Human Test

by E. M. Foner

  “So who is Kim supposed to be?”

  Sue pulled away and looked at me like I had rocks in my head.

  “Justin’s former apprentice?” I hazarded a guess.

  “Sometimes I think you’re finally beginning to get it,” my second-in-command said, giving me a quick hug. “I’ll be upstairs working on my report and spending some quality time with my cats. Did I tell you they’re both expecting?”

  “Kittens, right?” Six months of living in the same house with Sue and eBeth had taught me that it was easier to cover up my social deficiencies if they thought I was joking all of the time.

  Even before she finished her perfunctory laugh, I graded my interactions for the last twenty minutes and gave myself an internal pat on the back. The two correct guesses had put me over fifty percent in my conversations with Sue and eBeth since arriving on Reservation, and the second derivative showed that my accuracy was increasing. It was only a matter of time now before the women in my life stopped treating me like the village idiot.

  Two

  “You’re trying to sell me something, aren’t you, Mark?” Sophus asked suspiciously. “Whenever you start talking about efficiency, I feel the urge to hide my wallet.”

  “I just want to make your life easier,” I protested. “The calculator is free. I’m taking them around to all of the millers in the area.”

  “Including Cleo?” Sophus and his brother, Cleo, had fallen out over business differences after the death of their father and were now rivals.

  “No, and if you’d just look at the calculator you’d see why. It’s strictly for waterwheels. Your brother runs a windmill.”

  “Ought to be a law against those things,” Sophus grumbled. “My niece lives a five-minute walk from that eyesore her father built and she swears she can hear it squeaking in her sleep.”

  I made a mental note to order more lubricant from the supplier and shoved the custom slide rule into the miller’s calloused hand.

  “You won’t have to guess at the sluice gate heights anymore,” I told him. “You just set the cursor on the top scale to the flow rate and read off the millstone RPMs on the bottom scale. It couldn’t be simpler.”

  “The moving glass piece with the line on it is the cursor?” he asked. “I’ve seen my daughter using something like this for the astronomy homework she brings home from the academy on vacation. So what’s the purpose of the sliding scale in the middle?”

  “That gives you the expected yield in flour based on the crop,” I told him. “Plus, if you’re grinding on shares rather than charging per weight, you can figure out your profit ahead of time.”

  “So this row of digits on the slider is the number of bags of grain?” He tapped it with a thick fingernail.

  “I did it as weight since the bag size isn’t as standard as you might think. The top line on the slider is for wheat, the one below it is corn, and the next one is barley. The bottom line is your profit in coppers.”

  “It’s a lot of numbers,” he complained, but I could see he was intrigued by the operation, and I stood by silently as he worked through a couple of calculations based on orders he’d recently filled. “I guess it might save me a little time,” Sophus finally allowed. “How much?”

  “It’s a gift.”

  The miller shoved the slide rule back in my hand. “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” he proclaimed, reminding me again that some of the ancestors of the local population had been transplanted from Earth less than two thousand years ago.

  “Between the two of us, you’re the one with the Greek name, and I’ll make my money when you call me for repairs. The calculator is part of my new advertising campaign.”

  Sophus looked at the slide rule again, and this time he read off the branding, “Mark’s Mechanical Repairs and Custom Engineering Solutions. The Eatery, Covered Bridge, Fourth Province, 8GJX-4D.”

  “There’s a free case to keep the dust out,” I added, handing him a leather sleeve with the same branding stamped in gilt.

  “I’m afraid you made a mistake with the new postal code,” he informed me. “We’re 4F.”

  “That’s because you’re on the other side of the Weir River,” I told him. “The Village of Covered Bridge is 4D, and Old Bridge is 4E.”

  “I’ll never get used to the new system,” Sophus complained. “If it wasn’t for the pre-punched postage I wouldn’t use it at all. How can a few little holes in a scrap of stiff paper stuck to the edge of the envelope make it easier to deliver the mail?”

