The Half-Made World

by Felix Gilman

  They remained wary. They whispered to each other.

  “Where did Elgin die?”

  He told them.

  “Long way from anywhere. What were you doing out there?”

  “Isn’t it obvious, gentlemen? I’m a traveling poet. Song, jest, good humor, and so on and so on. A clown, I guess. I’d juggle this instant if I did not fear you might shoot me. And, being good with words, I also do a little lawyering—I’ll draw up your contracts or argue your case if you’re in the unlucky situation of needing me. And perhaps I’d been traveling with the good Dr. Sloop and his emporium, you may have heard of him, and Professor Harry Ransome and his electrical apparatus, and there’d been a dispute over the affections of the dancing girl, and I struck out on my own in unfamiliar country and frankly, gentlemen, got lost as all hell and—”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ll get to the point, shall I? I hope to be paid for my efforts. Your charges would have died in the wilderness if not for me. I am not a young man, and I’ve walked for days. Will you not at least give me a bed for the night for my troubles?”

  Liv stood close to Maggfrid. She did not know what to make of this strange man. He was handsome in an awful sort of a way, though not young. He unnerved her. His skin was leathered and his clothes were torn and filthy, and in Koenigswald, he would have been taken for a vagrant and accommodation would have been made for him in an institution. But out here, things were different, and who could say what he was? He had the confidence of an aristocrat. His eyes were laughing.

  Liv noticed that her guide was not nervous, or even interested; he stood by the asses smoking a foul cigarette and idly counting the money she’d paid him. The guards at the gate were wary, but they had been wary of her, too. They were wary people here at the House Dolorous.

  Cockle grinned at her; she nodded politely but guardedly.

  She watched the men haggle over Cockle’s payment. She coughed once, politely, to ask if she might perhaps be allowed to enter; they had already seen her papers. . . . Cockle threw up his hands and disavowed most fulsomely any desire to interrupt the lady’s business; he assured all present of his basically chivalrous intentions, notwithstanding his desire to be paid, on which subject he felt regrettably that it might be best if he were to speak to these men’s superiors, intending no slight to them, of course, it was only that . . .

  Liv sighed and walked away. Her dress dragged in the dust and tore on a sharp rock and she nearly swore. She’d kept a white dress packed safely away all this time so that she could approach the House respectably attired; already it was ruined.

  Weeks of travel, and her entrance had been entirely upstaged by this . . .

  Cockle kept talking. Now the guards were laughing along with his jokes. His voice rolled and echoed. Some mad people of her acquaintance could talk like that—quite cheerfully, endlessly, without ever saying a meaningful thing.

  She busied herself studying the poor souls Cockle had brought with him. Her patients-to-be, her new experimental subject matter. They looked half-starved, and their skin was peeling from the sun, but one of them gave her a lopsided smile. “I’m William, ma’am,” he said. She offered her hand, and he stared at it blankly, then mimicked her gesture with his hand hanging limp like a dead fish. She gave him her name, and he issued a little wheezing giggle.

  “William,” she said. “Do you know where you are now?”

  “The Doll House, ma’am.”

  “What happened to you, William?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “How did you get here?”

  “A man came.”

  “Why are you here, William?”

  “They say I’m not well.”

  “Why do you think you’re not well, William?”

  She was so engrossed in her subject matter that she hardly heard the approach of the Heavier-Than-Air Vessel. She didn’t sense it until after even William’s dull senses had caught it; she followed his nervous rheumy eyes up and saw it hanging in the sky. It was made of brass and iron and defied gravity and sanity. A man in black sat like an oversized fetus in a glass womb. The beating of its dreadful blades drove dust into the air and into her eyes, and she blinked away tears. The gate guards were shouting.

  Creedmoor fell silent and considered the situation.

  The Heavier-Than-Air Vessel hovered just within the rim of the ravine; the thrum of the spinning wing-blades and the rattle of its clockwork echoed from the rocks on either side. The black coal smoke from its engines climbed out of the canyon and into the sky.

  The pilot leaned out from his glass-and-brass bubble and surveyed the scene through a spyglass.

