Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  The Master Luminary spoke loudly. “The Factor will now address us.” Then he sat down.

  On cue, the Factor arose. He made the requisite internal adjustments, and when he began to speak his voice boomed out without distortion, carrying almost over the entire crowd. Of duty and reward and the happy unchanging durable nature of their lives the Factor spoke at length, varying his speech only slightly from previous years. The crowd seemed to appreciate it, in a sleepy fashion. But the Factor’s closing words caused them to grow alert.

  “And now I call upon you—you lucky ones, who labor for worthy ends in the Mill, and share in the bounty of the system—to extend your generosity. I call upon you to arrange construction of a new addition to the glory of the Mill, so that more outsiders may share your humble, shining way of life, and cause the wonder of the luxcloth to spread even farther throughout the stars.”

  The Factor ceased speaking. There was silence for a strained moment from the assembled listeners. Then someone vented a loud if dutiful huzzah, and soon the night air was split with calls and cries and whistles and yells. The bonfires blazed higher, and the crowd began to move again.

  Sitting, the Factor received the congratulations of the Master Luminaries, all of whom pledged their best to hasten the construction of the new mill.

  Curiosity subroutines moved the Factor to look for the Cairncross family once more, when the hullabaloo had died down a bit. But the affecting tableau they had formed was nowhere to be seen, broken up and dispersed like flotsam in a stream.

  The night wore on. The Factor catalogued many more experiences in his unwearying way. Everything and anything might be of interest to his masters.

  The first man to spot the fire break through the roof of the Mill ended the celebration. His sickened curdled shouts of “Fire! Fire in the Mill!” brought the Master Luminaries and the Factor to their feet.

  All eyes now turned to the Mill, there to confirm the alarm.

  From the roof of the immense structure licked as yet tiny tongues of flame, evilly alive against the dead hide of the stolid creature that was the nonsentient but ensouled Mill. Even as the dumbstruck people watched, the flames seemed to grow in strength and power.

  Otterness broke the trance. “Get men down into the cellars!” he shouted, referring, the Factor knew, to where the hidden river could be reached. “We must form the bucket brigades!”

  Otterness moved then as if to lead the rush to his threatened beloved mill, but the Factor restrained him. “There is no need to endanger your people. My ship is quite capable of ending this blaze. I will issue the commands from my pod.”

  Shouts of “Praise the Factor!” quickly mounted. Otterness looked uneasy, however, but restrained himself. The Factor traversed the short distance to his pod and gave orders for the mother ship to drop and begin spraying.

  He returned to the table of Luminaries. All the Masters looked nervous. The Factor noticed Otterness was missing. He asked where the man had gone.

  “To the Mill,” replied the Landfish Master. “He and his Apprentice insisted on going in. We tried to stop them, Factor, but they would not listen. Honestly, they wouldn’t.”

  The Factor considered. The substance his craft would soon begin spraying was a chemical flame retardant which might asphyxiate the men. He could not be responsible for their deaths. That was an integral part of his programming. His policy of benign neglect of their whole society was not consistent with this individual and particular loss of life.

  “I will rescue them. Please insure that no one else tries such an irrational thing.”

  Then the Factor was off.

  Moving faster than any human could have, he covered the distance to the Mill in a blur.

  At the entrance doors he looked up. Like a falling moon his ship had descended. Even now it was beginning to discharge the retardant. Without choice the Factor went in.

  Here on the first floor the only signs of the fire were smoke and hot dead air. With crystal-clear memory the Factor summoned up the location of the stairs. In seconds he had gained the second floor; seconds later, the third.

  A smoky crackling inferno greeted him at the head of the stairs. The incredible popping noise of destructing bricks resounded sharply at intervals. Heat assaulted his senses, and he could barely see. He switched to infrared. The loci of flames leapt out of the confusion. Stepping out onto the floor the Factor set out to find the men, who he was fairly certain would have rushed uselessly here, to the center of the disaster.

