The Outsorcerer's Apprentice

by Tom Holt

  Gordon stopped and made a perfunctory nod towards the black box, then turned and went back the way he’d come. When they were back in the cloister and the great door had shut behind them, Mr Greenlander could bear it no longer. “What was that?” he hissed.

  “Ssh,” Gordon replied. “Tell you in a minute.”

  Three monks were walking towards them, heads lowered, hands in sleeves, chanting softly. Then, quite suddenly, one of them dropped to the ground. The other two walked on, as though nothing had happened, while the fallen monk writhed and twisted on the ground for perhaps three seconds, and then lay perfectly still—

  “No,” Gordon hissed under his breath, before Mr Greenlander could move. “Leave it.”

  “But—”

  “Shh.”

  They had to step over the fallen monk. He was lying on his back, his eyes and mouth wide open, absolutely motionless. Mr Greenlander tried to stop, but Gordon held his arm in a grip like a mole-wrench and hustled him towards the small door they’d come in through.

  Once they were outside, back in the forest glade, Mr Greenlander tugged the invisibility cloak off over his head and threw it on the ground. “That monk—”

  “It’s fine,” Gordon snapped at him, “don’t worry about it. Now put the cloak back on right now, or I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”

  He said it so grimly that Mr Greenlander reluctantly obeyed. “Look,” he whimpered as his head disappeared, “what is that place? It’s—”

  “It’s a computer server,” Gordon said. “Come on, this way. I know a short cut to the stirrer plant.”

  He set off walking so briskly that Mr Greenlander had to trot to keep up. “A what?”

  Gordon smiled. “Think about it,” he said. “What’s the biggest headache of the IT revolution? Servers, right? You need a huge great building full of really expensive, temperamental machinery, which pumps out kilowatts and kilowatts of heat, so you’ve got to spend a fortune on sophisticated ventilation systems; the capacity is never enough and the electricity bill’s a killer. Result; overheads so far over your head they’re halfway to Alpha Centauri.”

  Mr Greenlander couldn’t help wincing; sore subject. “Yes, but—”

  “So instead,” Gordon went on, “why not adopt an organic approach? Instead of all that technology, simply download all those bits and megabytes of information into the brains of a bunch of monks?” He smiled proudly. “You don’t need me to remind you about the staggering storage and retrieval capabilities of the human brain. I’ve got twelve thousand monks in there, that’s all, and between them they can handle the entire output of five major home shopping networks, a leading search engine and a Latin American government. And,” he added, his voice close to breaking from emotion, “it doesn’t cost me a nickel.”

  “It–what did you just say?”

  Gordon shrugged. “They do it for free,” he said. “They think the voices in their heads are the word of God, they don’t want paying. And the pious locals give them food and stuff, so that’s all covered. Which means I can undercut the competition out of existence and still get a quite satisfactory return. It’s perfect. I’ve got ninety-six more like this one scattered about, and I’m planning on building another two hundred by this time next year.”

  Mr Greenlander could no longer feel his fingers and toes. “That’s—”

  “Yes,” Gordon said simply. “Isn’t it?”

  “But that monk, the one we saw—”

  “Oh, he just crashed, it happens all the time.” Gordon dismissed him with a vague gesture. “They overload, they freeze solid for a while, and then they’re right as rain. Usually it’s just a touch of software incompatibility, it doesn’t hurt them. Humans are amazingly resilient, you know. But when that happens to a machine, you’ve got outages that last for hours, and all the traffic lights go crazy in seventeen states.”

  “Yes, but—” Mr Greenlander’s mouth opened and closed, but no words came out. Sure, it didn’t seem right. But he’d seen it for himself, the monks had seemed genuinely serene and happy, and the cathedral was a place of beauty and joy. And all absolutely free—

  “That’s the key thing you have to understand about outsourcing,” Gordon went on. “It may look like ruthless exploitation from our decadent liberal sklavenmoral perspective, but to these people it’s great. It gives meaning to their lives, not to mention a higher standard of living than most of them have even dreamed of. And from the point of view of the hard-pressed businessman in today’s no-nonsense marketplace environment—”

  “Really and truly,” Mr Greenlander croaked hoarsely. “You don’t pay them anything?”

