The Half-Made World

by Felix Gilman

  On the way back, she got lost. In her early days in the Doll House, Liv was forever getting lost. Its corridors were narrow and not well lit. They seemed impossibly long and labyrinthine. They were identical everywhere, painted either a funereal white, or a soft eggshell blue, which could be sometimes soothing and sometimes sad. The corridors were never empty, but the people one met were generally even less certain of their whereabouts than Liv was.

  She turned a corner and bumped into John Cockle. He appeared to be replacing the hinges on one of the patients’ doors.

  He gave her a cheery wave. “It creaks,” he explained. “Can’t have that, can we? Will give the little ones nightmares.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Cockle.”

  “Good afternoon to you, too, Doc.”

  “You’re supposed to be finishing my office.”

  “Hasn’t slipped my mind even for a moment. When I’m done, you’ll have the finest office any doctor ever enjoyed. Your friends from back East will come visit just to take a look at it. As it happens, I myself am a Lundroyman by birth, no native of these parts, so I know what it’s like to be far from home—”

  “Well, you seem to have made yourself quite at home here, Mr. Cockle.”

  He grinned.

  Cockle seemed ubiquitous; one bumped into him everywhere, except, it seemed, where he was supposed to be. After his heroics at the gate, he’d been instantly welcomed onto the House’s staff. He wasn’t a very good carpenter, and he wasn’t a very reliable handyman, but it seemed that was what he wanted to be, and he certainly gave an impression of hard work. He was friendly with everyone. In particular, it seemed that all the doctors who most resented and disliked Liv thought Creedmoor was just the swellest fellow ever. . . .

  She found him unnerving.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Cockle.”

  “John, please. Otherwise I get confused. If you’re looking for the stairs, Doc, it’s left and left again and then, and this is the trick, right. . . .”

  The Child’s History said:

  Worst among the weapons of the Line is something you may not think of as a weapon at all: their noise. Yes, strange as it seems, their noise! The noise of the Engines is the noise of fear and submission. All those who hear it are diminished. This is why those who live in their grimy, awful, soot-choked Stations are so terribly stunted in their growth. Wickedly, though ingeniously, they have learned to focus it into a weapon. The bombs consist of hammers, pistons, sounding-plates, and amplifiers. The noise is said by those few who’ve heard its echoes and survived to be senseless and mad. It crushes the mind. What it destroys can never be rebuilt. This is a good lesson: What is destroyed is gone forever. This is why you must always strive to build, never to destroy.

  Gone forever. After two weeks, she’d made no progress with D or G. She felt under a great deal of pressure, and it was necessary, each night before bed, to take two drops of her nerve tonic in a glass of water. It was a great comfort simply to watch that smoky green fluid unfurl itself into the water.

  Liv took tea with the Director at noon. They sat on wicker chairs in the House’s herb garden, under the shade of parasols. A few patients listlessly wandered the garden’s paths—one of them in particular had a wound in his face like a—well, she tried not to stare. She focused her eyes instead on the Director’s neat black beard. She watched it enclose and devour a biscuit.

  “Perhaps you were hoping I would report some wonderful success,” she said. “I’m afraid I have to disappoint you.”

  “Early days yet, Dr. Alverhuysen,” he told her. He neatly dabbed the crumbs from his beard with a lace napkin. “Early days. This House has stood here for many years now. It outlived my father, and I expect it to outlive me and my sons. We do what we can; no more. So long as there is war, the work of the House Dolorous will never be done.”

  “You are, of course, correct, Director.”

  “Call me Richard, please.”

  “Richard, of course, you’re correct. But after coming all this way . . . the risks! I think I was a little mad to come. Sometimes strange moods seize me. I confess I hoped I might achieve miracles.”

  Her hand was shaking; she had spilled her tea. The Director was looking at her with concern. She flushed a little and dabbed with her napkin at her dress, muttering, “Early days. As you so rightly say. Oh, you must think me very foolish, Director! I am simply tired. And I suppose it was vain and foolish of me to hope that I could accomplish so much, so quickly, where others no less able have failed.”

