The Rise Of Ransom City Part 3

*Or to me. -EMC If you've ever been in a Smiler meeting-hall you know what they're like. They are the same everywhere, because it is an article of the New Thought that people are all the same. The townsfolk sat in circles around thepodium, and the Reverend welcomed them and everyone forced a big smile and shook the hands of those next to them and pretended good cheer.

The Reverend led them in the chanting of their daily Affirmations. When they got to the parts about Wealth and Success and Good Fortune I mouthed along with them, though I have never had the patience for religion of any organized variety. Carver shook his head in disgust and muttered something. I gestured at him to keep his silence.

Then the Reverend spoke. The congregation sat back and held their hats in their laps and slapped periodically at the mosquitoes that had come uninvited into the hall. They stared at the Reverend with an intensity that seemed to make him anxious. The Apparatus took up much of the podium and he had to kind of lean sideways to stand and be heard and whenever he turned too quickly he was always in danger of impaling an eye on the big handle. The theme of his sermon was the War. I don't know that I recall that sermon precisely but I heard many others like it in those days.

He acknowledged first of all that those were dark times and that the Adversity that makes us stronger and is a spur to success may sometimes seem too vast to struggle with, and sometimes it is hard to keep smiling. Sometimes the goodness of the world is not readily apparent. He a.s.sumed that everyone had read the newspapers lately and knew what had happened in the north at Melville and Greenbank where the Gun and the Line were fighting hot, and what had happened closer to home in somewhere-or-other that had been seized and fortified by the Line and in some-other-place where it was said the mercenaries of the Gun had moved in and taken over the whole town and turned it into a sink of wickedness and vice and dope and casual drunken violence. Then the Reverend fell very quiet then said very loudly and clearly like he was reading from Instructions from on high that he and the Smilers were neutral in that great perpetual conflict. He said that politics is not the business of the Smilers, they care only that you are strong and happy and zealous in what ever you turn your hand to. He looked at all the windows as if he was being spied on, which I doubt that he was but who knows.

A big man at the back stood and shouted, "What do they want? d.a.m.n 'em, what do they want out here?" And then he said that they were poor simple folk out on the Western Rim and had nothing the Great Powers would want and also simultaneously complained that the fighting was interfering with his business and lowering his profits. Some others took up the shout. A fat woman stood and announced that she had to keep her idiot son- her words- locked up lest he run off and join up with the Gun and get himself killed, and who in the meantime would do his ch.o.r.es in the store, and when would it end? These were not questions the Reverend was equipped to answer to anyone's satisfaction, and a number of other people started to stand and shout rumors at each other, back and forth in the darkening room. Secret weapons! Buried treasure of the Folk! Oil! Turncoat and runaway servants of the Line or Agents of the Gun, with secrets of their masters' most terrible vulnerabilities, hiding amongst us!

I strained to make out Elizabeth Harper's expression but could not. The woman who'd been sitting in front of Miss Harper got to her feet and blocked my view, saying in a voice that was disturbing how flat and matter-of-fact it was that the Great War was nearing its final end and when it did the world would end too. Another woman stood and said that the War was ending all right, that her husband said that soon the Great Powers would grind each other down to nothing and what would be left would be called peace.

At last the Reverend began to stamp his foot for attention. This is no easy thing to do while maintaining a smile, even the somewhat waxy one he had, and I admired the man's spiritual discipline.

"Rumor," he said, "is the child of despair. It is the ugly b.a.s.t.a.r.d offspring of panic and weakness. Adversity is always with us. Do not look outside yourself for salvation. You will not be saved. You yourselves are strong and you are the workers of your own prosperity and increase, if you only . . ."

The usual Smiler stuff. A man who held a kind of battered and mud-crusted hat in his hand like he was thinking of hurling it at the Reverend stood and stuttered I I I until the Reverend fell silent. Then the man said that he'd been in the town of I-don't-recall-what recently and they were saying they'd heard a rumor that there was a man on the western roads going town-to-town fleeing the armies of the Powers who had a weapon, a great and strange and unthinkable weapon, a weapon of the oldest Folk magic, a weapon that could destroy the Powers themselves if only he would unleash it, which maybe he would and maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he was withholding that grace from us until we proved ourselves worthy- or maybe he was holding out for money. As that man spoke he turned his hat over and over in his hands until it was upturned, so that now it was no longer like a weapon, but like he was begging with it. And a number of people started looking at me and my Apparatus in a way that made me anxious that there might be a misunderstanding.

