The Rise Of Ransom City Part 17

Jasper nodded.

"You should have seen it in its heyday. That was out on the Western Rim, under the big skies, the big red plains and the jagged wild hills and all that, like in the paintings. It lit up like the sun. You should have seen everyone's faces."

Jasper was sitting on the bench, studying the innards of the Apparatus. I was pacing.

"Do you see anything, Jasper? Anything at all?"

He shook his head.

"It's harder here- here in Jasper. Out on the Rim it all seemed to work so easily. I shall not say there weren't setbacks and frustrations because there were, oh there were, but somehow everything and anything seemed possible out there."

He nodded again, and looked thoughtful.

"I guess maybe you're thinking about days gone by, when the world was new-made, and Jasper City was new too, and you were all building a future where anything could be possible. a.s.suming you are in fact one of the founding generation of Jasper City and not just a shadow of a shadow of who-knows-what. a.s.suming you can hear me."

He seemed to look at me.

"If you are from those days maybe you should know that everybody hates the Senate you made. Just yesterday there was a riot on Thirty-second Street."

Sometimes I read to him from the newspapers. The topic was generally struggle and strife. Two more Senators were a.s.sa.s.sinated over the course of that summer. The Senate itself appeared to be in the painful process of splitting in two. So was the whole Tri-City Territory, for that matter.

It was now generally reported, as Adela had told us, that Gibson City had gone over to the Line. The Tri-City Territory had always understood itself to be neutral in the Great War. Gun and Line meddled in the heartland, but they did not operate there with the wild open abandon they allowed themselves on the Rim. The fall of Gibson shocked the Territory to its core.

In response to the news Juniper City had cut ties with Gibson and with Jasper both, announced that henceforth nothing would ever compromise its splendid independence. Juniper had expelled foreign businesses, including those of Mr. Baxter. The Juniper City Greater Council declared that it had acquired a terrible and unprecedented new weapon, capable of destroying the Engines themselves or laying siege to the Lodge of the Guns, and that if their affairs were meddled with they would make use of it. This was generally thought to be a bluff but n.o.body could be sure. One faction in Jasper City's Senate was for throwing in with Juniper City. Another was for preemptive surrender to the Line while it was possible to do so on favorable terms. Some of the newspapers railed against the Senate for failing to provide Jasper with its own secret weapons, some of them speculated that such weapons already existed. Meanwhile Liv and Creedmoor and myself were sighted all over the world. We were said to be raising an army, or rebuilding the Red Valley Republic. We were said to be whispering in the ear of the Juniper City Council or hiding in mountain caves. Pilgrims and drifters chased us all over the world. I was by now getting used to thinking about that other Ransom as somebody quite separate from myself, and I could read about him in the newspapers with only the tiniest chill.

I reported the news to Jasper whenever I saw him. It generally made him look sad, then disappear. I wondered if he understood me at all.

"Try signs," I said one late summer night. "Nod for yes, shake for no. Did you die here in this bas.e.m.e.nt? No? In the Ormolu? You don't look like an actor- was the Ormolu once something else, I don't know, like . . . Well, in Jasper? Are you dead? Do you have some purpose here, something to communicate to me about the Process, maybe? Listen- if you shake your head for everything I don't know if you understand me, do you understand?"

He nodded.

"Are you here with word from the world of the dead, maybe? Mr. Carver- do you know him? Does he forgive me? Yes? No? My father, maybe? What about Miss Harper and John Creedmoor- are they in the world of the dead yet? Do the dead have news of them- that's where the action is I guess- did they make it? If what they said is true, if they have a weapon that can kill the Powers, maybe there's a whole lot of Engines and Guns down there now- what's an Engine like out of its sh.e.l.l? Say,is there a world of the dead? I've never speculated much on religion."

He shook his head. I do not know what that meant exactly, or if it meant anything at all. Take it for what it's worth.

"The truth is I don't much care about politics and I don't care hardly at all about religion so if you are here to tell me something about the Great War or anything of that kind I don't want to hear it."

I mopped sweat from my brow- he did not. It was hot in the bas.e.m.e.nt. I guess it was not hot wherever he was.