  “Not a cent. Well, no, I tell a lie.” Gordon frowned. “Twice a year I give them a dollar fifty, for their benevolent fund. They use the money for good causes in the local community. But that’s purely ex gratia, a goodwill gesture. Great for PR. I guess I’m just an old-fashioned philanthropist at heart.”

  “A buck fifty.”

  “Goes a very long way in these parts,” Gordon said. “Without getting too technical or giving away how this whole thing works, let’s say exchange rates are definitely in my favour. It’s all to do with gold in this reality having a negative atomic number. Right then, this way to the stirrer plant.”

  They walked on through dappled woods, silent apart from the faint distant piping of songbirds, occasionally passing broad clearings, where heaped bonfires of cut brash sent straight lines of smoke up into the breezeless sky, and from time to time a few derelict cottages, their thatch smothered in creeping honeysuckle. After they’d been walking for an hour, Mr Greenlander said, “So how big is this place?”

  “I told you,” Gordon replied. “As big as it needs to be. Ah, we’re here. I promise you, you’re going to love this.”

  A dense stand of ancient oaks had somehow appeared; it must have crept up on them while they were preoccupied. The trees were forty-foot fingers groping blindly for the sun, which glittered in ribbons between the softly swaying branches. Directly ahead of them, a roe deer froze, stared and bolted, her hooves barely stirring the leaf mould. In the middle distance there was a sun-dappled clearing, in which stood a long, low building, its thatched roof carpeted with red and gold autumn leaves.

  “In there,” Gordon said.

  The door was open and they walked in. It took Mr Greenlander a moment to get used to the light; then he saw a long workbench, and four white-haired old men in clean, worn overalls. One of them was slowly sawing lengthways through a forty-foot log with a handsaw, working by eye, but cutting a perfect straight line; he looked up and nodded respectfully at Gordon, then went back to work. Next to him, another man was planing a long plank until it was perfectly flat and smooth. The third man was painstakingly rounding off the corners of an already planed plank with a drawknife and a rasp. The fourth held a paintbrush; he was decorating a finished plank with the distinctive logo of a leading fast-food franchise. Leaning against the shed wall were about a thousand finished planks. The floor was ankle-deep in shavings and the air was heavy with the rich scents of newly cut wood and linseed oil.

  “Coffee stirrers,” Gordon said quietly.

  Mr Greenlander blinked. “What?”

  “Coffee stirrers,” Gordon repeated. “You know, the little wooden stick things? You twiddle them round in your latte, then dump them in the trash.”

  Did not compute. “They’re forty feet long,” Mr Greenlander pointed out.

  “Perspective differential,” Gordon replied. “In our terms, these guys are an inch tall. Over here, though, size really doesn’t matter. I guess,” he added with a grin, “it’s one of the reasons I like it so much.”

  The old man with the plane paused, crouched down beside the plank he’d been working on and examined it carefully, using the light from the shed’s one narrow window to identify any rough or uneven spots he’d missed. After about thirty seconds, he reached out his hand, marked a place with a stub of pencil, stood up and took a gentle, light cut
. A paper-thin shaving curled upwards from his plane and floated to the floor. Then he stooped again, to satisfy himself that the surface was now perfect.

  “Good work,” Gordon said cheerfully. “Carry on.”

  The four men turned and smiled at him, and he and Mr Greenlander quietly withdrew.

  “Coffee stirrers?”

  “That’s right,” Gordon said. “Of course, they can churn them out on a machine in Jiangxi province in China, but the cheapest they can do it for is eighty-seven cents a thousand. These guys, sixty-two cents a thousand, and that’s using sustainable hardwoods.”

