by Felix Gilman
She averted her eyes from the Whipping Post. “Please, lead the way.”
There were ten men at work in the sawmill. Liv stood on the dusty fragrant floor and watched them for a while. She stayed after Peckham moved on. The men were all proud of their work. Some of them were younger than the rusty old saws they held. She wondered what New Design would do when its tools finally wore out.
There were almost-turkeys in a pen. Docile, silent, fat. Liv watched them and they stared back. Their eyes were oddly human, and their clawed feet, scratching the dirt, seemed oddly purposeful, as if they were trying to spell out a message in an alien language. Another aberration of the rim of the world? Or were all turkeys like that? Liv had no particular familiarity with turkeys. She made a note to eat no bird-meat in New Design, and moved on.
There was a well near the center of town. It was lined with a rough blue gray stone that Liv had not seen in the forest of oaks; they must have brought it from far away. A large pumping contraption hunched over it, its wooden wheels and gears creaking and swaying. One or two houses had tanks or cisterns; most others had water barrels. Otherwise, there was the well. She’d rarely seen a place so lacking in luxuries or conveniences or modern improvements. At least the water was clear and, to the naked eye, clean.
Liv sat by the well all morning. Around it was a haphazard arrangement of wooden water troughs, and the earth was muddy and crisscrossed with hoof tracks. All morning, the girls from the outlying pens and farms came and went with their deerlike-herds, or carrying buckets back and forth. They were wary of her. They reminded her of shy students, and the thought made her smile.
Liv made a point of smiling at them as they passed. Some smiled back.
They were not peasants, though they dressed like peasants, or worse. Morton and his wife Sally had boasted of the schooling New Design’s children received. It was an admirable curriculum. In the morning, a solid grounding in the classics and the beginnings of the mathematical sciences; in the afternoons, a devout drilling in the personal virtues. Sally, who was a schoolteacher, had rattled off the various virtues, with Morton interjecting on the finer points of military virtue, and they’d both been rather patronizingly impressed when Liv explained that she knew what they were—she’d read them in the General’s Child’s History. Sally clapped her hands together.
Liv stopped a shy black-haired girl and offered to help her with her work. The girl mutely acquiesced. They hefted the buckets back and forth between the troughs. The deerlike creatures drank with long shiny black tongues.
“We do the farmwork, ma’am,” the black-haired girl answered her. “The boys go to be soldiers.”
“Are they very ridiculous in their uniforms?” Liv smiled and tried to make the girl laugh, in hopes of making an ally. Instead, the girl scowled and looked shocked.
“No, ma’am! They’re very brave.”
“Of course they are,” Liv said. “Of course. I meant no offense.”
The girl left soon after, in silence.
Around midday, the school bells rang. Soon the smaller children came running past, boys and girls alike in patched hide like tiny savages, scattering the hens, drinking from the well bucket with cupped hands.
A few were brave enough to ask Liv questions. What was it like in the world outside? Had she ever seen a buffalo? What was the sea like? What was snow like? What were the big cities like—did they really stink as bad as the old men said? She answered in a very serious voice; that was her usual manner with children, and after her earlier attempt at levity, she thought it best to stick to it.
Seeing that Liv was harmless, more of the children threw questions at her. Had she ever been to the theater? What were horses like?
Had she ever seen an Engine?
Had she ever been in a battle?
Had she seen the monster of the oaks?
“Enough of that! Get on!” Bradley’s harsh voice scattered the children as they’d scattered the hens. “Back to your schoolwork! Leave her alone! Back to chores!”
Liv was left alone, sat on the edge of a water trough. Bradley regarded her fiercely.
