The Half-Made World (32 page)

She wore a white dress in a plain style. She had a book under her arm, as always. She had a sun hat when she came outside, but she left it perched on a hedge; she liked the summer sun on her skin.

Sunlight is essential for a growing child,
her mother always said.
Healthy body, healthy mind
. (Only she said that in a strange old dead language, which Liv had not yet begun to learn.) She therefore made sure that Liv’s tutors sent her out into the grounds for at least two hours each day, though Liv’s inclinations were bookish.

Her mother was the Emeritus Professor of Psychological Science. Liv had a great many tutors, because the students were always eager to curry favor with her mother, and her mother was always busy, and her father was No Longer With Us—an ill-defined state he had inhabited for as long as Liv could remember.

Liv passed the croquet lawn, where the hoops were rusted and spiderwebbed and the balls grown tuberously over with dirt and grass. She walked around the edge of the pond—saying good morning to Dr. Zumwald, the ichthyologist, who leaned over the water, taking notes, conducting observations. The fish were exotics, bright blue: they flickered in the weeds like hot young stars. She crossed the rose garden, where Mrs. Dr. Bauer was cutting samples.

There was a famous oak at the end of the lawns, in the gnarled wood of which a less sophisticated child might have seen faces. Past the oak, the grass ran wild and unweeded as the garden sloped down to the river. Liv broke into a run, panting as she jumped the oak’s twisted roots and vanished into the violet of the wild jacaranda. She always started running at the oak. The old men watched her go.

Liv always started running at the oak; but that day she had particular reason to do so, because the book under her arm was
stolen,
and she’d imagined, as she passed under the oak’s vast shadow, that she’d heard her mother’s voice calling angrily after her. (It was, in fact, only two students from the Faculty of Metaphysics debating the Logical Necessity of Other Earths in raised voices.)

Her mother’s rules were very clear. The books on the north edge of her mother’s library: Liv was
Too Young
for those books. Criminal and Deviant Psychology—her mother’s area of principal concern—was not a healthy interest for a child.

The stolen book in question was Gross’s
Criminal Psychology,
third edition. Liv sat on her favorite log down by the water and opened the book, but she was quickly lost and bored, and she put it aside with a scowl.

The Academy was built on a bend in the river. This clearing was on a pond that she thought of as
the River,
but in fact, it was only a tiny side-trickle. The great water itself rushed past half a mile away, looping around by the bridge and the road, and down through the town and on to the capital, and south into the Principalities of Maessen, about which Liv knew nothing at all, except that she once memorized a very strange chart of heraldic devices of the Princes, all eagles and lions and gryphons, which were both eagles and lions at once. . . .

The actual river thronged with barges and noisy boat races, and its banks were paved and crowded with carts and dray horses. This silent clearing was
her
River.

The water was still and green. Willows hung over it. It rained in the night, and the wood all around her was wet and lush and swollen. Her dress was already spattered with mud.

For a while Liv simply closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the water and things growing wild. Then, very suddenly, very seriously, she cracked open the book again at a random page and began reading out loud:

“The question of homesickness is of essential significance and must not be undervalued. It has been much studied and the notion has been reached that children mainly, in particular during the period of puberty”—about which Liv knew nothing at all, except that she had once studied a chart of physiological changes—“and idiotic and weak persons, suffer much from homesickness, and try to combat the oppressive feeling of dejection with powerful sense stimuli.”

Liv paused to consider this. She had never gone more than two days’ travel from the Academy, and found homesickness hard to imagine.

“Hence they are easily led to crime, especially to arson. It is asserted that uneducated people in lonesome, very isolated regions, such as mountaintops, great moors, coast country, the West’s red barren plains, are particularly subject to nostalgia.”

Crime, arson—Liv pronounced the words with ghoulish happy relish. She closed the book again as her mind wandered to thoughts of lonely plains and mountaintops and wild people.

The library from which Liv had stolen
Disorders of the Criminal Classes
was Liv’s mother’s own personal library. It was on the uppermost floors of August Hall, nestled in under a low arched ceiling. It was just down the corridor from Liv’s mother’s office, where she met her subjects. She believed that the light and airiness of the upper floor was good for their minds. She said:
Blows away cobwebs!

That morning, when Liv stole the book, her mother had been with a subject. She kept the door to her office open at all times, and encouraged the subject to sit near it. Once Liv had asked why, and her mother had explained:

“It keeps the poor young men from feeling trapped, dear. No one likes to feel trapped, but they especially do not. It prevents them from doing something they might regret.”

“What would they do?”

“Raise their voices, dear. Embarrass themselves. Run along.”

