The Rise of Ransom City (26 page)

I climbed back down the tree, and I fell asleep in the cradle of its roots. When I woke it was still dark. It seemed like an improbably long night but I knew that I was not far west of the Three Cities and the days at that longitude were mostly regular in their duration, so I guessed the fault was in my perceptions not in the world. I thought maybe I had a fever coming on.

The second time I heard the sound of somebody walking through the swamp nearby, I did not hide or hesitate. I stopped only to take my jacket and my one wet shoe and I ran out after that faint sound, waving the shoe in the air and shouting “Hey, hey, help, hold up, I’m with the
Damaris,
hey, wait” and so on. I waded through the water and crashed through thick undergrowth toward the sound and burst through a stand of head-high ferns that scratched at my face and out into a wide open stretch of moonlit green water. A half-dozen tall thin figures were wading single file across it. They were all long-legged fellows and the green did not quite reach their waists. They were stooped and they were pale and when they turned their heads to look at me I saw that they had the big-boned faces and red eyes and black beards of the Folk.

There were seven of them. They stood side-by-side. Two of them leaned together, as if for support, or comfort against the night. In the middle stood one whose shoulders seemed, at first shocked glance, to be hunched. Then I saw that he was wearing something looped around his shoulders and neck, dangling down his back, like an elegant lady of Jasper City might wear a fox-fur stole. I thought perhaps it was a length of rope. Then I understood that it was a chain— a long, long chain— and in the same moment I understood that these were some of the poor wretches who had powered the wheel of the
Damaris.
I had thought they’d all drowned.

That is not true. I had not given them a moment’s thought, not until I found myself looking at them face to face, yet now— as I looked into their leader’s wide dark eyes now I could think of nothing else.

When I say
their leader,
I mean the fellow with the chain wrapped around his shoulder. I guessed that he was their leader. There was something grand about the way he wore the chain.

I imagined them sinking, pulled down by the awesome weight of the
Damaris,
by the inexorable grip of their chain. They must have been afraid. I know that many scholars and preachers and politicians and businessmen will tell you that the Folk do not feel pain or fear the way we do, but I think that cannot be true.

I shook. All these thoughts took just moments. I guess they studied me too, and drew their own conclusions.

They had been walking in what I thought was a westerly direction. Moonlit ripples still showed the way they had come.

“Jasper City’s back that way,” I said, “but I guess maybe you’re heading out to the Rim, or beyond it I guess. I don’t know where you’re from. I, well, that is, it’s a long way either way and good luck to you.”

They continued to look at me. We were alone in the night and the wilderness now and the tables were turned. They could do what ever they pleased with me and what ever it was I could not say it was not just. The
Damaris
and its rules were long gone. This was now their world and I had no say in it.

“I’m glad you,” I said. “I mean, well, you know. I’m glad you got out. Got free.”

I was afraid.

I had once joined a municipal chapter of the Liberationist Movement, and for two weeks I paid my weekly dues toward the cause of the end of bondage. I wondered whether I should mention that fact. I decided not to.

“I think there was a rocket,” I said. “What happened to the
Damaris,
I mean. The
Damaris
was the name of the boat, if you don’t know. I don’t know whether you. I mean, it was the War again.”

The one I took for their leader whispered a word. I did not understand it.

I do not know if they understood me. I think they did.

It was like when I met the giant Knoll at White Rock. What ever would happen, I could not talk my way out of it.

I thought of the stories of travelers waylaid by Folk, and tortured and killed, maybe for revenge or maybe because they have broken some rule of the Folk’s world that they did not understand or maybe for no reason anyone has words for. I thought of Folk-tales of curses and transformations and the evil eye. I did not know if they meant me harm, and I do not know now. I thought they might harm me whether they meant to or not.

“You know,” I said, “once, when I was a boy, back in a place we call East Conlan but I guess maybe you have a different name for it, I visited with some of your people. That is, I—”

I had a sudden apprehension of the strength with which they must have torn loose their chains from the wheel, the strength with which they must have split open the waterlogged coffin that was the hull of the
Damaris,
and risen from the muddy bottom of the river— the same strength with which they had turned its wheel for who knew how many long years. A chill ran through me.

I took a step back. They came closer. The fellow who wore the chain was at the forefront. I could see where it had broken, and I could see where it had scarred him.

I said, “My name’s Harry Ransom,” but of course that name meant nothing to them.

Then I had one of my moments of inspiration. I pulled out the pocketknife and I turned to the nearest tree and I carved into its soft mossy trunk a certain sign, one that I remembered very well and that I thought they might know.

They studied it in silence for a while, looking from the sign to me and back again, and then at each other, while I tried to explain how I came to know this thing and to talk about the Apparatus and about my dreams and my ambitions and my great and wonderful destiny, and why it would be a damn shame for the world if I were to perish in that swamp. All together they began to roll their shoulders and shake their heads, and after a moment I realized that they were laughing, and not especially kindly, that is, they were laughing at me.

