by Felix Gilman
Lowry’s hands shook. In decades of service, he had never, never once, had any direct communication with the Engines themselves. The fact that this communication was merely accidental, being intended for Morningside, only very slightly tarnished Lowry’s pride or reduced his terror.
“Thernstrom.”
“Sir.”
“Wire back.”
MORNINGSIDE DECEASED IN ACCIDENT ON FRONT LINE CAUSED BY OWN CARELESSNESS. SUB-INVIGILATOR 2 LOWRY ACTING IN MORNINGSIDE’S PLACE. WILL ACT AS YOU COMMAND. LOWRY.
There was no response for three hours. Lowry waited by the telegraph, moving only when his nerves got too bad and his stomach revolted and he was forced to go dry-heave outside.
At last the response came:
FOR LOWRY ONLY. FOR LOWRY ONLY. LOWRY, YOU ARE TO TAKE ACTING COMMAND. YOU ARE NOT SIGNIFICANTLY LESS ADEQUATE FOR THE TASK THAN MORNINGSIDE. BANKS MUST GO. ACT WITH OUR SANCTION. ANGELUS. ARCHWAY. ARKELY . . .
BOOK TWO
THE DOLL HOUSE
CHAPTER 16
EARLY DAYS
The Director of the House Dolorous had arranged for Liv to stay in an upstairs room, on the fifth floor of the East Wing. Maggfrid and two porters brought her bags up. One porter was missing an ear and an eye. The other was mercifully unwounded, though he had very nearly no teeth. She thanked them profusely, and asked them to escort Maggfrid down to his quarters—a bunk in a shared room on the second floor, West Wing. She asked for dinner to be brought to her. For two days, she hardly left her room.
The House terrified her.
“The aircraft,” she told the Director, “The incident with the—what’s the word?—the Agent—the thing at the gate—it rather shattered my nerves.” He was very understanding.
But the truth was that she simply couldn’t bear to face her new patients. There were too many of them. Their wounds, physical and mental, were too various, too terrible. She couldn’t tell the patients from the doctors—they all shared the same vague and haunted expression. Most of the doctors and staff were old wounded soldiers themselves. The House echoed with sobbing. There was no organization that she could discern. And a demon slumbered in the walls and under the earth. . . .
She felt herself falling back into the bad habits of her youth, of the dark years following her mother’s death. She despised herself for it.
On the third day, she woke early in the morning. She took three drops of her nerve tonic, which numbed her very helpfully. She spent an hour breathing slowly and deeply. She spent several minutes looking in the mirror, critically assessing her flaws, and her weakness, and her selfishness. Afterwards, she spent another few minutes practicing a confident unruffled smile. She placed the golden watch in her purse because she found its tick comforting, and she went to visit Director Howell in his office.
The Director’s office was at the back of the House, on the third floor, and its wide windows looked out over the gardens, which decades of painstaking effort had somehow made moderately green. Sunlight flooded the office. Everything in it was white and clean. In the gardens below, a dozen mad persons with wild and filthy hair sat stiffly beside the paths like dead trees.
The Director himself was a little dark-skinned man with round gold-rimmed spectacles, and a neat black beard, and a mild and reasonable smile. As Liv entered, he rose from his chair with a look of concern on his face.
“Good morning, Director!”
“Dr. Alverhuysen, are you sure you’re well—?”
“Of course!” She smiled. “Of course. Entirely too much work to do for us to waste time, don’t you think? I intend to begin with a study of the victims of the Line’s mind-bombs, the noisemakers. Uncharted territory, not yet visited by science—that’s where I can be of most use. We must all do what we can, don’t you agree, Director?”
“Fresh thinking, Dr. Alverhuysen. What a pleasure!”
The West Wing housed patients whose injuries were (primarily) physical, while the East Wing housed those whose injuries were (primarily) mental. The victims of the mind-bombs were housed on the East Wing’s second and third floors. Liv and the Director toured the cells, and she selected two to be her first subjects. She opened files on them under the names D and G.
