Otterness held up a palm toward Charley to stop the torrent of speech. “I have considered all these issues and others you might not even stumble upon for months. I do not say this to boast, but merely to reassure you that I do not plunge into this without adequate forethought. But it is our only recourse. I do not blame you for not immediately coming to the same conclusion. You are missing part of the equation, one vital fact that forces our hand.”
Otterness resumed walking down the aisle dusted with lint that ran between the twisting machines. Workers looked up with momentary interest, then quickly turned back to their demanding tasks. For a moment, shining motes of lux hovered around Otterness’s head in a chance-formed halo and Charley regarded him with more than a little awe evident on his face. Quickly catching up to the Master Luminary, Charley waited for him to explain.
Instead, Otterness asked a question. “How long have you been working in the Mill, Charley?”
“Why, nearly twenty years, sir.”
Otterness nodded sagely. “You confirm my own memories, which I sometimes doubt. In that case, then, you were probably too young to really notice the lean years we passed through right about then, when the Tarcats started production.”
The naming of the sixteenth mill seemed to trigger some sudden flood of remembrance in Charley, for his face grew distant. “I remember—I remember that period well. And now that you mention it, I do recall some talk about how the new mill would affect us all. But I don’t really remember tough times, no. Always enough food on the table, new clothes when needed.…”
“I take that as a compliment to the way I handled the challenge,” said Otterness. “The Tarcats were diligent and inventive. Their workers had a hungry desire to establish themselves, which we complacent older mills sometimes lose. Three years after the Tarcats started up, they earned ten percent of the Factor’s gold. All other mills earned correspondingly less—some much less, some not so much. And when the dust settled, some of those mills—you can probably name them if you think about it—never recovered their former status. Of course, the Factor compensated somewhat, by buying overall a slightly greater quantity of cloth than before, but not enough to make up for the new mill’s total production. It was as if—I don’t know. As if he were encouraging competition for competition’s sake. Perhaps his buyers grow jaded, and this is the Factor’s method of shaking us up and producing newer, more exotic goods.”
Charley remained silent, and it seemed he was trying to digest all this uncommon and startling information—or rather, this new perspective on old events. Otterness lowered his voice, and Charley had to strain to hear his next words.
“What I am about to tell you must not be bruited about. The common folk will discover it soon enough anyway. This fall, the Factor is going to bid us start construction on another new mill. He warned us Luminaries last year.”
Charley drew in his breath sharply. Otterness grabbed his arm. “I’m not going to be caught flatfooted this time, anymore than the last. I know the new mill won’t come online for many years. Still, it’s none too early to experiment with new blends. If we can grab the Factor’s attention now, well be more likely to hold it during the rough years. Do you see, Charley? Do you see what we must do?”
Charley regarded the blunt-faced man with a direct and serious gaze that locked their visages—young and old—into a composite like those illusory drawings of vases that suddenly transform beneath one’s attention into two profiles. “I do, Master Otterness. Roland, I do.”
A wash of affection swept through Otterness at Charley’s use of his first name. How different it sounded out of his mouth than off Alan’s lips of late.…
“Now, secrecy is paramount regarding this decision, Charley. You and I are the only ones who know of this. Were the other mills to discover our plans, we would lose all advantage. I do not want this to turn into another debacle like the Sandcrab mess. How the other Luminaries ever discovered our schemes for that mix, I still cannot say.”
“Nor no more I,” interjected Charley hurriedly.
“I’m not blaming you, son, for the leak. Too many wagging tongues knew about that game strategy. The tattler could have been any of a dozen, in whose numbers you’re definitely not included. But I’m just speaking aloud my own fears.”
Charley nodded in understanding.
Otterness clapped a hand on Charley’s shoulder then, saying, “But enough of such dire talk, son. We’ll be discussing this issue oft enough in the years to come. Let’s speak of more pleasant things. How are your wife and son lately?”
Libby Straw, from the Swift Sparrow village, a member of one of the Valley’s oldest families, had become Charley’s bride five years ago, and had come to live in the Blue Devil village.
“Fine, sir,” replied Charley, though he still seemed ruminative. “Both healthy and fit, the one still beautiful and the other still a red-faced squaller.”
“And your mother and sister?”
“Also hale. Floy I saw just last week, when she came over from the Tarcats for the quilting bee.”
“She is happy there, then?”
“Yes, although even after all these years she still misses Blue Devil ways at times.”
“It was a shame, the way she was plunged headlong into that match. Your father was never the same after it. But I’m glad to hear she’s matured into it.”
“Oh, she has. She even deigns to speak to me now.”
The men shared a chuckle then at the folly of women. They walked on unspeaking … After a time, Otterness broke the silence, rather timorously for one usually so confident.
“And your brother, Alan—does he ever speak confidentially to you about his feelings toward me?”
Charley looked gloomy. “Alan keeps his own counsel, I’m afraid. Mother continues to coddle him, and his lack of a job has not improved his character. No, sir, I cannot report anything on Alan’s inner thoughts.”
Otterness tried to put some unfelt joviality into his voice. “So be it. I’ll have to muddle along on my own with the young rascal.”