"I don't know," I said. "It's hard to get it to work here. This place is older, harder. Conditions are different from the Rim. Have I told you how I found the sign- the word- I did, didn't I?- well, don't imagine it's easy. Don't imagine that's all there is to it. Bringing that world into this. Opening the door. What was possible then is impossible now. No words for it, even, d.a.m.n it. What'll I even do with it if I can rebuild it, except get myself hunted down and shot?"

Jasper stood.

"You've seen me build this thing. I guess you can see me, anyhow. If I go to law with Old Man Baxter over it will you be my witness? No? I guess not."

He folded his arms behind his back.

"Well, you must be here to teach me some kind of a lesson. In his Autobiography Mr. Baxter- d.a.m.n him- says that to a man of greatness everything's a lesson. Maybe I should find my way toward a theory of ghosts and spirits like yourself. Maybe-"

Suddenly there was an expression of panic on his face. He was not looking at me, but past me, maybe at the Apparatus, maybe at nothing visible in this world or time. Anyhow he turned right around and as soon as his back was to me he vanished.

I will tell you right now that though I tried and tried I have never understood this phenomenon, or what it is about the Process that causes it, or whether it is good or bad or if there is any way of doing anything with it. It is just one of those things that happens. Maybe in the future there will be time to investigate it.

Adela appeared onstage, two nights running, alongside the Mr. Barnabas Busby Bosko and his show of Western Rim wonders. It was not a success. She was too proud and too unbending to perform for a crowd. She had no craving to please. The experiment was not repeated.

She stopped working on the piano. She did not say why and I did not ask. She abandoned her little cell in the Gate and moved into an apartment a half-mile from Swing Street and overnight she became a Jasper City patriot- a true daughter of the Bull, as they used to say. She cursed the foreign influences that meddled in Jasper politics and she spoke urgently of the need to defend the city's honor and independence. I said that politics was a fool's game and that we had work of our own to do. She bit back the word coward, but her eyes said it. She went all over town to listen to speeches or shout herself hoa.r.s.e at Senators or businessmen or the offices of the Evening Post. She developed a very thorough accounting of which Senators were brave sons of Jasper and which Senators were weaklings and traitors and p.a.w.ns of the Line. I do not remember any of the names she spoke of. To this day all Senators or suchlike people are the same to me, like cats or dogs. Anyhow I did not accompany her on these ventures. While she was marching or waving flags I was working, or when I wasn't working I was paying court to that actress I mentioned, who I said I would not name and I will not but she was both statuesque & fair, and blissfully uninterested in politics. I who had once in the by-gone days of my youth ranged all across the Western Rim and slept under different stars each night now lived just about my whole life within the confines of Swing Street. When I left the Street it was an occasion and I dressed up in my go-to-meeting best.

Some days I would go and loiter outside the gates of Mr. Baxter's Tower on Fenimore with my hands in my pockets like an orphan child. I never caught a glimpse of him. Yet he haunted me anyhow. Twice that summer he returned to the pages of the newspapers, repeating his libel against me. He a.s.sured the readers of the Evening Post and the Clarion that detectives hired by the Trust were closing in on the fraud and thief Harry Ransom, who had so disturbed the peace of the simple folk of the Rim. . . .I wrote letters of my own. I wrote what I thought of his lies, you can be sure of that. I did not mail them.

Some days I would go visit the campus of Vansittart University. Vansittart U is gone now like so much else that was good in Jasper City but in its day it was a treasure-house of knowledge. It was a paradise of idleness and luxury and good fortune. I snuck into lectures on electricity, the light-bearing Ether, the history and society and science of the First Folk as revealed by their artifacts, and other topics of great interest. If only I had forever I would recount it all here. Instead I have only two pieces of advice. First, if you ever have cause to visit a University you should watch out for ball-players. Those beautiful green lawns are a menace if you do not understand the nature of the territory. Cross the wrong line and at any moment a football may tumble from the heavens and knock you off your feet and if you survive that then a half-ton of well-educated and well-fed Senators' sons will follow it, and they differ from stampeding buffalo only in the way that they apologize afterwards. Second, if you have trespa.s.sed into a lecture concerning the Etheric Flow by a very proud gowned and mutton-chopped Professor, do not raise your hand to contradict his errors or you will be ejected from paradise, never to return.

