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CHAPTER 1
Introductions
My name is Harry Ransom. Friends call me Hal or Harry, or by one of a half-dozen aliases, of which I have had more than any honest man should. Don't let that shake your confidence in me. I was a victim of circumstance. Often I went by Professor Harry Ransom, and though I never had anything you might call a formal Education I believe I earned that title. For the last few years it's been Excuse me, Mr. Ransom, sir, from those beneath me and just plain Ransom from those above. I never cared for any of that and now I am free and on the road again with nothing but my name and my wits and my words.
If you know my name maybe it's as the inventor of the Ransom Light-Bringing Process, or maybe you believe in all that secret-weapon stuff they wrote in the newspapers, in which case I intend to set you straight. Or you may know me as the man who lost the Battle of Jasper City, or won it, depending on where you stand in matters of politics. If you're an Officer of the Line who has intercepted this in the mails, then you know me as a Wanted Person but maybe you know to think twice before coming after me.
If you're reading this in the future maybe you know me as the man who founded Ransom City. It lies out in the unmade lands, or it will, one day. Maybe as you read this it's a bright new century and Ransom City is a great and glittering metropolis and there's a big bronze statue of me in a park somewhere — if I have any say in the matter there will be parks — well, who knows? I am an optimist. Maybe one day these pages will be read by every boy and girl in the West. Your grandfather will look over your shoulder and say, I remember old Harry Ransom, I saw him back in Nowheresville one time, that was a hell of a show but the bastard still owes me money.
* * *
I am writing from no place in particular. All I'll say is that it is a big red barn not so different in architectural grandeur from one of those old-world cathedrals you see in picture-books sometimes, although I guess more full of straw and dung. I have never been in a cathedral but I have been in a whole lot of barns. There are thousands like it in the Territory. The fields all around and the mountains in the distance are brown like an old coat. The man who owns the barn and the cows and the horses and all the straw and the dung is a good fellow, not educated but one of nature's Free-Thinkers, and when we strike out West again he will come with us.
I am writing on a typewriter that I salvaged from the old man's office after Jasper City fell. Naturally it's the very latest state-of-the-art machine. Nothing but the best was good enough for the old man. There's a bullet-hole in its casing and some water-damage to its innards. Nobody thought I could get it working again but I did not get where I am today by being a fool, at least not in matters mechanical. In spite of my efforts the letter R still sticks one time out of four, and that is no small inconvenience for a man who likes to talk about himself as much as I do. On the other hand the machine types in triplicate, through an arrangement of carbon papers and clever little levers, so that when I type RANSOM it echoes across one-two-three sheets of white paper. The old man used this device to convey orders with the greatest possible efficiency. I want to talk to a lot of people as I go so this is a great time-saver.
* * *
Well, we moved on from the big red barn. One of the Line's Heavier-Than-Air Vessels was spotted overhead. It circled, writing a kind of black-smoke question mark in the sky. Most likely it had nothing to do with us — there's fighting not far south of us, or so I hear — but we're taking no chances. We left by night and took the road west. I am sitting and typing under the shadow of a big old cottonwood tree in a valley of rank grass and blackberry bushes and old tin-plated junk and fat dragonflies. Our numbers have been swelled by the barn-owner's younger son and two of his friends, and I have just eaten one of his first-rate apricots, but the man himself stayed behind to sell off his furniture and settle his affairs. If all goes well we shall all meet up at a certain location on the Western Rim.
I left a triplicate of letters in his care all about who we are and where we are going and what we are going to do when we get there, by which I mean the founding of Ransom City. We are going West. I waxed eloquent about the glories of the free city of the future and true democracy and the Ransom Process and the parks and the tall buildings I have planned in my mind's eye and all the rest of it, and how every person who wants should follow us. One of the letters is to go to my onetime friend the famous Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson, formerly of the Jasper City Evening Post, one is to go to the editor of the Melville City Gazette, and because I do not know any other journalists, the third is to go to an editor of Mr. Barn-Owner's choosing.
I thought everything would be easy to explain but it is not. I mean to set the story straight, because a lot of things have been said about me or by me that are not exactly true. It is not easy to tell a true story. Most of my practice with words has been selling things, which is not the same at all, it turns out.
I am not yet thirty but I have had an odd kind of life and I have a lot to say before I go. Anyhow this is my AUTOBIOGRAPHY I guess, and so I will call this CHAPTER ONE, and below that INTRODUCTIONS, just like a real honest-to-goodness book.
