The Rise of Ransom City (4 page)

“Go to hell. Go to hell and fuck you. The things you serve should never have come up out of hell. They may steal everything else in the world in their greed but they shall not steal a single thing I have built. I will burn and bury it all first. Good day to you and go to hell. Go to hell! And as for the rest of you. Half you provincial dunderheads have never known a damn thing in all the years I have worked for this town, and yet I can see you are trying to
think
. Here are two things you should think about. First, their demands will not end with me and what’s mine but they will eat you up too. Second, any man who is not with me who sets foot near my properties will be shot. Good day to you all.”

And Mr. Grady stumped on out the back door of the meeting-hall and up the road up the hill, and he settled into his territory with those of his miners who were loyal to him, and they broke out rifles hoarded against maybe exactly this particular emergency, who knows, and Grady’s Mine turned into something like a fortress, lit at night by torches. Attempts were made by the town’s accountants to calculate the tonnage of explosives Grady might possess up there but they could not come to agreement. Honest traders started to pass Conlan by but we were visited by a plague of life-insurance salesmen. Dr. Forrest fled town without giving notice and I hear he later set up a practice in Sweet Water where he operated drunk and killed a child and was shot by her father, in a duel and in accordance with both law and custom. The Linesmen stayed in town in their rooms on Main Street and seemed to do nothing, which only made everyone even more afraid of what they
might
do. And nobody in East Conlan much remembered or cared that that odd little Ransom boy was still sick, except for my father.

He went into town and he called on the Linesmen. As I imagine it, it was one of those good old Conlan mornings when the sky was gray-black like coal dust, and my father stooped and stared at his feet and held his hat in his hand and tried to make himself look small and forced himself to be humble. For the Line had machines that no one else in the West could begin to understand, and back north in Harrow Cross there were sciences that only the Engines themselves fully comprehended, and while their ingenuity and their productive capacities were mostly turned to War they had medicines too. Certainly they had medicines that old Dr. Forrest could not dream of.

My father was a very proud man, and I do not doubt they made him grovel. The Line gives nothing for free.

Of course I knew nothing of these negotiations, until one afternoon there was the sound of many feet in the hallway outside, and the sound of ugly and unfamiliar voices, and then the door to my sickroom opened and five men entered. One of them was my father, and he stood in the doorway. The others, who quickly and without asking permission encircled my bed, were all short men in long black coats. Apart from various combinations of caps and spectacles and gloves or their absence there was no way I could see of distinguishing between them. One of the gloved ones seized my jaw and turned my head this way and that, and I could think of nothing clever to say. He let go of me and wiped his glove clean on the other glove and said, “He’ll die.”

“I do not believe that.” My father spoke as if from a very great distance, and his tone was very flat.

“It don’t make no difference what you believe, Mr. Ransom.”

“What is it? What does he have?”

“Don’t know. We don’t know. Some sickness, some poison. Some defect in the world. Something badly made. Not our business to catalog these things. What does it matter?”

“There is something you can you do.”

“If there was, you couldn’t afford it, Mr. Ransom.”

“You could send back to Harrow Cross for help.”

“Think they got nothing better to do in Harrow Cross? There’s a war on, Mr. R—”

“I know, I know. What do you want? Damn it what do you want?”

“You want to talk in front of your son, Ransom? Makes no difference to us if he hears but the stink in here—”

“No. No. Thank you. You’re right. Come away. Please, come away.”

They left. They were gone for a long time and I slept, and Jess came and chattered about nothing in particular, and I slept again, and when I next woke the Linesmen were back in the room. My father was not with them. But this time they had one of their machines with them, and I could not make out what it was exactly in the dark of my sickroom but it was the height of a low table, or maybe it was just something that sat on a table. In any case the wheels of it were turning and turning, and there was a terrible stench of burning metal and oil. Two pairs of strong hands— one gloved and one ungloved and cold— seized me by my arms and my head. I opened my mouth to protest and a leather strap was thrust into it. Like an animal my instinct was to bite on it and go silent. They lifted my head and lowered a crown of wood and wire upon it. There was a snap and a sizzle and a stink and then there was light— —and to this day I do not know if the Light was all in my head or if it really and truly filled the room but to me it made black ghosts of the Linesmen and splashed everything else white. After the Light there was pain, the way thunder follows lightning. The pain was in every part of my body, every muscle spasming and then bursting with new life, not least my heart, which rushed like an Engine until I thought I would certainly die.

