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