Devices and Desires (35 page)

“Excuse me?”

Ziani smiled. “For smelting direct from ore,” he said. “Back home we can get sufficient heat to melt iron into a pourable
liquid, but it’ll be a while before I’m ready to do that here. Until then, we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned labor-intensive
way. The best we’ll be able to do is get the iron out of the ore and into a soft, malleable lump — that’s called puddling.
Then it’s got to be bashed on with big hammers to draw it out into the sections we want: sheet, plate, square bar, round bar
and so on. Quite high on the list of priorities is a big trip-hammer, so we won’t actually have to do the bashing by hand,
but we can’t do that until we’ve got the water to drive it. Three months, maybe, assuming everything runs to schedule.”

“Water?” the woman said.

“That’s right. Like a water-mill for grinding flour. The first big mechanical project will need to be a pump — wind-driven,
God help us — to get water up in a tower to a sufficient height. Once we’ve done that, life will be a lot easier.”

She stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Right,” she said. “Go on.”

“Over here,” Ziani continued, “I want the main machine shop — it makes sense to have the shop right next to the foundry and
the smelting area, it saves on time and labor hauling big, heavy chunks of material about the place. So basically we’ll have
a big open square area, for fabrication and assembly; the machine shop on the north side, foundry and smelter on the south
side, main forge on the east, I thought, because we don’t need the light there so much…”

He knew it was all passing her by, soaring over her head like the white-fronted geese in spring. He was a little surprised
by that; a trader ought to be able to understand technical matters, well enough at least to grasp the implications: that this
was an enterprise on an unprecedented scale, never seen outside the Republic; an astounding opportunity, therefore, for anybody
with an instinct for business. She didn’t seem to have picked up on that. She was bored. She looked as if she was being introduced
to his large, tiresome family, none of whom she’d ever meet again, not if she could help it. Annoying, he thought; can she
really be the person in charge, or had they just sent down a junior?

But he didn’t mind giving her the tour of his hidden realm (wasn’t there a fairy tale about a magical land that only the pure
in heart could see?); saying it out loud helped him make it ever more solid in his own mind, gave him another chance to pick
up any flaws or omissions that had slipped past him. He was, as usual, talking to himself for the benefit of an eavesdropper.

“And that,” he concluded, “is all there is to it, more or less. So, what do you think?”

She was silent, frowning. Then she said, “Fine. Just one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You haven’t actually said what you’re planning on making here.”

“But —” Stupid woman, hadn’t she been listening? No, he realized, she hadn’t. He’d assumed she’d be able to work that out
for herself. Apparently not. “Pretty much anything, really,” he said. “If it’s made of metal, of course. Anything from a siege
catapult to an earring back.”

“Really.” The look in her eyes said,
You still haven’t answered my question.

“Furthermore,” Ziani went on, “and this is the real point of it, we can make machines that’ll make anything at all: pottery,
cloth, furniture, glass, you name it. What’s more, it’ll be made to Mezentine standards, faster and cheaper than anywhere
else in the world, and every single item will be exactly the same as all the others. Can you begin to understand what that’ll
mean?”

He had an idea that she was struggling to keep her temper. “That’s fine,” she said. “I’m impressed, truly I am. But you haven’t
told me what you’re planning to
make.
I need something I can load in the back of a cart and sell. All you’ve shown me is a derelict yard with thistles growing
in it.”

Ziani took a deep breath. “You don’t quite understand,” he said. “Here’s the idea. You tell me what you want; what you think
you can sell a thousand of, at a good profit. Anything you like. Then you go away and come back a bit later, and there it’ll
be. Anything you like.”

The look she was giving him now was quite different. She’d stopped thinking he was boring. Now she thought he was mad. If
only, he thought, I had something I could actually show her, some little piece of Mezentine magic like a lathe or a drill,
so she could see for herself. But it didn’t work like that.

She was saying something; he pulled himself together and paid attention.

“When you were back in Mezentia,” she said. “That place where you used to work. What did you make there?”

Ziani grinned. “Weapons,” he said.

She looked at him. The final straw, obviously. “Like those machines they killed our army with?”

