by CJ Brightley
“Easier to see if something’s slipping,” said Mister Gizmo. “Not that it has, yet. The boys did a fine job. Go on, add a couple of numbers together.”
“What shall I add?” she said, suddenly nervous.
“Here,” he said, “this is where I’ve got to on the accounts.” He turned a piece of paper towards her and tapped with his pencil.
At first hesitantly, and then with growing assurance, Rosie set the well-milled brass wheels, the same ones used to set the codes on the farspeakers. Clearly incised Dwarvish numerals indicated the setting. There were two sets, each of four wheels, which could represent numbers up to 65,535 in the sixteen-based dwarvish numerals that humans also used. The top set was the initial number (the sum of what Mister Gizmo had added up so far), and the bottom set was the next number to add to it. She set the lower number up carefully with a series of crisp clicks, and pulled the lever which engaged the calculating mechanism. The brass gears whirred inside the transparent box, and the top wheels spun into a new position representing the sum of the two numbers. She worked the calculation quickly on paper, and reached the same total, at which she beamed. The two gnomes beamed back.
“You have tested it extensively?” she asked Mister Gizmo.
“Yes, and it performs beautifully,” he said. “Every office and shop in the realm is going to want one of these. You should prepare to become a very wealthy woman, Mistress.”
She coloured. “Ah, well,” she said, “in point of fact, I’m rather a wealthy woman already.”
“Then you should prepare to become a wealthier one. Can I show this to the factor yet? Or are there changes you want to make?”
“Well, your suggestion of a reset to zero… I think I should work on that first. It shouldn’t be difficult. A little spur, some gearing which drives it round until the spur engages…”
“Well enough,” he said. “Also, I did think, because the top number gets changed when you add to it, sometimes you’re not sure what it was before. Could you talk to Dignified, perhaps, about making it so that it prints a list of all the figures you’ve put in so far? He knows printing very well, you see,” he added hastily when she frowned. “I mean, I’m sure you probably could work it out, but he may see an easy way.”
“Thank you, Mister Gizmo,” she said. “I will do that. Can I take it in and show it to Dignified and Hope?”
“Only if you bring it back,” he said, grinning. “I want it to finish my accounts with.”
The version they made to show to the Realmgold’s factor had the zero handle and the printer. The gnomes also boxed it in wood, hiding the gearing, so as not to distract.
Mister Wheel explained the role of the factor to her before the meeting. “We’re part of the Realmgold’s creatives, see,” he said. “She supports a whole lot of artists and thinkers and tinkerers of one kind and another, people like the Master who come up with wonderful ideas but aren’t always very practical. She puts practical people like us around them so they don’t, you know, starve or blow themselves up, and so that the things they think of can be made properly. We can sell to anyone we want, but the Realmgold gets first refusal, through her factor, and if she wants everything we can make we have to sell it to her. If she doesn’t, anything we sell to anyone else we give her part of the money. Anything you invent, it’s licensed to you and you get a portion of whatever it makes, as well as your basic wages.”
Rosie looked aside in thought, pursing her lips. “Do you know,” she said, “I don’t know what my wages are. Or even if I’m getting any. I never asked.”
“Oh, that’s not right,” said Mister Wheel, sitting up. “Being paid wages is very important.” The Realmgold had only just established in law that gnomes must be paid fair wages, so she understood that it was something he felt strongly about.
“Oh, well,” she said, “I really just want the chance to invent things.”
“Still,” he said, “we can’t have that. I suppose with the mage being sick, she didn’t think of it.” It went without saying that Dignified wouldn’t have considered anything so mundane. “I’ll talk to Uncle Gizmo.”
The factor arrived at this point, and they rose to greet him. He was a cheerfully sloppy middle-aged man with a Gryphon Clerk’s silver seal around his neck.
“Right,” he said, when he had introduced himself as Hardy Fuller, pressed palms with Rosie and exchanged a familiar nod with Mister Wheel. “What do you have to show me this time?”
