The Half-Made World (28 page)

After Busro, she visited a young girl called Bella, who’d lost her family and a leg to a stray rocket, and who was (again) on the verge of suicide. As Liv and Bella talked, Dr. Hamsa passed outside, in conversation with one of the House’s guards—Renato, she thought his name was—and she overheard them talking gravely of “news of a massacre at Kloan . . . agents of the Powers . . . many dead, no one apprehended.” Her blood ran cold. Bella just stared glumly at her feet and shrugged, as if to say,
See?

On the way back, she got lost. In her early days in the Doll House, Liv was forever getting lost. Its corridors were narrow and not well lit. They seemed impossibly long and labyrinthine. They were identical everywhere, painted either a funereal white, or a soft eggshell blue, which could be sometimes soothing and sometimes sad. The corridors were never empty, but the people one met were generally even less certain of their whereabouts than Liv was.

She turned a corner and bumped into John Cockle. He appeared to be replacing the hinges on one of the patients’ doors.

He gave her a cheery wave. “It creaks,” he explained. “Can’t have that, can we? Will give the little ones nightmares.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Cockle.”

“Good afternoon to you, too, Doc.”

“You’re supposed to be finishing my office.”

“Hasn’t slipped my mind even for a moment. When I’m done, you’ll have the finest office any doctor ever enjoyed. Your friends from back East will come visit just to take a look at it. As it happens, I myself am a Lundroyman by birth, no native of these parts, so I know what it’s like to be far from home—”

“Well, you seem to have made yourself quite at home here, Mr. Cockle.”

He grinned.

Cockle seemed ubiquitous; one bumped into him
everywhere,
except, it seemed, where he was supposed to be. After his heroics at the gate, he’d been instantly welcomed onto the House’s staff. He wasn’t a very good carpenter, and he wasn’t a very reliable handyman, but it seemed that was what he wanted to be, and he certainly gave an impression of hard work. He was friendly with everyone. In particular, it seemed that all the doctors who most resented and disliked Liv thought Creedmoor was just the swellest fellow ever. . . .

She found him unnerving.

“Good-bye, Mr. Cockle.”

“John, please. Otherwise I get confused. If you’re looking for the stairs, Doc, it’s left and left again and then, and this is the trick,
right.
 . . .”

The
Child’s History
said:

Worst among the weapons of the Line is something you may not think of as a weapon at all: their noise. Yes, strange as it seems, their noise! The noise of the Engines is the noise of fear and submission. All those who hear it are diminished. This is why those who live in their grimy, awful, soot-choked Stations are so terribly stunted in their growth. Wickedly, though ingeniously, they have learned to focus it into a weapon. The bombs consist of hammers, pistons, sounding-plates, and amplifiers. The noise is said by those few who’ve heard its echoes and survived to be senseless and mad. It crushes the mind. What it destroys can never be rebuilt. This is a good lesson: What is destroyed is gone forever. This is why you must always strive to build, never to destroy.

Gone forever. After two weeks, she’d made no progress with D or G. She felt under a great deal of pressure, and it was necessary, each night before bed, to take two drops of her nerve tonic in a glass of water. It was a great comfort simply to watch that smoky green fluid unfurl itself into the water.

Liv took tea with the Director at noon. They sat on wicker chairs in the House’s herb garden, under the shade of parasols. A few patients listlessly wandered the garden’s paths—one of them in particular had a wound in his face like a—well, she tried not to stare. She focused her eyes instead on the Director’s neat black beard. She watched it enclose and devour a biscuit.

“Perhaps you were hoping I would report some wonderful success,” she said. “I’m afraid I have to disappoint you.”

“Early days yet, Dr. Alverhuysen,” he told her. He neatly dabbed the crumbs from his beard with a lace napkin. “Early days. This House has stood here for many years now. It outlived my father, and I expect it to outlive me and my sons. We do what we can; no more. So long as there is war, the work of the House Dolorous will never be done.”

“You are, of course, correct, Director.”

“Call me Richard, please.”

“Richard, of course, you’re correct. But after coming all this way . . . the risks! I think I was a little mad to come. Sometimes strange moods seize me. I confess I hoped I might achieve miracles.”

Her hand was shaking; she had spilled her tea. The Director was looking at her with concern. She flushed a little and dabbed with her napkin at her dress, muttering, “Early days. As you so rightly say. Oh, you must think me very foolish, Director! I am simply tired. And I suppose it was vain and foolish of me to hope that I could accomplish so much, so quickly, where others no less able have failed.”

