Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  Several pages of details, headed restricted, of his work on ordnance development projects. Psellus nodded to himself; a question which had been nagging him like mild toothache would appear to have answered itself. There were, of course, no Guild specifications for military equipment. It was the only area not covered by specifications, the only area in which innovation and improvement were permitted. Vaatzes, apparently, had been responsible for no fewer than three amendments to approved designs, all to do with the scorpions: an improved ratchet stop, upgrading of the thread on the sear nut axle pin from five eighths coarse to three quarters fine, addition of an oil nipple to the slider housing to facilitate lubrication of the slider on active service. That wasn't all; he'd proposed a further four amendments which had been rejected by the standing committee on ordnance design. Psellus sighed. Allow a man to get the taste for innovation and you put his very soul at risk. The compliance directorate had considered the issue on several occasions and had recommended a programme of advanced doctrinal training to make sure that workers exposed to the danger had a proper understanding of the issues involved; the recommendation had been approved years ago but was still held up in committee. A tragedy. A small voice inside his head reminded him that the training idea had been a Foundrymen's proposal, and that the subcommittee obstructing it was dominated by the Tailors and the Joiners. He stowed the fact carefully away in his mental quiver for future use.

  Three approved amendments; he thought some more about that. Three amendments by a serving officer. Usually an amendment was held to be the glorious culmination of a long and distinguished career; it was something you held back until it was time for you to retire, and there'd be a little ceremony, the chief inspector of ordnance would shake you by the hand in front of the assembled workforce and present you with your letter of patent at the same time as your long-service certificate. It wasn't a perfect system, because a man might have to wait fifteen years before submitting his amendment, all that time churning out a product he knew could be improved; but it was worthwhile because it limited exposure to the innovation bug. Only a very few men proposed amendments while they were still working, and nearly all such applications were rejected on principle, regardless of merit. Three, for God's sake. Why hadn't he heard about this man years ago? And why, when the facts were here in the file for anyone to see, hadn't he been put under level six supervision after the first proposal?

  In a sense, Psellus thought, we failed him. He was reminded of the old story about the man who kept a baby manticore for the eggs, until at last one day the manticore, fully grown and reverting to its basic nature, killed him. We let Vaatzes walk this highly dangerous path alone because the amendments were all good, sound engineering, allowing us to improve the performance of the product. Credit for that improvement would've gone primarily to the chief inspector of ordnance, and from him to the members of the departmental steering committee. Manticore eggs.

  One last page caught his eye: schedule of items seized by investigators from the prisoner's house, after his arrest. It was a short list. Usually, when a man came to no good, there'd be pages of this sort of thing-tools and equipment stolen from the factory; the usual depressing catalogue of pornographic or subversive literature (always the same titles; the circulating repertoire of both categories was reassuringly small in Mezentia); forbidden articles of clothing, proscribed food and drink, religious fetishes. In this case, however, there were only a handful of items, and none of them was strictly illegal, though they were all disapproved. A portfolio of drawings of yet more amendments to the scorpion (a note in the margin pointing out that the drawings numbered seven, twenty-six and forty-one should be forwarded to the standing committee for assessment, since they appeared to have considerable merit); a book, The True Mirror of Defence-a fencing manual, copied in Civitas Vadanis (private ownership of weapons was, of course, strictly forbidden; whether it was also illegal to read books about them was something of a grey area); another book, The Art of Venery, about hunting and falconry. Psellus smiled; he was prepared to bet that Vaatzes had thought the word venery meant something quite different. Another book: A General Discourse of Bodily Ailments and the Complete Herbal, together with some pots of dried leaves and a pestle and mortar. Psellus frowned. He'd have to check, but he had an idea that the General Discourse was still a permitted text in the Physicians', so it was against the law for a Foundryman to have a copy. How had he come by it? Did that mean that somewhere there was a doctor with a complete set of engineer's thread and drilling tables? If so, why?

