by Felix Gilman
The man in the black suit beside him said, “Ransom’s here.”
It was unmistakably the accent of an Officer of the Line.
Mr. Baxter’s eyebrows twitched.
Gates shoved me forward.
“Ransom,” Mr. Baxter said. He was almost too quiet to hear. “Ransom.”
“The man who says he built a free-energy process, Mr. Baxter,” Shelby explained. “The man who stole from—”
“Yes, yes. I know, I know who he is. Well, let’s look at you, then, let’s see you, thief.”
“I am not a thief.”
“Course you are, son, course you are. This thing of yours is mine, I have a piece of paper says so— isn’t that right, Shelby? Eh, Watt?”
Shelby murmured obsequious assent. The Linesman nodded, never taking his eyes off me. I took it that he was Watt.
“I will not tell you anything about John Creedmoor,” I said, “Or Liv, or anything— I do not know where they are, except for what I read in the newspapers, same as you. I—”
“Too late for that, son. Eh, Watt? Too late. Cat’s out of the bag, barn door’s open. That’s business. Spilt milk. In business you don’t cry over it, you hit back harder. You compete. That’s what you’re here for, son.”
“I am a free man, Mr. Baxter, and the Process is mine. I can do what I like where I like. Once upon a time I dreamed of working with you— no more. You may have money but I have truth. I intend to stand on my rights— I will litigate if I must.”
Gates laughed. Nobody else laughed until Mr. Baxter laughed, after which everyone in the room except the Linesman followed suit.
Shelby stopped laughing and pretended obsequiously to wipe tears of laughter from his eyes.
“Let us be clear, Mr. Ransom,” Shelby said. “Who did or did not make the Apparatus is beside the point, should this come to a court of law. At the time that you— ah—acquired possession of the device, you were resident in the town of East— ah—Conlan, were you not? And you were I believe indebted, you and your family, to the management of that town, which is to say a debt that was acquired by the NLC, which of course is the property of the Trust; and accordingly, should the matter of authorship be contested, you will find that ownership of all such works belongs incontestably to the Trust; indeed by absconding from Conlan with the debt un-paid you have inflicted a very present injury upon the Trust, which . . .”
Mr. Baxter reached for the mouthpiece again while Shelby talked and he drew in a deep breath from it. His eyes did not leave me.
“That is a lie,” I said. That was a feeble answer, I know. What Shelby said was not a lie. It was unfair and absurd but it was not a lie.
Baxter exhaled. “Not a question of truth, son. All a question of power. We have it, you don’t. Future is ours and will stay ours. Better that way for everybody.”
“We? Ours? Mr. Baxter, I admired you for so long— ever since I was a boy— the elevator— the ammonia-ice machine— the cash-register— all of it— freedom, fortune, fame— well, I always imagined one day I’d come here and you’d see the greatness of the Ransom Process and together we’d— laugh if you must, sir— laugh away— but how could you work for this man— why, when did you sell yourself to the Line, Mr. Baxter—?”
Detective Gates hit me in the small of my back, making me gasp and fall silent. I do not blame him. At least he spared me from further embarrassing myself.
I reflected that I did not understand the world at all. My eyes watered. I recalled the time I had caught a glimpse of the world of the Folk that lay behind or beneath or before or on top of this one, and you could not quite see it because you did not have words for it. That was what it was like in Mr. Baxter’s room.
The telegraph rattled and the two young men rushed from their respective corners of the room to be first to take down the message. The victor presented his text to the Linesman, who shook his head, not seeing fit to share it with Mr. Baxter. The old man himself inhaled or imbibed or what ever it was he was doing from his pipe, and then when he was done coughing he looked at me and said, “So are you ready to talk business like a man, Professor Ransom?”
A Portrait of Mr. Baxter
Talking business with Mr. Alfred Baxter was not the great joyful exercise I’d imagined, but it sure was an education. If all the Professors of Vansittart University could somehow be crowded into that room they would not have taught me as much about the world as Mr. Baxter did— may he rot in hell.