  “Oh, but my dear! Where would we be without foolishness and vanity!” The Director’s eyes twinkled, and he dipped another biscuit in his tea. “Hard work must be leavened with hope. This is a serious house and a sad house, but also a house of wonders.” He raised a finger to cut off whatever she was about to say. “I think you need a break from your work, Dr. Alverhuysen. Get some rest. And come see me tomorrow morning. I want to show you something.”

  CHAPTER 17

  TELEGRAPH COMMUNION

  For a full day, Conductor Banks refused to emerge from his command tent or accept messengers, even after Lowry had the tent’s electricity supply cut. In the end, Lowry had to organize the ten men of the Signal Corps and march on Banks’s tent.

  He told the guards, “Stand aside. Sanction of the Engines.” They stared at their feet. They didn’t seem surprised.

  He sent in Subaltern Thernstrom first, just in case Banks was, in the extremity of his despair and humiliation, inclined to do something criminal. Who knew what a man might do when he knew—as Banks surely must—that the Engines had withdrawn their sanction from him?

  Thernstrom said, “Harmless, sir.” Lowry went in.

  The interior was crowded with shadows. Banks sat at his steel desk, typing.

  “One moment, Morningside.”

  “Lowry. Morningside is dead.”

  Banks looked up. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “Right. One moment, Lowry.”

  Lowry glanced at Banks’s desk. It looked like the Conductor was typing up a very long justification of his actions, or lack of action. It seemed to be mostly about the inevitability, regardless of individual human failings, of the progress of the Engines’ plan for the world.

  “That’s enough, Banks.”

  “One moment, Lowry.”

  “No one cares, Banks.”

  “For the record, Lowry.”

  Next to the typewriter sat an empty mug and Banks’s pistol.

  Lowry said, “Mr. Thernstrom.”

  “Sir?”

  “Watch him. Let him finish. Give him till evening shift.”

  So there were a few more hours before the moment when, at his desk and under Thernstrom’s eyes, Banks shot himself, and command formally passed to Lowry. Lowry was deeply glad of those hours. He was already being deluged with reports, queries, demands, problems. He stood firm. The attention of the Engines was on him.

  One of the first things he did was to order that the natives of Kloan be organized. They annoyed him, the way they hung around the outskirts of the Forward Camp, looking miserable and idle. Some of them had taken to begging. He ordered that they be put to work on construction and other menial labor, which freed up some of his forces to add to patrols, and to the siege of the Hospital. Additional forces were supposed to be en route from Kingstown but had not yet arrived, and manpower was short.

  “Besides,” he told Thernstrom, “it’ll do them good. The Line’s here to stay now, and they’d better get used to it.”

  After Banks shot himself, Lowry had a team of Kloanites, which he was amused to see included the former Mayor, remove the body from the tent, scrub everything clean, and dispose of Banks’s meaningless report. Then he moved in.

  At midnight, he wired to Kingstown:

  CONDUCTOR (ACTING) LOWRY, KLOAN FORWARD CAMP, ACTING IN PLACE OF BANKS, DECEASED. PROBLEM: SAFE DISTANCE FROM HOSPITAL UNCERTAIN. RANGE OF HOUSE DEFENSES UNCERTAIN. SITUATION COMPLICATED BY AGENT’S SUCCESSFUL INFILTRATION OF HOS
PITAL DUE TO NEGLIGENCE OF BANKS

  Lowry’s finger hovered over A for AS I PREDICTED. He thought better of it.

  AGENT’S PRESENCE LIKELY TO RESULT IN CONFLICT, MAY CAUSE LOSS OF TARGET. THEREFORE IMMEDIATE SIEGE NOW DANGEROUS. RECOMMENDATION: WIDE, LOOSE NET, MINIMUM SEVERAL MILES FROM HOSPITAL. ROADS TO BE BLOCKADED AND TRAVELERS SEARCHED. GREENBANK, GOOSENECK, FAIRSMITH, WORLD’S END TO BE EXPECTED TO COOPERATE. NET TO BE PROGRESSIVELY CLOSED AS ADDITIONAL FORCES ARRIVE. PLEASE ADVISE.