"Well," I said, "ladies and gentlemen of Kenauk," and I put a hand on the Reverend's arm and gently steered him aside and into the shadows, where he was happy enough to sit and stare at his shoes. "I am just the entertainment here, but your Reverend has been good enough to make me his guest and maybe I can answer some of your questions."

I felt Carver appear at my back- his timing was always impeccable- and mount the pedals of the Apparatus.

"Sir, n.o.body knows when the War will end. The Powers do not confide in us. Ma'am, if your son is acting up and talking crazy about becoming an Agent of the Gun why not introduce him to some girls? And you, ma'am, the world has never ended yet and n.o.body can be sure but it is not the way to bet. You, sir, nothing can destroy the Powers, you know that, one might as well try to shoot a bad idea or kick a foul mood, it is a confusion of concepts. A man who tries to tell you otherwise is trying to sell you something, and I want you to save your money until I've had my shot at you, understand?"

A few people laughed. Meanwhile at my signal Miss Harper was going from one side of the hall to the other snuffing the oil lamps until it was quite dark and it seemed to me that everyone was holding their breath. Mr. Carver was working the pedals with occasional grunting of effort and a noise like a man sawing wood. It made the whole rickety podium sway until I felt as if I was on a boat on a big lake at night.

"Here is an answer to a question n.o.body asked," I said. "Here is a question none of you even knew was a question. The question is Darkness and the answer is Light. My a.s.sistant Mr. Carver here is working up a sweat as you can hear and maybe catch a whiff of, I beg your pardon for that but it's necessary. Nothing will come of nothing. Ever hear that? It was in a poem or something. I'm a man of science not a poet but I know beauty when I see it and ladies and gentlemen, just wait a moment, just wait! Mr. Carver works the pedals because we need an initial spark, just something to excite the energies, set things in motion, grease the wheels, but now- now stop."

Carver stopped.

There was silence, except for the sc.r.a.pe as the magnetic cylinders turned against each other. In the deep places of the machine coils of wire like sigils of the deepest wildest magic twitched and shuddered within the counterposed fields of force. There was a harp-like noise and then a tw.a.n.g as a wire snapped loose. I smiled. There was a hum that ascended in pitch and urgency as the energies of the Apparatus mounted, magnetic and otherwise. I felt a tug on my pocket.w.a.tch and belt-buckle, that I always thought of as affectionate, somehow.

"Some of you," I said, "may have been in the Stations of the Line, and seen their electric-lighting. You may have seen the headlamps of their Engines in the distance. An ugly light, cold and nightmarish, and ruinously expensive to produce. I know of towns that have tried to purchase it from them and debt and penury follows. I could warn you about the Northern Lighting Corporation. . . . No. Not here! What you are about to see is my own invention. It is the marriage of my own long investigations into the deep principles of Nature, and my studies into the arts of the First Folk and the secrets they left behind."

I reached in the dark for the switch and threw it and the Apparatus released its power into the Ether, setting each Atom in the air to spinning, all jostling their neighbors to share the good news.

An Atom is a word the Jasper City professors use to mean the very small things that the world is made of, that ordinary people do not notice because they are so numerous, like the letters that make up a book or the grains of sand that make up a desert. They are always in motion- like people in a city, or words that are being spoken. They move faster in the West than in the East, but are less dense.

Anyhow within moments there was a soft dawnlike light pulsing from the gla.s.s lamps. In each of the lamps there was a coil of metal, which vibrated in resonance with the Apparatus. Like called to like. The lamps served to focus a Process that would otherwise operate everywhere and therefore nowhere. Light expanded within each lamp, shifting and pressing thick and eager against the containing gla.s.s.