He nodded. “The scorpion,” he said. “Lightweight, mobile field artillery. We built twelve hundred units while I was at the
ordnance factory. They used to leave the production line at the rate of a dozen a day.” He couldn’t read the expression on
her face, which was unusual. “Quite a straightforward item, in engineering terms,” he went on, filling time. “Tempering the
spring was the only tricky bit, and we figured out a quick, easy way of doing that. Machining the winding mechanism —”

“Why don’t you make them?” she asked, and he thought she was probably thinking aloud. “Orsea’d buy them from you, no doubt
about that.”

Ziani shrugged. “If he could afford them,” he said. “It’s a question of setting up. It’d take a long time before the first
one was finished, and in the meantime there’d be workers and material to pay for. I was thinking of something nice and simple
to begin with. Spoons, maybe, or dungforks. We’d have to start off doing a lot of the operations by hand, till we’d made enough
money to pay for building the more advanced machines.”

She shook her head. “Orsea doesn’t want spoons,” she said. “And nobody else in this country’s got any money — not the sort
of money you’re thinking of. These are poor people, by your standards.”

“I know,” Ziani said. “That’s —” He stopped. She wasn’t invited into that part of the plan; it wasn’t in a fit state to receive
visitors yet. “What would you suggest?” he said.

“Make weapons,” she told him, without hesitation. “Orsea would buy them, he’d give you the money, if you could show him a
finished — what’s the word?”

“Prototype.”

“That’s it. If you had one he could see. He’d feel he had to buy them, to make up for losing the war and putting us all in
danger.” She hesitated, then went on. “We’d put up the money to make the first one, in return for a share in the profits.”

“You’re forgetting,” Ziani said. “I offered to work for him. He turned me down.”

She shook her head. “I know all about that,” she said. “You just went at it from the wrong angle; head on, bull-at-a-gate.
You’ve got to be more like twiddling a bit of string under a cat’s nose. You get Orsea up here and show him one of these scorpion
machines, tell him, this is what wiped out your army, how many of them do you want; he wouldn’t be able to refuse.” She frowned
thoughtfully. “Then you could give him your speech, the one you gave me: furnaces and trip-hammers and piddling mills —”

“Puddling.”

“Whatever. He wouldn’t be listening, of course. He’d be looking at the war machine. And then he’d say yes.”

Ziani nodded slowly. “And you, your Merchant Adventurers, would put up the money.”

“Yes. Within reason,” she added quickly. “For just one. You can make just one without all the machinery and everything?”

“I could,” Ziani said. “Hand forging and filing, it’d be a bit of a bodge-up. But I don’t suppose your Duke Orsea would know
what he was looking at.”

“So long as it worked,” she replied. She took a deep breath. “So,” she went on, “roughly how much are we talking about?”

She couldn’t hear it, of course, the soft click of the component dropping into place. Ziani kept the smile off his face, and
answered her question. As he’d expected, she looked rather unwell for a moment; then she said, “All right.” After that, they
talked about timescales and materials and money for a while; then she went away. She was looking tired, Ziani reckoned, as
though she was carrying a heavy weight.

He went back to the tower after she’d gone. There was something about it that appealed to him; the view, perhaps, or the confined
nature of the space, maybe just the fact that it was a comfortable temperature in the fierce midday heat. In an hour or so,
when it was cool enough for work, the builders would be arriving to start work on the footings for the foundry house. Something
tangible, even if it was only a hole in the flagstones, a pile of sand, a stack of bricks: something he could see with his
eyes rather than just his mind, to confirm that the design was starting to take shape.

Starting; there was still a long way to go. The factory, the Duke’s involvement, making scorpions, all the individual components
that were also intricate mechanisms in themselves; if only, he couldn’t help thinking, all this inventiveness and ingenuity
could be spent on something truly worthwhile, such as a modified dividing head for the vertical mills at the ordnance factory
in Mezentia; if only his talent could be used for something other than abomination.