The lecture halls of VU were full of empty seats. The teams of the ball-players were always a few men down. Even some of the Professors were absent. Idealistic and vigorous youth, intellectuals- those were the kind of people most likely to set off for parts east or north or who-knew-where chasing after rumors of Liv and Creedmoor- or following stories that the Red Valley Republic was rising again in the west or the south or in Juniper City- or digging up Folk ruins, chasing after wondrous weapons of their own, poking their nose into Folk business and if they were unlucky getting run through with spears for their trouble. Some of Jasper City's gilded youth had joined the militia, ready to defend the Bull's City against all comers.

The armies of the Line moved south from Gibson across the Territory, toward Jasper, seizing small towns and bridges and roads, suppressing unrest. Flights of Heavier-Than-Air Vessels were seen in the skies over the Territory's rolling golden fields. Combustion-Powered Submersible Vessels were spotted along the meandering River Ja.s.s by night and mistaken for sea-serpents. The front moved forward. Agents of the Gun confronted Ironclads at Melnope- when the news. .h.i.t the Evening Post there were riots in the streets of Fenimore. Mr. Baxter hired private detectives in large numbers to guard his factories and his offices. The Baxter Trust ware house that I stole the magnets from that I used for the Apparatus was piled high with crates containing weapons, fuel, gas-masks &c. I did not notice that at the time, but I learned it later from a memorandum that crossed my desk, after the Battle.

I waited for my ghostly friend Jasper to reappear. He did not. There were rats down in the bas.e.m.e.nt with me but they were not so conversational as the ghost, and I missed him. By late summer the reconstructed Apparatus had grown to the size of a grand piano or a small church-organ. The bathtub had been incorporated into it and a number of other bits of stage business, including spears, a cartwheel, a mirror, and dinner-plates. It focused all the unstable energy of the Process into a sealed gla.s.s jar which I had placed, because it amused me, in the arms of a plaster statue of a half-naked nymph.

Sometimes I thought Jasper had returned to me, but it was only Mr. Quantrill or Amaryllis coming to check on their investment, to demand explanations. Sometimes Adela interrupted me. Once two stagehands came into the bas.e.m.e.nt to perform intimate acts together- well, it's a free city, or it was back in those days. Once I thought I glimpsed a man in a ragged soldier's uniform watching me from a far corner of the bas.e.m.e.nt but it was possibly only an old coat. On another occasion I recall I stood over the Apparatus for more than an hour, scratching my new-grown beard and just thinking about the Process, and then about how things had been out on the Western Rim, and about all my adventures out there and the Harpers and Mr. Carver and everything, and when I finally turned to sit on my bench there was a man already there. I jumped back in surprise and stumbled into the Apparatus, causing it to ring like a bell. The figure that sat on the bench held his head hung low, like he was tired, and a long mane of black hair fell to his knees.

I said, "Mr. Carver?"

The figure raised his head. For a moment I saw the face of a man of the Folk.. Then the Apparatus began to hum and throb behind me, and I turned back to it to see that when I stumbled into it I had knocked it on its side and set the cylindrical magnets spinning. Their spinning did not slow, but instead gathered speed, as the energies of the Process acc.u.mulated out of nothing and fed upon themselves. The acids in the jars and tubes started to bubble and the wires started to glow. I glanced back to see that the figure, if it was ever there, had vanished. The alarm I had felt at his sudden appearance had now been transformed into alarm at the sudden springing-to-life of the Apparatus, and now its increasing instability.

Well I have already said what it is like when the Process gets unstable, back in the good old town of Kenauk, and if you are curious maybe you can look back there, if any of these scattered pages are reaching anybody. All I'll say here is that the Process is not magnetism but it is kissing cousins with magnetism, like it is with all other energies. The bas.e.m.e.nt was full of old stage-weapons and doork.n.o.bs and magic-tricks and forks and I do not know what else was flying at my head, but you can imagine the chaos. There was a great flash of light. I wrestled with levers. From the Theater above I heard the sound of applause and cheering and then screaming.

