The Rise of Ransom City (14 page)

She hardly ever spoke a word to Carver except for time-of-the-day pleasantries, and it may be that Carver never said a single word to her. She communicated with Old Man Harper in significant glances and nods. She did not ride well. On the other hand she was cool under pressure whenever we were questioned at checkpoints, which was not infrequent. When I put on shows she took round the hat for donations and subscriptions, and it turned out that she had a talent for it, especially with women.

She took a considerable interest in the Ransom Process, and asked me about it often. I said I would not tell her how it worked until she told me who she was, and that was that. She also at my urging experimented with the Ransom Vegetarian Diet and my system of morning Exercises, the Ransom System of Exercises.

She would stare at the Apparatus with a half-smile as if it was a joke she did not get, and sometimes woke early in the morning and slid down on her back in the dirt to inspect its underbelly. She was appalled to discover that I had no regular system of note-taking regarding its functions. There were times when it ran smoothly for hours and there were times when it did nothing at all and I said that as far as I was concerned it was a matter of art, like understanding the moods of a high-spirited horse. She stared at me and I had the sense that I was back at school again, and being examined, and not doing well. After that she took on the task of recording observations herself. I think like me she liked problems that she could solve. Carver seemed to resent this intrusion but said nothing.

Soon she reported steady progress, despite occasional setbacks.

“I knew it in my heart,” I said, “But it does me a world of good to hear it from another person.”

“Well,” she said, “just wait until you get to Jasper City.”

Whenever we came to a crossroads she urged me eastward, toward Jasper City. I still had doubts and misgivings but she told me I was ready to face Mr. Alfred Baxter and roll the dice on my fortune, that it was only fear that held me back. I said maybe another year, and she pointed out that in another year the Northern Lighting Corporation would have beaten me utterly— would have sewn up every town in the West— it was now or never. I knew that she had her own purposes for going east, but I liked hearing it anyhow.

I don’t want to be ungallant and the fact is that Miss Harper was most likely not so much older than myself, but in a way she reminded me of what I imagined my mother might have been like had she not died when I was small. I do not mean that she cooked or cleaned or mended for me, because except when it was strictly necessary to maintain our servant & master subterfuge she did not. I think I mean that when I was a boy and my mother came to me in dreams she always seemed to be carrying some secret from the next world, I never knew whether it was wonderful or terrifying, but either way she could not tell me, there were no words. That is what Elizabeth Harper was like. I wanted to impress her. I boasted even more than usual. Her secrets and everything I didn’t yet understand about the Process and her urgency and mine began to get all bound up together in my mind. I would I lay half-awake at night sometimes imagining how one problem might be the answer to the other, looking up at the stars and listening to Old Man Harper pissing against a tree and muttering, or whittling ugly pointless nothings out of wood as he kept lookout. One time I felt I was on the threshold of understanding when Old Man Harper woke us all up, shooting into the woods at nothing. Only Mr. Carver slept through it. He could sleep through anything.

If I am to be remembered at all, it will be for the Process, or the founding of Ransom City, and the System of Exercises will be no more than a footnote. But I am justly proud of it.

Like the Ransom Process itself, the Ransom System of Exercises works mostly by the creation and counter-position of forces. Also like the Process, it may be performed anywhere, without wires or other equipment.

First you stand very straight, like a child trying to steal something from a high shelf. Then you bend, like you are suddenly fascinated by the dirt on the floor. You can do this in a rustic barn, by moonlight under a lonely tree on the western plains, in a Line prison cell, in the privacy of your childhood sickroom, in a narrow attic lodging in Jasper City. You can do it in the presence of strangers if you have a thick enough skin. You can try passing it off as a religious observance— that will not eliminate all jeering but may reduce it. Anyhow the motion is to be repeated, the number of repetitions to be increased daily. This loosens the muscles and the tendons, which otherwise become set in their ways. Then you seize one foot in each hand so that you form a full circle— by now you should be on your back— this is damned hard to put into words!— and now first on one side of your body, then the other, you may set the muscles of your own body against each other. Stand, clasp your hands as if about to wrestle an invisible man to the floor— the angle is important— set one arm against the other with all your might, and more. Repeat and repeat again. Thus you can build strength out of nothing. You would not think it to look at me but I can balance on my own head, and I almost never tire, and I can lift my chin to a tavern’s doorframe often enough to win wagers.

