Lightbringers and Rainmakers - Felix Gilman [1]
One of the motor cars crashed straight through my Apparatus, leaving broken glass and wire in its wake and the very expensive and rare acids and alkalis pooling in its tracks. The citizens of I-Don’t-Know-Where screamed, or threw themselves down in the mud in attitudes of surrender or maybe worship, or ran for the hills, which I guess is what I should have been doing but I didn’t seem to be able to move. All I could do was stand there and think, Not again.
So every so often one of the motor cars stopped, and an Officer of the Line got out, black-uniformed and scowling, and some unlucky citizen got lifted roughly by his collar and got questions barked in his face. I don’t know about what. Out here on the western rim of the world, which is a war zone these days, you learn that there’s always some reason, there’s always about a thousand different ways anyone might have offended against the Authority the Line claims, so who knows what the citizens of Wherever might have done. Smuggling? Seditious publications? Or maybe they were harboring Agents of the you-know-what. Or maybe they’d done nothing at all. I saw some young people cuffed and shoved into the back of the cars and about a dozen women lined up against a wall weeping, and I guess I should have mentioned earlier that there was some shooting, too, and one or two of Wherever’s buildings were on fire. Also the beating iron wings of the Vessels had blown my business cards off the table where I’d arranged them, carefully, in a fan, and the wings had blown them off the table and into the mud, like I said, the tiny tombstones &c.
May, I do not want to frighten or upset you. You’ll already have figured that your long-prodigal brother is not dead, nor in a Line jail. What happened next was that one of the Linesman Officers shouted You, yeah you, and he pointed, and I just about, well, it would be vulgar to write what I just about did, you know. And I guess he was pointing at a citizen of Wherever, not me, because he then wrestled him to the ground—the officer wrestled the civilian, I mean. That unfroze me. Sometimes when you pass an Electric jolt through a dead frog or bird it seems to come to life again for an instant. It was like that. I backed slowly away and did not start to run until out of sight. If you ever run afoul of the forces of the Line, and I pray that you and East Condon remain in the neutral zone forever, but if you do I recommend this approach. It has always worked for me.
If you’re wondering what had happened to Mr. Carver, well, so was I.
I stood, panting, heart pounding, sweating, alone in the hills outside of town.
He stepped from behind a tree.
I greeted him. “Mr. Carver.”
His long black hair was wild and a little singed. Otherwise he was the same as ever.
He gave me a curt nod, as if to say, See you’re not dead, then. As if to say, It goes on. Carver speaks very little, but his silences are expressive.
“Yes,” I said. “I guess. I don’t suppose you saved any of the…”
He hadn’t, of course.
“Let’s take stock.” I said this to Carver, and I’m saying it to you now, but I guess most of all I was saying it to myself, the first time and this time too, if you follow me.
“So this is the third time something like this has happened. There was Kloan, a couple months back, and I’m counting Melville City too.”
If you got my letters, May, you know what happened in Kloan and in Melville.
“There comes a time when a man has to consider the possibility that he may be taking the wrong direction in life. That he may be pushing against a door that’s just closed to him, and that’s all there is to it, and the harder he pushes the more he’ll hurt himself.”
Carver grunted.
“But not yet. I agree. Right now my thinking is, this is wartime, this is border country, this is what happens, it’s just bad luck is all. Easy come, easy go. Smile through adversity. Whatever other clichés come to mind. What do we have left?”
Carver furrowed his brow and looked thoughtful.
“The Apparatus is gone. Again. That’s one. Two, the wagon is down in what’s left of Wherever, and