  “You must have seen the punch cards some of the mechanical looms use to repeat standard patterns. It’s the same principle, except the postal service uses the holes to mechanically sort the letters without somebody having to read every address. Simon showed me a gelatin silver print of the main sorting room at the provincial capital. They handle hundreds of thousands of letters a day.”

  “Where do they get the power to do that? Windmills?”

  “They have a take-off wheel on the aqueduct and overhead belts on the sorting floor, just like a machine shop powered by a dam. People in the capital have been complaining for hundreds of years that their water pressure was too high, so the department of public works killed two birds with one stone.”

  “I’ll let you know how this works out,” Sophus said, setting the slide rule on the high shelf behind the large scale. “So you rode all the way out here just to give me this?”

  “Sue told me that your wife was having a problem with her sewing machine. They’re in the same weaving circle.”

  “What are you getting for Ferrymen’s Day?” he asked, suddenly sounding like a small boy.

  “Whatever Sue sees fit to give me,” I replied, in keeping with my cover. The inhabitants of Covered Bridge believe that Sue and I are married and that eBeth is our daughter. The last thing I wanted was to make a slip that would have the whole village gossiping about us like Justin and Kim. “I wouldn’t mind a new saddle for my bicycle.”

  “I’m getting a telescope,” he said. “A reflector, so I can keep up with what Athena is learning in academy.” He put his hands together with the fingers intermeshed and held his arms out from his body in a hoop. “The mirror is going to be this big.”

  “That’s the size of the reflector at the observatory in Springfield,” I said, naming the nearby academy town, “but whatever it is, let me know if you need help setting it up. My niece is an expert.”

  “Helen? No offense, Mark, but I don’t know if I want that woman around my daughter. Word is that she’s a bit fast.”

  “Only on her bicycle, Sophus. Now I’d better stop inside and see your better half before she sends Sue a note with your messenger dog asking where I am. I don’t want to end up with a lump of coal for my Ferrymen’s Day gift.”

  The miller chuckled at my open admission of who ruled the roost. “What are you giving your wife?” he asked as I was leaving.

  “Still shopping,” I replied with a vague hand wave, though his question gave me pause. Was Sue expecting me to give her a Ferrymen’s Day present? I made a mental note to check with eBeth.

  The miller’s messenger dog greeted me with a tail thump as I took the short path from the mill to the cottage. Mercurys, or “Go, Boys,” as they were familiarly known, had been bred on Reservation to carry messages and small packages in the unending rural sprawl of small farms and hamlets. A trained Mercury could remember a hundred or more specific locations or individuals by name. The Eatery had a thriving takeout business at lunchtime, the messenger dogs showing up with orders and coins and returning to their masters with the food in saddlebags.

  “Come in, Mark,” Palti greeted me at the door of the large post-and-beam cottage. “I just made cookies. Sue tells me that you’re a big fan of oatmeal-raisin.”

  “That’s right,” I lied, raisins being a particular problem for my encounter suit since they tended to swell in the holding tank and stick to the walls unless I run an extra flush cycle. “I always wondered what you ladies talked about
while knotting rugs and now I guess I know.”

  “She’s very proud of you and your daughter. We’ve never had a clockmaker living in the village before, and when you finish training eBeth, we’ll have two.”

  “Sue told me there’s a problem with your sewing machine,” I said, taking three warm cookies from the proffered plate in a demonstration of enthusiasm. When Palti turned her back to set the plate on her side table, I slipped one of the cookies in my pocket and declared, “Tasty.” The miller’s wife smiled at me over her shoulder as I made appreciative chewing motions.

  “The treadle doesn’t move,” she summed up the sewing machine’s problem. “I asked Sophus to look at it, but he’s only good with equipment that weighs at least as much as he does, and Athena is more of a theoretician.”

  “Did she offer a hypothesis?”

  “Does ‘I think something is jammed’ count?”

