by Felix Gilman
Mr. Nolt told me that his men were assaulting the Floating World that night.
“Informing you, sir, in your capacity as chief executive. You see some of the men to be used in the assault are detectives in the employ of the— in your employ, now.”
“What do I care? But if you’re—”
“You see sir the bitch has holed up there— who can be sure how many men she has with her. There are tunnels under that place or else we’d use rockets, you see. Who can be sure what kind of awful things go on down there. It’ll be bloody, that’s for sure.”
I stood. I seem to recall I was wearing one of the old man’s white nightshirts, finely made in the fashion of bygone decades, faintly malodorous.
“I don’t care about your men, Mr. what ever your damn name is, but my sister Jess is up there. Down there. It’s not her fault—”
“I know, Mr. Ransom, sir. We know very well where everyone is. Now I can’t make any promises, this thing has to be done and it has to be done fast, but maybe we can make an effort to see she comes to no accidental harm— you see you can be sure we know what she looks like, you can be sure of that. But you see you’ll have to be accommodating in return.”
“I think I’ve been accommodating enough, Mr. Nolt.”
“As you please, sir.”
He turned to go. My nerve failed me.
“Wait—Nolt, wait.”
He stopped in the doorway.
“Nolt—You’ll see she comes to no harm?”
“Well,” he said.
That is why I gave that speech at the premises of one Mr. Baxter’s munitions factories— now my factories. I dressed up in a fine black suit and I stood among the idle machinery and I spoke to the workers. Normal business would be resumed very soon, I promised them. The crisis would soon pass and order would be restored. Things would get better and better forever thereafter. Those who remained loyal and law-abiding would receive raises. As soon as the crisis was resolved there would be work for every able-bodied man in Jasper, mass-manufacturing the Bomb. Applause, cheering, stamping, caps thrown in the air. I am good at giving speeches.
The assault took place that night. A dozen of the Vessels converged from all four corners of the city— I watched from the window of the old man’s Tower as smoke trails criss-crossed the night sky. The Vessels climbed the bluffs and circled around and around the grounds of the Floating World, shooting at windows and gunning down whoever they saw in the rose-gardens or canoodling on the benches among the ivy— it was Mr. Nolt’s opinion, he told me, that nobody in such a filthy place could be innocent.
I did not see the fighting but I heard about it, because I was permitted to wait in the Big Office in Mr. Baxter’s Tower while the assault took place, and the reports that came in on the telegraph machines were translated for me.
By the Big Office I mean the place where I first met Mr. Baxter. That was what we called it. It was full of telegraphs and Linesmen in uniform. I was still wearing the black suit but I had loosened my neck-tie.
Initial reports were promising. The Vessels encircled the grounds, preventing escape. A group of two dozen detectives approached the premises. They offered a warrant before smashing down the door. Girls screamed, Senators threw themselves on the floor and begged for mercy. The detectives took names and confiscated weapons.
“You see,” Mr. Nolt said, nodding as he scanned the reports that came in on the telegraphs. “You see.”
“What about my sister, Nolt? You promised she’d be safe.”
“I promised we’d try, Mr. Ransom, sir. We’ll see, won’t we?”
The detectives broke into the cellars and hauled sobbing women out of their hiding-places. They wrestled hand-to-hand with Jen’s men in the tunnels. They beat them with sticks to the floor. They strapped them to chairs and questioned them. Jen could not be found.
“Well,” Mr. Nolt said. “She thinks she can hide? Run? We’ll see about that. We’ll see.”
Not a single one of the detectives died for the first forty-five minutes. After that they started dropping dead like it was their job to do so, each one shot without warning in the back, with no sign of the shooter— which was blamed in the reports that came back to the Big Office on the fact that it was dark in the Floating World, and all the women were in red and looked alike, and the flames in the fireplaces everywhere flickered and made strange shadows, and kept rising and rising and could not by any natural means be extinguished, until the surviving detectives were forced to retreat into the gardens. Fire leapt from the windows. The grass withered and the roses turned black and the statues cracked with the heat. Girls fled, their hair on fire. Updrafts of hot air and smoke made the Vessels unsteady— the rotary-wing Vessels shook like boats in a storm and three of them crashed. Canvas wings caught fire. Nobody was exactly sure how Scarlet Jen escaped but one of the Vessels went missing. One of the detectives reported seeing her standing on the burning roof as the Vessels wobbled by— it’s possible she stole it.