CHAPTER 2
My Humble Beginnings
When I was a boy I read the Autobiography of Mr. Alfred Baxter, the late great business magnate of Jasper City. We knew him even in the backwater town of my boyhood, and I read his Autobiography half a dozen times if I read it once. The book told of how he came up from nothing to triumph over adversity and become the richest and grandest and free-est man in the world. I read it by candlelight and I learned it like it was sacred Scripture. I can still quote some of it today.
There is a moment in the life of every man of greatness when he sees History clearly; when the Spirit of the Age stands like a woman before him; when he can seize the reins of Fortune!
I would not presume to call myself a man of greatness, but as it happens there were a few moments back there when it was my hand that seized the reins of History and Fortune, if only by accident or because nobody else wanted to or while I thought I was doing something else.
Mr. Baxter also liked to say that things come in threes, in business and history and Fortune. I will go the old man one better. By my count I have held history in my hands on four occasions, and if Fortune favors me like they say she favors the bold then the founding of Ransom City will be the fifth.
First I will tell how I saved the lives of the lovely Dr. Liv Alverhuysen and the horrible John Creedmoor and thereby changed the course of the Great War too, not that I meant to at the time.
But of course when Mr. Alfred Baxter sat down to write the story of his life and how he rose from Rags to Riches, as they say, he very sensibly began in the natural place, which is to say with Rags. You do not start right in with History and Greatness and the Future, that is no way to make the sale. And so in Mr. Baxter's first chapter he told us how he was born in a pauper's room in the bad part of Jasper City and he was the seventh and hungriest of seven hungry children, and so on and so on. So that's how I'll begin too.
* * *
I was born in the town of East Conlan, thirty years and a little more shy of the new century. I was the fourth of four children. I do not know the exact day of my birth. My father was scrupulous in his business affairs but did not make note of the date, and my sisters all remember it differently. I like to think my mother would have recalled it had she lived. I believe that I recall my birth as a kind of red light and terrible pressure but when I tell people this they get skeptical, and I do not want to strain your faith in me too soon.
East Conlan is a coal-mining town some four or five days' ride north of Jasper City, on the northern edge of the Tri-City Territory and not far south of the Line's lands. There is no West Conlan and so far as I know there never was. There are two mines up on the hills at opposite ends of a long straight road and the town of East Conlan is laid out in the depression between them. When I was a boy one was operated by the Conlan Coal Company and the other belonged to a Mr. Grady, and sometimes when Grady's men and the CCC's men met in the middle of town there was fighting, and the myths and epics on which I was schooled as a boy were stories of how Big Joe from the Grady mine had met the Bierce Brothers outside Shad's Bar and beaten both of them black and blue with a pick-handle for saying ...
Well the business of coal never interested me. Once when I was a boy no more than knee-high I met Mr. Grady. He was a very old man even then and there was something dry and dusty as coal about him. He had come to my father to make arrangements for someone's burial — as I remember it the burial in question was his own, though that may be a child's imagination at work. He patted me on the shoulder and asked if I would come work for him one day. I told him that I would sooner flee town and live wild among the Folk, even at the risk that they might eat me. He asked why and I said that coal-mining was always the same: the going down into the dark and the coming up again, day in day out, since men first set foot in the West, and that a new century was coming and I had my eyes on the future, when men would not toil like beasts. Mr. Grady gave me a quarter-dollar, and told my father that I had a clever tongue but no sense of when to use it, and that that quarter-dollar would likely be the last honest money I would earn.
* * *
My father was not a miner, and did not work for anyone. He made a living arranging funerals and burials, of which conditions in the mines ensured a steady supply. He was not a native of East Conlan. In fact he was as far from a native as it is possible to be. As a young man he came over the mountains into this western land of ours from the hot and distant country of Juddua, which to me has always seemed unthinkably magical and strange, and whenever I meet a fellow from that part of the world I pepper him with questions until he is about ready to strike me down and flee. I believe my father had been a man of great learning, maybe a priest or a doctor or something of the kind — he never talked about his past. He came West and I do not know what he was looking for but he found my mother in East Conlan.
He was a tall man in a town of short men. You could not imagine him entering Grady's Mines — he did not stoop. He kept his beard precisely scissored in a way that was somewhat too grand for East Conlan, where men mostly either went clean-shaven or shaggy as a moose. For exercise, he took long walks, alone. He was tremendously strong, or so it seemed to me. He hauled stones taller than me and he carved names and dates into them as casually as a man might jot down numbers in a ledger.
