The Rise of Ransom City (39 page)

That was the end of my summer on Swing Street. Now it is time to write about the rest of my time in Jasper, and how it all ended. The typewriter is very stiff to night, as if it has not got much traveling left in it, or as if it does not want to tell the rest of the story.

Adela and I sat on the floor of the basement in the aftermath of the incident. We were both of us breathless from exertion and panic and relief. The basement was hot as an oven. The floor was hot and the wall we rested our backs on was hot. The contents of the basement were strewn all around us, swords and pennants and spears and tables and chairs and wooden trees and picture-frames and broken crockery and machinery like there had been a battle or a tornado or I don’t know what. The Apparatus was in pieces again. It had suffered some damage during the instability, and further damage during our struggle to stop it. There was a smell of salt and surf and burning. The shadows cast by Adela’s candle moved in a way that did not look exactly right.

We were alone. Mr. Quantrill appeared at the stairhead but Adela told him to go away, and her tone brooked no argument— he went away. My ghostly friend Jasper did not join us, and I cannot say why but I knew that after that incident with the Apparatus he was gone from the Ormolu for good.

Adela said, “Don’t you dare lie to me.”

I gave her my most honest and open expression.

“I don’t— well, I mean— well, I guess I won’t. No.”

“That thing— that thing you’ve been working on all this time— what is it?”

“It makes light. Heat, too, and magnetism, as you can see, and a whole lot of other things. Free and perpetual, in theory, and without limit. In theory.”

“Does it work?”

“In theory.”

“What is it? How does it—?”

“There isn’t a name for it. I discovered it. Any of the Professors at good old VU will tell you it’s impossible by all the laws of the world.

Impossible not to mention indecent. Well, I made my own laws.” She stood and paced through the wreckage. I saw that her dress had torn in the struggle with the Apparatus. Her hair was unpinned and damp with sweat. She took the candle, leaving me in shadow against the wall. I knew what she was thinking and I was waiting for her to say it. There were fragments of stone and metal and wood in the wreckage— doorknobs, nails, stage-medals, branches from a painted tree, the brass leaves of the Automated Orange Tree. Some of them moved as Adela kicked them aside. Others still moved on their own account. A few floated a little way above the floor.

Adela turned over a bit of hot brass with the toe of her boot. “I heard about White Rock,” she said.

“I guess just about everybody did, from the World’s Walls to the Rim or beyond.”

“When the Line held me they asked me about— they
questioned
me about— White Rock. Harry Ransom. The east-country woman with the strange name and the turncoat Agent and about secret weapons and devices and science. I told them, I don’t know— I didn’t know.”

“They were scared,” I said. “The future belongs to them, or that’s their opinion anyhow, and they don’t care for competition.”

“They say he’s seven feet tall, this Professor Ransom, and he dresses like a sorcerer out of the far far East.”

That was how I was portrayed in
The Story of John Creedmoor,
upstairs on the Ormolu’s stage. The actor was a fellow of Judduan descent, with a thick and unfortunate accent of Gibson City’s docks. Sorcerer’s robes were easy to come by, backstage at the Ormolu. The tallness was accomplished with high shoes.

“A lot of things they say aren’t so.”

“They say,” she said, “that at White Rock this Professor Harry Ransom had a weapon like nothing else in the world— something there is no name for.”

“It’s not a weapon,” I said.

She turned a full circle, surveying the wreckage as she went. “Are you sure?”

I told her the whole truth as I knew it. That is everything I’ve written here. I told her everything I knew about Miss Harper— Liv Alverhuysen— and about Creedmoor. I told her everything about how the Apparatus worked, and what I had learned from the Folk. I said that I thought maybe they had meant me to see what I saw, that maybe they meant for me to make use of that knowledge. I said that I believed that my Process would one day change the world for the better, and maybe that was what they wanted.

She said maybe, or maybe they wanted me to bring the world to ruin. After all why should they have any love for the world we’d made? I acknowledged that that might be the case, but I said that we all have to do what we think is right, and none of us know how any of it will end.