D is a woman in her early twenties. From her features, which include a prominent forehead and pale, freckled complexion, I would judge that she is descended ultimately from settlers from Lundroy. Her pupils are abnormally enlarged, which gives her an appearance (likely false) of being quite fascinated by whatever she sees. She is 5' 2'' and somewhat overweight, though she is more physically active than is the norm among victims of the bombs—she is often found running heedlessly down the corridors or through the gardens. She has many bruises and scrapes.
She sings to herself constantly, generally love songs, most frequently something called “Daisy, My Dear,” an irritating composition that I am told is the work of the fashionable tunesmiths of Swing Street in distant Jasper City. The staff have therefore nicknamed her “Daisy.” In fact, her name is Colla Barber. She is the only daughter of a prominent Land Baron in the Delta, who is not incidentally a significant donor to the House. Four years ago, while out riding with a young man, she stumbled across a long-forgotten minefield.
She returns again and again to those songs. Based on my observations to date, this is typical of the victims of the bombs. Most of them have one or two fragments of conversation or knowledge remaining, quite arbitrarily; rather like the way in which (so the Child’s History tells me) when the Line bombards an ancient city with explosive rockets, whole districts may be flattened, but sometimes a single fine old church will be left standing.
Otherwise her responses to communication (words, gestures, touch) appear almost random. Nevertheless she is more active than the average sufferer, less closed off from the world. I have some access to information on her life before the bombs (whereas the lives of most sufferers are a mystery). I propose to begin with conversational therapy.
G is a man of uncertain age, most certainly very elderly. I judge him to be of mixed descent, primarily Dhravian. He is more than six feet tall, and very thin—in fact, I suspect that the House’s staff have neglected his feeding, and I have instructed that that is to cease. When I first found him, he had an immense and filthy white beard, which I had trimmed. For a man of his apparent age, he is remarkably healthy. Perhaps the victims of the bombs, being only half-alive, age more slowly than we do?
How he came to the House is uncertain. He has been in the House for at least seven years, probably more, and no records were kept of his arrival. This is quite typical. It is impossible at this point to determine when in his life he ran afoul of the bombs. If he speaks at all, which he does infrequently, he babbles garbled and nonsensical fragments of fairy tales, which makes me suspect that possibly he was damaged in infancy.
The staff have nicknamed him “the General,” for no clear reason; perhaps because there is something grand and military in his posture and the fierceness of his eye? I would not assume from the name that he was, in fact, an officer or even a soldier. The staff have given at least seven other patients the same unimaginative nickname, for equally trivial reasons. (There are also four “Barons” and innumerable “Princesses.”)
At first G seemed a hopeless case. He responds to nothing, and hardly moves. But his eyes are intelligent, and sad. Where we know nothing, we must admit that we know nothing, and trust to intuition. I propose to begin with the electrical therapy.
She took Daisy—Colla, her name was Colla, but it was terribly difficult not to think of her as Daisy—out into the garden. The grass was a hardy desert species, sharp to the touch, and the flowers were battered and dusty and harshly colored, and the garden was full of large red rocks. Still, the girl seemed to like it.
Through gentle motions, Liv encouraged her to sit.
“Colla,” she said. “It’s nice to get outside, isn’t it.”
Those huge eyes darted to the band of blue sky visible between the can
yon’s towering walls.
“You like to ride horses, don’t you, Colla?”
The eyes fixed intently on Liv then darted away.
“Colla—”
“Oh, Daisy, my dear, had I only the flair, to pen you a verse that’s as fair as your hair, or the perfume you wear, then I wouldn’t be in such a state of despair over you. . . .”
“Yes, Colla. I wonder where you first heard that song. Did someone sing it to you? A young man? Do you—?”
Daisy lurched suddenly to her feet. Still singing, she ran madly down the garden path, fell, cut her scalp on a rock, and lay there grinning and bloody, curled like a baby, and always still singing.
To Liv’s chagrin, Dr. Hamsa had been leaning against the back wall of the House, smoking and watching the whole affair.