What had happened was that at the very same moment that the Apparatus had taken it into its head to start running wild, the actors upstairs were performing The Story of John Creedmoor. This terrible play had been written in haste in the months after White Rock. It portrayed John Creedmoor as a n.o.ble but misunderstood hero who, with the aid of his lover Liv and his side-kick Harry Ransom had quested into the deadliest western wilderness and stolen a wondrous weapon with which to &c &c. The part of John Creedmoor was played by Mr. Barnabas Busby Bosko. Bosko was in the middle of booming out a speech about how all the Great Powers of the Earth will tremble when I hold this sign before them when suddenly a fountain of white light burst up through the trap-door that connected the bas.e.m.e.nt to the wings of the stage. The audience was delighted at first by this trick but they quickly turned fearful. As the power built the gentle tug of the magnetism became violent, yanking watches from pockets and s.n.a.t.c.hing eyegla.s.ses from faces and necklaces from throats, roughly, like what in Jasper City they call a "mugger." Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson described all this for the readers of the Evening Post as a wonderful though vulgar coup de theatre. I know for a fact he was not in the audience, though in his newspaper he implied that he was. A minor sin, in my estimation- I know what it is like to be a showman- and anyhow he was kind enough not to mention the screaming, the fainting, the stampede, or how the actor portraying John Creedmoor dropped his gun and said an unprintable word. Riot or worse disaster was narrowly averted when Adela come running down into the bas.e.m.e.nt to investigate, and with her a.s.sistance I was able to tame the Process again.

CHAPTER 21.

A VISIT TO THE FLOATING WORLD.

That was the end of my summer on Swing Street. Now it is time to write about the rest of my time in Jasper, and how it all ended. The typewriter is very stiff to night, as if it has not got much traveling left in it, or as if it does not want to tell the rest of the story.

Adela and I sat on the floor of the bas.e.m.e.nt in the aftermath of the incident. We were both of us breathless from exertion and panic and relief. The bas.e.m.e.nt was hot as an oven. The floor was hot and the wall we rested our backs on was hot. The contents of the bas.e.m.e.nt were strewn all around us, swords and pennants and spears and tables and chairs and wooden trees and picture-frames and broken crockery and machinery like there had been a battle or a tornado or I don't know what. The Apparatus was in pieces again. It had suffered some damage during the instability, and further damage during our struggle to stop it. There was a smell of salt and surf and burning. The shadows cast by Adela's candle moved in a way that did not look exactly right.

We were alone. Mr. Quantrill appeared at the stairhead but Adela told him to go away, and her tone brooked no argument- he went away. My ghostly friend Jasper did not join us, and I cannot say why but I knew that after that incident with the Apparatus he was gone from the Ormolu for good.

Adela said, "Don't you dare lie to me."

I gave her my most honest and open expression.

"I don't- well, I mean- well, I guess I won't. No."

"That thing- that thing you've been working on all this time- what is it?"

"It makes light. Heat, too, and magnetism, as you can see, and a whole lot of other things. Free and perpetual, in theory, and without limit. In theory."

"Does it work?"

"In theory."

"What is it? How does it-?"

"There isn't a name for it. I discovered it. Any of the Professors at good old VU will tell you it's impossible by all the laws of the world.

Impossible not to mention indecent. Well, I made my own laws." She stood and paced through the wreckage. I saw that her dress had torn in the struggle with the Apparatus. Her hair was unpinned and damp with sweat. She took the candle, leaving me in shadow against the wall. I knew what she was thinking and I was waiting for her to say it. There were fragments of stone and metal and wood in the wreckage- doork.n.o.bs, nails, stage-medals, branches from a painted tree, the bra.s.s leaves of the Automated Orange Tree. Some of them moved as Adela kicked them aside. Others still moved on their own account. A few floated a little way above the floor.

Adela turned over a bit of hot bra.s.s with the toe of her boot. "I heard about White Rock," she said.

"I guess just about everybody did, from the World's Walls to the Rim or beyond."

"When the Line held me they asked me about- they questioned me about- White Rock. Harry Ransom. The east-country woman with the strange name and the turncoat Agent and about secret weapons and devices and science. I told them, I don't know- I didn't know."

"They were scared," I said. "The future belongs to them, or that's their opinion anyhow, and they don't care for compet.i.tion."

"They say he's seven feet tall, this Professor Ransom, and he dresses like a sorcerer out of the far far East."

That was how I was portrayed in The Story of John Creedmoor, upstairs on the Ormolu's stage. The actor was a fellow of Judduan descent, with a thick and unfortunate accent of Gibson City's docks. Sorcerer's robes were easy to come by, backstage at the Ormolu. The tallness was accomplished with high shoes.

