The Rise of Ransom City (52 page)

For a while I hoped one of my sisters might see the letters and come find me, but they have not. I guess I don’t blame them.

We are camped out on the edge of the river, on the edge of the world. A little way past this point the river becomes un-navigable, even for the Beck brothers. There are a few more settlements alongside the river, with deep woods all around them— then nothing that has any name in our language. In the very far distance on a very clear morning you can see mountains. Ask the locals what they’re called and they’ll shrug. They reckon Folk live there, and they have all kinds of superstitions regarding them.

We got the Apparatus off the boat without incident except that Josh Beck slipped and soaked himself, and Mr. Langhorne laughed until he had one of his fits. The Apparatus hums constantly these days, like it is happy to be going home.

This is the last place from which we might send back mail, and even here for mail to get to any place that counts in the world it will have to pass through many hands— a ridiculous succession of improbabilities— like one of the complex contraptions Adela and I used to build back on Swing Street. I reckon the odds are better than even that this last part of the story will get lost, sunk in the river or eaten by wolves or stuck through with spears or tossed aside as worthless by bandits or left to bleach in the hot desert somewhere, going white like the unknown places on a map.

Miss Fleming caught sight of the smoke-trail of a scouting Vessel in the distance. I couldn’t see it myself but others with sharper eyes and a more finely honed sense of danger saw it clear enough. It turned backeast. They have spyglasses, so if we saw it it saw us.

We are far out beyond any lands controlled by the Line. But who knows these days. Everything is falling apart and it may be that some splinter of the Line’s forces operates in this area, or they may be deserters or rebels. Who knows. They are not likely to be friendly. Whoever they are I guess I must get through my story pretty quick if I want to be sure of telling it all before they find us.

The Baxter Trust became the Baxter-Ransom Trust.

The transformation of the Baxter Trust into the Baxter-Ransom Trust was an operation on a military scale, surpassing even the invasion of Jasper for manpower and planning. It happened maybe three or four months after the fall of Jasper City to the Line. I had no say in the matter. I am told it was a policy decided at the highest levels, which is to say by the Engines themselves, who find it useful sometimes to operate through a human face.

The Trust’s activities extended all over the western world, and it was essential that the transformation took place without disruption in the lines of power, and so an army of lawyers and accountants had to go out from Jasper City all across the Territory and out to the remotest mining towns on the Rim and the plantations of the Deltas and up into the cold north to handle paperwork. They even went into East Conlan. Soldiers of the Line went with them to suppress rebellious subsidiaries. I had no part in the planning of any of this except to sign my name to documents. Mostly what I remember of my first few months as President of the Baxter-Ransom Trust was signing documents. Once matters of money and power were taken care of I was presented for a public signing ceremony in Tanager Square. What was left of Jasper City’s great men sat in chairs before me and the crowd gathered behind a chain fence and I spoke through electrical amplification, promising a new start under new management and a square deal for the hard-working man of Jasper, who had the good sense to knuckle under and do his job without complaint. Sometimes Mr. Lime sat behind me while I spoke but he did not often need to threaten me. Most days I was so settled into my routine that I could make those speeches and make them well without feeling a thing.

The roads reopened. Jasper resumed trade, notably with Gibson City, which remained under control of the Line. There was a period of truce. Life in Jasper returned to something not so very different from what it had been before, except that production shifted to a war footing.

When I was a boy I used to dream about being a rich man, a man of power and the freedom to do as he pleases— what boy doesn’t? I tried to imagine what a man like Mr. Baxter did all day. I confess I sometimes got him mixed up with a king from a story-book about the old country, and imagined jousts and harems of a hundred beautiful women.

I slept in a four-poster bed that had previously belonged to Mr. Baxter, in the pent house apartment that had previously been his. I was woken at six every morning, whether I liked it or not, by one of the succession of adjutants who served me or commanded me, however you chose to look at it. The adjutant’s servant carried a silver tray which in turn carried coffee, a boiled egg, a heap of correspondence and legal documents, a copy of the
Jasper City Evening Post
from which most news about the War had been censored, and an arrangement of chemical tablets, the finest products of the Line’s science, which I was assured would calm my moods and sharpen my thinking and regulate my bowels and prevent cancer. Anyhow I was not permitted not to take them. The newspaper was a courtesy and they did not care if I read it or not. There was little in it after the censoring except sport.

