Lightbringers and Rainmakers

by Felix Gilman

  Yours,

  Harry.

  P.S. I suppose by the time you get this and consider praying it will all be over one way or the other. But if I think too much about that I will start thinking about Time again and never sleep, and tomorrow is a busy day.

  IV. On Big Witch

  Dear Mr. Baxter.

  You do not know me. I imagine you get a lot of letters that begin that way. I have heard of your exploits for a long time, and admired you. They say you are the richest honest businessman or the honestest rich businessman in Keaton City. Either of those seems to me to be a good thing to be. I am an entrepreneur and an inventor, too. My particular line of work is Electricity and Light. I have gone out to the edge of things to make my name and my fortune, and sometimes it seems the whole world is against it, because it does not want to become a better place. I once read where you were talking to a newspaper reporter about the obstacles you overcame when you were a young man, and it lifts my spirits to think about it, and helps me to forget about the fact that I am trapped in this pit.

  The obstacles in my case are somewhat larger than they were in yours. As I recall your father did not believe in you. In my case the issue is that I have stumbled into a war zone. The fighting between Line and G_n is very bad in this part of the world. The Line has its machines and its legions, and the enemy has its Agents and whatever else, its saboteurs and arsonists and poisoners and blackmailers and I do not know what else but I do not like it. They say it has something to do with something that happened at a Hospital, I do not know what. The War cost me my Apparatus, and now it looks like that is not all it will cost me. To me the War seems like a great Mountain between us and the Future, like the first pioneers must have crossed to get here. Anyway I hope that if I somehow get out of this godd_mn pit one day I may make it to Keaton City and you & I can talk business.

  Yours sincerely,

  “Professor” Harry Ransom, Lightbringer, Inventor of the Ransom Process for Perpetual Energy

  Out on Big Witch

  Carver:

  If you find this note I guess things have gone badly for me but at least you are okay and you have come back. Two things. First, send a letter to my sisters saying something nice about what happened to me. Second, watch out for Flood, he is trouble.

  Harry.

  To Whom it May Concern:

  I have never before written to an Officer of the Line, or imagined that I ever might. But I am stuck in this pit and I still have my writing paper, and more ink than water. Your Vessels are circling overhead around & around on their great iron wings, and I can see their spyglasses glinting blood-red in the light of the sun as it sets. Perhaps they are waiting for night to fall. Sooner or later they will find me, or if they wait too long and I am dead of thirst they will find my body and this letter. This letter contains VALUABLE INTELLIGENCE AND YOU SHOULD READ IT. Get to the point, you will be thinking, because your kind are nothing if not efficient. Well, tough. There is still light to write by and I have nothing else to do.

  I have been out on Big Witch for about three days. I started out from a town to the southeast of here, called Disorder, and the first thing I want to say is that no one in the town of Disorder knew any of what I’m telling you here. All they knew was that Flood & I were coming out here to fix their problem, namely Drought, by talking to the Folk who live out on this Hill, whose magic was hobbling Flood’s Apparatus. When I write it out like that I see that it does not make a whole lot of sense, but at the time when Flood & my assistant & I set out, everyone in town was very hopeful. It was morning and the town was all behind us as we set off and the sun was behind them smiling on us all. I nearly wrote here the name of the woman who kissed me as we set off, but I would not want to bring her name to the attention of the Line. I am sure you understand why.

  We were all traveling light, really just water and food. Flood had made a big show about how he would not carry a gun because it would make no difference if the Folk turned against us, and so I did not carry one either; also I never could shoot straight.

  When you get an hour out of town there are no trails any more. There is a band of rocks that are sharp to climb, but there is no going round them. My assistant helped me. He is an excellent climber, and so is Flood. At the top Flood turned to me and said:

  “Who are you really, Harry Ransom?”

  “Harry Ransom,” I said. “The ‘Professor’ is optional, and as a fellow man of Science you can drop it if you like.”

  Actually I was not quite so cool, but you will indulge me, I’m sure.

  Those were the first words he’d said to me since the lawyer’s office, and the last words he said for a while. Mostly he just walked in silence, and sometimes it was like he was talking to someone in his head.

  Let me tell you about the lawyer’s office. It is on Main Street, not far from the hotel. It was where we went to put the deal in writing, between me and Flood and the town. Ordinarily I do not like lawyers’ offices, but it made others happy to put it in writing. On the wall outside there are posters for some of the people you are hunting for. Inside there are legal diplomas from Jasper City. I gave the lawyer my second-to-last business card and he gave me his. He is a well-educated man and must have hoped for more when he came out to the edge of the world than a little town dying of Drought. Like a lot of people here he traces his ancestry back four hundred years to Founding and to the first Governor, or thinks he does. There is a painting on his wall of an ugly man with yellowish eyes and an old-style ruff and buttoned velvet coat, and that is the Governor of Founding. Behind him there are pines and darkness, and it seems in the corners of the painting in the darkness you can see the Wild People waiting and watching. Anyway it is a frightening painting, and it was in my mind as we went out on the hill.

