The Rise of Ransom City (13 page)

In that part of the Western Rim there were many Folk still living free, but many in chains too. You did not see the great chained legions you hear they have down in the Deltas but it was not uncommon to see a small family of them, if that is the right word, in the fields of a farm as you passed by or doing the worst work of any particular town. It mostly went unremarked-on. Liberationists did not get much of an audience out on the Rim. That was how it was in Ford, and Hamlin, and Izar, and other places. Ford was also haunted by a Spirit that resembled ball-lightning and darted up and down Main Street at dusk, causing strange moods in women. I did not see it myself but I heard about it and have no reason to doubt it, having seen stranger things in my time.

We stayed at one Mr. Bob Bolton’s farm on top of Blue Hill. He was too poor for slaves but he had goats and an ear-trumpet and three beautiful daughters. This sounds like the start of a filthy joke but there is no punch-line. He’d had sons too but they had all gone off to be soldiers for one side or another, and most of them were dead. Down below in Sholl there was a post-office, and I spent all afternoon sitting on a fence beside a cold brown field composing letters to May, Jess, and Sue, and also to Mr. Alfred Baxter, though I did not send that last one. Miss Elizabeth Harper taught me a great deal about spelling and commas.

In the next town over I nearly fought a duel with a man who claimed I had stolen the plans from the Apparatus from him. I was too proud to back down, although I am a poor shot, not least because I have next to no sight in my left eye, as I believe I have mentioned. Fortunately when dawn came, bleak and wintry, he was so drunk that at the signal he turned and walked ten paces at a forty-five-degree angle to true and right into a tree, concussing himself.

In the town after that three salesmen of the Northern Lighting Corporation jumped me in the darkness and beat me for a minute or two.

New Dreyfus was a mining town. It was like East Conlan only smaller and wilder and younger and more crowded, and it was built on lead-zinc, not coal, and there were slaves in the mines, which there were not in East Conlan. There were company stores and saloons all along New Dreyfus’s Lead Street. It was a town that was suddenly rich in a way it did not know what to do with. I called in at the most prominent saloon— it had three stories, one more than any of its competitors, and the girls who waved from its balcony were the prettiest and best-dressed in town. I gambled for a while, losing money but making friends, which is my usual practice in a new town. Then I started in pitching the Ransom Process to anyone who would listen.

The saloon’s owner leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the table and hooked his thumbs in a self-satisfied way into his lapels and said, “I’m surprised you haven’t heard, Professor. Seeing as you said you knew all about New Dreyfus and what a fine little town it is and how you came here especially to visit us. We have all the electric-light we could ever need, and N.D. does not go dark at night.”

My heart sank but I kept smiling.

The saloon owner winked, and got up from the table, and beckoned me to follow him upstairs. He told his lieutenants at the table we would be but a moment, and I agreed, and told them we would talk further when I returned. He led me up and out onto the balcony, where he shooed away the pretty girls and said, “See?”

I saw. While I had been idling in the saloon and drifting from table to table and talking about myself, evening had fallen. A switch had been thrown— I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. It now became apparent that all along Lead Street arc lights squatted on the rooftops. In the bustle of the afternoon I had not noticed them. They cast a cold white light that to my eye was hideous.

“The Northern Lighting Corporation fixed us up six months ago,” he said. “N.D. does not sleep.” There was indeed something manic and sleepless-looking and herky-jerky about the people below, caught in that light.

“I know of the Northern Lighting Corporation,” I said. “I know of their work. They are as crooked as the world is wide. They will bleed you, they will ruin you. What did they charge? They say they operate out of the Three Cities but you know what, that is a lie, they are a front for the Line, and that means all that comes with the Line. But what I offer you, sir, is entirely different. For one thing—”

He looked out over the white night of Dreyfus and shrugged. “I don’t know much about politics, Professor. But I know what works.”

He left me alone out there. I spied Mr. Carver down in the street below, leaning on a fencepost, rolling a cigarette. Our eyes met and we both shrugged.

