west—the world becoming crude, wild, unnamed, only half-made—closer and closer to that nameless Western Sea where, they said, unformed land became fog and wild water and fire and night. . . .

  The world blurred, and a sudden and surprising mood of exhilaration seized her. Koenigswald and the Academy and her old life were ten thousand miles behind her, and the world was a blur, the world was a dream, the world was unmade. Anything was possible. Wasn’t this what she’d come here for? She could hardly wait to step out into the world again and begin to remake it.

  She noticed a shanty town out on the salt-flats. Little black dots of shacks—were those laborers bent double in salt-traps?—rushed up close and vanished at once behind. Perhaps the Engine had obliterated it with the boom of its passing, Liv thought. She let the blind fall again; the glare hurt her eyes. She blinked in the dark of the cabin, but the bright crude shapes of the world outside were burned into her vision.

  Within the hour they’d left the salt-flats far behind.

  It never stopped; there was never a chance to deboard and breathe fresh air. Liv’s mood of exhilaration came and went. She stepped out into the corridor sometimes, but the Linesmen who worked there looked at her with such annoyance and distaste that she soon retreated. Her legs and her back were stiff with disuse. No wonder the men of the Line were so stooped.

  On the third night, someone came to her—she woke to a bright light in her face. She’d been dreaming she was before a blazing fire. She blinked slowly and in the glare, she could make out the vague shape of a man in black. He sat on the bunk opposite, leaning forward. He wore round reflective spectacles, a broad-brimmed hat; all else was dark. Maggfrid was asleep, slumped in shadows, and Liv herself was drowsy. She noted dispassionately a sharp glittering needle entering her forearm.

  “Mrs. Alverhuysen? Sorry to bother you, ma’am.”

  He had an ugly hoarse voic
e—a Linesman’s voice. Her head lolled and his rough hand reached out to her cheek to steady her, to fix her gaze in the harsh light. He had very dirty nails.

  “Steady on there, ma’am. The Line’s got questions for you. About your destination. I hear you’re a doctor. I hear you’re headed out west.”

  Her whole arm was numb, and very cold. She found herself nodding, without intending to. A small part of her mind wondered with dispassionate curiosity what they’d drugged her with.

  He spoke very slowly and patiently. It rather reminded Liv of the way she sometimes spoke to Maggfrid, and she disliked it, but she seemed unable to object.

  “You’re going to Kingstown. Then where?”

  Her own words were a distant buzz in her ears. She wasn’t sure what she’d said, but apparently it pleased him, because he favored her with an unappealing smirk.

  “Good, good. Thought you might be.”

  He blurred. “Stay awake now, ma’am.”

  He reached out and pinched her arm.

  “Dangerous country. Are you going there alone?”

  She turned her head to Maggfrid, who remained slumped immobile on his seat. She realized that she would not have woken him to face this horrible apparition with her, even had she been able to call out, which it appeared she was not.

  “Right. Him. The defective. Yes, he’s on the manifest, we know. Disgusting. Anyone else? Anyone worse? Meeting anyone? A nice honest naïve young woman like you, a visitor to this part of the world, some handsome fellow talks you into helping him with something that doesn’t sound quite right . . . Do you know what I’m talking about? No? No. All right.”

  Her head lolled. He snapped his fingers under her nose.

  “Your purpose at this Hospital? Any particular patients in mind? Any . . .”

  She drifted again. He slapped her and answers tumbled out. Then it seemed some more time had passed and he was hunched over, rummaging through her possessions. He sniffed at her flask of nerve tonic and snorted contemptuously.

  “Opium-fiend, then. Unreliable. Oh, well.”

  He left dirty thumbprints on her journals and creased the pages of the Child’s History. He lifted up her golden watch to the light and rattled it.

  “Huh. All right.”

  Other men entered. Two or more—she couldn’t count. Gray, black, indistinct. They opened briefcases and removed complicated metal instruments, pincers, spools of copper wire.

  “She’s watching us.”

  “Right. Sleep, Doctor.”

  Someone’s hand reached out and pushed down on the plunger of the needle in her forearm. Something cold and annihilating rushed into the line of her veins, and she was flushed out of the light into silence and darkness. The black thundering singing monster these ugly men served carried them all through the night and along the silver web of the Line and across the dark continent into the West. . . .

  In the morning, Liv remembered almost none of it. She had a vague recollection that some passing Linesmen had disrupted her sleep and been intolerably rude. She put her stiffness down to her prolonged immobility on hard seats. Imperiously she insisted on walking up and down the corridors to restore the healthy flow of blood and humors; the Linesmen grumbled but tolerated it.

  They changed Engines at Harrow Cross. Three days after that, they arrived at Kingstown Station, the Line’s westernmost terminus. After that it was horse-drawn wagons on roads then dust trails, then mules, then finally she followed her local guide on foot. Liv’s watch started working again, and so she knew exactly how slowly they crawled over those broken red hills. Westward; out to the edge of things. There were ravens in the sky, and things stranger than ravens; in the distance she saw the heavy iron aircraft of the Line, droning and smoking, hovering like hawks. What were they hunting?

  They descended a narrow slippery trail into a shadowed canyon, wide as the broad flat river that flowed beside the Academy, deeper than—well, certainly deeper than anything Liv could think to compare it to!