  Once you are an hour outside of town there is nothing but silence—no wind. Everything is wide and empty and it looks flat, though it is not, it is hard work, believe you me. There are red rocks that look hunched over and cast long shadows in the morning.

  Flood and me walked ahead, heads down, mostly in silence at first. Neither of us wanted to fall behind or let the other get in front. My assistant followed behind. He was not eager and I do not blame him. We did not know exactly where we were going, only northwest, and up, toward that witch-hat peak. We did not really know if that was where the Folk were to be found, but we needed a destination, so that was it. It was no closer by the afternoon than it was when we set out.

  We came to a tree, the first green thing we’d seen. It had alarm-red fruit that I did not recognize or trust, but Flood jumped up to get one—have I mentioned he is short? a little shorter than me, and stout—and he put it in his mouth and bit down and smiled.

  “I apologize,” I said.

  He wiped juice from his chin and raised an eyebrow.

  “You must be pretty sore,” I said. “About the money, and about the whole thing. I’d tell you it’s just competition, and competition is the lifeblood of business and science alike, but I don’t know if that would matter to you.”

  He said nothing. My assistant took one of the fruit, too. He is also short but has this way about him where when he reaches for something it seems to come to his hand. I guess that is what makes him such a good mechanic.

  I said, “I’d say I just wanted to do something good for those people down there—I don’t know if that matters, either.”

  He threw what was left of his fruit away. “To hell with Disorder. Three weeks down there. Three goddamn weeks.”

  “Well then look at it this way: better something than nothing. If I get your rain-making apparatus working again and we share the money, that’s more than you would have got just sitting down there drinking.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t know what’s going on at all, do you?”

  My assistant gave a kind of laugh. That is not the first time someone has told me that.

  I said all this because I wanted to work with Flood, and not to fight. After all, we were
not going to find the Folk before nightfall, it looked like, and I would have to sleep with him nearby. And what if he really was a Scientist? What if he had discovered the secret of making rain? That would be a man worth learning from, even if he was kind of an asshole.

  Nobody ever gets a chance to lecture an Officer of the Line and not fear retaliation. So I’ll take that chance now. You have been fighting the you-know-what and its Agents for three hundred years and what has it accomplished? Only more fighting. Your armies seize another town, and another. You lay the Line across another hundred miles of plain. Then the Agents of your Enemy sneak in after dark and blow up the Line, poison the wells, burn down your buildings. Then you do it again. It is the ordinary people who suffer. Think of what you and all your factories and your tens of thousands of machines and your sacred Engines could do if you made peace—for instance, you could dig channels or send trucks with water to Disorder; it would cost you nothing. And probably there is something the Agents of your Enemy could do that is more useful than murder and sabotage and blackmail and fraud and poisoning, though I can’t think what.

  Anyway there was a lot I wanted to ask Flood about. But at that moment the silence was broken by the sound of engines in the valley, and not long after that we saw a squadron of six Vessels of the long-winged variety passing overhead, hunting. Possibly the same ones that are circling overhead now.

  I am not much of a reader of the Novel and certainly neither are you, Linesman, but I have seen those three little stars used in stories to mean that time has passed or the writer has forgotten where he was going and needs to start over. In this case it is because it got too dark to write for a while after the sun went down, but now the moon is very bright.

  So we slept that night around the foot of a tree, kind of head-to-toe, and we rose early in the morning and pressed on.

  I tried a different tack.

  “I make Light,” I said.

  “So I’ve heard.” Flood stopped, and studied the sky. It was blue, and empty again. The peak was red in the distance.

  “Electric Light,” I added. “The Line smashed the prototype of my Apparatus, but you should have seen it when it was working.”

  Flood nodded. “They do that.”

  It is not just that it makes Electric Light. It makes an infinity of Electric Light, burning no fuel. Once it begins it does not stop. You will say this is impossible—I know how your Engines hunger for fuel—and in fact it has never quite worked right yet, but it will.

  I told Flood all about the Valves and the Coils and the acids and the ’Scopes and the Alternating Current Technique (patent pending) and the Ransom Theory of the Equilibrium of Opposites. My assistant mimed the working of pedals.

  Flood said, “Yeah, yeah.”

  He drank a little of his water and looked at me.

  He said, “Are you going to do this, then?”

  “What?”

  “The peak.” He pointed. “Are you really going all the way there?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t see that I have much choice. I made a promise. And besides I need the money, if I’m ever going to rebuild the Apparatus. You know how that is, right?”

  He laughed and we started walking again. This was yesterday, and we were high up, but not as high as we got later. There were scraggly thornbushes and slopes of red earth. If you looked behind you couldn’t make out the town, or anything else really. All you could see in the blue distance was the slopes of other hills, so everything in the world was vast angled planes, nothing was flat or firm, it was like being at sea.