  Creedmoor bowed his head and tried to look frightened. It wasn’t entirely a pretense.

  His instinct was to reach for his belt; but of course, there was no weapon there—he’d given it to William for safekeeping, strapped under William’s rags, for what gate guard would bother to search William? That was more or less the whole of the plan, in fact, now whirled away like leaves by fucking ’thopter blades. Now what was he supposed to do?

  If he took back his Gun and fired on the Vessel, he had little doubt he’d be able to bring it down. But then the guards would know what he was; and, if the stories were true, then the Spirit, which did not tolerate violence, would strike him down.

  The Vessel hovered, apparently suffering the same indecision as Creedmoor.

  He risked a glance at the pilot, trying to read the man’s intentions. Did he know who Creedmoor was? Had he followed him here from Kloan, or was this merely a chance encounter? It was useless. Creedmoor never could tell what, if anything, Linesmen were thinking.

  He turned to the guards and shouted, “Busy day!” They smiled nervously.

  He thought: the pilot wouldn’t open fire. That was for sure. The Line’s intelligence was at least the equal of the Guns’, and they would know what happened to those who brought violence into the presence of the Spirit of the House. If this was a chance encounter, the Vessel would move on soon enough. If, on the other hand, the pilot knew who Creedmoor was, then unless he was a fool—and Linesmen were dull, but they were not fools—he would simply wire back for assistance and wait, and soon Creedmoor would be surrounded. . . .

  With no warning but a high buzzing whine, the gun in the Vessel’s undercarriage spun into action. It looked like a mosquito’s nasty blood-spike; it cursed in lead. The guards scattered into the gatehouse. William and the mad folk milled around in panic, the rope at their ankles tangling. Rocks burst and red dust flew in the air and Liv fell to the floor and Maggfrid fell protectively over her, knocking the wind out of her.

  It had fired thirty, forty feet clear of the gatehouse. A warning.

  A voice sounded from the Vessel’s loudspeakers. It echoed off the canyon’s walls. It distorted and boomed.

  “GIVE UP THE AGENT. GIVE UP THE AGENT. GIVE UP THE SLAGGING AGENT.”

  Creedmoor threw himself behind a rock. His heart pounded, and he felt old and weak and exposed.

  “GIVE UP THE AGENT.”

  The loudspeaker boomed, and Creedmoor’s master shouted in his ear:

  —Now they will be looking for an Agent. The House will be on guard. You should not have dawdled, Creedmoor.

  —Shut up. Let me think.

  The loudspeaker boomed: “I SEE HIM. GIVE THE BASTARD UP.”

  The Vessel opened fire. Lead cursed and roared and spat away on the other side of the rock, harming no one, echoing up and down the ravine’s high walls. A pointless, ill-tempered display of power. One or more of the mad folk was screaming. Creedmoor uncorked a bottle of Sloop’s tonic water and swigged down a mouthful of the acrid stuff. He waited with some curiosity to see if it would do anything for his nerves. It did not.

  A whistling came down the canyon, subtle at first, then piercing. In the distance, the shutters on the House’s windows banged wildly open and shut; even over the noise of the Vessel, the rushing and clattering were audible. Red dust rose whirlin
g into the air.

  There was a strong sense of pressure; it began with a prickling of the skin and progressed quickly to the point where sinuses and eyeballs and teeth ached. Blood thickened; the veins in Creedmoor’s neck and head popped out, and his heart felt tight and heavy.

  The Spirit in action! Creedmoor felt it rising, gathering. He hadn’t expected to see it in action; in fact, he had hoped quite fervently not to. But he couldn’t deny that he was curious. Hand on his hat, he poked his head over the edge of the rock.

  Little whirlwinds of dust swirled up, so that it seemed that long red fingers reached toward the Vessel. It reared back like a spooked horse. It hung in the whirling air, its gun silent for a second, and Creedmoor was able to observe it closely. Insectlike, yes; quite similar also to the rubber and glass and steel gas masks that the men of the Line sometimes used. The wings that spun above it were a blur.

  The Vessel spun on its axis under the whirring wing-blades and rose slowly out of the ravine, but it was too late.

