Free The Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman

outlying fields or out houses. Even beyond, if you can imagine that— I could throw a lever here and set a light ablaze in Jasper City. You’ll have to trust me on that.”
    Mr. Carver sat back and lit a cigarette, which was frowned upon in Smiler circles but nobody said a word.
    I heard somebody whisper the word electricity and I rounded on them as if they had blasphemed.
    “No,” I said. “Not electricity— names are important, sir. I’ll forgive your error, though, because it’s a common one. This is something new. Something new in the world. It works on the principle of the synthesis of equal and opposite forces, the energy of tension and contradiction, you are watching light struggle with dark and the possible struggle with the impossible, and it doesn’t have any name yet except the Ransom Process, thank you very much. And if there’s a man or woman in the room who doesn’t think it’s pretty as a sunrise you can leave now and I’d give you your money back if I’d asked you for any.”
    The light grew in intensity and shifted through the spectrum, going fire-colored, sea-colored, candy-colored. At the time I could not stop it from doing that. It was a side-effect of instabilities and uncertainties in the Process, of imbalances among the energies it contained. Fortunately it was pretty and so I used to pretend it was a bit of deliberate stagecraft. I glanced at Miss Harper, by the window, and was happy to see that she looked delighted. Old Man Harper mostly looked wary.
    “You’ll see,” I said, “that Mr. Carver is no longer pedaling. And I want any man here, a volunteer, how about you or maybe you, Reverend, to come and see that there is no oil-powered engine here and nothing burning coal and nor is it mule-powered—trust me, Mr. Carver is not hiding a mule under his trousers.” Carver grinned toothily and bowed to the audience. “And in fact the Apparatus is now powering itself.”
    Most times at that stage in the show I would go on for longer about how the Ransom Process worked and what was remarkable about it, which was that once the first spark was roused it worked in perpetuity, feeding only on itself, like a rumor or a religion or a beautiful notion released into the world. I would observe truthfully that it created heat as well as light, and that once you had heat there was nothing you could not do with it. I would not explain precisely how it worked because, first, I wanted nobody to steal the idea. One day I planned to give it away to everyone but not until I had exacted the one price I demanded for it, which was that my name be known. Second, I did not entirely understand how it worked, and third, it did not entirely work. It depended on time and place but as a general matter it rarely lasted more than an hour without Mr. Carver returning to the pedals. I have improved it greatly since and I will improve it more when we get to Ransom City.
    And usually I would talk about the money that a canny investor might make on it. But instead that evening I had one of my occasional unsound ideas.
    I said, “You were all talking about the War and I said I had no answers. Well, maybe I do. Maybe I do. Maybe we all have a lot more answers in us than we think, once we dig ’em out from under all the questions. You’ve started me thinking along new lines and I thank you for that.”
    Mr. Carver must have inhaled wrong on his cigarette because he started coughing.
    “Maybe the cause of the War is that people think that nothing is free and everything good is at the expense of some other sucker’s suffering, and that if one place gets rich another must be poor. These things are what the professors in Jasper City would call a fallacy, or so I believe. That is what I believe. I can prove that to you. In a world with greater abundance the Line would have no power and there would be nothing for the men of the Gun to steal. And maybe—”
    I had the crowd’s attention and they were evenly balanced between