The Rise Of Ransom City Part 11

He shrugged, then threw his cigarette over the side.

"How does it work? The piano."

"Mathematics," I said.

"Like it's haunted," he said. "You know I've been out on the Rim for a long while- a long while- and I've seen things- I've seen hauntings and spirits. I performed at a Hospital once where-"

There was a flash and a thump from over in the direction of the Engine.

"Does it think? Tell me the truth. Is it a machine or something else?"

That was a question I had thought about a great deal, often while working on the piano late into the night, alone but for the rolling of the boat and the murmurings of drunks lying under corner tables. The piano was utterly self-sufficient, making music by and for itself out of nothing. Maybe that is what life is. The truth was that I did not know exactly what it meant to think or feel or live or have a soul, and I did not have any quick answer for the magician. What I sometimes thought about late at night, when the piano seemed to be rearranging itself of its own accord, was about the birth of the great powers of the world. I mean the Gun and I mean the Engines of the Line.

Now I am no great student of history, but I know that there was a time before either of them was here in the world to trouble us. There was a time when a gun was just a gun, and there was a time when men made Engines to serve them and not the other way around. I don't know whether we were at peace then or not, I guess not, but things were better. I have heard some people say that there are spirits in the land just waiting for the right kind of forms to take and that is how the Gun and the Line came about. I have heard it said that we ourselves made them, that something in those forms spoke to us and to our nightmares and obsessions and that is how the world changed, because of us. You do not see these speculations written down often and it takes a certain courage to write them now but everyone hears speculation of this sort. As I recall Old Man Harper was of the first school of thought and Miss Harper the second and Carver stayed silent as if he knew better than everyone. Anyhow sometimes I thought about the piano that way, and what the world would be like if what ever happened back then happened again, maybe right at that moment in the rolling fragrant dark of the Damaris.

"It's only a machine," I said.

While I had been thinking, the Great Rotollo had been rummaging in the pockets of his jacket and now removed a small gray stone. It was the size of an egg and smooth on the underside and whorled on the top, a little like a fossil, which was perhaps what it was, or a carving of a tiny city- I do not know, because it was dark and he did not show it to me. He moved his hands quickly over and under it as if to show that it was attached to no strings, then stretched his arm out over the water and opened his hand.

The stone did not drop.

What's more it became clear after roughly half a minute that it was not falling behind us, but kept pace with the slow eastward progress of the Damaris. Or rather, it seemed that the world moved, but it did not- it was hard to look at.

"No trick," Rotollo said.

The Engine was getting closer and very loud. You could see its lights glowing white between the trees. There was another flash and a thump from over in the direction of the Engine and the stone wobbled a little. Rotollo reached out and plucked it back out of the night and put it in his pocket.

"The only thing I've got that isn't a trick!" he shouted. "I don't show it. Never show it. Found it on the side of the road, out on the Rim- above the side of the road, you know? Outside a little nothing town called Kenauk. It does what it does. Don't know why. Like a little bit of another world. Like what ever came before. Everything changes all the time. You know, maybe there's something to this secret-weapon thing after all. Everything, all the time, changing."

He said more than that, in fact I think he tried to communicate to me his whole metaphysics of the world in shouting and gestures over the noise of the Engine, but much of it was lost on me.

"Jasper City!" he shouted.

"What?"

"Jasper! When you get to Jasper- don't look at me like that, kid, you're ambitious! I said ambitious! You're riding this thing all the way to Jasper same as me and when you do you'll be looking to get rich and famous- do you make weapons?"

"What?"

"You should read the newspapers!" he shouted.

He lit another cigarette. I noticed that he was smoking from a yellow packet stamped with the crest of Jasper City, and the name of the Baxter Trust.

"Come find me, when we get to Jasper!- if you don't want to work for the weapon-makers!"

The Great Rotollo handed me his card. It had his name on it, with a wonderful rococo flourish on the R.

"Ormolu Theater! Swing Street! I got a contract! Two months, percentage, continuation! Can hire if want to!"

"I don't know-"

What I was thinking was that I had always seen myself as a man of action, whose destiny it was one day to change the world, not merely to entertain it. But I took the card anyhow.

"I could use a clever fellow! Who knows? Who knows? The future, right?"