Mr. Nolt’s face fell as he read the reports.
“I see,” he said.
“What do you see? Look at me, Nolt. What about my sister? Nolt? What about my sister? You promised.”
Mr. Nolt placed the reports in a neat pile and walked silently out of the Big Office.
That was the first time I stood in the Big Office while the Linesmen worked— not the last. Standing in the Big Office I learned all about Gentleman Jim Dark’s various skirmishes with the occupying forces. By the time the Floating World burned Dark had organized a mob of several hundred men and in the days after the burning they put on a pretty good show, if that’s the sort of show you like. Mostly they burned and looted. Dark was everywhere in the city, rallying the mob, laughing and making speeches and handing out ill-gotten loot with aplomb. He invariably wore a top hat and a vest in the purple and gold of the Jasper City flag and in his speeches he compared his mustache to the horns of the Jasper City Bull. If there was any kind of strategic purpose to his activities I don’t know what it was, and neither did the officers of the Line. Later he told the newspapers that it was all only sport and maybe that is all it was to him. He was never caught but soon enough his mob shrank to nothing, while the number of Linesmen in the city only kept growing and growing.
I never saw Nolt again. After the fiasco of the raid on the Floating World he was replaced by a Mr. Lime, like I think I said. I guess they shot Nolt, or he shot himself, or he was sent to the front somewhere. I do not know. After the Floating World burned I guess you could say my spirit was broken. I was dead certain Jess was dead and that it was my fault. I had bargained and sold everything I had, I had given the Line everything they wanted, and I had not been able to do any good with it at all. I could not save anyone. I could not eat or sleep. I stopped asking about my sister and I stopped asking what they had done with Adela. I was scared to hear the answer. I remember that Mr. Lime came to me in the pent house and put papers in front of me to sign and I signed them just to make his face go away. Later they came to drive me somewhere to make a speech. I went with them without thinking twice. I did what I was told. It got easier every time. I stopped even day-dreaming of escape.
Two of the stagehands from the Ormolu died in the service of Jim Dark’s merry band. I learned this later from reports filed.
Mr. Quantrill from the Ormolu died in a stampede of cattle on Swing Street.
I can tell you how a lot of what happened happened, but not everything. I don’t know how come there was a stampede on Swing Street. All I know is that toward the end of the fighting somebody poisoned most of the cattle still penned in the Yards— I don’t know who. I would say it was the work of Jim Dark’s men but he always denied it. The Linesmen were baffled too. Most of the animals died. Some escaped their pens, maddened and frothing, charging through the city, and a few of them made it all the way to Swing Street, where Mr. Quantrill according to eye-witnesses stood in the street with his cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, frozen as the big bea
sts rounded the corner and came crashing down the street, like he was an actor playing at being a statue.
There were roughly one hundred Folk slaves in the Yards before the fighting started. Some time in the middle of things they escaped, leaving no tracks. I hope they made it out.
Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson remained in the city until the last possible minute, recording what he saw for posterity. At the time I wondered why he bothered but now I understand. After the Evening Post’s offices burned he moved into a house on the bluffs, from which he escaped by a back door when the detectives finally came for him. He fled the city by cover of night, taking only his typewriter in a suitcase. He has written about that better than I can.
I can tell you that it was the Agent Rattlesnake Renner who burned the Senate down. He was caught in the act and executed by hanging without delay. Of course his demon master could not be killed, the Linesmen not having either Liv’s weapon or mine to hand— its vessel could be smashed, but the thing itself returned to the Lodge of the Guns, beneath the earth or up in the sky or out in the far unexplored west or wherever it is, if it is a place— returned to wait and brood until it was ready to take a new servant and return to the world.
