The Half-Made World (14 page)

There was a history of the Republic’s battles—glorious triumphs against both the armies of the Line and the pirates and mercenaries of the Gun. The Republic recognized no gods, no masters.

On the fifth night out of Monroe Town, the men were all busy mending broken axles and torn canvas, and so Liv sat on a rock by the edge of camp and read alone. Bond, who’d stayed away on previous nights as she read to his men, swaggered and looked over her shoulder.

“He’s dead,” Bond said. He pointed at an illustration of General Enver, rallying his troops at the battle of something-or-other.

“Dead,” Bond added, as if he expected Liv to be astonished by this news. “Him and his Republic. They kept winning battles until they lost one, and that’s all there is to say. Dead and lost and forgotten.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Books are good for keeping accounts. You can’t learn much else from them. The world changes faster than words can make it stick.”

“The past doesn’t change, Mr. Bond.”

“They say the General was friends with Hillfolk. They say he had one for his adviser, a caster of stones, and that’s how he won his battles. I heard he married one, but I don’t believe that one, myself. Is any of that in there?”

“It’s only a children’s book, Mr. Bond. It’s very simple.”

“Huh. Books are all right for children, I suppose.”

She snapped the book shut. “Well, thank you
very
much for your insights, Mr. Bond.”

He flushed—he looked embarrassed.

“Mr. Bond, I apologize—”

“No offense, ma’am.”

“The heat, Mr. Bond, and the lateness of the hour . . .”

She felt oddly attached to the silly little book. In a way, it was something from home, and it made her sentimental.

“They say,” Bond said, “I mean, I’ve heard it said.” His tone was unusually quiet and thoughtful. “I’ve heard some folks say that the War will go on until it chews up the whole world. The Republic tried to stop it, but look what happened to them. Wherever there’s oil, Line will thrive. Wherever there’s bad men, there’s Gun. Forever.”

“A horrible thought.”

“I’ve heard it said that the Folk know how to end it. They were here first and they know this world and what’s meant to be here and it stands to reason they could put Gun and Line back down, if they wanted to, don’t you think?”

“Reason seems to have very little to do with it, Mr. Bond.”

“A friend of mine used to say, if there’s hope for peace, it’s with them, not us.”

“How shameful for us if that’s true!”

“He died. Someone shot him. Doesn’t matter who. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s something to think about, isn’t it? Something to think about. I’m not a stupid man, Doctor.”

“Of course not, Mr. Bond.”

Her husband, the late Professor of Natural History, Doctor Bernhardt Alverhuysen, had indeed resembled Mr. Bond in size—though beneath Bond’s fat there was muscle, and Bond was sunburned where Bernhardt had been pale, and he was physically deft and sure-footed where Bernhardt had been clumsy. In fact, there was only the faintest shadow of a resemblance. Why
did
Bond remind her so of Bernhardt? Perhaps precisely because he was so different from all the men she’d known in Koenigswald; deep in alien territory, she sought out whatever traces of the familiar she could find.

Bond’s arrogance, rudeness, and self-certainty reminded her of Bernhardt, too. And his lecturing—Bond had seemed taciturn back in Burren Hill, but out in the silent open spaces of the trail, he loved the sound of his own voice. Plants, weather, business, how to ride a horse and mend a wagon. He turned out to be surprisingly well informed and passionate on the industrial processes for which their cargo of bones were intended. Bernhardt had liked to talk philosophy. Bernhardt had had something of a romantic side, though deeply buried under bluster; did Bond?

What she had told Bond was true. Bernhardt had died of a heart attack two years ago, at the dining table, in the middle of a peevish diatribe on Faculty politics, during the soup course.

He’d been much, much older than her. She’d met him almost the very day she’d emerged from the Institute at Tuborren, where she had spent the greater part of her adolescence in treatment for shock, and certain related nervous conditions, arising out of the tragic death of her mother—a topic she most certainly did
not
intend to discuss with Mr. Bond. She’d been a pale, wan, sheltered little thing, uncertain of her place in the world—and Bernhardt been a great and substantial authority in his field, who had found her pretty.

She’d been very fond of him, albeit in a distant, irritated sort of way, and had mourned him for an appropriate period; but afterwards she rarely missed him.

It was a point of professional pride for Liv that she never deceived herself as to her own feelings.

Bond sounded out those feelings one evening as they rode together beneath the cedars. He stared fixedly at the path ahead as he spoke, and he somehow managed to be rude and coy at once—

“You won’t find a husband in that hospital of yours, Doctor.”

“I’m not presently looking for another husband, Mr. Bond.”

“None of us have forever to wait, Doctor.”

