The Half-Made World (27 page)

She took Daisy—
Colla,
her name was Colla, but it was terribly difficult not to think of her as Daisy—out into the garden. The grass was a hardy desert species, sharp to the touch, and the flowers were battered and dusty and harshly colored, and the garden was full of large red rocks. Still, the girl seemed to like it.

Through gentle motions, Liv encouraged her to sit.

“Colla,” she said. “It’s nice to get outside, isn’t it.”

Those huge eyes darted to the band of blue sky visible between the canyon’s towering walls.

“You like to ride horses, don’t you, Colla?”

The eyes fixed intently on Liv then darted away.

“Colla—”

“Oh, Daisy, my dear, had I only the flair, to pen you a verse that’s as fair as your hair, or the perfume you wear, then I wouldn’t be in such a state of despair over you. . . .”

“Yes, Colla. I wonder where you first heard that song. Did someone sing it to you? A young man? Do you—?”

Daisy lurched suddenly to her feet. Still singing, she ran madly down the garden path, fell, cut her scalp on a rock, and lay there grinning and bloody, curled like a baby, and always still singing.

To Liv’s chagrin, Dr. Hamsa had been leaning against the back wall of the House, smoking and watching the whole affair.

“Bravo,” he said. “A triumph of modern science. Whatever would we do if you weren’t here to show us the way.”

The West Wing of the Doll House held a number of doctors and surgeons. They were a crude lot. Nearly all of them were military men, and they approached disease and injury like an enemy, to be cut out or bludgeoned into submission. They liked to be called “Doc” or “Sawbones” and Liv could never keep their names straight. The distinction between
surgeons
on the one hand and
guards
and
porters
and
handymen
on the other was not rigorous, and seemed to depend mostly on who’d happened to have brought a saw with them when they drifted into the House’s shadow. That they didn’t kill more people was surely a tribute to the healing power of the Spirit below.

The East Wing, where the mad patients were kept, had only two doctors, not counting Liv. One was a Mr. Bloom, who wasn’t really a doctor at all, but a Smiler, who bothered the patients with pamphlets and meeting circles and encouragement to “buck up.” The other was Dr. Hamsa, who claimed proudly to have studied at Vansittart University in Jasper City. Liv was only passingly familiar with the institution. If Hamsa was typical of its graduates, she was not impressed. She suspected he might have been expelled. He was unshaven, slovenly, seedy. He abused medications for recreational purposes. He had a simple and rigid theory of psychological correspondences, according to which each patient’s psychic wound was supposed to mirror some physical wound sustained at some point during their lives, the soul-stuff being composed of the same matter as the body: so that aphasia was a sign of an injury to the jaw; hysteria, of course, arose from damage to the womb; and mania was connected for unclear reasons to injuries of the hands. When he first explained this to her, Liv gently offered obvious counterexamples. He never forgave her.

Both of them regarded the victims of the mind-bombs as hopeless.

“The cause is very simple,” Hamsa said. “Engines did this. Their noise brutalizes every part of the body and soul at once and leaves nothing behind. Therefore the Spirit is powerless to heal them, because there is nothing to heal; and because, though the Spirit is strong, the Engines are stronger. Cleverer. I know you think you’re cleverer than us, but are you cleverer than
them
?”

“Buck up,” Bloom said. “Some things aren’t meant to be. The trick is to keep on smiling.”

Maggfrid helped her move the General—G—down from his cell and into her office.

Maggfrid wore the white uniform of the House staff, and seemed delighted by it, though it didn’t fit: the shoulders were tight, and the collar simply had no hope of contending with his neck. He was already popular among the staff—a great deal more popular than Liv, in fact—in part because of his good nature, and in part because he could lift and carry as much as any three ordinary men.

He carried the General in his arms like a baby.

Liv’s office was on the first floor, at the front of the House. It was still—despite her complaints—unfinished and largely unfurnished, and it smelled of sawdust. Still, it had a couple of chairs. Maggfrid sat the General in one of them.

The General quickly arranged himself in a posture of fierce erect attention, bony brown hands gripping the armrests, and stared out the window onto an expanse of rockscape and wire fence as if it contained something of enormous significance.

Maggfrid leaned against a half-constructed bookshelf and watched curiously as Liv unpacked the electric therapy apparatus from its leather case. It consisted mostly of leather straps, plates of copper, bands of wire, and a wooden box with dials and two meters of mercury. It was the most advanced and experimental thing at the Academy in Lodenstein, and there was certainly nothing like it for a thousand miles around the Doll House.