  He closed the file, feeling vaguely uncomfortable, as though he'd been handling something dirty. A case like this was, of course, an effective remedy for incipient complacency. It was easy to forget how perilously fine was the line between normality and aberration. How simple and straightforward life would be if all the deviants were wild-eyed, unkempt and slobbering, and all the honest men upright and clean-shaven. There wasn't really anything disturbing about a thoroughgoing deviant; it was inevitable that, from time to time, nature would throw up the occasional monster, easy to identify and quickly disposed of. Far more disquieting the man who's almost normal but not quite; he looks and sounds rational, you can work beside him for years and never hear anything to give you cause for concern, until one day he's not at his post, and investigators are interviewing the whole department. Truly disquieting, because there's always the possibility (orthodox doctrine denies it categorically, but you can't help wondering) that anybody, everybody, might be capable of just one small aberration, if circumstances conspired to put an opportunity in their path. If the temptation was strong enough, perhaps even me-Psellus shuddered at the thought, and dismissed it from his mind as moral hypochondria (look at the list of symptoms long enough, you can convince yourself you've got everything). It was just as well, he decided, that he wasn't an investigator working in the field. You'd need to have nerves of steel or no imagination whatsoever to survive in that job.

  He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and waited to see if an image of Vaatzes would form in his mind-he thought of the process as something like what happens to an egg when it's broken into the frying-pan-but all he got was a vague shape, a cut-out in a black backcloth through which you could catch glimpses of what lay behind. His best hope of understanding the man, he decided, lay in interviewing the wife. If there was a key to the mystery, either she'd be it or have an idea of where it was to be found. Strictly speaking, of course, none of this was necessary. They weren't being asked to understand the man, just hunt him down and kill him. Probably just as well. Even so; the pathology of aberration was worth studying, in spite of the obvious danger to the student, or else how could further outbreaks be prevented in the future? Definitely the wife, Psellus decided. She was the anomaly he kept coming back to.

  He stood up, shook himself like a wet dog to get rid of unwelcome burrs of thought. A man could lose himself in work like this, and in his case that would be a sad waste. There were other letters waiting for him; he'd seen them when he came in but forgotten about them while his mind was full of Vaatzes and that dreadful man Crisestem. As was his custom, he broke the seals of all of them before he started to read.

  Two circular memoranda about dead issues; minutes of meetings of committees he wasn't a member of, for information only; a letter from his cousin, attached to the diplomatic mission to the Cure Doce, asking him to look something up in the Absolute Concordance-some nonsense about the structure of leaves and the diseases of oak-trees; notice of a lecture on early Mannerist poetry; an invitation to speak, from a learned society he no longer belonged to. The sad thing was, if he didn't get letters like these he'd feel left out, worried that he might be slipping gradually out of favour. He made a note to tell his clerk to check the oak-disease reference; he'd take the speaking engagement; standard acknowledgements to all the rest. So much for the day's mail-the world bringing him new challenges to revel in, like a cat that will insist on presenting you with its freshly slain mice. Another glas
s of brandy was a virtual necessity, if he didn't want to lie awake all night thinking about Vaatzes, and deviance in general. One last note to his clerk: set up meetings with Vaatzes' wife, father- and brother-in-law. Yes, that was where the answer lay, he was almost certain of that. It would help him make sense of it all if she turned out to be pretty, but he wasn't inclined to hold his breath.

  In the event he slept soundly, dreaming of Manuo Crisestem being eaten alive by monkeys, so that he woke early with a smile on his face, ready for his breakfast. His clerk had already come and gone, so he took his time shaving and dressing-it was always pleasant not to have to rush in the mornings; he even had time to trim his nails and pumice yesterday's ink stains from his fingertips. That made him smile-subconsciously, was he preening himself just in case the deviant's wife did turn out to be pretty?-and he backcombed his hair in gentle self-mockery; then he thought about his wife, spending the off season at the lodge, out at Blachen with the rest of the committee wives, and that took the feather off his clean, sharp mood. Still, he wouldn't have to join her for a month at least, which was something.

