The Rise of Ransom City Read online

  Tor Books by Felix Gilman

  The Half-Made World

  The Rise of Ransom City

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  EDITOR'S FOREWORD

  THE FIRST PART - THE RIM

  CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTIONS

  CHAPTER 2: MY HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

  CHAPTER 3: CLEMENTINE

  CHAPTER 4: ON THE ROAD

  CHAPTER 5: BLACK CUT

  CHAPTER 6: SOME MORE PORTRAITS

  CHAPTER 7: THE WOLVES

  CHAPTER 8: WHITE ROCK

  CHAPTER 9: THE SHOWDOWN

  CHAPTER 10: THE END OF THE FIRST PART

  THE SECOND PART - THE RIVER

  CHAPTER 11: THE BEGINNING OF THE SECOND PART

  CHAPTER 12: THE PIANO

  CHAPTER 13: MAGIC

  CHAPTER 14: THE WOUNDED ENGINE

  CHAPTER 15: THE CHAIN

  CHAPTER 16: THE END OF THE SECOND PART

  THE THIRD PART - JASPER CITY

  CHAPTER 17: NEW IN TOWN

  CHAPTER 18: THE AMAZING AMARYLLIS AND MR. ALFRED P. BAXTER AND MR. ELMER MERRIAL CARSON, AND OTHERS

  CHAPTER 19: THE DUEL

  CHAPTER 20: THE ORMOLU

  CHAPTER 21: A VISIT TO THE FLOATING WORLD

  CHAPTER 22: THE DETECTIVES

  CHAPTER 23: MR. ALFRED P. BAXTER

  CHAPTER 24: SCARLET JEN

  CHAPTER 25: THE INJUNCTION

  CHAPTER 26: HOW I GOT TO THE TOP

  CHAPTER 27: THE BATTLE OF JASPER CITY

  THE FOURTH PART - RANSOM CITY

  CHAPTER 28: THE BEGINNING OF THE FOURTH PART

  CHAPTER 29: MY TIME AT THE TOP

  CHAPTER 30: INFORMATION

  CHAPTER 31: ADELA

  CHAPTER 32: HOW I GOT OUT

  CHAPTER 33: LAST WORDS

  EDITOR'S AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, my agent Howard Morhaim, provided invaluable advice.

  Thanks to Eric Raab, whose edits made this a much stronger book, and

  to everyone at Torfor their hard work and creativity and the gorgeous

  cover, etc. Thanks to Sarah for all the usual, and thanks to everyone

  who supported or just read the first book.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in

  this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE RISE OF RANSOM CITY

  Copyright © 2012 by Felix Gilman

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2940-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4299-8729-5 (e-book)

  First Edition: November 2012

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  BY ELMER MERRIAL CARSON

  It seems I have worked half my life on this account of Mr. Harry Ransom and his labors. I have published more books in my life than I can now recall, I have founded two newspapers and run three into the ground, I have rewritten my own autobiography four times— one of the hazards of longevity— and it seems to me now that this book has cost me more labor than all the rest put together. Ever since I first met him, Mr. Harry Ransom has made my life difficult.

  This is Mr. Ransom’s story, and for the most part it is told in his own words., I have corrected the man’s unorthodox spelling, and in a few places where his pages were torn or fouled or never recovered, I have had to guess at his meaning. Some of his punctuation appears to be of his own invention, and I have forced it into a more standard mold. I have preserved all his digressions from the point and I have corrected only a small percentage of his errors. What I believe Mr. Ransom intended as his title was one hundred and sixty-six words long, which is an abomination that no publisher can abide. I have shortened it.

  I do not intend to say anything much about Mr. Ransom here. I do not intend to express an opinion on whether he was a good man or a bad one, a genius or a charlatan, an honest man or a traitor. He was the kind of odd fellow one used to meet back in the century gone by, in the days when the Great War was at its height.

  All that is to say that my editorial duties have been light. The labor I speak of has mostly been a matter of tracking down the pages of Ransom’s manuscript. But that has taken me half a lifetime.

  I received the first two hundred pages of Ransom’s manuscript thirty-six years ago last month, in one intimidatingly large parcel, left for me at the post office in the town of Colriffey, where I was at the time rooming with friends and working on a novel. Ransom’s manuscript promised— as you will soon see— an explanation and an apology of a kind for recent events in the great war. There was no indication of who had left it for me, and no letter of explanation as to what Ransom meant me to do with it. There was no “Hello Elmer I hope you are well”; there was nothing but two hundred pages of Ransom’s outlandish life story.

