by Felix Gilman
“You know,” I said, “I visited one of their places once.”
“I know.”
This surprised me and I did not know what to say. I was referring to an incident back in East Conlan, when I was a boy, that I have not yet written down here and maybe will not. Mr. Carver and I had never discussed the matter and I did not know that I wanted to discuss it all, and so instead of saying more about it I asked, “Who did this?”
“Someone hunting. Someone questioning. Someone prying into secrets.” He glanced at me in a meaningful way. Then he looked around and I guess he saw something I didn’t because he added, “Wolves.”
“Wolves did this?”
“Wolves were here— led by men. One man. A hunter. A madman. Not the Line, then— the others. Fuck.”
“What did they want?”
“Who knows?”
I remembered the rumors I had heard in Kenauk, of Folk weapons and Folk magic at large on the roads of the Rim. I had not thought much of those rumors, but I guess someone took them seriously.
“Fuck,” said Mr. Carver.
“Nothing we can do here and we should move on.”
Maybe you’ll think me callous but soon enough I forgot about this incident. I have that cast of mind that can only think about a problem when it can be solved.
When we got back to the wagon there was a man and a woman in filthy rags peering into the back of it, most likely wondering how in the world to go about stealing the Apparatus and what they would do with it if they did, and we had a short successful scuffle. We had forgotten the hatchet up there on the rocks and I told Mr. Carver that I would ordinarily take it out of his back-pay, but that I was so relieved at our triumph over the would-be Apparatus-Thieves that I would overlook the matter. We bought a new hatchet in the next town over, and some other parts to mend what had been broken back in Kenauk, including an apothecary’s full stock of glass jars. I haggled, Carver mended. He cursed and spat a lot and was back to his old self.
We ate at a saloon where I explained to the owners that I was a Vegetarian, and I explained what a Vegetarian was, and after they were done snickering they fed me well enough. I glanced at the other diners eating pork and beef and hardly thought about burned bodies at all. I struck up a conversation with a man who turned out to be a probate attorney, and I thought about mentioning the news about the Folk just west of town but I suspected from some other not especially agreeable political opinions he’d already expressed that he would say good riddance. So that was the last I thought about them until now. Instead we talked about the road ahead and I learned that the James River was unseasonably high and passable only at the bridges, the nearest of which had been destroyed in the fighting. Travelers were detouring a day or two north-east to the Black Cut Bridge. So that was what we did.
Three high iron arches held the Black Cut Bridge aloft of the water. You could see them from miles away because the land around the river was muddy and flat. We approached through waterlogged wheel-ruts and the deep ridged tracks of Line motor-cars, that always looked kind of scaled to me, like they were dug by the bellies of great big snakes. Also there was a considerable concentration of horse shit. Beneath the arches there were tents, and several motor-cars and one monstrous Ironclad with the blind eye of its cannon patiently regarding the road, and among the tents there were men in black uniforms going to and fro or shouting at each other or just standing all day foot-deep in mud and blank-eyed. In other words an encampment of the Line held the bridge. There was quite a crowd of travelers ahead of us waiting to pass, some being questioned and others searched, and among them I saw Elizabeth Harper and Old Man Harper.
The two of them were surrounded by a half-dozen soldiers of the Line. They were being questioned from all sides and it did not seem to be going well. The Linesmen had not yet drawn their guns but you could tell that it was only a matter of time. I saw this as a problem I could solve and I got to work.
“Stop them!” I yelled and I shoved my way through the crowd. “Stop them!” I repeated and I came up to where the Harpers were being questioned, and I held up one hand to dissuade the Linesmen from shooting me and with the other I seized Miss Harper by the arm and said, “Thought you’d got away from me, did you?”
I confess it delighted me to look in her eye and see that for once I knew what was going on, and she didn’t.
