The Rise of Ransom City (9 page)

*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 assumed 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? Damn ’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 chores 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 bastard 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, nobody 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 nobody 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 nobody 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 assistant 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 scrape 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 twang 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 pocketwatch 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 glass 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 glass.

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 nobody 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 nobody 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.”