The Half-Made World (69 page)

They watched torches and candles and oil lamps light up all down the streets. The sky was slowly tending to gray, and the night stars were fading. They watched men run back and forth; first bell-ringers and drum-beaters, then a few confused and halting men woken in their nightshirts or furs or stepping out naked into the night; soon more of them, some grimly silent, others muttering with fear or shouting with glee, all of them laden with spears, bows, rifles, hoes and rakes, or buckets, or timber, or bundles that Liv could not identify. The rain softly ceased and she did not remark the moment.

Mr. Hulgins was big and guileless, slow moving, decent. Back in the real world, he might have been the owner of a butcher’s shop or hardware store, most likely inherited from a sharper, harder father, or acquired by marriage to some clever woman—and he’d have been much loved by the neighborhood, and probably never have turned much of a profit, maybe lost the store to a bank, probably limped along well enough. . . . That, Liv thought, was Hulgins’s natural type. He’d been badly misplaced. A man like that had no business dying for New Design.

Hulgins noticed Liv studying him. He gave what was presumably meant to be a fierce scowl, but his eyes trembled, his chin quivered. She smiled at him.

In the yard in front of them, ten soldiers of New Design performed an impromptu drill, marching left and right, twirling and locking rifles, setting bayonets, shouting and stamping out commands and code words; then they scattered, seemingly midroutine, to the town’s four corners. Some saluted as they went; some held each other. Liv hoped all that noise and activity gave them confidence.

“This isn’t the Line itself,” Liv told poor Mr. Hulgins. “This is only a tiny distant echo of the Line. They didn’t come for war. They came chasing down one man. They’ll be tired. They don’t have their vehicles, Creedmoor said. They don’t have their flying machines. There are no Engines. They are little more than ordinary men. It’s not altogether hopeless, Mr. Hulgins.”

Hulgins stared out into the yard. He shook his head slowly; Liv wasn’t sure what he was saying no to.

“Are you married, Mr. Hulgins?”

He continued to ignore her.

There was a noise. Liv had been hearing it for some seconds before she really noticed it—rising from beneath the hum of New Design’s waking, rising quickly to force out all other, softer sounds. A noise like chalk on a blackboard; like a mosquito of unusual size whining of its horrible needs; like the ringing complained of by sufferers from injuries to the brain, to Ignvir’s Lobe or Werner’s Area, or by certain schizophrenics persuaded of mysterious alarms. . . . A whine, a hiss, a crackling chaos of sound, surging and then breaking, resolving into the boom of a voice, reboant, sounding from outside the town’s walls and resounding from the sky: “. . .
OF THE ANGELUS ENGINE. MEN AND WOMEN OF NEW DESIGN, THIS IS SUB-CONDUCTOR LOWRY OF THE ANGELUS ENGINE. I REPEAT: MEN AND WOMEN OF . . .”

Hulgins, Liv, three or four stragglers crossing the yard, a young woman just stepping outside her cabin—all looked up, as if expecting to see the voice thundering from the rain clouds; but the sky was empty and gray and still.

The voice was impossibly loud and distorted, but beneath the howling of electricity and static were the flat dull tones of a Linesman, sounding almost bored with his message.

“
CAN YOU HEAR ME? CAN YOU? YOU CAN? YOU ALL KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS, DON’T YOU? THE LINE’S HERE.
” The voice stretched and droned into incoherence. A muttering aside as loud as a landslide—“ah, you knew it was going to happen one day, didn’t you? we reach everywhere.”

Lowry
. So, Liv thought,
Lowry
was the name of the man who’d pursued her all that way. An ugly name, an ugly voice.

She recalled standing on the Concourse at Gloriana Station, in the shadows under the great weight of rusty iron that was the Station’s roof, listening to the boom and reverb of their voice-amplifier devices, which broadcast the Engines’ commands, marked out the hours, inflicted the awe the Engines demanded. But in Gloriana, there had been dozens of the devices, hung in the rafters like huge bats, so that the echoes played back and forth and the noise filled every crevice of awareness. Lowry couldn’t possibly have dragged more than one of the devices all the way to New Design, and that insufficiency was apparent. The sound was vast but not deep. The whine was the whine of a machine pushed past its limits and close to breaking. It slurred and howled. It
echoed
. She prayed for it to break.

“
LISTEN, NEW DESIGN. I HAVE A PRISONER. I TOOK ONE OF YOUR SCOUTS. HE SAYS HIS NAME IS HAYWORTH. LISTEN TO THIS, THEN.”

There was a new voice, screaming, begging for mercy, driving the sound up into a dreadful pitch, until it was impossible to distinguish the man’s screams from the machine’s, from the echoes still sounding down the streets.

Silence suddenly resumed.

Hulgins stared at the sky. He held his hands trembling near his ears as if desperate to give in to fear and cover them. Liv reached out a hand to comfort him; changing her mind, she withdrew it and took a step back. He didn’t notice.

“HEAR THAT? HE TOLD ME YOUR STRENGTHS. HAYWORTH. WE KNOW WHAT YOU’VE GOT. YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T FIGHT. YOU RAN FROM US ONCE. BRING OUT THE OLD MAN AND WE’LL LEAVE YOU ALONE. I REPEAT: BRING HIM OUT, WE’LL BE ON OUR WAY.”

