The Rise of Ransom City (22 page)

Once I wrote a letter to say:

Mr. Carver. I am sorry that the last thing you said to me was about what I stole. It was not that way. I wish I could explain to you, or you could explain to me maybe. I wish you could come back, so we could talk one more time.

But of course I had no place to send it. Not even a burial place. No body. The Process had swallowed everything.

I went to the town of Domino because I heard they were looking for engineers. The town was built on the banks of the River Ire, just a half-mile upstream from a Line camp. Domino was newly rich and anxious about it. The camp brought in goods and matériel and men from the factories of the north, and some small part of that wealth ended up in Domino’s pockets. Main Street sported new and empty second stories and storefronts full of shiny goods nobody knew what to do with.

I stood in a line outside one such building. It was one of those days that is not yet spring, where everything is bright but still bitter cold, and the storefronts glittered. When at last I got to the front of the line and into the building, I was allowed to present myself to a black-hatted man behind a desk, who looked at me like I was a defective part or stray nail that might just maybe be hammered into shape. I gave him a false name and an account of my experience and qualifications that was false in details but just about honest enough in substance. He scratched some quick notations in his ledger and told me he guessed I could be useful and named an insultingly low wage. Domino was to be electrified, he said, in the interests of efficiency and modernization and at the urging of the Linesmen in Camp Ire. He pushed a contract and a pen across the table. There was a space for my name, and beneath it the words
For the Northern Lighting Corporation
. I said that I would sooner starve than work for the Northern Lighting Corporation. He took back the pen and asked me if I was mad. I snatched the pen back from him, I do not know exactly why, and I said that maybe things hadn’t worked out so well for me but I had my pride still. He took off his hat and stood up. We exchanged some further words. It was not my finest hour and I do not enjoy recalling it. Two men lifted me by my arms and removed me from the building and threw me down in the street. I jumped up to my feet and brushed down my coat and turned with as much dignity as I could muster, smiling as if nothing in the world mattered to me, and walked down to the riverfront. There I met a man from the crew of the riverboat
Damaris,
who offered me a job, mainly I think because of my smile.

“Why not,” I said.

I was sick and tired of the land. It was time to give the water a fair try. If the science existed I would have taken to the air instead.

The
Damaris
was a tall red affair, with a great white wheel, and a profusion of lanterns. She looked like an opera house or a whore house escaped from the big city streets and gone looking for adventure. She was dusty and creaky and rotting in places— no longer young, but still outrageous. She had no business in a business-like place like Domino, and none of her crew liked being anywhere near the Line’s Camp. She resupplied and let off passengers and hired me and moved on at once, which suited me just fine.

The
Damaris
was owned by a man called John Southern. He was missing two fingers on his left hand and an old scar made his left eye droop in a way that was like a wink. He was quite bald on the top of his head but wore his gray hair extravagantly long behind, and his gray mustache hung right down to his collar, which was high and starched but dirty. Altogether these peculiarities lent him a roguish air. I knew at once that I would not be able to help liking him, but also that he was not a good man, and that he would never pay me regularly or fairly.

“Name?”

“Hal Rawlins.”

His handshake was crushing. He glared for a moment then grinned. “Well, I’ve heard worse, Mr. Rawlins. Charley says you’re looking for work. You look like you got a story. Everybody’s got a story these days. Don’t tell me. You sing?”

“I never tried but I guess I could learn. Charley said you needed a—”

“A man with a knack for machines, yeah. That you? Charley says you can talk like you got learnin’. Say somethin’ learned.”

“Light,” I said, “must be considered a form of energy, not dissimilar in nature to electricity or heat. It is a creative energy, a refinement of the raw Ether; darkness is merely its absence. It—”

I was quoting from the Encyclopedia published by the Baxter Publishing Corporation of Jasper City, parts of which I happened to have by heart.

“All right, all right. You a Linesman, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I am not.”

“I’ll have no Linesmen on board. Twenty years I’ve worked this river, since back when Damaris herself was alive and dancin’. You a dancer, Mr. Rawlins? No? Never mind. Got a girl for that. Twenty years and every year business gets harder as the Line gets closer. What keeps me afloat right now is defiance and spite.”

I had in fact noticed that the
Damaris
was light on passengers.

“I have my own grievances against the Line,” I said. “I understand.”

“You’ll keep ’em to yourself, then. You been to school?”

“Some school. Not much. I’m self-taught.”

“We go all the way east to the Three Cities and into Jasper City, where the University is. Sometimes we get rich folks’ kids on board. What’s that look for, Rawlins, you don’t want to see the big city?”

“Let’s talk about this machine. What do you need me for? As far as I can tell the wheel turns the, let’s say the old-fashioned way.”