  All the ceiling timbers above the Factor were ablaze. He heard the rain of chemicals descending, but knew that this third floor at least would definitely be lost, no matter what.

  “Otterness!” bellowed the Factor. “Cairncross! Where are you? There is no need!”

  The Factor’s supersensitive hearing seemed to distinguish faint calls from deep within the Mill. He pushed on, ignoring the flames that frequently lapped at him. Twice he had to lift a fallen flaming timber from his path.

  Emerging from one such barrier into a relatively clear eddy, the Factor realized he had come upon the men.

  Oddly, there seemed to be three. The Factor switched back to normal vision to resolve the discrepancy.

  Yes, three men struggled in a mass. One was the elder Cairncross. He held a can of oil in his hands with which he fed the flames. Trying to restrain him were Charley and Otterness. But the wild man’s strength seemed indomitable, and he continued to sprinkle his oil like a satanic priest asperging his congregation of devils.

  The Factor rushed forward and effortlessly scooped up Charley and Otterness like two weightless sacks, tossing them over his shoulders.

  Charley’s father, now released, raked them all with a final frantic glare and, letting forth a tremulous soul-bursting scream comprised of years of pent-up inexpungable frustration and bitterness, hurled himself headlong into the nearest flames.

  “Da!” screamed Charley, and tried to break free. But the Factor held him tight. Gripping the men with steely strength, the Factor turned and made for the stairs. He moved so fast and unerringly through the least damaging flames that by the time he emerged out into the open air Charley and Otterness had suffered only minor smoke inhalation and burns.

  Depositing his burdens upon their own shaky feet, the Factor turned toward the Mill. His ship was dropping mechanical remote units into the building through the gaps in the roof to battle the remaining spot fires. Everything seemed under control.

  Sensing a vast crowd behind him, the Factor turned to confront it. Surprisingly he saw that their shocked attention was concentrated on him rather than the subsiding conflagration. Raising a hand to command them, he realized why.

  The Factor’s suit had burned away in many spots. So had much of his artificial flesh. The hidden titanium armatures that articulated him shone through. Touching his face he found it gone.

  “It is all right,” the Factor said. The people backed away unconsciously when he spoke out of his charred indestructible self. “It is all right,” the Factor uselessly repeated. “The fire is under control. Everything will be as it was.”

  But even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true.

  5.

  At the mouth of the Valley, the caravan came to a halt. The lead steam-carriage, an elegant Whaleford six-passenger landau, shuddered to a stop, bringing the ones behind it—a mixed lot of cargo carriers, with tents lashed to their roofs—to an obedient standstill. Geartrains disengaged, the cars thrummed with the silent power of their coal-fired Tarcat boilers.

  The lead vehicle, as were all the others, was emblazoned with the gilt crest of Factor’s Head University: a blank-eyed mechanical face replete with fanciful rivets, surmounted by a depiction of the constellation known as Factor’s Ship. Completing the heraldry was a banner bearing the motto: “Growth From Ashes.” The hood of the landau bore a silver ornament in the shape of a wainwalker, those stolid beasts gone these many years from the streets of Tarrytown City where the University was located.r />
  The doors of the landau swung open now, revealing plush- padded inner panels, and its passengers emerged into the bright summer sunlight. Overhead, a soaring cliff kestrel banked and let out a scream.

  The driver of the Whaleford was a middle-aged man dressed still in the professorial garb he affected when in the classroom: a lightweight vested suit of flaxen dreamworm cloth, imported from the tropics, and a pair of ankle-high leather boots. In this conservative outfit he resembled any of his fellow pedants. Only in his choice of neckwear did he exhibit any oddity or individuality of taste. For the man wore an antique tie made of the old-fashioned stuff known as lux. In the light of the sun it cast its own radiance. An expert in antiquities had confirmed family legends regarding the tie: it was a blend of Palefire and Idlenorth fibers, one of the last fabrics ever created by the defunct Mill.