He stood leaning on a heavy wooden stick. His left leg was intact, but stiff and lame, the muscles and tendons having been ruined in some past battle. He breathed very heavily through his long mustache. His hair was wild and unclean. He was short, thick. He wore a long black tailcoat. He’d worn it at dinner, too. It still retained several of its brass buttons; however, it was greasy and worn, and covered in a variety of stains, and patched in places with cloth or even fur, as if undergoing some lycanthropic transformation. He glared constantly—as far as she could tell at everyone, not just at her—and generally had the manner of a guard dog, an attack dog, a beast of powerful energies and angers going vicious in idleness.
Two young men stood with him. They could be recognized as soldiers of New Design by their posture, and by their bows and knives. Bradley had been snapping at them as he approached. Now he sent them away with a sudden gesture; they vanished promptly.
Liv smiled stiffly. It would be necessary to ingratiate herself with Bradley, she decided, if she were ever to regain her access to the General.
“Are you a doctor or a commander, Dr. Bradley?”
“Dammit, woman—both, of course.”
“I take offense at your tone, Doctor.”
“Don’t ask damn fool questions, then. Now come along, walk with me. All right, then! I apologize. Come now. Let’s talk about what you can do for us.” He stamped off. Liv followed.
Bradley set a rapid pace, stabbing the crutch up and down and up and down like the pistons of a tiny snorting Engine.
“What’s this place you say you found him? Some hospital?”
“The House Dolorous,” Liv said. “It was a kind of hospital.”
“For mad people.”
“For anyone. The House was—is—presided over by a spirit of healing and protection. It was open to anyone who needed it.”
“A disgrace, to put the General in with mad people. He was no coward, no shirker. It’s those damn bombs. He’d still have sword in hand today, old as he is, if not for those damn bombs.”
“I expect so,” Liv agreed. “But he was not so lucky.”
“Who brought him there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does your Gun-pervert friend want with him?”
“He is not my friend, Mr. Bradley. He believes that the General knows something valuable. A weapon.”
Bradley halted sharply. He stared, seemingly hard in thought. His brow—where the skin was unburned—sweated with the exertion of walking. He wiped it with his sleeve. Then he shook his head and snorted. He gestured with his stick toward the south of town, and jerked into motion again.
Liv asked, “What could the General have seen that makes the Gun want him so badly?”
“Don’t know.”
“Did you know the General well? Did you ever know the Folk—?”
“Great men have their eccentricities. Don’t pry, woman.”
“My apologies. But—”
“Don’t know, don’t care. It’s courage that wins wars, courage and virtue—not to mention manpower and money. Real things. If in his later years, his desperation overcame him and he had foolish ideas, who are you to—?”
Bradley stopped and looked hard at her.
“Never mind. So what are you good for, then? We don’t get a lot of injuries here, but we get some. A few broken legs among the hunters. There are dangerous beasts here, as you know, but they generally leave nothing to be healed. Can you deliver a child? For that matter, the deer get sick, and can you deliver a calf? Our old folk die like anyone else’s, and us old folk are the only ones here who remember the old days, and the true cause and purpose of this place, and many of us have wounds. Have they discovered a cure for the cancer yet out in the world behind us?”
“I can do none of those things, Dr. Bradley. I am a scientist of the mind.”
“Like in the
big cities, the ones who charge a fortune to idle youths and housewives in pearls, to talk, and talk, and talk, about their empty lives and their unhappy families and all that rot and slime? We don’t go mad here. We have a purpose here. We put our backs to that purpose. We cannot have the luxury of madness. So what can you do for us?”
“I have done that work. I would not dismiss it so lightly. But I came here, from Koenigswald—I came from safety and comfort, thousands of miles into the wastelands, the borderlands, into the very heart of the Great War, Dr. Bradley, and I will not be dismissed lightly—to study and to heal the victims of the Line’s horrible mind-weapons. To heal the wrong that was done to your precious General. Do not speak to me as if—”
“But what good is that to us?”
“As if I were some—”
Liv’s finger jabbed at Bradley’s face; Bradley’s face jutted forward on his stout neck, the veins of which stood up red.
A small crowd was watching them.
