K Parker - Devices and Desires

'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 per cent 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 organise 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 organise 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 neighbour. All down the river-bank, 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.

'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 armoured 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 people as we care. 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.'

'I see,' Miel said. 'And have you been doing it long?'

'Six years. Before that, I was a toolmaker.'

'Like I said, 'Miel put in. 'A blacksmith.'

'If you like. Actually, my job was to make the jigs and fixtures for the machines that made the various products. It was all about knowing how things work, and how to make them do what you want.'