The Rise of Ransom City

by Felix Gilman

  I said, “Mr. Carver?”

  The figure raised his head. For a moment I saw the face of a man of the Folk.. Then the Apparatus began to hum and throb behind me, and I turned back to it to see that when I stumbled into it I had knocked it on its side and set the cylindrical magnets spinning. Their spinning did not slow, but instead gathered speed, as the energies of the Process accumulated out of nothing and fed upon themselves. The acids in the jars and tubes started to bubble and the wires started to glow. I glanced back to see that the figure, if it was ever there, had vanished. The alarm I had felt at his sudden appearance had now been transformed into alarm at the sudden springing-to-life of the Apparatus, and now its increasing instability.

  Well I have already said what it is like when the Process gets unstable, back in the good old town of Kenauk, and if you are curious maybe you can look back there, if any of these scattered pages are reaching anybody. All I’ll say here is that the Process is not magnetism but it is kissing cousins with magnetism, like it is with all other energies. The basement was full of old stage-weapons and doorknobs and magic-tricks and forks and I do not know what else was flying at my head, but you can imagine the chaos. There was a great flash of light. I wrestled with levers. From the Theater above I heard the sound of applause and cheering and then screaming.

  What had happened was that at the very same moment that the Apparatus had taken it into its head to start running wild, the actors upstairs were performing The Story of John Creedmoor. This terrible play had been written in haste in the months after White Rock. It portrayed John Creedmoor as a noble but misunderstood hero who, with the aid of his lover Liv and his side-kick Harry Ransom had quested into the deadliest western wilderness and stolen a wondrous weapon with which to &c &c. The part of John Creedmoor was played by Mr. Barnabas Busby Bosko. Bosko was in the middle of booming out a speech about how all the Great Powers of the Earth will tremble when I hold this sign before them when suddenly a fountain of white light burst up through the trap-door that connected the basement to the wings of the stage. The audience was delighted at first by this trick but they quickly turned fearful. As the power built the gentle tug of the magnetism became violent, yanking watches from pockets and snatching eyeglasses from faces and necklaces from throats, roughly, like what in Jasper City they call a “mugger.” Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson described all this for the readers of the Evening Post as a wonderful though vulgar coup de théâtre. I know for a fact he was not in the audience, though in his newspaper he implied that he was. A minor sin, in my estimation— I know what it is like to be a showman— and anyhow he was kind enough not to mention the screaming, the fainting, the stampede, or how the actor portraying John Creedmoor dropped his gun and said an unprintable word. Riot or worse disaster was narrowly averted when Adela come running down into the basement to investigate, and with her assistance I was able to tame the Process again.

  CHAPTER 21

  A VISIT TO THE FLOATING WORLD

  That was the end of my summer on Swing Street. Now it is time to write about the rest of my time in Jasper, and how it all ended. The typewriter is very stiff to night, as if it has not got much traveling left in it, or as if it does not want to tell the rest of the story.

  Adela and I sat on the floor of the basement in the aftermath of the incident. We were both of us breathless from exertion and panic and relief. The basement was hot as an oven. The floor was hot and the wall we rested our backs on was hot. The contents of the basement were strewn all around us, swords and pennants and spears and tables and chairs and wooden trees and picture-frames and broken crockery and machinery like there had been a battle or a tornado or I don’t know what. The Apparatus was in pieces again. It had suffered some damage during the instability, and further damage during our struggle to stop it. There was a smell of salt and surf and burning. The shadows cast by Adela’s candle moved in a way that did not look exactly right.

  We were alone. Mr. Quantrill appeared at the stairhead but Adela told him to go away, and her tone brooked no argument— he went away. My ghostly friend Jasper did not join us, and I cannot say why but I knew that after that incident with the Apparatus he was gone from the Ormolu for good.

  Adela said, “Don’t you dare lie to me.”

  I gave her my most honest and open expression.

  “I don’t— well, I mean— well, I guess I won’t. No.”

  “That thing— that thing you’ve been working on all this time— what is it?”

