K Parker - Memory

It didn't take long to clear up the misunderstanding. Somehow, a rumour had got about that General Muno Silsny, commander-in-chief of the Imperial forces, had come all the way to Dui Chirra (breaking off from a crowded schedule and riding through the night along flooded roads) to visit with an old friend or something of the sort. Not so. General Silsny had, in fact, come to the foundry to make a personal inspection of the Poldarn's Tube project-prompted, it had to be said, by the alarming lack of progress that his uncle had felt obliged to report directly to him. What more telling indication could there be of the importance that Torcea placed on the project than an impromptu inspection by the second most powerful man in the Empire (and so on). Silsny left the next day, having put the fear of several pantheons of gods into Spenno and Galand Dev. (He'd smiled at them, been extremely polite, and assured them that he didn't blame either of them personally: rumour had it that Galand Dev didn't stop quivering until late the next morning.) Assurances had been made by everybody concerned that work-actual sawing of wood and pounding of metal-would start the very next day, or the day after that at the very latest.

As far as Poldarn was concerned he was delighted to see the back of Silsny, even though he was the first person Poldarn could remember who actually had cause to be grateful for having met him; perhaps for that reason. For the next few days he had to put up with an insufferable amount of curiosity from everybody he met-what had all that been in aid of, had he really saved the general's life or was it mistaken identity, and what exactly had he said to the great man, all alone out there in the yard with nobody listening-which he dealt with by pretending to be deaf. Fortunately, there were plenty of other issues to occupy people's minds, and so the matter drifted and faded, with no worse effects for Poldarn himself than a useful reputation for being a miserable bastard.

The tremendous distraction was the sudden and unexpected announcement by Spenno and Galand Dev of their startling new plan of campaign. Since nothing could induce them to agree on which way up the core was to be, they'd decided to do without a core altogether. Instead, they declared, they were going to cast the tubes as solid bronze cylinders, and make the holes down the middle by drilling.

This was, of course, insane; and the foundrymen lost no time in pointing it out. In order to drill a hole down a solid lump of bronze that size, they said, you'd need to build a special lathe. Not just an ordinary lathe: it'd need to be the biggest, strongest, most precise lathe ever built. And then there were the cranes, gantries, steadies-in fact, you'd need to build a special shop for the bloody thing if you were going to do it properly; and even if it could be done at all, which was pretty unlikely, you'd be asking a hell of lot to have it up and running within a year, more like eighteen months. The headstock alone Spenno and Galand Dev replied that they'd thought of that. Furthermore, there were plans and detailed directions for building just such a lathe in Spenno's estimable book, Concerning Various Matters, which, if followed to the letter, would answer their needs perfectly. Brigadier Muno (they went on) had already sent to Torcea for specialist engineers who'd do the skilled work; while they were waiting for them to arrive, the foundry crew could get on with building the shed which, as they'd correctly assumed, would be needed to house the new machinery. By the time the engineers reached Dui Chirra, the Imperial lumber-yards at Sirupat should already have provided the necessary raw materials, including the enormous blocks of the very finest seasoned oak from which the headstock, tailstock and ways were to be fashioned. Nor, they added, would the blacksmith's shop be idle during this time: plans and sketches for the racks, pinions, cranks, spindles, bearings, lead screws and other necessary hardware would be ready in the morning, by which time bloom iron and steel billets would be at hand from Falcata. The time allocated for getting the lathe built and functional (Galand Dev added, with a broad grin) was thirty days.

Did anybody have a problem with that?

In the event, Galand Dev's time estimate proved to be hopelessly inaccurate. Instead of thirty days, the job was done in two weeks. It wasn't a pleasant time at Dui Chirra. Four overlapping shifts worked day and night, so arranged that there was no down time at all-when it was your turn to go to bed, you passed your hammer or your plane to the man standing waiting behind you, who carried on without missing a stroke. The specialist engineers turned out to be foreigners from Morevich; they were being paid for the job rather than by the day or the week, and they were clearly in a hurry to get finished and away from the filthy cold and wet as quickly as they possibly could. Most of the major components had been partly shaped in Sirupat, where they had huge water-powered sawmills that could cut a ten-foot length of thirty-by-forty heart of oak to within the thickness of a scribed line. Inside every shed and house in the compound, the air was thick and brown with sawdust-apart from in the forge, where the dust was black instead of brown and where Poldarn slept on the floor when he wasn't working, so tired that even the crashing of the three hundredweight trip-hammer that Galand Dev had had sent down from the Torcea arsenal wasn't enough to keep him awake. (It took twelve men to work the windlass, and when it dropped they could feel the ground shake right across the yard; it'd had to come in through the smithy wall since the doors were far too narrow, and there hadn't been time to make good or even rig a canvas sheet over the hole. But the extra ventilation turned out to be a life-saver, when the wind changed and blew the smoke from the enormous fire back into the shop.)

There came a moment when the trip-hammer fell and nobody winched it up again; when the fire was allowed to die down and go out. There was still work to be done-bolts to shank, a long thread to recut so it would turn freely, a cracked brace to weld-but it could wait, because the job was very nearly finished. (No job is ever finished; see the precept of religion that states that there is no end and no beginning, only the time that separates them.) The lathe was as nearly ready as it'd ever be, but nobody quite had the courage to throw the brake and set it running.

Poldarn celebrated the sudden outbreak of silence in the forge by sitting down hard against the wall, closing his eyes and going straight to sleep. When he woke up an unspecified time later, the building at first seemed empty; but then he heard what sounded like a soft, expressionless chanting, like some religious ceremony: an early-morning litany performed by sleepy monks. But it couldn't be that, so he climbed to his feet (pins and needles in his feet and hands) and staggered in the direction the noise was coming from.

The source of the chanting turned out to be Spenno. He was sitting on the big anvil with his precious book open on his knees, swearing in his sleep. Poldarn remembered what that meant, and grinned; if Spenno was cursing a blue streak, all was right with the world. The complex mechanism that moved the stars and the planets about their axis was balanced, oiled and running true; soon the pinions would engage with their ratchets and rotate the dial on which day was painted light blue with a golden sun, night dark blue with silver stars (cut out of sheet iron with heavy shears and riveted in place). The entire movement and escapement of the world was in order, and therefore Spenno could afford to sleep, still mumbling his mechanical obscenities (like charms to scare away evil spirits). Poldarn grinned-and then he caught sight of the book, open and unguarded.

If, as alleged, Galand Dev had been allowed to study the lathe plans set out in Concerning Various Matters, he was the only mortal in living memory apart from Spenno himself who'd seen inside the book and lived to tell the tale. As far as Spenno was concerned, the matter was perfectly simple. If anybody even tried to sneak a look at the book without his permission (which would never be granted), he'd kill them. He'd told the foundrymen so on many occasions, and they believed him.