The Half-Made World (21 page)

Why not? It would pass the time.

Maggfrid got the small medicine bag down from the compartment. Under the calipers and the various vials of brightly colored serums and powders were the cards.

The apparatus she used for the electric-cure was in the big black case overhead, safely cushioned in rags and old curtains. The applicator needles and plates, and the tongue depressors without which it was not safe, were all in the smaller bag.

She shuffled the cards and took the first one off the top of the pile. It was made of stiff wheat-yellow stock; it was printed with a complex dark pattern. “What do you see, Maggfrid?”

“. . . a dog.”

“Very good. And this?”

“. . . a house.”

“Excellent. Do you remember the name of the town we left this morning?”

“. . . ”

“It was called
Gloriana,
Maggfrid. But never mind. No, don’t look so sad. Let’s look at this card again, shall we?”

Time passed and outside the cabin the day wore into evening, though the monotone electric light inside never changed. At last Maggfrid slept, tired by his efforts. She tapped out three green smoky drops of her nerve tonic into a glass of water and soon she joined him, her bright hair lolling on the black of the seat back.

The Engine rushed endlessly on, never stopping, seemingly never swerving—though in fact, Liv knew from the maps she’d studied that it was curving in a wide arc south and southwest through the lands of the Line and then west out into the wild lands. Green hills gave way to sage and rust red. If the stories were true, then ahead of them in the dark untamed hills of the night waited Agents of the Gun. Liv wasn’t sure whether to fear them or not—she could hardly believe that any man could assault or even slow that dreadful Engine on which she traveled, no matter what sort of spirit or demon they’d trucked with.

The Engine obliterated space, blurred solid earth into a thin unearthly haze, through which it passed with hideous sea-monster grace.

The noise waxed and waned but never ceased. The chatter of pistons and hammers; low and sad moaning of steel under stress; the grinding of gears and the hiss of steam. The Song of the Line. What were they singing to each other? Orders and plans and schemes, no doubt. They planned in terms of leagues and multitudes. They sang to each other all across the continent.

Periodically Liv checked her golden pocket watch. It didn’t work; it had stopped entirely soon after she boarded the carriage. She had no good idea how much time was passing.

She opened the blind and saw that they were passing through the foothills of gray and white-capped and distant mountains. They rushed through dark pines. She closed the blind. When she opened it again—an hour, two hours later?—the mountains were gone.

Liv wrote in her journal. Maggfrid closed his eyes and listened; he seemed to find the scratching of her pen soothing. He had a touching faith in science. His brow twitched.

I am aboard the Gloriana Engine, in Compartment 317C. Sometimes I am too excited to read, and at other times I am dreadfully bored. None of the other passengers come to talk to me. There is none of the camaraderie of a sea voyage, or of Mr. Bond’s caravan. And I dare not intrude on them. It would seem sacrilegious, somehow.

The food is quite appalling. It tastes of ash and coal and dust.

What did the Engine look like? I saw it on the Concourse, but only in shadow, and besides, the memory fades. I cannot quite express it in words. I might try to sketch its machinery, as I have sketched in these pages the neuron, the cerebellum, the pituitary gland—but to do so, I think, would miss its essence. I can say that it was long, very long; it was four, five men tall. It was jet-black and it smoked. It was plated with extrusions and grilles and thorns of iron that might have been armor, and might have been machinery, but which in any case made it rough, uneven, asymmetrical, and hideous. It reminded me somewhat of the ink-blot tests devised by Professor Kohler. It reminded me also somewhat of storm-clouds. From the complex cowling at the very front of the engine two lights shone through the gloom and the smoke of the Concourse. The light was the gray of moths’ wings or dirty old ice.

The carriages behind the Engine stretched out into the distance until the smoke and shadows of the Concourse swallowed them. I could not count them. A mile or more of carriages. Each journey of this thing carries the population of the town of Lodenstein back and forth across the continent. This world is mobile.