  “It makes light. Heat, too, and magnetism, as you can see, and a whole lot of other things. Free and perpetual, in theory, and without limit. In theory.”

  “Does it work?”

  “In theory.”

  “What is it? How does it—?”

  “There isn’t a name for it. I discovered it. Any of the Professors at good old VU will tell you it’s impossible by all the laws of the world.

  Impossible not to mention indecent. Well, I made my own laws.” She stood and paced through the wreckage. I saw that her dress had torn in the struggle with the Apparatus. Her hair was unpinned and damp with sweat. She took the candle, leaving me in shadow against the wall. I knew what she was thinking and I was waiting for her to say it. There were fragments of stone and metal and wood in the wreckage— doorknobs, nails, stage-medals, branches from a painted tree, the brass leaves of the Automated Orange Tree. Some of them moved as Adela kicked them aside. Others still moved on their own account. A few floated a little way above the floor.

  Adela turned over a bit of hot brass with the toe of her boot. “I heard about White Rock,” she said.

  “I guess just about everybody did, from the World’s Walls to the Rim or beyond.”

  “When the Line held me they asked me about— they questioned me about— White Rock. Harry Ransom. The east-country woman with the strange name and the turncoat Agent and about secret weapons and devices and science. I told them, I don’t know— I didn’t know.”

  “They were scared,” I said. “The future belongs to them, or that’s their opinion anyhow, and they don’t care for competition.”

  “They say he’s seven feet tall, this Professor Ransom, and he dresses like a sorcerer out of the far far East.”

  That was how I was portrayed in The Story of John Creedmoor, upstairs on the Ormolu’s stage. The actor was a fellow of Judduan descent, with a thick and unfortunate accent of Gibson City’s docks. Sorcerer’s robes were easy to come by, backstage at the Ormolu. The tallness was accomplished with high shoes.

  “A lot of things they say aren’t so.”

  “They say,” she said, “that at White Rock this Professor Harry Ransom had a weapon like nothing else in the world— something there is no name for.”

  “It’s not a weapon,” I said.

  She turned a full circle, surveying the wreckage as she went. “Are you sure?”

  I told her the whole truth as I knew it. That is everything I’ve written here. I told her everything I knew about Miss Harper— Liv Alverhuysen— and about Creedmoor. I told her everything about how the Apparatus worked, and what I had learned from the Folk. I said that I thought maybe they had meant me to see what I saw, that maybe they meant for me to make use of that knowledge. I said that I believed that my Process would one day change the world for the better, and maybe that was what they wanted.

  She said maybe, or maybe they wanted me to bring the world to ruin. After all why should they have any love for the world we’d made? I acknowledged that that might be the case, but I said that we all have to do what we think is right, and none of us know how any of it will end.

  Mr. Quantrill showed his face again at the stairhead. He was now accompanied by several stagehands and by Mr. Bosko and by the actor who played the part of Professor Harry Ransom. Quantrill was huffing and puffing and threatening to evict me. My double was glaring at me as if he was in actual fact a wizard of the far East, and could give me the evil eye.

  I told them all that the Apparatus was an experimenta
l device for generating brightly colored smoke for the stage, and that there had been an accident with some chemicals but no harm done. Adela confirmed my story.

  Mr. Quantrill seemed to believe me, or at least he did not ask anymore questions. From the look on his face as he surveyed the room I think maybe he could not imagine what questions to ask. His eye fell for a moment on one of the brass leaves of the Automated Orange Tree, which was levitating some three feet off above the rest of the wreckage and turning softly as if in a breeze, and he looked away sharply, the way a man might look away from the sun.

  He chewed it over for a while and then fell back to the old familiar things he was sure of.

  “This is coming out of your wages, Rawlins.”

  Quantrill left. The stagehands left. Lastly my double left, gathering his robes around him.

  Adela investigated the floating brass leaf.

  “The shadows,” she said. “Look.”

  I did not get up. “Let me guess— it has no shadow?”

  “On the contrary. It has too many shadows by far.”