  The machine churned and rattled and sparked briefly, and the message was off to trouble the ether. Lowry dismissed the operator.

  He sat back and breathed deeply. The telegraph machine sat heavy and still. The Engines waited on his word. Soon they’d get it. There would be a change in the rhythm of their pistons and wheels, too subtle for gross human senses to perceive but nonetheless real, and that would be their thoughts, their Song, turning to him. To Lowry. Then they would cast their presence across wires and air and all the vastness of the continent, and spark the telegraph into life, and the tent would echo with the Song of the Line.

  Subaltern Drum brought Lowry a tin cup of cold coffee, and he sipped it gratefully. He planned to work through till morning.

  CHAPTER 18

  PLEASANT INVESTIGATIONS

  Creedmoor stood near the top of the second staircase in the East Wing. He was surrounded by buckets of blue paint, and his white work clothes were stained with dribbles and splotches of blue. He was painting the wall with great cheerful messy swings of the brush. He whistled and grinned at passersby.

  He said to himself:

  —Last night I got talking to a very charming young nurse.

  —We know you have, Creedmoor. We were with you.

  —She tells me little things. She is talkative, afterwards.

  —What you know, we know.

  —If only it worked the other way around. Who is this man you are looking for?

  —A General. The enemy destroyed his mind.

  —I know. You told me. A name, please? There are half a dozen inmates here who the staff call General. Dozens more who have no names at all. Play fair. Are we looking for a black fellow or a white one? Fat or thin?

  —He is darker-skinned than you. He is old. All men look much the same to us, Creedmoor.

  —Very helpful. There are a great many old dark men here.

  —Creedmoor, finding the man will do us no good; first we must find a way to kill the Spirit that guards him.

  —Killing will come. Meanwhile, my friendly young nurse tells me that the Alverhuysen woman, the Doctor from the north, has taken a dusky bearded old man into her care. She is repairing his brain. She has strange and terrible sciences from the north, electric cures, drugs, mesmerism. Perhaps he is the one?

  —Possibly. You must investigate. Creedmoor, if he is the one, and she extracts the secrets buried in his memory, she must be killed.

  —We’ll see. But with my luck, the man in question will be in the last place we look.

  —Not true. You always have been lucky, Creedmoor. It is why we have tolerated you for so long.

  Creedmoor slapped a last wide streak of fresh blue across the wall.

  “Good enough,” he said. “I think I’m due a break.”

  He’d joined a game of cards. Not purely for recreational purposes—his fellow players were important men in the House. Sichel was Head Cook. Renato had for fifteen years wandered all over the northwest, collecting patients for the House, and now ran security at the south fence. Hamsa was a doctor, one of the few to have a real education, being a graduate of Vansittart U, back in Jasper, which Creedmoor understood to be quite fancy.

  On his way down, he stopped by a dormitory on the second floor.

  —A whim occurs to me.

  A young man lay on his back on the bed by the window. He had only one leg. While the right side of his face was exceedingly handsome, the left had been melted, kind of like ice cream. His remaining eye stared up at a pipe in the roof with vicious intensity, as if trying to burst it.

  Creedmoor leaned against the window.

  “Kid. Hey, Kid.”

  “Fuck you.”

  If the young man had a name other than the Kid, it wasn’t known to anyone at the House. That was what he’d written in the ledger, and he answered to nothing else. In fact, he hardly answered to anything at all. He’d come in on the last ambulance party to arrive, three days after Creedmoor. He was intensely bitter about something, presumably something related to his injuries. He rarely left his bed. When he did, he limped down the hallways, shouting and snarling and threatening nurses, and was generally thought to be a hairsbreadth from doing something that would cause the Spirit to flatten him once and for all, and he would not be missed.

  “Hey, Kid. You play cards?”

  “Which idiot are you? Cackle, right?”

  “Cockle. John’ll do. You play cards?”

  “What’s the point?”

  “What’s the point of anything?”

  The Kid turned his head to glare at Creedmoor.

