The Rise of Ransom City

by Felix Gilman

  There were no sounds in the night that I recognized as human.

  The piano was gone. I tried to remember how it worked, in some vague hope that I might one day reconstruct it, I recall that I even took my knife and held it poised to carve a memento into the soft root— but I was already forgetting. I mourned it as bitterly as if it had been a lover. I still do.

  I think I mourn it more than I do its maker.

  I said that I would tell of four times I held history in my hand. Well, this was the second. Had I only held on to the mechanism perhaps the piano could have been reconstructed, and who knows what might have been done with that technology. Who knows how things might have gone differently with poor Adela, and maybe therefore everything else.

  I will write about Adela in due course, when I get there.

  I never said that this would be a story of triumph. For the most part it is not.

  Anyhow there I was. Alone in a swamp, with no prospects and no name.

  I tried to recall if Mr. Alfred Baxter of Jasper City had ever found himself in a similar predicament. I did not think that he had. I was without guidance.

  At one time in the night there was a sound that might have been feet splashing through the swamp not far away from me, and I thought it might be other survivors from the Damaris. I stood, and was about to call out Here, help me, it’s Rawlins, the piano-man, when it occurred to me that there had been fighting in those woods. Somebody had attacked an Engine of the Line. It might be a soldier of the Line, looking for the perpetrators or it might be the perpetrators themselves. In either case it might be deadly to draw attention to myself. The cry froze in my throat. The noise receded. It was not until after it was long gone that I thought that maybe it was somebody as lost as me, who might have needed my help, whose heart might have leapt at the sound of my voice, and that I had been selfish again, I had been a coward, thinking only of myself.

  “When I get out of here,” I said to myself, “I will be a better man. I have suffered more than the usual run of worldly misfortune but there is still greatness left in me. One day I will do good things for the world.”

  I thought of Liv and John Creedmoor and I thought of poor Mr. Carver. I thought about Mr. Carver’s last words to me, that I was a thief, and I thought that he was both right and wrong, and I thought about how I would one day make everything right, how I would make everything perfect. I thought about my sisters and how I missed them and how I would explain everything to them if I ever saw them again, which seemed unlikely. I thought about the Great Rotollo and his long-suffering wife Amaryllis and about the Ormolu Theater, which in my imagination was like a great golden palace. I thought about the Apparatus and how much I missed its light and its warmth. I thought about Jasper City, and recalled all my old dreams of how one day I would ride in high style down its triumphal avenues.

  I spent a great deal of time on this kind of profitless rumination. Hours, at least. I waited for dawn and dawn stubbornly did not come. Instead there was a flash of white light in the distance, which by the time it came through the trees to fall on the backs of my hands was soft and spiderwebbed. It stuttered, flashing and then fading, like telegraph-signals. There was a coughing sound then a deep roar.

  The noise and light was coming from what I guessed to be the north-west, a few miles or so upriver. Fear made me shrink against the trunk of the tree. Then curiosity got the better of my fear and I jumped to my feet and started climbing the tree.

  I was cold and tired and my shoulders ached and creaked and cracked like an old boat as I pulled myself up. It was a good tree for climbing, with knots and a thick sturdy mesh of vine and broad swooping branches. I remember thinking as I lay panting on a branch that I could not recall the last time I had climbed a tree. Not since back in East Conlan, in fact. The town was bare of trees and most of us did not dare go too far into the woods south of town but I recalled incidents of climbing, throwing stones, boys shouting. I felt like a boy again but at the same time I felt very old, and very far from home. I stood, slowly and carefully, and pushed my head through a curtain of slimy green leaves, and I saw that flash of light again.

  The light flashed, then ceased, then came again. It illuminated a long dark shape behind the trees. I could not properly judge the distance or its size, except that it was huge, and far enough away that I did not think it could sense me.

  It was the wounded Engine. Later I would learn from the newspapers that it was the Engine that runs out of Kingstown.

  Do you know what Kingstown is? Maybe not. I hope no one born in Ransom City will know of the Stations. I hope in the New Century all the Stations may have fallen. But in those days Kingstown was the westernmost of the Stations of the Line. It was a town of many thousands of people, mostly soldiers or factory-workers. It was full of industry and smoke and toil. It was a huge machine for projecting the power of the Engines westward. Mr. Carver and I went nowhere near it on our travels. Kingstown was thousands of miles west of the place where I stood, but the Engine that was its heart and soul and brain and god went ceaselessly back and forth across the continent carrying men and weapons and prisoners and information and . . .

  It moved. There was a flash of its lamps, then darkness, then another flash and it had moved. Its long metal body had stretched a hundred yards closer to my hiding place. Each flash illuminated a huge and growing trail of black smoke.

  I had seen Engines before, of course. East Conlan was not far from Line territory and we saw them in the north. Carver and I had crossed tracks, seen Engines roaring across the horizon, even considered on occasion traveling by Engine (we could not afford it). They were strange at the best of times, but that night the Kingstown Engine was quite terrifying.

