The Rise of Ransom City

by Felix Gilman

  I was born in the town of East Conlan, thirty years and a little more shy of the new century. I was the fourth of four children. I do not know the exact day of my birth. My father was scrupulous in his business affairs but did not make note of the date, and my sisters all remember it differently. I like to think my mother would have recalled it had she lived. I believe that I recall my birth as a kind of red light and terrible pressure but when I tell people this they get skeptical, and I do not want to strain your faith in me too soon.

  East Conlan is a coal-mining town some four or five days’ ride north of Jasper City, on the northern edge of the Tri-City Territory and not far south of the Line’s lands. There is no West Conlan and so far as I know there never was. There are two mines up on the hills at opposite ends of a long straight road and the town of East Conlan is laid out in the depression between them. When I was a boy one was operated by the Conlan Coal Company and the other belonged to a Mr. Grady, and sometimes when Grady’s men and the CCC’s men met in the middle of town there was fighting, and the myths and epics on which I was schooled as a boy were stories of how Big Joe from the Grady mine had met the Bierce Brothers outside Shad’s Bar and beaten both of them black and blue with a pick-handle for saying . . .

  Well the business of coal never interested me. Once when I was a boy no more than knee-high I met Mr. Grady. He was a very old man even then and there was something dry and dusty as coal about him. He had come to my father to make arrangements for someone’s burial— as I remember it the burial in question was his own, though that may be a child’s imagination at work. He patted me on the shoulder and asked if I would come work for him one day. I told him that I would sooner flee town and live wild among the Folk, even at the risk that they might eat me. He asked why and I said that coal-mining was always the same: the going down into the dark and the coming up again, day in day out, since men first set foot in the West, and that a new century was coming and I had my eyes on the future, when men would not toil like beasts. Mr. Grady gave me a quarter-dollar, and told my father that I had a clever tongue but no sense of when to use it, and that that quarter-dollar would likely be the last honest money I would earn.

  My father was not a miner, and did not work for anyone. He made a living arranging funerals and burials, of which conditions in the mines ensured a steady supply. He was not a native of East Conlan. In fact he was as far from a native as it is possible to be. As a young man he came over the mountains into this western land of ours from the hot and distant country of Juddua, which to me has always seemed unthinkably magical and strange, and whenever I meet a fellow from that part of the world I pepper him with questions until he is about ready to strike me down and flee. I believe my father had been a man of great learning, maybe a priest or a doctor or something of the kind— he never talked about his past. He came West and I do not know what he was looking for but he found my mother in East Conlan.

  He was a tall man in a town of short men. You could not imagine him entering Grady’s Mines— he did not stoop. He kept his beard precisely scissored in a way that was somewhat too grand for East Conlan, where men mostly either went clean-shaven or shaggy as a moose. For exercise, he took long walks, alone. He was tremendously strong, or so it seemed to me. He hauled stones taller than me and he carved names and dates into them as casually as a man might jot down numbers in a ledger.

  Ransom was not his real name. His real name was something a little like Ransom in sound but in a foreign tongue that was too hard to say for the simple people of towns like Conlan, so he became Ransom. He spoke little, and as I remember him he was quite bald on the top of his great black head, and though he was not a religious man in any way he tended to the widows and the dead with the dignity of a priest. He often quoted a variety of Scriptures in a variety of languages but he believed in none of them. The miners of East Conlan were not religious either in those days and the plain things he did for them sufficed.

  My mother died a little after I was born. She was pale and freckled and pretty and I am sorry that that is all I can say about her. Jess used to say that she had green eyes but in the photograph my father kept everything about her was soft and sepia-brown as if she was looking up from the earth where she lies. I have three sisters: Jess, Sue, and May. Two older brothers did not live past infancy. A reasonable percentage. We the survivors all worked for Father from as soon as we could walk. I was no damn good at it.

  One day my father summoned us all into his workroom. There were heavy tools and dust and fragments of stone. There was a human skull on a shelf above my reach and very dusty books in languages from the old country which I could not read but wished I could. There was also the photograph of my mother and some mementos of her in ivory and jade. My father sat behind a desk and looked at each of us in turn, and announced in his deep rumbling voice that he had been thinking about the future, and what would happen when he was gone. He reminded us that nothing on earth lasted forever, but everything sooner or later went down into the dark, and one day he would too. What would happen when he was gone, he said, was that May would go to the church, and Jess should find work in Jasper or Gibson City, and Sue would marry and take over the business and do well with it. I scratched my scabs and I asked what I would do and he was silent for a very long time then said that he had thought long and hard and consulted the wisdom of the ages and of the dark places of the world and of the most learned heirarchs of ancient Juddua and the wisest wizards of the Folk and still he could not imagine what sort of things I might do with myself.

  Not long after that I fell sick.

  The sickness in question was something that originated in Mr. Grady’s Mine, something belched up out of a dark recess of the deep earth. It laid low a dozen men with fever, and they were strong men who were used to physical hardship. Most recovered. Some did not. It was probably one of those who died who brought it into our home— no fault of his own, of course. May fell perilously ill for a week and it is possible that that is why she was never able to have children, and maybe that in turn is why she got so damnably Religious. I don’t know and I guess now that I have committed this thoughtless and idle speculation to the page I will have to hope she never reads this.

  One popular theory— regarding the sickness, I mean, not May— one theory was that the sickness was a curse left by the First Folk. Something they had left behind, a gift for the usurpers— maybe in some deep hidden place Mr. Grady’s diggers should not have penetrated. A word carved on the wall. A curse, a poison. Some of Grady’s men tried to organize a mob to go scour the hollows south of town, where some families of the Folk lived free, it was said. I know this because they came to my father to see if he would go with them and he told them to go home and stop being such fools, and there were raised voices but they did as he said.

