K Parker - Devices and Desires

'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 colour 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 realise,' 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 water-wheel 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 mill-races 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 flood-water 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.