The Rise of Ransom City (3 page)

My father was not a miner, and did not work for anyone. He made a living arranging funerals and burials, of which conditions in the mines ensured a steady supply. He was not a native of East Conlan. In fact he was as far from a native as it is possible to be. As a young man he came over the mountains into this western land of ours from the hot and distant country of Juddua, which to me has always seemed unthinkably magical and strange, and whenever I meet a fellow from that part of the world I pepper him with questions until he is about ready to strike me down and flee. I believe my father had been a man of great learning, maybe a priest or a doctor or something of the kind— he never talked about his past. He came West and I do not know what he was looking for but he found my mother in East Conlan.

He was a tall man in a town of short men. You could not imagine him entering Grady’s Mines— he did not stoop. He kept his beard precisely scissored in a way that was somewhat too grand for East Conlan, where men mostly either went clean-shaven or shaggy as a moose. For exercise, he took long walks, alone. He was tremendously strong, or so it seemed to me. He hauled stones taller than me and he carved names and dates into them as casually as a man might jot down numbers in a ledger.

Ransom was not his real name. His real name was something a little like Ransom in sound but in a foreign tongue that was too hard to say for the simple people of towns like Conlan, so he became Ransom. He spoke little, and as I remember him he was quite bald on the top of his great black head, and though he was not a religious man in any way he tended to the widows and the dead with the dignity of a priest. He often quoted a variety of Scriptures in a variety of languages but he believed in none of them. The miners of East Conlan were not religious either in those days and the plain things he did for them sufficed.

My mother died a little after I was born. She was pale and freckled and pretty and I am sorry that that is all I can say about her. Jess used to say that she had green eyes but in the photograph my father kept everything about her was soft and sepia-brown as if she was looking up from the earth where she lies. I have three sisters: Jess, Sue, and May. Two older brothers did not live past infancy. A reasonable percentage. We the survivors all worked for Father from as soon as we could walk. I was no damn good at it.

One day my father summoned us all into his workroom. There were heavy tools and dust and fragments of stone. There was a human skull on a shelf above my reach and very dusty books in languages from the old country which I could not read but wished I could. There was also the photograph of my mother and some mementos of her in ivory and jade. My father sat behind a desk and looked at each of us in turn, and announced in his deep rumbling voice that he had been thinking about the future, and what would happen when he was gone. He reminded us that nothing on earth lasted forever, but everything sooner or later went down into the dark, and one day he would too. What would happen when he was gone, he said, was that May would go to the church, and Jess should find work in Jasper or Gibson City, and Sue would marry and take over the business and do well with it. I scratched my scabs and I asked what I would do and he was silent for a very long time then said that he had thought long and hard and consulted the wisdom of the ages and of the dark places of the world and of the most learned heirarchs of ancient Juddua and the wisest wizards of the Folk and still he could not imagine what sort of things I might do with myself.

Not long after that I fell sick.

The sickness in question was something that originated in Mr. Grady’s Mine, something belched up out of a dark recess of the deep earth. It laid low a dozen men with fever, and they were strong men who were used to physical hardship. Most recovered. Some did not. It was probably one of those who died who brought it into our home— no fault of his own, of course. May fell perilously ill for a week and it is possible that that is why she was never able to have children, and maybe that in turn is why she got so damnably Religious. I don’t know and I guess now that I have committed this thoughtless and idle speculation to the page I will have to hope she never reads this.

One popular theory— regarding the sickness, I mean, not May— one theory was that the sickness was a curse left by the First Folk. Something they had left behind, a gift for the usurpers— maybe in some deep hidden place Mr. Grady’s diggers should not have penetrated. A word carved on the wall. A curse, a poison. Some of Grady’s men tried to organize a mob to go scour the hollows south of town, where some families of the Folk lived free, it was said. I know this because they came to my father to see if he would go with them and he told them to go home and stop being such fools, and there were raised voices but they did as he said.

I heard all this from my own sickbed.

Most likely there
would
have been a mob sooner or later, and ugly things would have happened, but within a few weeks the sickness had run its course— for everyone but me, that is. But then I was always an odd child, who had to be different.

