Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  “I’m not sure. Do you want me to?”

  He smiled again. “No,” he said. “But it’s not up to me, and if you’re looking for someone to blame —”

  “Already got someone, thanks,” Orsea said. “Now, there was no need for you to tell me that, and you don’t strike me as the sort who blurts things out without thinking.”

  The man nodded. “Scorpions aren’t the only thing we make at the ordnance factory,” he said. “And besides, from what little I know about the outside world, I get the impression that you’re a long way behind us as far as making things is concerned.”

  “To put it mildly,” Orsea said. “As you very well know.”

  The man’s dirty, battered face was closed, and his eyes were very bright. “I could teach you,” he said.

  “Teach us what?”

  “Everything.” His whole body was perfectly still, apart from the slight movements caused by his quick, shallow breathing. “Everything I know; and that’s a lot. Basic metallurgy; foundry and forge work; machining and toolmaking; mass production, interchangeable components, gauges and tolerances. It’d take a long time, you’d be starting from scratch and I’d have to train a lot of people. I don’t know how you’re fixed for raw materials, iron ore and charcoal and coal. We’d probably have to start off by damming a river, to build a race for a decent-sized waterwheel. You’d be lucky to see so much as a nail or a length of wire for at least five years.” He shrugged. “And it’d mean a lot of changes, and maybe you’re perfectly happy as you are. After all,” he added, “I’m hardly the best advertisement for an industrial society.”

  Orsea frowned. “Leave the bad side to me. You carry on telling me about the advantages.”

  “You don’t need me to do that,” the man replied. “You know as well as I do. First, you wouldn’t depend on us for pretty well every damned thing you use. Second, you could trade. Undercut the Mezentines and take over their markets. That’s why our government won’t let people like me leave the City. You could transform your whole society. You could be like us.”

  “Really. And why would we want to?”

  He raised one dust-caked eyebrow. “As I understand it, you just lost thousands of lives trying to wipe us out, and you never even got close enough to see the color of our eyes. You must’ve had some reason for wanting to annihilate us. I don’t know what it is, but maybe that’s the reason why you should turn into us instead.”

  Orsea tried to think. There was a great deal to think about, great issues of security, prosperity and progress that had to be addressed before taking such a radical decision. Orsea knew what they were, but when he tried to apply his mind to them it was like trying to cut glass with a file. Really he wanted someone to decide for him; but that was a luxury he couldn’t afford. He knew it was the wrong approach, but he couldn’t help thinking about the battle, the field bristling with the steel pins. It’d be a greater victory than winning the battle; and it’d be the only way of making sure something like that never happened again. But if Miel was here, what would he say? Orsea knew that without having to ask. Of course the Ducas were an old family, you’d expect one of them to have an intuition for this kind of problem, so much more effective than mere intelligence. Miel would know, without having to think, and no amount of convincing arguments would make him change his mind. But Miel (who always got the girls) hadn’t married the old Duke’s daughter, and so it wasn’t up to him. The dreadful thing was, Orsea knew, that nobody could make this choice for him. It was more important that he chose than that he made the right decision.

  “The men you killed,” he said. “Tell me about that.”

  The man hadn’t been expecting that. “How do you mean?” he said. “Do you want to know how I did it?”

  “That’s not important,” Orsea said. “And you did it because you had to escape, or they’d have executed you for whatever it is you did that’s too complicated for me to understand. No, what I’m asking is, did you have to kill them or else they’d have killed you on the spot or dragged you off to the scaffold? Or did you have the option of just tying them up or something but you killed them anyway?”