  The air was full of dust and roaring; the whistle was now a howl, rushing past Creedmoor’s ears as if he were falling. He clamped his hat brim down over his ears.

  A fist of dust struck the Vessel from the sky.

  With a dreadful noise, the Vessel’s blades buckled. The dust cloud burst around the Vessel’s blades and lost its illusion of form and solidity, dissipating upward into the blue sky. The Vessel spun down into the side of the ravine, where it tumbled into flame and broken metal. Its belly tore and clockwork guts tumbled out; toothed wheels and gears glowing red-hot rolled out into the canyon.

  For a long moment, the billowing dust clouds over the canyon seemed to form a vast human shape, squatting protectively over the House. Dust swelled like sloped shoulders, heavy breasts, rolls of fat, thick haunches—How fat it is, Creedmoor thought, how greedy, how old!

  It burst. A rain of sharp rocks, whipped up by the winds, now fell, as if hurled, on the Vessel’s wreckage. That struck Creedmoor as spiteful.

  The gate guards were shouting: “Who did this?”

  “A machine of the Line?”

  “Why would the Line attack us?”

  “We’re neutral! What do they want?”

  “They said there was an Agent of the . . .”

  Creedmoor thought:

  —They want an Agent. They won’t rest until they find one. So let’s see that they do.

  He stood and cried out—“There he is! I see him!” And he vaulted the rock he’d been hiding behind and sprinted full-tilt through the howling winds and the dust and the sharp rocks toward where the mad folk stood, still bound by their ankle rope, cowering in a circle. One of them, the old woman, was messily dead—the Vessel’s gun had caught her as it spun and fell. “Your fault,” Creedmoor muttered. “Your fault, Spirit, not mine.”

  He grabbed William by his shoulder. The poor bastard turned and smiled in relief to see Creedmoor standing behind him. He drew his silver-clasped knife and inserted it under poor William’s ribs.

  He turned away, not wanting to look at William’s eyes, and saw that the Spirit’s rage was slowing abating. The form that squatted over the canyon was gone. The dust was settling. The shrieking winds subsided.

  He waited for a tense moment for it to strike him down. It didn’t. It appeared distracted, exhausted, sated. . . .

  The gate guards lifted their rifles again. Creedmoor reached into William’s rags and tore out the glistening silver blackness of Marmion: he held the weapon up and shouted, “I saw it! I knew I saw it! The Gun! This is the Agent! This Agent of the Gun brought that mechanical monster down on us!”

  The gate guards lowered their rifles and shook their heads in awe.

  “An Agent. A fucking Agent.”

  “Here, trying to sneak in.”

  “Dead. An Agent, dead . . .”

  Creedmoor wound back his arm and hurled the weapon away into the rocks. “Filthy thing!”

  Then he was ostentatiously and tearfully sick. The clever-looking blond woman, whose white dress was now tattered by the winds and the dust, came and stood beside him and encouraged him to breathe deeply. He took great sobs and told her, “I never—I never—oh, I killed that man! Oh, what have I done?” She patted his shoulder and told him he had done the right thing; he had done the brave thing; he had done the only thing a decent person could do; he should not be ashamed. He told her she was very kind.

  The winds had settled and the canyon was silent.

  The gate guards fanned out, looking for the weapon. They didn’t find it.

  That night, Creedmoor was freshly showered and shaved, and fairly compensated—and in fact, feted, cheered, slapped manfully on the back by damn near every one of the House’s men, applauded and adored by its women, for he had saved the House from infiltration and done what few could boast: He’d killed an Agent of the Gun! It was pure luck, he said, pure good fortune. He went to bed drunk. And lying on a narrow bed in the little white-walled garret they’d found for him, he woke to a headache and a familiar voice. He rose on his arm; he leaned over the sleeping shoulder of that pretty young nurse. . . . There on the little nightstand, under the shuttered lantern, silver glinting in the moonlight, was his master. He looked Marmion in its yawning black barrel.

  He reached out across the girl’s body and lifted the weapon. It was heavy, and at once his arm ached.

  —Well done, Creedmoor. Here we are.

  —Yes.