  “That’s a reasonable guess. Why don’t we have a look?” As soon as she turned her back, I slipped a second cookie into my pocket. I’d have to remember to take them out for eBeth or I’d end up with Spot’s slobber and crumbs in there when he sniffed them out.

  Palti led me to the old treadle sewing machine that she had inherited from her mother, who had no doubt received it from her own mother and so on for a number of generations. The basic technology was frozen in time due to the Ferrymen’s prohibition on electrical generation, but the foot-powered design was an elegant engineering solution, and like vintage machines on Earth, the iron scrollwork that supported the table made an artistic statement that is so often missing from later industrial periods.

  Treadles are widely used on Reservation when water or wind power isn’t practical, especially for the small machines like wood lathes and grindstones that are so common in cottage-based production. In addition to subsistence farming, most of the landowners in the area sell their excess or raise a specialty crop for export to nearby towns or transport by barge to the capital city via the network of canals that has been developed over thousands of years. The majority of farm families also practice one or more crafts to supplement their income, selling wooden bowls, leather-work, and other items to the Ferrymen for export off-world.

  “Athena’s hypothesis was spot on,” I told Palti, who beamed proudly at her daughter’s acumen. “It’s not in the treadle mechanism or I’d see the jam right off. I’ll have to check the transmission.”

  “Take all the time you need. I’m making another batch of cookies so you can take them home with you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and as soon as she left, I slipped the final cookie into my pocket. As in most homes, the crafting room had the best natural sunlight, provided by large windows with dozens of panes of bulls-eye glass. I quickly located the problem, a buildup of lint holding a fragment of broken needle in just the wrong place where it jammed the gears, and I was able to finesse it out without even returning to my bicycle for the tool kit. Sometimes my encounter suit’s ability to blow air like a compressor really comes in handy. I pumped the treadle a few times and nodded in satisfaction.

  “Don’t tell me you need to mail-order parts,” Palti begged when I returned to the kitchen much sooner than she expected. “Couldn’t your friend Paul make whatever’s necessary? I’m willing to pay a bit more to save a couple of weeks.”

  “No parts required,” I told her. “You’re all set.”

  “You really are as talented as your wife is always telling us,” Palti said, and for a moment, I wondered if I’d detected a subtle criticism of Sue’s one-woman admiration society in the compliment. “How much do I owe you?”

  “The cookies are pay enough,” I told her. “Besides, I needed an excuse to stop by and see your husband, but I do have to be getting back to the village now.”

  “I thought you only worked nights in The Eatery.”

  “Yes, but the school’s headmaster wants to see me, and I’ll use the opportunity to look in on eBeth’s class.”

  “You know, nobody would ever take you for foreigners,” Palti said, handing me a paper sack of cookies. “If it wasn’t for eBeth and Paul’s apprentice not speaking the language when you all arrived, we would have thought you were just moving from the next province over.”

  “That’s because eBeth and Peter grew up on the northern continent after we were shipwrecked,” I fibbed, in accordance with our cover story. “The rest of us were born and bred in Province Eleven, and though it’s a long way from here, life is pretty much the same.”

  I wheeled my eight-speed bike out of the miller’s yard, hopped onto the narrow saddle, and began pedaling down the long drive to the aptly named Miller’s Road. The sound of a baying hound and a tan streak cutting through the extensive vegetable garden informed me that I was engaged in a race. Unfortunately, the messenger dog had chosen the right angle, and even though I pumped as hard as I could without breaking traction or risking damage to the bike, he intercepted me just as I turned onto the road.

  For a few seconds I tried to ignore the dog’s frantic barking and the dramatic snaps, but finally I was compelled to give in and pay his tithe. The Mercury, who had been tortured by the smell of baking all morning, caught the oatmeal-raisin cookie neatly in his mouth and skidded to a halt to enjoy the fruits of his efforts. Like many of the dogs living at local farms, he was a washout from the postal service’s Mercury training school, and I suspected that it was his predilection for chasing bicycles that cost him a shot at a civil service job.

