The Rise of Ransom City

by Felix Gilman

  The Floating World, if you have never heard of it, was a very famous— I shall be blunt— it was a very famous whore house. It stood on the top of the bluffs overlooking Jasper City, and sometimes at night you could see the faint red glow of its lanterns, taunting all the respectable and religious people of the city below. I was told by two or maybe three people that Jess or a woman answering to her description was working there now.

  I no longer needed to borrow money from her but I believed I owed her my help, or at least an apology. You may think it would have been better if I had left her alone, but that was how I felt.

  What stopped me from venturing up that well-worn trail to the Floating World was that rumor also had it that the Floating World was a front for the activities in Jasper of the Agents of the Gun. In fact this supposed secret was so open that hardly anyone in Jasper had not heard it. If I set foot in that place, might they recognize me? Professor Harry Ransom— confidant of Liv and Creedmoor, inventor of the terrible weapon that killed the giant Knoll— I could not take that chance.

  Some of the Ormolu’s crew were regulars at the Floating World. I asked them about it, but declined invitations to join them.

  Adela, overhearing my questions, raised an eyebrow.

  “If I asked what your interest in that place is, would you tell me?”

  “I guess not.”

  “You’re impossible, Hal. You and your secrets.”

  “I’d tell all if I could.”

  “You won’t even tell me what you’re building down in the cellar.”

  “Well— maybe not yet.”

  I did not confide in her. I wanted to— I longed to talk about her theories and mine— but I did not dare. I did confide in the other occupant of the Ormolu’s basement, who was a ghost.

  This is a difficult subject. On the one hand maybe I have strained your credulity enough already. Ghosts are not uncommon on the Rim but nearly unheard of in crowded old Jasper City, and you may think I am stretching the truth. On the other I once said a long time back I would try to write the truth and the whole truth. So I will, even if it sounds unlikely. I keep my promises, when I can.

  He first showed himself on my seventh night in the basement. It had been a long night and I was still crouched over the Apparatus. It was not working. That was no big surprise. I had no money and the thing was made of junk. I had few waking hours to work on it, I was so busy making toys for the stage. Nevertheless I was in an ill humor. It seemed that I would never recover what I had had out on the Rim, when I was free. It seemed like a very long time ago. I stood and sighed and turned, meaning to bring the lantern closer to its workings.

  A black man in a tall white wig and old-fashioned red velvet coat stood behind the lantern, its light turning his skin gold. He was wide-eyed, watching me. I jumped back, cried out, lifted a hammer to defend myself. He shook his head, then vanished. I lowered the hammer and persuaded myself that I had imagined it, perhaps mistaking a row of old coats and props for a visitor.

  He came back two nights later, again appearing behind me just as I turned off the Apparatus. That time I seized the hammer and swung at his head. What I learned from that experience is that when you swing a hammer at a ghost it does not, contrary to the way it is in that one famous ghost story Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson wrote, pass as if through mist. Instead the ghost is simply not there, and he never was, but instead he is somewhere else, six feet away, then he is behind you, then he is gone, leaving you dizzy.

  The third time he came back I asked him his name. He opened his mouth but no sound came out. Then he sat down on my bench, arranging his coat-tails beneath him, and looked so very sad that I felt sorry for him, and put down my hammer. Shortly afterwards he was gone.

  He only appeared by night. He often opened his mouth but was never able to speak. It will no doubt have occurred to you to wonder whether he was a real ghost or simply an unexpected effect of the Process, and I do not know exactly what to tell you.

  I did not think I had encountered any such presence before. Sometimes when I worked on the Process back in East Conlan I had felt like I was being watched— well, I was being watched, I guess, I had three sisters. But sometimes out on the Western Rim when I’d worked late through the night there had been motion at the corner of my eyes— I’d guessed rabbits, or cats on the prowl. I had never seen a ghost.