At that moment the Engine was pa.s.sing directly alongside us. I could see its smoke blotting out the stars. There was another thump and a flash of red behind the trees. I recognized the sound of explosives and I think the Great Rotollo recognized the sound at the same moment, because he dropped his cigarette and cursed. Then there was a lightning-strike of white that I took to be the lamps of the Engine flaring in sudden anger. There was a whistling sound in the sky and a thump and a splash not so far away from us, then a thick sheet of water came up over the edge of the boat and slapped into me, making me gasp and splutter. The Damaris lurched backwards. The whole immense thing, the Damaris I mean, rose up rearing like a spooked horse so that I fell into Rotollo, and Rotollo fell over the side into the water, and several lanterns fell off their hooks and onto the deck and started to burn.

CHAPTER 14.

THE WOUNDED ENGINE.

I don't know exactly what happened, and I guess I never will.

What I know is that the meandering path of the wide River Ja.s.s and the straight mountain-cutting length of the Line between Archway Station and the West came close to intersecting, in the depths of a swampy wood. As the Damaris crawled upriver the Kingstown Engine came hurtling along the Line. Persons unknown waited in the wood and when the Kingstown Engine approached they had attempted to derail it by blowing the tracks. Those were the thumps we had heard. It is not an easy matter to slow an Engine and it kept going for some time, and in furious retaliation against its attackers it launched rockets wildly into the woods and into the night, one of which had whistled over the treetops and hit the river just in front of the Damaris. The resulting disturbance of water lifted the Damaris, throwing her back and to one side. She was an ancient vessel and not equipped to withstand such a shock. Rotten wood splintered, rusted nails turned to powder, frayed ropes snapped. Her tall wheel broke away from its mechanism, which in turn tore a hole in her hull.

The Kingstown Engine survived, later arriving in Archway mostly unscathed, or so the Line claimed. The outrage was officially blamed on Agents of the Gun, but there were per sis tent rumors that it was the work of John Creedmoor and Liv Alverhuysen and Professor Harry Ransom, putting their strange weapon to work. I believe that it was the first shot of what we later called the Battle of Jasper, which I guess I will write about when the time comes.

The Damaris did not survive. She turned on her side and sank, pulled over by the listing wheel. She sank in a stately fas.h.i.+on, as befitted a lady of her advanced years. Lines of pennants and lamps snapped free of their fastenings and slithered into the water. Deck chairs followed. Then the pa.s.sengers came out onto the deck and held their hats on their heads or clutched their suitcases close like children as they jumped feet-first into the water. The crew followed close behind. The boat's cook had saved a bottle of whiskey and Mr. John Southern hefted a stuffed satchel of valuables. n.o.body made any effort to pump out the bilges, as far as I could see, or what ever it is that one does to save a sinking s.h.i.+p. Certainly I did not.

The river was wide and slow, black and warm. Pa.s.sengers and crew scattered across it in all directions. I saw the Great Rotollo swimming away north, his wake expanding and glittering in the light of the flaming deck. I think I saw his wife Amaryllis heading in the same general direction, while I think Mr. John Southern went south. There was no consensus as to which bank to swim for, or whether to swim against the current or with it. There was no plan. What had held us together was broken.

I do not mean to suggest that there was panic, because there was not, or very little. We had all known the Damaris could not last forever. Nothing does. There was a general air of resigned dignity. Mr. John Southern gave one last affectionate nod toward the prow of his boat before he folded his arms over his suitcase and fell backwards into the water. The cook jumped feet-first with a deep sigh, as if this happened to him all the time.

I myself turned and ran back into the bar in order to save the piano, or at least a part of it.

The piano was sliding down the slowly tilting floor toward a heap of broken gla.s.s and furniture and paintings and plants and cutlery. I staggered sideways toward it. Tumbling chairs tried to tackle me- I dodged and jumped and disentangled my legs from theirs. I cut my hand on a broken bottle. On reaching the piano I found that my own weight was not nearly enough to halt or even slow its slide. I took a b.u.t.ter-knife from a pa.s.sing cabinet and used it to lever open the piano's frame. The Great Rotollo's other dove fluttered back and forth overhead, I do not know how it had found its way into the room but it was apparently unable to find its way out- I could not help it and besides it was the bird or the piano and I do not regret my choice. I pried out part of the winding-mechanism, a heavy cylinder of bra.s.s and wood, etched with the piano's codes, shaped like a sacred scroll. It was the part with kotan scratched into it.

