The Rise of Ransom City (60 page)

“Maybe I will,” he said, “Maybe I won’t.”

“It’s your choice, of course.”

He said nothing. I felt obscurely pleased, like he had given me his blessing. Like I had his sanction to go out there and build. I felt that I would not be alone.

“It’s time,” the adjutant said. “They’re here.”

I turned. I was crouching over my work and the adjutant stood behind and above me. She seemed for a moment inhumanly tall and the shadow she cast on the laboratory’s gray and distant wall was larger even than Carver’s had been.

Mr. Carver was gone.

I rubbed at my eyes, pretending to wipe sweat from them. Mr. Carver did not return. For a while I could not think of anything to say. I was aware of a foul taste in my mouth.

“I said they’re here.”

“Yes. You did.”

I thought for a moment, and understood that she was talking about the forces of the Red Republic.

“Yes,” I said. “All right. Where?”

“They massed across the river yesterday,” she said. “Two days ago we destroyed the bridge— last night they bridged it again. They have the earthmovers and the engineers of Archway with them. The Heavier-Than-Airs on both sides engaged this morning. It was a stalemate.”

Because of my exhaustion and because of the drugs, it took me a long time to understand what she had said. I tried to picture the events that she described. I could not. I was excited that I might soon be released. I was sorry that there would be more fighting. I felt one of those fits of drug-induced weeping approaching, and fought it off.

“Carver,” I said. “Was here.”

“Sir, are you—?”

“Yes. Quite all right, quite well, thank you. Reminiscing. Gets lonely in here, you know?”

“Sir.”

“Well. The boys in red. Can they win?”

The adjutant shrugged. “Who knows? Not easily. In my opinion they’re over-confident. They think the Engines are broken and maybe they are but they still have damage left to do.”

“We are under siege, then.”

“By order of the Kingstown Engine itself I’m here to escort you and the Apparatus to the front, where you are to begin the Process. Like the Log-Town test again, sir— they don’t care who dies on either side. Not anymore— not if they ever did. They want you there personally.”

She held out her hand to me and helped me to my feet. I was so tired after my work that I could hardly stand. I was locked in a crouch, like a rusted machine or a comic actor. My legs shook.

“I don’t intend to do that, sir. The contact from the Republic got word to me this morning— we must meet them under Arch Six, by noon, no later.”

“Will Adela be there?”

“Yes,” she said. “So they say. She knows the contact— I don’t.”

“Then we should hurry,” I said. “One thing before we go.”

Have I described the inside of the laboratory before? I think I have not— an oversight. I apologize. It was one very big room with walls made of gray metal and a flat gray roof from which hung lamps powered by the Process— sometimes trapped pigeons died on them like moths. From one end of the laboratory you could hardly see the other— it could be hot at one end and cold at the other. I would not have been altogether surprised if one day it started to storm overhead. I have been in towns that were smaller than the laboratory and considered themselves to be booming little towns on the go. A room like that was hell for echoes at the best of times and you can imagine that under the conditions of heavy experimentation with the Process, I mean the phantoms and the effects on gravity and time and distance, it was a strange and confusing place to work. Rows of desks and workbenches were laid out grid-fashion to the farthest wall. Between them was a chaos of machinery. The letters nlc were etched over and over into the metal whether I liked it or not. There were experimental forms of the Apparatus everywhere. Many of those departed wildly from my design— I did not understand some of them at all. Some of them were big as houses with magnetic cylinders like a miller’s wheels and they disturbed the bowels of every person who went near them. Sometimes a team of engineers would venture inside and I cannot say for sure that they always emerged. Some were even taller than that, and constructed like grandfather-clocks, with a great iron weight that would drop with a terrible whooshing noise. There were empty zones cleared by past frightening incidents where maybe only an overturned bench or a single hammer lay on the floor. There were half-constructed or half-dismantled designs lying on their sides with their ribs sticking out. There were machines that were made to monitor the efficiency of the other machines and I’ll confess again— I did not understand them. The enterprise had long since surpassed the understanding of any one person’s mind. I do not think the Engines understood it either.

I guess I understood it well enough to break things.

For most of that last sleepless week I had been working on the various half-made Apparatuses that stood around the laboratory like crumbling ruins. I had rebuilt three of the largest models, readying them to run wild. The Line wanted weapons. I had made weapons. They were not weapons that could be controlled, but they did not need to be.