  Mr Greenlander swallowed. “But they’re doing it all by hand,” he said. “However long does it take?”

  Gordon shrugged. “On a good day, they can turn out three, maybe four. Lucky for us, though, time is relative here. Also, there’s a lot of these people.”

  “How many?”

  “As many as it takes,” Gordon replied airily. “That’s how it works.”

  As many as it takes. Well. “And you pay them—” Mr Greenlander’s brain nearly boiled with the strain of doing the maths. “Nought-point-zero-zero-zero-zero-one cent an hour?”

  Gordon smiled. “Actually, we don’t pay them anything,” he replied. “All we have to cover is the shipping cost from the interface to the container depot. And we’re looking very closely at shaving that.”

  Mr Greenlander made gurgling noises for a moment, until he finally managed to say, “So why are they—?”

  “Doing it?” Gordon grinned. “Sorry, but that’s what you might call restricted information. The point is, we’re supplying a worldwide fast-food outlet with coffee stirrers for significantly less than the competition. Isn’t that all that matters?”

  For some reason, Mr Greenlander couldn’t bring himself to answer that. “Can we go now, please?” he said. “This place gives me the—”

  ”Me, too,” Gordon said. “But you get used to it.” He glanced at his watch. Mr Greenlander couldn’t see any hands. “One more, and then we’re done. Now this one’s going to blow you away.”

  Mr Greenlander shot him a pleading look. “Couldn’t we just—?”

  “No.”

  They walked in dead silence for quite a while, leaving the forest and climbing the lower slopes of a great white-capped mountain. About a third of the way up, Gordon pointed out the mouth of a cave. “You don’t have a problem with confined spaces, do you, anything like that?”

  “Well, as it happens—”

  “Splendid, splendid. Follow me.”

  The cave led into a long, dark tunnel. Gordon muttered something under his breath, and a ball of bright blue light appeared, hanging in midair. “A flashlight would do just as well,” Gordon said, “but they don’t work around here. Do try and keep up.”

  Mr Greenlander didn’t need to be told. The further down they went, the more obvious it became that the tunnel wasn’t a natural occurrence. The rock walls bore the marks of steel tools, and the floor was quite smooth. “The call centre business,” Gordon said (his voice echoed eerily in the soft-edged darkness), “is worth billions of dollars a year, and what do you actually need? A phone line, and people at the other end. That’s all, really. Of course, to create a really great call centre, you need a special kind of staff. Fortunately—”

  They turned a corner, and found themselves in a vast natural cavern. The roof was too high up to see, but Mr Greenlander was distressingly aware of great rippling sheets and curtains of needle-pointed stalactites and stalagmites, reciprocating like teeth in the jaws of a huge carnivore. He touched something with his foot; lighter than a rock, it dislodged easily and rolled away. He caught sight of it as it crossed the border between the circle of blue light and the sea of shadows. It looked horribly like a human skull. He grabbed Gordon’s arm. “Look—” he said.

  The sound of his voice had disturbed something; something very large indeed, which had been sleeping in the silent darkness. Slowly it lifted itself off its side onto its haunches, and sat up.

  Maybe the size of a young Indian elephant; it had the body and tail of a lion, the wings of an eagle and the head of a beautiful woman. It blinked two hubcap-sized eyes, and yawned.

  “Keep perfectly still,” Gordon hissed. “We shouldn’t have to wait very long.”

  “That’s a sphinx,” Mr Greenlander whispered, in a tiny, bewildered voice. “There was a picture of one in my myths and legends book, when I was a—”

  “Shh.”

  The sphinx turned its head just a little, and Mr Greenlander realised with utter horror that it was looking straight at him. The pupils of its eyes were daffodil-yellow. He shivered. Then he remembered he was wearing the invisibility cloak, so presumably it couldn’t actually see him.

  “Don’t count on it,” Gordon whispered. “She knows exactly where you are, for sure.”

