The Rise of Ransom City (49 page)

He didn’t answer. Instead he stood so close to me that I could smell the stale sweat on his collar.

“So you’re the one,” he said. “You don’t look like much.”

“Truth is, I don’t feel like much right now.”

“Well, we need you— I don’t like it but we need you. So it’s time to shave and shine your shoes and put on a big smile, Ransom. Or else.”

“What is there to smile about? That’s a question, Officer— what’s going on out there?”

They had not been taking the trouble to keep me informed about politics, so I did not know.

“Fighting,” he said. He began to pace. “It’ll all be over soon. Only a matter of time. We’ll take Jasper City— not that we want it, it’s a fucking cesspit, it’s squalid beyond belief— but we’ll take it back because that’s what we do. The fighting won’t matter. We have numbers, production, history on our side. Understand? We’ll turn this place into a Station within the year, the Engines will come and go. Now listen.”

“Where’s Adela?”

“What I don’t like about you, Mr. Ransom, could fill a whole file. Understand? But the one big thing is that we need you. Numbers, mass-production, organization, ideology— that’s what wins. Or it should be. Understand? Ever since that Creedmoor business last year we’ve been concerned with
individuals
. Like Creedmoor, like the General, like you with your stupid smile, Ransom. It’s the Folk, that’s what I think— but it doesn’t matter, understand? What matters is we need you. We can take the City but it’ll fight back, it’ll keep fighting us, and we can’t afford that— not with what’s going on in Juniper, down in the Deltas, out on the Rim— all the wheels coming off— we need continuity here. A human face. Greasing the wheels, understand?”

“I don’t understand, Officer. I guess I don’t understand you any more than you understand me.”

“I mean, and this comes by order of the Engines themselves, who have taken an interest in you, you poor stupid bastard, that before Mr. Baxter died of his long unfortunate illness he was so impressed by your pluck and ambition and your devotion to Jasper City that he buried your dispute and the old man personally chose you as his successor.”

I had nothing to say to that. In fact I was so surprised that I do not think I could have spoken at all without choking.

“Quite a promotion, understand? Heir to the whole enterprise. Order restored. Everyone gets in line. Everyone pulls together to get over this unpleasantness. Understand? We’ll get you dressed up. You speak to the Senate in two hours. You do understand, right, Ransom? Damn it, he looks like he’s choking.”

I know that I have been accused of being a collaborator, a sell-out, and other such things. I do not intend to plead my case here because what I have learned over the years is that people believe what they want to believe, and that is what makes the world go. Never apologize— keep moving. But I will say that I did not say yes until Mr. Nolt had threatened Adela and my sister May, and even after that I did not say yes until he observed that if I did not say yes the odds of a peaceful transition of power in Jasper City would be lowered by a significant percentage, and the odds of atrocity correspondingly increased. You cannot argue with mathematics.

My clothes were chosen for me and my speech was written for me and I was driven to the Senate in the middle of a military procession of motor-cars. All I had to do, as Mr. Nolt kept telling me, was smile. I read from a sheet of typed paper and I spoke without listening to what was coming out of my mouth. I was too busy trying to think of ways I might turn this sudden elevation to my advantage and against the Line. I was sure I would think of something.

I recall that I stumbled over some of my lines— something about the long history of partnership between the Baxter Trust and Jasper City— and I looked up. The Senate chamber was half-full, and most of the assembled Senators had a look about them that suggested they were not entirely a willing audience. I wondered what might happen if I tore up my speech and told them a few of the things I could tell them about Mr. Baxter and about the Line. I doubted I would be telling the Senators anything they did not already know, but there were reporters in the balcony, taking notes. I wondered what would happen if I told them to fight. I was not greatly experienced in making speeches of a martial character but I reckoned I could learn quickly.

Behind me Mr. Nolt coughed quietly, and I thought about Adela, wherever she was. The Senators were staring at their feet or at the walls, anywhere but at me.

Maybe there is another world where I diverted from my prepared remarks, and said what it was in my mind to say. Who knows how things in that world would have gone. One day maybe I will know, because sometimes when the Ransom Process gets up a good head of steam it seems it might burn a hole right through the world so that you can see how things might have been instead of the way they are. But I do not know now.

The silence became so heavy I could not stand it anymore.

Another time,
I told myself. There would be a better moment. If I bided my time there would be a better moment.

I wished that Mr. Carver was there to nod or shake his head or spit or curse and tell me what was right to do— or Liv— or anyone.

