The Rise of Ransom City (59 page)

The young and freckle-faced new adjutant knocked on the door of my quarters. I let her in.

“I’m working,” I said. “I’m always working.”

She sat on the bed. She removed her cap and placed it in her lap. “Sir,” she said.

I stood by my writing-desk. By that time I no longer needed my stick to walk but I liked to lean on it anyhow. I felt it gave me a kind of authority. When I was a boy I had imagined the dignitaries of Jasper City, Mr. Baxter and the Senators and all those great men whose number I would one day join, all of them with sticks. I cannot say why.

“Another riot?” I said. “If you can’t keep control of your people here in Harrow Cross then the War is over and our efforts here are futile.”

“Sir,” she repeated.

“Yes?”

“I pulled strings, sir, to work with you. I distinguished myself at Chatillon. I proved my loyalty.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“It’s all falling apart, sir. I saw the test at Log-Town with my own eyes. I was in the Second Company of the Second Army of the Archway Engine. I saw the walls of Log-Town—I was a long-rifleman, sir. I was there when— that light, sir. Those shapes. What was left behind afterwards. It spilled— not many from Second Company survived, sir.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, sir. It opened my eyes.”

She leaned forward as she spoke, and her eyes were fixed on mine and full of a kind of frightening zeal.

“I heard all those stories about— and I heard about the Miracle at White Rock— and I didn’t believe. The Engines said it was all lies. Nothing was new, nothing had changed. But it was true.”

“Some of it was true.”

“I believed in the Engines. I believed in them with all my heart, all my life, sir. I wanted nothing more than to serve them. But they’re just— things, aren’t they, sir? Just things after all. The Archway Engine’s gone, sir. The Cross Engine’s gone. How long before they all go? Just— history, sir. They lied to me.”

I did not know who she meant by
They.
The Engines, I guess, or maybe everyone. I said nothing, just nodded.

“It’s a new century,” she said.

By the reckoning of most people we were still a few years off from the new century, but the Line has its own calendar. We count from a date of what I guess must be some kind of significance in the religions or history of one of the countries of the Old World but I cannot even tell you which country, and I do not believe I am alone in my ignorance. The men of the Line do not suffer from that kind of confusion. They count from the day the Engines spoke their first order. For them it was the Year 300, and it had been for quite a few months. There had been no celebrations.

“We can make a new world,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“There are people here in Harrow Cross who are working for the Republic, sir. Their armies will be here within the week. The Engines are too scared to fight back. They’re
scared
. We’ll get you out, sir, you and your Bomb— don’t worry— but you must help us too.”

“Adela,” I said. “You’ve seen her? You’ve talked to her?”

She nodded, stood, and put her cap back on.

“We communicated through channels, sir. Sir— the Republic must have your B— your Apparatus.”

“I see. That’s their price?”

“Yes, sir. If you want to call it that.”

“Then I guess I have work to do, don’t I?”

I do not have time to describe everything I did in the next week, and if I did have time you would not understand it, and if you did understand it you would be tempted to repeat it. All I’ll say is that I worked in my laboratory without sleep for days on end.

I chased away the engineers— I was forced to strike one of them with my stick— I shall not deny that it gave me great satisfaction. He lodged a complaint. I did not give a damn.

“No wonder this thing hasn’t worked,” I said. “It’s my damn fault it took me so long to understand it. It’s you— it’s your small minds, your lack of vision— It’s a delicate process, the Process, it’s as much magic as science— let us not delude ourselves, ladies and gentlemen— and your small-minded mean-spirited unbelieving presence is poison to it. Anathema. We are making new worlds and the end of old worlds. We don’t need paper-pushers. We don’t need anyone but me. Get out, the lot of you.”

The adjutant enforced my orders. The engineers complained to higher authorities but the higher authorities had more immediate concerns, namely that the forces of the Republic, swelled by the vehicles and guns of Gloriana and Archway, had clashed with loyalist Line forces in the Stow marshlands not that many miles south of Harrow Cross itself, and the result was so far a stalemate. The Line was not accustomed to stalemate.

I worked day and night. I did not leave the laboratory. I slept hardly at all, ate next to nothing, drank less than I sweated. To make this possible I took one hell of a lot of those chemical tablets that the Linesmen love so much, the ones that can make you work for days without sleep but also make you grind your teeth and twitch your leg. They give you a wonderful cold sharp focus on your work but leave you numb and dazed so that you do not notice when someone is talking to you, and when you try to talk back your words are slow. Sometimes they fill you full of sudden rage or tears. After a long enough time they make you see and hear things that cannot be the case.

I had exiled the engineers from the laboratory, and I had told the adjutant not to bother me with anything but the most urgent news, but I could not banish the phantoms that the Process produces.

Back when I first met the phantom I called Jasper, down in the basement of the Ormolu Theater, I had thought of him as a real person— a man not unlike myself, conjured into being by the Process and silent and prone to vanishing but still a man. In later years I had seen the phenomenon repeated a thousand times over, and in all that time not a single one of them ever spoke, or communicated through sign, or even looked me in the eye. I had come to think of them as a kind of shadow, cast by the light of the Process. It operates by cycling power between one world and another— one time and another— one state of being and another— it drags some things with it. If they were people at all, they were people who had once existed in a very different time, or who might have existed in a different world, or who one day might exist— even if they could speak, I would not understand them. And they could not speak.

