The Rise of Ransom City (56 page)

If you have never been in a Station of the Line you probably imagine that every moment in a Station is spent in the presence of the Engines. They are so immense— how could you not live in their shadow? Well, they are immense but their Stations are bigger. Truth is I rarely set eyes on one of the Engines while I was held in Harrow Cross. Sometimes I saw their smoke as they approached or departed across the plains. Sometimes I felt their vibrations through the floor or in my gut. Sometimes I got telegrams from the Engines themselves, full of bluster and menace:

ransom. we expect progress.

ransom. do not fail us.

ransom. we elevated you. is this how you repay us? explain yourself ransom.

Everyone told me this was a great honor but I did not enjoy it. Once and only once I replied. dear engines. a proposal. purpose of bomb is to destroy the demons of the gun. we have no demons to experiment on. no complaint intended but none have been captured for us. great obstacle to research. however any spirit will do, & there are still a great many engines in the world. perhaps 1 or 2 volunteers could be spared as experimental subjects?

That resulted in a storm of telegrams condemning my blasphemy and making threats of terrible tortures and I would like to say that did not scare me but truth is it did.

I got telegrams from just about all of the Engines but most often from the Kingstown Engine, until I began to feel that we had a kind of connection, me and It, that we had been through difficult times together, back in the swamp and in Jasper City, and that a bond of adversity had been forged. There were times when I wanted to please it.

I guess you would also imagine that in Harrow Cross every secret is top secret and nothing happens without the Engines knowing of it, not a word is whispered, not a sparrow flies without it being noted and logged somewhere in the cold recesses of the Engines’ minds. Well it is true that no sparrow flies there, but that is on account of the smoke and the noise. It is not true that there are no secrets. In fact Harrow Cross contains so many files and spies and so much information that it cannot be contained. It spills out. It falls through the cracks. The Engines banned loose talk— they required all mail to be censored— they forbade whispering and gossip and gatherings of more than four persons other than on official business— but when everything is forbidden nothing is forbidden. I am not the first to say that the Gun and the Line are more alike in some ways than they pretend.

I should have had access only to those files that I needed for my researches— that wasn’t how it was. There were so many files! They had to go somewhere. An error of a single digit on a requisition form was the difference between experimental observations regarding the aftermath of the white rock incident and report on the communications capacity of the red republic— an error of a single digit on a routing order was the difference between sending some preliminary predictions on the expected growth of the rim economies to me or to whoever’s business it rightly was. The Ether was thick with telegraph-messages just like the air was thick with smoke, and no wonder that often they ran afoul of each other, so that the wrong man was sent to the front, or projects begun or ended for no obvious reason. Anyhow it is on account of this tendency toward error that I know so much about the population of Melville City and the history of Jasper City and about banned books and the exploits of Jim Dark and how motor-cars and Injunctions work and a hundred other things. I guess if I had to describe Harrow Cross, that is how I would describe it. I did not get out into the streets a whole lot and I never set foot in a factory. Harrow Cross was a deluge of numbers and orders and words and facts.

News of the War was forbidden in Harrow Cross, except for the maddening deafening moving-pictures stories of triumph that played in monumental black-and-white on the walls of the Station’s towers and fortifications. The moving-pictures are sporting, I think— they tell you from the start that everything in them is a lie, because no ordinary soldier of Line has ever been so tall or so square-jawed or handsome as those ten-foot-high faces on the walls. But I heard the truth anyhow, or fragments of it. The engineers whispered. I heard conversation in the halls. Even the adjutant could not keep her mouth shut. I heard about the siege of Juniper, and how the mercenaries of the Gun broke it. I heard the news about the Collier Hill and Arkeley Engines and how they were both removed from the world in the space of one day, when they confronted the forces of the Republic— the real thing that time. I heard about the defeat of the Line’s armies at Chatillon no more than three or four weeks after everybody else in the world. I heard about how after the battle of Chatillon Dr. Lysvet Alverhuysen was no longer First Speaker of the Republic, though I heard a lot of different information as to whether she had stepped down, or been voted down, or shot, or got religion and gone to work in a mission hospital out on the Rim.

Anyhow I’d been in Harrow Cross for maybe a month when I got the first letter from Adela.

I was working in the laboratory. By that I mean that I was sitting in my chair in a shadowed corner watching engineers strut back and forth, shouting out numbers and waving their hands and bumping into phantom images of themselves, which were also waving their hands, though not shouting.