I could see every face in the hall and they were all now beautiful. I fancied there was something childlike about them.

"No wires," I observed.

Miss Harper opened the shutters on the meeting-hall's south-facing windows. We had hung a single lamp from the roof of the town blacksmith. It was lit now, a single point of brightness in the night.

"The Process is everywhere at once," I said. "Like gravity, or time. It occurs simultaneously, without wires, without loss of power, yes, even unto Kenauk's furthest outlying fields or out houses. Even beyond, if you can imagine that- I could throw a lever here and set a light ablaze in Jasper City. You'll have to trust me on that."

Mr. Carver sat back and lit a cigarette, which was frowned upon in Smiler circles but n.o.body said a word.

I heard somebody whisper the word electricity and I rounded on them as if they had blasphemed.

"No," I said. "Not electricity- names are important, sir. I'll forgive your error, though, because it's a common one. This is something new. Something new in the world. It works on the principle of the synthesis of equal and opposite forces, the energy of tension and contradiction, you are watching light struggle with dark and the possible struggle with the impossible, and it doesn't have any name yet except the Ransom Process, thank you very much. And if there's a man or woman in the room who doesn't think it's pretty as a sunrise you can leave now and I'd give you your money back if I'd asked you for any."

The light grew in intensity and shifted through the spectrum, going fire-colored, sea-colored, candy-colored. At the time I could not stop it from doing that. It was a side-effect of instabilities and uncertainties in the Process, of imbalances among the energies it contained. Fortunately it was pretty and so I used to pretend it was a bit of deliberate stagecraft. I glanced at Miss Harper, by the window, and was happy to see that she looked delighted. Old Man Harper mostly looked wary.

"You'll see," I said, "that Mr. Carver is no longer pedaling. And I want any man here, a volunteer, how about you or maybe you, Reverend, to come and see that there is no oil-powered engine here and nothing burning coal and nor is it mule-powered-trust me, Mr. Carver is not hiding a mule under his trousers." Carver grinned toothily and bowed to the audience. "And in fact the Apparatus is now powering itself."

Most times at that stage in the show I would go on for longer about how the Ransom Process worked and what was remarkable about it, which was that once the first spark was roused it worked in perpetuity, feeding only on itself, like a rumor or a religion or a beautiful notion released into the world. I would observe truthfully that it created heat as well as light, and that once you had heat there was nothing you could not do with it. I would not explain precisely how it worked because, first, I wanted n.o.body to steal the idea. One day I planned to give it away to everyone but not until I had exacted the one price I demanded for it, which was that my name be known. Second, I did not entirely understand how it worked, and third, it did not entirely work. It depended on time and place but as a general matter it rarely lasted more than an hour without Mr. Carver returning to the pedals. I have improved it greatly since and I will improve it more when we get to Ransom City.

And usually I would talk about the money that a canny investor might make on it. But instead that evening I had one of my occasional unsound ideas.

I said, "You were all talking about the War and I said I had no answers. Well, maybe I do. Maybe I do. Maybe we all have a lot more answers in us than we think, once we dig 'em out from under all the questions. You've started me thinking along new lines and I thank you for that."

Mr. Carver must have inhaled wrong on his cigarette because he started coughing.

"Maybe the cause of the War is that people think that nothing is free and everything good is at the expense of some other sucker's suffering, and that if one place gets rich another must be poor. These things are what the professors in Jasper City would call a fallacy, or so I believe. That is what I believe. I can prove that to you. In a world with greater abundance the Line would have no power and there would be nothing for the men of the Gun to steal. And maybe-"

