The Rise of Ransom City

by Felix Gilman

  He quoted Scripture. “No man is master of another man.”

  “The law may say otherwise. Who knows? Courts are unpredictable devices.”

  “They didn’t teach us the law, Mr. Ransom. Only what’s right and decent.”

  “Right and the law are not always in parallel, I think.”

  “There can be no question of that.”

  “So. What say we agree that neither of us will sue the other, and neither of us will mention the other ever again, and I go on my way?”

  We shook on it. He forced a smile. It was not bad but I have to say that I have seen better.

  CHAPTER 5

  BLACK CUT

  Today I had to maintain the Apparatus. There was water in it from the river-crossing and one of the new recruits, a young man named Tomasi, had proved to have an ulterior motive and had taken a hammer to it before the Beck boys could wrestle him down. A wrecker. I guess he is still mad about something that I did or that somebody said I did back in the War. And besides these incidents, as we go West the Apparatus needs fine and constant recalibration.

  I work alone these days and nobody is allowed to come close. A good time to write.

  Today I think I am going to write about Mr. Carver.

  Mr. Carver and I spent the night after the incident in Kenauk in the wagon, out on the edge of town. In the morning we went into town and there was a woman there who laundered and mended my white suit. I think I recognized her face from the night before, when she had been yelling. She did not meet my eye. She sold us some tomatoes, which she fried and Carver and I ate sitting on a bench looking out over the vineyard. I remarked to Carver on the astonishing and unlikely feats of irrigation involved, and what that said about the human spirit, but he was sulking over his bruises and my heart wasn’t in it either.

  I wasn’t happy about the damage the Apparatus had sustained or the loss of my time or the discovery of yet another mysterious flaw and instability in the Ransom Process. But worse than all that was the fact that Miss Harper and Old Man Harper had gone on their own way and I might never learn their secrets. I had come to feel that this was more than my usual curiosity, that it was somehow urgent. But I could see that if they were trying to keep a low profile then my antics of the night before would have scared them away.. I have never had a gift for keeping a low profile. It is not in me.

  “You know,” I said to Carver as I mopped up the last juices of the tomatoes with bread, “What really makes me unhappy this morning is that—”

  “Time,” Carver said, and he licked his fingers and thumb clean and stood. “Move on.” We went back to the wagon together in silence and moved on.

  A Portrait of Mr. Carver

  I hired Mr. Carver back in East Conlan, like I said. I put an advertisement in the newspaper for a mechanic and assistant. Experience with electricity and horses would be considered valuable, I said, and a willingness to travel and face danger was a necessity. No Linesmen, thank you very much, and no felons. Within a week I received visitations from several persons of no fixed abode, some small curious boys, a very elderly man who could hardly walk, a man who looked near-certain to slit my throat and rob me as soon as we left sight of town, a Linesman who informed me that my father’s debts remained unpaid and I was on no account permitted to leave town, and lastly Mr. Carver, who showed up as the sun was setting and stood in the doorway casting a shadow that reached all the way across the white-tiled floor to the stove.

  At first he did not impress me. He was tall, and thin, and stooped, and wild-looking. He wore something brown that could hardly be called a suit anymore, with no belt. He wore a single suspender, lop-sided, as if he were indifferent to customary notions regarding symmetry, or he was dressing for comic effect like a clown. He had no hat. His hair was very long and very black. He was pale and looked sleepless and the bones in his face were as big and as gaunt and as heavy as the arches of a story-book castle where an old king sulks on a shadowy throne or where a princess gets locked up in an attic.

  I said “Please, Mr. Carver, sit,” but he didn’t.

  He said, “You’re traveling. Said so in your newspaper. Where?”

  I said, “West, out to the Rim, maybe up toward Melville City. You see, you can’t get anything made here, there’s no money, there’s no opportunity, there’s no room, there—”

  “I know that country well. Show me the machine.”

  He had no small-talk.

  I went to the window and pointed at where the Apparatus was tethered under a tarp in the backyard. I said what it was and what it did, or what I hoped one day it would do, because at that point it did not work at all.

  He whistled. Then he said, “Yes.”

  I said, “Yes what?”

  He stepped out of the doorway and vaulted the fence and approached

  the Apparatus. Over my protests he laid hands on it. He yanked open the casing. He reached in and began to perform certain small adjustments. In particular he reached in and stretched out a tangle of copper wire and inspected it like a soothsayer reading entrails.

  “Hah,” he said, as if a suspicion had been confirmed.

  I said, “I made it. It owes nothing to the Line or the Northern Lighting Corporation or anyone else, what ever they may try to say.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It is.”

  He ran his finger across oiled machinery. “Wasn’t the Line I was thinking of. You know what? I’ll come with you, Mr. Ransom.”

  “Will you now, Mr. Carver? Seems like that’s up to me.”

  He shrugged, and turned back to the Apparatus.

  He did not negotiate, and he did not explain himself.

  “Well now,” I said. “Well.”

  We inked a contract in the margins of a newspaper. He signed with a K and beneath it I wrote Carver.

  We left town early in the morning, while everyone was asleep.