“Bravo,” he said. “A triumph of modern science. Whatever would we do if you weren’t here to show us the way.”
The West Wing of the Doll House held a number of doctors and surgeons. They were a crude lot. Nearly all of them were military men, and they approached disease and injury like an enemy, to be cut out or bludgeoned into submission. They liked to be called “Doc” or “Sawbones” and Liv could never keep their names straight. The distinction between surgeons on the one hand and guards and porters and handymen on the other was not rigorous, and seemed to depend mostly on who’d happened to have brought a saw with them when they drifted into the House’s shadow. That they didn’t kill more people was surely a tribute to the healing power of the Spirit below.
The East Wing, where the mad patients were kept, had only two doctors, not counting Liv. One was a Mr. Bloom, who wasn’t really a doctor at all, but a Smiler, who bothered the patients with pamphlets and meeting circles and encouragement to “buck up.” The other was Dr. Hamsa, who claimed proudly to have studied at Vansittart University in Jasper City. Liv was only passingly familiar with the institution. If Hamsa was typical of its graduates, she was not impressed. She suspected he might have been expelled. He was unshaven, slovenly, seedy. He abused medications for recreational purposes. He had a simple and rigid theory of psychological correspondences, according to which each patient’s psychic wound was supposed to mirror some physical wound sustained at some point during their lives, the soul-stuff being composed of the same matter as the body: so that aphasia was a sign of an injury to the jaw; hysteria, of course, arose from damage to the womb; and mania was connected for unclear reasons to injuries of the hands. When he first explained this to her, Liv gently offered obvious counterexamples. He never forgave her.
Both of them regarded the victims of the mind-bombs as hopeless.
“The cause is very simple,” Hamsa said. “Engines did this. Their noise brutalizes every part of the body and soul at once and leaves nothing behind. Therefore the Spirit is powerless to heal them, because there is nothing to heal; and because, though the Spirit is strong, the Engines are stronger. Cleverer. I know you think you’re cleverer than us, but are you cleverer than them?”
“Buck up,” Bloom said. “Some things aren’t meant to be. The trick is to keep on smiling.”
Maggfrid helped her move the General—G—down from his cell and into her office.
Maggfrid wore the white uniform of the House staff, and seemed delighted by it, though it didn’t fit: the shoulders were tight, and the collar simply had no hope of contending with his neck. He was already popular among the staff—a great deal more popular than Liv, in fact—in part because of his good nature, and in part because he could lift and carry as much as any three ordinary men.
He carried the General in his arms like a baby.
Liv’s office was on the first floor, at the front of the House. It was still—despite her complaints—unfinished and largely unfurnished, and it smelled of sawdust. Still, it had a couple of chairs. Maggfrid sat the General in one of them.
The General quickly arranged himself in a posture of fierce erect attention, bony brown hands gripping the armrests, and stared out the window onto an expanse of rockscape and wire fence as if it contained something of enormous significance.
Maggfrid leaned against a half-constructed bookshelf and watched curiously as Liv unpacked the electric therapy apparatus from its leather case. It consisted mostly of leather straps, plates of copper, bands of wire, and a wooden box with dials and two meters of mercury. It was the most advanced and experimental thing at the Academy in Lodenstein, and there was certainly nothing like it for a thousand miles around the Doll House.
The General appeared to glance at it, then glance away. “Once upon a time,” he said, very gravely, “a peddler came to the beautiful palace of bone with a magic box. It contained all the feathers in the world.”
He seemed to have nothing more to add.
Outside the window there was a small, ancient portable generator—the only source of electricity in the House. It was Line manufacture. One of the patients had brought it with him; he’d claimed it from a battlefield, where he’d been fighting in behalf of a Free City that had, without his knowing it, been fighting in behalf of the Gun. He’d stolen some valuable machinery but lost an arm.
“Maggfrid,” Liv said. “The generator, please.”
He began to climb out the window.
“The door, please, Maggfrid. Go around.”
