The Rise of Ransom City (8 page)

*The records of the court of Glendale town, Nevison County, make frequent reference to the four Beck brothers— enough brawls, affrays, breaches of the peace, and insults to decorum to fill another book, ending in Erskine Beck’s conviction for horse-theft and the brothers’ disappearance from the town’s records and one assumes the town itself. One imagines the Beck brothers were not so scrupulous about temptation as Mr. Ransom hoped. —EMC

“So what, precisely,
is
the Ransom Process?”

So said Miss Elizabeth Harper, pausing from her work, pushing some strands of golden hair back from her flushed and sweating forehead, smiling.

“You’ll see it work to night,” I said.

“You’re coy, Mr. Ransom.”

“I am wise,” I said. “And call me Harry.”

We were in the town of New Sydney, or maybe Homeward, or who

knows what it was called. A couple of days east down the road from Clementine. I recall that there were vineyards and a bank and the town was nestled beneath a yellow slope of valley. I had negotiated with the Reverend of wherever it was and we were to put on a show that night in his meeting-hall.

He was a Reverend of the Smiler faith, or as they are properly known the Brothers of the New Thought. I don’t recall his name because frankly the Smilers are all much the same to me. He was young, pleasant to look at, fair-haired and blue-eyed. It was his job to keep his circle smiling their way through times of struggle— to keep them day-by-day improving their souls, and not falling into despair— and it was putting the first lines of worry on his face.

“Adversity,” he said, “is good for the soul.” He gave me a strained smile. “But there are limits. The war, Professor, the war and the rumors of war, it’s hard for them all— for
us
all— it’s bad for business and bad for the nerves, is what it is—”

I noticed how he said
them
and asked if he was new in town. “Does it show? Well. Well it’s all right if it shows, isn’t it? Yes. Yes. I was trained at the Inner Circle in Jasper City. This is my first posting. Adversity strengthens us, that’s right, isn’t it?”

“You’re from the big city! I bet you particularly requested this difficult posting, I bet you lit out for the Western Rim to challenge yourself. I did just about the same thing, in fact the way I see it you and me have a lot in common. But maybe I’ve been here a while longer than you and I know how people are out here. They’re simple, not like in the big cities. They don’t get a whole lot in the way of entertainment. They brood, they hole up for the winter, they get the fear. What your circle needs is a diversion. Something that’s not war nor rumor of war nor anything they’ve seen before— something new. I can help you there.”

He smiled nervously.

“It must be consistent with the dignity of the faith.”

“Dignity is my watchword.”

“A month ago,” the Reverend said, “a man came through town with an automaton that played checkers. He won bets. But it turned out there was a dwarf beneath the table.”

“Is that a fact? I’ve never met a dwarf. Well— I’ll bet it was diverting.”

Miss Harper and Mr. Carver and I moved the Apparatus piece by delicate piece into the meeting-hall and Mr. Carver assembled it on the Podium. The Reverend watched nervously. I do not know whether he was more worried about the possibility of blasphemy or fraud or fire. Old Man Harper did not believe in manual labor, it seemed, but he pulled his weight in other ways. For instance in towns like that I was used to having small boys swarm around the Apparatus and sometimes try to steal small or shiny parts. Old Man Harper’s scowling presence was a wonderful scare-crow against such distractions.

Miss Harper asked me, “Are you a scientist or a prophet, Harry?”

“I observe no such distinctions,” I said.

“Or a circus-act?”

“Distinctions are for little minds.”

“Are they really?”

“No offense intended. How about you just wait till it’s dark. That’s when you can really see the Light.”

The meeting-hall was round, and well-worn, and would have been comfortable if it were not so damn hot. It was conspicuously clean and smelled strongly of floor wax. Sunlight streamed through wide windows. The benches and the walls were carved with Scripture of the Smilers, like smile through adversity and cleanliness is the best medicine and there is nothing to fear but fear itself and early to rise early to bed &c. You know the kind of thing. Between these slogans there was a poster urging that suspicious travelers be reported to the nearest available Officer of the Line, which I didn’t much like. There was also now the sign I had myself painted in blue and gold and red and white, come and behold the future of the west, the ransom process, &c, &c, which I liked very much if I do say so myself.

Miss Harper was tall and a deft hand with a hammer and a great help when it came time to hang the glass lamps all around the rafters. For much of that time I was otherwise occupied, soothing the Reverend’s mounting anxieties regarding the Apparatus and what it might do, explode or catch fire or call down the wrath of who-knows-what. (I guess I could see how it
did
have a certain blasphemous quality, sitting there on the podium.) Still, Miss Harper and I found time for a good long talk. I told her about good old East Conlan, maybe prettifying things a little, and about my sisters and where they’d scattered to with their marriages and work in Jasper City and occasional letters to remind me that I owed them money, and I told her about my big dreams and my big plans. I told her about the incident in Melville City— and maybe I made myself out to be more of a hero than I was— and I told her about some of my other escapades and misadventures in such colorful places as Kloan and Disorder and the like. I had been out on the edge of the settled world for more than a year and I had a lot of stories.