  It was injured. Its tracks took it not so very far north of my tree and when its lamp flashed again I could see that its frame was broken. The huge cowl that was its face was dented and twisted. The lamps above the cowl were lopsided, as if some had been blinded. Several of the cars that were its half-mile body were missing, or caved in like broken teeth, or still smoking from what ever or whoever had attacked it. There were cannon on the hindmost car, one of which looked bent.

  I don’t know why it was flashing its lamps in that way. I have heard that the Engines of the Line signal to each other— all across the continent— with their noise, their thunderous awful clatter, their smoke. Maybe it was signaling its distress, its outrage, maybe it was calling for aid, for revenge, for tightening of control. Maybe it was broken, or mad. I have always hated the Line. I have written about what it did to my father and to East Conlan and to me. And this particular Engine had destroyed the Damaris, and left me stranded, and destroyed the beautiful piano, and had done all this casually, indifferently, the way they did everything. I did not yet know which Engine it was, but I had a particular and specific hatred for it, whichever it was. And yet to see an Engine injured was troubling, and gave me little joy. It made me aware of my own so much greater fragility.

  I thought about Miss Harper and John Creedmoor and their weapon and for the first time I thought what it might be like if it were really true. Maybe their weapon could end the War, maybe it could do away with Engines and Guns and their servants. But they would not go quietly. The War would be worse before it would be better. And what would take its place?

  For the first time in my life, the thought of the Future frightened me. I do not mean to claim any great prescience. I did not foresee the Course of History. Any man who claims to have such powers of foresight is lying. Truth is I was lost in a swamp at night, and any man’s thoughts will turn grim in such circumstances.

  The tree shook as the Engine passed. There was a noise that made my bowels turn to water. Leaves were torn loose and blew around my head in its wake. I lost my footing and fell, catching myself painfully on the branch with knees and elbows and bloodied palms, and when I stood again the Engine was already far in the distance, heading north-east toward the Three Cities, toward Jasper.

  I climbed bac
k down the tree, and I fell asleep in the cradle of its roots. When I woke it was still dark. It seemed like an improbably long night but I knew that I was not far west of the Three Cities and the days at that longitude were mostly regular in their duration, so I guessed the fault was in my perceptions not in the world. I thought maybe I had a fever coming on.

  The second time I heard the sound of somebody walking through the swamp nearby, I did not hide or hesitate. I stopped only to take my jacket and my one wet shoe and I ran out after that faint sound, waving the shoe in the air and shouting “Hey, hey, help, hold up, I’m with the Damaris, hey, wait” and so on. I waded through the water and crashed through thick undergrowth toward the sound and burst through a stand of head-high ferns that scratched at my face and out into a wide open stretch of moonlit green water. A half-dozen tall thin figures were wading single file across it. They were all long-legged fellows and the green did not quite reach their waists. They were stooped and they were pale and when they turned their heads to look at me I saw that they had the big-boned faces and red eyes and black beards of the Folk.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE CHAIN

  There were seven of them. They stood side-by-side. Two of them leaned together, as if for support, or comfort against the night. In the middle stood one whose shoulders seemed, at first shocked glance, to be hunched. Then I saw that he was wearing something looped around his shoulders and neck, dangling down his back, like an elegant lady of Jasper City might wear a fox-fur stole. I thought perhaps it was a length of rope. Then I understood that it was a chain— a long, long chain— and in the same moment I understood that these were some of the poor wretches who had powered the wheel of the Damaris. I had thought they’d all drowned.

  That is not true. I had not given them a moment’s thought, not until I found myself looking at them face to face, yet now— as I looked into their leader’s wide dark eyes now I could think of nothing else.

  When I say their leader, I mean the fellow with the chain wrapped around his shoulder. I guessed that he was their leader. There was something grand about the way he wore the chain.

  I imagined them sinking, pulled down by the awesome weight of the Damaris, by the inexorable grip of their chain. They must have been afraid. I know that many scholars and preachers and politicians and businessmen will tell you that the Folk do not feel pain or fear the way we do, but I think that cannot be true.

  I shook. All these thoughts took just moments. I guess they studied me too, and drew their own conclusions.

  They had been walking in what I thought was a westerly direction. Moonlit ripples still showed the way they had come.

  “Jasper City’s back that way,” I said, “but I guess maybe you’re heading out to the Rim, or beyond it I guess. I don’t know where you’re from. I, well, that is, it’s a long way either way and good luck to you.”

  They continued to look at me. We were alone in the night and the wilderness now and the tables were turned. They could do what ever they pleased with me and what ever it was I could not say it was not just. The Damaris and its rules were long gone. This was now their world and I had no say in it.

  “I’m glad you,” I said. “I mean, well, you know. I’m glad you got out. Got free.”

  I was afraid.

  I had once joined a municipal chapter of the Liberationist Movement, and for two weeks I paid my weekly dues toward the cause of the end of bondage. I wondered whether I should mention that fact. I decided not to.

  “I think there was a rocket,” I said. “What happened to the Damaris, I mean. The Damaris was the name of the boat, if you don’t know. I don’t know whether you. I mean, it was the War again.”

  The one I took for their leader whispered a word. I did not understand it.

  I do not know if they understood me. I think they did.

  It was like when I met the giant Knoll at White Rock. What ever would happen, I could not talk my way out of it.

