The Rise of Ransom City (5 page)

I never did set foot in a mine but I always found work of one kind or another. Most of the money I earned went on my father’s debts. He didn’t thank me and I guess he didn’t owe me any thanks. The rest went on books and later on parts: copper wire and glass and magnets and acids &c. I kept on returning in my daydreams to that Light.

Jess moved away to the Three Cities to find work in the theaters. Sue got married. They both sent back money. May got religion and went off with a traveling revival, from which she sent back occasional optimistic messages about the World to Come. I sold Encyclopedias and swept and mended and dug and scraped and ran and climbed and carried and cooked and did what ever else I could. I worked at night on the Ransom Process. At first, naturally, I tried to create an electrical process just like the one the Linesmen had used on me. I climbed to the top of the disused tower on what some of us had started calling Grady’s Hill, in a thunderstorm, with a kite and some nails, though all I accomplished that way was three months of penal servitude as punishment for Trespass. The Encyclopedias were not well informed on the subject of electricity, it being so new and in those days mostly a closely guarded secret of the Line. I made a virtue out of ignorance. I did not know what could not be done. I did not know the names or the words for anything so I made my own. In my fourteenth year I had a piece of good fortune that I may write of later if there is time. Behind every moment of inspiration there is hard work and good luck. Anyhow what I ended up discovering instead of electricity was something more fundamental than electricity. I did not call it the Ransom Process then. I did not call it anything because it was not the sort of thing one could speak of in East Conlan. It was too big and wild a notion. I did not have the money to do it justice. And besides East Conlan was a Line town now and I did not mean to let the men of the Line steal my idea and make it ugly. I dreamed of heading out West, where I would be free to work and think freely and look for investors who might not know or think they knew that the whole thing was impossible.

I got taller. I exercised daily. I expect I will tell you about the Ransom System of Exercises in due course. I learned from a book how to paint signs and for a time I supported myself and paid down my father’s debts that way, making the town colorful until the Line ordered me to cease and desist. I was sometimes happy and sometimes not, just like everyone else. In my eighteenth year the Line installed electric-lighting in East Conlan, like they have in Harrow Cross or Archway or other Stations of the Line. Men from something called the Northern Lighting Corporation placed big arc lights on the rooftops or at the top of wooden poles, at the foot of which they placed barbed wire to discourage sabotage. The sky over Main Street became a cage of wires. The birds departed and were mostly replaced with rats. The lighting increased efficiency and working hours, but the costs of operation were extraordinary and the fee that was assessed on each house hold in town was so absurd that at first it was widely thought to be a mathematical error, and that is not even to mention the interest on it. Nothing the Line does is for free. Nothing in this world is free. I have never accepted that should be the case. The light was cold and hideous and I took it as a personal insult. I knew I could not stand it for long.

I was nineteen years old when my father got sick and died. In the same year I built the first prototype of the Apparatus, and I will certainly tell you about the Apparatus in due course, because if I am still famous it is what I am famous for. By the time I was nineteen years old East Conlan was a much bigger town than it had been when I was a boy, and when I put an advertisement in the newspaper for a mechanic and an assistant and a traveling companion it was not long until one Mr. Carver applied for the job. Not long after that Mr. Carver and me and two horses and the Apparatus’s rickety prototype headed out West.

I see that when I left off telling this story Mr. Carver and I were just setting off on our travels. Not a bad place to leave off. Maybe not a bad place to stop. Anyhow it has been a week since I wrote those words. I have not been idle. I am going West again, just like me and Mr. Carver did five years ago, but this time we are going a whole lot farther. I have a lot more people with me, all the pioneers of what is to be Ransom City, and I am busy all the time, which suits me just fine.

In the week since I last wrote we the pioneers of Ransom City have had all the usual kind of adventures and escapades you have on the road, with refugees and bandits and unexploded devices of the Line and the fording of high rivers. Our numbers have swelled to the tune of one poet one lady botanist a driller of wells two traveling salesmen one deserter from the forces of the Line and the four Beck Brothers, John, Erskine, Joshua, and Dick, who are handsome and smiling and fair-haired and good-natured and I guess you could say they have hired on as muscle. We passed by a town with a very fine Meeting-House of the Smiler faith, and I nailed to their door a letter regarding Ransom City, under the title an open invitation to the men and women who would live in the world of the future.* We have left the Tri-City Territory behind us and are traveling across what used to be called the territory of Thurlow before all the recent unpleasantness, toward the Opals and the Western Rim and beyond that: who knows.

It is raining. I am sitting on a rock in a tent listening to the rain type on the canvas as if it too has things it needs to get off its chest. When the Beck boys ask me what I’m doing I say I am thinking.

There is a whole lot I could say about the time Mr. Carver and me and the horses spent out on the Rim doing business. I do not know where to start.

*I do not know if this letter ever won Mr. Ransom any recruits, but I have it in my collection, and it is a fine piece of work! It makes promises about Ransom City that a priest would blush to make on behalf of the heavenly Silver City itself. I acquired it from the aged master of the Meeting-House, who had preserved it for twenty years, as an investment, believing instinctively that anything so odd would sooner or later be salable to someone. I proved him right. —EMC

The year was 1890. I was twenty years old.