  The first three hours of every working day were eaten up by letters; from the morals and ethics directorate, the assessment board, the treasurer's office, the performance standards commission (twenty years in the service and he still didn't know what they actually did), the general auditors of requisitions, the foreign affairs committee. Three of them he answered himself; two he left for his clerk to deal with; one went to one side for filing in the box he privately thought of as the Coal Seam. The process left him feeling drained and irritable, as though he'd been cooped up in a small room with a lot of people all talking at once. To restore his equilibrium he spent half an hour tinkering with the third draft of his address to the apprentices' conference, at which he would be the keynote speaker for the fourth year running ('Doctrine: a Living Legacy'). He was contemplating the best way to give a Didactic spin to the proceedings of the Third Rescensionist Council when his clerk arrived to tell him that the abominator's wife would be arriving at a quarter past noon.

  He'd forgotten all about her, and his first reaction was irritation-he had a deskful of more important things to do than talk to criminals' wives-but as the day wore on he found himself looking forward to the break in his routine. His clerk, he suspected, was getting to know him a little too well; the hour between noon and resumption was his least productive time, the part of the day when he was most likely to make mistakes. Far better to use it for something restful and quiet, where a momentary lapse in concentration wasn't likely to involve the state in embarrassment and ruin.

  There were five interrogation rooms on the seventh floor of the Guildhall. He chose the smallest, and left instructions that he wasn't to be disturbed. The woman was punctual; she turned up half an hour early. Psellus left her to wait, on the bench in the front corridor. A little apprehension, forced on like chicory by solitude and confinement, would do no harm at all, and he'd have time to read another couple of letters.

  He'd been right; she was pretty enough, in a small, wide-eyed sort of a way. He had the dossier's conclusive evidence that she was twenty-four; without it, he'd have put her at somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one, so what she must have looked like when she was seventeen and the subject of negotiations between her father and the abominator, he wouldn't have liked to say. She sat on the low, backless chair in the corner of the room quite still, reminding him of something he couldn't place for a long time, until it suddenly dawned on him; he'd seen a mewed falcon once, jessed and hooded, standing motionless on a perch shaped like a bent bow. An incongruous comparison, he told himself; she certainly didn't come across as a predator, quite the opposite. You couldn't imagine such a delicate creature eating anything, let alone prey that had once been alive.

  He sat down in the big, high-backed chair and rested his hands on the arm-rests, wrists upwards (he'd seen judges do that, and it had stuck in his mind). 'Your name,' he said.

  Her voice was surprisingly deep. 'Ariessa Vaatzes Connena,' she said. There was no bashful hesitation, but her eyes were big and round and deep (so are a hawk's, he thought). 'Why am I here?'

  'There are some questions,' he said, and left it at that. 'You were married young, I gather.'

  She frowned. 'Not really,' she said. 'At least, I was seventeen. But five of the fifteen girls in my class got married before I did.'

  She was right, of course; he'd misplaced the emphasis. It wasn't her youth that was unusual, but her husband's age. 'You married a man ten years older than yourself,' he said.

  She nodded. 'That's right.'

  'Why?'

  What a curious question, her eyes said. 'My father thought it was a good match,' she said.

  'Was it?'

  'Well, clearly not.'

  'You were unhappy with the idea?'

  'Not at the time,' she said firmly.

  'Of course,' Psellus said gravely, 'you weren't to know how things would turn out.'

  'No.'

  'At the time,' he said, 'did you find the marriage agreeable?'

  A faint trace of a smile. There are some faces that light up in smiling; this wasn't one. 'That's a curious word to use,' she said. 'I loved my husband, from the first time I saw him.'

  'Do you still love him?'

  'Yes.'

  She said the word crisply, like someone breaking a stick. He thought for a moment. Another comparison was lurking in the back of his mind, but he couldn't place it. 'You're aware of the law regarding the wives of abominators.'