  I asked the employees of the Ormolu if there were ghosts in their establishment and all of them said that there were, but that’s just how theater-people always are and it did not necessarily mean anything. The ghost himself could not answer my questions or explain himself.

  He had no visible wounds or cause of death. He was dressed in old-time finery and I imagined he might have been one of the founding generation of Jasper City, a nobleman or nobleman’s private secretary back in the ancient days when Jasper had noblemen. If so he had lived in the days before Gun and Line, before the Great War, when our world was still being made and everything was possible. Like I said, he could not answer my questions.

  I called him Jasper.

  “Jasper,” I said, “this device you’re looking at is the notorious

  Ransom Light-Bringing Apparatus. Tell no one.”

  Jasper nodded.

  “You should have seen it in its heyday. That was out on the Western

  Rim, under the big skies, the big red plains and the jagged wild hills and all that, like in the paintings. It lit up like the sun. You should have seen everyone’s faces.”

  Jasper was sitting on the bench, studying the innards of the Apparatus. I was pacing.

  “Do you see anything, Jasper? Anything at all?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s harder here— here in Jasper. Out on the Rim it all seemed to work so easily. I shall not say there weren’t setbacks and frustrations because there were, oh there were, but somehow everything and anything seemed possible out there.”

  He nodded again, and looked thoughtful.

  “I guess maybe you’re thinking about days gone by, when the world was new-made, and Jasper City was new too, and you were all building a future where anything could be possible. Assuming you are in fact one of the founding generation of Jasper City and not just a shadow of a shadow of who-knows-what. Assuming you can hear me.”

  He seemed to look at me.

  “If you are from those days maybe you should know that everybody hates the Senate you made. Just yesterday there was a riot on Thirty-second Street.”

  Sometimes I read to him from the newspapers. The topic was generally struggle and strife. Two more Senators were assassinated over the course of that summer. The Senate itself appeared to be in the painful process of splitting in two. So was the whole Tri-City Territory, for that matter.

  It was now generally reported, as Adela had told us, that Gibson City had gone over to the Line. The Tri-City Territory had always understood itself to be neutral in the Great War. Gun and Line meddled in the heartland, but they did not operate there with the wild open abandon they allowed themselves on the Rim. The fall of Gibson shocked the Territory to its core.

  In response to the news Juniper City had cut ties with Gibson and with Jasper both, announced that henceforth nothing would ever compromise its splendid independence. Juniper had expelled foreign businesses, including those of Mr. Baxter. The Juniper City Greater Council declared that it had acquired a terrible and unprecedented new weapon, capable of destroying the Engines themselves or laying siege to the Lodge of the Guns, and that if their affairs were meddled with they would make use of it. This was generally thought to be a bluff but nobody could be sure. One faction in Jasper City’s Senate was for throwing in with Juniper City. Another was for preemptive surrender to the Line while it was possible to do so on favorable terms. Some of the newspapers railed against the Senate for failing to provide Jasper with its own secret weapons, some of them speculated that such weapons already existed. Meanwhile Liv and Creedmoor and myself were sighted all over the world. We were said to be r
aising an army, or rebuilding the Red Valley Republic. We were said to be whispering in the ear of the Juniper City Council or hiding in mountain caves. Pilgrims and drifters chased us all over the world. I was by now getting used to thinking about that other Ransom as somebody quite separate from myself, and I could read about him in the newspapers with only the tiniest chill.

  I reported the news to Jasper whenever I saw him. It generally made him look sad, then disappear. I wondered if he understood me at all.

  “Try signs,” I said one late summer night. “Nod for yes, shake for no. Did you die here in this basement? No? In the Ormolu? You don’t look like an actor— was the Ormolu once something else, I don’t know, like . . . Well, in Jasper? Are you dead? Do you have some purpose here, something to communicate to me about the Process, maybe? Listen— if you shake your head for everything I don’t know if you understand me, do you understand?”

  He nodded.

