The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman Page B

Perhaps precisely because he was so different from all the men she’d known in Koenigswald; deep in alien territory, she sought out whatever traces of the familiar she could find.
    Bond’s arrogance, rudeness, and self-certainty reminded her of Bernhardt, too. And his lecturing—Bond had seemed taciturn back in Burren Hill, but out in the silent open spaces of the trail, he loved the sound of his own voice. Plants, weather, business, how to ride a horse and mend a wagon. He turned out to be surprisingly well informed and passionate on the industrial processes for which their cargo of bones were intended. Bernhardt had liked to talk philosophy. Bernhardt had had something of a romantic side, though deeply buried under bluster; did Bond?
    What she had told Bond was true. Bernhardt had died of a heart attack two years ago, at the dining table, in the middle of a peevish diatribe on Faculty politics, during the soup course.
    He’d been much, much older than her. She’d met him almost the very day she’d emerged from the Institute at Tuborren, where she had spent the greater part of her adolescence in treatment for shock, and certain related nervous conditions, arising out of the tragic death of her mother—a topic she most certainly did not intend to discuss with Mr. Bond. She’d been a pale, wan, sheltered little thing, uncertain of her place in the world—and Bernhardt been a great and substantial authority in his field, who had found her pretty.
    She’d been very fond of him, albeit in a distant, irritated sort of way, and had mourned him for an appropriate period; but afterwards she rarely missed him.
    It was a point of professional pride for Liv that she never deceived herself as to her own feelings.
    Bond sounded out those feelings one evening as they rode together beneath the cedars. He stared fixedly at the path ahead as he spoke, and he somehow managed to be rude and coy at once—
    “You won’t find a husband in that hospital of yours, Doctor.”
    “I’m not presently looking for another husband, Mr. Bond.”
    “None of us have forever to wait, Doctor.”
    —but she was touched anyway. “It’s a big world, Mr. Bond. Sometimes it seems as if we might have forever.”
    He was silent for a long minute. Then he said, “It does. Sometimes it does.”
    They talked about politics and history for the rest of the night.

    “That’s Conant,” Bond said. They came down a steep hillside, and a blazing sun was behind them and they cast long shadows. Spread out below was a little town in the bend of a river. Its walls were painted white, and it gleamed like a scatter of diamonds. The colors of nature around it were lurid, wild: the trees were brazen, the river muddy gold, the sky lush violet.
    “Not much of a town,” Bond said. “But you’ll get a horse there, and you and your big feller can find someone who knows the way to Gloriana.”
    “I think I know the way.” She shielded her eyes against the sun and looked south.
    “I guess you do.”
    She could see it for miles, across the grasslands. She’d never seen anything like it, but there was no doubt what it was. The black spires, the smoke. Gloriana, easternmost Station of the Line.
    “Watch yourself, Doctor. Some things are worse and weirder than Hillfolk.”

CHAPTER 8
    THE NET
    What left Kingstown the next morning was not, as Lowry had imagined it might be, any small or secretive adventure into enemy territory. Conductor Banks’s Expeditionary Force consisted of 420 men; a commensurate number of troop trucks and staff cars; seven Heavier-Than-Air Vessels of both the rotary-wing and the ornithopter variety, lightly armed and stripped for scouting; eight Ironclads; two trucks containing wireless telegraphy equipment, one of which was redundant in case of emergencies; one truck containing five fixed guns; one truck containing mortars, rockets, noisemakers, gas; three trucks containing nothing but fuel and food; six trucks containing canvas, concrete,