  “Ah.”

  “What causes that?”

  “Truth is that I do not know.”

  “Can I touch it?”

  “I guess so.”

  She plucked the leaf from the air, carefully wrapping it in a piece of torn cloth and putting it in her purse.

  “At my present wages,” I said, “I believe I could work for Mr. Quantrill for a hundred years and not pay him back for the damage.”

  “To hell with him,” Adela said. “What does it matter what he thinks? Or his money?”

  “I used to talk that way. Then I learned that a man needs to eat.”

  “You should give notice. We both should.”

  “You have another employer in mind?”

  She waved that objection away, as if it was nothing.

  “Not all of us were born rich. . . .”

  She did not take offense at that, she was so distracted by big ideas, and so I knew that she was serious.

  “You’ve got something in mind,” I said. “Dally’s Theater, or—”

  “No. Hal— Harry—this is more than a toy. Look at it! We have to go to the Senate.”

  I think I have said that Adela had become, over the course of the summer, a true patriot of Jasper City. I guess that it was because her own country was lost to her. She gave me quite a speech, a real honest blood and thunder stump speech, about how the Apparatus could be just what poor beleaguered Jasper City needed to fend off the encroaching forces of the Line. She spoke of driving the Line back, crushing its ambitions, humbling the Engines. She spoke of independence, power, wealth, freedom for Jasper from the great forces of the world. I said that that was all very well, but firstly the Apparatus was in ruins, and secondly what if I spoke up, what might Mr. Baxter do? What if Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson’s insinuations were accurate, and Mr. Baxter was in cahoots with the Line?

  She observed that if the Line was on my trail, the recent incident of flashes & bangs & blazing light would most likely have alerted them to my presence anyhow. She was right, of course. Anyhow we argued for a while. I was kind of annoyed to be told what to do, as if it was any business of hers, but I was kind of happy too. I had been alone with my secrets for too long. I missed Mr. Carver and I missed Miss Harper and I even missed John Creedmoor— I began to see why the two of them traveled together, though surely they did not like each other. I missed my sisters.

  I longed to talk to her about the Process, about words and language and names and the world. She only wanted to talk about politics and war. Not for the first time I wondered at what the Line had done to her to arouse such anger, and I wished I could have known her when she was young.

  Anyhow in the end we came to an agreement. We would leave Jasper and go to Juniper City, on the other side of the Territory. Juniper had declared open defiance of the Line. We would offer that city our services, and the use of the Process. To hell with Mr. Baxter and his libelous accusations. If the Line feared us let it have reason to fear— those were Adela’s words, not mine. I agreed that it would be good to be on the road again. She kissed both my cheeks. I understand that to be a sign among the landowning classes of the Deltas that an agreement of great significance has been reached.

  Back in the days when I traveled with Mr. Carver out on the Rim, we would have left at once, before dawn, without a word or a look back. If we had done that who knows how things would have turned out! But I guess I was slowing down in my maturity. First, I said, I had business to resolve. She asked if I was talking about that fair & statuesque & blissfully unpolitical actress I have mentioned, except that she described her less kindly. I said that no, it was a family matter, although I would not deny that I would miss the fair & statuesque &c.

  I passed the day after that mending the damage the Apparatus had done to the Ormolu’s basement, until I was exhausted and hungry and filthy with the sweat of a hard day’s work, and all in all I was in no fit state to do what I did next, which was to dress up as smart as I could in borrowed clothes and swallow my fear and strike out for the Floating World.

  To get to the Floating World from Swing Street you had to walk north toward the river. On the Fenimore Bridge I was importuned by flower-sellers, match-sellers, beggars, recruiters, and prophets of the end times. A devotee of the World Serpent informed me that one day very soon that famous reptile would swallow itself up entirely, and us with it, and he illustrated that proposition with a gesture that reminded me uncomfortably of the Ransom Process. I gave him a half-dollar.