The significance of this irritating habit, from Liv’s point of view, was that her mother sat with a view of the corridor, past which Liv had to creep to get to the library. So she waited at the end of the corridor until she judged that her mother was deeply engrossed in her work. She listened to the subject becoming agitated, his voice rising to a high-pitched quavering sniveling whine,
I don’t know how much longer it’s the dreams you see I don’t know how much longer I can.
She heard her mother’s voice, deep and calm:
Collect yourself. Collect yourself. Begin again.
She seized her moment and dashed—

She was safe in the library’s dusty silence. No sound but her own panting. A faint pleasant smell of cigarette smoke, her mother’s and the subject’s, still lingered.

Books lined every wall. Liv ran her fingers along the dust of the spines. She lingered on some of the case studies—arsonists! thieves! women of ill repute—a concept that she understood only dimly—and even murderers. Even something slim that was supposedly a study, from interviews, of an Agent of the Gun, which she understood to be a kind of supernatural monster from the far West, where the world was in the process of making and distinctions between the real and the monstrous were not yet fixed. Something like a vampire? And there was—tucked away on a low shelf—something hand-scrawled on yellowing paper that purported to be a study of the madness of the Engines themselves. The library was like a fairy-tale cave, full of dark and grisly and wonderful treasures.

Liv screwed up her face into an expression of great seriousness of purpose, passed by those frivolous entertainments, and settled on Diamond’s
Disorders
.

The subject in her mother’s office had gone quiet, so Liv waited for a moment before making her escape. She took a second to flip through the book for the word
thief
.

It is often intriguing to see the points at which the criminal seeks his “honor.” What is proper for a thief, may be held improper for a robber. The burglar hates to be identified with the pickpocket. I remember one thief who was inconsolable because the papers mentioned that he had foolishly overlooked a large sum of money in a burglary. This would indicate that criminals have professional ambitions and seek professional fame.

Only a very stupid thief, she thought, would want her crimes to be famous! Then she slipped the book under her arm and fled, past her mother’s office, and through the laboratory and its tables full of glass jars, in which floated the brains, pickled in solutions of various beautiful hues, of criminals, fallen women, apes, and—tiny, intricate, jewel-like—
rats
.

The willow shook in a sudden breeze and loosed rainwater shimmering across the green of the pond. Liv, who’d fallen into daydreaming, suddenly started—

There was a rustling in the trees. A
crashing
. There were deer on the grounds, and peacocks; Liv turned hoping to see the puzzled face and gorgeous purple tail of one of the Academy’s birds. Instead she saw a man, emerging from the bushes, blundering and snapping through branches.

He breathed in heavy short bursts and his pale moony face was slick with sweat.

On seeing her, he stopped short and stood there blinking. He seemed to be enormously surprised by her presence.

Liv was clever enough to be quite discriminating as to the ages of adults—among whom she spent most of her days anyway. She judged the intruder to be a young man. Hardly more than a boy himself. About the age of the more junior students. He wore an old suit, the sleeves of which were far too short, and a frayed red necktie. He was quite fat.

His pupils were remarkably tiny, making him appear rather alien; Liv wasn’t sure what to make of that.

He dabbed at the sweat on his brow with his necktie.

Liv folded away the book and stood with her hands on her hips. He was short, not a very great deal taller than she. She resented his intrusion.

She said, “Are you a student?”

He held up a finger as if to indicate that he’d heard her question, but didn’t answer. His peculiar eyes darted all round the clearing. His finger shook.

“My mother is Dr. Hoffman. She’s one of the Professors here. In fact, she’s very senior. Are you a student?”

The strange young man started a little at that name. “In my dreams,” he says, his pale brow furrowed, “I’ve seen this tree. And this water. This clearing.”

“I don’t think that’s very likely. I’m sure you’ve never been here before; only I come here.

“It’s very lovely. It’s very calm. I wish . . .”

He went silent and lowered his finger.

“My mother says that no one
really
sees things in dreams. They only think they do. She says it makes them think they’re being spoken to by the universe. As if they’re special. If they’re weak-minded. Do you often think you see things in dreams?”

He focused on her for the first time. “In my dream, you’re weren’t here. There was no little girl in my dreams.”

“But I
am
here. Do you see? This isn’t a place from your dreams. I really rather prefer to be alone here,
actually
.”

He blinked at her.

“Are you someone’s subject? If so, you shouldn’t be here anyway.”

He stepped closer to the water. His suit was stained, Liv noticed, spattered with something dark. Many of the subjects—which was, she was increasingly sure, what this poor young man must be—were prone to stains. They could not take care of themselves.

He looked back from the water to her. He studied her, up and down. There was something damp and despairing in his eyes.