“Two of them.”
He grinned.
“I keep all the neighbourhood children earning pocket money for themselves, including my own. That’s why the process is so slow, and the results expensive. Kids don’t want to work all the time; besides they’ve got school, sports, and all that, too. But grown-ups just don’t have the nimble fingers that the youngsters do, so we do the other work, and the area kids take turns on the knotting. Some of them are real whizzes at it, too, and the older ones train the younger ones, so the process works remarkably well. But it’s certainly not mass-production.”
“How’s your competition?” Kati asked.
“Competition?” For a moment Samu looked puzzled. “Oh, you mean other Carpet-Makers, right? I don’t even think about them, because everything we make is already sold by the time it’s finished and ready to be shipped out. We’re happy to leave the big jobs to the plants with the machines; hand-knotted rugs can’t compete with those.”
“Well, if I ever decide to get myself a young wife who likes beautiful things,” said Max with a wink at Kati, “I know where I’m going to order the bedroom carpet. But in the meantime....”
*****
The next two addresses gave them similar results.
One outfit was a commune in the commercial sector, with the rug-making one of a number of enterprises that the commune was involved in. The knotting was done by the members’ children, and apparently the members had a lot of children—or perhaps there were a lot of members. Kati was never quite sure which it was, since she and Max saw only a small part of the commune’s operations. The woman they talked to seemed busy and harried—and was thoroughly sincere, according to The Monk’s evaluation. Besides, the number of carpets the commune produced was not large, and what there was, was snatched up by buyers coming to the premises , as soon as they were set out, since the commune sold them on a first come, first served basis.
“If you really were in the market for a carpet this place might do,” Max commented. “Assuming that you came here at the right time, money in hand. But I very much doubt that these people are hiding a contingent of underage slaves; they’ve got enough to do looking after their own broods.”
“Your thoughts and mine are in agreement,” Kati conceded.
She wondered if they would have to go through the longer list before coming across anything resembling a large group of child chattels spending long days knotting carpets. Well, if that was so, then that was how it was. They would just have to keep at it, until they came up with results.
The fourth address was on the border of the Commercial District and the Manufacturing Region. When Kati and Max descended from the monorail tram, they saw that the address of the carpet maker’s establishment was a sizeable low building on the manufacturing side of the street, and on the other side was what was billed as a “School for Delinquent Children”.
“There’s the labour force for this plant,” Max said sharply, nodding his head at the school building. “Wonder how delinquent those kids are?”
Kati did not answer. She was wondering about the order of the addresses on the short list that Yana had given them. The first two outfits had been family-run craft businesses, then had come the commune. Now they were looking at a manufacturer who was most likely making use of institutionalized children; was the last one of the list going to be the place they were looking for?
The man they encountered in the small, messy front room of the address they had been given was skinny, short, middle-aged, and angry.
“Are you customers?” he asked. “Looking for quality carpets? Or are you do-gooders, come to lecture me about giving honest work to the young ones stuck next door?”
He glared at Max and Kati.
The two of them glanced at each other, and Kati shrugged.
“We had planned to ask about your carpets, and how they are manufactured,” she said. “We’re also interested in your prices, and what you have available at the moment. But we still have more manufacturers to check out, so, unless you have a fantastic deal to offer for a really superb piece of work, we’re not ready to buy today. However, we will eventually be buying something, from someone.”
The last statement was not true, of course, but it would have been true of Captain Katerina, had she truly existed as something other than Kati’s alter ego. Kati did not sweat the little lie; acting in character was a falsehood of sorts in itself, but necessary for their purposes.
“If you’re looking for hand-knotted rugs at ridiculously low prices, you may as well forget about my shop, and go directly to my latest competition,” the man said. “Assuming that you’re not troubled by the notion of children being worked long hours under appalling conditions.”
“Are you talking about this outfit, at the bottom of my list here?” Kati asked the fellow, laying the sheet of paper with the short list on the counter between them, and pointing to the final item.
The man leaned down to read it.
“No, not him; he’s an honourable manufacturer,” he replied. “The one I’m talking about isn’t on your paper. The names you’ve got there are all old, established craftspeople; the outfit I’m talking about, the owner added a hand-knotting room to his mechanical plant.”
Kati whisked out the other sheet that Yana had given her.
“One of these, maybe?” she asked.
The man took it to read it.
“You two are pretty thorough customers,” he said with an edge to his voice.
Kat ignored it, but sent the Granda to check out the psychic lay of the land.
The Monk was back before the man had finished with the list.
“The man’s worried about the business and his livelihood,” he subvocalized. “The new hand-knotter is cutting into his sales noticeably, is my impression. He figures that what the new guy is doing shouldn’t be allowed. His thoughts and feelings are muddled, so I can’t tell whether what this competitor is doing is actually illegal or not.”
The fellow must have been strongly broadcasting for The Monk to have picked up so much with a cursory pass.
“Here’s the name,” the man said, stabbing a forefinger at the paper sheet. “Yaroli’s Fine Carpets! That it! It’s a pity you aren’t do-gooders; it would be a pleasure to send some of those to his plant!”
“Actually, we do look into the ethics of the manufacturing process before we spend any coin,” Kati told him, circling the name and the address of Yaroli’s Fine Carpets. Max leaned down to look at it.
“That place is deep in the manufacturing sector,” he said.