I turned to the nearest Officer of the Line. They all look alike to me and I have never been able to figure out their ranks. I said, “Thank you for stopping these people, sir. I’m Harry Ransom, inventor and businessman, and these are my papers.” And I began to show him the various licenses and passports and authorizations I had had to purchase over the last year in order to do business in this part of the world, which was either Line territory or debatable territory and the Line has different forms for each. He was more interested in the Harpers than in me but a Linesman cannot resist the urge to study paperwork and authorizations.
“I am an honest businessman and I pay my dues, and these, sir, are my servants. I picked her up in Melville where she’d been arrested for fraud and him in Gooseneck where he was a vagrant and they fled from me in Kenauk where I had a dispute with the locals over money and they took with them their papers of service and no doubt they’ve burned them. What did they say they were, what lies did they tell you? Sir, they are mine. Had her for a year and the old fellow for two, I wish I could reward you for stopping them but . . .”
Well I had to talk a lot longer than I have rendered here, but I trust you get the gist. The Harpers played along smartly. At first they denied everything— then they started accusing me of withheld meals and other mistreatment. I noticed but did not let my eyes dwell too long on a photograph in the Linesman’s hand of a man who kind of resembled Old Man Harper, though younger and handsome and smiling or at least less worn-out, and anyhow the picture was blurry as if the man in it were caught in the act of turning suddenly to shoot the photographer. The Linesman’s eyes slowly dulled as he lost what little interest he’d ever had in me and eventually also the quite considerable interest he’d had in the Harpers. He filed away the photograph with a grunt and a shake of his head, and at last the Harpers were released into my custody. I was so pleased at my daring and ingenuity that I didn’t mind when the officer discovered a deficiency in my licenses and assessed me a fine. Nor did I think much about what might be pursuing the Harpers, or that it might now be pursuing me, too.
We traveled together for some time after that— through the end of fall and into winter. At first they had no choice but to come with me, in case the Linesmen were watching, and after a while I think they decided the cover I offered was as good as any. They did not acknowledge what I had done for them and I did not mention it again. Sometimes I tried to puzzle them out, and other times we were too tired or too hungry or too hot or too cold or too lost to care about puzzles and mysteries. We were just on the road together.
CHAPTER 6
SOME MORE PORTRAITS
I. The Western Rim
The world is made up of an infinite number of words, but it contains only a finite quantity of paper and ink. I cannot describe every little town we passed through or every person we met. But for the boys and girls who will be born in Ransom City and for all the generations to come I want to make some record of how things were.
There was a town called Mammoth that is worth recording for posterity. In a big red barn there they had a whole skeleton of a long-dead beast that they said was a monstrous precursor to human settlement or even Folk settlement, from back when the world was hardly made at all. Miss Harper suspected it was composited from bison but I was enthralled regardless. I displayed the Apparatus under the arch of its rib cage and its knuckly spine cast weird shadows on the ceiling.
The town of Izar had more dentists on Main Street than I could imagine was necessary or good for business or good for anyone’s peace of mind. New Delacorte was built at the edge of a valley flooded with jewel-blue but lifeless water, stinki
ng of salt and sulfur and dead fish, and nobody was willing to give me a satisfactory explanation as to how this came about. Dope fiends littered the streets of Caldwell, basking like lizards in the summer heat. In Kattagan a dispute over grave-rent threatened to turn violent. There was a store in Hamlin that sold nothing but candy! A hairy-knuckled woman on Main Street outside that extraordinary cornucopia thrust two live rattlesnakes up to my face as I stood sucking a mint and watching Carver water Mariette and Golda. She cut off both serpents’ heads with a single snip of her scissors and purported to read my future in their throes. I had not solicited this service and I was vexed about paying for it.
The fattest man I have ever set eyes on was the Mayor of Ford. Flesh rolled down his body like foothills and if he had a nose I cannot say that it was distinguishable from any other mountainous swelling of his features. I would just as soon have bought tickets for the Mayor as for the Mammoth.
