Part 12 (1/2)

”I'm glad you,” I said. ”I mean, well, you know. I'm glad you got out. Got free.”

I was afraid.

I had once joined a munic.i.p.al chapter of the Liberationist Movement, and for two weeks I paid my weekly dues toward the cause of the end of bondage. I wondered whether I should mention that fact. I decided not to.

”I think there was a rocket,” I said. ”What happened to the Damaris, I mean. The Damaris was the name of the boat, if you don't know. I don't know whether you. I mean, it was the War again.”

The one I took for their leader whispered a word. I did not understand it.

I do not know if they understood me. I think they did.

It was like when I met the giant Knoll at White Rock. What ever would happen, I could not talk my way out of it.

I thought of the stories of travelers waylaid by Folk, and tortured and killed, maybe for revenge or maybe because they have broken some rule of the Folk's world that they did not understand or maybe for no reason anyone has words for. I thought of Folk-tales of curses and transformations and the evil eye. I did not know if they meant me harm, and I do not know now. I thought they might harm me whether they meant to or not.

”You know,” I said, ”once, when I was a boy, back in a place we call East Conlan but I guess maybe you have a different name for it, I visited with some of your people. That is, I-”

I had a sudden apprehension of the strength with which they must have torn loose their chains from the wheel, the strength with which they must have split open the waterlogged coffin that was the hull of the Damaris, and risen from the muddy bottom of the river- the same strength with which they had turned its wheel for who knew how many long years. A chill ran through me.

I took a step back. They came closer. The fellow who wore the chain was at the forefront. I could see where it had broken, and I could see where it had scarred him.

I said, ”My name's Harry Ransom,” but of course that name meant nothing to them.

Then I had one of my moments of inspiration. I pulled out the pocketknife and I turned to the nearest tree and I carved into its soft mossy trunk a certain sign, one that I remembered very well and that I thought they might know.

They studied it in silence for a while, looking from the sign to me and back again, and then at each other, while I tried to explain how I came to know this thing and to talk about the Apparatus and about my dreams and my ambitions and my great and wonderful destiny, and why it would be a d.a.m.n shame for the world if I were to perish in that swamp. All together they began to roll their shoulders and shake their heads, and after a moment I realized that they were laughing, and not especially kindly, that is, they were laughing at me.

Well now. I guess I should explain, or otherwise just skip all this thras.h.i.+ng in the swamp and get straight to Jasper City and fame and fortune and the First and Second Battle and all the rest.

I have wrestled for a long time with how I will tell this or whether I should tell it at all, and maybe all I can do is write it all out and see how it looks.

This is about what I call the Ransom Process. I have to go back a way to tell this, back to when I was a boy, in good old East Conlan. If you like you may turn ahead to when I get to Jasper City.

I was fourteen years old. It was the summer of '83 or '84 or thereabouts. Conlan was halfway between what it had been when I was a child and what it was becoming, which is an outpost of the Line. I was living beneath my father's roof, or what was left of it- the old house and my father's business having been claimed by the Line. We were lodging on the south side of town. We kept different hours between all of his jobs and all of mine, and we did not speak.

For most of that summer I supported myself painting signs. I learned the trick of sign-painting from a book. The trick of persuading East Conlan's dour storekeeps that there was nothing more respectable or desirable than a brightly colored motto just like the storefronts of Jasper City- a place none of us had ever seen- well, that came naturally to me. I turned the town bright for a summer. My crowning achievement was a bird of paradise over Connolly's store. He asked why and I said why not. It blew down that winter.

Meanwhile my father vanished at night, or sometimes for days, running errands for Conlan's new management to New Foley, which was the next town over. His work, what ever it was, was secretive, unspoken. He was silent and often angry. And after all what was there to say? All day he served the Linesmen in various capacities that were degrading to a man of his pride- what would he talk about? What ever he had to say I did not want to hear it. I had my own obsessions. I would be free, wealthy, famous, great, I would bring Light to the world. I think I have written about how I climbed the tower on top of Grady's Hill with a kite and some wire in a thunderstorm- well, that was that summer. That was the state of my Great Work at the time. I had burns on both palms and let me tell you that is not a laughing matter for anyone who has to work for a living. My father called me a word in his buzzing old-country language that I guess meant fool. I could not or would not explain to him why I had done it.

