The Rise of Ransom City (10 page)

Mr. Carver must have inhaled wrong on his cigarette because he started coughing.

“Maybe the cause of the War is that people think that nothing is free and everything good is at the expense of some other sucker’s suffering, and that if one place gets rich another must be poor. These things are what the professors in Jasper City would call a
fallacy,
or so I believe. That is what I believe. I can prove that to you. In a world with greater abundance the Line would have no power and there would be nothing for the men of the Gun to steal. And maybe—”

I had the crowd’s attention and they were evenly balanced between apprehension and excitement. What happened next was poorly timed. The Process became imbalanced and immediately the Apparatus kicked and a surge of power went out of it into the Ether and startled the Atoms and the lamps all burst, costing me a substantial sum of money. For an instant the meeting-hall was filled with blazing light like the Silver City of Heaven itself. Through the window you could see a distant flash of blue-white flame as the lamp on the blacksmith’s roof burst, wirelessly and simultaneously and without loss of power. Without finishing my sentence I slammed shut my mouth and leapt for the emergency lever that sent the Process into reverse. It seemed to push back, like the Process had its own ambitions toward increase. My face smarted like I had spent too long in the hot sun. I threw my whole weight on the lever, even to the point of lifting my feet from the floor. It would not move. It may be that the problem was not so much that the lever was too stiff, as that I was not heavy enough. I mean that it is possible that I was getting less heavy with each passing instant— when the Process starts to run wild it plays tricks with Gravity. Sometimes you feel like you are no more than a shadow of yourself, or a paper-thin poster. I regret that I have never been able to study this phenomenon as it deserves, due to the fact that it manifests perceptibly only in conditions of extreme and mounting danger. What I believe it proves is that every kind of force is inter-linked, as I had been trying to explain to the people of Kenauk, and nothing is truly separate or divided from anything else, which was a beautiful notion though this was not how I would have chosen to demonstrate it. One also notices at these moments that time seems to stretch out infinitely. I do not know whether this is a side-effect of the Process or whether it is just because of good old ordinary terror. What I do know is that suddenly Mr. Carver added his weight on top of mine and the lever creaked and dropped a notch and then another notch. There was something solid about Mr. Carver. He was a rock, fortune smile on him— in fact for a moment I could have sworn there were two of him— anyhow the lever fell a third and a fourth notch and then there was a beautiful clunk-clunk and whir as the magnets altered their spin, first slowing and then reversing, and then the lever rapidly dropped the remaining notches to its nadir and the light ceased and Carver and I fell on top of each other. The meeting-hall plunged into an utter darkness which instantly became like Hell itself, or like I imagine the Lodge of the Guns is, by which I mean full of screaming and wailing and purposeless violence.

Unless you have been living in a hut in the woods these past few years, dear reader, I guess you have heard how dangerous the Process can be. But the people of Kenauk did not know, not back then. I don’t think they apprehended the danger they had nearly been in. I myself only dimly intuited the dangers of the Process in those days. I think the people of Kenauk panicked because after what I had just dared to say the sudden darkness seemed like a blow struck by the Powers themselves— as if the wrath of the Engines had come roaring down from Harrow Cross like a rocket, or like the Guns had spat some vile hex from out of their Lodge. Or maybe it was just that I had raised everyone’s hopes and then dashed them. The meeting-hall had been crowded before but now it seemed packed to the rafters with faceless figures, shouting and jostling. Anyhow I got a few good bruises and so did Mr. Carver. At one point I thought I would be dragged down into the mob and torn limb from limb. There were a number of hands on me and they were tearing at my suit. They were all asking me questions at once and I did not know what to say.

A hand gripped mine and pulled me back and when I turned I was surprised and delighted to see that it belonged to Miss Harper. I said to her that I thought she’d fled and left me to my fate and who could blame her and she said, “I did. Who knows why but I changed my mind.”

Another thing I saw as we stumbled toward the door was that a man reached out to seize Miss Harper, and Old Man Harper came up out of nowhere and struck that man with his iron-shod stick in the back of the knee and in the soft parts of his back in a way that was practiced and efficient and devastating. It made me a little sick to watch but I am sure it was worse for the man he struck. Then we got outside and I stumbled and Miss Harper let go of me, and when I got up again she was gone. Both of them were gone.

To my surprise the crowd did not destroy the Apparatus. They left it mostly untouched, as if they were afraid of it. Me and Mr. Carver waited until they had dispersed and we crept back in to salvage what we could. The Apparatus was a little dented and the meeting-hall itself was a mess. Benches were overturned and the lectern was broken like a lightning-blasted stump and somebody in a sudden whirlwind of nihilistic despair had taken their knife and carved fuck you in answer to each one of the slogans on the walls.

The Reverend was sitting on the edge of the podium with a tragic look on his face. He was no doubt thinking about the cost of repairs, and when he glanced up at me I could see he was wondering whether I could be held responsible.

