The Rise of Ransom City

by Felix Gilman

  I guess I was born without much of a sense of danger but it is a muscle like any other and I had given it years of exercise. I did not know what was going to happen but it seemed to me better to take my chances with the drop than stay where I was.

  I let go. As I fell backwards through the air the Engine screamed and a big cloud of gray-white steam emerged from its vents and swallowed up the whole scaffold, stripping paint and warping wood and boiling that poor fellow right where he stood, rock in his hand.

  I had the good fortune to land on an Officer of the Line. I broke my hip-bone but I was otherwise unharmed.

  The Kingstown Engine withdrew from the Station, gaining speed as it went. In another few minutes it was gone entirely, leaving only smoke and heat behind. The fighting continued on the Concourse for a while but I was picked up by two Officers of the Line and taken to what they called safety, and I called captivity. With my hip-bone and shoulder broken there was little I could do except hang there with my arms around their shoulders and go where they steered me.

  I said, “Who are they? Who are these people— what’s going on— wait, hold on—”

  I still do not know who they were. There were at least one hundred of them and my best guess is that most of them were working men from the factories and Yards of Jasper City, and that what ever connection they had to the Republic was only in their heads. That’s all I can say.

  Anyhow after that incident the authorities of the Line decided that Jasper City was too dangerous, and so they relocated me to Gibson City, and then six weeks later to Harrow Cross, along with Old Man Baxter’s triplicate typewriter and my adjutants and all the engineers and the prototypes and in fact the entire Ransom Project, by which I mean the Bomb.

  CHAPTER 30

  INFORMATION

  Too much has already been written about the sounds and the smells and the sights of Harrow Cross, oldest and biggest and foremost of the Stations of the Line— you could make a heap of words as tall as its tallest spike— I do not have the time or the inclination to add to that heap. The Official Statistical Digest of the Surveyors of the Line boasts of the Station’s size and power— Harrow Cross is to Jasper City as Jasper City is to East Conlan. There is nothing bigger than it. It is as far as you can go in that particular direction. The mad poetess Miss Hermosa Goucher of Keaton City wrote a poem about the place called “The Scream” and though she never visited it but only saw it in a dream, I hear her poem is well-regarded, if you like that kind of thing— I must warn you though that it does not rhyme. Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson stayed for three months in 1874 in a hotel on one of the sky-scraping upper levels above the smog, and later he wrote a book about it called On the Men Who Toil in Darkness, that was banned in Line territories but I hear it sold pretty well elsewhere. I don’t reckon much changed in Harrow Cross between 1874 and when I was there except that the smog level rose to engulf Mr. Carson’s hotel and the thing was converted into tenements. I recommend it to you, the same way I recommend all the works of my friend Mr. Carson to you. May he write kindly of me when I am gone!

  The Agent Jim Dark wrote an account of how one time he stole into the Station and fought through its labyrinth of lightless tunnels and wrestled with gas-powered pistons with his bare hands and outwitted an Engine in its lair and escaped in a stolen aircraft. It is called How I Fought in the Great War, and officially it is banned in the remaining territories of the Line, but in reality it is freely available as an example of how everything the Line’s enemies say is lies and bullshit and self-flattery.

  Old Man Baxter himself or whoever wrote his Autobiography sang for many pages the praises of Harrow Cross’s pistons and steam and smoke and industry and how every man there was sorted into his proper place, some at the top and some at the bottom, according to their nature. I am ashamed to say that when I read those pages as a boy I thought only about what it was like at the top.

  This morning we saw the trail of Heavier-Than Air Vessels overhead, criss-crossing, hunting. Miss Fleming was the first to notice the trails but I saw them clearly enough. They are fading now, which I guess means that the Vessels have moved on, or returned to their base to report. Back in Harrow Cross the sky was always dark with smoke but out here it is a very strange sight.

  They moved me from Jasper City to Harrow Cross by motor-car, under light guard, for reasons of secrecy. Ordinarily dignitaries such as myself would have been moved by Engine, but from the gossip of the officers who drove me and guarded me I learned that the Engines were no longer considered safe. The Engines themselves were targets now. This fact frightened the officers so much they could not stop themselves from talking about it, as if by repeating the absurdity of it they could prove to themselves that it was not true.

  I did not want to go to Harrow Cross. I wanted to be free again. But though things were changing and the discipline of the Line was not what it once was, its officers could not be bribed to let me go. They just ignored all my offers.

  They helped me out of the back of the motor-car and as they helped me to stand I opened my mouth to make one last attempt to bribe or cozen them but the noise and stench and hugeness of the Station took my words from me. They said, “This way sir,” and they moved me from the motor-car bays of the Station’s Arch Six up through a maze of corridors and elevators to a tower-top apartment, taller by far than Mr. Baxter’s pent house, from which I could look down from high windows into many-layered canyons of black metal, all the way down to the depths where I cannot think any daylight ever reached— the darkness crawled with what I think were men and women and machines.

  Officially the story was that I remained the head of the Baxter-Ransom Trust, and that I had been removed from Jasper City to Harrow Cross only so that I could be given the finest medical treatments available, after the injuries I sustained in the cowardly and underhanded and unsuccessful &c attack, in which I had bravely though unnecessarily stood between the assassin’s bullet and the Kingstown Engine.