By the time I had accomplished this I was the last person left on the boat. The upper deck dipped to starboard into the black water. It rose up to port behind me. I held the mechanism tightly beneath my arm and I threw myself into the water.

I sank.

Like I think I have said, I cannot swim, and besides the piano's mechanism was shockingly heavy and unwieldy. I kicked madly to put distance between myself and the sinking boat, which only drove me further down. The strength of the river took hold of me. All I could see was blackness, either beneath the water or above it. I recall that I panicked. I recall that I was quite certain that so long as I held on to the mechanism I would be safe. This was a self-defeating conviction but an irresistible one. I continued to sink.

Slowly darkness gave way and I began to see a red light at the edges of the world.

I do not recall letting go of the mechanism or how I came to be clutching instead a piece of wood that turned out to be a bench from the Damaris's bar. I do recall that when I finally noticed that the mechanism was lost I was too tired even to regret it- regret would come later.

I recall floating aimlessly downstream, all alone in the warm night.

At last the current took me toward the river's bank, where I came to rest in the tangled roots of a huge green tree.

I struck out for solid ground but I found none in any direction. The woods were swampy, like I said. They smelled green and wet. Black water came halfway up my legs. Tall cattail stands horripilated. Every moonlit ripple in the water looked to my imagination like a snake swimming toward me- every vine or frond that dangled from the trees looked snake-like too. There were fever-dream scatterings of fireflies- there were invisible insects that bit. Again and again I pushed through walls of wet fern and reed to look out over yet another expanse of dark weed-thick water.

Eventually I climbed up into the roots of another tree and decided to wait out the night.

The root was thick as the back of a horse, and not as uncomfortable as one might imagine. I sat with my back against the trunk and considered my situation.

I had no means of making fire, no food, very little money, a half-completed letter to my sister Jess, and the Great Rotollo's business-card. I had no weapons- only a small pocket-knife that I used to use to work on the piano, and it was hardly fiercer than a fingernail. I had only one shoe, and it was both soaked and slimy.

I still wore the jacket of the russet suit Mr. Southern had given me when I signed on with the Damaris. There had been a dried rose in the lapel but it was gone now. The jacket had been a loan not a gift and I guessed it belonged to Mr. Southern still, but because I saw no likelihood of returning it to him, and because he had not paid me in weeks, and because in any case it was now so vile that he would not want it back, I decided it was mine now. I hung it to dry from a protuberance on a nearby branch. It was like a sort of company. I half-expected it to speak to me in Mr. Carver's voice.

I did not know where I was. I knew that I was on the edges of the Tri-City Territory, south-west of Gibson and west of Jasper. I knew that I was not far from the River Ja.s.s. But I did not know what woods I was in, or where the nearest town might be. The River Ja.s.s ran westward, and I a.s.sumed therefore I had been carried by the current some distance west, away from Jasper City and back out toward the Western Rim. I did not know how far. Far enough that I was alone- whoever else had survived the sinking of the Damaris, they were nowhere in evidence.

There were no sounds in the night that I recognized as human.

The piano was gone. I tried to remember how it worked, in some vague hope that I might one day reconstruct it, I recall that I even took my knife and held it poised to carve a memento into the soft root- but I was already forgetting. I mourned it as bitterly as if it had been a lover. I still do.

I think I mourn it more than I do its maker.

I said that I would tell of four times I held history in my hand. Well, this was the second. Had I only held on to the mechanism perhaps the piano could have been reconstructed, and who knows what might have been done with that technology. Who knows how things might have gone differently with poor Adela, and maybe therefore everything else.

I will write about Adela in due course, when I get there.

I never said that this would be a story of triumph. For the most part it is not.

Anyhow there I was. Alone in a swamp, with no prospects and no name.

I tried to recall if Mr. Alfred Baxter of Jasper City had ever found himself in a similar predicament. I did not think that he had. I was without guidance.