He’d heard a story once; about the old days, the very early days of the Guilds, before the Specifications were drawn up and
the world was made fixed. Once, according to the story, there lived in the City a great engineer, who worked in the first
of the new-style factories as a toolmaker. One day there was a terrible accident with one of the machines, and he lost both
his hands. It happened that he was much afflicted by an itch in the middle of his back, something he’d lived with for years.
Without hands, he couldn’t scratch; so he summoned his two ablest assistants and with their help designed and built a machine,
operated by the feet, which would scratch his back for him. It was frighteningly complicated, and in the process of getting
it to work he thought up and perfected a number of mechanical innovations (the universal joint, according to some versions
of the story; or the ratchet and escapement). When it was finished, all the cleverest designers in the Guild came to look
at it. They were filled with admiration, and praised him for his skill and cunning. “Yes,” he replied sadly, “that’s all very
well; but I’d much rather use my hand, like I did before.”

All that invention and application, to make a machine to do a task a small child could do without thinking; there was undoubtedly
a lesson there (all stories from the old days had morals, it was practically a legal requirement) but he’d never been sure
till quite recently what it was. Now of course he knew, but that wasn’t really much comfort to him.

When the men eventually showed up — the Eremian nation had many virtues, of which punctuality wasn’t one — he went down to
show them what to do and where to do it, then escaped back to his tower, the shade and the coolness of the massive stone blocks
it was built from. He should have been down below — he had work to do, a machine to build, he ought by rights to be alive
again, not a ghost haunting himself — but there were issues to be resolved before he could apply an uncluttered mind to the
serious business of cutting and bending steel. He summoned a general parliament of his thoughts, and put the motion to be
debated.

It could be argued (he opened, for the prosecution) that he’d come a long way — away from the ordnance factory, the City,
his home. Now he was in a place that was in many respects unsatisfactory, but which he could survive in, more or less. It
might be hard to live here, but he could work, which was what really mattered. So long as he could work, he could exist. In
a tenuous sort of a way (but the only one that mattered) he could be happy. A proverb says that the beating of the heart and
the action of the lungs are a useful prevarication, keeping all options open. He’d lost everything he’d ever had, but he was
still on his feet, able to move, able to scribe a line and hold a file. The world hadn’t ended, the day they came for him
— Compliance, with their writ and their investigating officer and the armed men from the Guildhall. Now he was here, and there
wasn’t any real need (was there?) to build and set in motion the enormous machine that so far existed only in his mind. He
was here; he could stay here, settle down, start a business. A lot of people did that, lesser men than himself. So could he.

But (replied the defense) he could only do this if he was still, at heart, the man he’d been the day before they came for
him. If leaving there and coming here had changed him,
damaged
him (that was what he was getting at, surely), then the absolute priority must be to put the damage right; and only the machine
could do that.

Query (the prosecution rejoined) the motivation behind the machine. Consider the man in the story; did he build his machine
just to scratch his back, or because he was an engineer, because he
could?
Consider himself; was the purpose of the machine as simple, small and pure as he wanted this court to believe, or was it
something darker and vaguer? An inevitable result of engaging the machine would be the end of the world; he’d admitted and
regretted it as an unavoidable piece of collateral damage, but what if it was really his principal motive? What if he was
building the machine out of a desire to punish them, or (punishment sublimated) to destroy an evil? What if the real reason
for the machine was just revenge?

What nonsense (the defense replied). He could only desire revenge against the Republic if he hated it, and he didn’t; nor
did he want to change it, except in one very small way. He had no quarrel with the Guilds, or Specification, or anything big
and important; the constitution, operating procedures and internal structures were as near perfect as they could be, given
that the Republic was built from fallible human flesh rather than reliable materials like stone and steel. One small adjustment
was all he was after; a little thing, a trifle, something a fourth-level clerk in Central Office could grant with a pen-stroke.
It was only because he was out here, outside, unable to follow the ordained procedure, that he had need to resort to the machine.
Since his exclusion wasn’t his fault, the damage the machine would do wouldn’t be his fault either. It was a shame that it
had to be done this way, but that one little adjustment wasn’t negotiable. He had to have it; and if it meant the end of the
world, that wasn’t his problem.