Mr. Quantrill showed his face again at the stairhead. He was now accompanied by several stagehands and by Mr. Bosko and by the actor who played the part of Professor Harry Ransom. Quantrill was huffing and puffing and threatening to evict me. My double was glaring at me as if he was in actual fact a wizard of the far East, and could give me the evil eye.

I told them all that the Apparatus was an experimental device for generating brightly colored smoke for the stage, and that there had been an accident with some chemicals but no harm done. Adela confirmed my story.

Mr. Quantrill seemed to believe me, or at least he did not ask anymore questions. From the look on his face as he surveyed the room I think maybe he could not imagine what questions to ask. His eye fell for a moment on one of the brass leaves of the Automated Orange Tree, which was levitating some three feet off above the rest of the wreckage and turning softly as if in a breeze, and he looked away sharply, the way a man might look away from the sun.

He chewed it over for a while and then fell back to the old familiar things he was sure of.

“This is coming out of your wages, Rawlins.”

Quantrill left. The stagehands left. Lastly my double left, gathering his robes around him.

Adela investigated the floating brass leaf.

“The shadows,” she said. “Look.”

I did not get up. “Let me guess— it has no shadow?”

“On the contrary. It has too many shadows by far.”

“Ah.”

“What causes that?”

“Truth is that I do not know.”

“Can I touch it?”

“I guess so.”

She plucked the leaf from the air, carefully wrapping it in a piece of torn cloth and putting it in her purse.

“At my present wages,” I said, “I believe I could work for Mr. Quantrill for a hundred years and not pay him back for the damage.”

“To hell with him,” Adela said. “What does it matter what he thinks? Or his money?”

“I used to talk that way. Then I learned that a man needs to eat.”

“You should give notice. We both should.”

“You have another employer in mind?”

She waved that objection away, as if it was nothing.

“Not all of us were born rich. . . .”

She did not take offense at that, she was so distracted by big ideas, and so I knew that she was serious.

“You’ve got something in mind,” I said. “Dally’s Theater, or—”

“No. Hal— Harry—this is more than a toy. Look at it! We have to go to the Senate.”

I think I have said that Adela had become, over the course of the summer, a true patriot of Jasper City. I guess that it was because her own country was lost to her. She gave me quite a speech, a real honest blood and thunder stump speech, about how the Apparatus could be just what poor beleaguered Jasper City needed to fend off the encroaching forces of the Line. She spoke of driving the Line back, crushing its ambitions, humbling the Engines. She spoke of independence, power, wealth, freedom for Jasper from the great forces of the world. I said that that was all very well, but firstly the Apparatus was in ruins, and secondly what if I spoke up, what might Mr. Baxter do? What if Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson’s insinuations were accurate, and Mr. Baxter was in cahoots with the Line?

She observed that if the Line was on my trail, the recent incident of flashes & bangs & blazing light would most likely have alerted them to my presence anyhow. She was right, of course. Anyhow we argued for a while. I was kind of annoyed to be told what to do, as if it was any business of hers, but I was kind of happy too. I had been alone with my secrets for too long. I missed Mr. Carver and I missed Miss Harper and I even missed John Creedmoor— I began to see why the two of them traveled together, though surely they did not like each other. I missed my sisters.

I longed to talk to her about the Process, about words and language and names and the world. She only wanted to talk about politics and war. Not for the first time I wondered at what the Line had done to her to arouse such anger, and I wished I could have known her when she was young.

Anyhow in the end we came to an agreement. We would leave Jasper and go to Juniper City, on the other side of the Territory. Juniper had declared open defiance of the Line. We would offer that city our services, and the use of the Process. To hell with Mr. Baxter and his libelous accusations. If the Line feared us let it have reason to fear— those were Adela’s words, not mine. I agreed that it would be good to be on the road again. She kissed both my cheeks. I understand that to be a sign among the landowning classes of the Deltas that an agreement of great significance has been reached.

Back in the days when I traveled with Mr. Carver out on the Rim, we would have left at once, before dawn, without a word or a look back. If we had done that who knows how things would have turned out! But I guess I was slowing down in my maturity. First, I said, I had business to resolve. She asked if I was talking about that fair & statuesque & blissfully unpolitical actress I have mentioned, except that she described her less kindly. I said that no, it was a family matter, although I would not deny that I would miss the fair & statuesque &c.