At one time in the night there was a sound that might have been feet splas.h.i.+ng through the swamp not far away from me, and I thought it might be other survivors from the Damaris. I stood, and was about to call out Here, help me, it's Rawlins, the piano-man, when it occurred to me that there had been fighting in those woods. Somebody had attacked an Engine of the Line. It might be a soldier of the Line, looking for the perpetrators or it might be the perpetrators themselves. In either case it might be deadly to draw attention to myself. The cry froze in my throat. The noise receded. It was not until after it was long gone that I thought that maybe it was somebody as lost as me, who might have needed my help, whose heart might have leapt at the sound of my voice, and that I had been selfish again, I had been a coward, thinking only of myself.

"When I get out of here," I said to myself, "I will be a better man. I have suffered more than the usual run of worldly misfortune but there is still greatness left in me. One day I will do good things for the world."

I thought of Liv and John Creedmoor and I thought of poor Mr. Carver. I thought about Mr. Carver's last words to me, that I was a thief, and I thought that he was both right and wrong, and I thought about how I would one day make everything right, how I would make everything perfect. I thought about my sisters and how I missed them and how I would explain everything to them if I ever saw them again, which seemed unlikely. I thought about the Great Rotollo and his long-suffering wife Amaryllis and about the Ormolu Theater, which in my imagination was like a great golden palace. I thought about the Apparatus and how much I missed its light and its warmth. I thought about Jasper City, and recalled all my old dreams of how one day I would ride in high style down its triumphal avenues.

I spent a great deal of time on this kind of profitless rumination. Hours, at least. I waited for dawn and dawn stubbornly did not come. Instead there was a flash of white light in the distance, which by the time it came through the trees to fall on the backs of my hands was soft and spiderwebbed. It stuttered, flas.h.i.+ng and then fading, like telegraph-signals. There was a coughing sound then a deep roar.

The noise and light was coming from what I guessed to be the north-west, a few miles or so upriver. Fear made me shrink against the trunk of the tree. Then curiosity got the better of my fear and I jumped to my feet and started climbing the tree.

I was cold and tired and my shoulders ached and creaked and cracked like an old boat as I pulled myself up. It was a good tree for climbing, with knots and a thick st.u.r.dy mesh of vine and broad swooping branches. I remember thinking as I lay panting on a branch that I could not recall the last time I had climbed a tree. Not since back in East Conlan, in fact. The town was bare of trees and most of us did not dare go too far into the woods south of town but I recalled incidents of climbing, throwing stones, boys shouting. I felt like a boy again but at the same time I felt very old, and very far from home. I stood, slowly and carefully, and pushed my head through a curtain of slimy green leaves, and I saw that flash of light again.

The light flashed, then ceased, then came again. It illuminated a long dark shape behind the trees. I could not properly judge the distance or its size, except that it was huge, and far enough away that I did not think it could sense me.

It was the wounded Engine. Later I would learn from the newspapers that it was the Engine that runs out of Kingstown.

Do you know what Kingstown is? Maybe not. I hope no one born in Ransom City will know of the Stations. I hope in the New Century all the Stations may have fallen. But in those days Kingstown was the westernmost of the Stations of the Line. It was a town of many thousands of people, mostly soldiers or factory-workers. It was full of industry and smoke and toil. It was a huge machine for projecting the power of the Engines westward. Mr. Carver and I went nowhere near it on our travels. Kingstown was thousands of miles west of the place where I stood, but the Engine that was its heart and soul and brain and G.o.d went ceaselessly back and forth across the continent carrying men and weapons and prisoners and information and . . .

It moved. There was a flash of its lamps, then darkness, then another flash and it had moved. Its long metal body had stretched a hundred yards closer to my hiding place. Each flash illuminated a huge and growing trail of black smoke.

I had seen Engines before, of course. East Conlan was not far from Line territory and we saw them in the north. Carver and I had crossed tracks, seen Engines roaring across the horizon, even considered on occasion traveling by Engine (we could not afford it). They were strange at the best of times, but that night the Kingstown Engine was quite terrifying.

It was injured. Its tracks took it not so very far north of my tree and when its lamp flashed again I could see that its frame was broken. The huge cowl that was its face was dented and twisted. The lamps above the cowl were lopsided, as if some had been blinded. Several of the cars that were its half-mile body were missing, or caved in like broken teeth, or still smoking from what ever or whoever had attacked it. There were cannon on the hindmost car, one of which looked bent.