Liv swallowed her rage, collected herself, attempted a smile at the crowd. Morton’s wife, Sally, stood among them—she seemed unsure whether or not to meet Liv’s eyes, and shifted her hands protectively over her pregnant belly.
Bradley, clearly seeing no need on his part to keep the peace, demanded: “Do you know what makes me sick? Do you know?”
Liv listened with a thin half smile on her face.
“I was trained in a hospital in old Lannon town,” Bradley said. “A big city on the south sea. We had a few headshrinkers there, wasting their time on spoiled young ladies, daughters of the shipping concerns; it was a big town. Learned my art in a big black stone hall on the hanged bodies of Lannon’s criminal fraternity. Lannon’s gone now, probably, or swallowed up by the Line. Don’t much care. Lannon wanted to stay neutral; more fool Lannon. Soon as I’d got my sheepskin, I left town. Rode for a month. Caught up with the Republic’s forces in Coulter. Never left ’em. A lifetime of sawing off torn limbs and setting broken bones and salving these beauties”—he ran his finger down the smooth burn on his face— “and I never left ’em until my own wounds were too much, and the General sent me away on a stretcher. And I begged not to be sent away. I was his best man for a while, in the sawbones business. After the mind-bombs made Doc Ullerham into a thing. I ran field hospitals for the whole army. Huge camp hospitals and an army under me, sawing away like little elves. Then later, after Black Cap Valley, when we were on the run, there were times when it was just me. Just me and the broken flesh. And I’ll tell you what, in all that time, I never called on any fucking Spirit to do my work for me. Never needed to. I’d be ashamed to. It makes a mockery. . . . It makes me sick to think of some sickly vampire-thing slavering over the General’s wounds. If he’d been in his right mind, in his whole mind, he’d have rather died than suffer that indignity. Have you read our Charter, madam?”
“I have not.”
“Why not?”
“I was told I needed permission to touch its pages. I’m in no hurry, am I, Dr. Bradley? I can’t imagine I’ll be leaving here soon, after all.”
“Not if I have any say in the matter. I think you know more than you’re telling us. Frankly, I think you’re in league with that Agent—”
“I am not in league with him, Doctor; in fact, I can think of only one man I’ve ever disliked more, and that man was hanged by the neck for murder and rightly so. But Creedmoor’s masters are absent. He wavers in his loyalties. He wants to turn on them. He does not want the General to fall into their hands any more than we do. But he is too weak to do it alone. If we offer him an alliance—if we—”
“He cannot be saved. You are at best a very foolish woman. And we do not fear the Line.”
“But here you are, hiding on the edge of the world—”
Bradley reached a decision. “Perhaps you’d best be a schoolteacher, madam. I’ll not have any use for you.”
He turned sharply and limped away.
She stood there in confusion. Had she really said that Creedmoor should be saved? Perhaps she was a very foolish woman.
Liv was no schoolteacher, but the children gathered to her anyway.
It was strange; she felt as though she’d been in New Design for weeks, months, years even, slowly weaving into its frayed fabric—yet in actual fact, it had been four, maybe five days? There was something drowsy in New Design’s woodsmoke and the sighing of its oaks that stilled such thoughts. What did it matter how the world counted time? She was here. So the children came and went, and Liv had the strangest sensation that she’d seen them grow up, that she’d seen infants become boys become, the next day, young men. . . .
In fact, of course, she just couldn’t keep them straight one from another. They all looked alike. So unscarred, so confident, so full of New Design’s peculiar scheme of virtue, which was still so untested, so far. By the third day, they took her for granted. They still asked her questions about the outside world, but it slowly became clear that they were not so much curious, as they were concerned to explain to her the errors and confusions of the fallen world, and the superiority of New Design’s scheme of things . . . those little soft-skinned blond children with their bland smiles and their quiet complacent manner.