  It was true that I had been injured. It was weeks before I regained the use of my right arm, and months before it was strong again, and I still have some pain in it. I had to learn to write my correspondence with my left hand.

  My leg was not quick to heal either— I blame it on the bad air of Harrow Cross, and my conditions of confinement. For months I was stuck in a Wheelchair. This was a heavy contraption of metal and hard black rubber, a noisy rattling menace. It was never under any circumstances comfortable, like a device constructed for the self-mortification of an old-country Saint. Its wheels constantly threatened to sever wayward fingers, and once it started rolling sometimes the brakes could barely stop it and I was a danger to myself and anyone in my path. An adjutant was assigned to push me. This one was a woman, and she must have been stronger than she looked. I did not ask her name and she did not tell me. She addressed me as Sir, with contempt. Every day like clockwork she pushed me up and down the long electric-lit corridors and elevators and across the expanse of concrete rooftop between my quarters and the laboratories where they were building the Bomb.

  In Jasper City I had been a prisoner, but also a dignitary. I’d been the heir to the Baxter Trust, the man in the pent house, a man of many philanthropic enterprises, the wealthiest and most successful fellow for miles around. It was all an illusion, but a powerful one, and often even I thought that it was real. In Harrow Cross they did not play the same game. I was not admired or adored or respected. I was not called on to give speeches to the masses. I was not quoted in the newspapers— there were no newspapers. In Harrow Cross there were no Great Men. They were beyond such notions. My job was to advise on the construction of the Bomb. That was all.

  Truth is I had little to do with it. I had delayed and prevaricated and fed my captors false information for as long as I could, but bit by bit I had let slip too much of the truth, and now the engineers of the Line hardly needed me at all. The project was gathering its own momentum. Tests took place and the results were reported to me in the form of a rapidl
y upward-rising line on a chart pinned to the wall of the laboratory. The engineers were eager but silent young men who never questioned what they were doing. They talked over my head. They looked forward with quiet pride to the moment when they would win the approval of the Engines, when the Bomb was ready to be used against their enemies.

  When the phantoms started appearing again I was pleased to have somebody to talk to, even if they never talked back, just stood there looking stiff and wide-eyed and open-mouthed with alarm.

  If you have never been in a Station of the Line you probably imagine that every moment in a Station is spent in the presence of the Engines. They are so immense— how could you not live in their shadow? Well, they are immense but their Stations are bigger. Truth is I rarely set eyes on one of the Engines while I was held in Harrow Cross. Sometimes I saw their smoke as they approached or departed across the plains. Sometimes I felt their vibrations through the floor or in my gut. Sometimes I got telegrams from the Engines themselves, full of bluster and menace:

  ransom. we expect progress.

  ransom. do not fail us.

  ransom. we elevated you. is this how you repay us? explain yourself ransom.

  Everyone told me this was a great honor but I did not enjoy it. Once and only once I replied. dear engines. a proposal. purpose of bomb is to destroy the demons of the gun. we have no demons to experiment on. no complaint intended but none have been captured for us. great obstacle to research. however any spirit will do, & there are still a great many engines in the world. perhaps 1 or 2 volunteers could be spared as experimental subjects?

  That resulted in a storm of telegrams condemning my blasphemy and making threats of terrible tortures and I would like to say that did not scare me but truth is it did.

  I got telegrams from just about all of the Engines but most often from the Kingstown Engine, until I began to feel that we had a kind of connection, me and It, that we had been through difficult times together, back in the swamp and in Jasper City, and that a bond of adversity had been forged. There were times when I wanted to please it.

  I guess you would also imagine that in Harrow Cross every secret is top secret and nothing happens without the Engines knowing of it, not a word is whispered, not a sparrow flies without it being noted and logged somewhere in the cold recesses of the Engines’ minds. Well it is true that no sparrow flies there, but that is on account of the smoke and the noise. It is not true that there are no secrets. In fact Harrow Cross contains so many files and spies and so much information that it cannot be contained. It spills out. It falls through the cracks. The Engines banned loose talk— they required all mail to be censored— they forbade whispering and gossip and gatherings of more than four persons other than on official business— but when everything is forbidden nothing is forbidden. I am not the first to say that the Gun and the Line are more alike in some ways than they pretend.

  I should have had access only to those files that I needed for my researches— that wasn’t how it was. There were so many files! They had to go somewhere. An error of a single digit on a requisition form was the difference between experimental observations regarding the aftermath of the white rock incident and report on the communications capacity of the red republic— an error of a single digit on a routing order was the difference between sending some preliminary predictions on the expected growth of the rim economies to me or to whoever’s business it rightly was. The Ether was thick with telegraph-messages just like the air was thick with smoke, and no wonder that often they ran afoul of each other, so that the wrong man was sent to the front, or projects begun or ended for no obvious reason. Anyhow it is on account of this tendency toward error that I know so much about the population of Melville City and the history of Jasper City and about banned books and the exploits of Jim Dark and how motor-cars and Injunctions work and a hundred other things. I guess if I had to describe Harrow Cross, that is how I would describe it. I did not get out into the streets a whole lot and I never set foot in a factory. Harrow Cross was a deluge of numbers and orders and words and facts.

