Strange Trades (51 page)

And the luxcloth—that unbelievably splendid and gorgeously unique product of this humble uncharted world drifting forgotten and unknown and nameless amid the welter of Factor-visited suns—

The luxcloth was everything.

The luxcloth was his life.

Preparing to rise and shake the boy awake and at the same time administer a severe upbraiding, the man paused. Something about the boy struck him as familiar. Naturally there was a surface identicalness in the incident to many others. He had overseen the initial development of more than half a hundred such boys in his career as Master Luminary, and it was only natural that many of them would more than once be caught napping. But there was something about this lad that tugged more acutely at the strings of his memory. Something about his face.…

Of course.

The boy resembled Charley.

The man’s thoughts fled back down a tunnel whose ribbed walls were years.

Charley had entered the Mill in the summer. That meant that he had gone directly to the stockroom, that cavernous brick and timber hall—its high rafters plainly visible, unlike the other dusky chambers of the Mill—where the luxcloth was stored, a cathedral of radiance so intense that the stockboys must wear smoked-glass goggles as they worked.

The Master Luminary had not particularly noticed the new boy then, having the whole production of his mill to keep in mind. In the winter, a quarter of the boys had been shifted immediately to stovetender duties. (The other three quarters would be rotated out of the stockroom in turn, in order to save their eyesight, as the long cold months went on.) Charley had been one of the first transfers, and he had ended up in the man’s office, sitting right where the current boy now sat dozing. The man’s hair had been less gray then, and the little stool had had fewer initials carved into it. But aside from that, the situation had been identical.

Something about Charley had attracted the man’s close attention. A ceaseless curiosity and darting focus that played about the boy’s placidly intelligent features seemed to resonate with something inside the man himself. He made a mental note—along with all the other memoranda regarding the seemingly endless details of his mill—to keep an eye on this boy for future use.

And when Charley’s stint as stovetender was supposed to end, along with the old year, the man retained him by fiat in the office, denying three other faceless boys their turns, and perhaps causing some slight incremental damage to their vision as they continued to labor in the stockroom the whole winter.

This small harm he tried to forget, striving to convince himself that the good inherent in his actions outweighed the bad. His life was a patchwork quilt of such ethical trade-offs and judgements. And the quilt frequently scratched his conscience.

Busy years attached themselves like ambulatory Pagan Sea coral to the edifice of the man’s life. Always, among his overt duties, he took a covert interest in the progress of young Cairncross. After Charley was promoted from stovetender, the man watched him move from the gillboxes to the spinning frames, from the winders to the converters, always exhibiting a deft proficiency and keen understanding of each step in the intricate process of fabricating luxcloth. The man noted with quiet pleasure the quality of the work that the young man—for by now he was no longer a boy—turned out. After a while, the man felt he knew Charley’s secret soul and essence, how it was bound up into the luxcloth’s very weave, as was his own.

The only thing the man could never figure out was how such a progeny could spring from the loins of a soured old agitator like the elder Cairncross. That man was a bad egg. And to have also engendered another son such as Alan, so different from both Charley and the old man— The mechanics of destiny were hidden from mortal sight. Perhaps the Factor could explain it.

But one might as well hope for the secret of the Factor’s immortality.

The cranky misanthropy of the elder Cairncross, however, was not what the seated man wanted to ponder, and he put it off as ultimately inexplicable. He wanted to consider Charley some more, to recall more of their twenty years of association. Such daydreaming was certainly allowable from time to time, as long as one did not overindulge.

Finally, after nearly a decade of observation, the day came when the Master Luminary approached Charley on an errand he, the Master, had never before performed. Charley was a foreman by this time, supervising a score of workers, among whom was his own father, who had never gone further than machinetender, a post whose duties were changing gears and oiling bearings.

Out on the twilit floor, where the only illumination came from the dancing threads running through the machines like liquid moonlight and from the refulgent yarn on cones and bobbins piled high in hand trucks, and where the noise of the leather belts and the pulleys and the gears—all powered off the Swolebourne—was enough to shatter concentration, the Master found Charley supervising the changing of the worn rollers on an idled machine.

“Cairncross,” the man said. “Leave this now and come with me.”

“Yes, Master Otterness,” Charley replied.

They walked across the width of the mill and up a flight of stairs to the third and topmost floor, all the while silent. In the anteroom to Otterness’s own office, the Master Luminary indicated with a wave a tall spidery clerk’s workbench and accompanying high rail-backed chair.

“You will sit here,” said Otterness. “Begin studying the sample cards that chart the standard luminances. Start with the Whale- ford set. They’re the classic gauges from which all others derive. I doubt if you will get much beyond those today.”

“Yes, sir.”

Otterness turned to enter his own office, heard Charley cough, and swivelled back.

Charley’s face wore a look of hurt disappointment. “Sir, may I ask why I’ve been relieved of my former duties? I hope I have not disappointed you with inferior production.”

“To the contrary. Your work has been exemplary. The best I’ve ever seen. That is why I am now nominating you as Apprentice Luminary for this mill. I believe you have the talent for such a post, and understand the grave responsibilities involved. On the Tightness of our luminance choices and the resulting attractiveness of the cloth, the whole material well-being of the Blue Devil village rests. I trust you will repay my faith in you, and let neither me nor the mill nor the village down.”

Charley bowed his head for a moment. When he lifted it, light from the oil lamp glinted in his tears. “I will, sir. I will. I mean, I won’t. Let you down, that is.”

Otterness suppressed a smile. “Very well.”