  Miller’s Road ran directly into Provincial Highway 73, which was the east-west road that also served as the main street for Covered Bridge. Like most rural highways off the main trading routes, it was a dirt road that could get pretty messy in the rain, but there wasn’t enough traffic to justify an upgrade. The main commercial arteries running between provinces were two-lane stone roads that would have made the Romans jealous, and the tow roads running alongside the canal network were generally “improved,” depending on the local conditions.

  “Where’s the fire?” an older rider called to me as I shot past at more than double the speed he was making.

  “Just doing a little sprint to test a repair,” I called back, braking at the same time to allow him to catch up. Saul was plugged into the provincial government through his job as the county safety inspector and not a person I wanted taking an interest in my actions.

  “I heard the miller’s dog barking so I wasn’t surprised,” he said with a chuckle. “Did you buy him off?”

  “I gave him a cookie,” I said with a nod. “What brings you all the way out here this morning?”

  “Cyrus has his sheep in the high pasture and he reported seeing something funny at the last triple moon. Can you think of any reason a person would be out on the mountain digging holes at night?”

  Unfortunately, the reason that immediately came to mind was Paul burying pop-up masts for the antenna array, but I wasn’t going to share my suspicion with Saul.

  “Planting something?” I suggested.

  “Wrong season, wrong dirt, wrong altitude,” Saul replied, giving me a sidelong glance with his sharp hazel eyes. “Try again?”

  “Mining for gold? I’ve heard that a man could make a living panning some of those streams running down the Twelve Sisters into our valley.”

  “In the dark?” he asked skeptically.

  “You said it was a triple moon,” I pointed out. “Besides, Old Cyrus is half-blind, so if he thought he saw somebody digging, there must have been enough light to work. Assuming it wasn’t one of the Originals.”

  “And that’s why I’m going out to check,” the inspector said. “We don’t get too many of the natives this far west, but there have been an unusual number of sightings in the area lately, and it’s part of my job to make sure that nobody interferes with them. It’s funny that the Ferrymen are so protective of the Originals, but who knows the minds of Sky Gods.”

  I knew exactly why the humans on Reservation were forbidden from directly interfering with the O
riginals but I couldn’t explain to the inspector that the Ferrymen were playing by the League’s rules. There was no prohibition against colonizing sparsely occupied planets, even though it was taken for granted that this would interfere with the natural development of primitive natives, but intentional interactions were still subject to regulation.

  “Are you familiar with the history of our first contact?” he continued.

  “Just what I know from school,” I offered the expected answer.

  “When the Ferrymen first brought us to Reservation and gave us the covenant, they explained that we were welcome here as permanent guests, but the world was already occupied. Our ancestors were introduced to the Originals, but the natives didn’t have the capacity for language, at least, not spoken language. The safety inspectors do a rough census of Originals every ten years, but their numbers appear to be stable.”

  “And low.”

  “Barely enough for a breeding population, I’d think, not that anybody has ever reported seeing any offspring. But the Ferrymen banned our scholars from studying the Originals and we train our children to walk away if they ever encounter one.”

  “It’s not a bad compromise for two species sharing the same planet,” I said. “There’s no overlap between your food sources, and the natives are solitary night foragers who prefer the hills and swamps. I haven’t seen any evidence that the Originals are frightened of humans and I’m sure they would find a way to express their complaints if there was any serious friction. Their cliff-art and food preservation techniques display higher cognitive functions.”

  “No, there’s no overlap between our food sources,” Saul said, and his emphasis on ‘our’ made me aware of my earlier verbal slip. “You seem to have more interest in the subject than most people.”

  “Here’s my turn,” I declared, veering towards the bridle path that led the back way to the school. “I hope you stop by The Eatery on your way home. I won’t be there because I’ve got a repair in Old Furnace this afternoon, but tell them I said it’s on the house.”