There were at least three Glendales in that part of the world, and one New Glendale. None of them stick in my mind much but the four Beck Brothers, who you may recall have joined up with our westward expedition, Dick, Erskine, Joshua and John, they say that they grew up in one of the Glendales, and they want me to say it was an excellent little town. However when I ask them for details they are stumped too.
In the hills above Marchoun the trees were turning green to red to gold, the same way the light of the Process sometimes does as it grows unpredictable. I thought that was beautiful, and said so. But what held the Harpers’ attention was that two big Ironclads of the Line had been abandoned on Marchoun’s Main Street, their crews mysteriously vanished, their cannon blind. The townsfolk had resigned themselves to the presence of those hulking machines and business went on around them— certainly nobody dared try to move them. I dallied awhile in Marchoun to pay court to a handsome woman who owned a general store.
Skewbald’s Main Street was one long slavemarket where convicts and debtors and captured Folk stood chained to every storefront and porch in silent reproach, and we passed the town by, stopping only as long as it took to re-shoe Mariette. The blacksmith in Skewbald mostly worked on chains and goads, and you would have thought some unease would show in his face, some hint of disturbed sleep or bad digestion, but in fact he was a smiling and handsome fellow. As we walked out I remarked that there is no justice in the world and Old Man Harper remarked that I was too old to be just learning that now.
In that part of the Western Rim there were many Folk still living free, but many in chains too. You did not see the great chained legions you hear they have down in the Deltas but it was not uncommon to see a small family of them, if that is the right word, in the fields of a farm as you passed by or doing the worst work of any particular town. It mostly went unremarked-on. Liberationists did not get much of an audience out on the Rim. That was how it was in Ford, and Hamlin, and Izar, and other places. Ford was also haunted by a Spirit that resembled ball-lightning and darted up and down Main Street at dusk, causing strange moods in women. I did not see it myself but I heard about it and have no reason to doubt it, having seen stranger things in my time.
We stayed at one Mr. Bob Bolton’s farm on top of Blue Hill. He was too poor for slaves but he had goats and an ear-trumpet and three beautiful daughters. This sounds like the start of a filthy joke but there is no punch-line. He’d had sons too but they had all gone off to be soldiers for one side or another, and most of them were dead. Down below in Sholl there was a post-office, and I spent all afternoon sitting on a fence beside a cold brown field composing letters to May, Jess, and Sue, and also to Mr. Alfred Baxter, though I did not send that last one. Miss Elizabeth Harper taught me a great deal about spelling and commas.
In the next town over I nearly fought a duel with a man who claimed I had stolen the plans from the Apparatus from him. I was too proud to back down, although I am a poor shot, not least because I have next to no sight in my left eye, as I believe I have mentioned. Fortunately when dawn came, bleak and wintry, he was so drunk that at the signal he turned and walked ten paces at a forty-five-degree angle to true and right into a tree, concussing himself.
In the town after that three salesmen of the Northern Lighting Corporation jumped me in the darkness and beat me for a minute or two.
II. The Northern Lighting Corporation
New Dreyfus was a mining town. It was like East Conlan only smaller and wilder and younger and more crowded, and it was built on lead-zinc, not coal, and there were slaves in the mines, which there were not in East Conlan. There were company stores and saloons all along New Dreyfus’s Lead Street. It was a town that was suddenly rich in a way it did not know what to do with. I called in at the most prominent saloon— it had three stories, one more than any of its competitors, and the girls who waved from its balcony were the prettiest and best-dressed in town. I gambled for a while, losing money but making friends, which is my usual practice in a new town. Then I started in pitching the Ransom Process to anyone who would listen.
The saloon’s owner leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the table and hooked his thumbs in a self-satisfied way into his lapels and said, “I’m surprised you haven’t heard, Professor. Seeing as you said you knew all about New Dreyfus and what a fine little town it is and how you came here especially to visit us. We have all the electric-light we could ever need, and N.D. does not go dark at night.”