“Did you bring the list of figures?” asked Rosie.
“Yes,” he said, “just as you asked.” He produced a sheet of paper from a pocket.
“Perhaps you’d like to operate the machine yourself,” said Mister Wheel, who had conducted demonstrations before. He placed the device in front of the factor and Rosie explained its operation.
“That seems simple enough,” said Hardy, and commenced to enter numbers from his list. He was slow at first, and had to be reminded to pull the lever the first couple of times, but was soon clicking in the numbers rapidly. When he entered the last figure, they showed him how to extract the printed paper with the items and total, and he compared it with the total he’d calculated before arriving.
“It’s wrong,” he said.
“Are you sure?” said Rosie. “Let’s look.” They compared the figures line by line.
“Ah,” said Mister Wheel, who had started at the bottom. “Look there. You made an error entering the third one from the bottom, see?”
“Yes, but that’s only out by one,” said the factor. “The total’s out by three.”
They fell silent again, checking up and down, but found no other data entry errors.
“Let’s add up your list manually again,” said Rosie.
Wheel, again, was the one to spot it. Hardy’s total was incorrect. The machine’s total, given what he had put in, was right.
Rosie had a moment of worry. Not everyone took well to their errors being pointed out, as she had discovered at a young age, though she still found it hard to restrain herself from doing so. The factor, however, smiled.
“That’s well spotted,” he said. “There you are. I’m going to claim I did that deliberately as a test, and you can’t prove any differently.” He winked.
“So,” said Mister Wheel, “do you think the Realmgold will want these?”
“Oh, I don’t think there’s any question,” said Hardy. “How fast can you make them?”
“They are reasonably complex,” said Mister Wheel, “but they’re purely mechanical, which keeps the price down and makes them fast to produce. I’ll put together the usual report on production times, manufactory specs and quantity price breaks and send it through.”
“Good,” said Hardy. “All production to go for the realm, to start with, I think, though given that people will use these to work out their taxes I think we should encourage putting them into general circulation as soon as may be.”
He stood to leave, and paused at the door.
“Oh, incidentally,” he said, “I think you should make them so that they can subtract as well. That’s not difficult, is it?”
Rosie, startled, locked up and could neither think nor speak for a few critical moments.
“We’ll work on it,” said Mister Wheel smoothly, and the factor left.
“‘Work on it’?” said Rosie. “I’ll have to do a major redesign.”
“You weren’t expecting that?”
“Of course I wasn’t,” she said, miffed.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said. “As soon as the customer sees the product, they want one just like it, only completely different.”
Hope was in tears of frustration when Briar came home.
Her lawyer friend was humming, as usual lately, but she stopped when she saw Hope.
“Darling, what’s wrong?” she asked, dropping her lawyer’s bag and running over to crouch beside her. Hope sat in the corner of the room on the low cushions that Briar had furnished the flat with, surrounded by paper
s and books. Briar had to move a book to sit beside her and put a concerned hand on her shoulder.
“I can’t concentrate,” said Hope. “And I don’t want to do this anyway.” She gestured helplessly at the papers, which were meant to be the beginnings of her first article for Magical Research.
“Is your head hurting again?”
“Yes. And I’m so tired.” She heard herself whining, which she hated, but she couldn’t seem to stop.
Her friend gave her a look; not a lawyer look, nor yet a friend look. Hope cast around for a way to interpret it and remembered the Countygold’s oathmate looking at their daughter like that. A motherly look, then.
“Have you talked to Patient lately?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why don’t you call him? He calms you down.”
“He does, doesn’t he. Thanks, Briar,” said Hope, sniffing. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, heaved herself up, with Briar’s support, and headed for her bedroom, where she kept her farspeaker.
