The Rise of Ransom City (29 page)

If there is a moral to that story I guess it is that you do not always need to go to the ends of the world like Liv Alverhuysen and John Creedmoor did to discover wonderful and terrible things— sometimes they are in your own backyard. Or maybe it is that everything in this world is stolen, theft upon theft, and things happen for no good reason at all. Who knows. I can only say what happened.

I didn’t follow them. I took the knife and cut a few thick lines through the sign I had made, reducing it to nonsense in case anyone should happen upon it, so that it could not fall into the wrong hands, or at least no wronger than it already had.

At first the bark was warm where I had carved the sign, then it went cool. I folded up the knife and walked away.

Eventually I found the tracks of the Line. They were raised on iron buttresses like a bridge, twice the height of a man. The sun had risen by then and I walked in the tracks’ shadow, following their straight route north-east until the swamp gave way to marsh, then grassland, then hills. The tracks turned north and I turned east, toward Jasper.*

*No part of Mr. Ransom’s writings was so full of corrections and backtracking as this fifteenth chapter. Many lines were struck out, many paragraphs written over and over again. In places it is clear that pages were torn up and rewritten, leaving sentences cut in half. I obtained two copies of this chapter, one six years later than the other; I cannot say what happened to the third. Because of Mr. Ransom’s copious corrections, they do not entirely match. The impression is one of great anxiety; perhaps a great anxiety to achieve scrupulous accuracy. I have made the best sense of it that I can. —EMC

One week later I was in Poundstock. It is a little town in the western part of the Tri-City Territory, chiefly notable for the profitable operations of the Baxter Poundstock Clay Mine and a fervent local chapter of the World Serpent cult. Later— after the Battle of Jasper— it became a camp for the Line, and most of its population was relocated.

John Southern had made it there, along with a few other survivors of the
Damaris.
They had no news of the Great Rotollo or his wife Amaryllis, but I was happy to learn that others were unharmed. John Southern was not so upset at the loss of his boat as you might imagine. The Serpent cult had taken up a collection for the boat’s survivors, and taken them in, and Southern was well on his way to converting. He had shaved off his magnificent mustache as a sign of piety, and both his hands were swollen from snake-bites. He had given up all his remaining property to the cult, in order to live with the simplicity of the serpent, and also I suspect to avoid lawsuits over the sinking of his boat. I offered the return of his jacket— he said no.

There were soldiers of the Line in town. I submitted to an interrogation as to what I had witnessed of the attack on the Kingstown Engine. Electric-light in the eyes, words recorded by typewriter, the usual procedure. I told them nothing because I knew nothing. I understood from their questioning that they suspected Agents of the Gun, in particular Gentleman Jim Dark, who had been seen in the Territory lately, posing for photographs and signing autographs for young ladies. I suggested as a joke that the attack might have been the work of Liv Alverhuysen and John Creedmoor and Professor Ransom and their terrible mysterious secret weapon, and thereby extended the duration of my interrogation by an hour and added to its unpleasantness by an immeasurable degree.

I took advantage of the snake-handlers’ charity, thereby acquiring a second shoe (mismatched) and some pants that were threadbare but less vile than my own.

“Stop your wanderin’,” John Southern said. “Settle down. Here is as good as any other place. I see that now. The World Serpent is everywhere. What damn use is all our writhin’?”

Snakes had played a prominent and harrowing part in John Southern’s own wanderings in the swamp, and the experience had changed his outlook on the world.

“I’m young,” I said, “and not ready to retire.”

“The coils of the serpent encircle us all. There’s no escapin’ your fate. Where d’you think you’ll go?”

I did not know.

A coach came into town. It carried an executive of the Baxter Trust

from Jasper City, come to oversee the mine, and his wife, and it also carried blasting-powder, salt, rope, pots and pans, and a tall stack of Jasper City newspapers. I had no money but bartered for a newspaper with my own stories of the wreck of the
Damaris,
swamp-wanderings, the Western Rim. I learned from that newspaper that the Jasper City Senate was split evenly on ratification of the Salazar Accord, what ever that was, and that harsh words had been exchanged on the floor of that august body. I learned about ball-games and that Vansittart University had trounced Gibson City College’s boys thoroughly, unless it was the other way around. And I read a letter to the editor. I recall every word of it because I read it over and over. It said:

Dear Sir,

Lately there has been a great deal of tavern-talk and gutter-talk regarding what is surely the most preposterous of all the preposterous fancies ever to emerge from the fevered imaginations of the people of the wild Western Rim— I speak of course of the story of the turncoat Agent John Creedmoor, and the foreign doctor, and “Professor” Harry Ransom, and their magical device for the destruction of Engines, or the annihilation of armies, or the creation of free money and whiskey, or what-have-you. Bad enough that this talk should infect the lower orders of our city, but that the newspapers should encourage it defies all reason and propriety!

It is disruptive to business and to the balance of power, and it threatens our city’s hard-fought-for neutrality in matters of the Great War. Already there are unsound urgings from the mob. Several of my junior clerks have quit their jobs and gone adventuring in search of these unlikely fellows, in solidarity with pure fancy, causing considerable inconvenience. No man of sound mind and more than twenty-one years of age should credit this nonsense for a moment. There should be no demand for a de-bunking. But the City is not short of idle youth, men of unsound mind, and women. Therefore I must reveal that certain information has come to my attention that proves beyond doubt that the man who calls himself “Professor” Harry Ransom is a fraud and a mountebank.