Well now. I guess I should explain, or otherwise just skip all this thrashing in the swamp and get straight to Jasper City and fame and fortune and the First and Second Battle and all the rest.

I have wrestled for a long time with how I will tell this or whether I should tell it at all, and maybe all I can do is write it all out and see how it looks.

This is about what I call the Ransom Process. I have to go back a way to tell this, back to when I was a boy, in good old East Conlan. If you like you may turn ahead to when I get to Jasper City.

I was fourteen years old. It was the summer of ’83 or ’84 or thereabouts. Conlan was halfway between what it had been when I was a child and what it was becoming, which is an outpost of the Line. I was living beneath my father’s roof, or what was left of it— the old house and my father’s business having been claimed by the Line. We were lodging on the south side of town. We kept different hours between all of his jobs and all of mine, and we did not speak.

For most of that summer I supported myself painting signs. I learned the trick of sign-painting from a book. The trick of persuading East Conlan’s dour storekeeps that there was nothing more respectable or desirable than a brightly colored motto just like the storefronts of Jasper City— a place none of us had ever seen— well, that came naturally to me. I turned the town bright for a summer. My crowning achievement was a bird of paradise over Connolly’s store. He asked why and I said why not. It blew down that winter.

Meanwhile my father vanished at night, or sometimes for days, running errands for Conlan’s new management to New Foley, which was the next town over. His work, what ever it was, was secretive, unspoken. He was silent and often angry. And after all what was there to say? All day he served the Linesmen in various capacities that were degrading to a man of his pride— what would he talk about? What ever he had to say I did not want to hear it. I had my own obsessions. I would be free, wealthy, famous, great, I would bring Light to the world. I think I have written about how I climbed the tower on top of Grady’s Hill with a kite and some wire in a thunderstorm— well, that was that summer. That was the state of my Great Work at the time. I had burns on both palms and let me tell you that is not a laughing matter for anyone who has to work for a living. My father called me a word in his buzzing old-country language that I guess meant
fool.
I could not or would not explain to him why I had done it.

We were alone in the house except that there was an old woman above us and a large number of feral cats in the rank weeds back of the house. May was the oldest of my sisters and she had gone off the month before with a revival of the Silver City faith. Sue was the next oldest and she had moved to New Foley with an insurance salesman, where she was living in wedded bliss and learning book-keeping. Jess was I guess sixteen at the time, and what ever aspirations she later had to the stage had not yet manifested themselves, except that she loved to dance. She spoke all the time about Jasper City and fame and fortune I do not think she knew what she would do to get there. She was living at the time with one of the young men who had used to work for Grady’s Mine before the Line seized, and having been found surplus to requirements he now did nothing at all so far as I could tell except drink and brawl. His name was Joe or Jim or something of the kind. I disliked him and admired him, both at the same time, and now I do not remember what he looked like except that he was handsome, and dark, and had a curl of hair on his forehead that I reckon Jess liked. He was also stupid. I recall that he used to boast sometimes of his intention to take up arms in the service of the Gun, but the fact was that neither he nor anybody else in our backwater town knew how to do that. I cut him in on the sign-painting business because he was good at carrying buckets and ladders. Sometimes he and his fellows threw stones at the Line’s concrete barracks on the north of town. So did my sister. So did I, on occasion. One of my sister’s many talents is that she is as accurate with a stone as any Agent is with his Gun— it is mostly because of Jess that I am so quick at dodging stones and glasses thrown at my head, which has served me in good stead throughout my career. I am a bad shot. We all have our gifts.

Anyhow it was as we three were sitting by the old culvert east of town after one such glorious blow for the cause of freedom that the matter of my father came up in conversation. I guess one or other of us was talking about leaving town to strike out for fame and fortune and Joe said something about my father and how he vanished from town from time to time, and I said that he was running errands to New Foley, and Joe said that no such thing could be true, because Joe sometimes went to New Foley to drink away from the eyes of the New Management, and my father had not been seen there in years.

Joe’s speculation was that my father was attempting to contact the Gun— or else that he was raising up some black magic of his own, out in the woods, a curse upon the New Management. Joe was a simple fellow and always certain that because my father had come to the West across the mountains from the old country, and because he spoke an old-country tongue, he must be in possession of old-country magic. To him this was elementary, and he did not like it when Jess and me mocked him.

“He’s got a woman,” Jess said. “Of course he has— a woman in a hut in the woods!”

I did not believe that any more than I believed the black-magic story, and I said so. Not because of the honor of my late departed mother, nor because in my eyes my father was a hundred years old and incapable of romance, but because if he had a woman he would surely be less angry and tired and hollow-eyed than he was. I said that he was going to New Foley to work, just like he said, because the old man had no leisure and no freedom for women or hijinks in the woods.

Jess said, “Yeah— and whose fault is that, then?”

She could be very cruel.

We argued, and Joe and my sister argued, and after a while there was a wager, I do not recall exactly who proposed it first. We were to follow my father and see who was right.