by Felix Gilman
He smiled at me. “Well now, Professor— I reckon we’ll adapt. Resourceful, that’s something I’ve often been called.”
I did not want to argue with him. I had not meant to speak out loud at all.
When he saw I would give him no more entertainment, he turned back to the Apparatus. He touched a finger to one of the magnetic cylinders, and spun it.
“Is that it? Well, I guess I’m not the scientific type. Nor are the bosses. So long as it works.”
He dug beneath the Apparatus, and pulled out the letters from Adela.
“What are these?”
I told him. He did not trust me at first, but scanned a few and found them boring. He glanced over at the place beside me where Adela lay, and a theatrical expression of sorrow appeared on his face, making me wish I could somehow kill him.
He shook his head. “Too bad. Too bad. You know, Professor Ransom, I’m not a cruel man— whatever you may have read in the newspapers. I’m a sporting man— ask anyone. I know what love is. Here, take them.”
I hesitated, and he shrugged and scattered them on the floor.
Beneath the letters, he found the money I had packed for my escape.
“Ah, now,” he said. “That’s something else. Professor, I’m no thief. Ask anyone— I’m a decent fellow. But I have a great many widows and orphans to support. I can’t in good conscience let this go. But nor can I— well, now, here’s a sporting notion— what say we share it? Partners?”
“Take it,” I said. “Take it all! It has done me no damn good.”
Jim Dark smirked and stroked his chin.
It seemed to me then that this ridiculous man was the agent of retribution for all the things I had done wrong in my life and all the good I had meant to do but I had not done.
From outside there was a thump and the light from the one high window shifted, illuminating a stack of rusty old tools. Now you know that I am not a religious man but I felt that that little shed was full of something bigger than both of us and that what ever it was it had worked out my fate. It was as if there was a plan to the world and it had nothing to do with my dreams and ambitions or the pride of men like Mr. Baxter or the machinations of Gun and Line or what ever the Folk might have in mind. Gentleman Jim Dark was a preposterous fraud and a bully and a crook and a small and mean man but perhaps he was what I deserved.
“Take it,” I said. “Take it and be done with it.”
He nodded, and stuffed it into his pockets. Then he stood.
“Now will you come with me quietly, Professor? Otherwise I’ll have to shoot you too— I had a hell of a time getting in here and I’ll have a hell of a time getting you out if you won’t come quietly.”
“No,” I said.
“No, you will not come quietly?”
I nodded.
He shrugged, and drew. I closed my eyes.
The next I knew he pushed past me, laughing and slapping me on the back.
“You’re a good sport, Ransom. It would be a waste to shoot you— I want to know what you’ll do next. See you again, I’ll bet.”
He stepped lightly over the adjutant and Adela, and out through the door, leaving it swinging open behind him.
I had been mistaken. He was not the agent of my punishment. He was the agent of my deliverance. He had given me my freedom. I did not know what to do with it and I did not especially want it.
I was wrong about the money, too. I could have done a lot of good with it, certainly more than Gentleman Jim Dark would have done. I do not believe what he said about the widows and orphans for a moment. That is what comes of doing business when you are not thinking straight.
On the other hand the device he stole from me was just seventy-five pounds of junk. That is not because I had the foresight to expect that it would fall into the hands of the Gun— I won’t lie to you. It was junk because I did not trust the Republic with the Apparatus either. I did not trust anyone with the Apparatus, and I still do not. Sometimes I am not sure I trust myself with it. Anyhow I had planned to trick the soldiers of the Republic with junk, then try to escape. What Mr. Dark walked away with whistling was just a suitcase full of junk, and though it looked clever it did nothing at all and there was nothing that anyone could learn from it except that you should not count your chickens before they hatch, and you should keep an eye out for pigs in pokes. Those are good rules in science, business, and life.
Since he has never come after me again I guess that some bad luck befell Mr. Dark in the fighting after Harrow Cross fell, and now he has passed into the history-books. Like he said, there are not a lot of his kind left anymore.
I stayed with Adela and the poor adjutant for a while and I said my farewells until I could stand it no longer. Then I gathered up the letters and walked out into the streets of the Station. The light was gone. Some time during my conversation with Gentleman Jim Dark it had stopped growing, and fallen in on itself. I was not pleased. I had thought that I might sit on the sidewalk and wait for it to wash over me, or walk into it and be consumed. Its expansion had been unstable, and had collapsed. That seemed to me to be just one more of my many failures. Even my disasters were unstable.
In the darkening sky up above Arch Six Heavier-Than-Air Vessels circled each other and I guess they were fighting. I could not tell which belonged to which side.
There were no more phantoms. The door had closed. Now there were just people running in every direction.
I headed east, sticking with crowds. When all else fails you you can always follow a crowd and at least it will keep you moving. We were looking to get as far away from the fighting as possible. Eventually something exploded— masonry fell— I was not injured but someone behind me was and then people started running in a panic and I was knocked off my feet and hit my head on the concrete.
CHAPTER 33
LAST WORDS
I recall waking to bustle and screaming and stink and swaying lamps, then sleeping again. I recall that this happened a number of times— I cannot say how many— before I woke really and truly.
