The Half-Made World

by Felix Gilman

  A half dozen bloody and mangled corpses were cradled in the oak overhead. Broken backs were slung over branches; gore trickled in the hollows. Liv’s first thought was that the corpses were human—then she noticed a stripped leg loosely dangling, which ended in a cloverlike three-pointed hoof—and she noticed a head flung back, its throat torn, with the glassy round eye and delicate features characteristic of the local fauna, the not-exactly-deer—and then she turned away and retched.

  “Well, well,” Creedmoor said. “Do you smell that?”

  “Yes, Creedmoor, of course I do, yes.” She staggered away and leaned for support on a nearby tree trunk.

  “I mean its spoor. Its piss, Liv. It marks its kills, see. Oils, acids. Not a regular creature at all, but something very strange and misbegotten indeed.”

  He paced back and forth under the defiled oak, stroking his beard. “Claws not unlike a bear. Habits of a mountain cat. Look, see, it kills for pleasure—these corpses are butchered, not eaten. Doesn’t this interest you, Liv?”

  “Monsters do not interest me, thank you, Creedmoor.”

  “How can they not?” He crouched and gestured out across the forest’s thick floor of fallen leaves. “It slithers, Liv. It slithers. The motion is not at all that of a cat or a bear, but something snakelike.”

  She could see that the leaves were disturbed; she had no idea whether Creedmoor could or could not reliably guess at the creature’s method of locomotion.

  “Or possibly an eel. Something that crawled out of the Western Sea, onto mad shores, made neither of one thing nor another, a passing thought, a nightmare, one of the world’s bad ideas, brought on by indigestion, perhaps—a monster.”

  He leapt to his feet. “A serpent. A serpent in paradise. Didn’t I tell you there would be one?”

  “You did, Creedmoor.”

  He drew his gun and grinned repellently. “Now there are two.”

  The thoughtful, uncertain Creedmoor of that morning had vanished. Instead of thought his eyes were full of low cunning. His grin was confident, cheerful, animal. The possibility of imminent violence seemed to be a great relief to him.

  “Oh no, Creedmoor. No.”

  “Oh no what, Doctor?”

  “You mean to hunt it.”

  “I do.” He spun his weapon on his fingers. “I certainly do.”

  The General stumbled up, feet dragging through the leaves, and she put an arm around his shoulder to stop him.

  “Would you rather wait for it to hunt us, Liv?”

  “I would rather stay as far from it as possible.”

  “And you will. You will. You and the General. This will be no work for women or the elderly, and what kind of man would I be to drag you into it? We’ll find you a hiding place, where you can await my return, with one hell of a glorious story, John Creedmoor, slayer of the serpent of the western wilderness; if that’s the last story they ever tell about me, it wouldn’t be too bad. . . .”

  They left the monster’s kills behind and walked until sunset, at which time they came across a steep rocky scarp, a twenty-foot tumble of rocks and roots. A stream formed a very pleasant little waterfall and a deep clear pool at the bottom. Beside the pool there was an overhang of roots and a kind of shallow cave. The oaks stretched away into the distance, the stream winding on out of sight.

  “Perfect,” Creedmoor said. “You’ll be happy enough here.”

  He filled his water-skin but left Liv with their bags and all their food.

  “Hunger sharpens the senses,” he said. “Bear in mind, Liv, that I am an excellent tracker.”

  “Where would I run to, Creedmoor?”

  “Exactly. Take care of the old fellow. Keep yourself to yourself. The Line are a few days behind us, but they’ll find us again; the bastards do not give up. Good luck.”

  He turned and ran back the way they’d come, leaving her alone among the oaks, save for the General, who was looking into the pool and talking quietly to his reflection: “Once upon a time . . .”

  CHAPTER 37

  OUT OF THE OAKS

  In the morning Liv drank, washed herself and her clothes, and sat for a while on the rocks by the pool, warming in the sun. When she was dry, she dressed herself and returned to the cave.