These days sometimes you see people offering the
electric-cure
for madness or a variety of other ailments. In my expert opinion they are mostly quacks or madmen themselves. This was the real thing. I have never seen or heard of its like since.

They packed up their apparatus. As soon as they took the bit from my mouth I said, “What was that? What did you do? What
was
that?” Or I think I said it. In any case they did not answer, but marched silently out, single-file. I could still see the Light as they left, and it was some time before it faded.

The Linesmen demanded two things of my father. The first debt came due at once. I have said that my father had a certain authority in that town. He was not a priest but the next closest thing. He was their link to the next world. When he spoke they listened.

The town was divided. Some people wanted to side with Grady against the outsiders, because he was a bastard but he was our bastard. Some people wanted to get rid of Grady before the misfortune that had fallen on Grady fell on us all. Some thought that if they got in good with the Line it would make their fortune. All along my father had been neutral. Like a priest, he did not involve himself in politics. But now he spoke out against Grady, and for the Line. People listened to him.

And not long afterwards some fifty or a hundred men from town set off up the hill to Grady’s Mine. They were armed with picks and a few rifles. They banged on locked doors and shuttered windows with pick-handles and called for Grady’s surrender. From up on top of a tower one of Grady’s men let fire and in the ensuing daylong skirmish two men died and many more were injured. Some of the explosives went off and Shaft Number Three enjoyed a brief but noteworthy career as a volcano. And so of course the Linesmen had no choice but— for our own protection and for the maintenance of public order— to intervene and to resolve the situation by force, with noisemakers and poison gas. Then in order to maintain the operations of Grady’s Mine, which they said was vital for the War, they were forced to seize it. Mr. Grady was taken to Harrow Cross for trial and he was an old man and he did not make it all the way. Since then East Conlan has been a Line town, in some ways openly and in some ways that are not obvious or easily spoken of. And nobody ever listened to my father in the same way again. His foreignness, which had formerly been considered a sign of his great and exotic wisdom, now marked him as untrustworthy—hot-blooded, a rabble-rouser, of unsound judgment.

The other debt was only money, but it lasted the rest of his life and he never repaid it. He never came close, though he lowered his dignity and took on odd jobs and worked himself to death. He sold our better furniture and what remained did not fit his giant’s frame and it is on this that I blame the stoop that afflicted him more and more, as year by year he seemed to shrink until nothing was left and he died with nothing. He and I never talked much and I do not know how badly he regretted his bargain.

My sister May recalls all of this quite differently and says that bad business deals were to blame, but I know what I know.

I have worked all day and not said a whole lot of what I meant to say. I have not talked about how I first got interested in mathematics. That was while I was still laid up in bed— because though the Linesmen’s treatment set me back on the path to health I did not at once get up and walk around like in a miracle. My father had some old books and later I sent off for a set of books published in Jasper City by a company owned by Mr. Alfred Baxter, some Encyclopedias and some books on business and a whole lot of almanacs of various kinds. I sold them at a small profit to the few literates in town and to business travelers and to some gentlemen who could not read, but who thought the volumes gave their homes a touch of big-city sophistication. Before I sold them I read them myself. I do not mean to boast but I am what is called an
Autodidact
. That means I taught myself just about everything I know and that is why some of my notions are unorthodox, and it is why when I write letters to the Professors in Jasper City they do not write back. The
Autobiography of Mr. Alfred Baxter
came free with the set and that is how I came to read that book over and over dreaming of greatness and fame and the freedom that comes with them.

I have not talked about how one of Jess’s gentleman friends taught me to shoot, though not very well, or about what it was like when Line troops started moving into town, or about the boy in town who fell down an old shaft and stayed down there for weeks and we got reporters up from Gibson City and how I tried to impress them so they would take me back with them, or about first loves or anything of that kind— well, there is a lot I could say about Love but I am writing now about History and the two have little to do with each other. I have not talked at all about the time I ran away and met with the Folk and there is a lot more I guess I should say on that subject if I mean to tell the truth and the whole truth, and I do, but not to night.