Lightbringers and Rainmakers - Felix Gilman [0]
I. The Incident in Wherever-It-Was
II. The World’s Edge
III. Founding Day
IV. On Big Witch
V. The Peak
I. The Incident in Wherever-It-Was
Hello May.
I haven’t written in a while and maybe it seems I only write when there’s bad news. Well, this is not the exception that proves the rule, if you know what I mean.
I lost almost all my business cards. If you got my last letter, you’ll remember I sent you one of them, so that you can see what your prodigal kid brother’s up to these days and maybe be proud, maybe just a little. If you didn’t get my letter—and who knows these days?—then they had my name, “Professor” Harry Ransom, “Professor” like that, in what they call “quotes,” because I always say I’m nothing if not honest, as best I can be, and at least I never claim to be anything I’m not. There were lightning bolts printed on either side of my name. Those cost extra. Under my name it said Lightbringer, then Licensed and then By Appointment, which weren’t exactly true but didn’t mean anything either way, as I saw it, and then below that Inventor of the Ransom Process for &c &c, which is true. A dollar for fifty at Tally’s Printers on Tenth Avenue in Melville City, and I bought two hundred-fifty, and in consequence went hungry for a week, and so did good old never-complaining Carver, my assistant, who I’m sure I’ve mentioned before.
Also I have lost my Apparatus, and my wagon, and Sasha (the horse), and just about everything else in the world I own except the white suit and my wits.
If you got my last letter you’ll be thinking, Not again. So am I, believe me, so am I. The strange thing is that when I think back on the incident what I first recall is those business cards sticking up in the mud in the tire tracks where they’d been scattered by those awful wings and how they looked like little white tombstones for the very tiny dead, all with my name on them, kind of funny in a way, only not really. I can picture that so clearly, but I can’t remember the name of the town at all. Memory’s strange, or at least mine is.
This is where you’d cross your arms and say, Get to the point, Harry. Well, okay.
I was putting on the usual show. I have told you about it before more than once and it was the same as those times, only in a new town and for a new bunch of Investors. The Apparatus was set up right in the middle of town and I had the white suit on and Carver was hunkered down the way he gets ready to work the pedals and the Demonstration was ready to commence. I have told you before that I don’t like to describe the Apparatus in writing, not because I don’t trust you, May, but because I don’t trust the mail. There are always snoops, in particular if the mail goes across Line Territories, as it must to get to you. And as I have confessed before, the status of my patents is questionable. So no more on that except to say that the sun had come out after a morning of rain and the Glass shone in it and so did the copper coils, everything shining like a premonition of that greater and perpetual Light that was to come next, was to come as soon as Carver threw the switch. Or so I hoped, the Apparatus not in fact being reliable always, or even often, as I have always been honest about, at least with you, May, at least with you.
So I stood before the assembled citizenry of Wherever-It-Was and opened my arms wide and said: Ladies. And before I could get as far as Gentlemen there was a terrible roaring sound. Gentlemen, I said anyway. Behold. Then I shut up.
A dirt road led into town, into to the heart of Whatever-They-Called-It. Up that road five or maybe six motor cars were approaching. They roared and threw up dust and smoked in the way of all the things of the Line. A moment later two of their Heavier-Than-Air Vessels appeared in the sky like they’d dropped from the clouds, and they circled, iron wings a-clatter, spyglasses keenly glinting. Same oily black smoke, always the same. The motor cars roared into the center of town and circled like wolves while the Vessels watched overhead.
I have never liked to be