  Now the passengers of the lead car—four men and two women—were joined by others from the cargo vehicles. These latter folk were plainly laborers. Together, the crowd faced north. Shading their eyes, they raised their faces to the sky.

  Someone whistled; a woman gasped; one of the laborers said, “I’ll be a fur-faced abo—”

  The driver of the landau spoke. “It’s impressive, all right. Especially up this close. I’ve had the Factor’s Head explain it to me a dozen times now, and I still don’t understand the exact nature of what keeps it up there. I don’t think well be ready to grasp it for another generation or two. But remember—strange as it seems to us, it’s only science.”

  What captivated the visitors to the Valley was the sight of the Factor’s mother ship. Suspended like a lost silver moon above the ruins of the Mill halfway up the Valley, it hung as motionless as a mountain. The only evidence of any sort of imperfection was several open hatches. Thus it had remained for decades, tenantless and unvisited, by either planet-dweller or one of its mates from the stars.

  The leader of the expedition spoke again. “Well, we’d best continue. We need to set up camp before nightfall, and we’ve still got a few miles to go to reach the site. And if the old road ahead is anything like what we’ve traversed so far, it’ll be slow going. This is hardly the Grand Concourse. No pavement here.”

  “Nor no ladies of low virtue either,” added one of the laborers, provoking much laughter which served to relieve the slight tension they had all been feeling.

  The crowd broke up. One of the other drivers opened wide the door of his vehicle’s boiler, exposing the open flame to add more fuel. At that moment, someone shouted.

  “Professor Cairncross! Look!”

  From out of the undergrowth paralleling the track emerged a squat mechanism. Big as a footstool, it moved stiffly on three spidery legs, advancing on the carrier with the open firebox.

  The intruder was suddenly the focus of a dozen rifles and pistols carried as protection against dire wolves and other wildlife. Professor Cairncross stopped the men before they could fire.

  “No, don’t—I think I know what it is.…”

  The automaton homed in unerringly on the open flames. Once upon them, it swivelled a nozzle at the heat source. A sound of dry pumping ensued. After a few moments of this fruitless activity, the little mechanism lowered its nozzle in defeat, collapsed its legs underneath itself, and sank to the ground.

  “Let’s go,” said Professor Cairncross. “And remember, whatever curious things we may see, they’ll all be as harmless as what you’ve just witnessed.”

  In the car and once more in motion, the passengers of the landau were silent for a time. Then one of the women spoke.

  “Are you really so certain, Charles, that we won’t encounter any dangers?”

  “Basically, Jennifer, I am. The oral history and the written accounts all tally. The Factor’s ship never disgorged anything except him, his lighter and the clockwork firefighters. It’s true that after the Valley emptied other constructs may have landed, but it seems highly unlikely. It was all under the Factor’s control, and once he suffered his fate, he was unable to contact his ship via the lighter. He’s told me so often enough. And though one must always take the Head’s talk with a grain of salt—the damage it suffered manifests itself in strange ways—I’m inclined to believe him in this case.”

  “Well, you certainly sounded confident enough. I’m sure the workers were heartened.”

  Professor Cairncross appeared embarrassed. “Just part of my job, after all. We wouldn’t have much success in our dig if we were always looking over our shoulders for some alien menace. No, I expect that the most well meet will be a few friendly ghosts.”

  The road was indeed nearly impassable in spots. The expedition had to stop often to fell with axes the larger trees which had grown on the median strip; the centuries-compacted dirt ruts had proved more impenetrable to seedlings. Through the dense foliage running alongside the old track, they could catch occasional glimpses of the Mill and its many associated dwellings, the residences all broken-roofed and shatter-windowed. They encountered no more ancient firefighters, but the going was still slow. It took till dusk to reach the site selected by Professor Cairncross and his fellow archaeologists.