  The man seemed to be thinking it over carefully. “The two guards had caught me trying to get out of the Guildhall grounds,” he said. “They took me to the stables to kill me. It was two to one, and I was lucky to get away with it. And I was clever,” he added, “it wasn’t just luck. But it was them or me. The other man, the tribunal secretary — he was the judge, really — I don’t know if I killed him or not. I hit him very hard with a lampstand, to get past him so I could jump out of the window. I hit him as hard as I could; but it was so I could escape, not to punish him or get my own back on him for wrecking my life.” He paused. “If he was here now, and you said to me, Go ahead, if you want to bash his head in I won’t stop you, I’m not sure what I’d do. I mean, he did destroy my life, but killing him wouldn’t change anything; and as far as he was concerned, he was doing the right thing.” He looked at Orsea. “Does that answer your question?”

  “I think so. At any rate, it was what I thought I needed to know; assuming I believe you’re telling the truth.”

  The man shrugged. “That’s up to you.”

  “It’s all up to me,” Orsea replied. “I wish it wasn’t, but it is. There’s another thing, too. If I was in your shoes, I don’t know how I’d feel about what you’re proposing to do. Really, it’s betraying your country.”

  The man nodded, as though showing he understood the point Orsea was making. “Why would I do that,” he said, “except out of spite, because of what they did to me? Which means, if I’m capable of spite, maybe I killed the guards and the judge for spite too.”

  “That thought crossed my mind,” Orsea said.

  “Naturally.” The man was quiet for a while. “I can’t be sure,” he said, “but I don’t think that’s the real reason. I think maybe my reason is that if they can order me to be killed when I really didn’t do anything wrong, then perhaps the whole system needs to be got rid of, to stop them doing it again. And also,” he added, with a slight grin, “there’s the fact that I’ve got a living to make. I need a job, I’m an engineer. Not many openings for someone in my line outside the City, unless I make one for myself. And we hadn’t discussed it, but I wasn’t really thinking of doing all that work for free.”

  Orsea laughed. “There’s always that,” he said. “And I suppose, if you betray your people for money, that’s better than doing it for revenge. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever met an engineer before. Are they all like you?”

  “Yes,” the man said. “It’s a state of mind more than anything. You can’t help thinking in mechanisms; always in three dimensions, and always five stages ahead. It takes a little while to learn.”

  Orsea nodded. “And what about you? Are you married? Children?”

  “One daughter,” the man replied. “I won’t see either of them again, I don’t suppose.”

  “And will anything bad happen to them, if your people find out you’ve betrayed them?”

  “It’ll happen anyway, because of what I’m supposed to have done.” The man was looking away, and his voice was perfectly flat. “If I was going to take revenge for anything, it’d be that.”

  “At least you’re honest,” Orsea said. “Or you come across as honest.” He closed his eyes, rubbed them with his thumb and middle finger. “Tell you what,” he said. “You come back home with me, stay with me as my guest till I’ve made my decision. I’m sure we can find something useful for you to do, if you decide you want to stay with us, of course.”

  “Naturally.” The man’s face slumped into a long, narrow grin. “You do realize,” he said, “I haven’t got the faintest idea where your country is, or what it’s called, or what you do there, or anything. In the City we have this vague concept of the world as being like a fried egg, with us as the yolk and everywhere else slopped out round the edges.”

  “Interesting,” Orsea said. “Well, my country
is called Eremia Montis, and it’s basically a big valley cradled by four enormous mountains; we raise sheep and goats and dairy cattle, grow a bit of corn; there’s a good-sized forest in the eastern corner, and four rivers run down the mountains and join up to make one big river in the bottom of the valley. There’s something like a quarter of a million of us — less now, of course, thanks to me — and till recently we had this ghastly long-standing feud with the duchy on the other side of the northern mountain, but that was all patched up just before I became Duke. We’ve got loads of fresh air and sky, but not much of anything else. That’s about it, really. And I’m Orsea Orseolus, in case you were wondering; and you did tell me your name, but I’ve forgotten it.”

  The man nodded. “Ziani Vaatzes,” he said. “Just fancy, though; me talking to a real duke. My mother’d be so proud. Not that she’d have known what a duke is. Where I come from, dukes are people in fairy tales who fight dragons and climb pepper-vines up to heaven.”