Very few people had private farspeakers yet, and she felt guilty about lending one of the lab ones to Patient for her own convenience, but… well, it was very convenient. She mostly wrote to him still. He wrote a lovely strong hand, on paper that was at the same time unassuming and of decent quality, and he would say things in writing that he found hard to put into words aloud. So would she.
“Hope,” said his voice after a moment, and her heart lifted, only to drop again as he said, “I’m with a customer. Ten minutes?”
“Of course,” she said, and broke the sympathy between their devices. He took his business very seriously, and she couldn’t fault him for it. It was just… she was feeling like a little girl right now, and not a rational adult.
She put the device down and wandered off to make a cup of willow tea for her head. She sat at the table nursing the drink, bitter even with a generous dollop of honey, and staring into space as Briar rooted round in her room. Briar’s room was the feminine equivalent of Dignified’s lab, covered in clothes and shoes, and she practically had to move everything to get at anything. She emerged, changed into more casual, going-out clothes from the dark blue Victory suit she wore to the office.
“Will you be all right by yourself?” she asked Hope.
“Yes, fine. Are you going somewhere?”
“Concert, with a friend from work. Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
“Yes, go. Don’t worry about me.” She took another sip of the tea and grimaced at the taste.
“Did you call Patient? What did he say?”
“Oh!” said Hope. Her memory, which had, if she was honest, been patchy for months, had got much worse since her head injury. “I’m meant to call him back. He had a customer.”
“He’s working late.”
“He’s a hard worker. One of his many fine qualities,” said Hope over her shoulder, as she headed for her device.
Patient said calm, soothing things, apologised for having put her off, and promised to come up and visit next Fourday. “Is there a decent hotel?” he asked.
“You can stay here. Briar’s got a regular meeting down in Gulfport for the Gnome Advancement League, so you can have her bed, if you don’t mind a girly room you can hardly move in for shoes. Or you can always sleep on the floor cushions.”
“Are you sure?”
“People keep asking me that. Yes, I’m sure. I’m not in the habit of making statements that I don’t mean,” she snapped. “Sorry,” she added, after a moment. “I’m… my emotions are all everywhere.”
“All part of the head injury,” he said. “You’ll be back to normal before you know it.”
She was a lot calmer when they finished their conversation, though when she looked back on it, it seemed less coherent and more weepy than she preferred her conversations to be. He had managed not to ask her if she was sure when she said she’d be fine overnight, though he had stumbled over it.
Patient had given her a big carved wooden eagle, one which he’d made, and she had set it up at the foot of her bed. Before her accident, she had put some mindspells on it, reinforcing the associations it had for her of safety and security and Patient taking care of her. She had named it after him, and created what mindmages called a “helpful fiction” of how it enabled him to watch over her while she slept, and she had only to look into its carved wooden eyes for a few heartbeats and turn the light out to fall into a restful, magic-assisted sleep.
Like most of her sleeps recently, it lasted almost half a day. When she woke up, Briar had already left for work, leaving her clean breakfast dishes to drain by the sink. Hope picked them up to put them away and couldn’t, for a frustrating minute, remember where they kept the bowls.
She tried to work on her article, but gave it up after half an hour and walked to the lab. Dignified and Rosie (the byname did suit her better than the stuffy name her parents had given her, though she seemed like a hard worker too) were surrounded by boards covered in mathematics. Listening to the taller woman, Hope could tell that she knew mathematics at least as well as Hope did herself, and her Dwarvish vocabulary was excellent, though she muddled her syntax occasionally. She tried to follow the point they were discussing, but it kept slipping away like a fish. She stood in a daze for a short while, looking at the two of them together, both thinner than they ought to be, awkward, and too intelligent to hold a normal conversation. Dignified, obviously, was more brilliant and far less socially adept. Rosie seemed a pleasant enough woman, though she was painfully unsure of herself. Hope assumed her family were to blame for that. She had some experience of familial discouragement.
Realising that she wasn’t achieving anything and had tuned out of the mathematical conversation entirely, Hope drifted into the manufactory. A gnome whose name she couldn’t call to mind bustled up to her and reminded her to put on a safety helmet.
