The Half-Made World (50 page)

Lowry slogged forward, left-foot-right-foot-
left
, and the wind blew along the ridges and whipped the dust up into mad shadow shapes and blew right through his fucking brain.

Lowry was falling apart. The men were, too.

A few days ago, Subaltern Collier came to Lowry and told him, in a whisper, that they were officially crossing the point of no return; that if they pressed on, they would not have enough food in their packs for the return.

“We have our orders, Mr. Collier,” Lowry said. “We’ll hunt or something if we must.”

“Whose orders, sir?”

“Orders, Mr. Collier.”

No return. That was the last straw; that was the last fucking straw. That opened some cracks in everyone’s casing, all right.

Shortly after that, Subaltern Thernstrom approached him to say, “The men are frightened.”

And Lowry said: “Good. So am I.”

Subaltern Collier came up with a plan: If some of them made camp, and some went back in shifts, came back with supplies, organized a supply chain of sorts, they could perhaps all make it back. Lowry waved him away with a grunt and a scowl. Two days later, Collier came back with a new plan, suitably tinkered with to take into account the fresh wilderness miles they’d stumbled across since last time. Under more normal operating circumstances, Lowry would have had a sneaking admiration for Collier’s mechanical persistence, his careful calculating mind, though he would still have filed whatever reports necessary to have the jumped-up bastard demoted or arrested.
No one goes back.
As it was, Lowry just stumped on, hunched, lost in his own thoughts, which were bleak and gray.

The men chattered behind him. A general breakdown of discipline loomed. How many were still sound, and how many were broken parts, rattling loose? Lowry didn’t know. He no longer trusted his Subalterns to keep him informed on the mood of the men. Collier had his own agenda. Thernstrom talked to himself. Gibb had a look of wild-eyed sweaty-faced excitement that couldn’t be trusted. Lowry should have had
all
the Subalterns shot, but he couldn’t spare them.

It was different for the men, who at least had Lowry to lead them. Lowry had nothing, was out there all alone. The silence of his masters’ Song was more than he could handle.

He had no idea how much he muttered to himself all day.

Lowry’s one entertainment was reading the transcripts from the woman’s signaling device. Every night, they camped in tents that didn’t do a slagging thing to keep out the winds, and Lowry read in cold murk by the faint reddish light of an electric-bar lamp.

The typewriters were long since abandoned. The Signal Corps wrote their transcripts by pen, using shorthand and filling the margins to conserve paper, the supply of which was dwindling in a nerve-racking way, as Collier could be relied on to inform everyone. There were pages and pages of it every day. The Agent would not or maybe
could
not shut up. Sooner or later, he’d have dragged every filthy little detail of his filthy life into the light. Unveiling—unburdening—exposing himself, like a pervert. His first murder, in a town called Twisted Root. His adventures as a dealer of opium, and with the Keaton City mob. His very good friend Abban the Lion, who was dashing, and handsome, and brooding, and romantic, and who Lowry happened to know had murdered well over a hundred men. His days in various ridiculous religious orders, in his confused disordered pre-Gun youth, and a month in a cellar with the Knights of Labor in Beecher City, wiring up explosives for use on bankers. The first kill he made at the Guns’ command—a kill that reignited a feud that threw Burnham Town and Olmsburg into chaos, and opened them up in the end for new Mayors under the Guns’ thumb.
Jen of the Floating World; now
there’s
a woman worth knowing.
 . . .

Lowry had begun to imagine that he could hear the voices of the woman and the Agent and the General in his head. The woman’s voice as he imagined it was sometimes high-pitched and shrill and imperious, and sometimes, when she was frightened, soft and quite touching. The Agent’s voice was deep, theatrical, full of gloating gusto, fascinatingly horrible. The General sounded like a small boy.

He’d long since lost interest in what the General might say—it was Creedmoor who held Lowry’s attention. Lowry had never before had the opportunity to get so close to an Agent. What would the next disgusting revelation be? Could it get worse?

What confused Lowry was that Creedmoor seemed to shift between pride in his crimes and something like shame—at least, he was prone to dropping little defiant remarks at his masters’ expense. He toyed with the idea of disloyalty. Was he planning to betray his masters? Lowry couldn’t tell. He suspected not—he suspected that Creedmoor was simply so vain that he demanded to be admired both for his loyalty and for his disloyalty, and for his oh-so-tortured indecision between the two—but he couldn’t rule out the possibility. Did Creedmoor have unexpected allies hidden out here?