I coughed. Some of the Senators looked startled. I looked down and returned to my script.

After I had finished speaking, the Senators rose from their benches, slowly, as if prodded from behind, and gave me dutiful applause.

That evening my captors moved me from the basement cell and installed me in Mr. Baxter’s penthouse.

The Amazing Amaryllis died in a mission hospital in Hoo Lai operated by the sisters of the Silver City. I regret to say that her passing did not make the newspapers— I know about it only because my friend the soap-inventor Mr. Lung was with her.

You may recall that Mr. Lung had helped her to the hospital in the first place, after the altercation at the foot of Baxter’s Tower in which she got shot— in the leg as it happens— well anyhow he visited her a number of times after that. Love can blossom in the most unlikely circumstances. He sat by her bedside and they talked of his inventions and her growing fame and how they might leave Jasper and start over down south. When Jim Dark’s mob took the hospital over as a headquarters and kicked out the Silver City sisters Amaryllis remained in her bed and Mr. Lung remained by her side. Dark’s mob were the kind of men you would expect, recruited in haste from the city’s worst sorts— it was because of laziness, not kind-heartedness, that Dark’s mob did not evict the sick from their beds on the upstairs floors. They certainly did not bother to feed them. They occupied the lower floor and drank and schemed and boasted of how they’d win glory and take the city for themselves. They tormented the sick in their beds— thank fortune that Mr. Lung was there to protect Amaryllis. Food ran out, and medicine. Mr. Lung did not sleep. His spectacles were broken in a scuffle. Then as the forces of the Line closed in block-by-block around them the men of Dark’s mob started to shoot themselves. In the end Amaryllis died of infection. Mr. Lung assures me she passed in her sleep, and that he was there by her side— her last audience.

There is a story of heroism and suffering to be written about the mission hospital but that will have to be up to Mr. Lung. He is that story’s hero, kind and patient and steadfast and strong and all that kind of thing. I was not there. I spent that week in the pent house apartment of Baxter’s Tower. I paced and talked to myself, still scheming of ways to turn my new position to advantage. It took me some time to admit that I could not think of anything.

I was imprisoned, but I was imprisoned in circumstances of such luxury I cannot begin to describe them any better than I could describe the town of the Folk I once visited. A poor boy from East Conlan does not have the words in his head. The bathroom alone— not to mention the four-poster bed and the Dhravian carpets and the discreet bell-ropes everywhere and the bookcases . . . The windows were not barred but you could not climb down from that sky-scraping pent house, not even if you tied all the silk bedsheets together with all the bell-ropes and all the Dhravian carpets, and you may trust me when I say that I calculated and re-calculated that possibility to the last inch.

Mr. Lung escaped the city after Amaryllis died. Mr. Bekman, the inventor of financial instruments, perished in the fighting on the steps of the Bank; maybe he would have found that fitting. The rain-maker Mr. Angel Langhorne fled the city in advance of the Line’s invasion. Later when I met him again I asked how he knew— he stuttered and looked at his feet and smiled and said that he had f-f-fine antennae for danger, it came from contemplating lightning and thunder-clouds all day.

Mr. Baxter’s pent house was electric-lit, of course. Lamps hung from the high ceiling and hissed and buzzed and whispered like they were laughing at me. Of course the lamps were the work of the Northern Lighting Corporation. I could tell by their design and if I stood on a chair I could make out the letters nlc etched on them. On my fifth day in the penthouse I decided that I could not tolerate them. I had to stand on a chair and stretch and swing at them with one of the old man’s walking-sticks but in the end I got every last one of them. I could not escape and I could not rescue Adela and I could not do anything about what was happening outside in Jasper City but damn it I could show those lamps who was boss. Because of the demands of the fighting it was more than a week before they could be replaced.

Mr. Nolt, who had replaced Mr. Watt, was replaced in his turn by Mr. Lime. In the time I spent as chief executive of the Baxter Trust— subsequently re-named the Baxter-Ransom Trust— I met a number of others like them. They came and went, they were promoted and removed, I stopped noticing their faces or remembering their names. Mr. Nolt was shot for incompetence after his men raided the Floating World.

I knew about the raid before it happened. Mr. Nolt came to me in the old man’s pent house that morning, while I sat at the old man’s writing-desk reading his old correspondence. That was on the third day of my confinement in the pent house, when I was thinking that maybe I might find something in the old man’s secrets that could be turned to advantage. Mostly I was learning about old land deals that were of no use to anybody.