by Felix Gilman
Swing Street was in Hoo Lai. You might think it was named for music or dancing but in actual fact there used to be a prison there and a notorious gallows. Anyhow if you have ever whistled a song or laughed at a joke the chances are it was written on Swing Street. It defied the best efforts of city planners and it wound in an irregular fashion back and forth between the regular city streets, stopping and starting, like it was a state of mind as much as a place. Parts of Swing Street were electrified, as were scattered zones here and there throughout Hoo Lai and Rondelet and most of Fenimore. Vansittart University was mostly on its own island, gas-lit in the traditional style, and it was a city unto itself, or like a huge castle, all sharp peaks of red brick and yet more flags, though you could find outlying projections of VU’s domain all over town. In the river there were so many tall boats it was like another city, a mobile and fleeting one. The Damaris would have been lost among them. East of the river there were the Yards, like I said, the city’s ugly shadow, and maybe I will write about them some time but not now.
I came into the city from the west, on foot, walking beside the river. In those days everyone who came into Jasper came by river or by road. The nearest Station of the Line at that time was Archway, days to the north and across the border of the Territory. Jasper was not opposed to commerce with the Line but kept it at arm’s length. There were coal-barges on the river and wagons on the road, and a lot of drifters and refugees and day-laborers and would-be stars of Swing Street and I guess I did not stand out. I had a little bit of money in a cardboard wallet, and for days I clutched at it tightly for fear of pick-pockets, until I was generously informed that it made me look like a hick and a nobody.
I didn’t know what name I should go by. It was a conundrum. Nothing mattered to me more than clearing my name of the slander Mr. Baxter had heaped upon it— yet if I went about openly calling myself Harry Ransom who knew what might happen? Jasper City was neutral but it was not free of the meddling of Gun and Line, and their agents might cause me to disappear. Mr. Baxter himself might have me arrested.
On the Damaris I’d gone by the name Hal Rawlins. It had suited me well enough, but some part of me felt that Rawlins had gone down with the ship. One of the great things about the West and about Jasper City in particular is that both are so big you can always start over, or at least you can hope to. So as I drifted through the crowds I eavesdropped on conversations, listening for likely sounding Jasper City names. I muttered them under my breath to try them out.
I walked through the city, not knowing where I was or where I was going, through the narrow streets of Hoo Lai and up toward Fenimore, for no reason other than that it was tall and full of bright flags. I recall that I stood for a while on the south bridge into Fenimore, and watched the water go by. The sun was at its zenith and it was sweltering hot. The river was almost too bright to look at, and it stank. It seemed to me that the water was circling around and around the island, an endlessly replenishing cycle that made me think of the Process, though of course it was only my imagination.
For a while I thought it was all right to have no name at all. Eventually I noticed that a policeman was looking at me. I knew that he was a policeman because he wore a blue-black blazer and cap, and a brass badge with a bull’s horns on it. At first I was afraid he was on the lookout for the notorious fraudster or revolutionary Harry Ransom, but it turned out when we started talking that he was afraid I was going to jump. He did not personally care if I jumped but it was bad for business when people jumped, it upset the office-workers, and so he was tasked with saving lives wherever he could, like it or not. I told him that was not such a bad calling in life and he shrugged. I asked him for directions to Swing Street, and he asked what I was, an actor or a writer or a dancer or something of that nature, and I said I was nothing like that, I was just looking for family.
My big sister Jess left East Conlan two years before I did, in the company of a traveling salesman. Their plan was to get rich in Gibson City in the clothing trade. She got tired of the salesman in a matter of weeks, or he got tired of her, and she ended up heading to Jasper instead, drifting on riverboats the way I did, the way a lot of people end up in Jasper. There she met a man in the theater-business, and soon she started working in the Hamilton Theater on Swing Street, and then in an establishment that was just called No. 88. Her letters never said what she did, only that she was doing well. I remembered the addresses— not because she wrote often, because she did not, but because I wrote so often to her.
Swing Street in the afternoon was near-empty and half-asleep. Wouldbe actors with no fixed abodes napped in doorways or on the steps outside the theaters. The theaters themselves were jammed tightly together, with dark-windowed bars filling every remaining space. The theaters wore masks— I mean that nearly all of them boasted some brightly colored façade, in the style of a golden Judduan temple or a lacquered eastern palace or one of the ancient ivy-hung castles of Koenigswald. The street looked like it does in the photographs you have seen, except that in the unforgiving light of day you could see how new the façades were, and how thin and flimsy some of them were. Swing Street was meant to be seen after dark.
I didn’t know what I meant to say to Jess when I saw her. I had always told her that when I came to Jasper City I would come in style, I would come in triumph, with investors and fame at my back. I guess I hoped we would laugh and cry and embrace and I would not have to say too much about what had happened to me out West. She would know that Mr. Baxter’s accusations were slander, and that I was no fraud, and certainly no thief. She would give me a place to stay and a sympathetic ear while I schemed out how I would clear my name, as to which I still had no particular plan. I hoped that she would lend me money without asking what had happened to the money she had already invested in the Apparatus.
