The Rise Of Ransom City Part 29

Not everyone who showed up at the meeting-place I had proposed was friendly to me at first. I guess most of them thought I was an impostor, and the rest were still mad at me for one reason or another. As a matter of fact one man threw a chair at me. But I always was a good talker. That man is still with me now and will be with us when Ransom City rises.

When Miss Harper and I talked, back at the camp outside Harrow Cross, I told her about Adela and about our letters and about how we had talked of building a new city, free of war and all the other problems of the world. She said that was a common enough notion in these times and I acknowledged that it would never happen, it was only words. I said that I did not trust anyone with the Process, and I did not trust myself, because sooner or later someone would find me and offer me money for it, or fame, and maybe they would promise me they would not misuse it, and maybe they would even believe they were telling the truth, and who knows what I would do then. I said that I had to go far, far away. She said that it would not be enough to go to the edge of the world, I would have to go as far as anyone has ever gone and keep going, and that that country had its own inhabitants who might not welcome me. I acknowledged that that was true too. She took pity on me then, I think, and she asked me if I remembered when we first met at Clementine, and I said of course I did, and she said that at that time she and John Creedmoor had recently completed their own long wandering in the wilderness, having got almost all the way out to the place where everything turns into Sea, and if I wanted she could tell me a few things about what was out there, almost like a kind of map, though I should not rely on it too much. I said that I was grateful to her, and I would take it all as it comes, and that I relied on nothing these days.

This is the end of the fourth part. When I write again I will write from Ransom City.

-EMC.

And there endeth, as they say, the sermon.

I a.s.sume that one of the copies of the Fourth Part of Mr. Ransom's letters was addressed to me, the same as all the others. It never came to me through the mails, and I have never found any trace a copy addressed to me anywhere in the world. One of the copies was addressed to President Hobart IV. A few pages of that copy survive in the Public Library of New Morgan City. The rest of it is in private collections, or lost In the years after the fall of Harrow Cross there was briefly hot compet.i.tion for Mr. Ransom's letters, among those who had heard rumor of them, and who hoped that they might find clues as to how to reconstruct Mr. Ransom's weapon. That has gone out of fas.h.i.+on lately, and for the most part I have been able to indulge my hobby quite cheaply.

The third copy was addressed to the Baron Iermo, father of Adela. It reached him, and it remained in his possession through all the ups and downs that the Baronetcy of Iermo and the Deltas have suffered in the years since Ransom wrote; it was still in his possession last year, when I visited him in his rotting and vine-choked mansion. I had come all the way south to interview him on the subject of his daughter, but he was old, prodigiously so, older even than myself, and there was little that he could tell me, little that he remembered. There were no traces of her in the house. Some musical instruments; some rusting and overgrown machinery in the fields outside, the purpose of which was unclear to me. No marks of genius that I could see- but mine is an untutored eye. Yet it was not a fruitless expedition, because to my great surprise I discovered a complete copy of the Fourth Part of Mr. Ransom's writings rotting among the old Baron's papers. He was happy to give it to me, seeing no value in it.

I have never seen any Fifth Part of Mr. Ransom's writings, nor heard any rumor of any such thing. Moreover anyone can tell you that there is no Ransom City, and never was. You have only to look at a map.

I had planned to return home to New Morgan once I had said my good-byes to the Baron, leaving before the rainy season came to the Deltas. It is not an easy matter to travel at my age, and I had business to take care of. But at the pier at the river my excitement at my discovery of the Fourth Part overtook me, or perhaps it was the spirit of young Mr. Ransom. I exchanged my ticket and I set out west. I visited a number of acquaintances I had never thought to visit with again in this life, and I saw a lot of sights between here and the edge of the world for what I suppose will be the last time.

I toured the sights of Mr. Ransom's autobiography. East Conlan and New Foley are part of one town now, by the name of Foley. The town of Kenauk is a busy little metropolis, and hardly anyone remembers the day Mr. Ransom came to town. White Rock is long gone; only the lake and the trees remain. The town of Mammoth still has its mammoth, and I have the post-cards to prove it. Melville City thrives, of course. Clementine is gone. The town of Domino, where Ransom boarded the ill-fated Damaris, was destroyed in the last days of the Great War, along with the nearby Line camp and the Fountainhead Engine; in its place there is a memorial.

The western edge of the world expands further and further and places that were wild in Ransom's day are respectable now. I wanted to set eyes one last time on the edge of things, and so I kept going, out past Melville and the crossroads where Clementine had grown and dried up and blown away, out past places that in Ransom's day had no names, but were now thriving little towns, well-marked farms, busy roads. I traveled all summer. Thank our lucky stars that the motor-car is no longer the exclusive property of the Line, or I would never have been capable of it.

Wherever I went I interviewed old-timers. Well, call it interviewing; perhaps it was just old men jawing about the old days. A few people remembered Ransom, and the day long ago in the time of the War when he and his band of deserters, misfits, and reprobates went by on their way out west. n.o.body knew what had become of them. Most of them agreed that Ransom's band numbered twenty or thirty at most, not the hundred or more he claimed in his letters. Some of them still had copies of Ransom's letters and posters, his invitations to Ransom City, stiff and yellowed papers which they were happy to sell to me for pennies or tobacco.

I met a few old men who had come out looking for Ransom City, back in the days of their f.e.c.kless youth, but never found it. The place was a joke, a drifter's dream; the paradise at the end of the road, always the next town over, where n.o.body works and everybody lives for free.

The people of New Jasper, which is a town of some five thousand souls and about as far from old Jasper as it is possible to get, will tell you a story, if you ask, about how their founder was a war hero, and a businessman, and an inventor, whose genius was the secret of their town's success. They cannot agree on the nature of his genius, though most of them will say rain-making if you ask them, and a few will say electricity. That gentleman, who went by the name of Rawlins, left town twenty-five years ago, headed west. There is no statue to him in New Jasper but by the accounts of the old-timers he looked a little like Mr. Ransom, though they remembered him as tall, which Mr. Ransom was not. New Jasper is a fine little town but its people work for a living like everyone else, and it gets dark at night.

From the town of Gourney there are no roads west, so I traveled by mule to the settlement of Sherlund's Water. It was one of the old men there who told me of a place nearby called Carver's Hill, where strange lights are sometimes seen at night, and where travelers in the woods sometimes meet ghosts, and where a madman lived on the hill. Apart from the small coincidence of the name, there was nothing to set those stories apart from those that you might hear anywhere on the Rim. Wherever you go there is always a haunted hill somewhere nearby, there is always a madman who lives in the woods. The coincidence of the name was enough to make me curious, and I attempted to hire a guide; but Carver's Hill is not just haunted, but also Folk territory, and n.o.body would take my money. I set out a little way toward the hill myself but the going was too steep, and I was afraid- not because of ghosts, or lights, because I saw none, but for the most part because of the sheer remoteness of the place. My wrist.w.a.tch stopped working as I approached the hill, and still does not work today.

After Carver's Hill I turned back east. For the most part I traveled by steamboat, and slept on deck in the sun. I returned to New Morgan, and to my house on Cuvier Street, which my house keeper had kept for me in fine condition, and where, after I had bathed, and shaved, and dined, my secretary presented me with a heap of correspondence, near the top of which was a letter- no return address-hand-delivered- reading simply My Dear Mr. Carson, What are you waiting for? Yours, HR.

Tor Books by Felix Gilman.

The Half-Made World.

The Rise of Ransom City.