  We traveled together for a year, and worked together long into the night in barns and hotels and forest clearings and hilltops and gullies all across a thousand-mile stretch of the Western Rim. I talked science and big dreams and he never talked much. There were many things he did not do, such as cook or bathe or take collections, but everything he did he did well. He had an excellent sense of direction and a sense of humor that I never quite understood but believed to be profound. He had a deep and rough-edged voice and a trace of an accent which I could not place. He cursed frequently and with conviction, and without regard to occasion or polite company. He smoked foul cigarettes, which his long fingers could roll one-handed while his other hand was working. He was good with snares and could skin a rabbit so quickly even the rabbit would be impressed. He saved my life a few times— I lost count of how many. He rarely changed his clothes but apart from the cigarettes his odor was not offensive. He was shot at once or twice, we both were, but he was never hit until White Rock. He had no views on politics and as far as I could tell no family. I was not even sure how old he was.

  One night in a barn outside a town called Garland I drew up another contract, promising half the profits of the Ransom Process to him, in the event that we made it to Jasper City and got rich, although the name would remain the Ransom Process. This gallant gesture seemed to appeal more to his sense of humor than to his ambition. He signed again with a K and I wrote Carver. I guess since that was most likely not his real name it most likely wasn’t binding, not that it matters anymore.

  Anyhow we took the road east out of Kenauk. It was a thousand miles down that road to Jasper City and Mr. Alfred Baxter of the Baxter Trust but on the immediate horizon there was nothing much except a scattering of farms. After a while the road took a sudden crooked leftward turn for no reason that Mr. Carver nor I could speculate on and entered into a scraggly wood of scrub oak and cottonwood.

  The road was bad and we walked alongside the horses and conversed with each other while the horses plodded between us. The names of the horses were Mariette and Golda. I remarked on how the wood was like a me
taphor for the nature of the world, by which I meant that the leafy upper parts of it were golden and airy and inaccessible, while down on the ground where we had to toil it was nothing but damn mud and mosquitoes. Carver nodded and said, “Fuck that.”

  As the day wore on and his aches and bruises healed he got into an unusually talkative mood, as if the Harpers’ departure had lightened some anxiety he had been carrying in silence. In the afternoon he began to name the trees as we passed them by, and that is how I know they were scrub oak and cottonwood, which otherwise I would not have noticed or cared about. I asked him where he got this surprising learning on trees and he shrugged and said, “I travel.”

  “I travel too, Mr. Carver. Nobody could say I haven’t traveled. I’ve seen things beyond the wildest dreams of East Conlan. But I could not name a tree if you held a gun to my head.”

  “I reckon there’s a lot everyone can’t name, Professor.”

  “True enough.”

  Those handsome trees gave way to a third kind, something gnarled

  and ugly that Carver did not name for me, our conversation having wandered onto other topics. Between the limbs of those trees there were spiderwebs, thick as cotton or the hair in an old man’s ears. Then that scene too gave way. The road led us out from the trees and along the edge of a valley that opened out to the sunlit horizon. It was one of those sudden and always unexpected vistas of the Western Rim, that are like seeing the whole world all at once.

  “You know,” I said, “the man who figures out a way to bottle and sell such a scene to the people back East will be twice as rich as Mr. Alfred Baxter on his best day.”

  “Could be,” Carver said.

  We were in the midst of this sort of repartee when he suddenly stiffened and cursed. He halted Golda with a tug on her reins and Mariette with a word. He walked to the edge of the road and he pulled his long hair back from his face and he looked out over the valley.

  I asked Carver what he saw and he did not answer me. He walked to the back of the wagon and took the hatchet down from its hook. Ordinarily we used it for cutting firewood or clearing deadfalls from the road, or we used the blunt back-side for striking the Apparatus when the cylinders jammed. Still it was quite fearsome the way he held it now.

  I said, “What?”

  He shrugged off his jacket and his already loose neck-tie and hung them from the big lever on the back of the Apparatus and said, “Stay.”

  It was hard to say whether he was speaking to me or the horses. I was somewhat insulted at being spoken to in that way by my assistant, though I guessed it had been so long since he’d been paid that that word no longer fairly described our relationship.

  He turned his back and set off down the slope, with that bow-legged walk people have when they are balancing on a steep incline. It is something like the way bad actors walk to show that they are drunk.

  His shoulders sank below the level of the road and then his head.

  This was somewhat out of the ordinary for Mr. Carver, who was ordinarily level-headed and solid and silent and stable. He kept his own counsel and I was not allowed to look in his suitcases, but he was not prone to this sort of vanishing act.

  I walked to the edge of the road and looked out over the valley. Mr. Carver was a small bow-legged shape moving quickly down and into the distance. Beyond him the ground rolled up and down in the usual way— there were trees and rocks and black bushes. I did not see what had caught his attention.

  “You stay,” I said, patting Mariette’s flank. “Keep the Apparatus safe and there’s a raise in it for you when I get back.”

  I set off after Carver.

  He was moving fast and I quickly regretted the brief time I had wasted bantering with the horses, because I nearly lost sight of him.