  Creedmoor shrugged. “Some of these idiots have money for the taking. But if you’re busy . . .”

  —Why, Creedmoor?

  —I like him. He reminds me of me at his age.

  —He is maimed. Useless. We would not take him.

  —Not useless. Not useless at all. Just not sure how to use him yet, that’s all.

  They played down in one of the basements under the East Wing, in a vacant operating room. The afternoon was cool down in the tunnels—the walls were moist and prone to lichen, which had to be scrubbed off. Sichel brought whiskey from the kitchens. They sat on hard wooden stools, around an operating table.

  “Bad news out of Kloan,” Sichel said.

  “A tragedy,” Creedmoor agreed. “I blame the Line. Naked aggression. But no changing the subject, Sichel, my friend; let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Sichel scowled—which made his scarred and empty left eye socket crumple in something like a wink. He tossed his cards on the table. His hand was mostly Engines, bad numbers.

  “Curse the day you came here, Cockle.”

  “Now, now. This is a welcoming House. The Spirit forgives all. Even luck with cards.”

  Creedmoor reminded himself to start losing again. They talked more freely when they thought they were winning.

  “It certainly does,” Renato agreed, dealing. “It forgives everything.” Solemn as ever. Renato slurred his words because parts of his jaw were gone; he wore a red domino over his face. His hand was mostly Guns, Creedmoor thought, and pretty good.

  “It does at that,” Sichel said.

  “Bullshit,” said the Kid, who sat on the far end of the table, by himself.

  “Now, now.” Renato shook his head. “Now, now. You just need to give it time. Lie back. Let the Spirit work on you and—”

  “I got nothing to forgive,” said the Kid. “It’s those fuckers who did this to me who need forgiving, and I don’t plan on forgiving them. I don’t plan on sitting around here like a coward and rotting. I’m going to—

  “That way you’ll get yourself killed,” said Sichel.

  “So what?”

  Renato said, “Listen. You were a soldier, right? So there’s something to forgive right there. Doesn’t matter what side. Let me tell you a story. So twenty years ago . . .”

  Creedmoor stopped listening. Twenty years ago, Renato had fought in the army of one of the richer and more inbred southern Barons, a Baron who’d allied himself with the Gun and whose lands and, more important, oilfields now belonged to the Line. Renato was a great storehouse of war stories. All of them had a moral at the end about forgiveness, and healing, and above all of the importance of turning to the Spirit, which would take up one’s burdens onto its own metaphorical shoulders and bear them away. . . .

  Creedmoor caught the Kid’s attention and rolled his eyes.

  Sichel started in with his own story, something about a woman, a camp follower, who’d di
ed at the battle of Gabbard Hill. . . .

  Dr. Hamsa interrupted with a confession about how, as a student back in Jasper City, he’d had problems with drink. The old soldiers didn’t seem too impressed, but let it pass.

  To keep himself in practice, Creedmoor told some lies about his own old soldiering career. He pretended repentance for unspecified and imaginary sins at the battles of Pechin Drift and Huka’s Mill. Renato and Sichel listened solemnly.

  The Director of the House Dolorous was a Smiler. He believed very strongly in the virtue of open and honest talk and confession; and though the House’s staff were not required to share that faith, the Director’s habits trickled down to them. Sometimes the whole House was like one big meeting circle. So much talking!

  My name is John Creedmoor, and I would like to confess my crimes. Hope you all weren’t going anywhere this week. . . .

  He’d invited the Kid mainly in the hope that the other players would want to lecture him, which they were, but it was taking altogether too long, and Creedmoor had an appointment with a pretty nurse.

  “. . . and sometimes I still see their faces,” Sichel said. “But the Spirit took the pain from me, same as it took the pain where my arm had been, and now—”

  “Bullshit,” Creedmoor interrupted, hoping to get the conversation to its point, which was the Spirit.

  “Kid,” he said, “I don’t know what these fellows are talking about. I’m a simple man. In my experience, it’s only time that heals wounds: forgetting and time. Try drink if those don’t work.”

  Renato shook his head patiently. “There’s healing here, Cockle, if you’ll ask for it.”