From six until six fifteen I was left alone in the bathroom, where I did my best to perform the Ransom System of Exercises. Mr. Baxter’s bathroom was more spacious than most people’s houses and so the Exercises suffered little compromise, I am happy to report. There were gold fittings and big-breasted women made of white marble and mirrors big enough for the vanity of a King. A row of ivory boxes and greasy-looking jars on a shelf along the back wall held relics of Old Man Baxter, such as his false teeth and his spectacles and his wigs and breathing-tubes and syringes and his mechanical hearing-trumpet and his artificial foot. Sometimes I used to look at those and think of the failing sight in my bad eye and the various aches and pains I had accumulated out on the Rim and I contemplated the years ahead of me with dread.

At six fifteen if I had not emerged the adjutant opened the door regardless.

I signed legal documents for a period of time that varied from two minutes to half an hour, depending on whether I bothered to ask questions as to their meaning or raise any kind of futile protest against any injustice I saw in them. Sometimes I did— truth is, not often.

Then until half-past nine I sat at the old man’s writing-desk and answered correspondence. The desk was heavy and made of a very fine wood that was so black it looked burned and in the middle of it sat the big triplicate typewriter, which so far as I know is the only one of its kind in the world. Most of the correspondence was about business, letters from Mayors or Senators or the executives of subsidiary operations of the Baxter-Ransom Trust, like the Northern Lighting Corporation or the Conlan Coal Company. If it was important the adjutants told me what to write.

In my first month at the top I got at least a hundred letters from creditors from back in East Conlan or all over the Western Rim who reckoned I owed them money, and I guess I most likely did. All plausible claims were paid promptly and with interest. A few ambitious fellows attempted to bring lawsuits against me personally or the Baxter-Ransom Trust but they got a quick visit from the detectives of the BaxterRansom Agency, who taught them a thing or two about how the world works. Soon enough all my debts were cleared. I had never been debt-free since I was a knee-high child and I cannot say I altogether enjoyed the sensation— I felt like my strings had been cut.

I got letters from small boys in far-flung towns all over the West who wanted to know how come I made it from a nobody like them to the top of the tallest tower in Jasper City and I told them anyone who worked hard and played the game by the rules could get ahead, just like it said in Mr. Baxter’s
Autobiography.

On days when my correspondence was done before nine thirty I was permitted to stand by the window and stare out over Jasper City. I watched the new towers go up to fill the holes the Battle had knocked in the skyline. The cranes were taller than redwoods, and they were constructed in the Station of Harrow Cross and brought south on the backs of trucks to Jasper City and assembled by workmen in my employ and leased to the city by the Baxter-Ransom Trust for a sum so staggering I shall not write it down or you will think I am telling tall tales.

At nine thirty I dressed in a black suit and was taken down in the private elevator to the room that contained the old man’s fleet of black motor-cars. I shook the hand of what ever adjutant awaited me and said, “Well, Mr. whoever-you-are, where is it today?” Usually it was some factory somewhere, where I spoke to the workers, or a meeting with Senators to discuss the defense of the city, at which I sat quietly while the adjutant spoke.

Sometimes on these journeys my routine was enlivened by an attempt at assassination. The Agents Procopio “Dynamite” Morse, Black John Boles, Pearl Starr, and Red-Headed Dick all made attempts upon my life at one time or another. Gentleman Jim Dark returned to Jasper City six months after he first fled and boasted in taverns about what he would do when he got his hands on me, but I can tell you that he never did get up the grit to attack my car. Of all the Agents who tried it was Procopio Morse who got closest to success. With well-placed dynamite beneath a manhole on Seventh Street he managed to turn the car right over like a beetle on its back, and when he tore off the door I spilled out dazed and bleeding onto the street between his boots and I lay on my back looking up at him. He was a black fellow with a broad nose and a wild mop of reddish hair and a big black bow-tie and a brass-buttoned black coat and everything about him was handsome except for his hands, which were burned and club-like. Anyhow he stood over me and made a speech, which I guess was heart-felt and proud and impassioned from the look on his face but it was wasted on me because of the way my ears were still ringing, and it gave the Linesmen in the car behind a chance to shoot him. He fell on top of me. I recall saying “Thank you, well done, good work” to the officers who pulled him off me and helped me to stand.