Lightbringers and Rainmakers - Felix Gilman [12]
“Tell me about rain,” I said.
“It’s fucking wet, Ransom. What else do you need to know?”
“I’ve been out here on the Rim for about a year now,” I said.
My assistant grunted.
“Right,” I said. “We both have. And in that time we’ve met mesmerists, transmuters of lead into gold, star-readers, inventors of cures for cancer and the common cold, a woman who knew the secret language of horses, and various utopians, including at least one Communist. The unsettled conditions of the Rim draw us all here. Maybe you too, Flood. I’ve heard of rainmakers before but never met one. How does it work? I saw the Pole down in Disorder. It has something to do with lightning, right?”
“Something like that.”
“It pierces the clouds.”
“Could be.”
“We had no farmers in East Condon. That’s where I was born. Mining town. So no one watched the weather much. But I was a curious child. There was a rich kid in town and his father had an encyclopedia and I read it, cover to cover. Here’s what I learned about clouds.”
Flood stopped again and looked back into the valley. He seemed to be listening for something.
“They come out of the west. Like everything else—the sky is like the land in that respect. They form in the wilderness beyond the Rim, and by the time they get here they are only beginning to take shape.”
I searched the sky for a cloud to take as example. Mostly it was blue, and there were some faint gray-black scars where Vessels were passing. But I found one.
“Out here they’re vast, not like regular clouds back east. The sky is bigger just to house them. Like mountains are to hills, or wild horses to donkeys.”
You know what I mean, of course.
“They don’t know what to be yet. By the time they get east they are predictable. They rain in due course. Here they’re wild.”
“Something like that,” Flood said.
“So what is it? You have some way of taming them? Is that it?”
We talked like this for a while. I will cut it short. He did not know a damn thing about the clouds or about rain or about electricity or about science, and he was hardly even pretending he did any more.
Meanwhile we were still walking up the slopes of Big Witch.
From back down in town it did not look like it could take more than a day to get to the peak of Big Witch. And it shouldn’t have. It was bigger than it should have been. This is what happens when you start on the Edge and go west of it, of course, as everybody knows. We did not have enough water.
He said, “So what do you know about the Folk, Harry Ransom?”
“Not a whole lot,” I confessed.
He smiled, as if to say that he knew it all along.
“I’ve been out here for a long time, and I’ve passed through their territories before, and they’ve never given me any trouble, nor I them. I’ve seen them, once or twice, in the distance. I’ve seen their carvings and their paintings. I picked up one or two of their words from a book. I hear a lot about their tricks and their magic, but I don’t know if I believe that. Electric Light looks like magic too, but it isn’t.”
“Deep thoughts, Ransom. What’ll you do if you find them? They don’t like intruders, and with good reason. They’ll wind your guts on a stick.”
“I’m a persuasive fellow, and people generally like me, present company excepted, I guess. I’m going to talk to them, and do my best.”
You might be thinking: if I believed Flood was a con artist, which by that time I was certain of, then it follows that his rain-making machine didn’t work. If his stupid Pole didn’t work, then it follows that the Folk weren’t stopping it from working. So what was I still doing out there? Well, I needed to be sure. There were 300 dollars on the line, and I meant to earn them honestly. This will sound stupid to you, I bet.
Flood laughed.
“You got something you want to tell me, Flood?”
“Four things.” He held