While she waited for him to find his way, she studied the General. Now that he was trimmed and cleaned, there was something familiar about him. He vaguely reminded her of some of the old professors at the Academy, the ones who’d been ancient back in her mother’s day, when she was only a girl.
“Yes!” Maggrid shouted. “Yes! Right!”
“Like I showed you, Maggfrid.”
He leaned forward and threw all his weight onto the generator’s rusty mechanism. It roared into life, and started to smoke.
She attached the apparatus to the General’s forehead. His skin was paper thin.
“This may hurt a little,” she said. “If there’s anything in there to be hurt. But it may spark some life into the embers. It may build new connections. It may—oh, well.”
She turned a dial.
Nothing happened.
She turned the dial a little farther, and the General’s eyelid twitched.
He continued to stare silently out the window.
“That’s enough, Maggfrid.”
She sighed. Of course, she hadn’t expected a miracle, but part of her had hoped. . . . She made a note in G’s file:
Not immediately promising.
She went walking.
In addition to her studies into the victims of the mind-bombs, she was also responsible for a number of more ordinary patients, who suffered from simple shell-shock, depression, stress, and trauma. In fact, it was something of a relief to have a break from her studies, which were not going well.
There were no men of the Line among the House’s patients. There were plenty of men who’d lost limbs and eyes or the like in the service of some border state that had pledged itself to the Line, but no true-bred Linesmen; none of those born in the shafts and tunnels of Harrow Cross, or Dryden, or Kingstown, or Gloriana. There was no particular policy against it, the Director said; the House took anyone who needed it, so long as they would respect its peace; Linesmen just didn’t end up there. Rumor was the Line had its own unnatural surgeries.
Nor were there any Agents of the Gun. There were many soldiers from the ruins of Logtown or Sharp’s Hold, or other places that had thrown in on the Gun’s side in the War, but no Agents. Hardly surprising—by all accounts, the Agents were not in the business of being wounded. They fought until they were dead.
There was a one-armed man on the fourth floor who claimed to have fought with the Red Valley Republic, decades ago, in the days of that Republic’s brief glorious flourishing—and who, accordingly, held himself aloof from common soldiers of lesser causes. And there were men who’d fought under no flag at all, but only to defend their little homesteads from the great clashing armies of the world. And
there were two men who’d fought in the tunnels of the gold mines under Harker’s Mount, on opposite sides: one for the Zizek Extraction Co., one for Jared’s Limited. They’d lost their legs together in the same tunnel collapse: now they were the best of friends.
Despite their varied allegiances, the inmates never fought each other. There was rarely a harsh word exchanged, even. Liv wondered how much of that was due to fear of the Spirit that slept below.
She stopped in on the room of Mr. Root Busro, on the fourth floor, who was by far her least depressing patient. He was unwounded—in fact, physically quite healthy. He didn’t sob or claw at his hair. Apart from the disconcerting way in which his gray eyes stared right through you, he wasn’t unpleasant to be around. His one peculiarity was that he was quite convinced that the world as it appeared was all in his own mind, and in particular that the warring forces of Line and Gun that crashed back and forth across it were merely the opposing forces of his own diseased will.
“I feel just awful about it,” he said. “But it’s not my fault. I’m not well.”
“You may rest assured that no one blames you, Mr. Busro.”
“Of course, you can’t help me, Doctor, since you’re only a thing in my mind, too, and it’s the mind that’s the problem.”
“Well, perhaps we can both do our best.”
“I do enjoy your visits, though.”
After Busro, she visited a young girl called Bella, who’d lost her family and a leg to a stray rocket, and who was (again) on the verge of suicide. As Liv and Bella talked, Dr. Hamsa passed outside, in conversation with one of the House’s guards—Renato, she thought his name was—and she overheard them talking gravely of “news of a massacre at Kloan . . . agents of the Powers . . . many dead, no one apprehended.” Her blood ran cold. Bella just stared glumly at her feet and shrugged, as if to say, See?