I lay on a hard camp-bed. I was in a tent.
I raised my hand to my head to feel my bruises and then I lay with my head in my hands for some time. I did not feel that I had escaped. I felt that I had lost everything.
After a while I stood. I saw that the tent was full of beds, and the beds were full of injured men and women and children, and many more of them lay on the floor. Some of them looked like citizens of Harrow Cross and some of them did not. It was hard to tell them apart. A woman screamed and a man shouted at her to be silent.
It did not seem that anyone was doing anything for any of us. My first instinct was to protest. I stood, unsteadily, and said, “I will— I’ll see— don’t worry.” I took a few steps to the tent’s door then fell.
When I woke again I was lying on the ground looking up at the stars. A woman stood over me. It was Dr. Lysvet Alverhuysen, or Miss Elizabeth Harper as I cannot help thinking of her, what ever the history-books may call her. She wore white and she carried a candle.
“Harry,” she said, in a whisper.
“Miss Harper!”
“It is you, then.” She did not look entirely pleased to see me. “I wasn’t sure. You’ve changed.”
“Well, it’s been a long time since White Rock, and I haven’t been out on the road in a while. I guess I may have put on weight. You’ve changed, too.”
She had. She was a little older. She was not so thin any more, in fact she was becoming somewhat comfortably heavy-set. She looked well, and she did not look so uncertain of herself or so driven and hunted as she had been out on the Rim..
“Last I heard you were First Speaker of the Republic,” I said. “I was proud of you. A great role in history. I guess you’re doctoring again now? Also a noble profession.”
“It was ceremonial,” she said. “I made speeches about the necessity for struggle until I could stand it no more.”
She sat on the grass beside me.
�
��In the stories from back in— back in the old country— there was a spirit called the Mother of Battles. I began to feel— well, it hardly matters. Yes, I quit. Now I follow the army.”
Later in our conversation she had some sharp-tongued things to say about the government of the reborn Red Republic, and about the administration of President Hobart IV. I guess she would prefer that I not repeat them.
“How is John Creedmoor?”
“I don’t know what he’s up to these days. We haven’t spoken since Chatillon.”
I guess she was talking about the fighting there. I never heard any stories about John Creedmoor at Chatillon, but that does not mean he did not do anything terrible there.
“Well,” I said. “I’m happy you’re happy.”
“I know a thing or two about head injuries, Harry. You’ll be all right.”
“All right?” I touched my bruises again.
Something in my expression made her say, “You lost someone.”
“Yes.”
She did not look as sympathetic as I thought she might. In fact her face went hard.
She said, “Friends among the Linesmen?”
“I guess you could say that.”
She sighed.
I sat up.
“Well now— what do you mean by that?”
She explained to me that right at that moment nobody but she recognized me but as soon as the chaos in the aftermath of the fall of Harrow Cross subsided others would too. I was a very famous man indeed. Soon someone would see my face and jump up and shout, It’s him!
She also explained to me that the way many people saw it, I was kind of a monster. A traitor. I was the man who by stepping into Mr. Baxter’s shoes had brought about the surrender of Jasper City. I was the man who’d spent the last days of the war building terrible and blasphemous weapons for the Engines of the Line. The deaths at Log-Town were on my hands. I was known for my cruel and terrible experiments.
You will think me naïve and I guess I was, even after everything I guess I was, but I was stunned at the unfairness of this.
“Jasper was lost anyhow,” I said, “and I had no choice— they held me by force. I did not work for them willingly. I fought to be free. Why, when I fell and hit my head as a matter of fact I was escaping from Harrow Cross to deliver the Apparatus into the hands of the Republic— I was coming to meet— well, an impostor as it turned out, but . . .”
She sat cross-legged beside me and she listened to me patiently, without judgment, and I do not know whether she believed me or not.
Soldiers went to and fro around us, some brisk-marching, some idling, some limping. I looked down at my feet so as to hide my face. Harrow Cross stood on the horizon in the dark and there was a whole lot of work going on. I think there was still fighting within the Station, die-hards holed up in the tunnels and so forth.
We were not far from the river. It seems I am rarely far from rivers. When I started this account back in the Territory I thought it was about Light but maybe it should have been about Rivers all along.
“I should report you,” she said. “The officers of the Republic will want to question you.”
“I have nothing to hide.”
“There’ll be a trial. It won’t be fair. Passions are hot here. That light back at the Station—”
“My doing. I can explain. I brought down the Kingstown Engine with it. I won your damn battle!”
“Keep your voice down.”
I sat in a sullen silence.
“I have work to do,” she said. “You’re far from the only injured man here. And very far from the worst. And we’re moving on soon. It’s a punishing pace.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I’m just a doctor now— I’m not privy to the plans.”
“All be over soon, I guess.”
“Maybe. In a few years, perhaps.”
I asked her about what had happened to her and Creedmoor after White Rock and I asked her about the weapon they’d found and she said it was hard to describe. It was hard to describe the places they’d gone to find it. I acknowledged that the Process was hard to describe too. She gave me a small smile. I asked her if there ever was any weapon, or if it was all just a big hoax, if the Engines had just been scared to death by rumor and stagecraft. She did not answer, but told me that everyone has to decide for themselves what to believe.
