of as a weapon at all: their noise. Yes, strange as it seems, their noise! The noise of the Engines is the noise of fear and submission. All those who hear it are diminished. This is why those who live in their grimy, awful, soot-choked Stations are so terribly stunted in their growth. Wickedly, though ingeniously, they have learned to focus it into a weapon. The bombs consist of hammers, pistons, sounding-plates, and amplifiers. The noise is said by those few who’ve heard its echoes and survived to be senseless and mad. It crushes the mind. What it destroys can never be rebuilt. This is a good lesson: What is destroyed is gone forever. This is why you must always strive to build, never to destroy.
Gone forever. After two weeks, she’d made no progress with D or G. She felt under a great deal of pressure, and it was necessary, each night before bed, to take two drops of her nerve tonic in a glass of water. It was a great comfort simply to watch that smoky green fluid unfurl itself into the water.
Liv took tea with the Director at noon. They sat on wicker chairs in the House’s herb garden, under the shade of parasols. A few patients listlessly wandered the garden’s paths—one of them in particular had a wound in his face like a—well, she tried not to stare. She focused her eyes instead on the Director’s neat black beard. She watched it enclose and devour a biscuit.
“Perhaps you were hoping I would report some wonderful success,” she said. “I’m afraid I have to disappoint you.”
“Early days yet, Dr. Alverhuysen,” he told her. He neatly dabbed the crumbs from his beard with a lace napkin. “Early days. This House has stood here for many years now. It outlived my father, and I expect it to outlive me and my sons. We do what we can; no more. So long as there is war, the work of the House Dolorous will never be done.”
“You are, of course, correct, Director.”
“Call me Richard, please.”
“Richard, of course, you’re correct. But after coming all this way . . . the risks! I think I was a little mad to come. Sometimes strange moods seize me. I confess I hoped I might achieve miracles.”
Her hand was shaking; she had spilled her tea. The Director was looking at her with concern. She flushed a little and dabbed with her napkin at her dress, muttering, “Early days. As you so rightly say. Oh, you must think me very foolish, Director! I am simply tired. And I suppose it was vain and foolish of me to hope that I could accomplish so much, so quickly, where others no less able have failed.”
“Oh, but my dear! Where would we be without foolishness and vanity!” The Director’s eyes twinkled, and he dipped another biscuit in his tea. “Hard work must be leavened with hope. This is a serious house and a sad house, but also a house of wonders.” He raised a finger to cut off whatever she was about to say. “I think you need a break from your work, Dr. Alverhuysen. Get some rest. And come see me tomorrow morning. I want to show you something.”
CHAPTER 17
TELEGRAPH COMMUNION
For a full day, Conductor Banks refused to emerge from his command tent or accept messengers, even after Lowry had the tent’s electricity supply cut. In the end, Lowry had to organize the ten men of the Signal Corps and march on Banks’s tent.
He told the guards, “Stand aside. Sanction of the Engines.” They stared at their feet. They didn’t seem surprised.
He sent in Subaltern Thernstrom first, just in case Banks was, in the extremity of his despair and humiliation, inclined to do something criminal. Who knew what a man might do when he knew—as Banks surely must—that the Engines had withdrawn their sanction from him?
Thernstrom said, “Harmless, sir.” Lowry went in.
The interior was crowded with shadows. Banks sat at his steel desk, typing.
“One moment, Morningside.”
“Lowry. Morningside is dead.”
Banks looked up. His eyes were bloodshot.
“Right. One moment, Lowry.”
Lowry glanced at Banks’s desk. It looked like the Conductor was typing up a very long justification of his actions, or lack of action. It seemed to be mostly about the inevitability, regardless of individual human failings, of the progress of the Engines’ plan for the world.
“That’s enough, Banks.”
“One moment, Lowry.”
“No one cares, Banks.”
“For the record, Lowry.”
Next to the typewriter sat an empty mug and Banks’s pistol.