The same thing happened in Thatcher and Ford. In Thatcher my allegations against the Northern Lighting Corporation were overheard, and three men followed me outside. It was not that late in the day but it was late in the year when we got to Thatcher, and so when the arc light over the saloon sparked suddenly and went out we were in darkness. One fellow snatched the hat from my hand and a second shoved me into the third, who grabbed my arm and told me that if I kept spreading rumors I would regret it. I answered less diplomatically than I should have, maybe, and there was a scuffle and my nose was bloodied and I was knocked to my knees and to tell the truth I was already starting to regret it.

My assailants dispersed when the light came back on. A few minutes later Old Man Harper walked by, on his way into the saloon, and saw me wiping mud from my hat.

“I have more enemies than I deserve,” I said. “I am fighting a losing battle, me against the world. The next century is at stake. Time is running out and my optimism is sorely strained.”

“Yeah?” he said. “I was young once too.” He pushed past me and entered the saloon.

I tried not to talk politics or religion with anyone. That is the golden rule when traveling in strange country, doing business with strangers, or visiting with relatives. Little Water was a Line town and Mansel was a Gun town and Slate was divided down the middle and the mere act of eating breakfast in one establishment or another had consequences and implications I could not fathom. There were encampments of the Line all along Gold River and in the shadow of the Opals, and their Heavier-Than-Air Vessels were frequently seen overhead, watching like hawks. In Stone Hill and Dalton and Honnoth there were heaving tents hosting religious revivals of the Smiler, Silver City, and World Serpent faiths, respectively. South of Dalton we must have passed too close to a settlement of the Folk, or in some other way broken one of their laws, because somebody pelted us with stones from up on the rocky hillside until we moved on as fast as the horses could trot.

In Mattie’s Town we dined at a hotel whose owners were die-hard old men who had once been soldiers of the Red Republic, you could tell from the relics of that splendid and ill-fated Cause that decorated the walls, torn battle-standards and battered medals and the like, and I did not know where to look or what gestures of respect to make to avoid offense. In Kukri there was a bank that had been robbed seven times by the same Agent of the Gun, the notorious and dashing Gentleman Jim Dark. He robbed it every time he came through on other business, the way a traveling salesman might stop in to visit a woman, and after a while he started posing for photographs, and now Kukri did better business in memorabilia than it had ever done in banking. They kept talking about Jim Dark this and Jim Dark that, and Old Man Harper got unaccountably frightened and made us move on.

In Ruhr and in Tull and in Carnap people spoke with mixed feelings of rumors that nearby free settlements of the Folk had been slaughtered. Eye-witness accounts were not dissimilar to what Carver and I had seen outside Kenauk. Nobody could say who was responsible— but in Carnap I heard that a huge man wearing a foul bearskin over a big gray soldier’s coat and filthy breeches had wandered into town. He had a shaggy wild-man’s beard and he had more than a dozen long Folk finger-bones and hanks of dry black mane braided into his belt. He had a rifle of incongruous quality slung across his back, and a gun like that on a man like that could mean only thing. He was nearer to nine feet tall than eight. The two hunting dogs that stretched out at his feet were indistinguishable from wolves. He sat at a lunch counter and consumed enough sausage and coffee for six men or as many as twenty, depending on who was telling the story, then left without paying or ever speaking a single word except “Knoll,” which might or might not have been his name.

This story frightened Old Man Harper terribly. It frightened me too, though I was not sure why. I did not like the Agents of the Gun but I had no quarrel with them so far as I knew.

I have said the names of the Gun and the Line a lot. Maybe in the new century you will have forgotten what they are. Well— I am an optimist. Ransom City will be free of them if I have any say in the matter. We will build out in the unmade lands where things are not yet made in their image.

I could tell you what I know about the Engines of the Line and their cold greed and the legions of men and machines that serve them. I don’t know much but I know more than most men. I could tell you a few things about the Gun. They do not have the numbers the Line has but their chosen few, the Agents, are more than human— like Blood-and-Thunder Boch and Jim Dark and Dandy Fanshawe and all those other colorful ladies and gentlemen of the ballads and the legends and the crime reports. I have met more than one of them in my time, in White Rock and in Jasper, and most of what you hear about them is true. They are strong as bears and faster than snakes and they are not impossible to kill but it is damn hard.

