The Half-Made World (34 page)

—A creature of simple appetites.

He considered lighting a cigarette; he thought better of it. Best to leave no trace.

—It wallows in weakness and pain and suffering. It disgusts us, Creedmoor.

—We made it out of our misery. Just as we made you out of our hate, and we made the enemy out of our fear.

—Careful, Creedmoor.

He touched the water again. Water dripped from the walls like rain, a sleepy gentle rhythm. Circular echoes spread out across the pool.

—How do we kill it, do you suppose?

—It is immortal spirit, Creedmoor. It cannot be killed.

—Except by the General’s wonderful long-lost weapon, which can kill the enemy and can kill you and presumably this poor misbegotten thing, too.

—Presumably.

The water lapped at Creedmoor’s fingers.

—It has limits. When I killed poor William at the gate, it was distracted.

—You were lucky.

—Can’t kill it. But I know how to get around it.

—Yes. We know.

—It feeds on pain. So what happens if we
choke
it?

CHAPTER 22

FORWARD CAMP AT KLOAN

Lowry knocked back three of his gray bitter-tasting lozenges with a glass of water. They made him cough, and his eyes watered. He waited, clutching the edge of his desk with white knuckles, for the surge of energy that would kick his exhausted body into life again. He had not slept for—he didn’t recall how long. Ever, possibly. Too much to do. Only science and the will of the Engines kept him plodding forward.

There
it was. Yes.

“Thernstrom. Drum. Nickel. Slate. To me.”

He burst out of his tent into the blazing afternoon sun and the smoke and din and minutely ordered chaos of Kloan Forward Camp, which was gearing up for an assault.

“Come on, come on. Time’s wasting. Act fast. No second thoughts or turning back. Come on.”

He plunged into the crowds and they followed.

Old Kloan was nearly gone now.
Poor old Kloan,
Lowry thought.
Too late now.
The Line had done to Kloan what it did wherever it touched.

A city of tents surrounded Lowry, heavy, gray and black, squatting on Kloan’s remains. Black-clad soldiers emerged, formed into lines that pressed together into squares, rifles at the ready, gas masks dangling loosely round their necks, eyes forward. Lowry shoved through.

“Yes. Yes. Drum? What the fuck’s wrong with these idiots.”

Drum stopped to shout at a line of men who appeared uncertain where to go.
Pick it up, pick it up, you idiots.
Lowry pushed on.

Over the last month, nearly a full division of the Line’s forces had moved in. They came from Kingstown, Angelus, Gloriana, Harrow Cross, Archway, elsewhere. They came grumbling and cursing, blinking in the sun. They were far from any familiar Stations, and they hated the big sky and the hot sun and the bare earth and the thin air, which lacked the
texture
of air into which the Engines had exhaled. So Kloan had been rebuilt for them. Tents; then a
city
of tents; then iron shacks; hastily erected iron hangars and vaults; smoking chimneys and forges and foundries. The Line was mobile. Industry could be brought in on the back of trucks, assembled in days. . . .

An error. He stopped short, wheeled around.

“Slate? Where are these men’s gas masks?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

A rank of Linesmen, maskless, looked dead ahead, avoiding Lowry’s furious red-eyed gaze.

“Where the
slagging fuck
are their gas masks? Who’s to blame? Mr. Slate? Eh? They’ll die without masks. Serve ’em right. Take care of it, Mr. Slate.”

He strode on, through slick oil puddles, past ranks of throbbing machinery. He didn’t even know what it was. He passed the Signal Corps tent, where several shiny new telegraph machines had recently arrived, just barely keeping pace with the new volume of communications.

A Signalman emerged from the tent and came running up with a transcript in his hand. “Sir—Acting Conductor, sir—the woman has been talking to the target again. The device captured the conversation with better accuracy this time, sir, near twenty percent—”

“The
potential
target, Signalman. Make no assumptions. Anything new?”

“Unclear, sir, as you know he talks in nursery rhymes and we’re uncertain how to decode—”

“No time now. Assault under way. Mr. Nickel, go with him.”

Lowry and Thernstrom pushed on. Residents of old Kloan, under the eyes of Linesmen, loaded gleaming newly made gas rockets onto the back of trucks. Lowry nodded in approval. The Kloanites were looking pale and sickly now, they didn’t take well to the new air, but they were tolerably hard workers when properly directed.

Lowry put his arm round the shoulder of a Kloanite boy.

“Walk with me. The rest of you, get on with it.”

Lowry pushed on through ranks of Linesmen who struggled under the weight of machine guns, two men each and one to hold the ammunition case. Their insignia said they were from Gloriana. They staggered to one side as he passed and lowered their heads in submission.

“See that, boy? That’s good order, that is.”

“Yes, sir.”

The forces now at Lowry’s disposal had doubled since the day he’d taken Banks’s place. More had been promised. But the Enemy was active now in the South and in the East. Agents had destroyed tracks, fomented uprisings, poisoned, burned, committed acts of sabotage and terror. Good; the Enemy was afraid. It meant that Lowry’s reinforcements were delayed, but Lowry was willing to make do with what he had.