“That’s where you come in, Ransom,” said Mr. Lime, who was as cheerful and friendly that day as any Officer of the Line has ever been.
“One day we’ll burn down their Lodge itself, Ransom. One day. And that’s where you and your Bomb come in.”
He put a hand on my shoulder. That is the only time I have ever been touched in a friendly way by an Officer of the Line and I did not know how to respond.
“We’ll settle business with the city soon enough,” he said. “Then we’ll get to work.”
I’ve heard all the rumors about how in the last days of the fighting Liv and John Creedmoor showed up to join in the excitement. According to some accounts they had an army of Folk behind them, armed with sharp spears and strange magic, with storm and madness and evil eye, with dreadful old-world savagery, with a sound of terrible drumming. Some accounts say that it was their dreadful weapon that destroyed the Senate, or the Floating World. “Jasper will not fall to the Line,” John Creedmoor said as he stood on the Senate’s steps and wound the handle of his secret weapon, “it’ll burn first,” as the lightning struck on all sides of him and the Senate’s roof cracked open like an egg, “This is the end of the world.”
Well, none of that is true. I don’t know where they were but they were not in Jasper City. There was enough destruction without them and nobody needed their help.
A troupe of Swing Street actors in Folk masks of white wood and horse-hair manes were mistaken for the real thing and that started a panic that ended in arrests and the closure of Swing Street by order of the Archway Engine itself— the Street was cordoned off at all entrances by barbed wire. By that time the Linesmen had taken just about the whole city and they were cordoning off streets as they pleased, and defoliating the parks.
The fighting did not last long. The whole Battle of Jasper lasted less than two weeks. That was thanks to the excellence of the Engines’ planning, Mr. Lime assured me, but in a small way it was thanks to me. By stepping into Old Man Baxter’s shoes and lending my name to the cause of order, he said, I had helped to smooth over what might have been a significantly more troublesome transition.
If I had done things differently then who knows, maybe Jasper would have fought back and won its freedom. Mr. Lime did not think so but maybe he was wrong. Maybe Jasper would have fallen anyhow, only more people would have died. I believe that I did what seemed best at the time, under difficult circumstances.
Gentleman Jim Dark fled the city like a rat from a burning building as soon as things went south for him. He rode out on the road west at evening, with a Vessel in pursuit and the last few gold bars from the sack of the Jasper City Bank in his saddlebags, and he spent the next six months drifting from town to town on the Rim, boasting of how he may not have won the Battle of Jasper City but damn it he’d let the bastards know they were in a fight.
Scarlet Jen was made of sterner stuff. I guess the way she saw things Jasper City was hers and had always been hers and she would not leave it, she would rather die when it did. I admire that.
In the Linesmen’s files I read all about how she’d been in the Floating World for sixty years, seventy, or more, collecting secrets and scheming and blackmailing and what ever else Agents of the Gun do. The demon that rode her gave her long life and it made her beautiful. Don’t think it didn’t make her dangerous too. She cut her hair short and she wore trousers she’d taken from a dead employee of the Baxter Detective Agency and for ten days, even while the Linesmen’s trucks roared into the city along every road carrying men and machines, she roamed free. Unlike Gentleman Jim Dark she had no mob and she didn’t give speeches or pose for photographs or talk to the newspapers. Nor did she make demands or offer justifications or claim that right was on her side. She just killed.
Mr. Lime had a map made on the wall of the Big Office showing the place where she’d shot an officer from the rooftops, and another place where she’d murdered a whole checkpoint, and the place where she’d somehow cracked an Ironclad’s shell and the place where a lucky Private Second Class had shot her in the leg and she’d limped away bleeding, cursing out loud for her demon to heal her. It didn’t take a genius to see a kind of spiral drawn on that map, starting out across the river but coming in over the bridge to Fenimore, and around and around the outskirts of that occupied island, constantly probing and testing the defenses arrayed around the spiral’s central point, which of course was Baxter’s Tower.