I don't know why it was flas.h.i.+ng its lamps in that way. I have heard that the Engines of the Line signal to each other- all across the continent- with their noise, their thunderous awful clatter, their smoke. Maybe it was signaling its distress, its outrage, maybe it was calling for aid, for revenge, for tightening of control. Maybe it was broken, or mad. I have always hated the Line. I have written about what it did to my father and to East Conlan and to me. And this particular Engine had destroyed the Damaris, and left me stranded, and destroyed the beautiful piano, and had done all this casually, indifferently, the way they did everything. I did not yet know which Engine it was, but I had a particular and specific hatred for it, whichever it was. And yet to see an Engine injured was troubling, and gave me little joy. It made me aware of my own so much greater fragility.

I thought about Miss Harper and John Creedmoor and their weapon and for the first time I thought what it might be like if it were really true. Maybe their weapon could end the War, maybe it could do away with Engines and Guns and their servants. But they would not go quietly. The War would be worse before it would be better. And what would take its place?

For the first time in my life, the thought of the Future frightened me. I do not mean to claim any great prescience. I did not foresee the Course of History. Any man who claims to have such powers of foresight is lying. Truth is I was lost in a swamp at night, and any man's thoughts will turn grim in such circ.u.mstances.

The tree shook as the Engine pa.s.sed. There was a noise that made my bowels turn to water. Leaves were torn loose and blew around my head in its wake. I lost my footing and fell, catching myself painfully on the branch with knees and elbows and bloodied palms, and when I stood again the Engine was already far in the distance, heading north-east toward the Three Cities, toward Jasper.

I climbed back down the tree, and I fell asleep in the cradle of its roots. When I woke it was still dark. It seemed like an improbably long night but I knew that I was not far west of the Three Cities and the days at that longitude were mostly regular in their duration, so I guessed the fault was in my perceptions not in the world. I thought maybe I had a fever coming on.

The second time I heard the sound of somebody walking through the swamp nearby, I did not hide or hesitate. I stopped only to take my jacket and my one wet shoe and I ran out after that faint sound, waving the shoe in the air and shouting "Hey, hey, help, hold up, I'm with the Damaris, hey, wait" and so on. I waded through the water and crashed through thick undergrowth toward the sound and burst through a stand of head-high ferns that scratched at my face and out into a wide open stretch of moonlit green water. A half-dozen tall thin figures were wading single file across it. They were all long-legged fellows and the green did not quite reach their waists. They were stooped and they were pale and when they turned their heads to look at me I saw that they had the big-boned faces and red eyes and black beards of the Folk.

CHAPTER 15.

THE CHAIN.

There were seven of them. They stood side-by-side. Two of them leaned together, as if for support, or comfort against the night. In the middle stood one whose shoulders seemed, at first shocked glance, to be hunched. Then I saw that he was wearing something looped around his shoulders and neck, dangling down his back, like an elegant lady of Jasper City might wear a fox-fur stole. I thought perhaps it was a length of rope. Then I understood that it was a chain- a long, long chain- and in the same moment I understood that these were some of the poor wretches who had powered the wheel of the Damaris. I had thought they'd all drowned.

That is not true. I had not given them a moment's thought, not until I found myself looking at them face to face, yet now- as I looked into their leader's wide dark eyes now I could think of nothing else.

When I say their leader, I mean the fellow with the chain wrapped around his shoulder. I guessed that he was their leader. There was something grand about the way he wore the chain.

I imagined them sinking, pulled down by the awesome weight of the Damaris, by the inexorable grip of their chain. They must have been afraid. I know that many scholars and preachers and politicians and businessmen will tell you that the Folk do not feel pain or fear the way we do, but I think that cannot be true.

I shook. All these thoughts took just moments. I guess they studied me too, and drew their own conclusions.

They had been walking in what I thought was a westerly direction. Moonlit ripples still showed the way they had come.

"Jasper City's back that way," I said, "but I guess maybe you're heading out to the Rim, or beyond it I guess. I don't know where you're from. I, well, that is, it's a long way either way and good luck to you."

They continued to look at me. We were alone in the night and the wilderness now and the tables were turned. They could do what ever they pleased with me and what ever it was I could not say it was not just. The Damaris and its rules were long gone. This was now their world and I had no say in it.