  “Tell me about rain,” I said.

  “It’s fucking wet, Ransom. What else do you need to know?”

  “I’ve been out here on the Rim for about a year now,” I said.

  My assistant grunted.

  “Right,” I said. “We both have. And in that time we’ve met mesmerists, transmuters of lead into gold, star-readers, inventors of cures for cancer and the common cold, a woman who knew the secret language of horses, and various utopians, including at least one Communist. The unsettled conditions of the Rim draw us all here. Maybe you too, Flood. I’ve heard of rainmakers before but never met one. How does it work? I saw the Pole down in Disorder. It has something to do with lightning, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “It pierces the clouds.”

  “Could be.”

  “We had no farmers in East Condon. That’s where I was born. Mining town. So no one watched the weather much. But I was a curious child. There was a rich kid in town and his father had an encyclopedia and I read it, cover to cover. Here’s what I learned about clouds.”

  Flood stopped again and looked back into the valley. He seemed to be listening for something.

  “They come out of the west. Like everything else—the sky is like the land in that respect. They form in the wilderness beyond the Rim, and by the time they get here they are only beginning to take shape.”

  I searched the sky for a cloud to take as example. Mostly it was blue, and there were some faint gray-black scars where Vessels were passing. But I found one.

  “Out here they’re vast, not like regular clouds back east. The sky is bigger just to house them. Like mountains are to hills, or wild horses to donkeys.”

  You know what I mean, of course.

  “They don’t know what to be yet. By the time they get east they are predictable. They rain in due course. Here they’re wild.”

  “Something like that,” Flood said.

  “So what is it? You have some way of taming them? Is that it?”

  We talked like this for a while. I will cut it short. He did not know a damn thing about the clouds or about rain or about electricity or about science, and he was hardly even pretending he did any more.

  Meanwhile we were still walking up the slopes of Big Witch.

  From back down in town it did not look like it could take more than a day to get to the peak of Big Witch. And it shouldn’t have. It was bigger than it should have been. This is what happens when you start on the Edge and go west of it, of course, as everybody knows. We did not have enough water.

  He said, “So what do you know about the Folk, Harry Ransom?”

  “Not a whole lot,” I confessed.

  He smiled, as if to say that he knew it all along.

  “I’ve been out here for a long time, and I’ve passed through their territories before, and they’ve never given me any trouble, nor I them. I’ve seen them, once or twice, in the distance. I’ve seen their carvings and their paintings. I picked up one or two of their words from a book. I hear a lot about their tricks and their magic, but I don’t know if I believe that. Electric Light looks like magic too, but it isn’t.”

  “Deep thoughts, Ransom. What’ll you do if you find them? They don’t like intruders, and with good reason. They’ll wind your guts on a stick.”

  “I’m a persuasive fellow, and people generally like me, present company excepted, I guess. I’m going to talk to them, and do my best.”

  You might be thinking: if I believed Flood was a con artist, which by that time I was certain of, then it follows that his rain-making machine didn’t work. If his stupid Pole didn’t work, then it follows that the Folk weren’t stopping it from working. So what was I still doing out there? Well, I needed to be sure. There were 300 dollars on the line, and I meant to earn them honestly. This will sound stupid to you, I bet.

  Flood laughed.

  “You got something you want to tell me, Flood?”

  “Four things.” He held up four fingers.

  “If you were lying about the Folk,” I said. “If…”

  “One,” he said. “You’re not as smart as you think you are, Ransom.” He pointed to a rock and then to another rock. “There’s Folk markings all around and you haven’t noticed them.”

  I looked closer and saw that he was right. There were spirals and whorls and beautiful and alien forms carved into that rock, and another, and others all about.

 
“You think too much and you don’t see what’s really there. And two,” he said. “You heard those engines last night? You saw the smoke?”

  “Sure.”

  “That was the Line coming to Disorder.”

  I thought about it and I guessed he was right. It was kind of upsetting, though it didn’t seem to upset Flood.

  “They were in Hekima a few days ago. That was the name of the town where you lost your precious Apparatus, by the way, Ransom. They’ve made it down to Disorder by now.”

  “Why? Are they—?”

  “They’re not looking for you, Ransom.”

  “Are they looking for you, Flood?”

  “Yes and no,” he said.

  “That’s why you came with me, isn’t it? An excuse to get out of town. So is that the third thing you wanted to tell me, or is there more?”

  “The third thing is that we’ve been traveling too long. We should have hit the peak long ago. We’re traveling west, on the Rim, and we’re lost.”

  “I figured.”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  “Is that the fourth thing?”

  “The fourth thing is that the Folk are watching us now. They’ve been watching us for a while, Ransom. They don’t generally care too much for me or my kind. So it’s best that we move on. Even if we don’t know where we’re going.”