The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman

person’s.
    “It won’t last,” Bond said. His shirt was torn, and his broad face was red with exertion and anger.
    “What won’t?”
    “They come back. They get up again.”
    “So I’ve heard. I’d like to see it.”
    “Well, I don’t plan on waiting around.”
    The body looked nearly weightless. The long limbs were like a bundle of sticks. She found it terribly moving, and tears pricked her eyes.
    “They didn’t hurt anyone,” she said. “They didn’t even have weapons.”
    “Sometimes that’s how it is. Sometimes they have spears, and they kill every fighting man and torture the rest for days. Sometimes they have some real nasty tricks with the wind and the stones. But then again I know a man who swears on his mother’s soul that a pack of ’em found him injured on the trail and brought him water and set his leg and carried him home.”
    “Why?”
    “They’re not like us, Doctor. They do things that don’t make sense. Sometimes they bring storms, floods, hurricanes, dust storms. You’ll call me superstitious, but it’s true. They were here first, and if you ask me, they’re just waiting for us to fuck off, and this is how they play in the meantime.”
    “It seemed he was about to speak to me.”
    “They don’t speak. And look at ’em—would you understand ’em if they could?”
    At last he saw the expression of pity on her face, and his voice softened. “There are worse things than these, though. And what do I know anyway? I’m just a businessman.”
    “I understand, Mr. Bond.” She turned away from him. Her hands shook as she reached into her case for her nerve tonic.
    He called after her. “Hey—your big friend there did well, that was one hell of a job.”
    She looked where he was pointing. Maggfrid was pacing back and forth with his head in his hands. . . .

    There was hardly a single mention of the Folk in the Child’s History . One faded illustrated plate showed representative scenes from the West: an Engine slumbering on its tracks, twisted wind-carved rocks, and a Hillman perched on a craggy peak, obsidian spear in hand. And the Folk appeared also in the first chapter of the book, which told the story of the first colony, at Founding. A handful of sentences: Relations between First Governor Samuel Self and the aboriginal Folk of the Woods were uneasy, and not always honorable.  . . .
    Otherwise, the Folk were effaced from the history of their country. Perhaps, Liv thought, if they’d fought more battles . . .
    Most of Bond’s men were illiterate. One night, one of them asked what she was reading, and soon Liv was reading to all of them. They were a rough lot, bearded, yellow toothed, broken nosed, but they listened to her like children. Most of them knew less of the history of their own world than she did.
    Chapters 2 through 22 were a litany of disasters and battles. Founding was abandoned—lost years, a hard winter, plague, bad omens. The colonists spread west and south. Line rose in the south, where the colonists struck oil, and where the first Engines were built to travel between the outflung cities of the dry plains, and men quickly realized that they had built something larger and more terrible than could be comprehended on any human scale, something that had its own mind and its own will to expand. . . . Gun rose in the ragged West, among exiles, drifters, criminals fleeing the law. They hated each other at once. They were defined by their hatred. Line spread relentlessly, with its Engines and its machines and its speed and its masses of men. Gun cheated and schemed and poisoned and blackmailed and ambushed; it raised armies of mercenaries, mobs of deluded peasants. . . . And Bond was right: Gun was always losing. Three hundred years of defeat and bitterness. Why did they bother?
    The Child’s History condemned the Line as tyrannical and the Gun as anarchistic, and solemnly proclaimed the virtue of the Red Valley Republic—by whose Department of