This was what the learned Professors of Jasper City would call a
euphemism,
which is to say a magic word to make the world seem better than it is. What I meant was that the wheel of the
Damaris
was turned by a team of Folk, who were kept in chains below. Mr. Southern gave me a searching look and I thought he might be about to say something on that subject, but instead he nodded and then slapped the top of the piano.

I should say that the
Damaris
had a bar on the upper deck, full of shadows and faded finery and suggestive paintings and a faint sweetish smell of rotten wood. There was also a piano, and we were standing next to it.

“Well,” I said. “The piano? That’s not what I imagined but I reckon I could learn to play.”

“It’s not what it looks like, Mr. Rawlins.”

What it was, was something I had never heard of. It was a new thing in the world and there were no real names for it yet. John Southern called it a
motor piano
or a
self-player piano
or
that damn thing.
Its inventor had called it a
music box.

It looked like a large upright piano. It was made of wood, and in keeping with the rest of the
Damaris
it was painted red and black and gold, and somewhat over-ornamented, and covered in dust and grime. There were two wide rows of black and white keys, that were like a kind of terrifying message in a code I could not read. Above the keys there was a window in the piano’s frame, exposing bright metallic workings that bore no resemblance to any musical instrument I had ever seen before, or for that matter any machine. A wild profusion of wires hooked into each other at every possible angle and I could see that the apparatus almost hummed with counter-posed tensions. If it resembled anything at all, it resembled an illustration of the Brain and Nervous System that was one of the main attractions of the Encyclopedias I used to sell back in East Conlan— except that that was the lurid pink and vein-blue of human flesh, while the piano was all golden-glittering and immaculate. Immediately my curiosity got the better of me and I reached in and touched a wire, and there was a shivering sound and deep inside something turned over and the wires began to work against each other and the keys depressed as if a ghost was sitting at the bench and the piano played a few notes of very beautiful music, which turned into a few bars of utter cacophony, then silence.

“Useless damn thing,” Southern said.

I fell in love with the machine at once.

There was another window you could open in the frame. There were

a lot of secret parts, like in a haunted house in a book— I doubt I ever found them all. Behind that window were levers, switches, and several cylinders of hard molded wax, wrapped in stiff yellow paper punched with holes. I did not get where I am today without being a quick study and it did not take me long to understand that the cylinders could control the piano, the molding being a form of secret language that the mechanism could speak, not unlike telegraph-signals.

Someone had scratched kotan into the brass, with a flourish, on the topmost winding-mechanism. Beneath kotan were the words gibson city,
₁₈₈₉
.

“I guess that’s the fellow who made it,” Southern said. “Kotan. We got it for next to nothin’ in Gibson City last year. A theater didn’t want it anymore, they said it made their actors nervous. I reckon maybe they just couldn’t get it to work.”

“A great year for inventions,” I said. I could not stop running my hands over the frame. “A great year for the future.”

“We had a piano player,” Southern said, “but he was a drunk. I won’t tell you what the one before ’im did or I’ll get mad. I’ve had my damn fill of piano-players. I thought, guess we should get someone to fix this damn thing. Least it can’t get drunk. You’re not a drunk, are you, Rawlins? Can you fix it?”

“No,” I said. “Yes.”

Fixing the thing was easy enough. A few wires had snapped, a few more had been loosened by the rolling of the boat, some springs had sprung and some mice had made a nest in an unwise location, from which I had no choice but to round up and relocate them. Just replacing the wires and getting rid of the mice was enough to improve its operations greatly— Mr. Southern could have done it himself if not for what I think was a superstitious fear of the machine. By the time I had done that, we were a day further down the river, and I was hired on as a member of the crew, responsible mostly for the care and maintenance of the piano, and for pretending to play it in the evenings.

The performance was mostly a matter of smiling and patter and leaving the machine to do its own work. I could guide it but not control it. I could stop it and start it and gently coax it, through arrangement of the cylinders and wires, in certain directions, but that was all— it would play what it would play. In fact do not think I ever understood a quarter of the machine’s secrets.

I stayed with the
Damaris
until it was summer, until we had left the Western Rim far behind and the Ire had become the Jass and we neared the border of the Tri-City Territory. Our progress eastward was constant but irregular. We stopped in every town, and we followed what seemed like every last tributary of the Ire or the Jass, and we changed direction frequently, according to Mr. Southern’s whims, or the cross-currents of business, or because of rumors and warnings about which towns or stretches of river ahead of us or behind us were dangerous due to the fighting. I didn’t complain. Mr. Southern provided me with a russet suit, and though it was old and faded and too big and not nearly so fine as my old white suit from my days on the road it was handsome enough in the half-light of the bar. Every night I sat behind the piano as it worked itself, and mimed the action of playing, and smiled at everyone.