“Thanks,” she said. “Don’t want another knock to the head.”
Helmet in place, she wandered into the planning office, where Wheel was overseeing the latest changes to the farspeaker design. When she had asked the same question twice and forgotten the answer both times, she drifted out again.
Her airhorse stood under a canopy in the yard, and she started it up and drove out onto the street.
Her next awareness was of being surrounded by worried gnome faces. Light-coloured beards and big pale noses everywhere she looked.
“What happened?” she said in Pektal, too confused to remember her Dwarvish.
“You ran your airhorse into a wall,” said Wheel, one of the few fluent Pektal speakers. “Did you forget you aren’t supposed to drive it?”
She grimaced, and a spike of pain pierced the crown of her head. “Yes,” she said.
“Let’s get you to the healer,” said Wheel. “The rest of you, back to work,” he added in Dwarvish.
7
Staying the Night
Patient rode up on the ferry on Threeday evening after work. Rather to his relief, Hope was still forbidden from riding her airhorse, so she couldn’t come down to his village and fetch him. He did expect her to be at the ferry wharf, though.
She wasn’t. He seated himself (at one time, he would have paced, but his war injury had put paid to that) on one of the hard wooden benches provided for travellers, where he could see the street entrance, and waited. After a few minutes, he pulled a small knife and a piece of wood out of his pockets and started whittling, glancing up occasionally.
A small bird emerged from the wood, and he lost track of time. By the time he reached the point where he needed to use tools and equipment he didn’t have with him to finish the piece, and looked at his pocket watch, another ferry had come and gone. Hope had not.
“Must have had another memory lapse,” he muttered to himself, and frowned.
He knew her address by heart, having written it on many a letter, so he asked at the ticket office how to get there.
“Certainly, sir, it’s about a half-hour walk,” began the young man. His
eyes fell on the walking stick, and he amended hastily, “or you can take the horse bus opposite, the number 23. The driver will tell you where to get off. Should be along any moment now.”
Patient nodded curtly, thanked the youth gruffly, and limped off to the bus stop.
He reached the house without further incident as the light faded from the sky. He hadn’t been there before, and was impressed with the tidy exterior. An older house, but well cared for, and some nice jigsaw work on the bargeboards. The house rose two stories, and when he reached the door he saw that there were four letterboxes.
Just as he approached and peered at them, a pair of eyes looked out through the slot of the one marked Flat 1. She started back for a moment, then the eyes crinkled at the corners. “Hello,” she said through the letterbox.
“Good evening,” said Patient. “I’m looking for Flat 3.”
“Why is that, then?” It was a friendly question, but fair enough, he supposed. In the city, you had to be more careful who you let in.
“I’m… a friend of Mage Hope’s.”
“Good enough,” said the woman, and came and let him through the door. Her good-natured face matched her eyes, and kept partly disappearing behind tousled hair, which she had to scoop back. “I’m Leaf.”
“Patient.”
“Pleased to meet you. Go on up, it’s on the right.”
He ascended the old-fashioned staircase — all dark-stained wood with some very decent banister carving, though it could do with a touch-up on the stain — turned right and knocked on the door. After a while, he knocked again, then tried the door, which opened.
The well-lit room inside, a combination kitchen and living area, showed plenty of signs of occupation — scattered papers, the odd dirty mug — without currently being occupied. He listened carefully, and heard slumberous breathing from one of the bedrooms. Peeking in, he saw Hope, turned on her right side (away from her head injury), fast asleep in a nest of rumpled covers. A small smile found its way to his lips as he watched her chest rise and fall and listened to her breathing. Even with her magnificent eyes closed, her face was still beautiful, especially when it was relaxed and peaceful. He withdrew as silently as he could, made himself a cup of tea, and sat on the floor cushions that surrounded the room against the walls, watching the door.