  As they passed into the shadow of the canyon, there was a dark smoke-cloud on the horizon and she thought of war. Was the House safe? Of course not. Of course not! She had not come here to be safe. She ached, and she was tired, and she felt purposeful and strong.

  Her guide pointed. “There.”

  There was a fence strung from side to side of the canyon, and a gatehouse, and behind it loomed what could only be the House. It hid in the shadow of the canyon’s walls. It was a sprawling five-story mansion, painted in fading eggshell blue, with accents of a sickly white. Broad eaves like white eyebrows on an old man’s face stretched from side to side. Its upper windows gleamed bright, its lower windows were shadowed. Beneath it there were gardens, outhouses, and distant matchstick men performing what looked like healthy exercises.

  There were guards at the gate, dressed in white. They straightened up as Liv approached, and reached for their rifles.

  There was an echo of footsteps down the ravine. She looked over her shoulder; behind her a little group was approaching on foot. Some of them were dressed in rags, wild-bearded and blank-eyed. A handsome gray-haired gentleman led them. More visitors to the House? Patients, possibly. They looked like they’d had a hard journey. She wondered what their story was; she doubted it was as strange as hers!

  CHAPTER 13

  CREEDMOOR AT WORK

  It had taken Creedmoor some twenty-four hours—after departing Kloan, in embarrassing circumstances—to find a suitable group to which to attach himself. It was a procession of the walking wounded, the mad, the blind, and the lame—mostly the mad. They were being escorted through the deep ravines by a weather-beaten man in a dusty white jacket, with a rifle on his back, who held the rope to which they were all bound wrapped loosely round his right arm. They were en route to the House Dolorous, and doctors, and the healing balm of the hospital’s mysterious Spirit—about which Creedmoor remained skeptical.

  First he caught their scent. The mad were not great observers of hygiene. He stalked them. He crouched behind a red rock at the top of the valley and watched them shuffle along the trail below.

  —Damn it, will you look at these people. Will you just look at them. Did you ever see such a slack-jawed and sorry bunch, shuffling along in the dust, in the heat? Moaning and mumbling: oh, look at their faces! This is no way to live. Oh, will you look at them. I wonder what side they fought for, before the madness took them. Maybe no side at all. Innocents, caught in the deathly machine. What a terrible bill of indictment against us all these are; each one a count we cannot answer.

  —They fell because they are weak, Creedmoor. Now they are only things to be used.

  —Well, that’s one point of view, certainly.

  That sort of insincere agreeability irritated Marmion intensely, which was one of the few pleasures available to Creedmoor when he was at work.

  Another was tobacco. He hunkered down behind the red rock, opened his tarnished tobacco case, and rolled a cigarette. He struck the match behind the rock so that the little procession below wouldn’t see the flash, cupping it in his dirty hands though there was no wind. He tossed the dead match into a clump of thorny weed.

  —Oh, but will you just look at this one, in the front. Look at his flat cow eyes and his inbred’s weak chin and snaggled teeth and the way he shuffles. Look at the daft old bitch behind him with the hair like tumbleweed and the rags and the withered old gums in her mouth that’s sucking the air, look, like it’s sugar-candy. Fuck, will you look at the one with the smile. Look at these addled and ruined shufflers. This is so very sad.

  —Never mind the madmen. Keep an eye on their leader. He is armed and watchful.

  —Oh, sure, and he’s the worst of the sorry bunch. Look how proud he looks! Do-gooder. Who does he think he’s helping, running these people all over the backcountry, holding their hands and wiping their asses? Taking them to rot in hospital? No one will thank him. Kinder to kill them.

  —For now we need them. Later you may kill them.
>
  —I was joking, my bloodthirsty humorless friend.

  —Were you? Good. We like our servants joyful.

  Creedmoor smoked. The tobacco was stale and unpleasant. In the ravine below, one of the mad folk had fallen over, pulling his neighbors with him, and their white-jacketed leader was trying to help them to their feet.

  —An ugly business. No words can hide that.

  —But we do not like self-pity, Creedmoor. Go to work.

  —One moment.

  —Go to work.

  —One moment.

  —You are disrespectful, Creedmoor.

  —Do you know, my friend? They say that the Engines of our great enemy communicate with their servants only at a distance, by telegraph wire, by electric cable. Their Song is too terrible for any man to hear nakedly, not without ending up like these poor bastards down below. You natter and nag in my ear like a badly chosen wife. What does it say about man, do you think, that we have such an easy rapport with your murderous kind? Nothing good. What does it say about you?

  It did not respond. It was sulking, he thought; he’d offended it. They had a remarkable capacity for sulking. Their pride was easily stung. Sometimes Creedmoor imagined the dreadful and unearthly Lodge of the Guns as a windowless Old Folks Home where bitter old men sat in the dark and sucked their gums and moaned endlessly about forgotten wrongs, meaningless slights, ancient pointless feuds and grudges.

  His master sulked and throbbed darkly until the little hiding place behind the red rock grew uncomfortable and close. There was a stink of sulfur. It was almost audible, like the place swarmed with wasps. And besides, the shuffling party on the dust road below was moving along, out of sight. He took a last bitter drag on his cigarette, put his hat back on his head, patted the pockets of his long gray coat, and stepped out into the glare of the red hills.