The men reached the rear lamplit staircase and began to climb. Charley spoke.
“Sir, might there not be another way to improve production, in order to meet the new competition? I am thinking of certain modifications in the machinery, and perhaps even in our method of power. I have heard Tarrytown rumors about steam—”
Otterness recoiled visibly. To hear such talk from his protégé was perhaps the most disturbing thing that could have happened at this crucial juncture in the Mill’s existence. He wondered suddenly if young Cairncross could have inherited any of his father’s wild-eyed cynicism. Best to probe gently around the roots of this heresy and then yank it up for good.
“What you are advocating, Charley,” Otterness said slowly, “is the first step on a very slippery slope. If we begin to tamper with our time-honored methods of production—which the Factor has endorsed implicitly by his continued visits—then we risk all. Consider the upheaval in Mill hierarchies and procedures which new devices would bring, not to mention the radical alterations in village life. Do you wish to precipitate such things?”
Charley said nothing for a minute, then said—with what Otterness took for sincere conviction—“No, sir. No, I do not. Please forget I ever proposed such a foolish step.”
“It’s not your father who’s filling your head with such ideas, is it? I know he’s been especially bitter since the probation incident.”
Charley leapt to his father’s defense. “No, sir, he’s not been preaching those things anymore. And as for the probation—he admits that losing two month’s work was only fair for what he did. I don’t know what came over him, sir, actually to light his pipe in the Mill. God, I like my smokeweed as much as the next man, but to think of what could happen in this oil-soaked warren if a single spark should land in the wrong place— He’s promised me personally never to do such a thing again, sir. He was only tired and unthinking, is what it was.”
Ott
erness softened his tone. “I understand, Charley. We all make mistakes. I have nothing personal against your father, you understand. It’s only that occasionally … Well, you know what I mean.”
“It’s all right, sir. No offense taken. You’ve got the welfare of the whole Mill at heart, I know.”
Otterness felt relieved. “That’s just it, Charley. We’re all only partially cognizant of the real nature of things, you know. And I feel that my perception of reality is just a little more valid and complete than your father’s. It’s the big view, Charley, that you and I share. That is why the workers trust us to guide the affairs of the mill. And that’s also why we can’t seek after new ways, Charley. Because we don’t know enough. Don’t you think that the Factor—with his vastly superior knowledge—couldn’t lift us up out of our traditions if he chose? But since he doesn’t so choose, then we must have the best life we’re fit for. It all comes down to trust in the end. Either we trust the Factor’s decisions, and the workers trust ours, or everything collapses.”
“I see,” said Charley.
Otterness thought of a last image to persuade Charley, one that he frequently resorted to when doubtful himself. “We’re all just bricks, Charley. Just bricks in the Mill. And we can have no greater idea of the whole grand plan than a brick has of the immensity it forms a part of.”
Charley seemed struck by some personal resonance in Otterness’s trope. “Just bricks,” he muttered. “Just bricks.”
When they reached the office again, Pickering had it cozily hot. Dismissing the stoveboy to insure absolute secrecy, the Master Luminary and his Apprentice set about outlining the transition to the new blend. The hours passed in intense absorption for the two men. The final bell tolled, sending all the regular workers home, and still the pair toiled on. At last, closer to midnight than to sunset, they broke up their labor for the evening.
Outside the Mill they walked together across the crunchy snowfield, silent in their individual thoughts. Among the quiet snow-shrouded houses they parted, Charley to join his family, Otterness to greet an empty home.
Looking up for the first time only when he stood on the stoop of his house, Otterness was startled to see a light on inside his rooms. With his heart pounding, he opened the unlocked door and stepped inside.
Alan Cairncross was a slim young man with blond hair and thin lips. At age twenty-five, he still had hardly any cause to shave daily. Unadept at ballgames, he excelled at the annual spring morris dances. Even walking through the village, he carried himself with unusual grace. Slouched now in Otterness’s favorite chair, he retained this allure.
Otterness’s mouth was dry. Memories rose to plague him. The first time he had seen Alan, at a dinner at Charley’s house, some six years ago. Summer nights spent lying together outdoors on the meadowed Valley slopes. Winter nights like this one by a roaring fire. Old. He was getting too old. Old men had too many memories.
“Alan, it’s so good to see you again. Will you have a drink? I could easily mull some ale.…”
Alan straightened up. “No, thank you, Roland. I’m not here to stay the night. I just wanted to talk a bit. How is everything with you? How’s work?”
Seating himself across from Alan, Otterness found himself beginning to babble like an adolescent. Alan listened attentively. Then, for some reason, he reached out to grab Otterness’s hand. The Master responded by squeezing the other’s upper thigh.
“Roland, stop, I cannot continue with this deception.”
Otterness’s heart crumbled inside him, like a brick powdered by a sledgehammer. In a blinding instant he knew what Alan was about to say. But he had to hear it from the young man himself. “What—what do you mean?”