I had imagined she would have money to spare. Everyone said that Swing Street was booming and the theaters were machines for coining gold, at least if you were clever or beautiful or musically talented, and Jess was two of those three. Maybe that was true but I was soon to learn that what ever money there was on Swing Street had not found its way into my sister’s pockets.
I saw a building covered in pillars and carved masks and peeling gold paint. A sign at the front of it said the hamilton theater, and the door was unlocked, so I called in and apologized for interrupting a rehearsal and I asked after my sister. They said she’d worked there checking coats, but had left a year ago and nobody knew where she’d gone. She had not gone by Ransom, but by Gantry, which was the name of her husband.
I called at No. 88. It was closed for the afternoon and the windows were shuttered but there were some young women standing outside it who saw me peering through the shutters, and after we’d established that I was not interested in buying what they were selling we got on pretty well. They told me that they worked at the Eighty-eight, dancing or waitressing or otherwise, and that they remembered Jess— she’d lost the husband and gone back to Ransom— but that she’d left when all those rumors started about her brother.
I said, “Her brother?”
“You know,” they said. “Professor Ransom. They say he’s an anarchist or a revolutionary or a prophet or something, him and that Creedmoor guy, they’ve got some kind of secret weapon that everyone’s got themselves all excited about.”
I said nothing. I was thinking that I had not even thought about how my mistake at White Rock might have affected Jess. Let’s ascribe that to the arrogance of youth, and not to any deeper or more permanent flaw in my character.
I was also thinking that I liked the women of the Eighty-eight just fine, but that it was not what I had imagined Jess was doing in Jasper City.
“I heard he’s a crook,” one of them said. “A fraud.”
I said, “Who told you that?”
“Don’t play dumb, handsome. You know the story— you’re one of them, right?”
“One of them?”
“You’re looking for Ransom and Creedmoor a
nd all the rest. You don’t look rough enough to be a detective so I guess you’re a believer.”
“A believer? I guess I am.”
“Well we don’t know. She just left. That’s all we can tell you.”
“Did you know her well? Where did she live?”
“What good’s that going to do you? You want to cut up her bedsheets for relics or something? She wasn’t anything special. Are you that crazy? Shame. You’re pretty.”
“Well, maybe I am. Crazy, I mean. But I can pay— for information.”
They looked skeptical.
Just south of the south-western end of Swing Street was a building that everybody called the Gate. It was a sprawl of old-fashioned peaked towers and blocky outcrops of red brick, stained black. It had narrow windows that made me think of the slits on a zoetrope. In the old days it had been Jasper’s largest prison, but in these more civilized times criminals were generally sentenced to work in the Yards, or for Western Rim operations of the Baxter Trust, or pressed into the militia. The Gate had been converted into apartments for refugees or would-be theater-folk or failed theater-folk—it could be hard to tell the difference. They lived two or sometimes three to a cell. The hallways were a maze, painted with strange and sometimes shocking and often beautiful designs. Motifs of the Folk were much in evidence. Music echoed through the whole shadowy low-ceilinged labyrinth. In the apartment where Jess had lived, behind a red curtain, there was a young white woman washing herself with a rag and a bucket. She had dyed green hair like a fairy-tale river-sprite and a lean long-legged body. She cursed at me casually and flicked the wet rag at my face, and I withdrew. A quick glimpse had been enough to confirm there was nothing of Jess’s in the room. Apart from the bucket and some charms on the wall that were not Jess’s style there was nothing of anyone’s in there.
I’d grown accustomed to the wide open spaces of the Western Rim. I had often been poor out there, but even at my worst I slept under the stars or in big open barns. The narrowness and confinement of the Gate was like a nightmare. It reminded me of the worst stories I’d heard about the Stations of the Line, and their lightless factory-warrens. Beneath the incense and the cigarettes there was a damnable stink— actors smelt no better than prisoners. The Gate was not how I’d imagined Jess had been living, and it was certainly not how I’d imagined I would live, when the time came for me to come Jasper City. Yet the terrible truth was that I was not sure I could afford even a cell in the Gate, maybe not even a shared cell. The money I’d offered the women of the Eighty-eight as a bribe had only made them laugh. Money was worth almost infinitely less in Jasper City than on the Western Rim. I think it is because of the number and density of people there. It takes a greater force to get them to move.
I left the Gate by a different entrance, having gotten myself lost and turned around, and I came back out through an alley onto Swing Street right next to the Ormolu Theater. I knew it was the Ormolu Theater because there was a sign. It was studded with electric-lights, although the sun was still high and they were not in operation at that particular moment.
I took the Great Rotollo’s business-card from my pocket, and considered my prospects for a while— not for very long. The math of the situation was not complicated. Working for Rotollo was not as good as visiting with my long-lost sister, but it was a damn sight better than starving in the streets.
The Ormolu’s doors were open.