  The evening was hot and the sky was the color of the deep sea, with ink-blot clouds of black. If you stood on the edge of the bridge and looked north and waited for dark to fall you could see the Floating World. It stood on the cliff’s edge atop the bluffs north of Jasper. It was a tall building of many rooms, sprawling like a millionaire’s mansion, and at night it was lit by a thousand red lanterns that hung from its eaves or from the trees or from the arches in the rose-gardens. . . . Anyhow as the city below darkened the Floating World lit up and it shone through the trees.

  My coat was made for an actor who was bigger and taller than me. I carried a gun beneath it. I do not know why. If the rumors were true, and the Floating World was a haven for the Agents of the Gun, and if they sniffed me out, it would do me no good.

  When the city was fully dark and the stars were out and the Floating World was burning red like a coal I set off again.

  North of the river the city climbs the foothills. The city thins out as the road gains altitude until there is just one path that winds up among rocks and the trees into the heights. At first that path is dark. Later there are lanterns. It is wide enough for the narrow sort of coaches, and you had better watch your back in case one comes thundering past. Some men walk up alone, like I did, and others go in drunken packs, laughing and joking and slapping each other on the back.

  The Floating World is a thing of the past now— a long-gone monster, like the mammoth. That is why I mean to take the trouble to describe it. In those days it stood in the middle of lawns, rose-gardens, white marble statues and other such luxuries. There were men in the garden and arm in arm with or sitting beside them on the benches there were women, most of them in scarlet and black, in all kinds of states of undress. I followed a twisting path, glancing from side to side. I met the cold and indifferent gaze of a woman who stared right through me like I was a ghost, while a silver-haired gentleman slobbered at her throat. Three women curtsied in the elaborate old-fashioned style for the entertainment of a Reverend of the Smiler brethren, whose grin was not of the spiritual kind. And so on and so on.

  Now I have traveled all over the Rim in wild and lonely places and I do not claim to be an innocent, but I did not like the Floating World. It was as if I saw my sister’s face in the face of every woman there, and I did not like it at all. I have done things I am not proud of to get by and I do not judge what anyone does to make a living, but nonetheless I did not like i
t.

  The path led me to two big doors with glass windows spilling light. Soon as I stepped through them it felt like I was washed away in a swell of music and perfume and alcohol and cigar-smoke and laughter both false and real, but mostly false, and then I was standing by a counter of some lacquered and intaglio’d red wood and a woman with a smile as wide as the World Serpent’s must be was wishing me a wonderful evening, and inquiring as to my desires. She had a tattoo of a serpent all up one arm and around her wrist, and she was toying with the corner of a page of a ledger of some kind. My desires were mostly not the sort she could service, being more along the lines of striking one of those gentlemen of Jasper in the face or running away at once or both. I held my hat to my chest and stammered like a hayseed.

  “Well, ma’am, I don’t know, I don’t rightly know, I am new in town, it’s all just about more than a body can . . . I mean I don’t know, miss. I feel overcome. Back in Hamlin we never had any such . . . or I mean to say . . . Well maybe I should sit down . . . may I?”

  I sat heavily on a bench and began to dab at my forehead with a handkerchief. Another guest took my place in the woman’s attention.

  I sat with my hat in my lap and I watched the crowd.

  It was an immense room, with paintings and green plants and fireplaces on every wall and shadowed corners. I shall not say who I saw in it because I do not always know who survived Jasper’s fall and who did not, and maybe those who did not survive had wives or children who did. Suffice it to say that many of the great and the good of Jasper attended the Floating World. It was what the sophisticated people of the big cities call an open secret, I guess. I did not see Mr. Baxter but I saw men who I believed from what I overheard of their conversation were notable in just about every other business or faith or union in town. That is not to say that I did not also see hayseeds and rubes and prospectors with filthy hands and their hair slicked back attempting to ape what they imagined were the manners of city gentlemen. Desire is a great leveler. I saw no fewer than half a dozen Senators, or I think I did, because like I have said all Senators look much the same to me. Three of them were laughing together over some joke, which the women they’d bought pretended to find funny. A fourth came and joined them and said something and suddenly none of them were laughing.