"A lot of things they say aren't so."

"They say," she said, "that at White Rock this Professor Harry Ransom had a weapon like nothing else in the world- something there is no name for."

"It's not a weapon," I said.

She turned a full circle, surveying the wreckage as she went. "Are you sure?"

I told her the whole truth as I knew it. That is everything I've written here. I told her everything I knew about Miss Harper- Liv Alverhuysen- and about Creedmoor. I told her everything about how the Apparatus worked, and what I had learned from the Folk. I said that I thought maybe they had meant me to see what I saw, that maybe they meant for me to make use of that knowledge. I said that I believed that my Process would one day change the world for the better, and maybe that was what they wanted.

She said maybe, or maybe they wanted me to bring the world to ruin. After all why should they have any love for the world we'd made? I acknowledged that that might be the case, but I said that we all have to do what we think is right, and none of us know how any of it will end.

Mr. Quantrill showed his face again at the stairhead. He was now accompanied by several stagehands and by Mr. Bosko and by the actor who played the part of Professor Harry Ransom. Quantrill was huffing and puffing and threatening to evict me. My double was glaring at me as if he was in actual fact a wizard of the far East, and could give me the evil eye.

I told them all that the Apparatus was an experimental device for generating brightly colored smoke for the stage, and that there had been an accident with some chemicals but no harm done. Adela confirmed my story.

Mr. Quantrill seemed to believe me, or at least he did not ask anymore questions. From the look on his face as he surveyed the room I think maybe he could not imagine what questions to ask. His eye fell for a moment on one of the bra.s.s leaves of the Automated Orange Tree, which was levitating some three feet off above the rest of the wreckage and turning softly as if in a breeze, and he looked away sharply, the way a man might look away from the sun.

He chewed it over for a while and then fell back to the old familiar things he was sure of.

"This is coming out of your wages, Rawlins."

Quantrill left. The stagehands left. Lastly my double left, gathering his robes around him.

Adela investigated the floating bra.s.s leaf.

"The shadows," she said. "Look."

I did not get up. "Let me guess- it has no shadow?"

"On the contrary. It has too many shadows by far."

"Ah."

"What causes that?"

"Truth is that I do not know."

"Can I touch it?"

"I guess so."

She plucked the leaf from the air, carefully wrapping it in a piece of torn cloth and putting it in her purse.

"At my present wages," I said, "I believe I could work for Mr. Quantrill for a hundred years and not pay him back for the damage."

"To h.e.l.l with him," Adela said. "What does it matter what he thinks? Or his money?"

"I used to talk that way. Then I learned that a man needs to eat."

"You should give notice. We both should."

"You have another employer in mind?"

She waved that objection away, as if it was nothing.

"Not all of us were born rich. . . ."

She did not take offense at that, she was so distracted by big ideas, and so I knew that she was serious.

"You've got something in mind," I said. "Dally's Theater, or-"

"No. Hal- Harry-this is more than a toy. Look at it! We have to go to the Senate."

I think I have said that Adela had become, over the course of the summer, a true patriot of Jasper City. I guess that it was because her own country was lost to her. She gave me quite a speech, a real honest blood and thunder stump speech, about how the Apparatus could be just what poor beleaguered Jasper City needed to fend off the encroaching forces of the Line. She spoke of driving the Line back, crus.h.i.+ng its ambitions, humbling the Engines. She spoke of independence, power, wealth, freedom for Jasper from the great forces of the world. I said that that was all very well, but firstly the Apparatus was in ruins, and secondly what if I spoke up, what might Mr. Baxter do? What if Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson's insinuations were accurate, and Mr. Baxter was in cahoots with the Line?

She observed that if the Line was on my trail, the recent incident of flashes & bangs & blazing light would most likely have alerted them to my presence anyhow. She was right, of course. Anyhow we argued for a while. I was kind of annoyed to be told what to do, as if it was any business of hers, but I was kind of happy too. I had been alone with my secrets for too long. I missed Mr. Carver and I missed Miss Harper and I even missed John Creedmoor- I began to see why the two of them traveled together, though surely they did not like each other. I missed my sisters.