“Easy to say,” I said. “Not so easy to do.”
She suggested that one day somebody should write a book.
“It won’t be me,” I said. “I don’t know half of the truth of things. I think it would be for the best if the world heard nothing more from Harry Ransom for a while. It would be best if I’d died.”
“Maybe it would have.”
We talked a while longer. But soon enough she was distracted by the sound of screaming from the tent and someone calling “Doctor, Doctor, and she left me. I got up and walked away.
A little further down by the river there was a man who had a wagon and a heap of junk salvaged from the fall of Harrow Cross. He explained that much of it had floated down-river and he offered no guarantees as to its quality. He was wearing no uniform and I do not think he had any right to be selling anything. I was not interested in his rifles or flashlights or tin cans or automobile motors but I was interested to see the triplicate typewriter perched on top of the heap.
My great wealth was gone. I guess it had never really existed. I exchanged my watch for the typewriter. I regretted it later when I was hungry but I could not resist.
I introduced myself to the man as John— no last name.
I drifted south from Harrow Cross. I worked when I could. I made myself useful wherever I could. I attracted no attention. Word got around quickly that the terrible Professor Harry Ransom had perished in the taking of Harrow Cross. The story that the Republic told was that I had killed myself in the attempt to unleash my terrible weapon against the forces of the Republic— that I had blundered and blown up half of Harrow Cross’s forces along with me. President Hobart IV himself celebrated my death in a speech on the floor of the Capitol in Morgan.
I do not much resemble the man in the stories. I am of no more than average height and I do not think my manner is cruel and I do not mean to be arrogant and I have never to my knowledge cackled or stroked my mustache in a sinister way.
I went back to sign-painting after a while. A lot of people had moved to one place or another because of the fighting and so there was a demand for signs. I am good at it.
I joined up with a chapter of the Smilers who were doing good works near Gibson. I told them I wanted to make amends, and they asked what for, and I said that it did not matter, everyone had something to make amends for. It was hard work and accomplished nothing.
I made a little money in Keaton City teaching the Ransom System of Physical Exercises to rich young men. Of course I did not call it that and they did not know who I was. I told them I was teaching them the exercise secrets of long-dead Folk warriors, and mostly they liked that notion.
I had a lot of strange dreams for a very long time, which maybe is because I had stopped taking the sleeping-tablets too suddenly. Who knows. Anyhow I dreamed of the edge of the world, and of Mr. Carver, and of the Folk I had met back outside East Conlan when I was a boy.
I stopped hearing my name cursed as a villain. I started to hear my name made a joke. I do not quite know how it got around but soon it seemed there was a general view that there never had been any terrible weapon, that Professor Ransom was a fraud at best and maybe never existed. Some people said that the whole thing had been a decadent and deceitful and desperate ploy of the Engines in their last days. Others said that Professor Ransom was just a snake-oil salesman who had happened to cross paths with Dr. Alverhuysen and John Creedmoor, and who had subsequently taken credit for wonders they had performed. Still others denied the existence of Dr. Alverhuysen and John Creedmoor too. Soon enough there was a general view that the Republic had taken Harrow Cross thr
ough good old-fashioned fighting spirit, without the aid of mysterious weapons or happy accidents or Professor Harry Ransom. I did not like that much. If nothing else I hope I have shown that it is not true.
I moved town a few times and after a while I stopped hearing my name at all. I did not like that either.
Miss Harper thought the war might be done in a matter of years, and the current fighting is like a fever before it breaks. I hope she is right but I do not know. I still do not understand politics. I do not think I like the Republic very much, and I do not think I like President Hobart IV, but I do not move in great circles anymore and I do not know him.
I think I said that in one of the letters Adela sent to me she described the operations of the self-playing piano. Well, I do not want to speak ill of the dead but her explanations were unclear, and it took me months of hard work to understand them, months more to make the thing that the Beck brothers have hauled out here. Even after all that work it is not half as wonderful as the original, in fact the music it makes is downright ugly. The Beck brothers compare it to cats and dogs and they are right. But I mean to keep trying. She had a lot of bad luck in this world and I hope things will be better in the next.
I built a new Light-Bringing Engine. It still does not work as well as I would like it to. Most of its weight is made of safeguards to stop it running wild, and safeguards to be sure the other safeguards are in order. I did not dare exhibit it, or patent it, or try to go into business. I did not trust anyone with it. I was not sure that I trusted myself. I spent many long nights just staring at it, not daring even to make it run.
Eventually I was able to mend the typewriter, too. Then I realized that I did not know exactly what to do with it. I did not have anyone to write to. But the white space calls to you. It demands to be filled. I wrote a very long letter regarding how rumors of my death had been much exaggerated and regarding how as I saw it I had been unfairly treated by History, and how I had won the Battle of Harrow Cross just about single-handed. I addressed it to Mr. Carson but I did not send it. I tore it up. It was no more than a half-truth, no better than what you might read in the newspapers.