I had the crowd's attention and they were evenly balanced between apprehension and excitement. What happened next was poorly timed. The Process became imbalanced and immediately the Apparatus kicked and a surge of power went out of it into the Ether and startled the Atoms and the lamps all burst, costing me a substantial sum of money. For an instant the meeting-hall was filled with blazing light like the Silver City of Heaven itself. Through the window you could see a distant flash of blue-white flame as the lamp on the blacksmith's roof burst, wirelessly and simultaneously and without loss of power. Without finishing my sentence I slammed shut my mouth and leapt for the emergency lever that sent the Process into reverse. It seemed to push back, like the Process had its own ambitions toward increase. My face smarted like I had spent too long in the hot sun. I threw my whole weight on the lever, even to the point of lifting my feet from the floor. It would not move. It may be that the problem was not so much that the lever was too stiff, as that I was not heavy enough. I mean that it is possible that I was getting less heavy with each pa.s.sing instant- when the Process starts to run wild it plays tricks with Gravity. Sometimes you feel like you are no more than a shadow of yourself, or a paper-thin poster. I regret that I have never been able to study this phenomenon as it deserves, due to the fact that it manifests perceptibly only in conditions of extreme and mounting danger. What I believe it proves is that every kind of force is inter-linked, as I had been trying to explain to the people of Kenauk, and nothing is truly separate or divided from anything else, which was a beautiful notion though this was not how I would have chosen to demonstrate it. One also notices at these moments that time seems to stretch out infinitely. I do not know whether this is a side-effect of the Process or whether it is just because of good old ordinary terror. What I do know is that suddenly Mr. Carver added his weight on top of mine and the lever creaked and dropped a notch and then another notch. There was something solid about Mr. Carver. He was a rock, fortune smile on him- in fact for a moment I could have sworn there were two of him- anyhow the lever fell a third and a fourth notch and then there was a beautiful clunk-clunk and whir as the magnets altered their spin, first slowing and then reversing, and then the lever rapidly dropped the remaining notches to its nadir and the light ceased and Carver and I fell on top of each other. The meeting-hall plunged into an utter darkness which instantly became like h.e.l.l itself, or like I imagine the Lodge of the Guns is, by which I mean full of screaming and wailing and purposeless violence.

Unless you have been living in a hut in the woods these past few years, dear reader, I guess you have heard how dangerous the Process can be. But the people of Kenauk did not know, not back then. I don't think they apprehended the danger they had nearly been in. I myself only dimly intuited the dangers of the Process in those days. I think the people of Kenauk panicked because after what I had just dared to say the sudden darkness seemed like a blow struck by the Powers themselves- as if the wrath of the Engines had come roaring down from Harrow Cross like a rocket, or like the Guns had spat some vile hex from out of their Lodge. Or maybe it was just that I had raised everyone's hopes and then dashed them. The meeting-hall had been crowded before but now it seemed packed to the rafters with faceless figures, shouting and jostling. Anyhow I got a few good bruises and so did Mr. Carver. At one point I thought I would be dragged down into the mob and torn limb from limb. There were a number of hands on me and they were tearing at my suit. They were all asking me questions at once and I did not know what to say.

A hand gripped mine and pulled me back and when I turned I was surprised and delighted to see that it belonged to Miss Harper. I said to her that I thought she'd fled and left me to my fate and who could blame her and she said, "I did. Who knows why but I changed my mind."

Another thing I saw as we stumbled toward the door was that a man reached out to seize Miss Harper, and Old Man Harper came up out of nowhere and struck that man with his iron-shod stick in the back of the knee and in the soft parts of his back in a way that was practiced and efficient and devastating. It made me a little sick to watch but I am sure it was worse for the man he struck. Then we got outside and I stumbled and Miss Harper let go of me, and when I got up again she was gone. Both of them were gone.

To my surprise the crowd did not destroy the Apparatus. They left it mostly untouched, as if they were afraid of it. Me and Mr. Carver waited until they had dispersed and we crept back in to salvage what we could. The Apparatus was a little dented and the meeting-hall itself was a mess. Benches were overturned and the lectern was broken like a lightning-blasted stump and somebody in a sudden whirlwind of nihilistic despair had taken their knife and carved f.u.c.k you in answer to each one of the slogans on the walls.

The Reverend was sitting on the edge of the podium with a tragic look on his face. He was no doubt thinking about the cost of repairs, and when he glanced up at me I could see he was wondering whether I could be held responsible.

I was sorry for him but I knew that I had to be firm. I sat beside him, and after some thought as to how to proceed, I patted him on the back.

I said, "I can see how you might feel aggrieved."