  —We are pleased with you.

  —An ugly business.

  —What do you mean, Creedmoor?

  —The killing. Ugly.

  —No. Daring. Clever. Lucky. Ruthless. Be proud, Creedmoor. We like our servants joyful.

  The girl murmured. He brushed his lips softly across her shoulder.

  —Never mind.

  —Forgiven. Forgotten. We are pleased with you.

  —The Spirit will make trouble. Did you see that thing?

  —It is strong, but we are cunning. Are we not? First murder the Spirit. Then seize the General. What he knows, Creedmoor, what he has seen! The weapon! Victory!

  —Peace.

  —Victory.

  —What does it do?

  —It can end the Line, Creedmoor. It can kill them. It can prick them like a bubble, it can wake us from them like a bad dream, quickly forgotten.

  —Really? And you? Can it kill you, too?

  —Shut up, Creedmoor. Go to sleep. Tomorrow we begin.

  CHAPTER 15

  LOWRY

  The ground where Kloan’s boardinghouse had stood had been cleared. Now one large gray tent stood there, and one small one.

  The large tent was used by Conductor Banks for meetings of senior staff. The small tent was for the telegraphy equipment. The neighboring buildings, including the Mayor’s house and the Smiler meeting room and the offices of a small transportation business, had been requisitioned by the Line, and were in the process of conversion to barracks. The trucks had been brought in and now slumbered along Main Street like great black primeval beasts.

  Lowry worked in the telegraphy tent among his Signal Corps. They had formerly reported to Morningside; now they reported to Lowry. It was hot, crowded, noisy, and dark. Signals came in. The telegraphs chattered. The Signal Corps dutifully decoded and transcribed their utterances and presented them to Lowry, who either circulated the information to Banks, or ordered whatever response was necessary himself, in Banks’s name, and in the name of the Engines.

  Signals came in from the device that had been placed in the Doctor’s golden watch. In theory, the device should have transmitted every word that was spoken in the Doctor’s presence. But the world was only half-made, and had not yet attained the perfection of theory. The signals were weak and tremulous. Much was lost in transmission. There was a delay of at least several hours between the moment when those signals arrived through the ether and quivered on the copper receivers of the telegraphy equipment, and the moment when the Signal Corps had translated them into som
ething intelligible, and typed up a transcript that could be placed into Lowry’s hands. It was therefore not until early the morning after, while he was shaving, that Lowry learned that (a) one of the precious Heavier-Than-Air Vessels had been lost, due to the criminal recklessness and idiocy of its pilot, and (b) a person matching the description of the Agent who’d massacred Kloan had entered the Hospital.

  He sent a report up to Banks, and he sent a report back to Kingstown.

  Banks did not respond.

  That evening, Subaltern Thernstrom of the Signal Corps interrupted Lowry as he was eating his dinner, alone at the end of a long table in what had been the house of the Mayor of Kloan.

  “Sir.”

  “What is it, Subaltern?”

  “Sir. A signal. Urgent, sir.”

  Lowry sighed, abandoned his dinner, and followed the Subaltern back to the telegraphy tent, where Subaltern Drum showed him a brief typed transcript. It began: FOR MORNINGSIDE ONLY. FOR MORNINGSIDE ONLY.

  “Sir . . .”

  “Morningside’s dead, isn’t he? I’m Morningside now. Let’s see the rest of it.”

  . . . FOR MORNINGSIDE ONLY. OUR ADVERSARY HAS ENTERED THE HOSPITAL. UNACCEPTABLE. CONDUCTOR BANKS HAS PROVED INEFFECTIVE AND IS TO BE REMOVED. YOU ARE TO TAKE ACTING COMMAND, MORNINGSIDE.

  “It came via the restricted device, sir.”

  “I know.”

  “The Engines, sir.”

  “Yes.” The transcript tailed off with a long, long signature, the names of each one of the thirty-eight Engines themselves:

  ANGELUS. ARCHWAY. ARKLEY. ARSENAL. BARKING. COLLIER HILL. DRYDEN. FOUNTAINHEAD. GEORGIANA. GLORIANA. HARROW CROSS . . .