The Half-Made World
Page 47
Strangers come and go by cover of darkness. The girls of the Floating World are famous far and wide, but not all the strangers are there for the girls, and there’s more than one kind of business goes on in the Floating World. Everyone in Jasper knows that, and knows to keep their mouths shut: too much curiosity about those strangers can be fatal. . . .
Knoll comes in after midnight, slamming the door open and letting in the cold, slamming it shut again and rattling the lanterns and making the girls jump and scatter. The patrons look at their feet, sidle out of the room. Knoll’s furs stink. He’s big as a bear, and filthy. Hanks of matted black hair sway from his belt. Hillfolk beards. He collects them. He serves the Gun these days—as the monstrous sledgehammer-sized rifle slung over his back, riding him like a dumb animal, plainly shows—but his masters don’t begrudge him this recreation, so long as he does what’s needed when they Call.
Jenny, scarlet-haired Jenny, smiling Jenny, Jen to those who know her well, madam and proprietor of the Floating World, greets him over by the fire. She claps her hands and her girls scatter, leaving Knoll and Jen alone. He looms over her like a storybook ogre. He shifts uneasily in his tree-stump boots. He belongs in a cave, Jen thinks. Jen laughs, and he bows to kiss her gloved hand, and she keeps laughing as Knoll remains stiffly stooped. Under her scarlet skirts, on her thigh, there’s a Gun silver and sharp as a needle. Jen of the Floating World thinks,
—Knoll.
—Ma’am.
—You look different.
—Never seen you before, ma’am. They don’t let me in places like this.
—I should think not. But I didn’t mean you. I meant your weapon. Or what rides it. It used to belong to a friend of mine.
—Yeah? Dead now. Mine now.
—You’re a crude one. A lot of the young ones are crude. These are crude times. I hear you’re a tracker.
—Yes.
—There’s work for you. The Lodge is close, here. Look into the fire, Knoll. Listen. They speak to us in the flames.
Knoll kneels by the fire, and the flames leap. There’s a bloody blackness at their pulsing core. A voice sounds from a great distance, both familiar and deeply, perversely strange.
—Knoll.
—Master?
—This is not your master. You may call me Marmion. I blaze bodiless now in our Lodge. Creedmoor bore me into your world, most recently.
—Who’s Creedmoor?
—He is not dead, Knoll. We would feel it. Thirty years he served us, sometimes well though never faithfully. We would feel it. He is not dead, and yet the months go by and he has not returned.
Jen thinks,
—He should’ve come here, Knoll. I was the contact. He should have come here if he was coming back to us.
—Who’s Creedmoor? Never heard of him.
—He has not come back to us. He has betrayed us. That woman has led him astray.
Knoll furrows his brow:
—Master?
The one that called itself Marmion said:
—We need a tracker, Knoll. We need a simple man.
—That’s me.
—I will come with you. I am angry, Knoll.
THREE: REBIRTH
Mr. Waite, leader of the Smilers of what used to be New Design, and is now New New Design, finds his faith in a sunny disposition and a positive attitude sorely tested these days. He was never suited to leadership, but the town’s handful of survivors turned to him in those dreadful cold months after the Battle, first to keep their spirits high with singsongs and improving homilies, and then, when no better candidate emerged, to be their President. No, no, he said, we must keep the secular and sacred functions of government separate; and it was pointed out to him that the people of the Republic now numbered 233, and were long past caring for matters of principle; and in the end, how could he say no?
After the winter, they numbered an even two hundred. Leadership in such times is a terrible burden.
He married Sally Morton so that her unborn child might have a father. It came out wrong—marked in utero by the Linesmen’s bombs. It came out thin, and gray, and silent, and cringing, and habituated to fear. Another child is on its way, and Waite is cautiously hopeful.
Waite’s face is no longer smooth or boyish. Leadership has hardened him. He looks a lot like the old General, now, thin and severe. He smiles only for good reason.
New New Design is built in a river valley, a few miles east of the ruins of the old town. The survivors wintered there in the caves. Now Waite goes walking, once a week, in the ruins. It’s part of his new routine.
He tells his people that he goes walking in the ruins so that he can absorb the wisdom of their dead comrades, and also so that he can scavenge for useful tools. In fact, he goes there mostly to be alone.
He stops among the razed barns on the west side to remember how rich New Design was—how finely engineered a society it was—what a remarkable and generous achievement! And then he thinks that he has no notion of how he might go about building such a thing, and he sits with his head on his hands on a heap of charred timbers.
New New Design is rebuilding again. It’s spring. New houses cut from fresh logs are going up. The children, who number ninety-eight, are being schooled. A schoolhouse was the first thing they built. It’s Waite’s job to rebuild the world. No wonder he needs to be alone sometimes.
He watches birds settle in the rafters.
On the scorched floor, trapped beneath the timbers, is the skeleton of a Linesman, wrapped in a slick gray coat that does not rot and wearing a singed gas mask.
Waite unstraps the gas mask and kicks it with all his strength. Which is not inconsiderable—he used to be a fine athlete. The mask sails, flapping its straps over the ruins of poor dead Mr. Digby’s barn, and lands with a splash in a water-logged bomb-crater.
There’s an answering crack from the earth under Waite’s feet, and he jumps and puts his hand to his gun.
The crack repeats. It sounds like a stone being broken with hammers, by roots. It repeats again. It sounds like a man cracking his knuckles, over and over. It sounds like barking; like laughter. The earth shudders and quakes.