"Professor Ransom-"

"I won't tell you that adversity is good for the soul, or that every disaster is an opportunity, or any of that kind of thing, Reverend. All I'll say is-"

"Diversion, you said, entertainment-"

"Is this. My Apparatus was damaged too, and you may not believe this but the Apparatus costs more than your meeting-hall and maybe more than all of Kenauk"- this was not exactly a lie, as I consider the Apparatus priceless. "Now I am no lawyer, but I have had run-ins with the law- I admit it. I have been held accountable for the actions of my horses, and I was held to be at fault the time my a.s.sistant Mr. Carver insulted a man's wife. It seems to me that you are the master of your meeting-circle, and the responsibility is yours."

He quoted Scripture. "No man is master of another man."

"The law may say otherwise. Who knows? Courts are unpredictable devices."

"They didn't teach us the law, Mr. Ransom. Only what's right and decent."

"Right and the law are not always in parallel, I think."

"There can be no question of that."

"So. What say we agree that neither of us will sue the other, and neither of us will mention the other ever again, and I go on my way?"

We shook on it. He forced a smile. It was not bad but I have to say that I have seen better.

CHAPTER 5.

BLACK CUT.

Today I had to maintain the Apparatus. There was water in it from the river-crossing and one of the new recruits, a young man named Tomasi, had proved to have an ulterior motive and had taken a hammer to it before the Beck boys could wrestle him down. A wrecker. I guess he is still mad about something that I did or that somebody said I did back in the War. And besides these incidents, as we go West the Apparatus needs fine and constant recalibration.

I work alone these days and n.o.body is allowed to come close. A good time to write.

Today I think I am going to write about Mr. Carver.

Mr. Carver and I spent the night after the incident in Kenauk in the wagon, out on the edge of town. In the morning we went into town and there was a woman there who laundered and mended my white suit. I think I recognized her face from the night before, when she had been yelling. She did not meet my eye. She sold us some tomatoes, which she fried and Carver and I ate sitting on a bench looking out over the vineyard. I remarked to Carver on the astonishing and unlikely feats of irrigation involved, and what that said about the human spirit, but he was sulking over his bruises and my heart wasn't in it either.

I wasn't happy about the damage the Apparatus had sustained or the loss of my time or the discovery of yet another mysterious flaw and instability in the Ransom Process. But worse than all that was the fact that Miss Harper and Old Man Harper had gone on their own way and I might never learn their secrets. I had come to feel that this was more than my usual curiosity, that it was somehow urgent. But I could see that if they were trying to keep a low profile then my antics of the night before would have scared them away.. I have never had a gift for keeping a low profile. It is not in me.

"You know," I said to Carver as I mopped up the last juices of the tomatoes with bread, "What really makes me unhappy this morning is that-"

"Time," Carver said, and he licked his fingers and thumb clean and stood. "Move on." We went back to the wagon together in silence and moved on.

A Portrait of Mr. Carver I hired Mr. Carver back in East Conlan, like I said. I put an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the newspaper for a mechanic and a.s.sistant. Experience with electricity and horses would be considered valuable, I said, and a willingness to travel and face danger was a necessity. No Linesmen, thank you very much, and no felons. Within a week I received visitations from several persons of no fixed abode, some small curious boys, a very elderly man who could hardly walk, a man who looked near-certain to slit my throat and rob me as soon as we left sight of town, a Linesman who informed me that my father's debts remained unpaid and I was on no account permitted to leave town, and lastly Mr. Carver, who showed up as the sun was setting and stood in the doorway casting a shadow that reached all the way across the white-tiled floor to the stove.

At first he did not impress me. He was tall, and thin, and stooped, and wild-looking. He wore something brown that could hardly be called a suit anymore, with no belt. He wore a single suspender, lop-sided, as if he were indifferent to customary notions regarding symmetry, or he was dressing for comic effect like a clown. He had no hat. His hair was very long and very black. He was pale and looked sleepless and the bones in his face were as big and as gaunt and as heavy as the arches of a story-book castle where an old king sulks on a shadowy throne or where a princess gets locked up in an attic.

