Maggfrid with her. She found herself in a long line, the distant end of which slowly moved through an arched gate in the south wall of the Station. She asked, “What are we—?” and the man in front of her answered with a grunt and a shrug. Someone pressed a ticket with a number on it into her hand. She said, “Excuse me . . . ,” and was shushed, angrily. She’d never been in the presence of so many people, and it threw her badly off balance; she felt almost physically compelled to follow the slow-moving line ahead of her. She kept quiet and looked at her feet. The queue lasted for what felt like hours. When she got to the front of the Line and the clerk in the gate’s little booth questioned her about her purpose, and her identity, and her intentions, in the rudest possible manner, she was too cowed to answer back. Only once she’d been fed through into the interior of the Station was she able to stagger into a somewhat empty corridor and turn to Maggfrid and whisper, “These are the most awful people.” But Maggfrid’s face was flat with terror. . . .
The noise! Inside the Station there was a constant din of machinery. The roar of vast furnaces, the clatter of intricate clockwork. No wonder the Linesmen looked so pale and haunted! No wonder their eyes were so dull! After an hour, the noise was enough to drive Liv to tears—it did drive Maggfrid to tears. She was unsure of the long-term psychological effects, but she had no doubt they were unhealthy.
The Linesmen were gray-faced and short. They looked poorly nourished. They surged through the corridors as if they were themselves parts of the great machine, moving to the beat of the omnipresent clocks. Their ugly voices echoed from loudspeakers. They jostled and scowled and swore. They had no manners; they were too busy for manners.
Her golden watch worked erratically. She suspected it was the noise, and the grit in the air, and the constant shaking of the machines. Koenigswald’s ornate and fragile workmanship was simply overwhelmed by the Line’s monstrous operations. What did it do to the mind? What did it do to the soul?
Everything smelled of coal and oil and smoke. There was nothing natural in the Station, except the occasional rat. It was an ecology of machines. Somewhere at the heart of the structure, the Gloriana Engine lived, and its mechanical dreams shaped the world around it.
The signs confused her, but eventually she found her way to the Ticketing Facility, where she was directed into a low-ceilinged dark room, lined with wooden benches and lit by whispering electricity. She sat and waited among her fellow passengers-to-be. An old woman wept silently, surrounded by black leather cases. A young couple clutched each other’s hands and stared at the floor. Three fat nuns in the white of their religious order bowed their heads in prayer. Four bored Linesmen stared into space. The tick of a tall clock like a coffin filled the room and suppressed conversation.
An hour passed. Then there was another long and humiliating process of checking and double- and triple-checking of tickets and identification and questioning as to her business. Her questioners never looked her in the eye; they made constant scratching notes on their clipboards and they spoke in a bored contemptuous monotone. They read over and over the promissory note from the Academy that was her payment for the journey. She was not accustomed to being spoken to in such a manner. She swallowed her tongue; she could not stop her cheeks from flushing.
Each one of the men had gray dull eyes. They had a sort of shuddering glowing device like a—Liv wasn’t sure what to compare it to—like a mangle?—a device with which they somehow reproduced gritty mirror images of all her papers. One copy was placed with some ceremony into a vacuum tube, and with a thump it ascended into the upper reaches of the machine. The rest of the copies the Linesmen indifferently stuffed into various cabinets and wire trays. One of them shoved a ticket into her hand and said, “Three days. Come back in three days. Nineteen hours. Don’t be late.”
The Gloriana Hotel occupied six floors of the south face of the Station. From the outside, it was a concrete box. The interior, to Liv’s surprise, was luxurious to the point of excess. Every surface groaned with food and drink—every corner