The Rise of Ransom City (43 page)

While we talked Mr. Baxter inhaled again and again from the mouthpiece of his apparatus. What ever it was that was in it stained his ragged lips reddish-brown and made his breath sickly-sweet. Each time his eyes were a little duller, his voice a little softer. At last his eyes closed and he fell asleep. His head did not move.

“Well,” I said.

Mr. Watt looked me in the eye.

I have not described Mr. Watt’s appearance because I cannot. There was nothing about his face that stuck in my memory.

“It doesn’t matter what the old man says,” Watt said. “You know that, right, Ransom? It doesn’t matter what he promises.”

“But—”

“We let him talk because he likes to talk. You’re dealing with the Engines themselves, Ransom. You’ll do what you have to do in the end. No promises, no deals. You’ll do what you’re told and you’ll do it on the Engines’ terms.”

“Get out of here,” Gates said. “Go sleep on it, Professor. We know where to find you now.”

Well I was younger back then and naïve, but not so naïve that I could not figure out that they had let me go only so that they could follow me and see who I talked to. As a matter of fact I did not know where Liv and Creedmoor were and I did not have any contact with Juniper City or whoever it was who was claiming to be the Red Valley Republic reborn and in fact I did not even know if such a thing existed, but I guess Detective Gates did not know that. A Vessel took off from the roof of Mr. Baxter’s Tower far overhead as I exited onto the street, and it circled for a while then departed north. I guess whoever was following me was on foot, where I would not notice them. I walked all over the city all afternoon, mostly to confuse and annoy the detectives, but also because I had no place else to go. I could not return to the Ormolu or the basement there or my attic room. I did not want to lead the detectives to Adela, and nor did I want to face her and apologize to her or explain myself.

It was a warm night and I was well-used to sleeping rough. I went to the park and I sat on a bench by the river. That was where Scarlet Jen found me.

She was as beautiful as all the stories say. Her laugh was a temptation all in itself. I shall not write down everything she promised me because there was something about her that made it hard to think straight and I do not remember half of her words, only how I felt.

If Mr. Baxter’s detectives were following me, they did not dare intervene— or maybe she’d quietly killed them before she sat down beside me. I do not know. Either’s possible. I have seen with my own eyes what the Agents of the Gun are capable of.

She sat beside me on the bench, gathering her dress beneath her with a silken whisper that it confuses me to recall even now.

I said, “No.”

She said, “Listen to me, Harry.”

I did.

Now, Mr. Baxter had believed, or had said he believed, that what ever extraordinary weapon had been unearthed out there was in the hands of the Gun, and had been used against the Angelus Engine at Juniper. Scarlet Jen told me with a similar urgency in her voice that Creedmoor was a traitor, that his discovery had been sold to or seized by the Line, and that the spirits of the Gun Marmion and Belphegor and three or four other unearthly names I do not recall had been snuffed out like candles and no longer burned in their Lodge. The Line now had its Vessels and its Ironclads and its legions of men and it had the unstoppable weapon of the new century and the doomed cause of the Gun was more doomed than ever before, unless I helped it. She promised me fame, vengeance, freedom, power. She told me that the Line would weigh me down with law and money and Injunctions and duty until there was nothing left of my genius but dust. I wanted to say that one master was much the same as another but it was hard to argue with her or put my thoughts in order. She told me that Mr. Baxter might make promises but the Line would never keep them, it was not in their nature to deal with men as equals, whereas her masters positively loved to barter. I said I was sure that they did but I was afraid of the price. She said that I might think of myself as a mere tinkerer or businessmen, but that was only cowardice speaking— I was born for greater things. She would kill Mr. Baxter for me, she said, she would kill the lawyer Mr. Shelby. I said no. She said that she would give me the strength to kill them myself if that was what I wanted. I said I would rather not. She said that all I had to do was whistle— from now on she would always be watching.

When she got up and walked away I breathed for a moment and wiped the sweat from my brow.

I called after her, “Wait. Ma’am— my sister. My sister Jess— she’s with you. At your place.”

She turned her head and smiled a little, like I had done something to please her, and that gave me courage to speak a little more.

“Now I don’t need to know what she’s doing these days and I do appreciate that you didn’t make any threats to her person— you’ve got a nicer way about you than the other fellows and I’ll tell that to anyone who asks— and I will not say that I’ll give you the Process for her because I don’t know whether I would or not but if you would just let me talk to her— all I can do now is beg, ma’am.”

She kept walking along beside the river until the dark swallowed her up.

A few minutes later my sister came walking up that path.

“Jess—”

I ran to embrace her. She was trembling.

She wore a long and plain black coat. Beneath it I guess was the uniform of the Floating World.

