The Rise of Ransom City (63 page)

I do not much resemble the man in the stories. I am of no more than average height and I do not think my manner is cruel and I do not mean to be arrogant and I have never to my knowledge cackled or stroked my mustache in a sinister way.

I went back to sign-painting after a while. A lot of people had moved to one place or another because of the fighting and so there was a demand for signs. I am good at it.

I joined up with a chapter of the Smilers who were doing good works near Gibson. I told them I wanted to make amends, and they asked what for, and I said that it did not matter, everyone had something to make amends for. It was hard work and accomplished nothing.

I made a little money in Keaton City teaching the Ransom System of Physical Exercises to rich young men. Of course I did not call it that and they did not know who I was. I told them I was teaching them the exercise secrets of long-dead Folk warriors, and mostly they liked that notion.

I had a lot of strange dreams for a very long time, which maybe is because I had stopped taking the sleeping-tablets too suddenly. Who knows. Anyhow I dreamed of the edge of the world, and of Mr. Carver, and of the Folk I had met back outside East Conlan when I was a boy.

I stopped hearing my name cursed as a villain. I started to hear my name made a joke. I do not quite know how it got around but soon it seemed there was a general view that there never had been any terrible weapon, that Professor Ransom was a fraud at best and maybe never existed. Some people said that the whole thing had been a decadent and deceitful and desperate ploy of the Engines in their last days. Others said that Professor Ransom was just a snake-oil salesman who had happened to cross paths with Dr. Alverhuysen and John Creedmoor, and who had subsequently taken credit for wonders they had performed. Still others denied the existence of Dr. Alverhuysen and John Creedmoor too. Soon enough there was a general view that the Republic had taken Harrow Cross through good old-fashioned fighting spirit, without the aid of mysterious weapons or happy accidents or Professor Harry Ransom. I did not like that much. If nothing else I hope I have shown that it is not true.

I moved town a few times and after a while I stopped hearing my name at all. I did not like that either.

Miss Harper thought the war might be done in a matter of years, and the current fighting is like a fever before it breaks. I hope she is right but I do not know. I still do not understand politics. I do not think I like the Republic very much, and I do not think I like President Hobart IV, but I do not move in great circles anymore and I do not know him.

I think I said that in one of the letters Adela sent to me she described the operations of the self-playing piano. Well, I do not want to speak ill of the dead but her explanations were unclear, and it took me months of hard work to understand them, months more to make the thing that the Beck brothers have hauled out here. Even after all that work it is not half as wonderful as the original, in fact the music it makes is downright ugly. The Beck brothers compare it to cats and dogs and they are right. But I mean to keep trying. She had a lot of bad luck in this world and I hope things will be better in the next.

I built a new Light-Bringing Engine. It still does not work as well as I would like it to. Most of its weight is made of safeguards to stop it running wild, and safeguards to be sure the other safeguards are in order. I did not dare exhibit it, or patent it, or try to go into business. I did not trust anyone with it. I was not sure that I trusted myself. I spent many long nights just staring at it, not daring even to make it run.

Eventually I was able to mend the typewriter, too. Then I realized that I did not know exactly what to do with it. I did not have anyone to write to. But the white space calls to you. It demands to be filled. I wrote a very long letter regarding how rumors of my death had been much exaggerated and regarding how as I saw it I had been unfairly treated by History, and how I had won the Battle of Harrow Cross just about single-handed. I addressed it to Mr. Carson but I did not send it. I tore it up. It was no more than a half-truth, no better than what you might read in the newspapers.

Then one night I sat down and wrote to all men and women of goodwill it is time to begin anew i invite you to join me in the city of the future et cetera. I signed my true name to it and sent it to the editor of the town’s newspaper.

Not everyone who showed up at the meeting-place I had proposed was friendly to me at first. I guess most of them thought I was an impostor, and the rest were still mad at me for one reason or another. As a matter of fact one man threw a chair at me. But I always was a good talker. That man is still with me now and will be with us when Ransom City rises.

When Miss Harper and I talked, back at the camp outside Harrow Cross, I told her about Adela and about our letters and about how we had talked of building a new city, free of war and all the other problems of the world. She said that was a common enough notion in these times and I acknowledged that it would never happen, it was only words. I said that I did not trust anyone with the Process, and I did not trust myself, because sooner or later someone would find me and offer me money for it, or fame, and maybe they would promise me they would not misuse it, and maybe they would even believe they were telling the truth, and who knows what I would do then. I said that I had to go far, far away. She said that it would not be enough to go to the edge of the world, I would have to go as far as anyone has ever gone and keep going, and that that country had its own inhabitants who might not welcome me. I acknowledged that that was true too. She took pity on me then, I think, and she asked me if I remembered when we first met at Clementine, and I said of course I did, and she said that at that time she and John Creedmoor had recently completed their own long wandering in the wilderness, having got almost all the way out to the place where everything turns into Sea, and if I wanted she could tell me a few things about what was out there, almost like a kind of map, though I should not rely on it too much. I said that I was grateful to her, and I would take it all as it comes, and that I relied on nothing these days.

This is the end of the fourth part. When I write again I will write from Ransom City.

And there endeth, as they say, the sermon.

I assume that one of the copies of the Fourth Part of Mr. Ransom’s letters was addressed to me, the same as all the others. It never came to me through the mails, and I have never found any trace a copy addressed to me anywhere in the world. One of the copies was addressed to President Hobart IV. A few pages of that copy survive in the Public Library of New Morgan City. The rest of it is in private collections, or lost In the years after the fall of Harrow Cross there was briefly hot competition for Mr. Ransom’s letters, among those who had heard rumor of them, and who hoped that they might find clues as to how to reconstruct Mr. Ransom’s weapon. That has gone out of fashion lately, and for the most part I have been able to indulge my hobby quite cheaply.

The third copy was addressed to the Baron Iermo, father of Adela. It reached him, and it remained in his possession through all the ups and downs that the Baronetcy of Iermo and the Deltas have suffered in the years since Ransom wrote; it was still in his possession last year, when I visited him in his rotting and vine-choked mansion. I had come all the way south to interview him on the subject of his daughter, but he was old, prodigiously so, older even than myself, and there was little that he could tell me, little that he remembered. There were no traces of her in the house. Some musical instruments; some rusting and overgrown machinery in the fields outside, the purpose of which was unclear to me. No marks of genius that I could see— but mine is an untutored eye. Yet it was not a fruitless expedition, because to my great surprise I discovered a complete copy of the Fourth Part of Mr. Ransom’s writings rotting among the old Baron’s papers. He was happy to give it to me, seeing no value in it.

I have never seen any Fifth Part of Mr. Ransom’s writings, nor heard any rumor of any such thing. Moreover anyone can tell you that there is no Ransom City, and never was. You have only to look at a map.