  The General had been energetic overnight, pacing and stumbling and muttering and gesturing as if giving commands, and so she’d tied him by his leg to a gnarled root. This procedure was by now so familiar that she had to make a particular effort to recall its oddity.

  He sat on the floor and addressed the root in learned tones.

  “Once upon a time there lived a miserly couple who had no children and expended their affections upon the serpents that slithered in the churchyard around branches and bones, when once upon a time a beggar . . .”

  She sat before him and held his jaw open, so that his discourse devolved into wet guttural noise, and forced a strip of dried meat down his throat. With a little encouragement, he began chewing, and eventually he swallowed. She worked some water down him, then wiped his bearded chin dry.

  “Are you well, General?”

  He said nothing.

  “The oaks seem to do you good. You talk more, and how can that be bad? Creedmoor’s gone. We’re alone. Will you speak?”

  He fixed her with a glare of fierce command, as if about to pronounce a sentence of execution or order her to charge a motor gun emplacement. It was, of course, quite meaningless.

  She sighed, and untied him. She picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder, and with the other hand she led the old man down to the pool, where she began to strip him naked.

  He struggled. She held his thin flailing arm up and tugged his shirt over his head.

  “Do you know, General, one could learn a great deal about the operations of the mind by a comparative study of your kind. If the devastation were less total, if perhaps only parts of the mind were damaged, here and there, one could learn, from the ways the injuries might differ from subject to subject, how . . .”

  She got the shirt off, exposing a sunken hairy brown chest. “This is how I pass the time, General.”

  She unbuckled his belt. His trousers were foul, and he was greatly in need of a wash.

  “Creedmoor suggests that I should kill you, rather than risk your secrets falling into his masters’ hands. Murder may be his answer to everything. Watching John Creedmoor attempt moral reasoning is a ridiculous and revolting experience, like watching a dog walk on its hind legs or a cat trying to give a sermon. Nevertheless, he may be right.”

  As she spoke, she removed the General’s cracked and battered shoes, leaving him naked, and urged him gently into the water. He stood in it up to his waist, swaying in the faint current, and shivered despite the sun.

  “It would be simple enough, and probably not even cruel. I could stop feeding you, or simply hold you underwater. I think he rather hopes that I will. It would relieve him of the burden of making a choice. He could run back to his vile masters and say: The woman did it, blame her. And perhaps they would forgive him and put him back to work and the world would go on again the same as ever, for ever and ever.”

  She sat on a rock and folded her hands in her lap. “I will not do it.”

  The General stood in the water and stared impassively up at her.

  “Is that right or wrong, General? What would you say, if you could say anything meaningful? I’ve read your book. On the one hand, you were ruthless. You burned cities, torched fields. You had traitors executed. You told ten thousand young men it was virtuous to die in battle, and they did. You were quite willing to make necessary sacrifices.”

  He didn’t blink.

  “On the other hand, you were an optimist, despite all evidence against optimism. You believed the world could be remade. So perhaps you would say: find the weapon, take it back, use it. And risk letting it fall into the hands of the Gun or the Line, it would be worth the risk. Creedmoor’s change of heart cannot be trusted; but what if it could? Because . . .�
�

  She shook her head and smiled.

  “I understand why Creedmoor would prefer not to make his choice. I would prefer not to choose, too. This is not a responsibility that should fall to me. It’s quite mad. No sane person can consider such a question without laughing. Really, General, you’re the hero, you’re the legend, the great man of history, you’re the one who should . . .”

  He said nothing.

  “I would prefer not to be alone here,” she said. “That’s all there is to it. I don’t believe in any of the rest of it.”

  Still nothing. She sighed. After a while she opened her bag and removed the Child’s History, or what was left of it.

  It had never recovered from the rains. Its spine had warped and cracked, its covers had begun to rot and fray, its pages dried and stiffened and fell loose. A grainy black mold bloomed all over it. Whole centuries were missing and illegible. Between the first awakening of the first Engine in what was at the time the city of Harrow Cross, and the Tri-City Accords between Jasper and Gibson and Juniper, there was a 120-year period about which Liv knew literally nothing at all.

