The Rise of Ransom City (42 page)

Detective Gates hit me in the small of my back, making me gasp and fall silent. I do not blame him. At least he spared me from further embarrassing myself.

I reflected that I did not understand the world at all. My eyes watered. I recalled the time I had caught a glimpse of the world of the Folk that lay behind or beneath or before or on top of this one, and you could not quite see it because you did not have words for it. That was what it was like in Mr. Baxter’s room.

The telegraph rattled and the two young men rushed from their respective corners of the room to be first to take down the message. The victor presented his text to the Linesman, who shook his head, not seeing fit to share it with Mr. Baxter. The old man himself inhaled or imbibed or what ever it was he was doing from his pipe, and then when he was done coughing he looked at me and said, “So are you ready to talk business like a man, Professor Ransom?”

A Portrait of Mr. Baxter

Talking business with Mr. Alfred Baxter was not the great joyful exercise I’d imagined, but it sure was an education. If all the Professors of Vansittart University could somehow be crowded into that room they would not have taught me as much about the world as Mr. Baxter did— may he rot in hell.

How long had Mr. Baxter worked for the Line? Since long before I was born. As a young man himself he’d taken up arms and fought for the Line at Log-Town and Comstock and at Black-Cap, in the armies of the Archway and the Gloriana and the Harrow Cross Engine in turn. This, he gave me to understand, was by way of promotion, or climbing the ladder closer and closer to the heart of the Line at Harrow Cross. That Engine was oldest and therefore first in their hierarchy. The multitude of ordinary citizens may not distinguish among Engines any more than you can tell one thunder-cloud from another but among themselves there is a strict hierarchy. The Line is nothing without hierarchy.

Another misconception that the multitude have is that the Line has no use for clever or handsome or ambitious men. As a matter of fact the Line can make use of anything. Everything in the world can be turned to advantage. Out on the Rim where things are still unsettled and crude the Line operates big and fierce and brutal— here in the heartland the Line finds it efficient to put on a somewhat kinder and more human face. That was what Mr. Baxter was for. Harrow Cross gave him his start. They gave him his capital and his patents. They greased his path to success. He had never sold himself to the Line because there was nothing to sell. He and the Baxter Trust and the Northern Lighting Corporation and the Baxter Detective Agency and all the rest were the creatures of the Line through and through, no less than the rocket that had come crashing through the roof of the Grand Hotel in Melville all that time ago. He was not ashamed of this, and nor was he proud of it. He spoke of it as if it was a mathematical or logical truth.
A
is
A
and two plus two is four and power is power. Fortune had nothing to do with it. Grasping the reins of history had nothing to do with it— it was entirely the other way around. As a matter of fact he had never written nor troubled himself to read a word of his own
Autobiography.

He had very little hair, and what there was was bristly, and his skin was just about yellow. I think he had been a handsome fellow when he was young but he was not anymore. His eyes were sharp but his body was just about used up. I need hardly say however that Mr. Baxter was not your everyday octogenarian. He was stick-thin and he rasped and he was racked by coughing— I believe he may have been mostly deaf— yet he did not shake— he did not fidget or twitch. He made no unnecessary motions. He was steady as an Engine.

They gave me no place to sit. I had to bend almost halfway over to hear Mr. Baxter’s dry and worn-out voice. Detective Gates and Attorney-at-Law Shelby and the Linesman Watt all watched me closely.

“Those damn— and their weapon— stamped out the Red Valley Republic when I was hardly a boy and now we got to do it all again. Nothing ends. Nothing ever ends! If I had my way I’d burn all the newspapers. Look at you. Look at you. Where are they? Eh? Mr. Watt wants to question you, look at him. And now Juniper— I said I should have run Juniper too, didn’t I always say that? Free and independent, what nonsense, they’re working for the Adversary, Professor Ransom, I would stake my fortune on it. There is us and them. Yes or no. Right or wrong. Future or past. Us or that bitch at the whore house. They have their weapon and we must have ours. This thing you have. This thing you found.”

“This thing I invented, Mr. Baxter.”

“No you didn’t, Ransom. This thing— this thing is nothing natural. Heard what happened at White Rock. Gates here saw the aftermath with his own two. That right Gates?”

Gates nodded. “Hell of a thing, Mr. Baxter sir.”

“Hell of a thing. Hell of a thing! Gates has a way with words. Know what it did, Mr. Ransom? Didn’t just kill the Agent. Killed its master too. Never happened before. Left an empty chair in their Lodge. Hell of a thing! Nothing made by the rules of our world.”