  That didn’t make Mr Greenlander feel any better at all. “Can we go now, please?” he said. “I mean, I’m deeply, genuinely impressed, but I really, really need a—”

  “Shh.”

  Then Mr Greenlander heard what was unmistakably a dialling tone, amplified to just below the point where it would have been painful to listen to. It rang three times, and then there was a click. The sphinx’s head shifted back, almost mechanically, to where it had been before, staring straight ahead. It closed its eyes and said, in a high, flat voice; “Hello, you’re through to FirstServe Internet Banking, how may I help you?”

  Um. Mr Greenlander felt rather than heard the voice; it wasn’t coming from anywhere, or, more precisely, it came from everywhere at once. Yes, hello, I’d like to move some money from my, um, deposit account to my current account, please. Hello?

  The sphinx opened its eyes. “Certainly, madam,” it said. “First, please state your account number, sort code and four digit PIN.”

  The sphinx’s eyes closed again while the voice mumbled a bunch of numbers. Then the eyes snapped open again, and the sphinx said, “And how long have you lived at your current address?”

  What? Oh, um, I’m not, let’s think, four years, no, sorry, make that five, because it was February when Tony had his operation. Five years.

  “Thank you,” said the sphinx. “Now, what is the name of your favourite pet?”

  I haven’t got a pet.

  “I need you to tell me the name of your favourite pet.”

  I don’t, oh hang on, I remember. Arthur. My niece’s cat.

  “Thank you,” said the sphinx. “Now, I need you to tell me the third letter of the first name of your first teacher at primary school.”

  What? Blimey. Oh, hold on, I’ve got a pencil somewhere. I. It’s I.

  “Thank you.” The tip of the sphinx’s tail twitched just a little. “Now I need you to tell me what’s the fastest fish on three wheels?”

  Long, long pause. What did you say?

  “I need you,” the sphinx repeated, “to tell me what’s the fastest fish on three wheels? Otherwise I cannot access your account.”

  I–I’m sorry, I don’t know that one. My mum’s maiden name was Moore, if that’s any good.

  “I’m sorry,” said the sphinx, “but that is not the correct answer. You are only allowed two attempts. If you give another incorrect answer you will be locked out of your account, funds held in your account will be forfeited, and I will hunt you down to the ends of the earth and kill you. Now, can you please tell me what’s the fastest fish on three wheels?”

  Um.

  “I’m sorry, could you repeat that, please?”

  I, oh God, this is like a riddle or something, right?

  “I’m sorry, I’m not authorised to disclose additional information or provide hints. Now, if you value your life, can you please tell the name of the fastest fish on three wheels? You have five seconds. Four. Three.”

  I, oh hell, I don’t, no, hang on. It’s a motorpike.

  “A motorpike with a—”

  Sidecarp?

  “Correct,” said the sphinx; its face didn�
�t move, but its tail twitched again. “Now, I need you to tell me the colour of the scarf worn by the woman who trod on your foot at the bottom of the escalator at Oxford Circus Underground station on the afternoon of 6 July 1997.”

  You what?

  “The colour of the scarf worn by the woman who trod on your foot—”

  I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t think I’ve ever been to Oxford Street Tube station.

  “Sorry, that’s not the right answer,” the sphinx said in a sing-song voice. “I’m afraid I shall have to put a block on your account and confiscate the funds held therein. Also, kindly prepare to die. If you haven’t yet made a will, perhaps you’d like to hear details of our expert and confidential will-writing and estate planning service, operated by fully qualified staff and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.”

  Green. It was green.

  “Correct.” The sphinx’s tail swished, backwards and forwards, three times. “You may now access your account. How may I help you?”

  What? Oh God, I don’t know. Um, I’d like to move fifty-seven pounds forty from deposit to current.

  “Doing that for you now. Done. Transaction complete. Thank you for calling FirstServe Internet Banking. Have a nice day.”