  At the time, nobody had heard from the gentleman in question for quite a few years. His fame was waning, or his notoriety, or what ever you’d call it. I guessed he meant to rekindle it, and wanted my help. He talked about building a city in the wilderness. I wanted nothing to do with the matter. I was tired of war and talk of war and justifications for or against it. The novel I was working on was a light and fantastical comedy, later published as A Toad’s Tale. I was not at all happy to hear from Ransom, whom I had last met back in Jasper City, shortly before it fell to the Line, and I held him at least partly to blame for that fall. What’s more, I had only to read a few pages into the thing to see that it was dangerous stuff, and that if half of what Mr. Ransom had to say was true, then the spies of Gun and Line would be very interested indeed in his story.

  Those two hundred pages covered Mr. Ransom’s life from his birth in East Conlan, which is a dull little mining town in the eastern part of the Flinders, through his travels out on the Western Rim, with a great many digressions on his fabulous Ransom Process, and up to the famous Incident in White Rock. Along the way, Mr. Ransom managed to claim credit for the exploits of Liv Alverhuysen and the late John Creedmoor and for the beginning of the end of the Great War and for many other things besides. Two hundred pages; he promised more. One part of the story delivered, three to come. He wanted me to publish his story. He was on his way out west to make his new world. He had a typewriter with him, and by the Powers, he meant to use it.

  I read his two hundred pages in one night and burned them in the fireplace and left town the next day. Those were dark times and I am not ashamed to say that I was afraid.

  And that was that for a few years. No more parcels of pages came in the post. Maybe I was traveling too much; maybe spies or censors intercepted them. Maybe Mr. Ransom had lost interest, or found someone else to publish his story, or fallen down a ravine out there in the western wilderness. Wherever he was and what ever he was doing, he was long gone from the known world. I heard from time to time about Ransom City, the utopia that he and his colleagues were said to be building out there beyond the borders of the settled world, though nobody knew exactly where. I wrote another two or three comic novels and made a little fortune and I tried to retire.

  In the fall of 1906, a part of the third of the four parts of Ransom’s story was sent to me care of my publishers. It came to me from a young lady who had inherited it in the papers of her recently deceased father, who had formerly been a Professor of Physical Science at Vansi
ttart University. The pages were not signed, but she knew they concerned me, because they were the pages of the story in which Mr. Ransom recounted his meeting with me, back in Jasper City, back in ’91. I was surprised firstly to see that he had continued his story, and secondly that his account of our meeting was passably accurate.

  Well, I cannot abide loose ends, and I cannot abide gaps in the story; and besides, retirement did not suit me. I set out to track down the rest of Ransom’s narrative, a few pages here and a few pages there. And that is a story in itself, for Mr. Ransom’s pages got scattered all over the world, which was the way of things back in those bitter waning days of the Great War. I have been all over the West in search of the things, and I have spent a lot of money, and I have met with retired Officers of the Line and aged Agents of the Gun and I have been in danger; I attribute my longevity to the exercise Mr. Ransom has given me. The events of Mr. Ransom’s story faded into history, and my dangerous hunt turned into an old man’s harmless hobby. A few more pages here; a few pages there; the recollections of certain people who knew him, which have clarified some illegible passages. The thing is as complete now as it will ever be. Maybe Mr. Ransom never achieved half his ambitions, and maybe he never made good on any of his promises, but at least he has kept an old man busy in his retirement. And who knows; maybe he did.

  AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, in Parts, written on The Road between Here and The Western Rim, and mostly On The Run, I expect containing an explanation of sorts and An Apology of a Kind for Some Recent Events In The Great War and some advertisements for Ransom City, soon to rise In The West, “THE CITY OF THE FUTURE” and some interesting facts regarding The Ransom Light-Bringing Apparatus and the “MIRACLE AT WHITE ROCK” and a sketch of a dinner with Mr. Elmer Merrial Carson, formerly of the Jasper City Evening Post and A mammoth and a full and fair accounting of the Crimes of The Northern Lighting Corporation and of The Inner Secrets of Money and Power in this world and a lamentation for the DAMARIS and for Mr. Carver and for all of JASPER and for Adela and for Everybody Else I have Forgotten with some maxims for Success In Business and Some Useful PRINCIPLES of Exercise and Diet and Some Invaluable ADVICE for What To Do Should You Run Foul of WOLVES.

  THE FIRST PART

  THE RIM

  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 and 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.

  * * *

  *Of course, there never was a Jasper City Evening Post. I was an Evening News man. Mr. Ransom’s memory fails him here, not for the first or last time. —EMC

  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 S
cripture. 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.