We were alone in the house except that there was an old woman above us and a large number of feral cats in the rank weeds back of the house. May was the oldest of my sisters and she had gone off the month before with a revival of the Silver City faith. Sue was the next oldest and she had moved to New Foley with an insurance salesman, where she was living in wedded bliss and learning book-keeping. Jess was I guess sixteen at the time, and what ever aspirations she later had to the stage had not yet manifested themselves, except that she loved to dance. She spoke all the time about Jasper City and fame and fortune I do not think she knew what she would do to get there. She was living at the time with one of the young men who had used to work for Grady's Mine before the Line seized, and having been found surplus to requirements he now did nothing at all so far as I could tell except drink and brawl. His name was Joe or Jim or something of the kind. I disliked him and admired him, both at the same time, and now I do not remember what he looked like except that he was handsome, and dark, and had a curl of hair on his forehead that I reckon Jess liked. He was also stupid. I recall that he used to boast sometimes of his intention to take up arms in the service of the Gun, but the fact was that neither he nor anybody else in our backwater town knew how to do that. I cut him in on the sign-painting business because he was good at carrying buckets and ladders. Sometimes he and his fellows threw stones at the Line's concrete barracks on the north of town. So did my sister. So did I, on occasion. One of my sister's many talents is that she is as accurate with a stone as any Agent is with his Gun- it is mostly because of Jess that I am so quick at dodging stones and gla.s.ses thrown at my head, which has served me in good stead throughout my career. I am a bad shot. We all have our gifts.

Anyhow it was as we three were sitting by the old culvert east of town after one such glorious blow for the cause of freedom that the matter of my father came up in conversation. I guess one or other of us was talking about leaving town to strike out for fame and fortune and Joe said something about my father and how he vanished from town from time to time, and I said that he was running errands to New Foley, and Joe said that no such thing could be true, because Joe sometimes went to New Foley to drink away from the eyes of the New Management, and my father had not been seen there in years.

Joe's speculation was that my father was attempting to contact the Gun- or else that he was raising up some black magic of his own, out in the woods, a curse upon the New Management. Joe was a simple fellow and always certain that because my father had come to the West across the mountains from the old country, and because he spoke an old-country tongue, he must be in possession of old-country magic. To him this was elementary, and he did not like it when Jess and me mocked him.

”He's got a woman,” Jess said. ”Of course he has- a woman in a hut in the woods!”

I did not believe that any more than I believed the black-magic story, and I said so. Not because of the honor of my late departed mother, nor because in my eyes my father was a hundred years old and incapable of romance, but because if he had a woman he would surely be less angry and tired and hollow-eyed than he was. I said that he was going to New Foley to work, just like he said, because the old man had no leisure and no freedom for women or hijinks in the woods.

Jess said, ”Yeah- and whose fault is that, then?”

She could be very cruel.

We argued, and Joe and my sister argued, and after a while there was a wager, I do not recall exactly who proposed it first. We were to follow my father and see who was right.

The next night we skulked in the yard with the weeds and the cats but he went nowhere but to bed. After that we forgot our wager for a while. You may recall that after I climbed Old Grady's tower with the kite and the baling-wire I was charged by the New Management and sentenced to a period of penal servitude. My experiment with the kite and the lightning in the thunderstorm on top the abandoned tower on Grady's Hill was in the view of the new authorities not the admirable curiosity of a young man of genius, but rather an instance of criminal trespa.s.s, aggravated by vandalism. I was therefore plenty busy and forbidden to leave town anyhow. My father went off without warning and came back once and then again and n.o.body thought to follow him. It was not until maybe a month later that my father announced at breakfast that he was leaving the next day to look for work in New Foley and would be gone for a long time, if all went well, and so it was time for me to be a man.

I am sorry to say that I was still only a boy. My servitude had expired the day before and I was free again and in the mood for adventure. Therefore I rounded up Jess and Joe and reminded them of our wager and the next day we followed the old man when he left.

The road from Conlan to Foley had not yet been widened for motor-cars. It wound through the woods. It was therefore possible to follow a man un.o.bserved, if one stuck to the trees and if that man was occupied with his own thoughts.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and hot, and the woods belonged to insects. They liked the taste of me and Joe but not Jess. Women have their ways, she explained.

My father walked west down the road for an hour or two. A wagon pa.s.sed and he refused a ride and did not make conversation. After that he sat on a fallen tree for another hour or more, at a place where the road turned north toward Foley. He had his pack at his feet and his great bald head in his hands. Then he stood very quick like he had seen us, but he had not. He swung his pack over his shoulder and set off west into the woods.

I had lost my wager.