The laboratory was built in a hangar, constructed on one of the rooftops high over the Station. It was windowless, and so huge that one of the prototypes could explode and it would not shake the walls or dislodge the electric-lights from the ceiling. It was bone-white and gunmetal-gray and the floor was tiled in the same kind of discomforting grid as the floor of the big office where I had first met Mr. Baxter.

The adjutant had left me alone. Two of the engineers came to me to ask me to resolve a dispute over the nature of the Process and I answered them without thinking or looking up at them. Another presented me with a series of notes and observations regarding a test that had been conducted at Black Lake— disappointing to them and delightful to me— the prototype had burned down a barn but done nothing else. A third engineer slipped a piece of paper into my hand and walked quickly away, and I could not turn the heavy chair fast enough to see his face.

Harry. I hope this note finds you. I am so sorry. If they tell me this gets to you I shall write again. If you do not want to read anything I write at all I will understand but I will write regardless. —A.

But no more letters came from her for two weeks. I got angry with her and then hopeful and then sentimental and then angry again— last of all I got sad.

It was the middle of the afternoon. Three of the engineers stood with their backs to me, a row of black coats and folded arms. One was a woman. I do not know her name. Their attention was fixed on a prototype of the Apparatus, the wheels of which were turning and turning and turning, its light casting shadows in which all kinds of phantoms big and small could be seen.

The engineers talked amongst themselves. They paid no attention to me, and I paid little enough attention to them. I sat in my chair thinking about Adela and getting sad. I was thinking about how I would surely never hear from her again, and I was thinking about how maybe she did what she did because of me— how if only I had saved the piano, she might not have been driven to that extremity that caused her to shoot Mr. Baxter. Maybe.

One of the engineers said “Won’t work.”

“It was promising,” said another.

“Dead end.”

“Easy for you to say. Your team’s working with the new data.”

“They’ve got new data? What data?”

“Hush-hush. The latest raid. They brought back a half-ton of junk and the code-crackers have been at work on it— promising new leads.”

“Huh. Not fair, if you ask me— why hasn’t my team seen that data?”

“Strings. It’s all about what strings get pulled.”

“Favoritism, that’s what it is— it’s bad for efficiency and it’s entirely improper. When did this happen? Why wasn’t my team informed?”

“Last week. They say the Harrow Cross Engine itself carried the stuff in— a half ton of the usual junk and a dozen interviewees.”

“Well, I’m going to complain. Why wasn’t my team informed?”

I said, “What raid?”

They turned to look at me. Two of them blinked blankly and one removed his spectacles to polish them.

“What raid?”

“Hush-hush, Mr. Ransom. Sir.”

“What damn raid? What do you mean? Don’t look at me like that— you’ll tell me, damn you— what raid?”

“There’s no need for you to know, sir.”

“You’ll tell me or I’ll never say another word to you. I won’t be lied to. I’m in charge here. What raid?”

The one who had removed his spectacles put them back on.

“What did you think, Ransom? This thing you found— you found it in one of the hovels of the Folk. Everyone knows that. Creedmoor and the woman— whatever they found they found it in the same way you did. That’s what everyone says. The Line’s had men raiding every Folk cave and squat and forest within a thousand miles of East Conlan for the last six months. Seizing the carvings. Interviewing the inhabitants. Extracting the information. Good men have died. Now what are you looking so shocked for, Ransom? Did you think we wouldn’t go digging too?”

I do not know what I said in response to this.

“We’ll have what we need with or without you, sir. As a matter of fact I don’t know why we keep you around.”

The other two looked anxious about this speech. I guess I confused their sense of hierarchy. But they did not protest or apologize, and all three of them turned their backs on me again when the light of the prototype suddenly pulsed.

During this conversation the light of the prototype had steadily increased and at the same time the room’s shadows had sharpened, and the number of phantoms had increased. Many but not all of them looked like Folk. I would swear that among them I saw Mr. Carver. The engineers and me were greatly outnumbered by those phantoms.

Later that day I attempted suicide. As it turns out the windows of the tall spikes over Harrow Cross Station are not made of glass, though they look like glass, and even in a heavy runaway wheelchair you cannot break them.

I was going to write a lot more about Harrow Cross and our experiments and how what ever people say about me I did not serve the Line willingly, and I did what I could to defy them. Well I guess you will have to believe me or not as you please. We have had more sightings of Line Vessels overhead. Deserters, perhaps, or scouts. Our camp has surely been discovered. I have no time to waste and I want to write about what happened to Adela.