“Here we go,” I told the adjutant.

I threw levers, turned wheels. There were signs on the three Apparatuses warning of danger if certain parameters were exceeded. I exceeded them.

“What will happen?” asked the adjutant.

“Nothing good,” I said.

“Why?”

“I won’t leave them behind for just anyone— besides this may give the Republic’s men a fighting chance. I believe in fair play.”

“How long?”

“Half an hour? Maybe less. Maybe more. Sometimes it builds slowly and sometimes it comes on at a rush. To be honest I thought it might happen at once.”

She was a good soldier, and said nothing, only stiffened slightly. I respected her.

“Well,” I said. “I guess we’ll see.”

There was a protocol in event of emergencies that called for the laboratory and all of the many-storied building beneath it to be evacuated. It required both my key and the adjutant’s. We activated it, causing alarms to sound and telegrams to be rattled off from the machines of offices everywhere—clear the building in an urgent but orderly fashion. . . .

The three Apparatuses were magnificent beasts, even if I did not fully understand them. I remarked to the adjutant that it felt like I was setting them free.

“Sir—we have to go.”

We left the laboratory and went down from the roof. Alarms blared. A panicked mob blocked the elevators, including my private elevator, which they would never be able to use. I confessed to the adjutant that I had not thought of that before starting the alarms— I blamed sleeplessness. We were forced to go down from the rooftop by one of the endlessly spiraling echoing staircases. We stumbled in the gloom. Crowds pushed past us. Already the Process as it built up in the laboratory was creating its phantoms— summoning them to it— and as we ran downstairs there were phantom people doggedly heads-down climbing the stairs as if the event upstairs was an appointment they had to keep, like it or not. There was that usual moment of electric uncertainty every time you bumped into one. Like always they were in a variety of styles of dress and like always they were silent. It was no use saying
excuse me
to them or
are you mad
because they were not really there.

We stumbled down the staircase. The adjutant and I carried the suitcase with the miniaturized Apparatus between us. The suitcase also contained a number of Adela’s letters, and it contained a great deal of money and a fortune in letters of credit and stock in what was left of the Baxter-Ransom Trust. I had to leave Mr. Baxter’s typewriter behind. I was somewhat sorry to leave the thing after all the time I had spent with it but when I suggested that together we might carry it out, the adjutant told me as respectfully as she could not to be a fool.

We quickly went further down than I had ever been— I had not touched ground level for months. There were noises and stinks of machinery. Below us somewhere in the subterranean levels the Kingstown Engine cowered in its lair. I wondered what it made of the alarms.

I followed the adjutant outside through a big open doorway through which hundreds of people were streaming— it led out onto a concrete plaza under a concrete sky. Everyone was running everywhere and shouting. By no means everyone running out there on that plaza was really a real person. There was a light up above on the roof of the building that was hard to look at but also hard to look away from.

It was just as we got outside and while I was still staring up at that light that a group of men in black coats stopped us. I only recognized them as engineers from the Ransom Project after blinking and thinking for a moment and after they called me
sir
in a menacing way.

“Evacuate,” the adjutant told them.

“What’s happening— where are you going?”

“I said, evacuate— didn’t you hear the alarms?”

Well, they weren’t fools and they quickly guessed that we were up to no good. Two of them tried to seize the suitcase and the adjutant had to shoot one of them in the leg. I wrestled the suitcase from the other and swinging it I knocked him on the head. I do not know where I found the strength to swing it like that.

The adjutant waved her gun and the other engineers scrambled away. Addressing the crowd, she explained, “Traitors.” Nobody seemed to care—I am not sure who was on whose side anyhow. Harrow Cross was in chaos. The streets were full of phantoms. Tall Folk in robes strode brazenly down the Station’s avenues. I saw the citizens of Harrow Cross running, crouching in dark corners, screaming, laughing, looting, kissing each other right in the street— I saw people shooting the phantoms conjured by the Process, to no avail— I saw people taking the phantoms in their arms and kissing them— I cannot tell you how strange that was to see. The living and the dead, the real and the unreal, all running here and there in the maddened avenues— I remarked to the adjutant that maybe that was what the Process was for after all. All together as one, I said.

The adjutant waved her gun. Above us, one by one, the windows began to break, all the way down the building. Below us there was a sound like a great beast roaring, and the concrete shuddered beneath our feet.