Lightbringers and Rainmakers - Felix Gilman [15]
Another one of the Vessels opened fire. It missed. Bullets hit the rocks about thirty feet from us. I do not think your Vessels are very accurate: it must come of the wind and the altitude and the difficult angle, and probably the pilot is trying to keep the thing even-keeled and up in the air with one hand while he directs the motor-gun with the other. Anyway that is an interesting engineering problem which I hope you never solve.
We got to where we were sheltered by an overhang of carved red rock, so your Vessels could not shoot us or probably even see us.
“Strip,” Flood said.
I took off my white shirt and white trousers, and he put them on. I put on his clothes. Even the shoes. He went through my pack and took my water and matches but did not think the ink or writing paper worth stealing, it seems.
“All that nonsense about clouds and light and electricity and the future. You think you’re smart, Ransom? You don’t understand anything.”
I do not think he knows exactly what he is looking for, either. And I bet whoever finds this note will not know. I expect it makes sense in someone’s Grand Strategy for this stupid war, but I do not think Flood understands, or you understand, and I know that I don’t.
He leveled his gun at me. He said, “Good-bye, Mr. Flood.”
Then there was a spear in Flood’s shoulder and blood all over the white shirt, and he screamed.
It was a long spear of hard red wood with a stone tip, which you would not guess would be very sharp but obviously it is. It had come from the rocks above us, and I did not see who had thrown it, but I recognized it as a weapon of the Folk, of course. I might have noticed more, but when Flood cried out I jumped back in surprise and my foot slid on the edge of this pit. I think maybe if I hadn’t been wearing Flood’s shoes, which do not fit me, I might have kept my balance, but as it was I did not.
So far as I know nothing is broken, though my ankle is sprained. The pack got caught on my foot and it fell down after me, which accounts for some of the bruises, but by no means all.
I have had a lot of time to study this goddamn hole in the ground, and I do not think anyone dug it. I think it is just a hole in the ground, a kind of cave, but open to the sky. It is just an accident, like everything else. But if someone had dug it, for the express purpose of keeping people in, they couldn’t have done a better job. I mean that I cannot climb out. But that is not your problem, of course, and you do not care.
I think Flood is still alive. I heard him shouting for a while. I do not know why he didn’t come back to finish the job.
I do not want to take any side in your horrible War and I would not care if he gets away from you, except that I did not like what he said about going back to Disorder, later, because one or two people there were kind to me. So if you meet a man in white who says he is me (the undersigned) you should shoot him.
Yours,
“Professor” Harry Ransom, Lightbringer, Inventor of the Ransom Process, &c &c.
V. The Peak
Dear Jo,
I am well and I hope you are well too. I like to hope that everything is better in Disorder these days. For my part I am doing well—with the money I got from the Mayor for ending the drought I was able to buy a new wagon, and a horse, and Carver and I were able to reconstruct the prototype of my Apparatus better than ever. It is still not perfect, but it comes as close to perfection as anything in this fallen world. Also I had a tailor in the last-town-but-one run up a new white suit; I did not feel altogether myself without the white suit.
About that money—my conscience has been nagging at me, Jo.
I told you that I spoke to the Hill Folk out on Big Witch and they agreed to let Flood’s machine do what it does. That was not exactly a lie, but it was not exactly true either. This is what happened.
So Flood and me had kind of a falling-out up there. You will not be surprised, I know. Like you said, he was an asshole and he was a crook. You do not need to know exactly