The Half-Made World (64 page)

—I don’t know what you’re talking about, ma’am.

—No.

—Are you Ku Koyrik? Your voice in my head is familiar.

—Yes. Call me no other name.

—And what can I do for you?

—What is it like to die?

—I don’t recommend it. Say, ma’am, our conversation last time was interrupted, and if you don’t mind, I’d like some answers before I go, so: Do you know a gentleman by the name of Kan-Kuk? Looked much like you, used to pal around with an old General.

—Of course. You could call him my husband.

—Really?

—Or my brother.

—I’m liberal-minded, ma’am, that’s all right. And what was it that he promised the General, what—?

—No. I won’t tell you. I don’t trust you.

—Suppose I said I’d make you the same deal the General made Kan-Kuk?

—Not you.

—Or a
better
deal! You want to wipe away my masters, the enemy—well, so do I, so do I. If you wanted to wipe away all the rest of our world with them, I wouldn’t blame you and I wouldn’t say no;
there’s
a great cause I could die for—

—Never you.

—Why not me? What’s the old man got that I haven’t got?

—You’re broken. You belong to the broken things. I couldn’t fight them for you.

Creedmoor slowly turned his head back and looked up at the stars. He considered his various pains. After a while he said:

—Are you still here?

—Yes.

—Why?

—I have nowhere else to go. Now I am going mad.

—Do you plan to kill me? If so, better hurry.

—I don’t know. Perhaps I should. But then the woman will die, and the General will die, and we will have to begin again. And fail again. Our agony will be prolonged, and yours. And every time it gets harder.

—The woman? Liv? Shit. How?

—I have become less myself since we last met. It is hard for us to act here, hard to plan.

—Where is Liv? How will she die?

—Your enemies get closer. Too many to stop.

—The Linesmen?

—Yes.

—Shit.

—Your masters get closer, too.

—They do? Send them back.

There was no answer.

—Send them back. Please.

He gritted his teeth against the pain and turned his head once more. She was gone.

The stars crawled and shifted. Even by the standards of the skies out in the far West, there were an unusual number of shooting stars. Meanwhile, Creedmoor couldn’t feel any part of his body below the neck; instead his head floated on a vague cloud of pain. Hours passed. He wasn’t dead, but nor was he healing. His head itself was blessedly free of pain, until around dawn the word

—Creedmoor.

. . . formed in it, and his head swelled with blood and his sinuses burned.

—Creedmoor.

—Go away.

—We have fought our way across a great silent void to find you, Creedmoor. Nothing here echoes with our voices, and so we were blind and lost. We suffered. We came to save you.

—Go away.

—We know what you have been thinking. The servants of the Enemy are loyal; why are ours so ungrateful? But we forgive you anyway. We have always loved you, Creedmoor.

—You have?

—Of course, Creedmoor. Have we not always treated you well? Have we not—?

—You’re terrified, aren’t you? You’re desperate. This is grotesque. Are you about to
grovel
to me?

The sky lightened to gray, and the stars withdrew into the deep distance. Creedmoor’s left leg began to itch and ache. A shot of agony ran up his spine, but then his master reached in and firmly pressed it back down.

—You have always been our favorite servant, Creedmoor. Do not die. Do not suffer unnecessarily. We will never leave you again.

His shoulder wrenched itself back into its socket, making his whole body spasm. His bones ground together and reknit.

—I was never anybody’s favorite anything. My own mother regarded me as an embarrassing error.

—You were cunning, Creedmoor. And brave. And deadly. And proud. And fierce. And—

—You need me.

—Yes, Creedmoor. We need you. There is no one else here. The Line will take the General and his secret and we will die. Think of all we have given you.

—I wanted none of it.

—Of course you did.

His right ankle twisted back into shape, and suddenly his right leg was full of pain, and he screamed.

—Stand.

He pulled himself slowly to his feet. His legs trembled beneath him. His right arm was still limp and heavy as lead.

—There. Well done, Creedmoor.

—Fuck you.

—We promise we will not hold your insolence against you, once we have the General back. On our honor.

Creedmoor hefted his right arm with his left, and rubbed feeling back into the fingers.

—You thought foolish thoughts while we were gone. But no more. You have no choice; you never did.

—No. I suppose not.

—Go save the General, Creedmoor.

—And the woman, of course.

—If you like.

CHAPTER 45

THE DANCE

On the fourth day, Captain Morton introduced Liv to a young man—well, not
so
young, his sandy hair was receding over his sunburned scalp and he was tending to middle-aged plumpness—but well favored nonetheless, and charmingly shy and quiet. “His name’s William Warren,” Morton said, “the Second, after a fine father, who fought with me at the Battle of . . . but that’s beside the point, now, isn’t it? Our Bill the Younger’s a fine fellow in his own right, and near enough the best carpenter we have. . . .” Warren stood there all the while, on Morton’s doorstep, fidgeting his callused and broad-fingered hands. “Came here as a mere babe, didn’t you, young Mr. Warren? There’s hardly a buildin’ in this town he hasn’t done a hard day’s work on. Anything you want to know about New Design, you ask him. I’ll be busy for a spell, ma’am, with—ah, you know. Come in, come in!”