“All that was an accident, Mr. Baxter. I meant to give them illuminations. That’s what it’s for.”

“No—nothing from our world. That means you found it— something of
theirs
— you went digging. Digging in places best left forgotten. Where was it? Eh? Out on the Rim somewhere I’ll bet. Nonsense! Poppycock and nonsense. You know what it is, son? You know what it is? It’s a disease. It’s madness. Poke around in old dark places and you’ll get sick, sure enough. Things we built over for a reason. But we must have it. Right, Watt? They have it so we must too. Must show the world. Future is ours. Even if it must be annihilation.”

“Build it if you can Mr. Baxter, it’s none of my business.”

“Stupid boy. Stupid clever boy. Want you to come work for us.”

“How can you expect me to—?”

“I was like you once,” Mr. Baxter said, smiling. “Not like Watt here— a military man. Not like Shelby— a university brat. Nor even Mr. Gates, salt of the earth but a simple man. I see something in you—” He stopped speaking, inhaled again, and when he was done the twinkle in his eye had been turned off, and that was the last and only time he ever troubled himself to flatter me. He should have kept trying— I was susceptible back then to flattery, and I still admired the old man.

“It
hardly
needs to be said,” Shelby said, “that the terms of your employment will be generous. Nor I hope does it need to be
repeated
that under the terms of the Injunction you may not work for anyone else; nor may you work on your ‘Process’ or ‘Apparatus’ on your own behalf;
furthermore
—”

Shelby named sums of money that meant nothing to me. Nothing about Shelby was admirable to me.

The telegraph rattled again and the Linesman Mr. Watt went to see what new messages had come from his master.

Detective Gates admitted that he and his colleagues had been unable to secure control over the person of my sister Jess, but informed me that my sister Sue and her family remained in New Foley, while May was bringing the word of the Silver City to the Delta Territories, and that both were under close and constant observation.

Mr. Baxter croaked something so quiet that I had to bend very close indeed to hear him. The stink of him made me sick. It was mostly old age and oil and medicine.

We talked terms. I can never resist haggling.

They wanted the Process only as a weapon. As a matter of fact talk of free energy made Mr. Baxter’s lip curl. What use did they have for free anything? All the wealth in the world was already theirs. But they were desperate for a new and better weapon. Liv and Creedmoor had found something out there, after all. Or somebody had. The Angelus Engine had been destroyed at Juniper. They could not or would not tell me how.

They needed me. The Line had thousands upon thousands of engineers and scientists— it had Heavier-Than-Air Vessels and Submersibles and all manner of wonders— it had the ice-cold minds of the Engines themselves. But it was what it was, and could not be anything else. It could never speak in the language of the Process. I was therefore valuable, and that is why they were willing to bargain with me almost as if we equals.

I said that the Process must bear my name, not Baxter’s. They were willing to agree to that term, and so I said that we must light all of Jasper City, and in addition the Northern Lighting Corporation must be dismantled, and furthermore each and every one of the Folk held in the possession of Mr. Baxter or the Baxter Trust or any subsidiaries thereto must be released and restored to their homes and their freedom— and I kept on piling impossibilities upon impossibilities like that for a while. Impossibilities are my stock-in-trade, after all. Mr. Baxter told me I was an unreasonable and unruly child.

I bargained because if I had simply told them all to go to hell, who knows what they would have done to me and to May and Sue and Adela and Amaryllis and Mr. Quantrill and the fair & statuesque actress and who knows who else.

I bargained because I was badly tempted. Despite everything I now knew about Mr. Baxter and Line I was badly tempted, and full of pride to be dealing with him, even if we were not exactly equals. As our negotiation went on I even began to think I might come out ahead. I began to think I might walk out of that office with Baxter’s blessing, and the backing of his factories, and enough promises of independence from his masters that maybe I could sleep at night. I began to think that maybe Mr. Baxter might even agree to my terms. I began to think that I might turn Mr. Baxter’s power to good, and so make myself great. Mr. Baxter was still human, I thought, he was not an Engine, he had his own dreams and desires, he could be reasoned with.

What Mr. Baxter had whispered in my ear, when Mr. Watt was for a little while distracted by the telegraph, was this.

“With what you found— bigger than the Engines, son, bigger than the Engines themselves. Where do you think they come from anyhow? We made ’em— before we made ’em there were the others. The ones you stole it from. We can be like ’em, son, and never die, never get old—”

Those were his words, or as close as I can recall. I never got to find out what he was planning. I do not know if he was really planning to rebel against his masters, or only dreaming of it. He never committed any such blasphemy to writing in any of his files, as far as I was able to tell.