“Oh, but my dear! Where would we be without foolishness and vanity!” The Director’s eyes twinkled, and he dipped another biscuit in his tea. “Hard work must be leavened with hope. This is a serious house and a sad house, but also a house of wonders.” He raised a finger to cut off whatever she was about to say. “I think you need a break from your work, Dr. Alverhuysen. Get some rest. And come see me tomorrow morning. I want to show you something.”

CHAPTER 17

TELEGRAPH COMMUNION

For a full day, Conductor Banks refused to emerge from his command tent or accept messengers, even after Lowry had the tent’s electricity supply cut. In the end, Lowry had to organize the ten men of the Signal Corps and march on Banks’s tent.

He told the guards, “Stand aside. Sanction of the Engines.” They stared at their feet. They didn’t seem surprised.

He sent in Subaltern Thernstrom first, just in case Banks was, in the extremity of his despair and humiliation, inclined to do something criminal. Who knew what a man might do when he knew—as Banks surely must—that the Engines had withdrawn their sanction from him?

Thernstrom said, “Harmless, sir.” Lowry went in.

The interior was crowded with shadows. Banks sat at his steel desk, typing.

“One moment, Morningside.”

“Lowry. Morningside is dead.”

Banks looked up. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Right. One moment, Lowry.”

Lowry glanced at Banks’s desk. It looked like the Conductor was typing up a very long justification of his actions, or lack of action. It seemed to be mostly about the inevitability, regardless of individual human failings, of the progress of the Engines’ plan for the world.

“That’s enough, Banks.”

“One moment, Lowry.”

“No one cares, Banks.”

“For the record, Lowry.”

Next to the typewriter sat an empty mug and Banks’s pistol.

Lowry said, “Mr. Thernstrom.”

“Sir?”

“Watch him. Let him finish. Give him till evening shift.”

So there were a few more hours before the moment when, at his desk and under Thernstrom’s eyes, Banks shot himself, and command formally passed to Lowry. Lowry was deeply glad of those hours. He was already being deluged with reports, queries, demands, problems. He stood firm. The attention of the Engines was on him.

One of the first things he did was to order that the natives of Kloan be organized. They annoyed him, the way they hung around the outskirts of the Forward Camp, looking miserable and idle. Some of them had taken to begging. He ordered that they be put to work on construction and other menial labor, which freed up some of his forces to add to patrols, and to the siege of the Hospital. Additional forces were supposed to be
en route
from Kingstown but had not yet arrived, and manpower was short.

“Besides,” he told Thernstrom, “it’ll do them good. The Line’s here to stay now, and they’d better get used to it.”

After Banks shot himself, Lowry had a team of Kloanites, which he was amused to see included the former Mayor, remove the body from the tent, scrub everything clean, and dispose of Banks’s meaningless report. Then he moved in.

At midnight, he wired to Kingstown:

CONDUCTOR (ACTING) LOWRY, KLOAN FORWARD CAMP, ACTING IN PLACE OF BANKS, DECEASED. PROBLEM: SAFE DISTANCE FROM HOSPITAL UNCERTAIN. RANGE OF HOUSE DEFENSES UNCERTAIN. SITUATION COMPLICATED BY AGENT’S SUCCESSFUL INFILTRATION OF HOSPITAL DUE TO NEGLIGENCE OF BANKS

Lowry’s finger hovered over
A
for
AS I PREDICTED.
He thought better of it.

AGENT’S PRESENCE LIKELY TO RESULT IN CONFLICT, MAY CAUSE LOSS OF TARGET. THEREFORE IMMEDIATE SIEGE NOW DANGEROUS. RECOMMENDATION: WIDE, LOOSE NET, MINIMUM SEVERAL MILES FROM HOSPITAL. ROADS TO BE BLOCKADED AND TRAVELERS SEARCHED. GREENBANK, GOOSENECK, FAIRSMITH, WORLD’S END TO BE EXPECTED TO COOPERATE. NET TO BE PROGRESSIVELY CLOSED AS ADDITIONAL FORCES ARRIVE. PLEASE ADVISE.

The machine churned and rattled and sparked briefly, and the message was off to trouble the ether. Lowry dismissed the operator.