Over and over—days flattening out in the quiet of the oaks and the soft drone of New Design and seeming to be weeks—the same conversations again and again. A delicate elegant machine spinning its wheels endlessly. Perhaps time really was different there. Perhaps the town, out on the edge of creation as it was, lifted and moved out of the world and its wars, was also lifted out of the flow of time, disengaged from its grinding gears. . . . Morton and Bradley and Woodbury and the rest of them did seem strangely unaged, preserved, statue-frozen. And though there was a sense of expectancy, of waiting, an excitement in everything they did, though they spoke and moved with a confident sure knowledge that they were building for the future, that one day the mission would resume, Liv thought that they did not really expect it to happen, that they did not really imagine that they would ever be reinserted rudely into the violence of time, that their precious perfect children would ever be scarred for the cause as their fathers and mothers were. War was more an idea than a reality; they contemplated it bravely, knowing it would not come.
But of course, it would come, and soon—but when Liv tried to warn them, they only smiled confidently and told her not to worry.
CHAPTER 44
HEEL
—Monster.
Creedmoor’s eyelids were stiff and heavy as sailcloth, but he forced them open anyway. Above him were the same old stars. He’d shut his eyes so that he wouldn’t be tempted to read meaning into them—dying or not dying, he was too old to go getting religion again.
—Monster.
He turned his head, which caused his shoulder to throb with agony. A face looked down at him. Its red eyes shone.
All around the face hung what at first looked like shadow but was, in fact, a long black mane, shifting gently in the breeze. Beneath the face were two bony knees, drawn up. It was a woman of the Folk. She perched on a jutting rock ten feet up the slope down which Creedmoor had tumbled.
—No ma’am. I killed the monster.
—Poor thing. Broken thing. The red men made it from their fears. Perhaps we should have turned them back when they came here, but they seemed so weak, so harmless.
—I don’t know what you’re talking about, ma’am.
—No.
—Are you Ku Koyrik? Your voice in my head is familiar.
—Yes. Call me no other name.
—And what can I do for you?
—What is it like to die?
—I don’t recommend it. Say, ma’am, our conversation last time was interrupted, and if you don’t mind, I’d like some answers before I go, so: Do you know a gentleman by the name of Kan-Kuk? Looked much like you, used to pal around with an old General.
—Of course. You could call him my husband.
—Really?
—Or my brother.
—No. I won’t tell you. I don’t trust you.
—Suppose I said I’d make you the same deal the General made Kan-Kuk?
—Not you.
—Or a better deal! You want to wipe away my masters, the enemy—well, so do I, so do I. If you wanted to wipe away all the rest of our world with them, I wouldn’t blame you and I wouldn’t say no; there’s a great cause I could die for—
—Never you.
—Why not me? What’s the old man got that I haven’t got?
—You’re broken. You belong to the broken things. I couldn’t fight them for you.
Creedmoor slowly turned his head back and looked up at the stars. He considered his various pains. After a while he said:
—Are you still here?
—Yes.
—Why?
—I have nowhere else to go. Now I am going mad.
—Do you plan to kill me? If so, better hurry.
—I don’t know. Perhaps I should. But then the woman will die, and the General will die, and we will have to begin again. And fail again. Our agony will be prolonged, and yours. And every time it gets harder.
—The woman? Liv? Shit. How?
—I have become less myself since we last met. It is hard for us to act here, hard to plan.
—Where is Liv? How will she die?
—Your enemies get closer. Too many to stop.
—The Linesmen?
—Yes.
—Shit.
—Your masters get closer, too.
—They do? Send them back.
There was no answer.
—Send them back. Please.
He gritted his teeth against the pain and turned his head once more. She was gone.
The stars crawled and shifted. Even by the standards of the skies out in the far West, there were an unusual number of shooting stars. Meanwhile, Creedmoor couldn’t feel any part of his body below the neck; instead his head floated on a vague cloud of pain. Hours passed. He wasn’t dead, but nor was he healing. His head itself was blessedly free of pain, until around dawn the word