I was sorry for him but I knew that I had to be firm. I sat beside him, and after some thought as to how to proceed, I patted him on the back.

I said, “I can see how you might feel aggrieved.”

“Professor Ransom—”

“I won’t tell you that adversity is good for the soul, or that every disaster is an opportunity, or any of that kind of thing, Reverend. All I’ll say is—”

“Diversion, you said, entertainment—”

“Is this. My Apparatus was damaged too, and you may not believe this but the Apparatus costs more than your meeting-hall and maybe more than all of Kenauk”— this was not exactly a lie, as I consider the Apparatus priceless. “Now I am no lawyer, but I have had run-ins with the law— I admit it. I have been held accountable for the actions of my horses, and I was held to be at fault the time my assistant Mr. Carver insulted a man’s wife. It seems to me that you are the master of your meeting-circle, and the responsibility is yours.”

He quoted Scripture. “No man is master of another man.”

“The law may say otherwise. Who knows? Courts are unpredictable devices.”

“They didn’t teach us the law, Mr. Ransom. Only what’s right and decent.”

“Right and the law are not always in parallel, I think.”

“There can be no question of that.”

“So. What say we agree that neither of us will sue the other, and neither of us will mention the other ever again, and I go on my way?”

We shook on it. He forced a smile. It was not bad but I have to say that I have seen better.

Today I had to maintain the Apparatus. There was water in it from the river-crossing and one of the new recruits, a young man named Tomasi, had proved to have an ulterior motive and had taken a hammer to it before the Beck boys could wrestle him down. A wrecker. I guess he is still mad about something that I did or that somebody said I did back in the War. And besides these incidents, as we go West the Apparatus needs fine and constant recalibration.

I work alone these days and nobody is allowed to come close. A good time to write.

Today I think I am going to write about Mr. Carver.

Mr. Carver and I spent the night after the incident in Kenauk in the wagon, out on the edge of town. In the morning we went into town and there was a woman there who laundered and mended my white suit. I think I recognized her face from the night before, when she had been yelling. She did not meet my eye. She sold us some tomatoes, which she fried and Carver and I ate sitting on a bench looking out over the vineyard. I remarked to Carver on the astonishing and unlikely feats of irrigation involved, and what that said about the human spirit, but he was sulking over his bruises and my heart wasn’t in it either.

I wasn’t happy about the damage the Apparatus had sustained or the loss of my time or the discovery of yet another mysterious flaw and instability in the Ransom Process. But worse than all that was the fact that Miss Harper and Old Man Harper had gone on their own way and I might never learn their secrets. I had come to feel that this was more than my usual curiosity, that it was somehow urgent. But I could see that if they were trying to keep a low profile then my antics of the night before would have scared them away.. I have never had a gift for keeping a low profile. It is not in me.

“You know,” I said to Carver as I mopped up the last juices of the tomatoes with bread, “What
really
makes me unhappy this morning is that—”

“Time,” Carver said, and he licked his fingers and thumb clean and stood. “Move on.” We went back to the wagon together in silence and moved on.

A Portrait of Mr. Carver

I hired Mr. Carver back in East Conlan, like I said. I put an advertisement in the newspaper for a mechanic and assistant. Experience with electricity and horses would be considered valuable, I said, and a willingness to travel and face danger was a necessity. No Linesmen, thank you very much, and no felons. Within a week I received visitations from several persons of no fixed abode, some small curious boys, a very elderly man who could hardly walk, a man who looked near-certain to slit my throat and rob me as soon as we left sight of town, a Linesman who informed me that my father’s debts remained unpaid and I was on no account permitted to leave town, and lastly Mr. Carver, who showed up as the sun was setting and stood in the doorway casting a shadow that reached all the way across the white-tiled floor to the stove.

At first he did not impress me. He was tall, and thin, and stooped, and wild-looking. He wore something brown that could hardly be called a suit anymore, with no belt. He wore a single suspender, lop-sided, as if he were indifferent to customary notions regarding symmetry, or he was dressing for comic effect like a clown. He had no hat. His hair was very long and very black. He was pale and looked sleepless and the bones in his face were as big and as gaunt and as heavy as the arches of a story-book castle where an old king sulks on a shadowy throne or where a princess gets locked up in an attic.

I said “Please, Mr. Carver, sit,” but he didn’t.

He said, “You’re traveling. Said so in your newspaper. Where?”

I said, “West, out to the Rim, maybe up toward Melville City. You see, you can’t get anything made here, there’s no money, there’s no opportunity, there’s no room, there—”

“I know that country well. Show me the machine.”

He had no small-talk.

I went to the window and pointed at where the Apparatus was tethered under a tarp in the backyard. I said what it was and what it did, or what I hoped one day it would do, because at that point it did not work at all.