Vasily & The Works (Tales from the Middle Empires Vol III)
Page 7
#
Vasily slept badly that night. Despite the convincing front he had put up before his mother, a gram of doubt slipped across the blood-brain barrier, infecting his mind. In the coldest gloom, when the warmth of Linnet arose from ancient, reactive depths, he lay awake practically fevered. He had had all those years to prepare to take up his place at the Works. He had, however well-intentioned, emphasized the broad view over the specifics. He couldn’t carbon-etch a ring, as his father had by age twelve. He couldn’t print microgears with a vapor-deposition pen. He couldn’t even handle an articulating lev-loader well enough to hoist a spindle of ceramo-composite. What good were his strategic-planning skills if he couldn’t mingle with his workers?
He could handle the welding all right — it wasn’t that that kept him awake. He knew a pro forma recitation of the rites must come sooner or later, and better, perhaps, if the solid terms of a well-made bargain kept his coital union stable and predictable. Besides, he had heard or read of such arrangements creating actual warm companionship. So long as the Chernow girl didn’t come between him and his roving fancies, he could certainly tolerate her. Plus, the shocking alignment with the Chernows — and, by extension, with the oligarchal trading entities — could prove both lucrative and strategic. In a way, his own delay and dilettantism had proven diabolically clever; his mother would never have come so far on her own. He just hoped the girl didn’t kick or smoke cheroots in bed.
The only way he managed to sleep at all that night was by resolving to get more involved in shop-floor supervision first thing on the morrow. He would get up early, have Portia set him up with a quick bite, and meet with Inchrises. Not that Vasily needed a chaperone, but Inchrises served as an important link between management and manufactory. More than once, Inchrises had smoothed ruffled feathers when Vasily’s requests of station or line workers hadn’t been fulfilled. Inchrises had a touch.
Vasily did get up early but quickly realized, at woozy micturation, that he would do nobody any good with so little roborative sleep. It was no way to begin the new regime. So, he managed a couple hours’ additional pillow time before yawning and stretching and looking around the kitchen. He heard a door close in the entry hall and realized with a pang of regret that Portia must be leaving. He padded quickly to catch her.
“I haven’t had breakfast,” he said. “What have you got?”
Portia turned. “Me gloves on. Feed yourself, hunky. There’s a trifle in the cold, and what’s left of biscuits still out. Black-gear jam wif. Oleen comes on in a ‘hower. Wait around if you like.”
She finished her preparations and left, closing the door unnecessarily loudly.
Vasily frowned. There was another good point about marrying: he’d be set up in the penthouse apartment alone. He’d send Mother and Portia below. Or the reverse. Either way, he wouldn’t be at Portia’s impudent mercy again. Things could have been very different. She had let him slip from her calloused hands. A jack-stand, indeed! Let her have her rough trade.
Vasily, in a fresh monogrammed smock, met Inchrises at the pyramidal-top security station leading into the main shop. A great security eye swiveled upon the apex. Workers in coveralls, jumpsuits, uniform outfits, safety parkas, and various other workstations’ requirements streamed through the scanner-stiles, taking no notice of the heir. It was doubtful that most knew who he was, even with the high-grade work smock.
“Mr. Vasily is not working on his pet projects this morning?” faithful Inchrises asked.
“My project at the moment — well, I’ve several — but my immediate concern is the well-being of the manufactory and the need for a hands-on management approach.”
“Ah, indeed. That is commendable, Mr. Vasily. Quite in the spirit of the past. You wish a tour of the stations?”
“I wish to work the stations.”
Inchrises coughed. “Excuse me, Mr. Vasily. The fumy airs underground always affect me in the morning. You come to be trained?”
“Certainly not. I was born into the Works. I come to be updated on the particular innovations we’ve implemented within each station and line.”
“That is of course what I was referring to, Mr. Vasily,” Inchrises corrected himself. “Updating. Keeping your hands on things, like your father and grandfather.”
“Just so. It all starts with the stampers and molds, so let’s start at the beginning.”
“At the foundry, then, Mr. Vasily?”
Vasily looked indignant. “Well, of course the foundry. Goes without saying, doesn’t it?”
They bypassed the diverging streams of workers and hopped a supervisor’s cart. They threaded their way through the great underground labyrinth of chambers great and small until they arrived at the mighty sealed door of the foundry, deep within the heart of the manufactory. Two score foundrymen awaited the all-clear telltale. Vasily sat in silence with Inchrises, making sure to avoid eye contact with any specific worker. Finally, a honk and a light, and the door came up.