  She had read the General the story of the signing of the Charter a dozen times—not to mention the stories of the making of the Republic and its early battles—and the chapter that recounted with diagrams its system of government and the democratic Virtues—and the discussion of the debates over tariff reform and the Nullification Principle and the Public Land Controversy—and a very long aside on the early childhood of President Bellow regarding his honesty and his courage and his simple kindness to a poor slave who might or might not have been one of the Folk (it was unclear from what remained of the text)—and the story of the Relief of Beecher City—and. . . . None of it had elicited much of a reaction. She was never sure whether he was listening or not.

  She sorted among loose pages—smeared, worn and moldy pages—and settled almost at random on a few loose pages, which, once she’d scraped away the black mold, turned out to be from chapter 1: “The First Colony, at Founding.” Her voice carried with great clarity in the silence as she read:

  There is a famous painting of Governor Sam Self. Perhaps you’ve seen it, or one day you will, for it hangs in the Museum of the Republic in Morgan Town. It shows a very fat man, with jowls like candle wax, golden rings on his fingers, which are seen in the act of signing a warrant of execution. The window behind him is open and the young fields of Founding are visible, and in the distance is a man being whipped on a cruciform frame. Behind that are the vast dark primordial woods. The artist has made Self’s eyes almost yellow, not unlike those of a wolf, and perhaps this painting is the source of certain persistent and scandalous rumors regarding the Governor, which we shall not give credence here. (For while the world was very young then, and unsettled, and some things were neither one thing nor the other, the forms of man and wolf were well-made and distinct.)

  You may have heard that the Governor was a tyrant; that he ruled Founding cruelly; that he was known for the whip and the stocks and the headsman’s axe; that his treatment of the Folk of the Woods was dishonorable. All of this is true. Nevertheless, this is where our world begins and

  She heard the General splashing but did not look up. When his hand suddenly reached up from the pool and closed around her wrist, she cried out in surprise and dropped the pages. They scattered across the water and were washed away by the stream.

  The General stood half out of the water, precariously balanced on the rocks of the pool, and his eyes were fixed fiercely on Liv’s.

  He had never before touched her intentionally.

  His grip was stiff; it hurt. His mouth worked as if he were chewing, or about to spit up something that disgusted him.

  Liv waited, watched. She put her hand over his and nodded.

  He said, “Once upon a time . . .”

  She sighed and let go of his hand.

  “. . . an old king a mad king white-bearded on a charging horse with a sword and flags and trumpets like in the very oldest oldest stories we learned in our nurseries and taught us to be brave there was an old king and a fallen kingdom and his wise adviser who was very old and wise and who talked to rocks and birds and the wind and his name was Kan-Kuk, madam, Kan-Kuk of the First Folk who saved me on a night when I lay dying under stars and on ash ash ash and we promised to aid each other for neither could stand alone—he stepped from the rocks and lifted me in his arms and his red eyes were sad and wounded—he told me: It began at Founding, the first . . .”

  He shook as he spoke—the name Kan-Kuk tore itself from his throat like two sharp gunshots—and as he said the word Founding, he slipped on a rock and let go of Liv’s wrist and fell back into the water. His head went under.

  Liv waded in after him.

  The General thrashed briefly, pulling her off her feet, then went still. She lifted his head clear of the water and pulled his limp form up onto the rocks. Fortunately, he was near weightless—and even more fortunately, he began to breathe again on his own, much to Liv’s relief, because she had no real notion of how to help a drowning person.

  He was silent again. She sighed and looked away.

  She sat in the sun and waited. The General remained silent.

  After a while she checked her golden watch—it was, as she suspected, still not working. Time was not reliable in the western wilderness. She snapped it shut and returned it to the bag.

  When she looked up, she gasped in shock.