  News of the War was forbidden in Harrow Cross, except for the maddening deafening moving-pictures stories of triumph that played in monumental black-and-white on the walls of the Station’s towers and fortifications. The moving-pictures are sporting, I think— they tell you from the start that everything in them is a lie, because no ordinary soldier of Line has ever been so tall or so square-jawed or handsome as those ten-foot-high faces on the walls. But I heard the truth anyhow, or fragments of it. The engineers whispered. I heard conversation in the halls. Even the adjutant could not keep her mouth shut. I heard about the siege of Juniper, and how the mercenaries of the Gun broke it. I heard the news about the Collier Hill and Arkeley Engines and how they were both removed from the world in the space of one day, when they confronted the forces of the Republic— the real thing that time. I heard about the defeat of the Line’s armies at Chatillon no more than three or four weeks after everybody else in the world. I heard about how after the battle of Chatillon Dr. Lysvet Alverhuysen was no longer First Speaker of the Republic, though I heard a lot of different information as to whether she had stepped down, or been voted down, or shot, or got religion and gone to work in a mission hospital out on the Rim.

  Anyhow I’d been in Harrow Cross for maybe a month when I got the first letter from Adela.

  I was working in the laboratory. By that I mean that I was sitting in my chair in a shadowed corner watching engineers strut back and forth, shouting out numbers and waving their hands and bumping into phantom images of themselves, which were also waving their hands, though not shouting.

  The laboratory was built in a hangar, constructed on one of the rooftops high over the Station. It was windowless, and so huge that one of the prototypes could explode and it would not shake the walls or dislodge the electric-lights from the ceiling. It was bone-white and gunmetal-gray and the floor was tiled in the same kind of discomforting grid as the floor of the big office where I had first met Mr. Baxter.

  The adjutant had left me alone. Two of the engineers came to me to ask me to resolve a dispute over the nature of the Process and I answered them without thinking or looking up at them. Another presented me with a series of notes and observations regarding a test that had been conducted at Black Lake— disappointing to them and delightful to me— the prototype had burned down a barn but done nothing else. A third engineer slipped a piece of paper into my hand and walked quickly away, and I could not turn the heavy chair fast enough to see his face.

  Harry. I hope this note finds you. I am so sorry. If they tell me this gets to you I shall write again. If you do not want to read anything I write at all I will understand but I will write regardless. —A.

  But no more letters came from her for two weeks. I got angry with her and then hopeful and then sentimental and then angry again— last of all I got sad.

  It was the middle of the afternoon. Three of the engineers stood with their backs to me, a row of black coats and folded arms. One was a woman. I do not know her name. Their attention was fixed on a prototype of the Apparatus, the wheels of which were turning and turning and turning, its light casting shadows in which all kinds of phantoms big and small could be seen.

  The engineers talked amongst themselves. They paid no attention to me, and I paid little enough attention to them. I sat in my chair thinking about Adela and getting sad. I was thinking about how I would surely never hear from her again, and I was thinking about how maybe she did what she did because of me— how if only I had saved the piano, she might not have been driven to that extremity that caused her to shoot Mr. Baxter. Maybe.

  One of the engineers said “Won’t work.”

  “It was promising,” said another.

  “Dead end.”

  “Easy for you to say. Your team’s working with the new data.”

  “They’ve got new data? What data?”

  “Hush-hush. The latest raid. They brought back a half-ton of junk and th
e code-crackers have been at work on it— promising new leads.”

  “Huh. Not fair, if you ask me— why hasn’t my team seen that data?”

  “Strings. It’s all about what strings get pulled.”

  “Favoritism, that’s what it is— it’s bad for efficiency and it’s entirely improper. When did this happen? Why wasn’t my team informed?”

  “Last week. They say the Harrow Cross Engine itself carried the stuff in— a half ton of the usual junk and a dozen interviewees.”

  “Well, I’m going to complain. Why wasn’t my team informed?”

  I said, “What raid?”

  They turned to look at me. Two of them blinked blankly and one removed his spectacles to polish them.

  “What raid?”

  “Hush-hush, Mr. Ransom. Sir.”

  “What damn raid? What do you mean? Don’t look at me like that— you’ll tell me, damn you— what raid?”

  “There’s no need for you to know, sir.”

  “You’ll tell me or I’ll never say another word to you. I won’t be lied to. I’m in charge here. What raid?”

  The one who had removed his spectacles put them back on.

  “What did you think, Ransom? This thing you found— you found it in one of the hovels of the Folk. Everyone knows that. Creedmoor and the woman— whatever they found they found it in the same way you did. That’s what everyone says. The Line’s had men raiding every Folk cave and squat and forest within a thousand miles of East Conlan for the last six months. Seizing the carvings. Interviewing the inhabitants. Extracting the information. Good men have died. Now what are you looking so shocked for, Ransom? Did you think we wouldn’t go digging too?”