Liv took another slow step away from Hulgins’s side.

“IN HALF AN HOUR IF HE’S NOT OUT HERE’S WHAT WE’LL DO.”

There was a cough like a thunder clap. The voice resumed, but now it was hard to make out the words; the voice had started to mumble, rant and ramble and whine, drifting sometimes too close and sometimes too far from the mouthpiece of the amplifier as if Lowry swayed back and forth in neurotic discomfort.

Lowry turned his head away from the amplifier and covered the speaking-plate with his hand. He’d tried to think of some horror with which to threaten New Design, and, not being imaginative, his thoughts had naturally run straight and true back to the last time he’d faced the armies of the Republic. His mind filled with visions of Black Cap Valley—the wire, the muck, the poison flowers that thrived there, how he crawled through it, the riflemen of the Republic with their steady hands and clear merciless eyes picking off the boys on either side of him, one by one, like the children of the Line were worth less than ants. It shook his calm for a moment.

He began again.

“What we’ll do is first we’ll shake down your walls.” He leaned in close and muttered into the speaking-plate, and it threw his voice out into the air so that it seemed the sky itself boomed with his own private thoughts. “We’ll flatten your homes. We’ll destroy what you’ve made. We’ll leave only mud and muck. We’ll dig you up. We’ll do this because it’s our duty and what the fuck else are we going to do with ourselves? You’ll see. We’ll send smoke and noise, the old ones, your old men, they’ll remember, they’ll tell you what it’s like, they’ll be the ones to go first, it’s always the old who go first. Or the children. It’s always the children who get it hardest. Choking up black dust. Bleeding from the eyes and the ears. Old men go mad. The children go old and gray, they look like they’re a thousand years old when they die. I don’t want to do that. I really don’t, I really don’t fucking care if I do or I don’t. There’s no pleasure in this. This is my job. But then I’ll send my boys in. You’ll be on your knees pleading when they cut your throats. Everything’s flat and clean and so quiet after we’ve passed through a place, it’s so easy for everyone who comes after us, but you should see what it’s like for us, at the hard edge, where you have to cut and you have to get cut. The blasting edge. If some of you are still standing when we come in, it’s going to make it harder but it won’t . . .
Fuck!
”

Sparks flew and the red-hot speaking-plate snapped off under pressure of internal stresses and cut Lowry’s cheek.

There was a sudden electrical crackle, a snap, a drop in air pressure, a silence that was full of dying echoes. The voice had gone.

In fact, Liv had hardly been able to hear a thing it said for some time. She’d not been listening anyway. Hulgin had frozen in terror at the first moment the voice began, and closed his eyes and begun to mutter slogans of Smiler self-affirmation. She took that moment to inch away slowly. As soon as it became clear that Hulgins hadn’t noticed what she was doing, she ran.

She saw Mr. Waite the Smiler by the water pump, leading a group of boys in an affirmation of resolve and courage and pride. None of the boys had rifles: they had spears, and bows, and knives. They wore furs, under which their thin bodies were tense and trembling. Waite looked like a boy himself, and Liv supposed he was, in a way: he must have been of the generation that did not remember the old world, that had been reared outside of time and history, and had never, therefore, grown up. The smile on his face was ridiculously wide and confident. Liv thought of the department store dummies she’d seen on some of her infrequent visits to Koenigswald’s big cities, in quieter, saner times. Waite’s smile had that same quality of waxy artless salesmanship. She smiled back and nodded. She slowed to a walk. Waite and the boys watched her as she passed. She tried to look as though she had legitimate business, somewhere important to be. She didn’t know where she was going.

When Bradley’s arm tired, he lowered the bomb. He held it at his side, fidgeting with the hammer. His face twitched and snarled.

—He feels foolish, Creedmoor. You make him look ridiculous in front of his men. He imagined a heroic confrontation. This waiting is farce.

—You always perceive our weaknesses, my friend.

—He is only more dangerous for it. He may act foolishly. He is keen to die grandly. His old fingers tremble.

—Do you hear that? That whine, that tremor, abusing the ether. Our pursuers are clearing the throats of their hideous machines. They are about to sing their unmusical song. Will this be the sound that kills, or are they going to speak, first?

—Every sound the Line makes kills, Creedmoor. Either the body or the spirit. Only we offer true life.

—Is that what you call it?

—Watch Bradley. If his attention falters, kill him.

Lowry’s flat nasal voice settled over the town like a foul rain; it crept in through the hospital’s curtained windows. “
I REPEAT: BRING HIM OUT, WE’LL BE ON OUR WAY. IN HALF AN HOUR IF HE’S NOT OUT HERE’S WHAT WE’LL DO. . . .”

Bradley’s riflemen went pale with dread and their weapons began to tremble; but Bradley was made of stronger stuff, and though his eyes, red rimmed, started to water, they didn’t flinch from Creedmoor’s hovering hand.

Creedmoor raised his voice over the din. “He’s lying, Dr. Bradley. You know it. The Line leaves nothing unchanged. He won’t just take his men away. He’ll destroy you. It was already too late for you long before they got here. Do you know when it was too late? When they sat down and looked at their maps and drew the line of their progress, and you were in their way. There may not even be particular malice in it. You’ll die here, Doctor. But something can be saved. Let me take the General away from here.”