  She nodded, said nothing. She didn't seem unduly frightened.

  'There is, of course, a discretion in such cases,' he said slowly.

  'I see.'

  She was watching him, the way one' animal watches another: wary, cautious, but no fear beyond the permanent, all-encompassing fear of creatures who live all the time surrounded by predators, and prey. 'The discretion,' he went on, 'vests in the proper compliance officer of the offender's Guild.'

  'That would be you, then.'

  'That's right.'

  'I imagine,' she said, 'there's something I can help you with.'

  (In her dossier, which he'd glanced through before the interview, there was a certificate from the investigators; the wife, they said, had not been party to the offence and was not to be proceeded against; her father and brother were Guildsmen of good standing and had co-operated unreservedly in the investigation on the understanding that she should be spared. It was, of course, a condition of this arrangement that she should not know of it; nor had she been made aware of the fact that clemency had been extended in her case.)

  'Yes,' Psellus said. 'There are a few questions, as I think I mentioned.'

  'You want me to betray him, don't you?'

  Psellus moved a little in his chair; the back and arms seemed to be restricting him, like guards holding a prisoner. 'I shall expect you to co-operate with my enquiries,' he said. 'You know who I am, what I do.'

  She nodded. 'There's nothing I can tell you,' she said. 'I don't know where he's gone, or anything like that.'

  'I do,' Psellus said.

  Her eyes opened wide; no other movement, and no sound.

  'We have reports,' he went on, 'that place him in the company of Duke Orsea of Eremia Montis. Do you know who he is?'

  'Of course I do,' she said. 'How did he-?'

  Psellus ignored her. 'Clearly,' he said, 'this raises new questions. For example: do you think it possible that your husband had been in contact with the Eremians at any time before his arrest?'

  'You mean, spying for them or something?' She raised an eyebrow. 'Well, if he was, he can't have done a very good job.'

  He'd seen a fencing-match once; an exhibition bout between two foreigners, Vadani or Cure Doce or something of the sort. He remembered the look on the face of one of them, when he'd lunged forward ferociously to run his enemy through; but when he reached forward full stretch the other man wasn't there any more. He'd sidestepped, and as his opp
onent surged past him, he'd given him a neat little prod in the ribs, and down he'd gone. Psellus had an uncomfortable feeling that the expression on his face wasn't so different to the look he'd seen on the dying fencer's.

  'You didn't answer my question,' he said.

  'No,' she said. 'I don't think he was spying for Eremia. I don't think he'd have known where Eremia is. I didn't,' she added, 'not until the other day. A lot of people don't.'

  'You sound very certain,' he said quietly.

  'Yes,' she said. A pause, then: 'I know that what my husband did was wrong. One of your colleagues explained it all to me, and I understand. But that was all he did, I'm absolutely positive. He just did it for our little girl, for her birthday. I suppose he thought nobody'd ever find out.'

  Psellus looked at her for a while. She ought to be frightened, he thought. At the very least, she ought to be frightened. Maybe her father or her brother broke the terms of the deal and told her; but then she'd know that if we found out, the deal would be off, and she ought to be frightened about that. I don't think she likes me very much.

  He thought about that. I don't like her very much either, he thought.

  'So,' he went on, 'you don't think your husband took any interest in politics, foreign affairs, things like that.'

  'Good Lord, no. He couldn't care less.'

  He nodded. 'What did he care about?'

  'Us,' she said, quick as a parry. 'Me and our daughter. Our family'

  Psellus nodded. 'His work?'

  'Yes,' she said-it was a concession. 'But he didn't talk about it much at home. He tried to keep it separate, home and work. I could never understand about machinery and things.'

  'But he did work at home sometimes?'

  She shrugged. 'In the evenings,' she said, 'sometimes he'd be in the back room or the cellar, making things. He liked doing it. But I don't know if it was work or things he made for himself, or us.'