Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  Otterness put both hands on Alan’s thighs. How much better they felt there, than around his throat.

  “Then just try. That’s all I ask.”

  Alan’s eyes widened in astonishment. “That’s all?”

  Otterness smiled. “And why not? That’s all life asks.”

  4.

  Seen from three miles high, the autumnal Valley was an abstract composition illustrating the beauty of pure geometry and color. By far the greater part of the Valley was a mass of brilliant fiery foliage: from both ridgetops, down almost to the outhouses that were the most distal structures from the Mill, spread a carpet of orange and red and yellow treecrowns threaded with green, like a bed of inextinguishable coals salted with minerals.

  Trees bracketed the Mill and the dwellings of the workers. The Mill’s slate roof stretched straight down the Valley’s length, a fat gray line that swallowed a skinnier silver-blue and rippling turbulent one at the north and disgorged it at the south. The clustered houses—each village separated from the others on its side by sere brown fields—punctuated the exclamation mark that was the Mill like bisected umlauts somehow gone astray from their vowels, the punctual Mill and its outliers as a whole signifying the exclamatory pronunciation of some obscure but vital word.

  Beyond the Valley other settlements could be dimly apprehended. Of course, under further magnification they could be resolved to any required depth.

  The Factor, regarding the aerial view on the screens of his titanic spherical ship now hovering directly above the Mill, thought—insofar as he was capable of appreciation—that it was a rather esthetically pleasing vista.

  He was glad that he had gotten a chance to come here at last. As with all places in this miraculous universe, it was a sight worth seeing in and of itself. But it took on special meaning when one considered the remarkable product that was produced here and only here, in this archaic and time-lost Valley. From what he had heard, he had quite a reception in store when he set foot below to redeem the goods that had been stockpiled all year against his coming. He couldn’t know for sure, of course, until he jacked in, never having been here before.

  It was time now, he supposed, for that particular precontact necessity. Yet for a moment the Factor hesitated. He was unwontedly sentimental today, outside all his parameters. He supposed it stemmed from the fact that he was visiting this world for the first time in his long and limitless life span. His yearly round of planetary visits normally took him only to worlds he had been to at least once before. His coming here was a newness to be savored, arising from the rare disappearance elsewhere of the Factorial ship previously assigned here. The next time he visited this world, it would be as one returning to the familiar. There would be no exciting thrill of the heretofore unseen to add a touch of spice to his unvarying and solitary life. And although the Factor had been designed to tolerate a degree of boredom and regularity which would have driven a human insane, he still found newness a thing not unwelcome in small doses.

  So for a few minutes the Factor merely reclined in his chair and studied the view offered on his remote panels. When he had drunk his fill of these visual stimuli, he reached with both hands up and behind his padded headrest, grasping a node-studded wire cage which he swung up on its arm until it rested securely atop his skull.

  Then he jacked in.

  When he arose a second later, he knew the whole history of this world. Not dating from its initial settlement by humans, of course. Those records were long ago vanished, destroyed or mislaid when the Concordance disintegrated in a galaxywide psychic calamity, or evolutionary leap. No, the history that the Factor had so effortlessly internalized began after the Inwardness, when the Factors had been created, almost as an afterthought, to partially resume a role that most of mankind had abandoned. Interstellar travel no longer appealed to those human societies capable of it. Integrating themselves into the Bohmian implicate order that underlay external reality, they had moved on to other, less visible concerns. Still, those who had turned Inward had not wholly severed themselves from their primitive cousins elsewhere, the mental Neanderthals who had failed to make the transition, and continued to maintain an obscure and manipulative concern with information and products from other worlds.

  Not that those who had turned Inward could really use material goods as they once used to.

  The Factors now obediently and disinterestedly served to link, in an almost gratuitous fashion, the scattered and devolved human communities around the galaxy that had not turned Inward.