—but she was touched anyway. “It’s a big world, Mr. Bond. Sometimes it seems as if we
might
have forever.”

He was silent for a long minute. Then he said, “It does. Sometimes it does.”

They talked about politics and history for the rest of the night.

“That’s Conant,” Bond said. They came down a steep hillside, and a blazing sun was behind them and they cast long shadows. Spread out below was a little town in the bend of a river. Its walls were painted white, and it gleamed like a scatter of diamonds. The colors of nature around it were lurid, wild: the trees were brazen, the river muddy gold, the sky lush violet.

“Not much of a town,” Bond said. “But you’ll get a horse there, and you and your big feller can find someone who knows the way to Gloriana.”

“I think I know the way.” She shielded her eyes against the sun and looked south.

“I guess you do.”

She could see it for miles, across the grasslands. She’d never seen anything like it, but there was no doubt what it was. The black spires, the smoke. Gloriana, easternmost Station of the Line.

“Watch yourself, Doctor. Some things are worse and weirder than Hillfolk.”

CHAPTER 8

THE NET

What left Kingstown the next morning was not, as Lowry had imagined it might be, any small or secretive adventure into enemy territory. Conductor Banks’s Expeditionary Force consisted of 420 men; a commensurate number of troop trucks and staff cars; seven Heavier-Than-Air Vessels of both the rotary-wing and the ornithopter variety, lightly armed and stripped for scouting; eight Ironclads; two trucks containing wireless telegraphy equipment, one of which was redundant in case of emergencies; one truck containing five fixed guns; one truck containing mortars, rockets, noisemakers, gas; three trucks containing nothing but fuel and food; six trucks containing canvas, concrete, wire, and other parts and materials for the construction of a Forward Camp; and that wasn’t even mentioning the clawed and treaded earth-moving machinery that went ahead to clear mudslides and deadfalls, to widen narrow roads not made for the Line. The expedition roared into the hills like a chain saw, in a haze of dust and noise.

Lowry found the noise an enormous comfort. If he kept his eyes down and didn’t look at the horizon, he might still be safely at home.

Lowry had had one and only one face-to-face encounter with Conductor Banks, as the expedition gathered on the vast tarmac fields just outside Kingstown’s fortifications, shortly before it was due to set off. He approached the window of Banks’s staff car and waited patiently until the window at last wound down, and Lowry’s reflection was replaced by Banks’s face. As it turned out, Banks was a man of about Lowry’s size, little more than Lowry’s age, and with much the same sort of drab shapeless round-spectacled ghost of a face—except for the tracks of exhaustion and stress that invariably came with high command in the Line, which were more deeply cut on Banks than they’d ever been on Lowry.

Banks’s lap was buried under a heap of reports, which he was studying through reading glasses. Large sections of text were blacked out.

“Yes?”

“Sub-Invigilator (Second Class) Lowry, sir.”

“Right. Right. One of the advisers. The experts. The intelligence people.” Banks took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Do
you
know what we’re doing here, Lowry?”

“No, sir.”

“No, sir. No, sir—I bet you fucking don’t. I don’t. Why should you? What’s your expertise in, Lowry?”

“The enemy, sir. The—”

“Who isn’t an expert in the fucking enemy, Lowry? What do you think we do all day? Let’s see—Can you talk to the Signal Corps, Lowry?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve worked with Signals—”

“Good. I can’t make head or tails of any damn thing they say. I understand artillery, wheels and motors, fuel, supply lines, fortifications—not Signals. Report to S-I First Morningside, who’s another so-called
expert
all the way from Archway. He’s responsible for intelligence here and is acting in the absence of clearer orders as my second. Assist him with the Signals.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lowry, come here. Lowry.”

Lowry leaned closer.

“Are you here to spy on me, Lowry?”

“No, sir. My orders are to assist you in any—”

“Four hundred and twenty of us. Another two thousand coming behind, Lowry, but no time to wait or fully mobilize or organize. Precipitous action. Seize and control each shitty little town in a patch of worthless red wasteland. Form a net, a circle. Why? It must be done
immediately
. No answer. Precipitous action; thirty years of service and never known
precipitous action
. Deliberation is what we
are,
Lowry, deliberation and control. Someone somewhere’s in a panic. A blunder? Maybe. Not mine. Not mine, Lowry. I do my duty. Forwardprogress! Right into the wasteland if that’s where it’s going, not my business. Not my blunder. I don’t complain. Tell them that, Lowry.”

It could be advantageous to Lowry’s career to be taken for an informant for higher authorities; on the other hand, it could be dangerous to lie. He therefore stayed silent.

“Get to work, Lowry.” Banks grunted with effort as he wound the window up.