The Rise of Ransom City (37 page)

She said it didn’t matter. She visited the Yards and took notes on the deplorable working conditions and began to talk about Automation of the processes there. She wanted me to go into business with her. She wanted to approach Mr. Baxter with her ideas. I advised her against it.

“He’s a thief,” I said. “He will steal your ideas and give you nothing.” She frowned. “I haven’t forgotten that
you
—”

“If you want another apology it’s yours. Just steer clear of Mr. Baxter and his untrustworthy Trust.”

“You always talk as if you know more than you’re willing to say,

Hal. Here you are working for play-actors for pennies—”

“There are worse fates. Let the stage-lights fall on the Amazing Amaryllis, let Wise Master Lobsang and Mr. Barnabas Bosko struggle with fame. I’ll work backstage and be happy. That’s hard-won wisdom,

Adela—”

“There it is again— you drop hints. You talk as if you know Mr. Baxter personally, you talk about politics and about the Great War as if you played some great part in it, but all you are is— oh, I don’t mean it that way, but—”

Of course I did not explain the reasons for my low profile. Nor did I like to lie. I waited for her to depart, then I returned to my work. I had commandeered a corner of the Ormolu’s basement, hidden away behind rows and rows of costumes and painted scenes. In one corner of the ceiling there was a little light from a hole up at street-level, and in another corner there was a trap-door that led to the stage above.

Behind my workplace there was a door boarded over that led who-knows-where. Probably like most things beneath Jasper there was some picaresque ancient history of crime or politics behind it, but I did not investigate. There were rats, with whom I was willing to establish friendly relations if only they would meet me halfway.

I started to reassemble the Apparatus down there.

I can’t say I had any real plan for what I would do if I could re-create it. As I worked I daydreamed that I might confront Mr. Baxter with it. I wrote letters to him in my head, telling him that my spirit was unbowed. I imagined showing it to the world, refuting his libel in one bright undeniable flash of Light. The truth is that more than anything else I needed to know if it
could
be re-created. I was not certain. I stripped wire from junkyards. I liberated springs of all kinds from conjurers’ top-hats and mirror-tricks. I sawed wood. I was able to commission the blowing of glass personally, after Mr. Quantrill showered us with money on account of what Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson wrote in the
Jasper City Evening Post
about the wonders of the Automatic Orange Tree. I had no choice but to steal the magnets I required, I confess it, from the electrical generators stored in a ware house belonging to the

Northern Lighting Corporation. This theft too was written about in the newspapers, though it was beneath the notice of Mr. Carson. It is hard to do anything in Jasper City that escapes the attention of the newspapers, I have found.

I brewed up the acids and alkalis I needed in an old porcelain bathtub, which had previously been used as a prop in risqué comedies. This process caused Mr. Quantrill some anxiety, not least because it produced odors that could be detected by the more sensitive members of the audience upstairs. Adela was curious. I told her to wait and see. That made her angry, as I recall— at that time her own work on the self-playing piano was frustrating her.

I built the frame. I used parts of an old typewriter and I used some old brass breastplates that had formerly been employed in opera, and which Mr. Quantrill did not miss.

Lastly I reproduced that red-sun-of-creation sigil that had always been at the heart of it. It was there in the wires and in the tubes and in the play of the magnetic fields. The snake eating its own tail, the always-ascending staircase &c &c. It was warm to the touch. When I passed a charge across it there was a glow so faint that it was visible only by night, and then only if you closed one eye and stared. Adela asked again what it did and I said it did nothing so far. I did not want to tell her what it was. I kept on working.

You may recall that when I first came to Jasper, I tried to find my sister Jess. I failed. She had left her last known address, maybe because after Professor Harry Ransom And His Terrible Secret Weapon got famous it was hard being his sister. Well, I do not want you to think I am a quitter. I kept on asking around after her. I came up with this ingenious plan: I persuaded Mr. Quantrill to authorize me to hire dancing girls and concession girls for the Ormolu Theater, and under cover of that purpose I made inquiries all along Swing Street. I felt like a story-book spy, an Agent-in-training. Rumor had it she had left Swing Street. I followed her trail to a low and sinister hotel in the worst part of Fenimore. I shall not describe that place. From there rumor pointed the way to the Floating World.

The Floating World, if you have never heard of it, was a very famous— I shall be blunt— it was a very famous whore house. It stood on the top of the bluffs overlooking Jasper City, and sometimes at night you could see the faint red glow of its lanterns, taunting all the respectable and religious people of the city below. I was told by two or maybe three people that Jess or a woman answering to her description was working there now.

I no longer needed to borrow money from her but I believed I owed her my help, or at least an apology. You may think it would have been better if I had left her alone, but that was how I felt.

What stopped me from venturing up that well-worn trail to the Floating World was that rumor
also
had it that the Floating World was a front for the activities in Jasper of the Agents of the Gun. In fact this supposed secret was so open that hardly anyone in Jasper had not heard it. If I set foot in that place, might they recognize me? Professor Harry Ransom— confidant of Liv and Creedmoor, inventor of the terrible weapon that killed the giant Knoll— I could not take that chance.

Some of the Ormolu’s crew were regulars at the Floating World. I asked them about it, but declined invitations to join them.

Adela, overhearing my questions, raised an eyebrow.

“If I asked what your interest in that place is, would you tell me?”

“I guess not.”

“You’re impossible, Hal. You and your secrets.”

“I’d tell all if I could.”

“You won’t even tell me what you’re building down in the cellar.”

“Well— maybe not yet.”

I did not confide in her. I wanted to— I longed to talk about her theories and mine— but I did not dare. I did confide in the other occupant of the Ormolu’s basement, who was a ghost.