Ransom was not his real name. His real name was something a little like Ransom in sound but too hard to say for the simple people of Conlan, so he became Ransom. He spoke little, and as I remember him he was quite bald on the top of his great black head, and though he was not a religious man in any way he tended to the widows and the dead with the dignity of a priest. He often quoted a variety of Scriptures in a variety of languages but he believed in none of them. The miners of East Conlan were not religious either in those days and the plain things he did for them sufficed.
My mother died a little after I was born. She was pale and freckled and pretty and I am sorry that that is all I can say about her. Jess used to say that she had green eyes but in the photograph my father kept everything about her was soft and sepia-brown as if she was looking up from the earth where she lies. I have three sisters: Jess, Sue, and May. Two older brothers did not live past infancy. A reasonable percentage. We the survivors all worked for Father from as soon as we could walk. I was no damn good at it.
One day my father summoned us all into his workroom. There were heavy tools and dust and fragments of stone. There was a human skull on a shelf above my reach and very dusty books in languages from the old country which I could not read but wished I could. There was also the photograph of my mother and some mementos of her in ivory and jade. My father sat behind a desk and looked at each of us in turn, and announced in his deep rumbling voice that he had been thinking about the future, and what would happen when he was gone. He reminded us that nothing on earth lasted forever, but everything sooner or later went down into the dark, and one day he would too. What would happen when he was gone, he said, was that May would go to the church, and Jess should find work in Jasper or Gibson City, and Sue would marry and take over the business and do well with it. I scratched my scabs and I asked what I would do and he was silent for a very long time then said that he had thought long and hard and consulted the wisdom of the ages and of the dark places of the world and of the most learned heirarchy of ancient Juddua and the wisest wizards of the Folk and still he could not imagine what sort of things I might do with myself.
* * *
Not long after that I fell sick.
The sickness in question was something that originated in Mr. Grady's Mine, something belched up out of a dark recess of the deep earth. It laid low a dozen men with fever, and they were strong men who were used to physical hardship. Most recovered. Some did not. It was probably one of those who died who brought it into our home — no fault of his own, of course. May fell perilously ill for a week and it is possible that that is why she was never able to have children, and maybe that in turn is why she got so damnably Religious. I don't know and I guess now that I have committed this thoughtless and idle speculation to the page I will have to hope she never reads this.
One popular theory — regarding the sickness, I mean, not May — one theory was that the sickness was a curse left by the First Folk. Something they had left behind, a gift for the usurpers — maybe in some deep hidden place Mr. Grady's diggers should not have penetrated. A word carved on the wall. A curse, a poison. Some of Grady's men tried to organize a mob to go scour the hollows south of town, where some families of the Folk lived free, it was said. I know this because they came to my father to see if he would go with them and he told them to go home and stop being such fools, and there were raised voices but they did as he said.
I heard all this from my own sickbed.
Most likely there would have been a mob sooner or later, and ugly things would have happened, but within a few weeks the sickness had run its course — for everyone but me, that is. But then I was always an odd child, who had to be different.
Previously I had resided in the same room as my sisters, with a curtain for modesty's sake, but now I was quarantined. What had previously been storage was made into a sickroom. It smelled at first of dust and stone and it was cold. There were two cabinets of battered pine. My father shuttered the room's window, at the advice of Dr. Forrest, who worked for Grady's Mine and believed that sunlight would excite and overtax the nervous system or some such nonsense. Nor were candles permitted. The sickroom was at the end of a long hallway, the shape of which created a sort of big camera obscura mechanism, so that there was real Light only at certain unpredictable times when all the right doors were open at once. Otherwise everything was gray. I sweated and shook and did not eat. The sickness was a great mystery and when Dr. Forrest visited, cloth to mouth and hovering in the doorway, there was something like awe in his eyes. My father could not look at me. My sisters came and went and I don't mean to sound ungrateful but I have to confess that in my state of delirium I could not often tell them apart. Dr. Forrest stood in the hallway and whispered to my father that it was inexplicable that I had not died already. For a time I was scared pretty bad, I will not lie, but after a while it came to me with certainty, as if I had reasoned it out and the mathematics was sound, that I would not die, and I could not die, because I was meant for something greater. After that it was mostly a matter of patience. There was not a lot in that sickroom to do for fun and a lot of discomfort to endure. I do not mean to ask for your pity, because it seems to me that for a great many people life is always like that, and I have otherwise been lucky for the most part.
It was while I was sick that the Line came to town.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Rise of Ransom City"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Felix Gilman.
Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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