Now he came back to himself in his office. The stoveboy still slept. Otterness considered the scullion’s dreaming features. He knew he would never have occasion to choose another apprentice. He would die in his job, or be dismissed by a committee of his peers from the other mills if his performance became senilely awful, whereupon in both instances Charley would become Master, with the consequent right to select his own apprentice. But the fact that Otterness was not always on the outlook for talent anymore did not mean that he could risk alienating the skilled. Who was to say what role this snoozing boy would possibly play in the future? The mill—and the Mill—needed all the competent hands it could get. His unnecessarily brusque reprimand here could have unforeseen consequences years down the line. No, better to handle the lapse—after all, it was only the boy’s first—in a subtler manner.

Otterness deliberately pushed back his chair with a loud scraping noise, his face averted from the stoveboy. He had the satisfaction of hearing the regular breathing suddenly stop in a panicked reaction, then the noise of the boy’s booted feet as he stood up and the clunk of the stove door opening and the chunky rattle as he began scooping coal into the stove.

Getting to his own feet, Otterness turned to the boy—who was drowsily rubbing his eyes with one hand while dishing out coal with the other—and said (pausing a moment while he recalled the boy’s name), “Pickering, have that stove good and hot by the time I get back, if you please.”

Now furiously tossing coal with a two-handed motion, little Pickering said, “Yes, sir! Of course, sir! Before you return, sir!”

Otterness stepped outside his office. The anteroom was empty. He knew Charley was out somewhere on the mill floor, among the turbulent, clattering, endlessly breaking-down machines, watching and directing the myriad workers who strove to reify the newest type of shining cloth which he and Charley envisioned and sometimes, it seemed, actually dreamed into possibility, after much contemplation and discussion of possible blend- ings. Having something vital he must discuss with Charley—the original object of the intense pondering that had allowed him to let Pickering fall into a doze and his own hands to escape—Otterness set out to find his assistant.

Leaving the relatively quiet anteroom—whose thick panelled walls, bearing sconced oil lamps, served to mute the continuous roar of the machinery—was like plunging into a surf of shadow and sound and odor. Pausing while his eyes adjusted to the silvery gloom, Otterness drank in the glorious chaos from which his beloved luxcloth emerged.

The Mill had no lighting except in its offices. All its other operations were conducted in the ethereal glow of its product. The luxfibers, in their various unfinished forms such as raw combed tops or spun threads, had to be protected from sunlight or artificial radiance, and so all activities in the Mill took place in a diffuse illumination that amounted to the light one might encounter when both moons were full. This illumination had to suffice. There was no alternative without ruining the product. The reason lay in the very nature of the lux.

Lux was a common plant, native and unique to this world, easy to cultivate and harvest. In the daytime it was an inconspicuous crop: tall waving fronds of a silvery green with tough fibers visible just inside its translucent stalks. But at night—at night it could be seen to glow. With the sun’s competition gone, the lux visibly re- radiated stored sunlight. At least this was the most commonly accepted theory. No one —save perhaps the Factor, and he was unapproachable on such matters—could quite agree on the reason for the lux’s remarkable properties. A rival to the sunlight theory was that the lux absorbed certain glowing minerals from the soil, which, becoming part and parcel of its very being, allowed it to continue shining even after being chopped down and processed in a dozen different ways, shattered and pulled and twisted and recombined.

Whatever the true explanation, one fact was certain: continued exposure to any light above a certain threshold after the lux was harvested would drastically affect its desirable qualities in an unpredictable fashion. Thus the lux led a most secretive afterdeath existence, like some noble god fated to an underworld imprisonment. Hurriedly reaped and crammed into cunningly crafted barrels in the fields under starlight, it was loaded onto wagons which were then covered by canvas tarpaulins as further insurance. These wagons were kept indoors by day and traveled only at night. Still a faint luminance came from them, revealing that all the best precautions could not insure a light-tight seal.

Upon arrival at the Mill, the lux plunged into the massive building’s lightless depths, never to emerge until it had undergone a final wet chemical finishing that fixed the radiance once and for all. The luxcloth, then, could be exposed to daylight without ruining its miraculous qualities.

The fact that there were different kinds of lux was the simple pivot that made Otterness and his peers the most important men in the Mill, and which allowed competition between mills to exist. Had there been only one kind of lux, all would have been simple. Only a single variety of cloth could have been produced, and the Factor would have bought equally from all sixteen mills. But every region where lux was produced experienced different conditions: soil, sunlight, clouds, precipitation, all contributing toward the individual qualities of a region’s lux. Some shone with an opal whiteness. Another kind might exhibit a diamond purity. A third was nearly blue, a fourth celery green, a fifth amethyst, another the faintest of yellows.

Within hundreds of miles of the Mill, there were as many different types of lux produced. From all quarters they funneled into the unduplicated manufactory that was the Mill. The dishwater-colored harvest from Teaford; the ale-colored harvest from Claypool; the silver harvest from Goldenfish; the lilac harvest from Albion Cay; the ginger harvest from Clinkscales; the pewter harvest from Yellow Hedges; the pinkish harvest from Fireflats; the champagne harvest from Shining Rock—each with its gradations of luminance also. The number of blends were astronomical.

There were well over a hundred known luminances. Whale- ford, Emberstone, Sleet, Silent Sea Wine … The catalogue went on and on. A Master Luminary had to be able to instantly recognize each kind without error, so as to spot inadvertent mixes and stop them before they got too far into production. Moreover, the Master Luminary had to know all the standard blendings, and also those poor choices which resulted in muddy or eye-shattering fabric. On top of all this, the Master Luminary had to be a creative experimenter, developing his hunches about what new blends would turn out to be marketable, thus securing one’s mill an inordinate share of the Factor’s patronage. (And even after four centuries of trial and error, all the blends were not known.)

Additionally, the Masters engaged in bidding wars for each region’s crops. They had to be skillful traders as well as perceptive visionaries.