And what was the woman’s angle? She was mostly silent. Sometimes she asked pointed questions. Did she share Lowry’s mixture of loathing and fascination? Maybe. Did Creedmoor’s stories disgust her? Impress her? Was she falling in love with him? Maybe. Lowry didn’t have much sense of what made women tick. No sign of mating yet, though who knew what kind of significant glances they might throw at each other between the cold lines of the transcript?

Better than a moving picture.

When Lowry stamped along in the morning’s freezing fog, he kept thinking of the Agent and the woman, down in the valley where, for some reason, it was warm,
talking
. He resented them deeply.

No one ever asked about
Lowry’s
life. Lowry’s stories were, he was keenly aware, of interest to no one. No one gave a half-an-ounce of clinker for Lowry’s stories. No different from any other man of the Line, was he? Competent, not exceptional. Angelus born, Angelus raised. Father unknown, mother irrelevant. Unschooled—you picked up things on the way. Tunnel-scrabbling childhood, in dust and rust and soot. Stunted, pale, rheum-eyed, coughing. Pale girls laughing at him.
Leery Lowry
. Filthy appetites, in later life suppressed not so much through
will
as through constant grinding exhaustion. When he first saw an Engine, still on the Concourse, he pissed himself in terror; that wasn’t much of a story, was it? First uniform, ill-fitting on a child’s scrawny body. Long barbed-wire nights at Black Cap Valley, long muck-and-blood nights, horrible but hardly unique, one of thousands of boys to fight, one of hundreds to survive. First posting to Gloriana. Two talents discovered: violence, mathematics—three if you count organization—four if you count greasing up and kicking down. Man of the Angelus Engine. Hardly the perfect model, but effective and cheap enough for mass production. Incapable of disloyalty; he lacked the parts.

Lowry marched through thick gray fog. His men were flickering shadowy smears of black. What that reminded him of, when he got sick of his own self-pity and looked up, was a moving picture brought to life. The world was gray, no, black-and-white, grainy and ill-focused, and everyone marched with an odd lurching jerking motion.

Back in Angelus, the tunnel-children had been rounded up from time to time and herded into moving-picture vaults. The vaults were dark and cold and echoing and smelled of sweat and rust and leaking fuels. Lowry still remembered his first time: two hundred boys, shoveled in like coal—the doors had locked behind them, and the littler brats whined and pissed themselves then went silent. Even Lowry at first feared a trap—though it wasn’t a trap, that would come a couple of years later when they shoved him into a lightless crowded car on the back of the Angelus Engine and it carried him off to the battle of Black Cap—in fact, it turned out to be the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen, though that wasn’t saying much.

The huge screen had glowed softly—flickered—seemed to crack open with those shuddering black lines and sudden flaring of ink-blots—and then the cracks and blotches had resolved instantly into smoke—clouds of dark smoke, gray smoke, billowed across the screen—then
whoosh
: a pure black Engine punching through the smoke and pulling it behind as it rushed on along the tracks into the distance as the screen opened up to show a vast gray sky, gray plains, a world made of shadows, a terrifying emptiness that nearly made Lowry piss himself, too—and the title card, in white block print on black:

THE LIVINGSTONE ENGINE PATROLS THE NORTHERN BORDER. THE BORDER IS YET TO BE CIVILIZED BUT THE LIVINGSTONE ENGINE IS PUSHING THE PURPOSE FORWARD!

Or something like that. The vault had been full of a noise that drove Lowry to his knees. . . .

He marched through the fog for what seemed like days. The ground was uneven: he stumbled over low walls of rock. The shadows of his men moved all around him but didn’t speak. That was normal enough, since there was nothing to say; but after a while, it frightened him anyway. He began to doubt that they were real. He began to imagine that they’d been replaced, in the nights or in the fog, with man-shaped hostile reflections of themselves. He swore and spat and told himself not to be such a slagging coward.

“Mr. Collier!”

“Sir?”

“There you are.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Begun to wonder.”

“Yes, sir. I know—”

“Mr. Thernstrom!”

When Thernstrom didn’t immediately answer, Lowry went stamping over, waving wisps of curling fog away from his face, to a knot of men that he thought might contain Thernstrom but didn’t; then when he turned away from them, he grabbed at the shoulder of the first shadowed figure he saw before him. Instead of a uniform jacket, he got a fistful of greasy black hair. The figure spun round, and for a moment an inhuman face was pressed up against Lowry’s own—bone white, odd angled, red eyed—then the figure twisted, effortlessly pulling its mane from Lowry’s fist, leaving Lowry stumbling as that First Folk interloper scrabbled away into the fog.

Someone nearby screamed. Lowry drew his gun.

CHAPTER 34

KU KOYRIK