The General appeared to glance at it, then glance away. “Once upon a time,” he said, very gravely, “a peddler came to the beautiful palace of bone with a magic box. It contained all the feathers in the world.”

He seemed to have nothing more to add.

Outside the window there was a small, ancient portable generator—the only source of electricity in the House. It was Line manufacture. One of the patients had brought it with him; he’d claimed it from a battlefield, where he’d been fighting in behalf of a Free City that had, without his knowing it, been fighting in behalf of the Gun. He’d stolen some valuable machinery but lost an arm.

“Maggfrid,” Liv said. “The generator, please.”

He began to climb out the window.

“The door, please, Maggfrid. Go around.”

While she waited for him to find his way, she studied the General. Now that he was trimmed and cleaned, there was something familiar about him. He vaguely reminded her of some of the old professors at the Academy, the ones who’d been ancient back in her mother’s day, when she was only a girl.

“Yes!” Maggrid shouted. “Yes! Right!”

“Like I showed you, Maggfrid.”

He leaned forward and threw all his weight onto the generator’s rusty mechanism. It roared into life, and started to smoke.

She attached the apparatus to the General’s forehead. His skin was paper thin.

“This may hurt a little,” she said. “If there’s anything in there to be hurt. But it may spark some life into the embers. It may build new connections. It may—oh, well.”

She turned a dial.

Nothing happened.

She turned the dial a little farther, and the General’s eyelid twitched.

He continued to stare silently out the window.

“That’s enough, Maggfrid.”

She sighed. Of course, she hadn’t
expected
a miracle, but part of her had
hoped.
 . . . She made a note in G’s file:

Not immediately promising.

She went walking.

In addition to her studies into the victims of the mind-bombs, she was also responsible for a number of more ordinary patients, who suffered from simple shell-shock, depression, stress, and trauma. In fact, it was something of a relief to have a break from her studies, which were not going well.

There were no men of the Line among the House’s patients. There were plenty of men who’d lost limbs and eyes or the like in the service of some border state that had pledged itself to the Line, but no true-bred Linesmen; none of those born in the shafts and tunnels of Harrow Cross, or Dryden, or Kingstown, or Gloriana. There was no particular policy against it, the Director said; the House took anyone who needed it, so long as they would respect its peace; Linesmen just didn’t end up there. Rumor was the Line had its own unnatural surgeries.

Nor were there any Agents of the Gun. There were many soldiers from the ruins of Logtown or Sharp’s Hold, or other places that had thrown in on the Gun’s side in the War, but no Agents. Hardly surprising—by all accounts, the Agents were not in the business of being
wounded
. They fought until they were dead.

There was a one-armed man on the fourth floor who claimed to have fought with the Red Valley Republic, decades ago, in the days of that Republic’s brief glorious flourishing—and who, accordingly, held himself aloof from common soldiers of lesser causes. And there were men who’d fought under no flag at all, but only to defend their little homesteads from the great clashing armies of the world. And there were two men who’d fought in the tunnels of the gold mines under Harker’s Mount, on opposite sides: one for the Zizek Extraction Co., one for Jared’s Limited. They’d lost their legs together in the same tunnel collapse: now they were the best of friends.

Despite their varied allegiances, the inmates never fought each other. There was rarely a harsh word exchanged, even. Liv wondered how much of that was due to fear of the Spirit that slept below.

She stopped in on the room of Mr. Root Busro, on the fourth floor, who was by far her least depressing patient. He was unwounded—in fact, physically quite healthy. He didn’t sob or claw at his hair. Apart from the disconcerting way in which his gray eyes stared right through you, he wasn’t unpleasant to be around. His one peculiarity was that he was quite convinced that the world as it appeared was all in his own mind, and in particular that the warring forces of Line and Gun that crashed back and forth across it were merely the opposing forces of his own diseased will.

“I feel just awful about it,” he said. “But it’s not my fault. I’m not well.”

“You may rest assured that no one blames you, Mr. Busro.”

“Of course, you can’t help me, Doctor, since you’re only a thing in my mind, too, and it’s the mind that’s the problem.”

“Well, perhaps we can both do our best.”

“I do enjoy your visits, though.”