  Three men stood under the oaks, not thirty feet from the rock pool.

  At first, because they were in shadow, she couldn’t make out their faces or their clothes. They might have been Linesmen, or Folk, though they were tall for the former and short for the latter—and something in their bearing suggested that they were almost as surprised to see her as she was to see them, which suggested they were neither Linesmen nor Folk. It seemed possible but unlikely that they were hallucinations, brought on by loneliness.

  They approached. They moved slowly, stiffly, almost shyly.

  They’d come silent as Folk, but they were clean shaven and sun-browned, dressed in bright clothes, holding steel weapons—they were men.

  She inched her hand closer to her bag, and the knife within it. Not too close or too quickly, for the men held bows, arrows notched and straining. Bows! Like storybook fairies. Not Linesmen, then.

  Two were bare from the waist up. The tallest, thinnest, and oldest wore a red jacket—a cavalry jacket—with faded golden epaulettes, and a few remaining black buttons. Beneath the jacket he, too, was bare chested. He wore rough deerskin trousers. He carried a cavalry saber at his waist. He had a fine-boned old face, long white hair greased back from a high scalp.

  The other two were younger. Both were short and heavy shouldered. One fair; one dark. The dark one had a large wen on the side of his nose, from which hair sprouted. An unfortunate face but not an alien face. Liv could not, she thought, be imagining them—she would not have troubled to create that wen.

  They came forward slowly, staring with such open amazement that Liv could not fear them, bows notwithstanding.

  Liv stood, hands open. They were already lowering their bows.

  “We are not alone,” she told them.

  The silver-haired man in the red jacket—where the jacket fell open, its buttons lost to time, the hair on his skinny old chest was white, too—saluted smartly.

  He greeted her: “Madam.” He nodded to the General, who appeared to have fallen asleep. “Sir.”

  Then he huddled and whispered with his companions.

  She was so delighted to see the faces of human beings other than Creedmoor and the General that it was all she could do not to run up and put her arms around them and burst into tears.

  “You seem,” she interrupted, “to be civilized men. I had not thought to meet civilized men so far west.”

  Red-jacket turned back to her. “We’d not thought to see so-called civilized men ever again. Nor women. Never a woman and an old man alone li
ke this . . .”

  “We are not alone.”

  Red-jacket drew himself erect and placed his hand on the pommel of his saber. “Madam. You and your companion must come with us. I must insist. These woods are not safe.”

  “Who are you, sir?”

  “Captain William Morton, ma’am, of the town of New Design, which is not only the very most westernmost outpost of humanity, but also the last refuge in exile of the Red Valley Republic, and if you have news of the world back east and how they remember us, I’d be delighted to hear it. May I ask your name? And your friend here, or is it your grandfather perhaps—who’s he?”

  CHAPTER 38

  THE HUNT

  Creedmoor crouched among weeds. Their leaves were thick and spiny and dark. They had tiny flowers, which resembled golden pen nibs. The serpent had thoroughly crushed them on its passage through, wriggling and thrashing its fat tail from side to side, perhaps just for the sheer pleasure of destruction. Not too long ago, either—the weeds still bled ink.

  The weeds grew in the shadow of rocks. The beast had slithered up among them. A few of the creature’s scales lay glittering among the flakes of stone chipped loose by its passage. Above the rocks stood more oaks, which the creature had slashed in passing, leaving its distinctive two-clawed mark on their trunks or tearing off branches, which Creedmoor suspected it did with its teeth. The ground rose sharply upward. Among the oaks were scattered rocks and smaller trees, pinelike, that Creedmoor couldn’t name; the woods thickened and darkened.

  —It seeks high ground.

  There was no answer.

  Creedmoor picked up one of the creature’s scales. It was no larger than his thumb. It was covered with soft spines, which he carefully pressed down, wary of poison. Beneath the spines, its surface shimmered with an uncertain color—depending on how it caught the sun, it was either pearly white or a dark bruised purple—it shifted like a puddle of motor oil.