The Rise of Ransom City (38 page)

I reported the news to Jasper whenever I saw him. It generally made him look sad, then disappear. I wondered if he understood me at all.

“Try signs,” I said one late summer night. “Nod for yes, shake for no. Did you die here in this basement? No? In the Ormolu? You don’t look like an actor— was the Ormolu once something else, I don’t know, like . . . Well, in Jasper? Are you dead? Do you have some purpose here, something to communicate to me about the Process, maybe? Listen— if you shake your head for everything I don’t know if you understand me, do you understand?”

He nodded.

“Are you here with word from the world of the dead, maybe? Mr. Carver— do you know him? Does he forgive me? Yes? No? My father, maybe? What about Miss Harper and John Creedmoor— are they in the world of the dead yet? Do the dead have news of them— that’s where the action is I guess— did they make it? If what they said is true, if they have a weapon that can kill the Powers, maybe there’s a whole lot of Engines and Guns down there now— what’s an Engine like out of its shell? Say,
is
there a world of the dead? I’ve never speculated much on religion.”

He shook his head. I do not know what that meant exactly, or if it meant anything at all. Take it for what it’s worth.

“The truth is I don’t much care about politics and I don’t care hardly at all about religion so if you are here to tell me something about the Great War or anything of that kind I don’t want to hear it.”

I mopped sweat from my brow— he did not. It was hot in the basement. I guess it was not hot wherever he was.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to get it to work here. This place is older, harder. Conditions are different from the Rim. Have I told you how I found the sign— the word— I did, didn’t I?— well, don’t imagine it’s easy. Don’t imagine that’s all there is to it. Bringing that world into this. Opening the door. What was possible then is impossible now. No words for it, even, damn it. What’ll I even do with it if I can rebuild it, except get myself hunted down and shot?”

Jasper stood.

“You’ve seen me build this thing. I guess you can see me, anyhow. If I go to law with Old Man Baxter over it will you be my witness? No? I guess not.”

He folded his arms behind his back.

“Well, you must be here to teach me some kind of a lesson. In his
Autobiography
Mr. Baxter— damn him— says that to a man of greatness everything’s a lesson. Maybe I should find my way toward a theory of ghosts and spirits like yourself. Maybe—”

Suddenly there was an expression of panic on his face. He was not looking at me, but past me, maybe at the Apparatus, maybe at nothing visible in this world or time. Anyhow he turned right around and as soon as his back was to me he vanished.

I will tell you right now that though I tried and tried I have never understood this phenomenon, or what it is about the Process that causes it, or whether it is good or bad or if there is any way of doing anything with it. It is just one of those things that happens. Maybe in the future there will be time to investigate it.

Adela appeared onstage, two nights running, alongside the Mr. Barnabas Busby Bosko and his show of Western Rim wonders. It was not a success. She was too proud and too unbending to perform for a crowd. She had no craving to please. The experiment was not repeated.

She stopped working on the piano. She did not say why and I did not ask. She abandoned her little cell in the Gate and moved into an apartment a half-mile from Swing Street and overnight she became a Jasper City patriot— a true daughter of the Bull, as they used to say. She cursed the foreign influences that meddled in Jasper politics and she spoke urgently of the need to defend the city’s honor and independence. I said that politics was a fool’s game and that we had work of our own to do. She bit back the word
coward,
but her eyes said it. She went all over town to listen to speeches or shout herself hoarse at Senators or businessmen or the offices of the
Evening Post.
She developed a very thorough accounting of which Senators were brave sons of Jasper and which Senators were weaklings and traitors and pawns of the Line. I do not remember any of the names she spoke of. To this day all Senators or suchlike people are the same to me, like cats or dogs. Anyhow I did not accompany her on these ventures. While she was marching or waving flags I was working, or when I wasn’t working I was paying court to that actress I mentioned, who I said I would not name and I will not but she was both statuesque & fair, and blissfully uninterested in politics. I who had once in the by-gone days of my youth ranged all across the Western Rim and slept under different stars each night now lived just about my whole life within the confines of Swing Street. When I left the Street it was an occasion and I dressed up in my go-to-meeting best.

Some days I would go and loiter outside the gates of Mr. Baxter’s Tower on Fenimore with my hands in my pockets like an orphan child. I never caught a glimpse of him. Yet he haunted me anyhow. Twice that summer he returned to the pages of the newspapers, repeating his libel against me. He assured the readers of the
Evening Post
and the
Clarion
that detectives hired by the Trust were closing in on the fraud and thief Harry Ransom, who had so disturbed the peace of the simple folk of the Rim. . . .I wrote letters of my own. I wrote what I thought of his lies, you can be sure of that. I did not mail them.

Some days I would go visit the campus of Vansittart University. Vansittart U is gone now like so much else that was good in Jasper City but in its day it was a treasure-house of knowledge. It was a paradise of idleness and luxury and good fortune. I snuck into lectures on electricity, the light-bearing Ether, the history and society and science of the First Folk as revealed by their artifacts, and other topics of great interest. If only I had forever I would recount it all here. Instead I have only two pieces of advice. First, if you ever have cause to visit a University you should watch out for ball-players. Those beautiful green lawns are a menace if you do not understand the nature of the territory. Cross the wrong line and at any moment a football may tumble from the heavens and knock you off your feet and if you survive that then a half-ton of well-educated and well-fed Senators’ sons will follow it, and they differ from stampeding buffalo only in the way that they apologize afterwards. Second, if you have trespassed into a lecture concerning the Etheric Flow by a very proud gowned and mutton-chopped Professor, do not raise your hand to contradict his errors or you will be ejected from paradise, never to return.