Warren shrugged, and smiled at her, and extended a hand, saying, “Perhaps you would prefer to come for a walk, madam?”

Even after a full turn around the town, hand in hand, and after a series of eager stuttering attempts at conversation on Warren’s part, Liv was still unable to be sure of his intentions.

“This here,” Warren said, “was built in the ninth year of New Design, as we count it, by Captain Pratt, to be a home for . . .”—patting the logs of yet another cabin. And so on all up and down the muddy streets as the sun sank westward over the mountains, toward the wild sea beyond. Warren shone with love for every rough-hewn log of his town. He seemed to have no other topics of conversation—he quizzed Liv on the world outside, politely but without comprehension or apparent enthusiasm.

Toward the end of the afternoon, Liv decided that the real nature of Warren’s intentions made no difference. Either he was assigned to spy on her, and his clumsiness was a ruse, in which case, she saw no reason to make his task easy for him; or he was, after a somewhat rustic fashion, attempting to
court
her—in which case, she was tempted, briefly, she would not deny it, but he seemed so
young
. That is, although they’d been born, it seemed, within a handful of years of each other, as best as they could reckon, Warren was so unscarred by his timeless years in New Design that Liv could not quite see him as fully a person, and it seemed cruel and somehow shameful to interfere with his blameless existence. So she squeezed his hand gently and let go of it, and told him that she was, she regretted to say, very tired, and at the mercy of a nervous headache that made further conversation impossible, and she left him standing alone in the mud, a forlorn expression on his guileless face, under the lengthening shadow of the logging mill on the west side of town.

The next day, they held a dance, and Liv saw Warren again.

The dance was apparently a weekly affair, held on one of the fallow north fields, and attended with great solemnity and deliberate good cheer. The old danced slowly in the central ring, and the young whirled around them. The choreography was elaborate—mathematically and topologically complex, the work of clever thinkers with too much time on their hands. Morton explained that dance, like sport, like war, built strong bodies in the young, built a sense of community and respect and fair play, and that the rings symbolized . . . oh, symbolized
something;
Liv’s attention wandered. She saw Warren again, but across the field, in a haze of lanterns and torches, laughing with the other men of the town, and she had to concede that he was not altogether unappealing. But then a group of boys, arm in arm, red faced and laughing, wheeled sidestepping across the field, and when she could see again, he was gone.

Perhaps he’d joined the dance. Liv had tried to step in, at Morton’s gentle urging, but was unable to find her footing. The dance was unfamiliar and strenuously athletic, and she’d nearly fallen. Instead, Liv sat with Morton’s young wife, Sally, who was herself unable to dance because the baby within her was acting up, and she was suddenly prone to sickness. Liv had no particular advice to give, but the young woman was in some distress, and she did her best to be kind. While holding Sally’s sweating hand and murmuring,
There, there,
Liv looked for Warren, but she never saw him again.

On the fifth day, they held a referendum.

New Design’s men and women lined up on the long hard benches of the meeting hall. The hall’s roof was a high-peaked lace of timbers, open to the sky. Around noon, a cold sleeting rain blew across the town. None of them flinched. They sat straight-backed, listening to Alderman Merrill’s long ponderous speech as the rain slicked their hair black over their scalps.

Merrill’s subject was property, and taxation, and points of high principle concerning both—though as far as Liv was aware, there was no property in New Design, and no taxes. Indeed, she’d seen no money at all, and had imagined New Design to be communistic, after the manner of the prophets in the ancient texts. She decided that Merrill’s economics was more aspirational than empirical. He had the look of a dreamer, in a small quiet way.

When Merrill was done—to measured applause—he trudged back across the muddy floor to his place on the benches. Alderman Polk took the podium, and the townsfolk listened just as gravely to him in his turn. He wore spectacles, one glass of which was cracked, the other empty, long vanished. Nevertheless, he bore himself with dignity. Liv couldn’t comprehend his subject at all.

The Aldermen of the town were also members of the Assembly of the Republic. They spoke for both offices. The serious young man on Liv’s left and the serious old man on her right both explained this to her.

Young Mr. Waite, of the Smilers, spoke briefly, extempore, on the theme of
What it says about us that we’re able to have this meeting in the face of what we’re all agreed would be worrying news—yes, it would—if we were the kind to give in to worry; but instead we should be very proud.
The rain darkened his fine blond hair and slicked it down over his scalp. His smile only widened as he spoke, till he put Liv in mind of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He sat down amid applause, and the Secretary of Measures and Motions brought business to a start.