Waite feels warm and cold at once. He starts to laugh.
He stops laughing when a white arm shoots up out of the roiling earth of the floor of what used to be Mr. Digby’s barn.
The arm is terribly long and thin, like a bone-white sapling. It stretches. What follows, lifting itself up and shaking off earth and laughing, is the maned form of a female of the First Folk, rising from death.
She looks Waite’s way with brilliant ruby-red eyes, and he slowly moves his hand away from his gun.
She looks all around her, head cocked, listening. She seems troubled. She climbs up the timbers of Digby’s barn and looks west.
She tumbles loosely back to earth, and opens her fist; it’s full of stones. She scatters them. She pokes among them. She seems unhappy with their answer.
What she’s doing, Waite thinks, is very nearly like shaking her head. Or drumming her fingers nervously. In her troubled uncertainty, she suddenly seems remarkably human. Her gestures are nearly human gestures. She might even be beautiful.
She looks Waite’s way again. With a crackling of joints and a shifting of her mane, she shrugs her bony shoulders as if to say, What can you do? and she smiles.
Waite turns and runs from the ruins, and he never goes back. When Sally asks why, he tells her it’s time for a fresh beginning.
Her second child, born in summer, is healthy.
FOUR: GOOD-BYE
And when the letter finally arrived at the Academy of Koenigswald, it bore the stamps of a dozen postal services. Between the House Dolorous and the Academy, it had crossed the continent with the uncertain dithering flight of a butterfly. It was addressed to one Dr. Grundtvig, who had retired several years ago, and so it gathered dust in a pigeonhole that no one checked anymore, until one of the porters noticed it, opened it, called for silence, and read the high
lights to his colleagues: It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that Dr. Alverhuysen was taken from us . . . the responsibility is ours . . . no ransom demand so far . . . an Agent of those Powers that bedevil our land . . . we must now presume her dead . . .
In one of those coincidences that are so impressive and terrifying to the weak-minded, but are in fact inevitable in the nature of things, it was a mere two days later that the enormous mental defective Maggfrid showed up at the Academy’s August Hall—banging on the great doors in the dead of a rainy night, bellowing to be let in—and confirmed the sad news. He was unable or unwilling to explain how he’d accomplished his return across the world, beyond the words I fought. There was something wild and savage in his bearing. He resumed his janitorial duties, but now a certain glamour attached to him, and the students sought his conversation.
The Faculty commissioned a commemorative painting. At the insistence of Agatha, Liv’s dear friend from the Faculty of Mathematics, it pictured Liv in a white dress carrying a book down the Academy’s summer lawns. They hung it in a shadowy spot at the back of the Hoffman Library, where overworked students liked to take afternoon naps.
There was a small quiet farewell service. Dr. Ekstein gave a speech, praising that noble spirit of scholarship that knows no frontiers, that fears no peril! Maggfrid sat with solemn dignity. Agatha, mildly sedated, muttered good-bye, good-bye, my dear over and over; and those colleagues who were inclined to say well what did she expect going out there or I told her so were at least able to hold their tongues until after the service, when sherry was served and decorum somewhat loosened.
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Book One: Out to the Edge of Things
Chapter 1: The Departure ~ 1889 ~
Chapter 2: A Gentleman of Leisure
Chapter 3: The Black File
Chapter 4: Ancient History
Chapter 5: Smile Through Adversity
Chapter 6: Kingstown
Chapter 7: The Long Road West
Chapter 8: The Net
Chapter 9: Kloan
Chapter 10: Gloriana
Chapter 11: Sub-Invigilator Lowry Investigates: Kloan, After the Fire
Chapter 12: The Passage
Chapter 13: Creedmoor at Work
Chapter 14: The Guardian at the Gate
Chapter 15: Lowry
Book Two: The Doll House
Chapter 16: Early Days
Chapter 17: Telegraph Communion
Chapter 18: Pleasant Investigations
Chapter 19: The Spirit
Chapter 20: The Wound ~ 1871 ~
Chapter 21: Weakness
Chapter 22: Forward Camp at Kloan
Chapter 23: The General in his Retirement
Chapter 24: Breaking Cover
Book Three: Westward
Chapter 25: Flight
Chapter 26: Greenbank
Chapter 27: Over the Border
Chapter 28: The Rains
Chapter 29: The Valley
Chapter 30: Lowry in the Wilderness
Chapter 31: The Games
Chapter 32: Liberation
Chapter 33: Forward the Glorious Purpose
Chapter 34: Ku Koyrik
Chapter 35: The Shadows
Book Four: A Land Fit for Heroes
Chapter 36: The Rose
Chapter 37: Out of the Oaks
Chapter 38: The Hunt
Chapter 39: Lowry’S Duty
Chapter 40: A Machine That Would Go of Itself
Chapter 41: A Guest at Dinner
Chapter 42: The Serpent
Chapter 43: A Stranger in Town
Chapter 44: Heel
Chapter 45: The Dance
Chapter 46: Creedmoor in the Shadows
Book Five: The Battle of New Design
Chapter 47: Raising the Alarm
Chapter 48: The Amplifier
Chapter 49: New Design at War
Chapter 50: Murder
Chapter 51: The General Speaks ~ 1878 ~
Chapter 52: Liv Chooses
Epilogue One: Engine Song ~ Six Months Later ~