  The Factors had discovered—or rediscovered—this world over four centuries ago. They had fastened on one product as being of interest to their human motivators. They had encouraged the production of the luxcloth in the manner that seemed best to their semiautonomous intellects, stimulating competition and diversity every generation or so by ordering a new mill complex to be constructed. Elaborate rituals had evolved around the visit of a Factor—which ceremonies were not discouraged, contributing as they did toward respect and compliance.

  And now the cycle had come round again. It was time for this Factor to initiate the familiar exchange which he had never actually participated in before. And also time to order the new mill built. That was imperative. The old Factor’s resolve to order new construction was plain in the inherited memories the new Factor had received. He had no worries that the populace would balk at the commands, no doubts that this might not be the best course for them and their world.

  Such concerns were simply not an issue that mattered to the Factor or those who directed him, and hence were not included in his complex programming.

  The Factor moved off his couch. He was tall and supple- jointed, clad in a slick almost rubbery black suit that merged imperceptibly into boots. His features were nondescript almost to the point of invisibility; his head was hairless; his limbs, although not heavily muscled, seemed powerful. His irises were silver.

  Beside a metallic cabinet tall as himself, the Factor stopped. He picked out a sequence on a keypad blazoned with icons. In a slot at waist level materialized a bar of worthless atomically pure gold. The Factor crooked his right arm, picked up the ingot with his other hand, and placed it on his horizontal forearm up near his elbow. Another brick appeared; it went next to the first. This continued until the Factor held, apparently effortlessly, about a score of stacked ingots that must have weighed well over two hundred pounds.

  Without haste the Factor exited the main cabin of his ship. Passage through corridors and portals brought him to a huge bay filled with auxiliary craft. There the Factor entered a landing pod. He piled the gold neatly on a floating pallet waiting inside the spherical pod. He sat in the command chair, activated the pod’s screens and drive. Several panels showed various views of the Valley, while one disclosed the big ship itself, as if seen from a small device already on the ground. In this last screen the Factor witnessed his pod’s departure. Like a cell budding, the daughter craft separated from the floating sphere and rapidly dropped, down toward its tradition-bound meeting.

  Within less than a minute, under swift acceleration and deceleration whose forces the Factor did not appear to feel, the pod came to a rest on the earth. The Factor got to his feet. He caused the outer door to open.

  The natives awaited him. It was impressive in a primitive way, as a school of bright fish might be.

  The pod had arrived roughly halfway along the length of the Mill, settling in the middle of a vast playing field in a compacted bowl-shaped hollow worn by the accumulated landings of four hundred years. Here it would stay during the seven Days of Festival—a celebration that began soberly but soon escalated to what amounted to a bacchanalia utterly unlike anything indulged in during the rest of the year. A curious custom, thought the Factor, and one he would welcome the chance to observe.

  Stepping to the port, the Factor made his ritual initial appearance. The field had been decorated with bright pennons and streamers, all strung from a multitude of wooden poles. Numerous booths ha
d been erected by outsiders to the Valley, who arrived each year to share in the new prosperity. Here were sold such items as food and drink and clothing, jewelry and geegaws, and other novel diversions distinct from the familiar goods in the Company Store. This was the only time hoarded coins circulated in the Valley, as the elaborate credit and barter system utilized by the Valley dwellers could not extend to outsiders, who demanded payment in solid currency.

  Beyond the booths were sixteen billowing tents, striped with the colors of the individual mills, their flaps closed against competitors and the curious. Inside these awaited samples of the year’s luxcloth, trucked from the various storerooms, ready for the Factor’s inspection.

  A ramp extruded itself from the Factor’s feet to the ground. At the foot of the ramp waited sixteen men, mostly old, wearing their freshly cleaned and pressed black suits and white shirts and heavy shoes, all so drab compared to the shining stuff they produced. Beyond them clotted a tremendous crowd, all respectfully hushed.

  The Factor raised a gloved hand. The hush intensified in an indescribable fashion, as if silence could be doubled and redoubled like noise, until it reached a magnitude almost painful.