  “Are you here with word from the world of the dead, maybe? Mr. Carver— do you know him? Does he forgive me? Yes? No? My father, maybe? What about Miss Harper and John Creedmoor— are they in the world of the dead yet? Do the dead have news of them— that’s where the action is I guess— did they make it? If what they said is true, if they have a weapon that can kill the Powers, maybe there’s a whole lot of Engines and Guns down there now— what’s an Engine like out of its shell? Say,is there a world of the dead? I’ve never speculated much on religion.”

  He shook his head. I do not know what that meant exactly, or if it meant anything at all. Take it for what it’s worth.

  “The truth is I don’t much care about politics and I don’t care hardly at all about religion so if you are here to tell me something about the Great War or anything of that kind I don’t want to hear it.”

  I mopped sweat from my brow— he did not. It was hot in the basement. I guess it was not hot wherever he was.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to get it to work here. This place is older, harder. Conditions are different from the Rim. Have I told you how I found the sign— the word— I did, didn’t I?— well, don’t imagine it’s easy. Don’t imagine that’s all there is to it. Bringing that world into this. Opening the door. What was possible then is impossible now. No words for it, even, damn it. What’ll I even do with it if I can rebuild it, except get myself hunted down and shot?”

  Jasper stood.

  “You’ve seen me build this thing. I guess you can see me, anyhow. If I go to law with Old Man Baxter over it will you be my witness? No? I guess not.”

  He folded his arms behind his back.

  “Well, you must be here to teach me some kind of a lesson. In his Autobiography Mr. Baxter— damn him— says that to a man of greatness everything’s a lesson. Maybe I should find my way toward a theory of ghosts and spirits like yourself. Maybe—”

  Suddenly there was an expression of panic on his face. He was not looking at me, but past me, maybe at the Apparatus, maybe at nothing visible in this world or time. Anyhow he turned right around and as soon as his back was to me he vanished.

  I will tell you right now that though I tried and tried I have never understood this phenomenon, or what it is about the Process that causes it, or whether it is good or bad or if there is any way of doing anything with it. It is just one of those things that happens. Maybe in the future there will be time to investigate it.

  Adela appeared onstage, two nights running, alongside the Mr. Barnabas Busby Bosko and his show of Western Rim wonders. It was not a success. She was too proud and too unbending to perform for a crowd. She had no craving to please. The experiment was not repeated.

  She stopped working on the piano. She did not say why and I did not ask. She abandoned her little cell in the Gate and moved into an apartment a half-mile from Swing Street and overnight she became a Jasper City patriot— a true daughter of the Bull, as they used to say. She cursed the foreign influences that meddled in Jasper politics and she spoke urgently of the need to defend the city’s honor and independence. I said that politics was a fool’s game and that we had work of our own to do. She bit back the word coward, but her eyes said it. She went all over town to listen to speeches or shout herself hoarse at Senators or businessmen or the offices of the Evening Post. She developed a very thorough accounting of which Senators were brave sons of Jasper and which Senators were weaklings and traitors and pawns of the Line. I do not remember any of the names she spoke of. To this day all Senators or suchlike people are the same to me, like cats or dogs. Anyhow I did not accompany her on these ventures. While she was marching or waving flags I was working, or when I wasn’t working I was paying court to that actress I mentioned, who I said I would not name and I will not but she was both statuesque & fair, and blissfully uninterested in politics. I who had once in the by-gone days of my youth ranged all across the Western Rim and slept under different stars each night now lived just about my whole life within the confines of Swing Street. When I left the Street it was an occasion and I dressed up in my go-to-meeting best.

  Some days I would go and loiter outside the gates of Mr. Baxter’s Tower on Fenimore with my hands in my pockets like an orphan child. I never caught a glimpse of him. Yet he haunted me anyhow. Twice that summer he returned to the pages of the newspapers, repeating his libel against me. He assured the readers of the Evening Post and the Clarion that detectives hired by the Trust were closing in on the fraud and thief Harry Ransom, who had so disturbed the peace of the simple folk of the Rim. . . .I wrote letters of my own. I wrote what I thought of his lies, you can be sure of that. I did not mail them.