“For the last two years I’ve been a spy, a serpent in your bosom. The Scorpions have paid me handsomely to learn of your plans in advance. Actually, it was not them alone. Others too. That’s why I’ve been so cool to you lately. I’ve hated myself every moment we’ve been together. I can’t stand it any longer. I’ve come to say goodbye.”
Otterness surprised his hands together again, rubbing, squeezing. Alan’s neck was so thin.…
He forced them apart. Maybe if he had blurted out the latest scheme. But he had not. Thank the Factor for small favors, however ironic.
“Why?” he managed to ask.
Alan shrugged. “I could say it was the money. That was what I thought at first myself. But I realize now that it was because you loved the Mill more than you loved me.”
Otterness tried to deny the charge. But he could not.
“And you could never reconcile yourself to that status, if it had to be?”
“How can my answer matter, after what I’ve done?”
“Just tell me.”
“I—I don’t know. I could try to understand.”
Otterness put both hands on Alan’s thighs. How much better they felt there, than around his throat.
“Then just try. That’s all I ask.”
Alan’s eyes widened in astonishment. “That’s all?”
Otterness smiled. “And why not? That’s all life asks.”
4.
Seen from three miles high, the autumnal Valley was an abstract composition illustrating the beauty of pure geometry and color. By far the greater part of the Valley was a mass of brilliant fiery foliage: from both ridgetops, down almost to the outhouses that were the most distal structures from the Mill, spread a carpet of orange and red and yellow treecrowns threaded with green, like a bed of inextinguishable coals salted with minerals.
Trees bracketed the Mill and the dwellings of the workers. The Mill’s slate roof stretched straight down the Valley’s length, a fat gray line that swallowed a skinnier silver-blue and rippling turbulent one at the north and disgorged it at the south. The clustered houses—each village separated from the others on its side by sere brown fields—punctuated the exclamation mark that was the Mill like bisected umlauts somehow gone astray from their vowels, the punctual Mill and its outliers as a whole signifying the exclamatory pronunciation of some obscure but vital word.
Beyond the Valley other settlements could be dimly apprehended. Of course, under further magnification they could be resolved to any required depth.
The Factor, regarding the aerial view on the screens of his titanic spherical ship now hovering directly above the Mill, thought—insofar as he was capable of appreciation—that it was a rather esthetically pleasing vista.
He was glad that he had gotten a chance to come here at last. As with all places in this miraculous universe, it was a sight worth seeing in and of itself. But it took on special meaning when one considered the remarkable product that was produced here and only here, in this archaic and time-lost Valley. From what he had heard, he had quite a reception in store when he set foot below to redeem the goods that had been stockpiled all year against his coming. He couldn’t know for sure, of course, until he jacked in, never having been here before.
It was time now, he supposed, for that particular precontact necessity. Yet for a moment the Factor hesitated. He was unwontedly sentimental today, outside all his parameters. He supposed it stemmed from the fact that he was visiting this world for the first time in his long and limitless life span. His yearly round of planetary visits normally took him only to worlds he had been to at least once before. His coming here was a newness to be savored, arising from the rare disappearance elsewhere of the Factorial ship previously assigned here. The next time he visited this world, it would be as one returning to the familiar. There would be no exciting thrill of the heretofore unseen to add a touch of spice to his unvarying and solitary life. And although the Factor had been designed to tolerate a degree of boredom and regularity which would have driven a human insane, he still found newness a thing not unwelcome in small doses.
So for a few minutes the Factor merely reclined in his chair and studied the view offered on his remote panels. When he had drunk his fill of these visual stimuli, he reached with both hands up and behind his pad
ded headrest, grasping a node-studded wire cage which he swung up on its arm until it rested securely atop his skull.
Then he jacked in.
When he arose a second later, he knew the whole history of this world. Not dating from its initial settlement by humans, of course. Those records were long ago vanished, destroyed or mislaid when the Concordance disintegrated in a galaxywide psychic calamity, or evolutionary leap. No, the history that the Factor had so effortlessly internalized began after the Inwardness, when the Factors had been created, almost as an afterthought, to partially resume a role that most of mankind had abandoned. Interstellar travel no longer appealed to those human societies capable of it. Integrating themselves into the Bohmian implicate order that underlay external reality, they had moved on to other, less visible concerns. Still, those who had turned Inward had not wholly severed themselves from their primitive cousins elsewhere, the mental Neanderthals who had failed to make the transition, and continued to maintain an obscure and manipulative concern with information and products from other worlds.
Not that those who had turned Inward could really use material goods as they once used to.
The Factors now obediently and disinterestedly served to link, in an almost gratuitous fashion, the scattered and devolved human communities around the galaxy that had not turned Inward.
The Factors had discovered—or rediscovered—this world over four centuries ago. They had fastened on one product as being of interest to their human motivators. They had encouraged the production of the luxcloth in the manner that seemed best to their semiautonomous intellects, stimulating competition and diversity every generation or so by ordering a new mill complex to be constructed. Elaborate rituals had evolved around the visit of a Factor—which ceremonies were not discouraged, contributing as they did toward respect and compliance.
The Paul Di Filippo Megapack Page 18