When I was a boy it was always said that the Engines themselves and the demons of the Gun were immortal. They might in the course of their fighting smash each other’s bodies of wood and metal but their spirits would always return, after a suitable vacation from history, after maybe one or two human generations had gone by, like a feud reigniting or a touch of madness in the family tree. Nothing could kill them. If that was true the War would be without end. It was best not to think about that for too long.

Anyhow when we got to Garland the Linesmen were going house to house kicking in doors and shouting questions and when they were done with a house they wrapped it in black tape and barbed wire and afterwards nobody would look at that house, like it had just vanished. They questioned us and we did the old servant & master routine again and did not stay the night.

When we got to New Boylan Town it was already gone, the buildings leveled by Line rockets and the population evacuated to nobody-knew-where, because there had been Agents of the Gun hiding there, or so they said. And in Sandalwood, which was close enough to New Boylan that they could see the smoke, a man came up to me as I was preparing the Apparatus and said, “I know who you are.”

I said, “I should hope so. I put up posters all over town.” He was nervous and thin and did not smile or take my hand when I offered it, only pushed his spectacles up on his nose then fiddled with his tie.

“My brother-in-law saw you in Kenauk and he wrote to me.”

“It could take me a moment to recall Kenauk. Would you hand me that hammer?”

“Me, I’m from Boylan. I used to be from Boylan. I had a store there.”

“I’m sorry. I am sorry, I really am. So. Ah. Well then. What did your brother think of the show?”

“Brother-in-law.”

“Sorry.”

“He said you said you had a machine that could end the War. We wouldn’t have to. . . . He said you could. That it was a secret, that it was some secret weapon you learned from the Folk. That if you . . . I mean . . . the Powers, the you-know-what and the you-know-who, that you’d found a way to, you know.”

“No,” I said.

He took off his spectacles and stared at his feet. I was nervous that he would attack me or start crying, and I did not know which would be worse. Fortunately Miss Harper had been watching this exchange as she polished the Apparatus, and now she came around the side of it and put her hand on the man’s arm and asked what his store had sold, and after a while he started talking about that instead, much to my relief. When people asked me about my politics I usually said I was a Free-Marketer, or that I thought the little guy ought to get a fair shot, or if I thought those might cause offense I would just say that I was a believer in Light.

She was tall, and fair, and blue-eyed. She wore her hair long, tied in a tail. She might once have been pretty but after all the hard and weathering travel she’d done you would have to call her handsome. She did not mind the cold but was short of breath when it was hot. There were times when we ate well and times when we ate badly but she was always thin, in a way that concealed a quite respectable strength and hardness. Her one luxury was expensive tooth-powder. If she ever complained about anything she was too proud to do it in my presence.

The stories she told me about herself were never true, and after a while stopped being even consistent. It was like a game between us. When we had company she was my servant, and very quiet. At other times she was variously a refugee, a botanist, an heiress fleeing an unwelcome marriage, a reporter on assignment for the
Gibson City Gazette,
a missionary come to minister to the wild Folk, an undercover surveyor for the Jasper City Bank, the wife of a famous outlaw in hiding, and the granddaughter of the late General Orlan Enver of the late Red Valley Republic, in hiding from enemies of the Cause. I think she enjoyed being other people. It was a kind of liberation for her. You could tell that she labored under some great responsibility.

She could never quite hide her accent. I guessed that she was from the Ancient East, far away and across the mountains, from one of the cold green northern principalities, like Koenigswald or Maessen or Kees or the like. The way I was raised, that made her almost as fantastic and unlikely as an elf or a troll, and if she’d ever just said she was a princess I might have believed her. I guessed also that she was a scientist, not from anything in particular she said but from the way she said things, and from all the foolish sort of things that most people say all the time but she never did.