  Some days I would go visit the campus of Vansittart University. Vansittart U is gone now like so much else that was good in Jasper City but in its day it was a treasure-house of knowledge. It was a paradise of idleness and luxury and good fortune. I snuck into lectures on electricity, the light-bearing Ether, the history and society and science of the First Folk as revealed by their artifacts, and other topics of great interest. If only I had forever I would recount it all here. Instead I have only two pieces of advice. First, if you ever have cause to visit a University you should watch out for ball-players. Those beautiful green lawns are a menace if you do not understand the nature of the territory. Cross the wrong line and at any moment a football may tumble from the heavens and knock you off your feet and if you survive that then a half-ton of well-educated and well-fed Senators’ sons will follow it, and they differ from stampeding buffalo only in the way that they apologize afterwards. Second, if you have trespassed into a lecture concerning the Etheric Flow by a very proud gowned and mutton-chopped Professor, do not raise your hand to contradict his errors or you will be ejected from paradise, never to return.

  The lecture halls of VU were full of empty seats. The teams of the ball-players were always a few men down. Even some of the Professors were absent. Idealistic and vigorous youth, intellectuals— those were the kind of people most likely to set off for parts east or north or who-knew-where chasing after rumors of Liv and Creedmoor— or following stories that the Red Valley Republic was rising again in the west or the south or in Juniper City— or digging up Folk ruins, chasing after wondrous weapons of their own, poking their nose into Folk business and if they were unlucky getting run through with spears for their trouble. Some of Jasper City’s gilded youth had joined the militia, ready to defend the Bull’s City against all comers.

  The armies of the Line moved south from Gibson across the Territory, toward Jasper, seizing small towns and bridges and roads, suppressing unrest. Flights of Heavier-Than-Air Vessels were seen in the skies over the Territory’s rolling golden fields. Combustion-Powered Submersible Vessels were spotted along the meandering River Jass by night and mistaken for sea-serpents. The front moved forward. Agents of the Gun confronted Ironclads at Melnope— when the news hit the Evening Post there were riots in the streets of Fenimore. Mr. Baxter hired private detectives in large numbers to guard his factories and his offices. The Baxter Trust ware house th
at I stole the magnets from that I used for the Apparatus was piled high with crates containing weapons, fuel, gas-masks &c. I did not notice that at the time, but I learned it later from a memorandum that crossed my desk, after the Battle.

  I waited for my ghostly friend Jasper to reappear. He did not. There were rats down in the basement with me but they were not so conversational as the ghost, and I missed him. By late summer the reconstructed Apparatus had grown to the size of a grand piano or a small church-organ. The bathtub had been incorporated into it and a number of other bits of stage business, including spears, a cartwheel, a mirror, and dinner-plates. It focused all the unstable energy of the Process into a sealed glass jar which I had placed, because it amused me, in the arms of a plaster statue of a half-naked nymph.

  Sometimes I thought Jasper had returned to me, but it was only Mr. Quantrill or Amaryllis coming to check on their investment, to demand explanations. Sometimes Adela interrupted me. Once two stagehands came into the basement to perform intimate acts together— well, it’s a free city, or it was back in those days. Once I thought I glimpsed a man in a ragged soldier’s uniform watching me from a far corner of the basement but it was possibly only an old coat. On another occasion I recall I stood over the Apparatus for more than an hour, scratching my new-grown beard and just thinking about the Process, and then about how things had been out on the Western Rim, and about all my adventures out there and the Harpers and Mr. Carver and everything, and when I finally turned to sit on my bench there was a man already there. I jumped back in surprise and stumbled into the Apparatus, causing it to ring like a bell. The figure that sat on the bench held his head hung low, like he was tired, and a long mane of black hair fell to his knees.