“Fortune and fame,” she said, “always on the horizon. And always some pitfall between you and it.”

“An excellent summation,” I said, “of my life in particular and of the world in general.”

She stood by the window where there was a little breeze and she took a long drink of water.

We talked for a time about the War. It seemed she had a great interest in it but she had not been able to read a newspaper or talk to anyone much for a long time, because there was a lot she wanted to know but did not. I told her what I could, which was little enough, and after a while she stopped asking. She asked me instead why I’d come out to the edge of the world, where things were so dangerous, and I explained that I was looking for investors and partners in my great work, and also that if you had it in mind to make something new and strange this was the place to do it.

It is widely known that as one presses West it is not only the people and the land but nature itself that gets wilder and rougher and looser. Many things that are settled certainties in the heart of the world are negotiable on the edge of it. It has been shown that clocks run faster out here, except when they run slower or not at all. The boiling point of water varies from place to place. If you drop a stone from a roof in one town it may fall faster or slower than in the next, or so I have heard: I have never successfully observed this myself.

If you were looking to found a new political order or the city of the future you would go West— that’s the standard practice. Or if you were fleeing from the law of law-abiding places, west is the direction in which you would flee. Similarly, if your quarrel was with what in solider and more staid places they might call
laws of nature
. . .

I asked her how far she had gone out West and what she had seen of the edge of the world, thinking of how when I met her she had been coming from that horizon. She gave me no straight answer.

I shrugged and pulled on the jacket of my fine white suit.

She said, “Where are you going, Harry?”

I said that I was going nowhere in particular at that moment except to the doorway, where I wished to be seen in my fine white suit so as to attract the curiosity of passers-by. If she meant where did I plan to go tomorrow, it depended where the road led. I said I was just wandering, going no place in particular, the same as she was.

“I thought you said you were going to see Mr. Baker in Jasper City,” she said.

“Baxter,” I corrected her.

“Baxter, then.”

“I did say that, didn’t I? I didn’t think you were listening.”

“Of course I was listening, Harry. He’s a businessman?”

“You really haven’t heard of him? I didn’t think anyone in the West didn’t know that name. Well,” I said, warming to my subject, “he’s the greatest and most famous businessman in Jasper City and in all of the West and besides he’s the author of a book that meant a lot to me when I was young. And more importantly he is famous for investing in promising young men, and he is known to have made the fortunes of the inventors of the slipjoint lockknife and the hand-crank dishwasher. One day— one day, when the Process is perfected— I plan to visit him— we’ll go together, eh Mr. Carver?”

Mr. Carver sat at the pedals of the Apparatus, head hung down, half-asleep, as if preparing himself for the labors to come.

“If I have to I’ll sit on his doorstep all day,” I said, “until his butler has no choice but to let me in. Or I’ll jump in his carriage while it rolls down Swing Street among the theaters and before his driver can eject me I’ll strike up a conversation. I reckon if I can just start talking they can’t stop me.”

She laughed.

“Maybe I’ll wait for him in his library all night, sipping his brandy. He won’t mind, he can take it out of our profits. Oh, don’t think I haven’t thought of a hundred other angles of attack. . . .”

I told Miss Elizabeth Harper nearly everything I had to tell about my hopes and dreams, and in return she told me nothing about herself except a pack of lies. She told me that she was a schoolteacher from a little town near Gibson City, and that she and the old man had come out West to visit a dying aunt, and some other falsehoods which I will not waste ink repeating. I don’t mean to say she was a bad liar because she was not, but I did not believe any of it.

The sun started to set and a pink light came through the windows, and it bathed Mr. Carver as he sat at the pedals of the Apparatus, giving him a sinister aspect. The Apparatus itself was a thing of beauty as always. Brass flamed in the evening light and the domes and flutes of glass were so clear that the meeting-hall’s slogans were legible in their mirror-images. The magnetic cylinders had a certain heavy elegance, like prayer-wheels from one of those old-country faiths. The Apparatus began to hum. Old Man Harper had fallen asleep on one of the benches at the back of the meeting-hall with his stick in his lap and he was snoring just out of time with the rise and fall of the Apparatus’s unpredictable energies.

Then I stood by the door as the townsfolk filed in for evening Meeting, and the Reverend shook some hands and I shook others, like we were competing for souls. The men in that town mostly wore tall hats, as I recall, and the women dressed plainly in grays and blacks.

The name of the town was Kenauk. I recall it now. A Folk word. Its meaning unknown, at least to me.*