How long had Mr. Baxter worked for the Line? Since long before I was born. As a young man himself he’d taken up arms and fought for the Line at Log-Town and Comstock and at Black-Cap, in the armies of the Archway and the Gloriana and the Harrow Cross Engine in turn. This, he gave me to understand, was by way of promotion, or climbing the ladder closer and closer to the heart of the Line at Harrow Cross. That Engine was oldest and therefore first in their hierarchy. The multitude of ordinary citizens may not distinguish among Engines any more than you can tell one thunder-cloud from another but among themselves there is a strict hierarchy. The Line is nothing without hierarchy.
Another misconception that the multitude have is that the Line has no use for clever or handsome or ambitious men. As a matter of fact the Line can make use of anything. Everything in the world can be turned to advantage. Out on the Rim where things are still unsettled and crude the Line operates big and fierce and brutal— here in the heartland the Line finds it efficient to put on a somewhat kinder and more human face. That was what Mr. Baxter was for. Harrow Cross gave him his start. They gave him his capital and his patents. They greased his path to success. He had never sold himself to the Line because there was nothing to sell. He and the Baxter Trust and the Northern Lighting Corporation and the Baxter Detective Agency and all the rest were the creatures of the Line through and through, no less than the rocket that had come crashing through the roof of the Grand Hotel in Melville all that time ago. He was not ashamed of this, and nor was he proud of it. He spoke of it as if it was a mathematical or logical truth. A is A and two plus two is four and power is power. Fortune had nothing to do with it. Grasping the reins of history had nothing to do with it— it was entirely the other way around. As a matter of fact he had never written nor troubled himself to read a word of his own Autobiography.
He had very little hair, and what there was was bristly, and his skin was just about yellow. I think he had been a handsome fellow when he was young but he was not anymore. His eyes were sharp but his body was just about used up. I need hardly say however that Mr. Baxter was not your everyday octogenarian. He was stick-thin and he rasped and he was racked by coughing— I believe he may have been mostly deaf— yet he did not shake— he did not fidget or twitch. He made no unnecessary motions. He was steady as an Engine.
They gave me no place to sit. I had to bend almost halfway over to hear Mr. Baxter’s dry and worn-out voice. Detective Gates and Attorney-at-Law Shelby and the Linesman Watt all watched me closely.
“Those damn— and their weapon— stamped out the Red Valley Republic when I was hardly a boy and now we got to do it all again. Nothing ends. Nothing ever ends! If I had my way I’d burn all the newspapers. Look at you. Look at you. Where are they? Eh? Mr. Watt wants to question you, look at him. And now Juniper— I said I should have run Juniper too, didn’t I always say that? Free and independent, what nonsense, they’re working for the Adversary, Professor Ransom, I would stake my fortune on it. There is us and them. Yes or no. Right or wrong. Future or past. Us or that bitch at the whore house. They have their weapon and we must have ours. This thing you have. This thing you found.”
“This thing I invented, Mr. Baxter.”
“No you didn’t, Ransom. This thing— this thing is nothing natural. Heard what happened at White Rock. Gates here saw the aftermath with his own two. That right Gates?”
Gates nodded. “Hell of a thing, Mr. Baxter sir.”
“Hell of a thing. Hell of a thing! Gates has a way with words. Know what it did, Mr. Ransom? Didn
’t just kill the Agent. Killed its master too. Never happened before. Left an empty chair in their Lodge. Hell of a thing! Nothing made by the rules of our world.”
“All that was an accident, Mr. Baxter. I meant to give them illuminations. That’s what it’s for.”
“No—nothing from our world. That means you found it— something of theirs— you went digging. Digging in places best left forgotten. Where was it? Eh? Out on the Rim somewhere I’ll bet. Nonsense! Poppycock and nonsense. You know what it is, son? You know what it is? It’s a disease. It’s madness. Poke around in old dark places and you’ll get sick, sure enough. Things we built over for a reason. But we must have it. Right, Watt? They have it so we must too. Must show the world. Future is ours. Even if it must be annihilation.”