Mr. Lime folded his arms behind his back, studied his map, nodded. “She’s coming for you, Mr. Ransom, sir.”
“I guess she is, Mr. Lime. I’m flattered.”
“Well, too late, isn’t it? They’ve lost. You’re with us now.” I waited in the Big Office for days and I watched them make marks on the map as incidents were reported in— always closer and closer— an inch here, an inch there. I’ll confess that I was rooting for her to make it all the way.
She didn’t.
“Good work, everyone,” Mr. Lime said. With his thumb he pushed one last pin into the map, then stood back and examined it with satisfaction. “Good work.”
My sister Jess survived the burning of the Floating World too, though I did not learn that for many months— not until long after Jasper City had fallen. The barricades had gone up and gone down again. The rest of the world called it the Battle of Jasper but in the language of the new administration it was the Recent Emergency, and what ever you called it it was over. I was so well settled into my new employment that I no longer started when an Officer of the Line called me sir, and whole days went by when I thought neither of escape nor suicide. Every morning I sat at the old man’s desk— my desk— and I answered my correspondence— some days I no longer needed the Officers of the Line standing at my shoulder to tell me what to write.
I guess it must have been a mistake that the report regarding miss jessica hite, neé ransom, was sent across my desk. The Line makes more mistakes than you’d think. Maybe it was a friendly power, still looking out for me in spite of everything. Anyhow the report said that Miss Hite had been seen down in a place in the Deltas that I won’t name, under an alias that I won’t write, and asked “whether action should be taken to retrieve her.” I tore the damn thing up and ate it. That small act of rebellion gave me the strength to go on for another six months. I was still a prisoner but knowing that she was alive gave me the strength to start thinking again.
Neither the author of the report nor I had any notion how she’d escaped the burning of the Floating World, not to mention the military cordon around Jasper City. Maybe the world is not always as hard a place as it pretends. I never tried to track her down. That was the best thing I could do for her.
THE FOURTH PART
RANSOM CITY
CHAPTER 28
THE BEGINNING OF THE FOURTH PART
To my way of thinking the Battle of Jasper City ended on the day when Scarlet Jen died at a checkpoint on Zelda Street. As I write this that was four years ago almost to the day. It is not an occasion anybody ever celebrates or mourns, not even back in the Territory, maybe because since then so many places have fallen to one side or the other and then fallen back. Ever since we brought our secret weapons and our rumors of weapons and the Bomb into the world there has been a whole lot of History, more than anyone can remember. More than I could write down even if I had forever, and I do not.
Nobody in this country would remember the date anyhow— out here Jasper City is just a rumor of something ancient and magnificent back east, like how people in Jasper City thought about the old countries back over the mountains. They hardly even know who I am. I guess our visit to these parts must be the strangest thing they’ve ever seen.
We are far out on the Rim, not far from a little town I won’t name and by the edge of a big west-flowing river I won’t name either. It is not the same river I mentioned in Chapter Twelve. We are striking the boats.
The Beck brothers turned out to be first-rate boatsmen. They had told me they were boatsmen when they joined up but I had thought it was only bravado, because in addition to boat-handling they are fist-fighters and crack shots and they know what do with horses and sheep and rope and how to read direction from trees and stars and how to tell if there is gold in a river and Josh Beck even says with a wink that he knows a bit of Folk magic. Ransom City is lucky to have them.
By the by the boats were bought for us by Mr. Lung, who after Amaryllis died left the city and struck out north-west and to make a long story short he ended up making his fortune in Melville City, which has now put itself on the map as the Cleanest City on the Western Rim. He was in a coffee house in Melville City a couple of months back when one of his acquaintances among Melville’s business elite handed him one of my letters. It was the letter that began: to whom it may concern to whoever picks this up to all free-thinking men and women of peace and goodwill i invite you to join me in the city of the future.