  I heard all this from my own sickbed.

  Most likely there would have been a mob sooner or later, and ugly things would have happened, but within a few weeks the sickness had run its course— for everyone but me, that is. But then I was always an odd child, who had to be different.

  Previously I had resided in the same room as my sisters, with a curtain for modesty’s sake, but now I was quarantined. What had previously been storage was made into a sickroom. It smelled at first of dust and stone and it was cold. There were two cabinets of battered pine. My father shuttered the room’s window, at the advice of Dr. Forrest, who worked for Grady’s Mine and believed that sunlight would excite and overtax the nervous system or some such nonsense. Nor were candles permitted. The sickroom was at the end of a long hallway, the shape of which created a sort of big camera obscura mechanism, so that there was real Light only at certain unpredictable times when all the right doors were open at once. Otherwise everything was gray. I sweated and shook and did not eat. The sickness was a great mystery and when Dr. Forrest visited, cloth to mouth and hovering in the doorway, there was something like awe in his eyes. My father could not look at me. My sisters came and went and I don’t mean to
sound ungrateful but I have to confess that in my state of delirium I could not often tell them apart. Dr. Forrest stood in the hallway and whispered to my father that it was inexplicable that I had not died already. For a time I was scared pretty bad, I will not lie, but after a while it came to me with certainty, as if I had reasoned it out and the mathematics was sound, that I would not die, and I could not die, because I was meant for something greater. After that it was mostly a matter of patience. There was not a lot in that sickroom to do for fun and a lot of discomfort to endure. I do not mean to ask for your pity, because it seems to me that for a great many people life is always like that, and I have otherwise been lucky for the most part.

  It was while I was sick that the Line came to town.

  East Conlan is on the southern edge of Line territories, like I said. Before I was born it owed its allegiance to no one, and the law was mostly what Mr. Grady said it was. The Red Republic rose and then fell and East Conlan politely declined all offers of federation and would not sign the Charter, but we sold the Republic coal at neutral terms. When I was a boy some people said we belonged to Jasper City, though I never understood exactly what that meant. I have never cared for politics. But we were near to Line territories and even a child could see that we could never be free of their influence. On a clear day if you went up onto the hill north of town, among the store houses and out houses and cranes and heaps and unmarked shafts of Grady’s Mine— and if you found a clear high place to stand— you could see all the way to a black mark on the horizon that might debatably have been Harrow Cross, oldest and biggest of the Stations of the Line, with its enormous smoking factories and its indescribable fortifications. And sometimes when the wind was just right the sound of an Engine crossing the continent in the distance might be carried into town and there would be one of those moments of nervous silence, as if anyone who spoke too loudly might be swept away in its wake.

  Mr. Grady’s business belonged to no one but Mr. Grady, but it was an open secret that the Conlan Coal Company was owned by the Line. This was the cause of some of the fights I spoke of, though most were over women or money or for no reason at all. Even Grady sold much of his coal to the Line, like it or not, because their factories were always hungry and they could always outbid anyone else in the world. Otherwise they did not interfere with us much.

  One afternoon while I was busy sweating and puking, and my sisters were at their chores, and Dr. Forrest dozed in a chair in the hallway with a bottle at his feet, and my father was in town doing business, three big black cars came up a road that had previously mostly been used for mules or horse-drawn conveyances and led right into the heart of town. The cars’ motors kept running as their passengers emerged, and kept running all afternoon, with a noise like a swarm of locusts. Or so Jess said, who said she heard it from my father. However, when Jess went sneaking out after dark to spy on these new arrivals the Linesmen had gone to bed— she was disappointed that Linesmen went to bed like regular people— and their cars sat silent in the road. They were warm to the touch, she said. I do not believe she really dared to touch them.

  The Linesmen had taken up rooms in some of the bigger houses on the main road. Rented or requisitioned or a little of both. There were about a dozen of them, which is a unit that Linesmen often come in, I have noticed. Some were soldiers, black-clad and dead-eyed and fearsomely armed. Some were what for want of a better word one could call businessmen. It was said that they had with them a great deal of complex machinery of mysterious appearance and function, and perhaps their real motives were ulterior and unearthly, known only to the Engines whose minds are not like ours, but their ostensible purpose in town was straightforward enough. They wanted Grady’s Mine.

  There was a war on. There was always war somewhere or other, like weather, and at that time it was blowing quite close to East Conlan. Line was at war with Gun, whose sinister and fabulous Agents had infiltrated some nearby towns and were working their corruption in secret. So the Linesmen said, or so Jess told me they said. She snuck into the town meeting where the Linesmen’s demands were debated, and heard everything, though she may not have understood it all.

  Have I said what Jess looks like? It’s been years since last I saw her but she was quite tall, and very beautiful. She was brown and green-eyed and thick-haired. There, now she is immortalized in a way. Let’s call that a portrait of my sister. It is very strange this business of turning flesh-and-blood people into words.

  Anyhow a neighboring county had thrown in with the Line’s enemies and there had been some acts of terror and sabotage, affecting the Line’s chains of supply, which were vast and far-flung beyond East Conlan’s imagining. To avoid further incidents it was necessary for the Line to assert control over the means of production in the region. The price they were offering Grady was not unreasonable— so Jess said they said— and the alternative unthinkable.

  Well, after considering the offer but not for long Mr. Grady stood up in front of the meeting and the old man leaned on his stick and shook with rage like a proper old-fashioned prophet of doom and he said:

  “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.