My heart sank but I kept smiling.
The saloon owner winked, and got up from the table, and beckoned me to follow him upstairs. He told his lieutenants at the table we would be but a moment, and I agreed, and told them we would talk further when I returned. He led me up and out onto the balcony, where he shooed away the pretty girls and said, “See?”
I saw. While I had been idling in the saloon and drifting from table to table and talking about myself, evening had fallen. A switch had been thrown— I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. It now became apparent that all along Lead Street arc lights squatted on the rooftops. In the bustle of the afternoon I had not noticed them. They cast a cold white light that to my eye was hideous.
“The Northern Lighting Corporation fixed us up six months ago,” he said. “N.D. does not sleep.” There was indeed something manic and sleepless-looking and herky-jerky about the people below, caught in that light.
“I know of the Northern Lighting Corporation,” I said. “I know of their work. They are as crooked as the world is wide. They will bleed you, they will ruin you. What did they charge? They say they operate out of the Three Cities but you know what, that is a lie, they are a front for the Line, and that means all that comes with the Line. But what I offer you, sir, is entirely different. For one thing—”
He looked out over the white night of Dreyfus and shrugged. “I don’t know much about politics, Professor. But I know what works.”
He left me alone out there. I spied Mr. Carver down in the street below, leaning on a fencepost, rolling a cigarette. Our eyes met and we both shrugged.
The same thing happened in Thatcher and Ford. In Thatcher my allegations against the Northern Lighting Corporation were overheard, and three men followed me outside. It was not that late in the day but it was late in the year when we got to Thatcher, and so when the arc light over the saloon sparked suddenly and went out we were in darkness. One fellow snatched the hat from my hand and a second shoved me into the third, who grabbed my arm and told me that if I kept spreading rumors I would regret it. I answered less diplomatically than I should have, maybe, and there was a scuffle and my nose was bloodied and I was knocked to my knees and to tell the truth I was already starting to regret it.
My assailants dispersed when the light came back on. A few minutes later Old Man Harper walked by, on his way into the saloon, and saw me wiping mud from my hat.
“I have more enemies than I deserve,” I said. “I am fighting a losing battle, me against the world. The next century is at stake. Time is running out and my optimism is sorely strained.”
“
Yeah?” he said. “I was young once too.” He pushed past me and entered the saloon.
III. Politics and Religion
I tried not to talk politics or religion with anyone. That is the golden rule when traveling in strange country, doing business with strangers, or visiting with relatives. Little Water was a Line town and Mansel was a Gun town and Slate was divided down the middle and the mere act of eating breakfast in one establishment or another had consequences and implications I could not fathom. There were encampments of the Line all along Gold River and in the shadow of the Opals, and their Heavier-Than-Air Vessels were frequently seen overhead, watching like hawks. In Stone Hill and Dalton and Honnoth there were heaving tents hosting religious revivals of the Smiler, Silver City, and World Serpent faiths, respectively. South of Dalton we must have passed too close to a settlement of the Folk, or in some other way broken one of their laws, because somebody pelted us with stones from up on the rocky hillside until we moved on as fast as the horses could trot.
In Mattie’s Town we dined at a hotel whose owners were die-hard old men who had once been soldiers of the Red Republic, you could tell from the relics of that splendid and ill-fated Cause that decorated the walls, torn battle-standards and battered medals and the like, and I did not know where to look or what gestures of respect to make to avoid offense. In Kukri there was a bank that had been robbed seven times by the same Agent of the Gun, the notorious and dashing Gentleman Jim Dark. He robbed it every time he came through on other business, the way a traveling salesman might stop in to visit a woman, and after a while he started posing for photographs, and now Kukri did better business in memorabilia than it had ever done in banking. They kept talking about Jim Dark this and Jim Dark that, and Old Man Harper got unaccountably frightened and made us move on.