  I thought of the stories of travelers waylaid by Folk, and tortured and killed, maybe for revenge or maybe because they have broken some rule of the Folk’s world that they did not understand or maybe for no reason anyone has words for. I thought of Folk-tales of curses and transformations and the evil eye. I did not know if they meant me harm, and I do not know now. I thought they might harm me whether they meant to or not.

  “You know,” I said, “once, when I was a boy, back in a place we call East Conlan but I guess maybe you have a different name for it, I visited with some of your people. That is, I—”

  I had a sudden apprehension of the strength with which they must have torn loose their chains from the wheel, the strength with which they must have split open the waterlogged coffin that was the hull of the Damaris, and risen from the muddy bottom of the river— the same strength with which they had turned its wheel for who knew how many long years. A chill ran through me.

  I took a step back. They came closer. The fellow who wore the chain was at the forefront. I could see where it had broken, and I could see where it had scarred him.

  I said, “My name’s Harry Ransom,” but of course that name meant nothing to them.

  Then I had one of my moments of inspiration. I pulled out the pocketknife and I turned to the nearest tree and I carved into its soft mossy trunk a certain sign, one that I remembered very well and that I thought they might know.

  They studied it in silence for a while, looking from the sign to me and back again, and then at each other, while I tried to explain how I came to know this thing and to talk about the Apparatus and about my dreams and my ambitions and my great and wonderful destiny, and why it would be a damn shame for the world if I were to perish in that swamp. All together they began to roll their shoulders and shake their heads, and after a moment I realized that they were laughing, and not especially kindly, that is, they were laughing at me.

  Well now. I guess I should explain, or otherwise just skip all this thrashing in the swamp and get straight to Jasper City and fame and fortune and the First and Second Battle and all the rest.

  I have wrestled for a long time with how I will tell this or whether I should tell it at all, and maybe all I can do is write it all out and see how it looks.

  This is about what I call the Ransom Process. I have to go back a way to tell this, back to when I was a boy, in good old East Conlan. If you like you may turn ahead to when I get to Jasper City.

  I was fourteen years old. It was the summer of ’83 or ’84 or thereabouts. Conlan was halfway between what it had been when I was a child and what it was becoming, which is an outpost of the Line. I was living beneath my father’s roof, or what was left of it— the old house and my father’s business having been claimed by the Line. We were lodging on the south side of town. We kept different hours between all of his jobs and all of mine, and we did not speak.

  For most of that summer I supported myself painting signs. I learned the trick of sign-painting from a book. The trick of persuading East Conlan’s dour storekeeps that there was nothing more respectable or desirable than a brightly colored motto just like the storefronts of Jasper City— a place none of us had ever seen— well, that came naturally to me. I turned the town bright for a summer. My crowning achievement was a bird of paradise over Connolly’s store. He asked why and I said why not. It blew down that winter.

  Meanwhile my father vanished at night, or sometimes for days, running errands for Conlan’s new management to New Foley, which was the next town over. His work, what ever it was, was secretive, unspoken. He was silent and often angry. And after all what was there to say? All day he served the Linesmen in various capacities that were degrading to a man of his pride— what would he talk about? What ever he had to say I did not want to hear it. I had my own obsessions. I would be free, wealthy, famous, great, I would bring Light to the world. I think I have written about how I climbed the tower on top of Grady’s Hill with a kite and some wire in a thunderstorm— well, that was that summer. That was the state of my Great Work at th
e time. I had burns on both palms and let me tell you that is not a laughing matter for anyone who has to work for a living. My father called me a word in his buzzing old-country language that I guess meant fool. I could not or would not explain to him why I had done it.

  We were alone in the house except that there was an old woman above us and a large number of feral cats in the rank weeds back of the house. May was the oldest of my sisters and she had gone off the month before with a revival of the Silver City faith. Sue was the next oldest and she had moved to New Foley with an insurance salesman, where she was living in wedded bliss and learning book-keeping. Jess was I guess sixteen at the time, and what ever aspirations she later had to the stage had not yet manifested themselves, except that she loved to dance. She spoke all the time about Jasper City and fame and fortune I do not think she knew what she would do to get there. She was living at the time with one of the young men who had used to work for Grady’s Mine before the Line seized, and having been found surplus to requirements he now did nothing at all so far as I could tell except drink and brawl. His name was Joe or Jim or something of the kind. I disliked him and admired him, both at the same time, and now I do not remember what he looked like except that he was handsome, and dark, and had a curl of hair on his forehead that I reckon Jess liked. He was also stupid. I recall that he used to boast sometimes of his intention to take up arms in the service of the Gun, but the fact was that neither he nor anybody else in our backwater town knew how to do that. I cut him in on the sign-painting business because he was good at carrying buckets and ladders. Sometimes he and his fellows threw stones at the Line’s concrete barracks on the north of town. So did my sister. So did I, on occasion. One of my sister’s many talents is that she is as accurate with a stone as any Agent is with his Gun— it is mostly because of Jess that I am so quick at dodging stones and glasses thrown at my head, which has served me in good stead throughout my career. I am a bad shot. We all have our gifts.