  “I am here to judge and to winnow,” said the Factor, shattering the loud silence with the words instilled in him, “to separate dross and chaff from the pure and valuable. Whatever satisfies me I will buy, and the fame of your work will travel with me among the stars.”

  “We are ready,” the Master Luminaries chorused simply.

  A nearly visible wave of relaxation coursed through the crowd of workers, as the greeting was completed according to form. Murmurs of speculation and excitement sounded like a minor duplication of the Mill’s normal purring, which was absent during the Festival.

  The Factor descended the ramp, the Master Luminaries parting to allow him into their middle. As a group, the men and the Factor moved off.

  Now the Factor experienced the familiar yet always disorienting doubling of perceptions and memories that never failed to accompany jacking in. He possessed all the memories of all his brother Factors who had ever visited this world, yet not totally integrated into his private consciousness. Thus all he saw appeared at first mysterious and strange, then a second later, totally explicable and mundane.

  Striving to completely internalize his artificially acquired past, the Factor still found time to appreciate the spectacle before him. He had landed during late afternoon. Invisible tethers hauled down the big white sun, like some impossible dirigible, to below the western ridge. How good its autumnal heat felt, after the time spent within the ship, how clear and penetrating the blue-white light. And the smells of harvest time, the slight dampness and chill in the moving air.… They tingled on his chemoreceptors.

  Did these backward, unsophisticated folk realize the wonder of their world, of any world? Did they know how lucky they were just to inhabit such a bountiful globe, out of all the charred and dead and frozen ones the Factor had seen? For a brief moment the Factor almost envied them their uncomplicated primitive existence. They were so unlike the aloofly superior humans who had ventured Inward. The Factor felt a paternal care for these primitives envelop him. He was glad to be able to provide such a focus for their simple lives.

  It did not matter to the Factor then that he had been engineered to feel just such an emotion. After all, considered rationally, every creature, whether organic or not, was engineered to feel certain things.

  And this charming divertissement, the Days of Festival! What a lot of work and preparation had gone into this Mill Valley Mardi Gras! As a proportion of the Gross Planetary Product, expenditures for this affair were quite significant. The Factor directed his gaze all about, careful to record everything, since he knew that when he returned to his human motivators his memories would be minutely and exquisitely probed and analyzed and correlated by those cryptic beings, for whatever they could extract and utilize in their enigmatic schemes.

  One of the Master Luminaries, the Factor suddenly realized, was addressing him. The Factor turned to face the man, as the group continued their traditional promenade among the booths, for the purpose of allowing everyone to circumspectly gape at the Factor and ascertain his awesome unchanging immortal reality for themselves.

  “Factor,” said the man, who had short grizzled hair and a thick jaw, “we realize it is late in the day, but perhaps we can still make a tour of the mill of your choice, so that you can see that we continue to abide by the old ways of production.”

  The Factor, after a fractional hesitation while he matched facial image to memory, replied, “Indeed, I think we can fit the tour in, Master Otterness. As I recall, I visited the mill of the Red Stalkers last year. This year.…”

  The Factor considered his choice. It would be well, he thought, to pay an honor to this very man, who had a record of being one of the Factor’s staunchest partisans. “This year, let it be your mill, the Blue Devils.”

  Watching the man swell with pride, the Factor congratulated himself on the political wisdom of his choice. It was good to sow envy and contention, for it raised the levels of creativity.

  Hearing the Factor’s decree, the Luminaries now directed their course toward the distant Mill. They soon reached the edges of the crowd. Ready to strike off down the path to the Mill, they were halted by Otterness’s sudden darting escape back into the crowd, from which he dragged forth a young man to join them.

  “Factor,” said Otterness, “you remember my assistant, I hope.”

  “Certainly. Charley, how are you?”

  The young man tugged at a short-billed cap he wore and inclined his head respectfully. “Very well, Factor. Very well. I— we’re all glad of your return.”

