The Rise of Ransom City (30 page)

Speaking of the administration— Jasper was a republic in those days, and a free city, first among equals among the Three Cities. It was determinedly neutral in matters of politics and war and religion and grand ideology— the allegiance of Jasper was to business. The Great War was generally regarded as something rather uncivilized and rustic, a barbaric game of the younger and westerly parts of the world. The men of the Line were not welcome in Jasper except under strict conditions. The servants of the Gun were no more welcome than any other sort of criminal trash.

Jasper was ruled by a Senate of one hundred and three mostly handsome silver-haired businessmen and lawyers and Smilers. They met in a domed building of smoke-stained marble on Fenimore, and I do not know what they did all day, made speeches and formed alliances and schemed against each other I guess. Signed pieces of paper. The building was covered in flags and statues of bulls. A tall pillar rose from the dome on its roof like a spike on an old-fashioned helmet, and there was another bull on it, though all you could see from the street was a glint of gold. The bull was the totem animal of Jasper and you saw it on the flags and on the masthead of newspapers and on the placards outside hotels and bars and there was the famous Brass Bull at the fork of the river, stamping its metal hooves in the red mud, and lowering its huge horns as if to warn visitors that Jasper was not to be messed with, as if anyone would think otherwise. There were legends about how the bull would come to life if Jasper was ever threatened but I think nobody took them seriously, and I can assure you they were not true. There were also legends that Jasper was built on the site of a great city of the Folk, and nobody took that seriously either, because who ever heard of a city of the Folk? Nevertheless there were some tall stones on Fenimore on vacant lots between the office-towers that nobody went near.

Swing Street was in Hoo Lai. You might think it was named for music or dancing but in actual fact there used to be a prison there and a notorious gallows. Anyhow if you have ever whistled a song or laughed at a joke the chances are it was written on Swing Street. It defied the best efforts of city planners and it wound in an irregular fashion back and forth between the regular city streets, stopping and starting, like it was a state of mind as much as a place. Parts of Swing Street were electrified, as were scattered zones here and there throughout Hoo Lai and Rondelet and most of Fenimore. Vansittart University was mostly on its own island, gas-lit in the traditional style, and it was a city unto itself, or like a huge castle, all sharp peaks of red brick and yet more flags, though you could find outlying projections of VU’s domain all over town. In the river there were so many tall boats it was like another city, a mobile and fleeting one. The
Damaris
would have been lost among them. East of the river there were the Yards, like I said, the city’s ugly shadow, and maybe I will write about them some time but not now.

I came into the city from the west, on foot, walking beside the river. In those days everyone who came into Jasper came by river or by road. The nearest Station of the Line at that time was Archway, days to the north and across the border of the Territory. Jasper was not opposed to commerce with the Line but kept it at arm’s length. There were coal-barges on the river and wagons on the road, and a lot of drifters and refugees and day-laborers and would-be stars of Swing Street and I guess I did not stand out. I had a little bit of money in a cardboard wallet, and for days I clutched at it tightly for fear of pick-pockets, until I was generously informed that it made me look like a hick and a nobody.

I didn’t know what name I should go by. It was a conundrum. Nothing mattered to me more than clearing my name of the slander Mr. Baxter had heaped upon it— yet if I went about openly calling myself Harry Ransom who knew what might happen? Jasper City was neutral but it was not free of the meddling of Gun and Line, and their agents might cause me to disappear. Mr. Baxter himself might have me arrested.

On the
Damaris
I’d gone by the name Hal Rawlins. It had suited me well enough, but some part of me felt that Rawlins had gone down with the ship. One of the great things about the West and about Jasper City in particular is that both are so big you can always start over, or at least you can hope to. So as I drifted through the crowds I eavesdropped on conversations, listening for likely sounding Jasper City names. I muttered them under my breath to try them out.

I walked through the city, not knowing where I was or where I was going, through the narrow streets of Hoo Lai and up toward Fenimore, for no reason other than that it was tall and full of bright flags. I recall that I stood for a while on the south bridge into Fenimore, and watched the water go by. The sun was at its zenith and it was sweltering hot. The river was almost too bright to look at, and it stank. It seemed to me that the water was circling around and around the island, an endlessly replenishing cycle that made me think of the Process, though of course it was only my imagination.

For a while I thought it was all right to have no name at all. Eventually I noticed that a policeman was looking at me. I knew that he was a policeman because he wore a blue-black blazer and cap, and a brass badge with a bull’s horns on it. At first I was afraid he was on the lookout for the notorious fraudster or revolutionary Harry Ransom, but it turned out when we started talking that he was afraid I was going to jump. He did not personally care if I jumped but it was bad for business when people jumped, it upset the office-workers, and so he was tasked with saving lives wherever he could, like it or not. I told him that was not such a bad calling in life and he shrugged. I asked him for directions to Swing Street, and he asked what I was, an actor or a writer or a dancer or something of that nature, and I said I was nothing like that, I was just looking for family.