There’ve been worse years. Swing Street boomed and theater-people traveled from all over to Jasper City and some of them made their fame and fortune there and even the ones who starved did so with a touch of romance. The Free State of Nod extended the franchise to women, and opinions were divided on that but I count it an unqualified good. Down in the hot wet marshy lands of the Delta Karthik the Younger’s Territories seceded from Karthik the Elder’s without bloodshed, or so I read. The Line’s laboratories at Harrow Cross began the mass-production of a vaccine for polio. In the northern mountains the Baron of New Pisan held an Exposition for the West’s Fourth Centennial, with sharpshooters and lion-tamers and Dhravian rope-dancers and jousters from the ancient principalities of the far East, and I know it was a hell of a show because there were photographs, which were of a new and highly experimental sharpness and beauty. Everyone everywhere that year saw the photographs and after a while nearly everyone remembered it like they were there, or said they did. I won’t lie: I was not there.

That was the good, or some of it. The bad? Well, the Juniper Municipal Bank collapsed, scattering bad debts and lawsuits all across the world like ashes on the wind. There was an epidemic in Cray, I forget of what but it was ugly.* There were collections for the victims but I was young that year and I had no money to spare. Explorers brought back a monster from the far uncreated West to the Gibson City Zoo— iron bars could not hold its vague and slippery form and to make a long story short several unfortunate zoo patrons were killed before it was brought down.

On the edges of the world the Great War between Gun and Line raged on. It was always worse on the Rim than it was back home in the Territory and environs. The fighting was worst in the north-west, up around the town of Greenbank— or what was left of it. Greenbank itself was well and truly annihilated right in the early weeks of that year. Some blamed Agents of the Gun, some blamed the forces of the Line. I don’t know. I got caught in the crossfire at a place called Kloan between Linesmen and an Agent or maybe half a dozen Agents, I don’t know— I kept my head down and saw as little as it was possible to see. That was early in the fighting. After that the Line settled into the ruins and built up an iron-walled Forward Camp there, and laid track, and Engines came back and forth all spring and summer carrying Line troops, until soon there was no place you could go for a drink in that whole hot country without seeing a black-clad squad of them, watching you disapprovingly, taking notes on your movements. Meanwhile the Gun brought its Agents and mercenaries in the hills, and recruited refugees, making its usual promises of revenge. The fighting dragged on toward summer. The Dryden Engine was derailed. A pack of Agents burned the orange groves at Toro-Town so that the Line could not have them, butchering the slaves there for good measure, and afterwards posed smiling for reporters and photographs: Gentleman Jim Dark, Rattlesnake Renner, and I forget the names of the others. Bridges were cut, stranding refugees and interfering with business. A brutal Line-made poison-gas rocket penetrated the ornate stuccoed ceiling of the dining room of Melville City’s Main Street Hotel, killing seventeen of that town’s wealthiest citizens, a number of waiters, and damn near yours truly too. Later it was said to have been an accident, off-target by a number of miles. The Line blamed sabotage but it was most likely the work of some minor military clerk in a Harrow Cross Signals Station who hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours and added 2 and 2 and got 7. Or something of that kind. I heard that some small compensation was later paid to the Hotel. None to me.

*Rasmussen’s disease. —EMC

I was in Melville on business. Everywhere I went that year I was on business. You may find it hard to credit but there was a time when people doubted the efficacy of the Ransom Process, or its wisdom, or even its existence, and I was always on the lookout for investors. At the moment the rocket hit I was sitting at a large round table, heaped high with silverware and warship-like gravy boats and fanned-out napkins fastened with gold. I hoped that if I kept talking fast enough I might forget how hungry I was, and also that the assembled worthies of Melville City might forget to have me ejected. As I talked and gestured with my left hand I used my right to sketch on a napkin.

“. . . so ask yourselves,” I said, “What’s going to put this town on the map? This is a young town, gentlemen, on the very edge of the world— a pioneer— it stands on the edge of greatness, in my opinion.”

Melville was one of the oldest cities in that part of the Western Rim, which was to say that it was only a little younger than me.

“Now, think about Jasper City back east— what do you think of?— well, Jasper’s got Swing Street and Vansittart U and the yards and the Brass Bull and all the rest. Gibson’s got the Horse Guards and football and that big statue of the woman with the lantern, you know the one. Juniper? Juniper’s got its Banks—”

“Not anymore,” said a scowling banker.

I said, “Crisis is opportunity, sir, I don’t have to tell a businessman like you that.”

His wife cleared her throat. She was a very fine-looking woman. She was, I had learned from listening at the next table, the President of Melville’s Six Thousand Club, whose aim was the increase of Melville’s population to that number by the turn of the millennium. I reckoned that she and I should be natural allies, because we were both about making something out of nothing, but so far she remained skeptical.

“What did you say your name was, Mr.—?”

“Ransom, ma’am.” I smiled at her. “Professor, if you don’t mind. And I take your point about opportunity, sir, you put your finger on the very heart of the matter, but what opportunity? What’s going to make Melville City’s fortune, that’s the—”

“Copper,” piped up a little tufty-eared businessman to the left of the fine-looking President. “We control the largest deposits of copper on the northwestern rim and my smelting operations are second to none, and now listen anyhow, Professor, of what exactly—?”