The Rise of Ransom City (31 page)

I’d grown accustomed to the wide open spaces of the Western Rim. I had often been poor out there, but even at my worst I slept under the stars or in big open barns. The narrowness and confinement of the Gate was like a nightmare. It reminded me of the worst stories I’d heard about the Stations of the Line, and their lightless factory-warrens. Beneath the incense and the cigarettes there was a damnable stink— actors smelt no better than prisoners. The Gate was not how I’d imagined Jess had been living, and it was certainly not how I’d imagined
I
would live, when the time came for me to come Jasper City. Yet the terrible truth was that I was not sure I could afford even a cell in the Gate, maybe not even a shared cell. The money I’d offered the women of the Eighty-eight as a bribe had only made them laugh. Money was worth almost infinitely less in Jasper City than on the Western Rim. I think it is because of the number and density of people there. It takes a greater force to get them to move.

I left the Gate by a different entrance, having gotten myself lost and turned around, and I came back out through an alley onto Swing Street right next to the Ormolu Theater. I knew it was the Ormolu Theater because there was a sign. It was studded with electric-lights, although the sun was still high and they were not in operation at that particular moment.

I took the Great Rotollo’s business-card from my pocket, and considered my prospects for a while— not for very long. The math of the situation was not complicated. Working for Rotollo was not as good as visiting with my long-lost sister, but it was a damn sight better than starving in the streets.

The Ormolu’s doors were open.

Inside there was a sweeping staircase, and a white stone statue of a naked woman veiling her face, and a lot of brass and purple velvet. There was a young man sitting in a gilded box, but he was asleep with his head on his brocaded arm and did not stop me as I walked through another door and into the corridors behind the stage, until I found a gray-haired woman sitting at a dressing-table smoking a cigarette.

“My name’s Randall,” I said.

I had tried out a lot of new Jasper City names in my head, and that was what I had settled on.

The woman started but did not turn around. Instead she looked at me in her mirror.

“Ma’am, I’m just going to come out and say it, because people in this city are awful busy and I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. Time is money, Mr. Baxter always says, and money is time.”

I could not break the long habit of quoting Mr. Baxter, even if he was now my enemy.

“I met a man on a boat called the
Damaris
who called himself the Great Rotollo— I guess that wasn’t his real name but I don’t know what it was— anyhow ma’am if he made it off the
Damaris
and into town he said he was going to work at this Theater, and if he’s here I bet he’d vouch for me as a decent fellow and a hard worker, he said I should call on him here. I have his card, it’s kind of battered by now but—”

She turned, stood.

“Hal Rawlins!” she said.

“Rand—that is, ma’am, I—”

“Hal Rawlins, don’t you remember me?”

I did not, but pretended like maybe I did.

She clapped her hands together and ran toward me and before I could retreat she was embracing me, saying, “Hal Rawlins, as I live and breathe! Fortune is kind, fortune is kind after all, there’s a silver lining to every cloud,” and other Smiler maxims.

It took me a while to realize that the woman was Amaryllis, the Great Rotollo’s wife and assistant. I had not recognized her without her wig and make-up and pearls.

To tell the truth, Amaryllis and I had exchanged no more than half-a-dozen words back on the
Damaris.
But it seemed that she remembered me fondly, as if we traveled together for years and had been great friends. She took it upon herself to introduce me to the manager of the Ormolu Theater, a Mr. Quantrill, and to praise my talents to him in the most effusive terms. She praised my musical gifts, my rapport with the tough crowds of the
Damaris,
my loyalty and hard-working nature, my handsomeness and my pleasing smile, and above all my mechanical genius. She described the wonders of the self-playing piano, and attributed its invention to me. I did not correct her. Mr. Quantrill asked what else I could do, and I said I had some ideas regarding Light. Mr. Quantrill’s eyebrows slowly raised as if operated by pulleys in the wings— by which I mean he looked skeptical. Amaryllis then appealed to his sense of charity, painting the sinking of the
Damaris
in the most lurid terms, and characterizing me as a tragic and pitiable orphan of war. In the end Mr. Quantrill shrugged and agreed to hire me for room and board, room being a dressing-room with a bench and a blanket, further wages to be discussed if and when I made myself useful. Then he put on his hat and went home.

“Well,”
Amaryllis said. She gave me a possessive kind of smile.

Amaryllis had survived the wreck of the
Damaris
by shedding her wig and her fake pearls and her frilly dress, washing up on the riverbank in nothing but a thin white shift— or so she told me. As she lay exhausted on the bank she saw the Great Rotollo struggling toward her, fighting the current. He was too proud and too thrifty to let go of his suitcase full of trick knives and charms and puzzle-rings and weighted dice and watches and cards, and he could hardly keep his head above water. She crawled out onto a tree-root that arched out into the river, and she reached a hand to save him, catching his sleeve— but he struggled, and splashed, and the current was too strong, and all she was able to save was the suitcase.