The woods south of Conlan are nothing like the swamp I fetched up in after the Damaris sank, except in the way that all lonely places are the same. Conlan's woods were dry. Trees stuck up out of the ground tall and thin and regular like the bed of nails I once saw a circus-act lie down on out on the Rim. There was th.o.r.n.y brush everywhere. The ground was stony and uneven and rose up into a hundred tiny hills and shallow gulches, none of which had any names but all of which served to turn you around, so that it was notorious among the people of Conlan and Foley and Haman that to enter those woods was to get lost, sure as anything. We did not get far into the woods before Jess's nerve failed and she wanted to go back.

No-that is not the right way to say it. Truth is that Jess was always brave. But she had better sense than me. Joe did not understand that, and mocked her for cowardice. Hard words were exchanged in whispers. I was for pressing on too, because I could never stand to be thought a coward. In my time I have done a lot of stupid things for reasons of pride. In the end Jess turned back and Joe and me went on. I have mentioned her deft hand with a stone- well, as soon as our backs were turned she buzzed a stone to clip Joe's ear. He cursed. I thought my father would hear but I guess he did not.

Another difference between the swamps and the woods south of Conlan was silence. The swamps were full of strange and wet and unearthly noises, and the woods were silent. My father made no noise, and nor did Jess. Joe grunted and cursed, but he had the good sense to do so quietly. Even the insects were for the most part quiet. Sometimes one of them would make a whining sound that was as shocking in the silence as a gunshot.

n.o.body much lived in the woods outside of town and there was little in them of use to commerce or industry. My father stopped at no little huts, enjoyed the company of no women. Nor did he practice any black magic.

We got hungry. It began to get dark. My father produced a lantern from his pack. That made him a good deal easier to follow from a safe distance. Of course we would never find our way back without him.

Joe offered his speculation again that my father was conspiring with Agents of the Gun, and I said that he should hope that was not true, because the Agents would have no second thoughts about slitting the throats of spies.

We were still pretending not to be afraid. As the older of the two of us Joe was naturally determined to show that he was the braver of the two of us, and because I was who I am I was determined to show that it was me. Truth is we were both afraid. In no particular order we feared the dark, hunger, getting lost, wolves, snakes, silence, and Agents of the Gun who might be skulking and scheming in the wilderness and sharpening their throat-slitting knives. Soon enough we added Officers of the Line to that list of bogeymen. On our walk west we twice pa.s.sed old camp-sites. You could tell they had been occupied by Linesmen because of the kind of junk they leave behind. We did not know what business the Linesmen could have had in those parts but we did not like it. If they found us wandering in the woods there would be questioning.

We lost sight of my father's lantern. After a little argument we agreed to keep walking west, keeping the setting sun at our backs. That might take us in the direction of New Haman by morning.

Joe remarked that it was like we were out on the edge of the world, traveling in unmade lands, and you could not be sure which way you were going or if the sun would come up tomorrow. I told him I was not scared. I was.

Above all else we were afraid of the Folk.

I did not know how many of the Folk lived in the woods south of Conlan. n.o.body did. There was nothing very profitable in that wilderness and it was of no particular strategic importance to anyone and so great expanses of it were still unmapped. There was no question though that a sizable settlement of free Folk resided there, most likely in the triangle of land between Conlan and New Haman and the peak we called Old Man Hump. Sometimes a wagon on the road to Foley or Haman crossed paths with a half-dozen Folk going about their business, what ever that was. Once when I was sick a group of the Folk came to the outskirts of town, or so I heard, and the townspeople watched them watch us watching them for an hour or two before they turned back. It was said that Grady's Mine had been hollowed out of caves that had belonged to them. There had been violence back before I was born. Old-timers spoke darkly of witchcraft and curses and strange storms and devils of dust and stone and signs scratched on trees that could drive a man mad- all the usual sort of stories you hear everywhere. Grady brought in a Mother Superior of the Silver City faith to say blessings for his men, and a Master of the World Serpent faith to spit sickness upon his enemies, and in the end religion with the aid of dynamite proved more than a match for magic. Eventually a kind of entente was achieved, which is to say that Grady got his mine and the Folk got the woods and for the most part we each left each other alone. But if Joe and me blundered into one of their places there was no telling what they might do to us.

My father was well out of sight and hearing now and so to show each other that we were not afraid Joe and me were talking as loud as we pleased. He told me some blood-curdling stories he had heard about the Folk of the woods and the cruelties they visited on unfortunate travelers. I doubt that there was a word that he said that was not pure invention. I would like to say that I expressed my doubt of his stories but I did not. Truth is that I made up some of my own. Well, I have always been a good talker. I do not remember what ever I said but I remember that Joe's face went pale and he fell silent.