The group coming off shift and the group heading in merged briefly in an intricate dance in which hands touched and significant glances were exchanged. Each multi-cellular organism re-emerged more or less coherent and continued on its way, having succeeded once again in the struggle with entropy. Inchrises shot the cart forward as the door began its pitiless descent.
“It’s the one door we can’t safety,” he shouted over the din of the door motors. “The foundry inputs and outputs — the gases and volatiles — are timed very precisely. The multicore has to regulate the doors. I’ve never lost anyone yet, though. Heh heh.”
Vasily nodded.
In the huge chamber, the top of whose dome lay just below the dirt of Manufactory Lawn, two massive, complicated cap structures composed of pistons, rods, pressure tanks, braided-ti hoses, panel boxes, and every kind of machine-tool articulation, hovered just above round well liners the circumference of a hundred workers with arms outstretched. As Vasily watched the ‘tween-shifts routine, graceful robot arms slid out from unseen apertures and began some sort of precise cleaning routine upon the idle wellheads.
“Those are new?” Vasily said. “I mean, ahem!, those are new, certainly.”
“Retrofits. We finished your father’s re-design. He modified nearly every operational parameter of the foundry — well, spec’d it and programmed it for his big multicore. All we had to do was build it all out. Heh heh.”
Inchrises went into VIP-tour-guide mode:
“You’ve got your two foundry wells, one deep and narrow, the other shallower and wider. Perfect circular shafts machined from a solid block of diamond-latticed, ti-nuchrome alloy, sleeved the whole way, or any length you may desire along the way, in discardable composites. The foundry block is also the floor here, a few hundred hands either direction, a quarter-cubit down. All one big block, formed and machined six hundred years ago with the second works at this site — we’re the fourth or fifth, depending on how you count. This is the crown jewel of the manufactory, the basis for everything that comes after on the production chain. The whole block, by the way, rests on some sort of massive cushion-plates. We don’t know all the old secrets, but we can measure this block’s movement relative to Linnet’s, and we know they ain’t the same. Whoever poured and pounded this block took account of the old girl’s — Linnet’s, I mean — propensity to move and jostle every now and again. She’s got life left in her, she does.
“Now, the one shaft here, the ‘Deep’ as we call her, is the diamond-press. We also got the vapor-deposition diamond shop — that’s on the other side of that wall over there, accessible from the other side of the main shopfloor traverseway. But vapor-depo, as you know, is your light-duty, intricate components — all the friction-free parts and finework. We’re good at that, sure, but we never cornered the market like we did with the high-strength custom parts. We’re sole supplier for any ship above a hundred-year, plus we got a library of every licensed Empire ship type, except total custom jobbers, which is a different chambe
r ‘o vapors.
“Now, all you’re seeing up top here, at the well-head, is the control module, which has the de-coupled transmission line to the top pressure-plate about fifty spans down in the well . . .
Inchrises went on in this vein for quite some time, occasionally illustrating his points with a little tablet he kept in his shopjacket pocket and could whip out instantly as he spoke. It was one of those perorations much like lectures in college, during which Vasily understood enough to be impressed but not enough to put the details together and really understand what was going on. He gathered that two things came out of the foundry: diamond blocks with varying atomic lattices, and custom alloys in great cylindrical sections.
“. . . in fact,” Inchrises was saying. “Once we got the control modules fully synced with the multicore — speaking the same language, you might say — we got greater precision control over manufacturing parameters than we ever had. Based on phase changes at the micro-increment level as predicted by the multicore, we could output instructions and fine-tune the materials properties in ways we couldn’t do in Mr. Arseny’s lifetime. Ah, Mr. Vasily, he woulda been proud. He knew it could be done, which is why he plowed all those profits, plus a note, into expanding the multicore. Too bad he’s not here to see it!”
“What do you mean, ‘a note’?” Vasily said.
“Note? Why, a debenture.”
“As in, we Alexseyevs don’t own all this?”
Inchrises flushed and averted his gaze. “Maybe it’s not my place —”
“Speak, Inchrises!”
“No, ‘n course you own it. The debt ain’t secured against the Works at all. It’s a friendly loan, like.”
“Father took out a loan to finish the multicore? Why have I not heard about this?”
“Now, don’t worry, Mr. Vasily. Ain’t no one gonna call it in. It was freely give — not even sought. Almost a gift.”
“From whom?” Vasily demanded.
Inchrises shifted on his feet. His face went deep red.
“Well, Mr. Vasily sir, that would be . . . that is to say . . . just in case it couldn’t get paid, part of the ownership interest — just a small part, mind you, a minority in the Works — would be . . . er . . .”
“Speak, Inchrises!”
“In my name, Mr. Vasily, sir. Which I would hold in trust for all of them.” He jerked a thumb indicating the Works generally. “It’s formally my eesig, but that’s just a graven image in a tablet we keep stored away. You see, I got a multitude behind me.”