She dabbed at her eye as she said this, like she was crying, but the corner of her mouth smiled.

“
You
saw how he struggled, didn’t you, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Well,” I prevaricated. “It was very dark.”

I didn’t find her story very likely, but didn’t want to cast accusations or innuendos. There is always so much we do not know, and it is my rule not to judge unless I must.

Shortly after the Great Rotollo drowned— one way or the other— Amaryllis met some of the other survivors of the wreck. Rotollo’s suitcase contained several tricks for making fire, which helped them survive the night. It also contained the Great Rotollo’s contract to perform at the Ormolu Theater, and to make a long story short Amaryllis had stepped into Rotollo’s shoes and was now performing two nights a week at the Ormolu, where she went by Amaryllis the Amazing.

“This is a new century,” she said, “Or near as dammit, and who says women can’t do magic? I saw every trick that old bastard ever did and I can do ’em just as good as him. But that’s not enough, is it? Not these days. Not for me. Oh no. We have to prove ourselves, Mr. Rawlins, the old tricks won’t cut it anymore. Why, just six months ago I met a man with an honest-to-goodness machine for making rain! What’s the old bastard’s card tricks next to that? That’s what we need. The very latest science. The latest ideas. Like your piano, or what-have-you. A man who can do that can do just about anything, I reckon. My very own genius! You and me together, Mr. Rawlins. You and me, Hal, you and me.”

She tried to kiss me. I extricated myself as politely as I could, and shut myself away in my room.

Sometimes my words get away from me. I will say no more unkind words about Amaryllis. She did me a good turn when I was in a bad spot, and she had many admirable qualities, including grit and drive and a natural facility with the Gazzo Shuffle and the Log-Town Drop. And besides the lady is no longer able to defend herself, having perished in the Battle of Jasper.

The room was windowless, but from long habit of wandering I woke at first light anyhow. I shaved, and I washed, and I found a pair of clean pants in a wardrobe, thinking that clothing was implicit in my deal with Mr. Quantrill. Nothing could be done about the unruly black explosion that was my hair.

Theater-folk are late risers. If anyone else was there in the Ormolu at that hour, they were asleep. I wanted to make myself useful and show that I was a hard worker, and so I poked around in closets and dusty back rooms until I found a broom. I swept the stage and I polished the stage’s gas lamps until each one of them gleamed.

Behind the stage I found a number of painted backdrops. One of them was painted like red rock, ornamented with designs that I guess were supposed to resemble the carvings of the Folk, except that they were neither beautiful nor meaningful. Another was painted like a forest, and another showed a starry night, and another was a lurid yellow desert scene, with more ziggurats than seemed plausible. Behind the backdrops there were chests and wardrobes and heaps of props. There were guns that were probably fake and guns that were probably real, there were mirrors that were really cabinets, there were mechanisms I could not identify that looked a little like mantraps. There was a scrapyard’s-worth of interlinked metal rings, and there were enough trick hats to start a trick department store. Amaryllis was not the only magician who worked the Ormolu. There was the Wise Master Lobsang, and there was Doctor Agostron, and there was Mr. Barnabas Busby Bosko, Wizard of the Western Rim. The big city had a boundless appetite for magic at that time. I might speculate at length as to why but I will not, except to say that if they wanted the real thing all they had to do was head west. Anyhow in addition to magic the Ormolu boasted dancing girls and two nights a week it showed a hastily written play called
The Story of John Creedmoor,
which was a big hit, I am sorry to say.

I tinkered for a while but I could find no tools and I could only guess what anything was meant to do. I grew bored and restless.

The front doors were locked, and no-one had yet thought to give me a key, so I squeezed out through a window at the building’s rear.

I walked north and over the bridge, toward Fenimore. I got kind of lost seeing the sights, which I will not recount here, and by the time I got there it was mid-day. The streets thronged with workers leaving their offices for lunch. The air buzzed with conversation about money, about business, about how the Old Man might be eased out of his position to make room for young blood, or about what was wrong with young people today— or about matters of state— there was speculation about what the fighting out on the Rim might mean for trade, or whether Jasper might get involved, or whether it was true what people were saying about this secret weapon the Line was afraid of, and if so whether there was any way of making money off it.

I pushed against the crowd until I found my way to the offices of the Baxter Trust. They were easy enough to find. Baxter’s Tower was the tallest building in Jasper, taller even than the Senate, even including the pillar on the Senate’s dome. I recalled that Mr. Baxter’s first fortune had come from his invention of a newer and more efficient form of elevator— his Tower was a great advertisement for his invention. It occupied a full city block, though it was set back from the street by a high fence. There were a number of policemen at the gate.