I have done these Exercises almost daily— with frequent refinements of the System and with occasional exceptions for emergencies or injury— ever since I was fourteen years old. When I was a boy I tried to sell lessons regarding the System to the miners of East Conlan to finance my greater work, but they regarded the practice with ill-founded suspicion and contempt. Mr. Carver refused to participate too. In the town of Heinberg I was accused of witchcraft on account of the Exercises— they thought it was a Folk-dance to scare up curses. Miss Harper experimented, like I said. Old Man Harper sneered whenever he witnessed me performing the Exercises but once I caught him attempting them himself, puffing, red in the face and furious. It was the day after we heard about the giant Knoll, with the wolves and the bearskin and the big rifle &c, and I think he was still in a panic. Anyhow he was doing it all wrong. I said nothing.

Mariette was a horse. I do not know very much about her parentage and she kept her political opinions to herself. Golda was also a horse, and she had a certain dignified stubbornness that makes me think she would have fallen in with Trade Unionists had I ever shown her the big city. Mariette was brown and I purchased her in Melville City from a man with crooked teeth. Golda was black and white and I purchased her on a farm south of Disorder after a previous horse got shot. They were both pretty good animals. Neither survived White Rock. So far as I know they were just horses and kept no particular secrets. Though who knows what’s important to a horse?

I don’t like to speak ill of anyone but Old Man Harper was a mean son of a bitch.

He was of medium height, and solidly built, with the kind of shoulders that could still throw a punch if need be. He wore a long dirt-brown duster and beneath that there was a gray shirt, a curl of gray chest hair, and a thick neck with one or two white scars. He had the kind of face that is either pale or blotchy red or sometimes both at once, and a slightly skewed nose. His hair was still thick and he oiled it. Sometimes he walked with a stick, sometimes not. Often one sensed he was exaggerating his infirmity and the ugliness of his limp, either to mislead his enemies or out of pure bitterness. I always felt that I had seen him before, but I wasn’t sure where.

You could tell he’d been handsome when he was younger. That was not enough to explain his huge bitterness. He was like a man who has given up too much and thought he was owed the world in return, and got nothing. I wondered at first if he had failed in business, but once I got to know him I could not imagine him ever doing honest work.

Mr. Carver did not like Old Man Harper, and Old Man Harper did not like Mr. Carver. Most days Old Man Harper had no good word to say about anyone. He could make the word
Professor
sound like the vilest insult imaginable. Then again there were rare days when he was the soul of good cheer, he would encourage me to smoke with him and would walk beside me and tell jokes and stories about things that happened in battles before I was born, and he was so charming one could forget all the slights and the threats of the day before. I did not know what caused these changes of mood, and I suspect neither did he.

He purchased every newspaper he ever set eyes on and scanned first the reports of crimes, then the reports of miracles, then the reports of business, and lastly as if he’d been building his strength for it he read the latest dispatches from the War. He had strong opinions on most political issues— generally that everyone involved was a thief or a damn fool— with the exception of questions pertaining to War between the Gun and the Line, about which he would only shake his head and say that things were very complicated. He was sometimes generous to children, more often menacing. He could stare down men twice his size and half his age and a hundred times drunker than he was. I saw it happen. He spoke to dogs as if he expected obedience, which he sometimes got and sometimes didn’t. He stole, thoughtlessly and often. He was never without a gun on his person, often concealed. He was a keen and deadly hunter.

He was always on the lookout. He rarely slept. Like I said he sometimes fired blindly into the woods at night, spooked by an owl or a rodent or a wind in the trees or the moon or who-knows-what. He read menace in the tracks of animals and whenever he was in town he fancied people were watching him and taking notes. Signs of the Folk fascinated him and sometimes when he thought they were nearby he would set off into the woods or up among the rocks and just stand there impatiently, as if waiting for someone to answer his grievances. Nothing ever happened and he would come back furious and scowling. Sometimes he would vanish for a day or two at a time, as if he had decided to go his own way— but he always found us again, or more precisely he found Miss Harper— I was surplus to requirements.