So far, he had not been removed from command. No doubt he was being watched.

There were cranes overhead. They lifted concrete walls off flat-bed trucks and slowly lowered them into place around Lowry and Thernstrom and the boy, like a city exploding in reverse. Lowry squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t have seen
that
in Old Kloan, would you? Wonderful, isn’t it? Progress.”

He passed by a row of Linesmen bent over the innards of black motorcycles. His mood was much improved now, the bustle and fear and respect of his men had put him in good spirits, not to mention the chemicals were now having their full energizing effect. “Good work, that man. Well done. Will they be ready?”

The Linesmen snapped to attention.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

“Good, good. Forward, forward.”

Lowry modeled his good-fellow manner on old moving-picture images of Mr. Clay, the old Master of Angelus Station. They used to pack the children into the moving-picture vaults, back in Angelus, when Lowry was a boy, to learn the Line’s Purpose in glorious pure black-and-white. There little Lowry saw Clay: that jerking gray screen-phantom in muttonchops and long black tailcoat striding through the halls and shadows and shuddering machines of Angelus with a glad word for every busy soot-black worker.

“GOOD FELLOW, GOOD FELLOW”

. . . the moving-picture title card had read.

MASTERS OF INDUSTRY.

Stark white block letters on deep inky black.

Of course, Clay was long gone,
removed,
and all those moving-pictures gone, too, burned probably, and his name forbidden, and quite right, too; it didn’t do for a mere man, even a man like that, to get too popular. Still, in secret, Lowry remembered him. Clay had a useful way about him.
“Good fellow, good fellow, strong arm there,”
Lowry said, just as Clay used to.
“Keep it going.
 . . .”

A Signalman came running up, disturbing Lowry’s daydream.

“Sir.”

“What? Good fellow. What?”

“Scouts report they’re moving, sir.”

“Do they know we know their location?”

“Not clear, sir.”

“Which way?”

“Northeast. Across open country, parallel to the road.”

“Good. Fine. Good. Then we have them. As you were.”

Lowry realized that he was still holding the Kloanite boy, who was trembling and staring at his feet.

“Hey. Hey, boy. Look up.”

“Sir.”

“Do you know what’s going to happen here?”

“Sir.”

“We’re going to kill a bunch of the Enemy. But that’s nothing to do with you. Let me tell you what’s going to happen to Kloan.”

. . . because Lowry, he explained, was only the point man. That was how the Line worked. Military forces went ahead to scout the path, clear out enemies. Behind them come and will come and will
keep
coming the factories. The smokestacks and forges. The silent soot-smeared foundry men straining in their hundreds and then thousands as the towers of iron and concrete go up and the drills go deeper and deeper down, relentlessly in search of anything that might smell like oil.

Along with the factories would come the gray-haired women of the assembly lines, endlessly grinding up the earth and spilling out goods and necessities.

“This
will
happen, boy. It has to happen. The Line does what it does. First, after the soldiers, they’ll send the merchants, the traders . . .”

In fact, the traders were already there, like they were waiting in the earth all along and the Line’s passage had ground them up from it, spilled them out like slag or mine tailings. They came in classes and grades like standardized engine parts. Some of them were low nervous men in shabby patched coats, trading shoddy and damaged goods out of battered suitcases; they would get sent out to Gooseneck, and to the farms around Fairsmith, where the hicks would be thrilled to see so much as a dented tin kettle, or maybe a sharper kind of plow or something. Lowry didn’t know the details. Some were sober men in gray suits already poking around Kloan’s streets, teams of surveyors and engineers in tow, site-scouting for the coming workshops and factories. A few were flamboyant. Strange as it seemed, the Line sometimes had to produce flamboyance and color, because the hicks loved it so: so a few of the traders sported silk ties, silver watches, tall black hats, waistcoats in purple and gold. They brought with them little bright flocks of showgirls. They’d go out to Greenbank and World’s End and put on a song and dance to sell medicines, and watches, and eyeglasses; or ephemeral factory-milled luxuries like cigarettes or chocolates. Or spun sugars and ices, dyed bright unnatural shades of gold and cobalt blue and cadmium red, refined in the processing towers of Angelus Station or Arsenal.

“How does that sound? Sounds good? Well, boy, the factories aren’t built yet. In time. For now, the goods come by Engine and by truck. Bulk. Cheap. Cheap as we care to make ’em. The smallest youngest Station of the Line produces more goods in its factories in an hour—produces more goods
by mistake
every day—than Kloan and Greenbank and Gooseneck would ever have produced in ten years, in
twenty
. You can’t compete. As you are to the Folk, we are to you. Right where you’re standing, boy, there’s going to be a moving-picture vault. I marked the spot personally. Things you’ll never have imagined you might see.”

Lowry crouched to look the boy in the eye. “So it’s time to decide, boy, whether you’ll stand in the way and be ground down, or go forward. Join up. Think about it. You have to choose, boy, and you have to choose—”

The boy slipped Lowry’s grasp and ran off across the fields.

A gray numbness descended on Lowry’s vision.