The Rise of Ransom City (64 page)

I had planned to return home to New Morgan once I had said my good-byes to the Baron, leaving before the rainy season came to the Deltas. It is not an easy matter to travel at my age, and I had business to take care of. But at the pier at the river my excitement at my discovery of the Fourth Part overtook me, or perhaps it was the spirit of young Mr. Ransom. I exchanged my ticket and I set out west. I visited a number of acquaintances I had never thought to visit with again in this life, and I saw a lot of sights between here and the edge of the world for what I suppose will be the last time.

I toured the sights of Mr. Ransom’s autobiography. East Conlan and New Foley are part of one town now, by the name of Foley. The town of Kenauk is a busy little metropolis, and hardly anyone remembers the day Mr. Ransom came to town. White Rock is long gone; only the lake and the trees remain. The town of Mammoth still has its mammoth, and I have the post-cards to prove it. Melville City thrives, of course. Clementine is gone. The town of Domino, where Ransom boarded the ill-fated
Damaris,
was destroyed in the last days of the Great War, along with the nearby Line camp and the Fountainhead Engine; in its place there is a memorial.

The western edge of the world expands further and further and places that were wild in Ransom’s day are respectable now. I wanted to set eyes one last time on the edge of things, and so I kept going, out past Melville and the crossroads where Clementine had grown and dried up and blown away, out past places that in Ransom’s day had no names, but were now thriving little towns, well-marked farms, busy roads. I traveled all summer. Thank our lucky stars that the motor-car is no longer the exclusive property of the Line, or I would never have been capable of it.

Wherever I went I interviewed old-timers. Well, call it
interviewing;
perhaps it was just old men jawing about the old days. A few people remembered Ransom, and the day long ago in the time of the War when he and his band of deserters, misfits, and reprobates went by on their way out west. Nobody knew what had become of them. Most of them agreed that Ransom’s band numbered twenty or thirty at most, not the hundred or more he claimed in his letters. Some of them still had copies of Ransom’s letters and posters, his invitations to Ransom City, stiff and yellowed papers which they were happy to sell to me for pennies or tobacco.

I met a few old men who had come out looking for Ransom City, back in the days of their feckless youth, but never found it. The place was a joke, a drifter’s dream; the paradise at the end of the road, always the next town over, where nobody works and everybody lives for free.

The people of New Jasper, which is a town of some five thousand souls and about as far from old Jasper as it is possible to get, will tell you a story, if you ask, about how their founder was a war hero, and a businessman, and an inventor, whose genius was the secret of their town’s success. They cannot agree on the nature of his genius, though most of them will say
rain-making
if you ask them, and a few will say
electricity
. That gentleman, who went by the name of Rawlins, left town twenty-five years ago, headed west. There is no statue to him in New Jasper but by the accounts of the old-timers he looked a little like Mr. Ransom, though they remembered him as tall, which Mr. Ransom was not. New Jasper is a fine little town but its people work for a living like everyone else, and it gets dark at night.

From the town of Gourney there are no roads west, so I traveled by mule to the settlement of Sherlund’s Water. It was one of the old men there who told me of a place nearby called Carver’s Hill, where strange lights are sometimes seen at night, and where travelers in the woods sometimes meet ghosts, and where a madman lived on the hill. Apart from the small coincidence of the name, there was nothing to set those stories apart from those that you might hear anywhere on the Rim. Wherever you go there is always a haunted hill somewhere nearby, there is always a madman who lives in the woods. The coincidence of the name was enough to make me curious, and I attempted to hire a guide; but Carver’s Hill is not just haunted, but also Folk territory, and nobody would take my money. I set out a little way toward the hill myself but the going was too steep, and I was afraid— not because of ghosts, or lights, because I saw none, but for the most part because of the sheer remoteness of the place. My wristwatch stopped working as I approached the hill, and still does not work today.

After Carver’s Hill I turned back east. For the most part I traveled by steamboat, and slept on deck in the sun. I returned to New Morgan, and to my house on Cuvier Street, which my house keeper had kept for me in fine condition, and where, after I had bathed, and shaved, and dined, my secretary presented me with a heap of correspondence, near the top of which was a letter— no return address—hand-delivered— reading simply

My Dear Mr. Carson,

What are you waiting for? Yours, HR