My big sister Jess left East Conlan two years before I did, in the company of a traveling salesman. Their plan was to get rich in Gibson City in the clothing trade. She got tired of the salesman in a matter of weeks, or he got tired of her, and she ended up heading to Jasper instead, drifting on riverboats the way I did, the way a lot of people end up in Jasper. There she met a man in the theater-business, and soon she started working in the Hamilton Theater on Swing Street, and then in an establishment that was just called No. 88. Her letters never said what she did, only that she was doing well. I remembered the addresses— not because she wrote often, because she did not, but because I wrote so often to her.

Swing Street in the afternoon was near-empty and half-asleep. Wouldbe actors with no fixed abodes napped in doorways or on the steps outside the theaters. The theaters themselves were jammed tightly together, with dark-windowed bars filling every remaining space. The theaters wore masks— I mean that nearly all of them boasted some brightly colored façade, in the style of a golden Judduan temple or a lacquered eastern palace or one of the ancient ivy-hung castles of Koenigswald. The street looked like it does in the photographs you have seen, except that in the unforgiving light of day you could see how new the façades were, and how thin and flimsy some of them were. Swing Street was meant to be seen after dark.

I didn’t know what I meant to say to Jess when I saw her. I had always told her that when I came to Jasper City I would come in style, I would come in triumph, with investors and fame at my back. I guess I hoped we would laugh and cry and embrace and I would not have to say too much about what had happened to me out West. She would know that Mr. Baxter’s accusations were slander, and that I was no fraud, and certainly no thief. She would give me a place to stay and a sympathetic ear while I schemed out how I would clear my name, as to which I still had no particular plan. I hoped that she would lend me money without asking what had happened to the money she had already invested in the Apparatus.

I had imagined she would have money to spare. Everyone said that Swing Street was booming and the theaters were machines for coining gold, at least if you were clever or beautiful or musically talented, and Jess was two of those three. Maybe that was true but I was soon to learn that what ever money there was on Swing Street had not found its way into my sister’s pockets.

I saw a building covered in pillars and carved masks and peeling gold paint. A sign at the front of it said the hamilton theater, and the door was unlocked, so I called in and apologized for interrupting a rehearsal and I asked after my sister. They said she’d worked there checking coats, but had left a year ago and nobody knew where she’d gone. She had not gone by Ransom, but by Gantry, which was the name of her husband.

I called at No. 88. It was closed for the afternoon and the windows were shuttered but there were some young women standing outside it who saw me peering through the shutters, and after we’d established that I was not interested in buying what they were selling we got on pretty well. They told me that they worked at the Eighty-eight, dancing or waitressing or otherwise, and that they remembered Jess— she’d lost the husband and gone back to Ransom— but that she’d left when all those rumors started about her brother.

I said, “Her brother?”

“You know,” they said. “Professor Ransom. They say he’s an anarchist or a revolutionary or a prophet or something, him and that Creedmoor guy, they’ve got some kind of secret weapon that everyone’s got themselves all excited about.”

I said nothing. I was thinking that I had not even thought about how my mistake at White Rock might have affected Jess. Let’s ascribe that to the arrogance of youth, and not to any deeper or more permanent flaw in my character.

I was also thinking that I liked the women of the Eighty-eight just fine, but that it was not what I had imagined Jess was doing in Jasper City.

“I heard he’s a crook,” one of them said. “A fraud.”

I said, “Who told you that?”

“Don’t play dumb, handsome. You know the story— you’re one of them, right?”

“One of them?”

“You’re looking for Ransom and Creedmoor and all the rest. You don’t look rough enough to be a detective so I guess you’re a believer.”

“A believer? I guess I am.”

“Well we don’t know. She just left. That’s all we can tell you.”

“Did you know her well? Where did she live?”

“What good’s that going to do you? You want to cut up her bedsheets for relics or something? She wasn’t anything special. Are you that crazy? Shame. You’re pretty.”

“Well, maybe I am. Crazy, I mean. But I can pay— for information.”

They looked skeptical.

Just south of the south-western end of Swing Street was a building that everybody called the Gate. It was a sprawl of old-fashioned peaked towers and blocky outcrops of red brick, stained black. It had narrow windows that made me think of the slits on a zoetrope. In the old days it had been Jasper’s largest prison, but in these more civilized times criminals were generally sentenced to work in the Yards, or for Western Rim operations of the Baxter Trust, or pressed into the militia. The Gate had been converted into apartments for refugees or would-be theater-folk or failed theater-folk—it could be hard to tell the difference. They lived two or sometimes three to a cell. The hallways were a maze, painted with strange and sometimes shocking and often beautiful designs. Motifs of the Folk were much in evidence. Music echoed through the whole shadowy low-ceilinged labyrinth. In the apartment where Jess had lived, behind a red curtain, there was a young white woman washing herself with a rag and a bucket. She had dyed green hair like a fairy-tale river-sprite and a lean long-legged body. She cursed at me casually and flicked the wet rag at my face, and I withdrew. A quick glimpse had been enough to confirm there was nothing of Jess’s in the room. Apart from the bucket and some charms on the wall that were not Jess’s style there was nothing of anyone’s in there.