I said "Please, Mr. Carver, sit," but he didn't.

He said, "You're traveling. Said so in your newspaper. Where?"

I said, "West, out to the Rim, maybe up toward Melville City. You see, you can't get anything made here, there's no money, there's no opportunity, there's no room, there-"

"I know that country well. Show me the machine."

He had no small-talk.

I went to the window and pointed at where the Apparatus was tethered under a tarp in the backyard. I said what it was and what it did, or what I hoped one day it would do, because at that point it did not work at all.

He whistled. Then he said, "Yes."

I said, "Yes what?"

He stepped out of the doorway and vaulted the fence and approached the Apparatus. Over my protests he laid hands on it. He yanked open the casing. He reached in and began to perform certain small adjustments. In particular he reached in and stretched out a tangle of copper wire and inspected it like a soothsayer reading entrails.

"Hah," he said, as if a suspicion had been confirmed.

I said, "I made it. It owes nothing to the Line or the Northern Lighting Corporation or anyone else, what ever they may try to say."

"Is that right?"

"It is."

He ran his finger across oiled machinery. "Wasn't the Line I was thinking of. You know what? I'll come with you, Mr. Ransom."

"Will you now, Mr. Carver? Seems like that's up to me."

He shrugged, and turned back to the Apparatus.

He did not negotiate, and he did not explain himself.

"Well now," I said. "Well."

We inked a contract in the margins of a newspaper. He signed with a K and beneath it I wrote Carver.

We left town early in the morning, while everyone was asleep.

We traveled together for a year, and worked together long into the night in barns and hotels and forest clearings and hilltops and gullies all across a thousand-mile stretch of the Western Rim. I talked science and big dreams and he never talked much. There were many things he did not do, such as cook or bathe or take collections, but everything he did he did well. He had an excellent sense of direction and a sense of humor that I never quite understood but believed to be profound. He had a deep and rough-edged voice and a trace of an accent which I could not place. He cursed frequently and with conviction, and without regard to occasion or polite company. He smoked foul cigarettes, which his long fingers could roll one-handed while his other hand was working. He was good with snares and could skin a rabbit so quickly even the rabbit would be impressed. He saved my life a few times- I lost count of how many. He rarely changed his clothes but apart from the cigarettes his odor was not offensive. He was shot at once or twice, we both were, but he was never hit until White Rock. He had no views on politics and as far as I could tell no family. I was not even sure how old he was.

One night in a barn outside a town called Garland I drew up another contract, promising half the profits of the Ransom Process to him, in the event that we made it to Jasper City and got rich, although the name would remain the Ransom Process. This gallant gesture seemed to appeal more to his sense of humor than to his ambition. He signed again with a K and I wrote Carver. I guess since that was most likely not his real name it most likely wasn't binding, not that it matters anymore.

Anyhow we took the road east out of Kenauk. It was a thousand miles down that road to Jasper City and Mr. Alfred Baxter of the Baxter Trust but on the immediate horizon there was nothing much except a scattering of farms. After a while the road took a sudden crooked leftward turn for no reason that Mr. Carver nor I could speculate on and entered into a scraggly wood of scrub oak and cottonwood.

The road was bad and we walked alongside the horses and conversed with each other while the horses plodded between us. The names of the horses were Mariette and Golda. I remarked on how the wood was like a metaphor for the nature of the world, by which I meant that the leafy upper parts of it were golden and airy and inaccessible, while down on the ground where we had to toil it was nothing but d.a.m.n mud and mosquitoes. Carver nodded and said, "f.u.c.k that."

As the day wore on and his aches and bruises healed he got into an unusually talkative mood, as if the Harpers' departure had lightened some anxiety he had been carrying in silence. In the afternoon he began to name the trees as we pa.s.sed them by, and that is how I know they were scrub oak and cottonwood, which otherwise I would not have noticed or cared about. I asked him where he got this surprising learning on trees and he shrugged and said, "I travel."

"I travel too, Mr. Carver. n.o.body could say I haven't traveled. I've seen things beyond the wildest dreams of East Conlan. But I could not name a tree if you held a gun to my head."