  “Oh, I do that all the time,” Orsea said. “When I’m not losing battles. So,” he went on, “tell me a bit about all these wonderful machines you’re going to build for us. You said something just now about a waterwheel. What’s that?”

  “You’re joking, aren’t you? You don’t know what a waterwheel is?”

  Orsea shrugged. “Obviously some kind of wheel that can travel on water. Not much use to us, because the river flows down the mountain, clearly, and there’s nowhere in that direction we want to go. Still, it must be terribly clever, so please tell me all about it.”

  Ziani explained to him about waterwheels, and how the Mezentines used the power of the river Caudene to drive all their great machines. He told him about the vast artificial delta in the middle of the City; scores of deep, straight millraces governed by locks and weirs, lined with rows of giant wheels, undershot and overshot in turn, and the deafening roar of regulated, pent-up water exploited to perfection through the inspired foresight of the Guilds. He explained about the City’s seventeen relief aqueducts, which drew off floodwater in the rainy season and circulated reserve current when the pressure was low in summer; about the political dominance of the hydraulic engineers’ Guild; about the great plan for building a second delta, worked out to the last detail two centuries ago, still running precisely to schedule and still only a third complete.

  “Are you serious?” Orsea interrupted. “There’s thousands of your people working on a project that’ll never do anybody any good for another four hundred years, but they’re happy to spend their whole lives slaving away at it.”

  “What’s so strange about that?” Ziani replied. “When it’s finished, it’ll double our capacity. We’ll be able to build hundreds of new factories, providing tens of thousands of jobs for our people. That means a hundred percent increase in productivity; we’ll be able to supply goods to countries we haven’t even discovered yet. It’s an amazing concept, don’t you think?”

  Orsea looked at him. “You could say that,” he said.

  “You don’t sound all that impressed.”

  “Oh, I’m impressed all right,” Orsea said. “Stunned would be nearer the mark, actually. You’re using up people’s lives so that in four hundred years’ time you can make a whole lot of unspecified stuff to sell to people who don’t even know you exist yet. How do you know they’ll want the things you’re planning to make for them?”

  “Easy,” Ziani said. “We’ll find out what they need, or what they want, and then we’ll make it.”

  “Supposing they’ve already got everything they want?”

  “We’ll persuade them they want something else, or more of the same. We’re good at that.”

  Orsea was quiet for a while. “Strange,” he said. “Where I come from, we organize the things to suit the people, or we try to; it doesn’t usually work out as well as we’d like, but we do our best. You organize the people to suit the things. By the sound of it you do it very well, but surely it’s the wrong way round.”

  Ziani looked at him. “I guess I’d be more inclined to agree with you,” he said, “if you’d won your battle. But you didn’t.”

  There was a long silence. “You’re a brave man, Ziani Vaatzes,” Orsea said.

  “Am I?” Ziani shrugged. “Yes, I suppose I am. I wonder when that happened? Didn’t used to be. I suppose it must’ve been when they took my life away from me. Anyway, that’s waterwheels for you. Did you say something a while ago about something to eat?”

  That night, when his guest had been fed and clothed and found somewhere to sleep, Orsea expected he’d dream about the great river, squeezed into its man-made channels, turning all those thousands of wheels. Instead, he found himself back in that same old place again, the place he always seemed to end up when he was worried, or things were going on that he didn’t understand; and that same man was there waiting for him, the one who’d always been there and who seemed to know him so well. All his life, it seemed to him, the man had been ready for him, a patient listener, a willing provider of sympathy, always glad to give him advice which never seemed to make sense. Tonight the man told him, when he’d finished explaining, that he had in fact won the battle; and he took him to the top of the mountain, to the place where you could see down into the valley on one side, and out as far as the sea on the other, and he’d shown him the city burning, and great clouds of smoke being carried out to sea on the wind. He reached out and caught one of the clouds (he could do that sort of thing; he was very clever); and when he opened his fist, Orsea could see that the cloud was made up of thousands and millions of half-inch steel rods, three feet long and sharpened at one end. So you see, the man said, it turned out all right in the end, just as you designed it. I imagine you’re feeling a certain degree of satisfaction, after six hundred years of planning and hard work.