The lecture halls of VU were full of empty seats. The teams of the ball-players were always a few men down. Even some of the Professors were absent. Idealistic and vigorous youth, intellectuals— those were the kind of people most likely to set off for parts east or north or who-knew-where chasing after rumors of Liv and Creedmoor— or following stories that the Red Valley Republic was rising again in the west or the south or in Juniper City— or digging up Folk ruins, chasing after wondrous weapons of their own, poking their nose into Folk business and if they were unlucky getting run through with spears for their trouble. Some of Jasper City’s gilded youth had joined the militia, ready to defend the Bull’s City against all comers.

The armies of the Line moved south from Gibson across the Territory, toward Jasper, seizing small towns and bridges and roads, suppressing unrest. Flights of Heavier-Than-Air Vessels were seen in the skies over the Territory’s rolling golden fields. Combustion-Powered Submersible Vessels were spotted along the meandering River Jass by night and mistaken for sea-serpents. The front moved forward. Agents of the Gun confronted Ironclads at Melnope— when the news hit the
Evening Post
there were riots in the streets of Fenimore. Mr. Baxter hired private detectives in large numbers to guard his factories and his offices. The Baxter Trust ware house that I stole the magnets from that I used for the Apparatus was piled high with crates containing weapons, fuel, gas-masks &c. I did not notice that at the time, but I learned it later from a memorandum that crossed my desk, after the Battle.

I waited for my ghostly friend Jasper to reappear. He did not. There were rats down in the basement with me but they were not so conversational as the ghost, and I missed him. By late summer the reconstructed Apparatus had grown to the size of a grand piano or a small church-organ. The bathtub had been incorporated into it and a number of other bits of stage business, including spears, a cartwheel, a mirror, and dinner-plates. It focused all the unstable energy of the Process into a sealed glass jar which I had placed, because it amused me, in the arms of a plaster statue of a half-naked nymph.

Sometimes I thought Jasper had returned to me, but it was only Mr. Quantrill or Amaryllis coming to check on their investment, to demand explanations. Sometimes Adela interrupted me. Once two stagehands came into the basement to perform intimate acts together— well, it’s a free city, or it was back in those days. Once I thought I glimpsed a man in a ragged soldier’s uniform watching me from a far corner of the basement but it was possibly only an old coat. On another occasion I recall I stood over the Apparatus for more than an hour, scratching my new-grown beard and just thinking about the Process, and then about how things had been out on the Western Rim, and about all my adventures out there and the Harpers and Mr. Carver and everything, and when I finally turned to sit on my bench there was a man already there. I jumped back in surprise and stumbled into the Apparatus, causing it to ring like a bell. The figure that sat on the bench held his head hung low, like he was tired, and a long mane of black hair fell to his knees.

I said, “Mr. Carver?”

The figure raised his head. For a moment I saw the face of a man of the Folk.. Then the Apparatus began to hum and throb behind me, and I turned back to it to see that when I stumbled into it I had knocked it on its side and set the cylindrical magnets spinning. Their spinning did not slow, but instead gathered speed, as the energies of the Process accumulated out of nothing and fed upon themselves. The acids in the jars and tubes started to bubble and the wires started to glow. I glanced back to see that the figure, if it was ever there, had vanished. The alarm I had felt at his sudden appearance had now been transformed into alarm at the sudden springing-to-life of the Apparatus, and now its increasing instability.

Well I have already said what it is like when the Process gets unstable, back in the good old town of Kenauk, and if you are curious maybe you can look back there, if any of these scattered pages are reaching anybody. All I’ll say here is that the Process is not magnetism but it is kissing cousins with magnetism, like it is with all other energies. The basement was full of old stage-weapons and doorknobs and magic-tricks and forks and I do not know what else was flying at my head, but you can imagine the chaos. There was a great flash of light. I wrestled with levers. From the Theater above I heard the sound of applause and cheering and then screaming.

What had happened was that at the very same moment that the Apparatus had taken it into its head to start running wild, the actors upstairs were performing
The Story of John Creedmoor.
This terrible play had been written in haste in the months after White Rock. It portrayed John Creedmoor as a noble but misunderstood hero who, with the aid of his lover Liv and his side-kick Harry Ransom had quested into the deadliest western wilderness and stolen a wondrous weapon with which to &c &c. The part of John Creedmoor was played by Mr. Barnabas Busby Bosko. Bosko was in the middle of booming out a speech about how
all the Great Powers of the Earth will tremble when I hold this sign before them
when suddenly a fountain of white light burst up through the trap-door that connected the basement to the wings of the stage. The audience was delighted at first by this trick but they quickly turned fearful. As the power built the gentle tug of the magnetism became violent, yanking watches from pockets and snatching eyeglasses from faces and necklaces from throats, roughly, like what in Jasper City they call a “mugger.” Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson described all this for the readers of the
Evening Post
as a wonderful though vulgar coup de théâtre. I know for a fact he was not in the audience, though in his newspaper he implied that he was. A minor sin, in my estimation— I know what it is like to be a showman— and anyhow he was kind enough not to mention the screaming, the fainting, the stampede, or how the actor portraying John Creedmoor dropped his gun and said an unprintable word. Riot or worse disaster was narrowly averted when Adela come running down into the basement to investigate, and with her assistance I was able to tame the Process again.