Once I asked him, “So what brings you back?” I meant this as a pleasantry and did not expect an answer, but it seemed he was in a thoughtful mood.

He shook his head and said, “Someone must keep me on the straight and narrow. I’m too weak to do what must be done. I’m not a good man, Ransom. Without that damn woman’s nagging . . .”

“What must be done, exactly?”

“Mind your own business, Professor.”

You may recall the story I recounted earlier, regarding the nine-foot

giant in the bearskin coat who came into Carnap with trophies of the Folk on his belt and two wolf-like dogs at his feet and who did not pay for his breakfast. This story scared Old Man Harper like I have never seen a grown man scared by anything. He developed an interest in soothsaying, he purchased charms and icons in every town where such things were for sale, he trapped rabbits and consulted their entrails as to the movements of his enemies. I asked what enemies and he said that the great hidden secret of the universe was that the whole thing and everyone in it is your enemy. “You can write that maxim down, Professor, and call it yours if you like.” He was told by a patently mad palm-reader in Mansel Town that he should avoid river-voyages and mirrors and for the rest of our time together he dipped the brim of his hat to cover his eyes whenever he passed a mirror. As the condition worsened he started to do the same for windows, bodies of still water, even men with spectacles.

If he saw the smoke of a Line vehicle ahead he might make us go miles out of our way. Once he heard two little boys speculating excitedly about rumors that a real live Agent of the Gun had been seen in the vicinty, and he made us leave town at once. A woman who said she was a witch sold him a dried dog’s penis on a piece of string, that was supposed to ward off the eyes of the Powers. So far as I know it did not.

He had no interest whatsoever in the Apparatus. He was like a wild animal. What ever he could neither use nor master frightened him. Whenever I mentioned Mr.Alfred Baxter, he scoffed.

“I could have been a businessman,” he said. “Had I chosen to. I was full of big ideas when I was a boy.”

“Is that a fact. For instance?”

He gave the question a moment’s thought then shrugged. “Buy low and sell high, Professor. It’s a simple enough con.”

I didn’t ask him a whole lot of questions. I tried to puzzle him out by tracking and observation and studying his signs.

I was still sure that I had seen him before. Eventually, and quite by chance, I found out where.

We’d stopped in Durham Town. It was the beginning of winter and the wind was wet and cold and we’d paid to sit by the fireplace in a beer hall and un-freeze our joints and wring chunks of ice from our hair. There were old newspapers by the fire and a shelf of even older books, which the proprietors loaned out for a penny. Mostly they were smut. A few concerned notorious crimes. There was a single ancient copy of the Charter of the Red Republic standing stiff-backed on the shelf like a missionary among whores. Miss Harper found the Charter interesting. Old Man Harper read the newspapers. I got talking to a boy who worked in the beer hall about books and I suggested that an ambitious boy might want to read the
Autobiography of Mr. Alfred Baxter,
or a good Encyclopedia of the natural sciences. And he said that was all very well but he had grander ambitions, and he pointed me to his favorite among his employer’s books. It was called
The Captains of Crime: Their Glorious Lives and Their Ignominious Ends.

It was printed on stiff yellow paper and it recounted the escapades of a dozen Agents of the Gun in tones of both righteous condemnation and ghoulish glee. I read about Dagger Dolly, who once burned a whole town to the ground because a man had insulted her. I read about Blood-and-Thunder Boch, whose legend and whose burden it was that he could never say no to a dare, and who consequently stood athwart an onrushing Engine and shot out its headlamp and was killed. I read about elegant Dandy Fanshawe of whom it was said that no dope was dealt in the West without his taking a cut, and Procopio “Dynamite” Morse, Abban the Lion who dueled a hundred men and could talk to snakes, and then I turned the page and read about John Creedmoor, the charming monster who stole away the heir to the Tyrias Transport Trust, who led the Gibson City Mob for five years, who sabotaged the Line’s factories at the Devil’s Spine, who . . .