For the past year or more, Mr. Ransom— a miner’s son of no education or accomplishment— has drifted from town to town along the Western Rim, seeking “investors” in a purported Free-Energy Apparatus of his own devising. In fact the device is nothing more than an ordinary electrical engine, albeit a prototype, stolen from one of my companies that operated in the town of East Conlan, from which he absconded last year. I am speaking of the Northern Lighting Corporation. Investigators retained by the Corporation have followed his trail for the better part of a year. With the stolen electrical device and some pretty words this low criminal has bilked the honest but simple citizens of a dozen towns all along the rim. Lawsuits for fraud and misappropriation of property and violation of patents await him in Melville, Kenauk, White Rock, Hamlin, Clementine, and Ford, and in Jasper City should he ever be so bold as to show his face here. His so-called Miracle of White Rock is the very sort of mal-function one would expect of a delicate prototype in the hands of a charlatan. Well, let this letter set the matter to rest. This man is no more than a fraud and a thief.

Yours sincerely,

Mr. Alfred P. Baxter, President,

Baxter Trust 1 Baxter Street,

Isle of Fenimore, Jasper City.

By the time I finished reading this I was so severely wide-eyed and stricken-looking that several members of the Serpent cult rushed to my aid, afraid I had been bit by one of their sacred snakes.

I could tolerate being called a fraud, but to be called a thief was unendurable. The Process was mine!— well, maybe the Folk of East Conlan had a claim to it, and I do not deny I had creditors, but it was not Baxter’s. By the time I got to Jasper City, three or maybe four days later, I had read that letter a hundred times and I was hardly any less angry about that letter than I was after the first.

I wasn’t sure whether I would rip up all that talk about the swamp and the Apparatus or not. The truth is that I nearly did but at the last moment honesty prevailed. There will be no secrets in Ransom City! I parceled it all up and Dick Beck went bravely forth to mail it again, along with the usual invitations and proclamations &c. And so here I am beginning all over again.

In his
Autobiography,
Mr. Baxter wrote:

There is no place in this land that so suits the temperament of an adventurous young man as does Jasper City. I have traveled widely and I know this to be no mere expression of parochial loyalty— I am a man of the world. I have seen Gibson and Keaton and the Western Rim and the complacent principalities of the ancient East. I have traveled in the lands of the Line and I have visited the stronghold of the Gun at Log-Town. No place compares to Jasper. My return to that City after my long wanderings— after my soldiering years and my years of self-imposed exile— was not merely a homecoming. Rather, let us call it a Rebirth. As I passed under the shadow of its tall buildings, as I felt beneath my feet the power of that great and wonderful engine that is the City, I understood that it was time to put away childish things, and attend to the business of a Man.

Well, Mr. Baxter and I had our differences. But he was right about Jasper City. I count myself a lucky man to have seen it before the fall.

A Portrait of Jasper City

From a distance, if you came to it from the west, the city looked golden-brown, crown-shaped. (The stockyards sprawled on the east— I did not see them until later.) It was in the heart of the Tri-City Territory, which is to say that it was in the heart of the West. The vast rolling plains of the Territory were a patchwork of farms and grassland, bright green in the early summer sun, green as an accountant’s eyeshades, so green they made you blink. The River Jass wound across those plains for miles and miles and days and days, then widened, there were islands, and it forked, going north to Gibson and east into Line lands. Jasper City was built on the island and in the fork of the river, and you could spend all day happily crossing and crossing again the bridges between Fenimore and Rondelet and Hoo Lai and back to Fenimore.

Fenimore was what they called the island in the river, after a long-dead duke from the old country— I don’t know which old country. It was shaped kind of like a dagger, or a skinny winged lizard with a long tail, depending on which map one consulted. It boasted tall buildings with countless windows and ornate terra-cotta pediments and sometimes gargoyles. There were the offices of the Baxter Trust and the Northern Lighting Corporation and some meat-packing operations and a few publishers and a whole lot of banks and the smarter sort of mercenary company. In the shadow of the tall buildings the crowds moved in a purposeful way— there was a Jasper City Walk that I never learned to imitate. The Jasper City gentleman wore hats and tails, and he carried a stick, unless he rode in a carriage. It seemed unlikely that I could acquire a carriage but I made it my immediate goal to acquire a stick of my own.

On the north bank of the river were the Bluffs, a wall of tawny sandstone cliffs grown over with deep green pine. The Smilers’ Inner Circle was there, perched on an outcrop, gleaming white. The notorious whorehouse they called the Floating World was there too, glowing red at night from behind the pines. There were also mansions among the pines, and I guessed some of them belonged to the gentlemen of Fenimore, and surely one of them was Mr. Baxter’s. South of the river in Rondelet there were ware houses and work houses and streets of tenements, which were arranged in an ever-expanding pattern of concentric half-circles like a sunrise, and there were people in them from every part of the world. There was more filth in the streets than I have words to describe, not just in bad neighborhoods but everywhere, even among the mansions of Fenimore, where there were trees and a policeman on every corner. There was a ceaseless clamor of advertisement. The storefronts were less brightly painted than I had imagined but they were still something. Every respectable house had a little stone staircase up to its front door, so that it was lifted free of the muck, and sometimes there were wooden bridges across the worst of it. In every district there were parks, sun-dappled by day and dangerous at night, with statuary that was sometimes sacred and sometimes risqué, depending I think on the administration that constructed it.