by Felix Gilman
“Thank you,” said Miss Harper.
I figured that they were most likely just con-artists fleeing the law or escaped indentureds or something of the kind— maybe just possibly they were spies, which was interesting to a degree but in those days of War there was no shortage of spies on the roads. Nevertheless my curiosity was roused. Curiosity has always been my weakness. One of my weaknesses. And besides like Mr. Baxter wrote it is true that opportunity can be found in the most unexpected of places.
“There are Linesmen all along the road east too,” I said. “And they are checking papers and asking questions about I don’t even know what they want to know— who knows how their masters think? Not that I think you have anything to hide from anyone but nobody likes an interrogation.”
I nodded to them and made as if to walk away, then turned again and said, “Listen. If you don’t mind cramped conditions Mr. Carver and I are setting out before dawn. You may not credit it looking at me but our papers are all in order so far as I know, and we could use a couple of extra hands, the roads being what they are these days.”
He said, “No thank you, Mr. Ransom.” And at the same time she said, “Where are you headed?”
I waved a hand toward the big black night and I said, “no place in particular. Wherever business takes me.”
“Well, Mr. Ransom, we’re heading east.”
“Any place in particular?”
Old Man Harper said, “It’s a family affair.”
“Well,” I said, “It so happens that right now business takes me back east toward Jasper City.”
“You’re a long way from Jasper City,” said Old Man Harper. “About as far as you can get. You’ve got a sideways kind of way of going about things if you’re heading for Jasper City.”
I waved away his objections. “I have business there,” I said, and smiled at Miss Harper. “With Mr. Alfred Baxter himself.”
That was half-true. As I saw it back then I had business with Mr. Baxter whether he knew it or not. Besides I had thought the name might impress her. It did not.
Something about her said, as clear as if she were branded with it, that she had some secret she wished to tell, that she needed to tell, and that sooner or later she would have to tell someone.
She shrugged, exhausted, and succumbed to temptation.
“Maybe for a little way,” she said.
I smiled.
The dog had one eye open and was regarding the two of them calmly and without great interest. It is not true what they say about dogs and their sixth sense.
Meanwhile the man who claimed to be Miss Harper’s father looked at me for a moment like he was reckoning the most efficient way of killing me, then having quickly reached a conclusion looked east past me and seemed to be scheming something unguessable.
“But nobody travels for free,” I said. “Nothing in this world is free. Ma’am, can you cook? Sir, can you shoot?”
Well as it turned out later she was not much of a cook, but he most certainly could shoot.
Mr. Carver wasn’t so happy to be woken in the dark hours of morning so that we could pack up and leave town like thieves, especially since for once we owed nobody money. Nor did he seem to care for our new traveling companions, but he kept his own counsel.
The sun rose as we got a couple of miles out of Clementine. There was a roaring noise and a bad smell and a black Line motor-car came up from behind us. As it passed us by it slowed a little, and though the car’s window was black too I thought I could make out the gray face of an Officer of the Line examining us. The Harpers were safely in the back of the wagon with the Apparatus and all he saw was me and Mr. Carver and the horses. I nodded but did not wave and the face receded into the black glassy depths as the car accelerated past us into the distance. It frightened the horses, and then it scared up a big family of black birds out of the fields. The flock rose up across the huge pink sky like a lady raising the lace hem of her skirt. Mr. Carver cursed and shook his head. Otherwise he said nothing.
CHAPTER 4
ON THE ROAD
It has been a few days since I last returned to these pages. Red ants have made a home in the remarkable triplicate typewriter. I do not have the heart to oust them. Fortunately they do not seem to mind the clatter of the typewriter. I guess these are frontier ants and they know how to make do in tough conditions.
We have been camped for a few days while the Beck Brothers haggle for provisions with farmers. Farmers here and everywhere in these parts mistake us for a lost regiment or unemployed mercenaries and they have a tendency to bring us tribute in hopes that we will move on. It is a constant temptation but I insist that we pay our way. In Ransom City every man and woman will get a fair deal.*
Red ants have also made a home in the Apparatus, where they are less welcome. The Apparatus is delicate and dangerous. I have driven them from their hiding places like an angel of wrath.
It is not easy traveling with the Apparatus. Rivers are a particular problem, so is rain, so are ants. But what good will Ransom City be if it doesn’t have the Process lighting its streets? The Beck Brothers keep asking to see the Apparatus in action. Not yet, I say. Not until we get there. No matter how cold or dark it gets at night. It is not to be trifled with.
I guess I should try to say what the Ransom Process is. I hope that in the future when you read this everyone will learn in school about the Process but maybe your education has been deficient.
* * *
*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 M
an 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.*
* * *
*Or to me. —EMC
If you’ve ever been in a Smiler meeting-hall you know what they’re like. They are the same everywhere, because it is an article of the New Thought that people are all the same. The townsfolk sat in circles around thepodium, and the Reverend welcomed them and everyone forced a big smile and shook the hands of those next to them and pretended good cheer.
The Reverend led them in the chanting of their daily Affirmations. When they got to the parts about Wealth and Success and Good Fortune I mouthed along with them, though I have never had the patience for religion of any organized variety. Carver shook his head in disgust and muttered something. I gestured at him to keep his silence.
Then the Reverend spoke. The congregation sat back and held their hats in their laps and slapped periodically at the mosquitoes that had come uninvited into the hall. They stared at the Reverend with an intensity that seemed to make him anxious. The Apparatus took up much of the podium and he had to kind of lean sideways to stand and be heard and whenever he turned too quickly he was always in danger of impaling an eye on the big handle. The theme of his sermon was the War. I don’t know that I recall that sermon precisely but I heard many others like it in those days.