Lightbringers and Rainmakers - Felix Gilman [6]
I have entered into a new business arrangement. You can picture it as triangular. It involves me, and the whole town of Disorder, and a Mr. Flood, who is a Scientist like myself, a Rain-Maker. I stand to make between 150 and 300 dollars, depending on how things go, and also to do some good for some people who’ve had a bad time lately, much worse than me. It is not exactly my usual arrangement, but out here you have to take things as they come.
Yours,
Harry.
Hi Jess. There is a fellow here who is exactly like some of those boys you used to run with back in East Condon when you were wild and I was a skinny kid with my nose always in a book of Mathematics. He is also exactly like what some people take me for, by which I mean I think but cannot prove that he is a crook. His name is Mr. Flood, but that can’t be his real name. I guess there are people who come by that name honestly, but not this guy. He is a professional Rain-Maker, you see, the same way I do Light, and “Flood” is just too pat. He and I are in business together, in a way. Let me explain.
I think I said in last night’s letter that Disorder is in the grips of Drought, worst of all the horrors of the western Rim. The irony, if that’s the right word, is that three days’ walk to the north in Wherever it was raining just fine, in fact more than I liked, enough to seep under canvas and threaten the integrity of the Apparatus. Probably three days’ walk south of Disorder there is rain too. The weather out on the Rim is not reliable, as you know. Out here the weather, like just about everything else in the world of nature or Man or Folk, is always up for renegotiation without warning.
So farming is what Disorder does, or did, before the Drought. There are maybe three hundred souls here. The World’s Edge Hotel is at its western end like a pioneer striding into the wilderness, and behind it straggles Main Street, which frankly is kind of halfhearted as these things go. There are a couple of general stores and a doctor of sorts and three lawyers, which seems excessive but what do I know. There is a huge sprawl of farms with wire fences and yellow dead-looking vegetation and bony animals and a few unfree Folk working in chains, which you know is a thing I have never liked to see. Otherwise it is not so ugly. It is in a dry waterless valley between two hills. The northwestern one has a strange kind of point like a crumpled witch’s hat when seen from most Main Street angles, and that is probably why they call it Big Witch or the Big Red Witch. The southeastern one is nameless and I guess just hill-shaped.
The better of the two general stores is Jo’s. The woman who runs it is pretty and blonde in the way of a flower that is a little faded but only needs water to come alive. I walked into her store this morning because when you are trying to make a deal with a town it is always good to get the store-owners on your side first, and because often the women are more open than the men are to hearing about the wonders of the Process and about Light and the New Century &c, and because I needed to buy needle and thread for the white suit and a razor for shaving, and she threw in ink for free, the ink you’re reading now. It was Jo who told me all about Disorder and about the Founding Day celebrations and about Mr. Flood, who she doesn’t like so much and I think neither do I, but she likes me and I am a little bit what you might call smitten with her. Now we (Jo & me) are sitting out side by side on the warm rocks and watching the sun set over the town and the valley and the Founding Day stage and Flood’s Pole and she is smiling at me. You have no idea how much work I invested in getting her to smile, but once she gets that first smile going the rest come easily and without cease. I told her I am writing to my business partners back east, which