And the Gloriana Engine itself is more than a century old. It features prominently in a number of ancient battles recounted in Mr. General Enver’s
Child’s History.
Its physical form was destroyed once, by the forces of its adversary, in 1800 or thereabouts. It returned. The black coal dust that gathers in its upswept corners, that I breathe in as I write this, is ancient dust. For all that time this machine has run in its tracks, back and forth, across the countless miles. What is my own journey in comparison?

The lights went dim. The seats stretched with a groan of rust out into bunks. Liv closed her journal. The lights went out. In the darkness the Linesmen’s black boots clanked through the corridors. So many of them! And all so much the same. Massing for war, or business, or some mysterious and complex project. She’d overheard them talking in the corridor outside; many of them would be disgorged at Ravenbrook, birthed back into the solid and sunlit world . . .

Morning light streamed in through the cracks of the blind, making visible all the cabin’s dust and dark slow-settling soot.

Liv pulled back the blind. They were racing across white salt flats that gleamed like a mirror; running like a black line across new paper; smoke tumbling from them like spilled ink.

Mountains in the distance again. So much
distance
. Habitations and cultivation became fewer and fewer as they went west—the world becoming crude, wild, unnamed, only half-made—closer and closer to that nameless Western Sea where, they said, unformed land became fog and wild water and fire and night. . . .

The world blurred, and a sudden and surprising mood of exhilaration seized her. Koenigswald and the Academy and her old life were ten thousand miles behind her, and the world was a blur, the world was a dream, the world was unmade. Anything was possible. Wasn’t this what she’d come here for? She could hardly wait to step out into the world again and begin to remake it.

She noticed a shanty town out on the salt-flats. Little black dots of shacks—were those laborers bent double in salt-traps?—rushed up close and vanished at once behind. Perhaps the Engine had obliterated it with the boom of its passing, Liv thought. She let the blind fall again; the glare hurt her eyes. She blinked in the dark of the cabin, but the bright crude shapes of the world outside were burned into her vision.

Within the hour they’d left the salt-flats far behind.

It never stopped; there was never a chance to deboard and breathe fresh air. Liv’s mood of exhilaration came and went. She stepped out into the corridor sometimes, but the Linesmen who worked there looked at her with such annoyance and distaste that she soon retreated. Her legs and her back were stiff with disuse. No wonder the men of the Line were so stooped.

On the third night, someone came to her—she woke to a bright light in her face. She’d been dreaming she was before a blazing fire. She blinked slowly and in the glare, she could make out the vague shape of a man in black. He sat on the bunk opposite, leaning forward. He wore round reflective spectacles, a broad-brimmed hat; all else was dark. Maggfrid was asleep, slumped in shadows, and Liv herself was drowsy. She noted dispassionately a sharp glittering needle entering her forearm.

“Mrs. Alverhuysen?
Sorry
to bother you, ma’am.”

He had an ugly hoarse voice—a Linesman’s voice. Her head lolled and his rough hand reached out to her cheek to steady her, to fix her gaze in the harsh light. He had very dirty nails.

“Steady on there, ma’am. The Line’s got questions for you. About your
destination
. I hear you’re a doctor. I hear you’re headed out west.”

Her whole arm was numb, and very cold. She found herself nodding, without intending to. A small part of her mind wondered with dispassionate curiosity what they’d drugged her with.

He spoke very slowly and patiently. It rather reminded Liv of the way she sometimes spoke to Maggfrid, and she disliked it, but she seemed unable to object.

“You’re going to Kingstown. Then where?”

Her own words were a distant buzz in her ears. She wasn’t sure what she’d said, but apparently it pleased him, because he favored her with an unappealing smirk.

“Good, good. Thought you might be.”

He blurred. “Stay awake now, ma’am.”

He reached out and pinched her arm.

“Dangerous country. Are you going there alone?”

She turned her head to Maggfrid, who remained slumped immobile on his seat. She realized that she would not have woken him to face this horrible apparition with her, even had she been able to call out, which it appeared she was not.