  Not really, Orsea replied. All I wanted to do was go home.

  The man smiled. Well, of course you did, he said. That’s all any of us want; but it’s the hardest thing there is, that’s why we had to work so hard and be so cunning and resourceful. And you mustn’t mind the way he talks to you. Where he comes from, they naturally assume they’re better than foreigners, even foreign dukes and princes. But you wanted to see the waterwheels, didn’t you? They’re just here.

  He pointed, and Orsea could see them, but they didn’t look quite how he’d imagined them. They were crowded together up close, so that each one touched the one next to it, and the gear-teeth cut into them meshed, so that each one drove its neighbor. All down the riverbank, as far as he could see; but it was the wrong way round, like he’d tried to tell the stranger.

  That’s not right, he said. The river should be driving the wheels, but it’s the other way round.

  4

  “Orsea said you wanted to learn about the world,” Miel said. “Is that right?”

  The path was too steep and uneven for horses; even the badly wounded were walking, or being carried. Miel was wearing his riding-boots — he’d brought ordinary shoes, suitable for walking in, but they’d been in a trunk with the rest of his belongings in the supply train, and he didn’t fancy going down the mountain and asking the Mezentines if he could have them back. The boots were extremely good for their intended purpose, which wasn’t walking; close-fitting, thin-soled and armored with twelve-lame steel sabatons, attached to the leather with rivets. The heads of those rivets were starting to wear through the pigskin lining and chafe his heels and the arches of his feet, and he could feel every pebble and flint through the soles as he walked. As if that wasn’t enough to be going on with, he’d been given the job of being nice to the Mezentine he’d done his best to persuade Orsea to lynch. It could be seen as a backhanded compliment, but Miel wasn’t in the mood.

  “If it’s no trouble,” the Mezentine said. “I’m afraid I’m rather ignorant about everything outside the City. Most of us are; I think that’s a large part of the problem.”

  Miel shrugged. “Same with us,” he said. “We know exactly as much about your p
eople as we care to. Not the best basis on which to start a war.”

  “I guess not.” The Mezentine sounded faintly embarrassed to hear a high officer of state implying a criticism of policy. Quite right, too; but it’s always galling to be taught good manners by an enemy.

  The Ducas had rules about that sort of thing. Be specially polite to people who annoy you. True feelings are for true friends. Miel particularly liked that one because it meant you could convert trying situations into a kind of game; the more you disliked a person, the politer you could be. You knew that each civility was really a rude gesture in disguise, and you could therefore insult the victim like mad without him ever knowing.

  “I’m forgetting my manners,” Miel said. “You only know me as the bloodthirsty bugger who tried to have you killed. I’m Miel Ducas.”

  “Ziani Vaatzes.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” Miel thought for a moment, then frowned. “Do all Mezentine names have a z in them?”

  The Mezentine — no, at least do him the courtesy of thinking of him by his name; Vaatzes grinned. “It does seem like it sometimes,” he said, “but it’s not like there’s a law or anything. Actually, I believe it’s a dialect thing. Back in the country we originally came from, I’d be something like Tiani Badates. A singularly useless piece of information, but there you are.”

  “Quite so. What was it Orsea said you did, back home? Some kind of blacksmith?”

  Vaatzes laughed. “Not really,” he said. “I was a foreman at the ordnance factory.”

  “Fine. What’s a foreman?”

  “The answer to that,” Vaatzes said, “depends on who you ask, but basically, I walk up and down the place all day making sure the workers in each shop are doing the work they’re supposed to be doing, and making a proper job of it. A bit like a sergeant in an army, I suppose.”