  Nodding beneficently, with an air of much wisdom, the Factor said, “We are all part of a master plan, Apprentice Cairncross, and I merely fulfill my part.”

  The Luminaries expressed their appreciation of this sentiment with various wordless sounds.

  After their mutual cooing was over, Otterness spoke the next words of the ritual. Chosen as host by the Factor, he could request the presence of one other member of his mill on the tour of inspection.

  “Factor, I wish to nominate as the extra member of our party my protégé, Charley Cairncross. After all, someday he will stand in my place, and might as well become accustomed to his future duties.”

  The other Luminaries harrumphed and coughed, jealous of the extra attention focused on the Blue Devil mill. But such unexpected shifts and seeming favoritism were necessary to keep this little hive of humanity humming. (The Factor even recalled, in his secondhand way, how one of the mills—not by far the strongest today—had been given reason to once name itself Factor’s Favorites.)

  “Of course, Master Otterness. I fully approve your choice.”

  Not daring to contravene or protest, the other Luminaries settled down to a ruffled acquiescence, and the group, enlarged by one, left behind the noisy, exuberant crowd and entered the shadow of the Mill.

  The tour of the strangely silent mill took several hours. In the elfinlit twilight the little party moved from section to section, among the resting hulking machines: carding, gilling, doubling, twisting, roving, spinning.… They ended up in the weaveroom, inspecting the unfinished lengths of lambent cloth. The Luminaries were all eyes, eager to see any secret blends Otterness might have carelessly left in the open. But the resident Luminary wore such a look of self-satisfaction that they knew any such things would have been hidden well in advance, in anticipation of just such a visit. After all, had they not taken just such precautions themselves?

  At last the tour of inspection was over. The Factor signified his approval of all he had seen, and the group rejoined the crowd outside. Now it was early evening. Odors of cooking drifted among the huge bonfires that had been lit. The material for these pyres, the Factor knew, was partially composed of discarded household items contributed by each family, in a ceremony of renewal that intrigued him. How easy if burning the old we
re all that was required to create the new.…

  The Factor was now brought to a long table draped with a piece of luxcloth that added its glow to the light from lamps and fires. He was seated at its middle, with eight Luminaries on either side. They all fell to eating. The Factor pretended to enjoy his food. Meanwhile he watched the crowd. There were no tables for the common workers, only scattered benches, and they took advantage of the constant movement of the crowd to circulate past the Factor’s table, watching him eat as if it were the most marvelous thing in the world.

  A familiar figure caught the Factor’s eye some distance away, and he magnified his vision. It was Charley Cairncross, with a group of people that the Factor surmised must be his relatives: a young wife with a toddler, an elderly couple that had to be his parents, a thin graceful youth and another young woman, whose resemblance to Charley made them his two siblings. Everyone in the little cluster seemed tense, the focus being the father. Charley, standing, bent over the seated patriarch in a cajoling fashion. The older man wore a sour face and stubbornly stared into the middle distance, apparently refusing to listen to his son. The Factor boosted his hearing and ran through several filter sequences, finally managing to extract a bit of their conversation from the general hubbub.

  “Da, try to be more cheerful. Alan, Floy, tell him he’s acting like a senseless old bull. There’s nothing to account for such an attitude. It’s Festival, after all, and we’re here to celebrate.”

  “What have we got to celebrate?” the father demanded. “What but another year of servitude?”

  “Da, don’t …,” said the brother, Alan.

  “Don’t talk to me, you little catamite. You’re as bad as your sister.”

  The Factor’s attention was distracted from this interesting display by the rising of the Master Luminary at his right, a skinny middle-aged man he identified as the overseer of the Landfish. The Master Luminary coughed several times until he had the attention of those closest to him. They fell quiet, and from them the silence spread among the workers, who began to draw in closely to the table. Soon the entire gathered populace, save for those at the very farthest extremes, was hushed and expectant beneath the watching stars.