  The Field of the Festival was nearly all overgrown with copses of sapodilla and jacaranda. However, a grassy clearing about the size of a ballfield remained, not far from the road. Here they chose to pitch their tents, leaving the vehicles lined up in the track.

  While the tents were being raised, Professor Cairncross took Jennifer and the rest of his University colleagues on a beeline across the tree-dotted field. What directed him, he found hard to say. Surely hours of studying old maps had a lot to do with his certainty, as did hours of listening to his grandfather and namesake ramble on in his half-cogent, half-dotty way about life in the Mill Valley. But there was more guiding him than these things; it was an instinct almost genetic, a rising of ancestral feelings and memories.

  Within minutes they had come upon the Factor’s little ship, trees growing right up to its walls. Grass—having sprouted in wind-deposited soil on the very ramp—licked at the door, into which leaves had blown. The scat of some animal wafted pungently from inside the vessel.

  Professor Cairncross’s excitement was nearly palpable, and transmitted itself to the others. Sweaty, dressed for city streets rather than cross-country trekking, their faces showing the rising welts from branches, his comrades did not protest when he said, “Let’s press on, toward the Mill. I want to find the Factor’s skeleton.”

  They burst from the marge of the woods, and stopped. The oily waste strip had resisted organic encroachments much more easily, and only the toughest weeds grew there. They had an unobstructed view in the gold and purple twilight of the sad, silent, sag-roofed Mill, parts of it crumbled by flooding of the Swolebourne, its middle portion still exhibiting the effects of the fire that had unmasked the Factor and precipitated his demise and the abandonment of the Mill.

  Professor Cairncross scanned the waste fruitlessly. Then Jennifer said, “There, that glint—”

  The metal armature of the Factor was wreathed in maidenhair, as if the earth strove to clothe it.

  Professor Cairncross shivered. “I can feel it as if it were yesterday. I’d sit on my gran’da’s knee, and he’d tell me how the Factor was decapitated with a dozen blows from a huge wrench, wielded by his old boss, Otterness. Once I thought I’d found the very wrench, an old rusty thing in my father’s shop. But it turned out to be much too new. I think I’d date my desire to do archaeology to that moment.”

  Jennifer said, “And look where it’s led you. To something much more exciting than an old wrench!”

  Back at the camp, a fire was already going. All throughout supper, they half expected more clockwork visitors, starting at every sound from the surrounding woods. But in this they were disappointed.

  As he fell asleep in Jennifer’s arms that night—their betrothal had been announced last month, and it had not taken them long to get a jump on the actual marriage—Professor Cairncross thought wistfully how w
onderful it was that this expedition, the first such, could include women. The Head’s revelation a generation ago of the dietary deficiency that had limited female births for so long, and how to correct it, was having far-reaching changes already.…

  In the morning, Professor Cairncross arose before the others, with first light. He felt the need to be alone with his thoughts and emotions.

  Wandering away from the camp without any intentions, he soon found himself among the brick houses of a Village. In one such, his ancestors had passed their whole lives. It was nearly inconceivable.…

  Outside the Village, he came upon an old midden of waste bricks, nearly concealed by vegetation. Time and the elements had softened what must have once been a formidable pile. Moved by some urge he could not explain, excitement mounting in his breast, Professor Cairncross climbed awkwardly to the top. It took only a few adult steps.

  Yet when he stood atop the brick pile, sourceless tears tickling his cheeks, he felt master of all he surveyed, and king of the world.

  Am I being fair in allowing this sour little parable to close out a collection of stories revolving around the theme of work? It’s certainly a bitter ending for a volume that strives to offer balanced portraits of a variety of vocations and workplaces, and attitudes toward same.

  On the other hand, who hasn’t felt—while sitting through a useless meeting or while performing a pointless task—just like the Kafkaesque protagonist of this tale?

  As Arthur C. Clarke has blithely remarked with a godlike perspective, “Work is a temporary aberration in the history of our species.”

  I say we get our licks in against the institution while it’s still around!

  The Boredom Factory