Previously I had resided in the same room as my sisters, with a curtain for modesty’s sake, but now I was quarantined. What had previously been storage was made into a sickroom. It smelled at first of dust and stone and it was cold. There were two cabinets of battered pine. My father shuttered the room’s window, at the advice of Dr. Forrest, who worked for Grady’s Mine and believed that sunlight would excite and overtax the nervous system or some such nonsense. Nor were candles permitted. The sickroom was at the end of a long hallway, the shape of which created a sort of big camera obscura mechanism, so that there was real Light only at certain unpredictable times when all the right doors were open at once. Otherwise everything was gray. I sweated and shook and did not eat. The sickness was a great mystery and when Dr. Forrest visited, cloth to mouth and hovering in the doorway, there was something like awe in his eyes. My father could not look at me. My sisters came and went and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful but I have to confess that in my state of delirium I could not often tell them apart. Dr. Forrest stood in the hallway and whispered to my father that it was inexplicable that I had not died already. For a time I was scared pretty bad, I will not lie, but after a while it came to me with certainty, as if I had reasoned it out and the mathematics was sound, that I would not die, and I could not die, because I was meant for something greater. After that it was mostly a matter of patience. There was not a lot in that sickroom to do for fun and a lot of discomfort to endure. I do not mean to ask for your pity, because it seems to me that for a great many people life is always like that, and I have otherwise been lucky for the most part.

It was while I was sick that the Line came to town.

East Conlan is on the southern edge of Line territories, like I said. Before I was born it owed its allegiance to no one, and the law was mostly what Mr. Grady said it was. The Red Republic rose and then fell and East Conlan politely declined all offers of federation and would not sign the Charter, but we sold the Republic coal at neutral terms. When I was a boy some people said we belonged to Jasper City, though I never understood exactly what that meant. I have never cared for politics. But we were near to Line territories and even a child could see that we could never be free of their influence. On a clear day if you went up onto the hill north of town, among the store houses and out houses and cranes and heaps and unmarked shafts of Grady’s Mine— and if you found a clear high place to stand— you could see all the way to a black mark on the horizon that might debatably have been Harrow Cross, oldest and biggest of the Stations of the Line, with its enormous smoking factories and its indescribable fortifications. And sometimes when the wind was just right the sound of an Engine crossing the continent in the distance might be carried into town and there would be one of those moments of nervous silence, as if anyone who spoke too loudly might be swept away in its wake.

Mr. Grady’s business belonged to no one but Mr. Grady, but it was an open secret that the Conlan Coal Company was owned by the Line. This was the cause of some of the fights I spoke of, though most were over women or money or for no reason at all. Even Grady sold much of his coal to the Line, like it or not, because their factories were always hungry and they could always outbid anyone else in the world. Otherwise they did not interfere with us much.

One afternoon while I was busy sweating and puking, and my sisters were at their chores, and Dr. Forrest dozed in a chair in the hallway with a bottle at his feet, and my father was in town doing business, three big black cars came up a road that had previously mostly been used for mules or horse-drawn conveyances and led right into the heart of town. The cars’ motors kept running as their passengers emerged, and kept running all afternoon, with a noise like a swarm of locusts. Or so Jess said, who said she heard it from my father. However, when Jess went sneaking out after dark to spy on these new arrivals the Linesmen had gone to bed— she was disappointed that Linesmen went to bed like regular people— and their cars sat silent in the road. They were warm to the touch, she said. I do not believe she really dared to touch them.

The Linesmen had taken up rooms in some of the bigger houses on the main road. Rented or requisitioned or a little of both. There were about a dozen of them, which is a unit that Linesmen often come in, I have noticed. Some were soldiers, black-clad and dead-eyed and fearsomely armed. Some were what for want of a better word one could call
businessmen
. It was said that they had with them a great deal of complex machinery of mysterious appearance and function, and perhaps their real motives were ulterior and unearthly, known only to the Engines whose minds are not like ours, but their ostensible purpose in town was straightforward enough. They wanted Grady’s Mine.

There was a war on. There was always war somewhere or other, like weather, and at that time it was blowing quite close to East Conlan. Line was at war with Gun, whose sinister and fabulous Agents had infiltrated some nearby towns and were working their corruption in secret. So the Linesmen said, or so Jess told me they said. She snuck into the town meeting where the Linesmen’s demands were debated, and heard everything, though she may not have understood it all.

Have I said what Jess looks like? It’s been years since last I saw her but she was quite tall, and very beautiful. She was brown and green-eyed and thick-haired. There, now she is immortalized in a way. Let’s call that a portrait of my sister. It is very strange this business of turning flesh-and-blood people into words.

Anyhow a neighboring county had thrown in with the Line’s enemies and there had been some acts of terror and sabotage, affecting the Line’s chains of supply, which were vast and far-flung beyond East Conlan’s imagining. To avoid further incidents it was necessary for the Line to assert control over the means of production in the region. The price they were offering Grady was not unreasonable— so Jess said they said— and the alternative unthinkable.

Well, after considering the offer but not for long Mr. Grady stood up in front of the meeting and the old man leaned on his stick and shook with rage like a proper old-fashioned prophet of doom and he said: