The Rise of Ransom City

by Felix Gilman

  And et cetera.

  He sold up fast and headed south— by motor-car at first— and he caught our trail near the county of Nabilac. His wife is a beautiful and spirited young woman from Melville City who was active in the Six Thousand Club there and who is eager to build our city too, though our goals will be more modest at first. Along the way they met up with Mr. Angel Langhorne, who had not prospered so well— as a matter of fact he spent most of the years since the Battle of Jasper in prison on the Rim for fraud, and some of them in an insane asylum, and when he met up with Mr. Lung he possessed only one shoe. He still shakes and stutters and cannot look you in the eye and smells of sweat and burned hair, but none of us are perfect. His rain-making device does not quite work yet but he assures me that it is showing promise as we get further out west, where the skies are bigger and the clouds are wilder and stronger kinds of animal. I believe him. We need not fear for lack of water in Ransom City!

  For a while I hoped one of my sisters might see the letters and come find me, but they have not. I guess I don’t blame them.

  We are camped out on the edge of the river, on the edge of the world. A little way past this point the river becomes un-navigable, even for the Beck brothers. There are a few more settlements alongside the river, with deep woods all around them— then nothing that has any name in our language. In the very far distance on a very clear morning you can see mountains. Ask the locals what they’re called and they’ll shrug. They reckon Folk live there, and they have all kinds of superstitions regarding them.

  We got the Apparatus off the boat without incident except that Josh Beck slipped and soaked himself, and Mr. Langhorne laughed until he had one of his fits. The Apparatus hums constantly these days, like it is happy to be going home.

  This is the last place from which we might send back mail, and even here for mail to get to any place that counts in the world it will have to pass through many hands— a ridiculous succession of improbabilities— like one of the complex contraptions Adela and I used to build back on Swing Street. I reckon the odds are better than even that this last part of the story will get lost, sunk in the river or eaten by wolves or stuck through with spears or tossed aside as worthless by bandits or left to bleach in the hot desert somewhere, going white like the unknown places on a map.

  Miss Fleming caught sight of the smoke-trail of a scouting Vessel in the distance. I couldn’t see it myself but others with sharper eyes and a more finely honed sense of danger saw it clear enough. It turned backeast. They have spyglasses, so if we saw it it saw us.

  We are far out beyond any lands controlled by the Line. But who knows these days. Everything is falling apart and it may be that some splinter of the Line’s forces operates in this area, or they may be deserters or rebels. Who knows. They are not likely to be friendly. Whoever they are I guess I must get through my story pretty quick if I want to be sure of telling it all before they find us.

  CHAPTER 29

  MY TIME AT THE TOP

  The Baxter Trust became the Baxter-Ransom Trust.

  The transformation of the Baxter Trust into the Baxter-Ransom Trust was an operation on a military scale, surpassing even the invasion of Jasper for manpower and planning. It happened maybe three or four months after the fall of Jasper City to the Line. I had no say in the matter. I am told it was a policy decided at the highest levels, which is to say by the Engines themselves, who find it useful sometimes to operate through a human face.

  The Trust’s activities extended all over the western world, and it was essential that the transformation took place without disruption in the lines of power, and so an army of lawyers and accountants had to go out from Jasper City all across the Territory and out to the remotest mining towns on the Rim and the plantations of the Deltas and up into the cold north to handle paperwork. They even went into East Conlan. Soldiers of the Line went with them to suppress rebellious subsidiaries. I had no part in the planning of any of this except to sign my name to documents. Mostly what I remember of my first few months as President of the Baxter-Ransom Trust was signing documents. Once matters of money and power were taken care of I was presented for a public signing ceremony in Tanager Square. What was left of Jasper City’s great men sat in chairs before me and the crowd gathered behind a chain fence and I spoke through electrical amplification, promising a new start under new management and a square deal for the hard-working man of Jasper, who had the good sense to knuckle under and do his job without complaint. Sometimes Mr. Lime sat behind me while I spoke but he did not often need to threaten me. Most days I was so settled into my routine that I could make those speeches and make them well without feeling a thing.

  The roads reopened. Jasper resumed trade, notably with Gibson City, which remained under control of the Line. There was a period of truce. Life in Jasper returned to something not so very different from what it had been before, except that production shifted to a war footing.

  When I was a boy I used to dream about being a rich man, a man of power and the freedom to do as he pleases— what boy doesn’t? I tried to imagine what a man like Mr. Baxter did all day. I confess I sometimes got him mixed up with a king from a story-book about the old country, and imagined jousts and harems of a hundred beautiful women.

  I slept in a four-poster bed that had previously belonged to Mr. Baxter, in the pent house apartment that had previously been his. I was woken at six every morning, whether I liked it or not, by one of the succession of adjutants who served me or commanded me, however you chose to look at it. The adjutant’s servant carried a silver tray which in turn carried coffee, a boiled egg, a heap of correspondence and legal documents, a copy of the Jasper City Evening Post from which most news about the War had been censored, and an arrangement of chemical tablets, the finest products of the Line’s science, which I was assured would calm my moods and sharpen my thinking and regulate my bowels and prevent cancer. Anyhow I was not permitted not to take them. The newspaper was a courtesy and they did not care if I read it or not. There was little in it after the censoring except sport.

  From six until six fifteen I was left alone in the bathroom, where I did my best to perform the Ransom System of Exercises. Mr. Baxter’s bathroom was more spacious than most people’s houses and so the Exercises suffered little compromise, I am happy to report. There were gold fittings and big-breasted women made of white marble and mirrors big enough for the vanity of a King. A row of ivory boxes and greasy-looking jars on a shelf along the back wall held relics of Old Man Baxter, such as his false teeth and his spectacles and his wigs and breathing-tubes and syringes and his mechanical hearing-trumpet and his artificial foot. Sometimes I used to look at those and think of the failing sight in my bad eye and the various aches and pains I had accumulated out on the Rim and I contemplated the years ahead of me with dread.

  At six fifteen if I had not emerged the adjutant opened the door regardless.

  I signed legal documents for a period of time that varied from two minutes to half an hour, depending on whether I bothered to ask questions as to their meaning or raise any kind of futile protest against any injustice I saw in them. Sometimes I did— truth is, not often.

  Then until half-past nine I sat at the old man’s writing-desk and answered correspondence. The desk was heavy and made of a very fine wood that was so black it looked burned and in the middle of it sat the big triplicate typewriter, which so far as I know is the only one of its kind in the world. Most of the correspondence was about business, letters from Mayors or Senators or the executives of subsidiary operations of the Baxter-Ransom Trust, like the Northern Lighting Corporation or the Conlan Coal Company. If it was important the adjutants told me what to write.

  In my first month at the top I got at least a hundred letters from creditors from back in East Conlan or all over the Western Rim who reckoned I owed them money, and I guess I most likely did. All plausible claims were paid promptly and with interest. A few ambitious fellows attempted to bring lawsuits against me personally or
the Baxter-Ransom Trust but they got a quick visit from the detectives of the BaxterRansom Agency, who taught them a thing or two about how the world works. Soon enough all my debts were cleared. I had never been debt-free since I was a knee-high child and I cannot say I altogether enjoyed the sensation— I felt like my strings had been cut.

  I got letters from small boys in far-flung towns all over the West who wanted to know how come I made it from a nobody like them to the top of the tallest tower in Jasper City and I told them anyone who worked hard and played the game by the rules could get ahead, just like it said in Mr. Baxter’s Autobiography.

  On days when my correspondence was done before nine thirty I was permitted to stand by the window and stare out over Jasper City. I watched the new towers go up to fill the holes the Battle had knocked in the skyline. The cranes were taller than redwoods, and they were constructed in the Station of Harrow Cross and brought south on the backs of trucks to Jasper City and assembled by workmen in my employ and leased to the city by the Baxter-Ransom Trust for a sum so staggering I shall not write it down or you will think I am telling tall tales.

  At nine thirty I dressed in a black suit and was taken down in the private elevator to the room that contained the old man’s fleet of black motor-cars. I shook the hand of what ever adjutant awaited me and said, “Well, Mr. whoever-you-are, where is it today?” Usually it was some factory somewhere, where I spoke to the workers, or a meeting with Senators to discuss the defense of the city, at which I sat quietly while the adjutant spoke.

  Sometimes on these journeys my routine was enlivened by an attempt at assassination. The Agents Procopio “Dynamite” Morse, Black John Boles, Pearl Starr, and Red-Headed Dick all made attempts upon my life at one time or another. Gentleman Jim Dark returned to Jasper City six months after he first fled and boasted in taverns about what he would do when he got his hands on me, but I can tell you that he never did get up the grit to attack my car. Of all the Agents who tried it was Procopio Morse who got closest to success. With well-placed dynamite beneath a manhole on Seventh Street he managed to turn the car right over like a beetle on its back, and when he tore off the door I spilled out dazed and bleeding onto the street between his boots and I lay on my back looking up at him. He was a black fellow with a broad nose and a wild mop of reddish hair and a big black bow-tie and a brass-buttoned black coat and everything about him was handsome except for his hands, which were burned and club-like. Anyhow he stood over me and made a speech, which I guess was heart-felt and proud and impassioned from the look on his face but it was wasted on me because of the way my ears were still ringing, and it gave the Linesmen in the car behind a chance to shoot him. He fell on top of me. I recall saying “Thank you, well done, good work” to the officers who pulled him off me and helped me to stand.

  At one I took lunch alone in the dining room of the old man’s penthouse apartment. Paintings all around the room bore the likenesses of thirty-eight Engines, which all looked alike to me. I ate lightly. Mr. Baxter was an old man and had had little taste for rich food— the bill of fare was fixed and invariable. At least I did not ask them to vary it— who knows if they would have. Dinner was at seven under the same circumstances. Like me, Mr. Baxter was a Vegetarian. From two until seven I worked in a laboratory of the Northern Lighting Corporation, which had been given to me for the development and refinement of the Process. After dinner I continued my researches and correspondence at the old man’s writing-desk, sitting beneath a circle of cold electric light, typing away on this very machine right here. The Line’s finest chemical science ensured that I slept by midnight every night, and did not dream.

  The first time I refused to cooperate with Mr. Lime’s instructions was, as I recall, when I was asked to sign a document authorizing the seizure and depopulation of certain territories on the South-Western Rim— well, I will say no more, for I have enough enemies. It was shortly after I had learned of my sister’s survival, and I was starting to think for myself again.

  “No,” I said.

  “No?”

  “No, Lime. Take it away.”

  He waited very patiently for me to change my mind. You have never seen a more patient man in all your life. His face was as blank as a clock, ticking its way toward midnight. I flatter myself that my face was firm as well. When he saw that I would not easily relent he simply gathered up the papers and left me alone in the pent house. He locked the door behind him and had the lights turned off. At first I thought I had won. It took me a while to realize that he had ordered no food or water to be brought to me until I changed my mind. I am telling the truth when I say that I held out for a long time before giving in— as a matter of fact I was so weak from hunger and thirst that I could hardly pull the bell-rope to summon him back. They did not come when I summoned, but waited until I was near-dead before opening the door, letting in a great blast of electric-light that at first I thought was the light of the next world, and they hoisted me on the shoulders of two heavyset officers and swept me down to the infirmary in the Tower’s basement. While I lay on a bed down there I seemed to hear many voices talking to me, and I dare say all of them were really just nurses or doctors or Officers of the Line, but it seemed to me that I heard the voice of Liv Alverhuysen, counseling silence, cunning, and subterfuge, and I heard the voice of my old friend Mr. Carver counseling patience.

  When Mr. Lime presented the document to me again, I signed it. I do not mean to say that I rebelled that way often. I did not. Sometimes I pretended to be sick, retreating to my bed like a child— I am not very proud of that, but you play the hand you are dealt. When the discomfort of my situation became too great there were chemicals that the Line’s doctors could provide, ones that would help to calm you or to take away anxiety or to narrow and sharpen your thinking. Sometimes I asked for them. For the most part I did not need them. The truth is that for the most part I cooperated, telling myself I was biding my time, waiting for my moment to escape or to turn the tables on the Line. I kept thinking that I could do some good with Baxter’s money. I kept thinking that for longer than you might credit, but it is the truth. I used Mr. Baxter’s money to establish the Baxter-Ransom Scholarship for Poor Boys and Girls, and although it only lasted for two years before everything fell apart it was not a bad thing to have done. I am not a fool and I do not imagine that it counts for much set against everything else.

  Often, and more and more as the months went by, I forgot to resist, even in my own mind. I forgot that I was playing a part. I found myself taking plea sure in the triumphs of the Baxter-Ransom Trust, the way Mr. Baxter must have.

  My work in the laboratory kept me sane, or just about sane enough. I could forget about politics and I could forget about right and wrong. I could think about nothing except the work itself.

  A whole basement floor beneath the Baxter-Ransom Tower was cleared out for the reconstruction of the Apparatus, and a couple dozen Line engineers were assigned to assist me. Some of them were from Harrow Cross, and others were formerly employed by the Northern Lighting Corporation. They could have given me a thousand Line engineers and they would not have been the equal of one half of Mr. Carver or Adela Kotan Iermo and I was not shy about telling them so. Nevertheless within a few weeks all the grimy and sinister stone corridors beneath the Baxter-Ransom Tower were lit by the lights of the Process, and the elevators were powered by it too— not that Mr. Lime was impressed.

  “That’s not what you’re here for, Ransom.”

  “The Process is free-energy—it’ll save the Baxter-Ransom Trust a substantial sum— I know, I’ve seen the books.”

  “You’re here because of the Miracle at White Rock, Mr. Ransom. You’re here because you promised Bomb-making.”

  “Never my words. And White Rock was an accident and not easy to replicate. These things take time.”

  “You’re here because the other side has their secret weapon, and we must have ours. You’re here because of what you found. You’re here because of dumb luck. Never f
orget that you’re replaceable, Mr. Ransom, that’s my advice to you if you mean to survive in this life.”

  “Replace me then, Lime, and see how far you get.”

  Not long after that Mr. Lime himself was replaced. That was right about when I stopped remembering the names of the adjutants.

  I guess that was about the time when the Concord of the Barons down in the Delta declared for the Republic, and so did the Territory of Thurlow. Dr. Lysvet Alverhuysen was appointed First Speaker of the Republic, second in rank only to the President himself. The Gloriana and Dryden Engines met their end. The Northwest Territory was swept by a wave of little rebellions. There was word that the abandoned town of White Rock had been taken over by a group of the Folk, who were not afraid of the transformations that had been worked on that place, and who were letting nobody across the pass. I guess they do not make the same mistake twice. The adjutants tried their best to keep news of the War from me but things slipped out. The rebellions in the Northwest Territory disrupted the Baxter-Ransom Trust’s operations so badly that I was forced to spend hours signing documents. Anyhow by the time the historians sort out who did what when and how I will be long gone, one way or the other.