Inside there was a sweeping staircase, and a white stone statue of a naked woman veiling her face, and a lot of brass and purple velvet. There was a young man sitting in a gilded box, but he was asleep with his head on his brocaded arm and did not stop me as I walked through another door and into the corridors behind the stage, until I found a gray-haired woman sitting at a dressing-table smoking a cigarette.
“My name’s Randall,” I said.
I had tried out a lot of new Jasper City names in my head, and that was what I had settled on.
The woman started but did not turn around. Instead she looked at me in her mirror.
“Ma’am, I’m just going to come out and say it, because people in this city are awful busy and I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. Time is money, Mr. Baxter always says, and money is time.”
I could not break the long habit of quoting Mr. Baxter, even if he was now my enemy.
“I met a man on a boat called the Damaris who called himself the Great Rotollo— I guess that wasn’t his real name but I don’t know what it was— anyhow ma’am if he made it off the Damaris and into town he said he was going to work at this Theater, and if he’s here I bet he’d vouch for me as a decent fellow and a hard worker, he said I should call on him here. I have his card, it’s kind of battered by now but—”
She turned, stood.
“Hal Rawlins!” she said.
“Rand—that is, ma’am, I—”
“Hal Rawlins, don’t you remember me?”
I did not, but pretended like maybe I did.
She clapped her hands together and ran toward me and before I could retreat she was embracing me, saying, “Hal Rawlins, as I live and breathe! Fortune is kind, fortune is kind after all, there’s a silver lining to every cloud,” and other Smiler maxims.
It took me a while to realize that the woman was Amaryllis, the Great Rotollo’s wife and assistant. I had not recognized her without her wig and make-up and pearls.
CHAPTER 18
THE AMAZING AMARYLLIS AND MR. ALFRED P. BAXTER AND MR. ELMER MERRIAL CARSON, AND OTHERS
To tell the truth, Amaryllis and I had exchanged no more than half-a-dozen words back on the Damaris. But it seemed that she remembered me fondly, as if we traveled together for years and had been great friends. She took it upon herself to introduce me to the manager of the Ormolu Theater, a Mr. Quantrill, and to praise my talents to him in the most effusive terms. She praised my musical gifts, my rapport with the tough crowds of the Damaris, my loyalty and hard-working nature, my handsomeness and my pleasing smile, and above all my mechanical genius. She described the wonders of the self-playing piano, and attributed its invention to me. I did not correct her. Mr. Quantrill asked what else I could do, and I said I had some ideas regarding Light. Mr. Quantrill’s eyebrows slowly raised as if operated by pulleys in the wings— by which I mean he looked skeptical. Amaryllis then appealed to his sense of charity, painting the sinking of the Damaris in the most lurid terms, and characterizing me as a tragic and pitiable orphan of war. In the end Mr. Quantrill shrugged and agreed to hire me for room and board, room being a dressing-room with a bench and a blanket, further wages to be discussed if and when I made myself useful. Then he put on his hat and went home.
“Well,” Amaryllis said. She gave me a possessive kind of smile.
Amaryllis had survived the wreck of the Damaris by shedding her wig and her fake pearls and her frilly dress, washing up on the riverbank in nothing but a thin white shift— or so she told me. As she lay exhausted on the bank she saw the Great Rotollo struggling toward her, fighting the current. He was too proud and too thrifty to let go of his suitcase full of trick knives and charms and puzzle-rings and weighted dice and watches and cards, and he could hardly keep his head above water. She crawled out onto a tree-root that arched out into the river, and she reached a hand to save him, catching his sleeve— but he struggled, and splashed, and the current was too strong, and all she was able to save was the suitcase.
She dabbed at her eye as she said this, like she was crying, but the corner of her mouth smiled.
“You saw how he struggled, didn’t you, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Well,” I prevaricated. “It was very dark.”
I didn’t find her story very likely, but didn’t want to cast accusations or innuendos. There is always so much we do not know, and it is my rule not to judge unless I must.
Shortly after the Great Rotollo drowned— one way or the other— Amaryllis met some of the other survivors of the wreck. Rotollo’s suitcase contained several tricks for making fire, which helped
them survive the night. It also contained the Great Rotollo’s contract to perform at the Ormolu Theater, and to make a long story short Amaryllis had stepped into Rotollo’s shoes and was now performing two nights a week at the Ormolu, where she went by Amaryllis the Amazing.
“This is a new century,” she said, “Or near as dammit, and who says women can’t do magic? I saw every trick that old bastard ever did and I can do ’em just as good as him. But that’s not enough, is it? Not these days. Not for me. Oh no. We have to prove ourselves, Mr. Rawlins, the old tricks won’t cut it anymore. Why, just six months ago I met a man with an honest-to-goodness machine for making rain! What’s the old bastard’s card tricks next to that? That’s what we need. The very latest science. The latest ideas. Like your piano, or what-have-you. A man who can do that can do just about anything, I reckon. My very own genius! You and me together, Mr. Rawlins. You and me, Hal, you and me.”