This is a difficult subject. On the one hand maybe I have strained your credulity enough already. Ghosts are not uncommon on the Rim but nearly unheard of in crowded old Jasper City, and you may think I am stretching the truth. On the other I once said a long time back I would try to write the truth and the whole truth. So I will, even if it sounds unlikely. I keep my promises, when I can.

He first showed himself on my seventh night in the basement. It had been a long night and I was still crouched over the Apparatus. It was not working. That was no big surprise. I had no money and the thing was made of junk. I had few waking hours to work on it, I was so busy making toys for the stage. Nevertheless I was in an ill humor. It seemed that I would never recover what I had had out on the Rim, when I was free. It seemed like a very long time ago. I stood and sighed and turned, meaning to bring the lantern closer to its workings.

A black man in a tall white wig and old-fashioned red velvet coat stood behind the lantern, its light turning his skin gold. He was wide-eyed, watching me. I jumped back, cried out, lifted a hammer to defend myself. He shook his head, then vanished. I lowered the hammer and persuaded myself that I had imagined it, perhaps mistaking a row of old coats and props for a visitor.

He came back two nights later, again appearing behind me just as I turned off the Apparatus. That time I seized the hammer and swung at his head. What I learned from that experience is that when you swing a hammer at a ghost it does not, contrary to the way it is in that one famous ghost story Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson wrote, pass as if through mist. Instead the ghost is simply not there, and he never was, but instead he is somewhere else, six feet away, then he is behind you, then he is gone, leaving you dizzy.

The third time he came back I asked him his name. He opened his mouth but no sound came out. Then he sat down on my bench, arranging his coat-tails beneath him, and looked so very sad that I felt sorry for him, and put down my hammer. Shortly afterwards he was gone.

He only appeared by night. He often opened his mouth but was never able to speak. It will no doubt have occurred to you to wonder whether he was a real ghost or simply an unexpected effect of the Process, and I do not know exactly what to tell you.

I did not think I had encountered any such presence before. Sometimes when I worked on the Process back in East Conlan I had felt like I was being watched— well, I was being watched, I guess, I had three sisters. But sometimes out on the Western Rim when I’d worked late through the night there had been motion at the corner of my eyes— I’d guessed rabbits, or cats on the prowl. I had never seen a ghost.

I asked the employees of the Ormolu if there were ghosts in their establishment and all of them said that there were, but that’s just how theater-people always are and it did not necessarily mean anything. The ghost himself could not answer my questions or explain himself.

He had no visible wounds or cause of death. He was dressed in old-time finery and I imagined he might have been one of the founding generation of Jasper City, a nobleman or nobleman’s private secretary back in the ancient days when Jasper had noblemen. If so he had lived in the days before Gun and Line, before the Great War, when our world was still being made and everything was possible. Like I said, he could not answer my questions.

I called him Jasper.

“Jasper,” I said, “this device you’re looking at is the notorious

Ransom Light-Bringing Apparatus. Tell no one.”

Jasper nodded.

“You should have seen it in its heyday. That was out on the Western

Rim, under the big skies, the big red plains and the jagged wild hills and all that, like in the paintings. It lit up like the sun. You should have seen everyone’s faces.”

Jasper was sitting on the bench, studying the innards of the Apparatus. I was pacing.

“Do you see anything, Jasper? Anything at all?”

He shook his head.

“It’s harder here— here in Jasper. Out on the Rim it all seemed to work so easily. I shall not say there weren’t setbacks and frustrations because there were, oh there were, but somehow everything and anything seemed possible out there.”

He nodded again, and looked thoughtful.

“I guess maybe you’re thinking about days gone by, when the world was new-made, and Jasper City was new too, and you were all building a future where anything could be possible. Assuming you are in fact one of the founding generation of Jasper City and not just a shadow of a shadow of who-knows-what. Assuming you can hear me.”

He seemed to look at me.

“If you are from those days maybe you should know that everybody hates the Senate you made. Just yesterday there was a riot on Thirty-second Street.”

Sometimes I read to him from the newspapers. The topic was generally struggle and strife. Two more Senators were assassinated over the course of that summer. The Senate itself appeared to be in the painful process of splitting in two. So was the whole Tri-City Territory, for that matter.

It was now generally reported, as Adela had told us, that Gibson City had gone over to the Line. The Tri-City Territory had always understood itself to be neutral in the Great War. Gun and Line meddled in the heartland, but they did not operate there with the wild open abandon they allowed themselves on the Rim. The fall of Gibson shocked the Territory to its core.

In response to the news Juniper City had cut ties with Gibson and with Jasper both, announced that henceforth nothing would ever compromise its splendid independence. Juniper had expelled foreign businesses, including those of Mr. Baxter. The Juniper City Greater Council declared that it had acquired a terrible and unprecedented new weapon, capable of destroying the Engines themselves or laying siege to the Lodge of the Guns, and that if their affairs were meddled with they would make use of it. This was generally thought to be a bluff but nobody could be sure. One faction in Jasper City’s Senate was for throwing in with Juniper City. Another was for preemptive surrender to the Line while it was possible to do so on favorable terms. Some of the newspapers railed against the Senate for failing to provide Jasper with its own secret weapons, some of them speculated that such weapons already existed. Meanwhile Liv and Creedmoor and myself were sighted all over the world. We were said to be raising an army, or rebuilding the Red Valley Republic. We were said to be whispering in the ear of the Juniper City Council or hiding in mountain caves. Pilgrims and drifters chased us all over the world. I was by now getting used to thinking about that other Ransom as somebody quite separate from myself, and I could read about him in the newspapers with only the tiniest chill.