“Build it if you can Mr. Baxter, it’s none of my business.”
“Stupid boy. Stupid clever boy. Want you to come work for us.”
“How can you expect me to—?”
“I was like you once,” Mr. Baxter said, smiling. “Not like Watt here— a military man. Not like Shelby— a university brat. Nor even Mr. Gates, salt of the earth but a simple man. I see something in you—” He stopped speaking, inhaled again, and when he was done the twinkle in his eye had been turned off, and that was the last and only time he ever troubled himself to flatter me. He should have kept trying— I was susceptible back then to flattery, and I still admired the old man.
“It hardly needs to be said,” Shelby said, “that the terms of your employment will be generous. Nor I hope does it need to be repeated that under the terms of the Injunction you may not work for anyone else; nor may you work on your ‘Process’ or ‘Apparatus’ on your own behalf; furthermore—”
Shelby named sums of money that meant nothing to me. Nothing about Shelby was admirable to me.
The telegraph rattled again and the Linesman Mr. Watt went to see what new messages had come from his master.
Detective Gates admitted that he and his colleagues had been unable to secure control over the person of my sister Jess, but informed me that my sister Sue and her family remained in New Foley, while May was bringing the word of the Silver City to the Delta Territories, and that both were under close and constant observation.
Mr. Baxter croaked something so quiet that I had to bend very close indeed to hear him. The stink of him made me sick. It was mostly old age and oil and medicine.
We talked terms. I can never resist haggling.
They wanted the Process only as a weapon. As a matter of fact talk of free energy made Mr. Baxter’s lip curl. What use did they have for free anything? All the wealth in the world was already theirs. But they were desperate for a new and better weapon. Liv and Creedmoor had found something out there, after all. Or somebody had. The Angelus Engine had been destroyed at Juniper. They could not or would not tell me how.
They needed me. The Line had thousands upon thousands of engineers and scientists— it had Heavier-Than-Air Vessels and Submersibles and all manner of wonders— it had the ice-cold minds of the Engines themselves. But it was what it was, and could not be anything else. It could never speak in the language of the Process. I was therefore valuable, and that is why they were willing to bargain with me almost as if we equals.
I said that the Process must bear my name, not Baxter’s. They were willing to agree to that term, and so I said that we must light all of Jasper City, and in addition the Northern Lighting Corporation must be dismantled, and furthermore each and every one of the Folk held in the possession of Mr. Baxter or the Baxter Trust or any subsidiaries thereto must be released and restored to their homes and their freedom— and I kept on piling impossibilities upon impossibilities like that for a while. Impossibilities are my stock-in-trade, after all. Mr. Baxter told me I was an unreasonable and unruly child.
I bargained because if I had simply told them all to go to hell, who knows what they would have done to me and to May and Sue and Adela and Amaryllis and Mr. Quantrill and the fair & statuesque actress and who knows who else.
I bargained because I was badly tempted. Despite everything I now knew about Mr. Baxter and Line I was badly tempted, and full of pride to be dealing with him, even if we were not exactly equals. As our negotiation went on I even began to think I might come out ahead. I began to think I might walk out of that office with Baxter’s blessing, and the backing of his factories, and enough promises of independence from his masters that maybe I could sleep at night. I began to think that maybe Mr. Baxter might even agree to my terms. I began to think that I might turn Mr. Baxter’s power to good, and so make myself great. Mr. Baxter was still human, I thought, he was not an Engine, he had his own dreams and desires, he could be reasoned with.
What Mr. Baxter had whispered in my ear, when Mr. Watt was for a little while distracted by the telegraph, was this.
“With what you found— bigger than the Engines, son, bigger than the Engines themselves. Where do you think they come from anyhow? We made ’em— before we made ’em there were the others. The ones you stole it from. We can be like ’em, son, and never die, never get old—”
Those were his words, or as close as I can recall. I never got to find out what he was planning. I do not know if he was really planning to rebel against his masters, or only dreaming of it. He never committed any such blasphemy to writing in any of his files, as far as I was able to tell.