“You! But you’re not an oligarchal representative, Inchrises! How could you presume to accept shares in Alexseyev? Surely that’s not legal! We would never stand for it! You can’t enforce it!”
Inchrises looked sorely tested by the young heir’s provocation. “It’s a — what do you call it? — a ‘academic’ question, Mr. Vasily.”
“It certainly is, Inchrises. I’m pleased you recognize that. Especially now that I’m taking matters in hand.” Vasily swiped the back of his wrist against his forehead. “So, the foundry. It doesn’t seem all that hot in here to me.”
Inchrises tried to resume his former didactic composure. “We don’t waste heat at the Works. Not with energy gotten so dear. The block you’re standing on is a great radiator, from which we take heat constantly to warm hydraulics. You see those hoses and couplings, just there, fastened along the walls? Those channel out elsewhere. The hydraulics crew got them a map of the whole network of hoses, condensers, compressors, boilers, cooling towers, extractors, you name it. All they do — their whole mission, like — is attend to flows of heat and cold here and there around the Works. Your nice house tower over there, no mechanicals of its own except what’s needed to take the hot and cold lines coming from the manufactory.”
“Fascinating, Inchrises. Are we finished with the foundry?”
“They’re just getting underway with lowering the caps, Mr. Vasily. It ain’t much to see, but you can feel it right through your marrows. The diamond-press generates pressures like a small nuclear, all upon a graphite ring. Diamond more perfect than any in the universe. When the buffing wheel lifts off, you can’t even see the diamond. It’s a perfect medium of re-transmission — no error, no distortions, nothing. Unless we make it imperfect, which we do that too for filter material.”
“Ports?”
“Sure. Also, nose cones, since they got lead in the lattice too. All sorts of combinations ‘o things. Limitless, practically. What with the multicore.”
“So without the computer —”
Inchrises looked alarmed and shook his head. “No Works. Not even the old Works. There’s no going back. Onward and upward, Mr. Vasily.”
“What do you mean, you can’t go back? Why not make what we made, say, a century ago? One can always go back.”
Inchrises looked sheepish. “He threw it all out. Mr. Arseny did. Dumped it. Came to me one day, just before he . . . passed on. Handed me a stack ‘o wafers. Took me a second to figure it. ‘Memory?’ I says. ‘History,’ he says. ‘Alexseyevs never look back. The old Works is gone. ‘You want me to keep ‘em?’ I says. ‘I want you to tell them,’ he says. ‘Take these, re-use the material, but tell them you saw everything that came before die. Tell them you made sure of it.’
“And I did — recycle the wafers, I mean. But you’re the first one I ever told. I didn’t know who else I was supposed to, so I just kept my mouth shut, waiting for the right time. Strange. It’s almost as if he knowed what was coming, there at the end. And here you are, Mr. Vasily, standing just about where he stood that day. Isn’t that a laugh riot, Mr. Vasily?”
Vasily looked at Inchrises vacantly for a moment.
“The computer — the new one, the multicore — it runs the Works? It doesn’t need us?” Vasily finally said.
“In a manner o’ speaking, but it’s not quite like that. Sure, the multicore is as good as a processing device can get, as far as I know — and I keep up with the journals. But it ain’t the human element. You hear it. Simulation, running every alternative to find the right one. That’s why it’s got to be so big, so many cores running all the time. We run her hot, that’s for sure, but she always keeps up. Worst delay I ever saw was under a millisecond, and that was just ‘cause of a programming mistake with an open-ended equation. A typo, actually. Nothing like you’d actually want to run, and it was obvious as soon as we saw it come up.”
“Like how? How did it come up?”
“First-level sum-check. Before we even implemented. SOP. The bug never had a chance.”
“Oh, I see.” Vasily looked thoughtful.
“You take an interest in core-level programming code, Mr. Vasily?”
“I’ve been known to dabble in it. Mental exercises, that sort of thing.”
“Your father loved it too. She’s all him, you know. All her core code — all her system programs — is him, what he wrote. It’s a thing of beauty, Mr. Vasily. Proprietary, of course. I sometimes read a few lines here and there, just to marvel at it. What do you give a man who has everything? Something to do, Mr. Vasily. That’s what. That’s all your Arseny wanted, was something to do. And he did it.”
Vasily stood quietly, staring at the descending well-head cap — now emitting puffs of steam — but seeing nothing.
“Mr. Vasily? Shall I ask her to open up now? Next stop is automated curing and sorting. That’s automated, mainly, but nothing gets made on the lines and stations till bulk slabs from here are proofed-up, stamped, and stacked.”