So perhaps it was the Line’s drugs that caused me to believe that one night, while I was working on the Apparatus by the light of the Apparatus, I was visited by Mr. Carver, and he spoke to me.

He stood behind me. “Well,” he said, in that familiar voice. I put down my wrench and turned to him, and at first he did not acknowledge me, just stood looking into the light of the Apparatus without speaking, and he was silent for so long that I began to doubt that I had heard him speak at all. Then he smiled and shook his head, and I knew that he had spoken to me. The light of the Apparatus shone on his face so that his skin was stark white and his beard and long hair gray and ghostly. Behind him towered his shadow and mine.

“Well, Mr. Carver,” I said. “Well indeed.”

“You’ve fucked things up pretty bad, Ransom.”

“Indeed I have, Mr. Carver. Indeed I have.”

We talked for hours— maybe days. The laboratory was windowless and we were alone and I do not know how long we talked for. The clocks did not work— the Process is hell on clocks. The adjutant brought me food and water. There were rumblings from below at irregular intervals that suggested that the Engine was moving. If you do not know what it was like in the Stations of the Line I cannot describe to you how strange and unprecedented it was that anything at all should occur at intervals that were not perfectly regular.

I told Mr. Carver all about what had happened since we parted at White Rock, and how I hoped he was not disappointed in me, and did not feel that his sacrifice was in vain. I told him all about what I had learned about the Process, and about Adela, and I told him about my plans for our freedom, and about Ransom City.

He told me what it was like to be dead. Mr. Carver was never much of a talker and it took him a long time to explain. I asked him if he had met Mr. Baxter, now that he was dead and Mr. Baxter was dead. I asked if he had met the Harrow Cross Engine, if that entity was truly no more. He explained that the next world was not like that.

I asked him how he pulled off the trick of coming back from the dead. “Practice,” he said.

“I find that answer unsatisfactory, Mr. Carver. Not only as a scientist, but as a businessman. Coming back from the dead— there’s money to be made in that, if you know how to do it.”

“You’re imagining me, Mr. Ransom.”

I did not like to hear that, and I did not entirely believe it, but I did not want to argue with him and so I pretended I had not heard.

Throughout our conversation he was naked, and not ashamed of it.. Neither of us remarked on that fact, as I recall. He looked thin.

“You knew,” I said. “From the start— I mean that you knew what was in the heart of the Apparatus. Where it came from.”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Carver, there’s been a lot I’ve wanted to ask you, ever since White Rock.”

“Guess there must be.”

“Well then?”

“Yeah?”

“Have I done right by this thing, Mr. Carver?”

He looked into the light of the Apparatus.

“Who the fuck knows. Who knows, these days. This is something new.”

There was a great pounding noise from the depths of the building below us. It made the dust jump. I remarked that noises of that kind were like weather in a Station of the Line, and Mr. Carver remarked that he missed weather, and we started talking about weather we had experienced in our travels, together or apart. It turned out that he had a lot to say about weather, because in life he traveled a lot, but also because now he was dead. He told me what a lightning-storm looks like to one perceiving it from the next world. I found that so interesting that I forgot to ask him anything further about his past or about his purpose in traveling with me. Instead we talked about lightning, and about electricity, and then about the Ransom Process, which I promised him I would rename the Ransom-Carver Process, and in fact for a while afterwards I did try to call it the Ransom-Carver Process but by then it was too late: it was already too famous.

I wish that I had time to write down every word that he said, or that the drugs caused me to imagine that he said, because either way they were full of interesting and valuable information. But I do not.

We worked as we talked— Mr. Carver and I. Wherever I moved in the laboratory, he always stood behind me, which at the time I guess I put down to the natural modesty of the naked and of the recently dead— now it seems more characteristic of hallucination. Anyhow I did a lot of work in that week, with and without Mr. Carver’s help. I made a number of quite radical adjustments to several of the numerous models of the Apparatus that stood in the laboratory. During the time when Mr. Carver was there— I cannot say how long that was— he made helpful suggestions, and encouraged me when my nerve was failing, and pointed out things I had missed, which once or twice prevented me from causing crisis sooner than I had intended.

Once I had finished those adjustments, I made a wholly new model of the Apparatus. The adjutant had told me that when we fled we would have to flee on foot. Therefore the Apparatus had to be shrunk down. Mr. Carver stood behind me as I worked. I took parts from wherever I could find them in the laboratory and I constructed a device that was hardly bigger than a suitcase— it was kind of reminiscent of an accordion.

“Back in the old days we could have gone door-to-door with this,” I said to Mr. Carver, and he nodded. “We could have dispensed with the wagon. But I would have missed the horses.”

He said nothing. He was a man who traveled a lot, and he was never sentimental about horses.

“I’m going back out there,” I said. “Out and beyond. Into the unmade, out to the sunrise, out where it gets weird, and not before time. Me and her. And whoever else. Going to start over. Wish you could come with us.”