Lightbringers and Rainmakers - Felix Gilman [3]
The windows were shuttered and it was dark, though it was only the middle of the afternoon outside, and sunny. There was no one there but the owner and a fat pale woman who was leaning against the bar and stared with a puzzled and you might say wounded expression at Nothing, like she was waiting for her date to come back from an absence of a length she could not explain or ever forgive.
Anyway there was a bell by the door, and I rang it.
Very loudly I said, “Mr. Carver,” and “Fetch my bags,” and I pressed a dollar bill into Carver’s hand, in such a way that the owner, who was up on his knees now in what was a kind of prayer-like attitude and looking at me with interest, could see what I was doing. Carver went off into the street and I came inside. You know I have always loved Light, but for once I was glad of the shadows because after four days on the road from Wherever I knew I looked like a bum, or a refugee.
The owner looked at me, at the woman, who kept staring at Nothing, and back at me.
“What d’ya want?”
“Well, it said Hotel outside. Sorry if I’m the first to break it to you. My name’s Harry Ransom. I need a room. Myself and my assistant.”
“That’s two rooms.”
“One. I like him close by, in case I have a flash of genius and someone has to take notes. I’m a scientist, you see.”
I smiled at the owner, and then at the woman, who kept staring, and then at the owner again.
I said, “Can I ask your name?”
“Adams.”
“Well, good afternoon, Mr. Adams. I’m new in town.”
“You here for the celebrations?”
“I never miss ’em. Sure. What celebrations, exactly?”
Adams got to his feet, and tossed the washcloth into a bucket. He is short, also bald, with hair scraped thin across his scalp but bushy sideburns below.
“Founding Day, of course.”
“Right.” I nodded and smiled. I have never heard of it. Have you, Jess? I don’t recall Founding Day being observed back in good old East Condon. You know I am terribly ignorant of History, always with my eyes on the Light Of The Future &c, but I think I would have heard of it. By the way I shall forget to ask later so I’ll ask now if your kids are doing okay.
“We got rooms,” Adams said. “No one travels much these days. A dollar a night. That’s two dollars for you both—you and your hairy friend, wherever he’s gone to.”
“Fetching my bags.”
“Right.” Adams went to stand behind the bar. “You said. Eight dollars and you can stay for the week.”
“Is that for both of us?”
The town is called Disorder. Not a good omen, you might think, but not necessarily a bad one, either. In my extensive experience there are two basic ways of naming towns out in this part of the western Rim. One is to name them after some sort of local Hill Folk word, which usually turns out to be the word for how dare you or go away or stop touching that. Like Kloan, for instance, or Kumko. The other way is when you get to the Edge where you daren’t go farther you just stop and pick a word at random out of whatever dog-eared sacred text you happened to have with you on the journey, like Sam Smiles’ Self-Help Commonplace Book or The Book of the White City or whatever your tastes run to, and that’s how you get Increase and Prosperity and Dominion, but also how you get Mischief and Abomination, and once I passed through a Shellfish, and my theory as a Scientist and a Man of the World is that Disorder is the same story: it means nothing. You may not have found this little lecture interesting, Jess, but it beats an account of the haggling which followed, all throughout which Adams wiped the bar pretending like he wasn’t interested and didn’t need my business, and I pretended not to be starving, and the fat woman kept staring, until I began to wonder, being starving and light-headed, if she was stuffed.
We got it down to six dollars for the week, which I still didn’t have. I said, “Forget the money. Let me make you a better offer.”
“No,” Adams said.
“I said I was a Scientist. I said that, I’m pretty