  The earth fell and rose. I caught sight of Mr. Carver black against the sky as he climbed high ground ahead. He crouched, steadying himself with his left hand on the ground and the ax out in his right.

  I followed him. It seemed like we had been walking a long time and I began to worry about the Apparatus and considered turning back, but was unsure of the way. I could not imagine what he had heard or smelled or intuited so far from the road. I strained my ears and I sniffed the air and for a long time all I heard or scented was sun and dust and wind. Then at last there was a faint scent of burning.

  When I caught up with Mr. Carver he was standing at the edge of a wide expanse of smooth gray rock. At the far edge of the expanse the rock rose in forms a little like breaking waves and among them there were the dark and narrow mouths of caves. In front of them was a great heap of charred wood.

  Mr. Carver stood with the ax loose in his right hand. He did not turn to look at me but I knew him very well and I knew that he was aware of my presence.

  I looked down and beneath my feet the rock was carved in the looping intricate designs of the Folk, and I realized that I had stepped on some sign or sigil of theirs, and maybe I only fancied that a sudden pain shot through my leg as if I had stepped on a snake. “Mr. Carver,” I said.

  He ignored me. He strode across the plain of rock as if he were the master of it.

  I think I said that there were Folk living south of East Conlan when I was a boy. From time to time one of the Folk and one of East Conlan’s men might even meet, uneasily, in the woods. There was little or no regular commerce between us but there was rarely violence, so long as both parties maintained the proper attitude of wary respect for the other’s prerogatives. Our world and theirs were superimposed, and there was tension. What I mean is that one did not lightly trespass. There were all the usual stories about the Folk seizing and torturing travelers, out of sheer wickedness or for revenge or for breaking their rules, although I do not think it ever happened to anyone in particular. There were all the usual Folk-tales about curses and the evil eye and my sister Jess used to tell me that before I was born a girl from East Conlan who went trespassing in the woods was transformed into a hare.

  “Mr. Carver,” I repeated.

  He knelt down by the mouth of a cave, where the heap of charred wood was scattered— except that it was not all wood. When my curiosity finally mastered my dread and I followed Carver I saw that as a matter of fact some of what I had taken for timber was bodies, burned.

  They were the bodies of Folk, and there were seven of them. One could tell that they were Folk because of the long limbs and the useful-looking extra knuckle— though someone had severed the hands and feet from a couple of the bodies, maybe as trophies. The stones of their homes had been scattered and the wood used for the fire. Some other cruelties had been performed on the bodies, either before or after the burning. I will not recount those cruelties except to say that the man who did it was a monster.

  I was aware of no appropriate prayers and so I just stayed silent for as long as I could stand.

  “They say,” I said, “that the Folk do not die the way you and I will one day die. That’s the first thing every child learns about them. That they were made from a different plan when the world was different and that death for them is not final, but they return to the world, again and again, clothed in new-made flesh, as I once heard a Reverend put it.”

  “In the end, maybe,” Carver said. His voice was flat. He had put the hatchet beside him on the ground.

  “Do you think it’s true? Would we know? Most people can’t tell one from another anyhow. I don’t know, you hear people say it but you hear people say a lot of things that aren’t true. Like if you yawn without covering your mouth evil spirits get in and ride you. Or that burning a white calf keeps the rest of the herd safe from sickness. Or, well, you know.”

  Carver said nothing. No flies gathered on the bodies, but nor did they get up and walk. There were what might be tracks on the ground but they meant nothing to me. There were sigils carved in the rocks and I studied them curiously but I could learn nothing from them.

  “It may yet be true,” I said. “The world is very large and we do not know the tiniest
part of it.”

  Sure that is trite, but it is true.

  Carver stood. He scratched his beard.

  I said, “I used to think long and hard about what it would be like. When I was a boy, I mean. It kept me awake at night. The coming back, I mean. Into the dark and back into the light again and again. Like it’s said the Great Powers do. Like stars. Around and around. In fact it seemed to me that maybe it was only men like us for whom death is final, and that was a kind of mistake in our making. As if death is only a word and has no meaning of its own. I don’t know. I’ve often said that it was one of the great inspirations for the Ransom Process. You’ve heard me say that. I said it back in Kenauk.”

  “Yeah.”

  I was ashamed that I had started talking about myself again, but it was only to fill the silence of the rocks and the big blue sky above and Carver and the blackened bodies.

  “You got questions,” Carver said. “Go on then.”

  “How did you know—?”

  “Saw the smoke.”

  “Is that a fact. I didn’t see a damn thing, Mr. Carver. I guess I don’t pay you enough.”

  “Huh,” he said. He looked around. He traced one of the signs carved into the rock with a finger. He peered into one of the dark openings in the rock but did not go in. Neither of us did. You don’t go crawling into the Folk’s secret places if you know what’s good for you.

  “Was like you knew this was here,” I said.

  “Was it?”

  “It was, Mr. Carver. It was.”

  “Told you I traveled when I was young. Said you wanted somebody who knew this country. Was I wrong?”

  “I guess not. You visited with the Folk often, then?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  There was a long silence.