“Long time,” I said. “Why, I haven’t seen you since the day you rode off side-saddle with that salesman from Gibson— I don’t count the time I saw you in that place, we don’t have to speak of it— you know I forget the salesman’s name— you don’t look a day older than you did that day. You don’t. I feel about a hundred years older, Jess. Two hundred. Did you get my letters, ever, any of them?”

She stopped trembling and she shoved me away. She was always a strong woman— I stumbled.

“I won’t apologize,” she said. “I won’t apologize for a damn thing, Harry.”

“Oh, Jess, I wouldn’t ask you to— it’s my fault, I know, don’t think I haven’t figured it out— after I got famous I guess they took you to get to me, or you went to them to hide from Mr. Baxter’s men— I understand.”

“Oh, you’ve got it all figured out, have you?”

“Not yet but I will. I’ll get myself out from this trap and you too, I’ll spring us both, I just need a little time—”

“Who says I need to be
sprung
?”

She gave me a defiant look.

“You should give her what she wants, Harry.”

“You don’t know what that would mean.”

“I know plenty.”

“You don’t.”

“Oh don’t I?”

I guess this is none of posterity’s business, and it gives me no particular plea sure to recall it, and besides we were interrupted in our conversation before too long. I was just starting to reminisce about the good old days back in East Conlan when we used to sneak about together in places where we weren’t allowed and always got away with it, and she was just starting to tell me all about the wealth and fame that the proprietor of the Floating World would give us both if only I were less of a fool, and I was recalling how my sister and I loved each other but did not always particularly like each other— well it was not long before we were interrupted by the sound of somebody whistling. I guess it was Scarlet Jen herself. It cut through the night of the city like a noise some beautiful hawk might make out on the emptiness of the Rim. Anyhow my sister turned and heeled like a dog. I hated to see that. She walked off briskly in the direction of the whistle, stopping only once to look back.

I sat with my head in my hands and watched the river go by.

Let me tell you about Mr. Baxter’s Injunction. The
Injunction,
as Mr. Shelby indicated, is an ingenious kind of legal device or weapon. It is made out of words but backed by force, in the form of policemen or private detectives or sometimes armies. By means of the Injunction a man or a hundred men or a whole Territory at once may be compelled to do something or not to do something or to do nothing at all, by order of the Law. There are towns out on the Rim whose whole existence is mandated and measured out day-by-day by Injunctions backed by the Law of Jasper, or the Northwest Territory, or Harrow Cross. Injunctions have broken Baronies and strangled the Keaton City Labor movement and built fortunes out of nothing. I am not a scholar of the law but so far as I know there is nothing the Injunction cannot accomplish. Under the terms of the Injunction Mr. Baxter had conjured up against me I was forbidden to work on the Process or claim it as mine, and I was forbidden to do about a thousand other things. Mr. Baxter was not kidding about any of it.

I soon learned to pick an undercover employee of the Baxter Detective Agency out of a crowd passably quick, and I could get it right nine times out of ten. They were always there, always watching. I went back to the Ormolu to bang on doors and demand my possessions and my back-pay and to tell Mr. Quantrill what I thought of his disloyalty. Detectives watched me from across the street, and when I emerged they stopped me and searched my possessions. I moved into a room in Hoo Lai and by way of welcome they kicked in the door and confiscated my suitcase. They menaced the fair & statuesque &c until she thought that some performance of hers had somehow offended a deranged admirer, so she left town for Keaton City and so ended that affair of the heart. Ordinarily I am the one who leaves town and I took it hard.

They harassed Adela. They interfered with her employment. They searched her premises, confiscating a number of her scarce possessions but as luck would have it overlooking the brass leaf from the basement of the Ormolu Theater, which she kept in a drawer wrapped in undergarments to prevent it from floating away. Anyhow I guess they were not satisfied with what they confiscated, because for good measure they brought an Injunction against her, too, claiming that the self-playing piano was also stolen from Mr. Baxter. Like Atoms or like the Angels that the Sisters of the Silver City posit, a million Injunctions can occupy the same space. Adela flew into such a rage at this injustice that I was scared of her.

They wouldn’t let me seek employment. Nor would they let me leave the city. I walked out along the west road— the detectives followed and brought me back. Nor for some reason that they never troubled themselves to explain or justify would they permit me to me purchase a newspaper, and so it was only through what Adela told me before the litigation and the rage &c that I learned that there was still fighting at Juniper City, and also that several of the fiefdoms of the Deltas had declared themselves in support of Juniper and in support of what everyone was now calling the Red Republic, and that the Second Army of the Archway Engine had been stationed outside Jasper for a week— for the city’s own protection, of course. I was not permitted to approach the Senate Building or Vansittart University. For the first time in life I yearned for the comforts of religion but the detectives stood between me and meeting-circle and I was forbidden to set foot in a Church like I was a Vampire.