While we talked Mr. Baxter inhaled again and again from the mouthpiece of his apparatus. What ever it was that was in it stained his ragged lips reddish-brown and made his breath sickly-sweet. Each time his eyes were a little duller, his voice a little softer. At last his eyes closed and he fell asleep. His head did not move.
“Well,” I said.
Mr. Watt looked me in the eye.
I have not described Mr. Watt’s appearance because I cannot. There was nothing about his face that stuck in my memory.
“It doesn’t matter what the old man says,” Watt said. “You know that, right, Ransom? It doesn’t matter what he promises.”
“But—”
“We let him talk because he likes to talk. You’re dealing with the Engines themselves, Ransom. You’ll do what you have to do in the end. No promises, no deals. You’ll do what you’re told and you’ll do it on the Engines’ terms.”
“Get out of here,” Gates said. “Go sleep on it, Professor. We know where to find you now.”
CHAPTER 24
SCARLET JEN
Well I was younger back then and naïve, but not so naïve that I could not figure out that they had let me go only so that they could follow me and see who I talked to. As a matter of fact I did not know where Liv and Creedmoor were and I did not have any contact with Juniper City or whoever it was who was claiming to be the Red Valley Republic reborn and in fact I did not even know if such a thing existed, but I guess Detective Gates did not know that. A Vessel took off from the roof of Mr. Baxter’s Tower far overhead as I exited onto the street, and it circled for a while then departed north. I guess whoever was following me was on foot, where I would not notice them. I walked all over the city all afternoon, mostly to confuse and annoy the detectives, but also because I had no place else to go. I could not return to the Ormolu or the basement there or my attic room. I did not want to lead the detectives to Adela, and nor did I want to face her and apologize to her or explain myself.
It was a warm night and I was well-used to sleeping rough. I went to the park and I sat on a bench by the river. That was where Scarlet Jen found me.
She was as beautiful as all the stories say. Her laugh was a temptation all in itself. I shall not write down everything she promised me because there was something about her that made it hard to think straight and I do not remember half of her words, only how I felt.
If Mr. Baxter’s detectives were following me, they did not dare intervene— or maybe she’d quietly killed them before she sat down beside me. I do not know. Either’s possible. I have seen with my own eyes what the Agents of the Gun are capabl
e of.
She sat beside me on the bench, gathering her dress beneath her with a silken whisper that it confuses me to recall even now.
I said, “No.”
She said, “Listen to me, Harry.”
I did.
Now, Mr. Baxter had believed, or had said he believed, that what ever extraordinary weapon had been unearthed out there was in the hands of the Gun, and had been used against the Angelus Engine at Juniper. Scarlet Jen told me with a similar urgency in her voice that Creedmoor was a traitor, that his discovery had been sold to or seized by the Line, and that the spirits of the Gun Marmion and Belphegor and three or four other unearthly names I do not recall had been snuffed out like candles and no longer burned in their Lodge. The Line now had its Vessels and its Ironclads and its legions of men and it had the unstoppable weapon of the new century and the doomed cause of the Gun was more doomed than ever before, unless I helped it. She promised me fame, vengeance, freedom, power. She told me that the Line would weigh me down with law and money and Injunctions and duty until there was nothing left of my genius but dust. I wanted to say that one master was much the same as another but it was hard to argue with her or put my thoughts in order. She told me that Mr. Baxter might make promises but the Line would never keep them, it was not in their nature to deal with men as equals, whereas her masters positively loved to barter. I said I was sure that they did but I was afraid of the price. She said that I might think of myself as a mere tinkerer or businessmen, but that was only cowardice speaking— I was born for greater things. She would kill Mr. Baxter for me, she said, she would kill the lawyer Mr. Shelby. I said no. She said that she would give me the strength to kill them myself if that was what I wanted. I said I would rather not. She said that all I had to do was whistle— from now on she would always be watching.