Lightbringers and Rainmakers - Felix Gilman [11]
I said, “I’d say I just wanted to do something good for those people down there—I don’t know if that matters, either.”
He threw what was left of his fruit away. “To hell with Disorder. Three weeks down there. Three goddamn weeks.”
“Well then look at it this way: better something than nothing. If I get your rain-making apparatus working again and we share the money, that’s more than you would have got just sitting down there drinking.”
He shook his head. “You don’t know what’s going on at all, do you?”
My assistant gave a kind of laugh. That is not the first time someone has told me that.
I said all this because I wanted to work with Flood, and not to fight. After all, we were not going to find the Folk before nightfall, it looked like, and I would have to sleep with him nearby. And what if he really was a Scientist? What if he had discovered the secret of making rain? That would be a man worth learning from, even if he was kind of an asshole.
Nobody ever gets a chance to lecture an Officer of the Line and not fear retaliation. So I’ll take that chance now. You have been fighting the you-know-what and its Agents for three hundred years and what has it accomplished? Only more fighting. Your armies seize another town, and another. You lay the Line across another hundred miles of plain. Then the Agents of your Enemy sneak in after dark and blow up the Line, poison the wells, burn down your buildings. Then you do it again. It is the ordinary people who suffer. Think of what you and all your factories and your tens of thousands of machines and your sacred Engines could do if you made peace—for instance, you could dig channels or send trucks with water to Disorder; it would cost you nothing. And probably there is something the Agents of your Enemy could do that is more useful than murder and sabotage and blackmail and fraud and poisoning, though I can’t think what.
Anyway there was a lot I wanted to ask Flood about. But at that moment the silence was broken by the sound of engines in the valley, and not long after that we saw a squadron of six Vessels of the long-winged variety passing overhead, hunting. Possibly the same ones that are circling overhead now.
I am not much of a reader of the Novel and certainly neither are you, Linesman, but I have seen those three little stars used in stories to mean that time has passed or the writer has forgotten where he was going and needs to start over. In this case it is because it got too dark to write for a while after the sun went down, but now the moon is very bright.
So we slept that night around the foot of a tree, kind of head-to-toe, and we rose early in the morning and pressed on.
I tried a different tack.
“I make Light,” I said.
“So I’ve heard.” Flood stopped, and studied the sky. It was blue, and empty again. The peak was red in the distance.
“Electric Light,” I added. “The Line smashed the prototype of my Apparatus, but you should have seen it when it was working.”
Flood nodded. “They do that.”
It is not just that it makes Electric Light. It makes an infinity of Electric Light, burning no fuel. Once it begins it does not stop. You will say this is impossible—I know how your Engines hunger for fuel—and in fact it has never quite worked right yet, but it will.
I told Flood all about the Valves and the Coils and the acids and the ’Scopes and the Alternating Current Technique (patent pending) and the Ransom Theory of the Equilibrium of Opposites. My assistant mimed the working of pedals.
Flood said, “Yeah, yeah.”
He drank a little of his water and looked at me.
He said, “Are you going to do this, then?”
“What?”
“The peak.” He pointed. “Are you really going all the way there?”
I shrugged. “I don’t see that I have much choice. I made a promise. And besides I need the money, if I’m ever going to rebuild the Apparatus. You know how that is, right?”
He laughed and we started walking again. This was yesterday, and we were high up, but not as high as we got later. There were scraggly