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dog, beetle, and human— and the inventors of cures for cancer using flowers, crystals, exercise regimes, uranium, and magnets. Magnetism was in style that year. We drank and argued with the inventors of several plausible-sounding alternatives to the Gold Standard, and of two or three new religions, and what seemed to be a kind of rural utopia called Land-Tax Distributism. They came out West, like us, looking for territories where the future was still open, where the laws were still unsettled— I mean not least what they call the laws of nature, which as everyone knows are different on the Rim.
    They drank. I did not. I abstain from drink for the most part— it clouds the mind. Coffee is my only vice, not counting curiosity and pride.
    We lunched on bread and cheese at a rugged brown-canvas camp overlooking a sweep of golden valley, talking with a man by the name of Thomas, who’d come out West to hawk the prototype of a hand-cranked contraption that was so complex in appearance you might have guessed it could read the future or puzzle out the stock market or at the very least calculate the primes, but in fact it only peeled apples, and not very well, as you could tell from the bandages on his fingers. The thing was beautiful to him regardless, and I wished him good luck. We met a man in Hillsdale who said he was secret business-partners with a great wizard of the First Folk, and that together they could bottle the magic of those people, including the seven-mile step and the drumming up of storms and the trick of immortality. Mr. Carver spat on the sawdust floor and said “Bullshit. Fucking bullshit.” I had to agree.

    So we came to Melville City and we left Melville City in a hurry. We went south to Carlton, where we were nearly press-ganged into the militia. Another story. We fled Carlton for Toro, and Toro for the mining camps at Secchi, and from there south and south-west. Mania had descended all over the western edge of the world. Armies massed on every horizon. The Engines flashed each other paranoid signals from horizon to horizon, and the Guns brooded and schemed in their Lodge. It seemed like every second person sitting at any bar you might care to walk into was a spy for someone or other. Agents of the Gun camped in the woods and sometimes strolled boldly into town, armed openly, larger than life, recognizable from the picture-books and not caring who saw them. It took some fancy footwork just to stay neutral. In the banks and futures-markets in the cities back East there was intense giddy speculation over what would survive when it was done. If you were a bright young fellow but not so bright as to have got to blazes out of that whole unlucky part of the world after the Kloan massacre if not sooner then you could make good money sharing your observations by occasional post with the financial speculators in Jasper City or Cray or even Harrow Cross. I was able to pay off certain debts and settle certain lawsuits surrounding the Process, and to purchase a very fine white suit, and also to purchase a new and gleaming white and more spacious wagon for myself and the Light-Bringing Apparatus and Mr. Carver, in which we joined the stream of refugees heading south out of the ever-expanding war zone.
    There were rumors. There were always rumors. It was said that both Gun and Line had come out to that country chasing the same quarry. A deserter. A stolen weapon. Secret intelligence. An old man. A beautiful woman. A general. Some secret of the Folk. The war was nearing its end, people said. This battle was for the prize. Somewhere out there was a weapon that might end the war. Well, I was twenty years old in that year and for as long as I’d been alive people had been saying the Great War was coming to an end, that deliverance was knocking on the door. In my view the armies were there for no particular reason at all. The fighting was a purpose in itself. There were scores to settle, and every week brought a fresh