“Yes, indeed,” said the man on the other side of the counter. “Yaroli’s is a large operation.”
*****
Max and Kati stopped to eat lunch before they caught the tram for the long ride to Yaroli’s. While eating they talked about things other than what was uppermost in their minds; now that it felt like they were zeroing in on their target they had grown a bit uneasy.
During the tram trip Kati wondered what exactly she was hoping to do once she had seen the slaves. About all she could do was get a nodal record of the abuse of the small boys, forced to work long hours with their fingers, for, basically, no reward. She and Max were in no position to cart them away; Max had no authority to take action on Continent Sud. Had she insisted on taking this trip merely for emotional reasons, without the backing of logic? Perhaps her time would have been better spent doing something that would have led to the capture of Gorsh. Arresting Gorsh, and forcing him to face Federation justice was the way to help the child slaves; visiting them was almost certainly pointless. She sighed as she sat staring at the passing buildings.
Max was looking as troubled as she was feeling. He did not make any effort to initiate a conversation; Kati could guess that he was feeling rather appalled at the state of his world, and frustrated by his inability to do much to improve things. Still, he had done a lot already, Kati knew; talking with the other Waywardians in the Continent Nord’s Government had made
her realize how central this man had been to the effort that had succeeded in peacefully wresting the old Council of Families of its traditional powers, and passing those powers to the new Great Council. He and his allies had changed a whole continent from an oligarchy to a democracy, and had done it without a single shot being fired. Of course the fact that Wayward was in no way battle-ready, had helped them; nevertheless, the achievement was phenomenal. Max Lordz certainly had the right to rest on his laurels, yet here he was, helping her locate alien slaves in a city which was on a continent not his own.
At last the tram operator announced their street corner stop, mentioning Yaroli’s name as well as the other plants which the stop served. Kati and Max climbed off the vehicle along with a few others. The tram had not been full; it was not shift-change time. They stood and stared at the grim, industrial building that was Yaroli’s, for a few moments, while the tram resumed its route, leaving them to walk where they would.
“Well,” Kati said finally, when the street had emptied of everyone except the two of them, “I guess I better do what I came to do, and go in?”
“And what exactly are you here to do?” Max asked her, echoing her earlier musings.
She laughed shortly, humourlessly.
“I guess that all I can do at the moment, is to get a nodal record of the slaves, so their identities as a racial type known to me can be established without doubt. More rope with which to tie up Gorsh, once he is facing Federation justice. Unfortunately, I don’t see how this caper will help us to catch him, unless I put a request in for a Torrones ship, using my nodal record as proof of his activities. Only, bringing in armed men, always invites an armed retaliation, and we’re trying to avoid that.”
“The armed retaliation won’t come from the Government of the Continent Nord,” Max pointed out drily. “We don’t have the capability.”
“No, but until we hear from Lank and Chrysalia, assuming that they’ll succeed in digging out the information we want, we don’t know what sort of an arsenal Gorsh may be hiding in the bowels of that building known as the Citadel. For all we know, he may be perfectly prepared to blow into smithereens the whole of Salamanka and much of the surrounding countryside—including the inhabitants—if he’s threatened.”
“You have an imagination capable of visualizing terrible things,” said Max.
They were walking towards Yaroli’s building, now.
“I’ve got the blood-thirsty Granda node living inside my head,” Kati replied.
She did not add that her parents had been children at a time when her home planet had been threatened by the possibility of nuclear war, and they had told her how they had been taught in grade school to hide under their desks if an atomic strike should happen. A pitifully inadequate measure that would have been. But frightened populations tried to do something—anything—to safeguard their children, even in impossible circumstances, and Kati knew that she did not want any of the people of Wayward to face the possibility of whole scale destruction.
Yaroli’s front office was very different from the room they had been in at the last carpet shop. In contrast to the mess they had found there, with the owner of the outfit being the only person present, this was a sleek, clean, and well-ordered place, staffed by two young women who were busy with office work, one writing behind a desk, the other running some small office machine unfamiliar to Kati.
The comely lass behind the desk got up when Kati and Max entered, carefully setting her papers and pen aside.
“You are looking for carpeting, I presume?” she said when she reached the other side of the counter that bisected the room.
“We are.” This was Max. It was clearly the sort of a place where his Old Family manners were the most useful item to pull from their repertoire.
“My off-world friend here is looking for a piece of an exquisite carpet, at a price which would make it profitable for her to obtain it for a very demanding client of hers, who is looking for something that would be exotic on his world. Yaroli’s has been recommended to us as a possible source of such a thing, at a reasonable price.”
“We do believe in keeping our costs down so that we can offer good prices to our clients,” the girl chirped. “Were you looking for a milled carpet, Sieurra, or for one in our new, hand-knotted line?”
She had turned her attention to Kati.
“Sieurra!” snarled The Monk inside her head. “What a philistine! On the Continent Nord, only the wife of the head of an Old Family can be addressed as Sieurra!”
“And you know about it...,” Kati subvocalized back, then let it drop.
She had other matters to attend to.
“Hand-knotted?” She raised her eyebrows. “You have hand-knotted rugs? You’re not on the list of craftsmen that we received from the Council of Manufacturers’ Office.”
She laid the short list on the counter for the girl to examine.
She did not more than glance at it.
“We’re new to the hand-knotting,” she said. “Of course we still have our milled lines, too, if those are what you’re interested in. But if you’re looking for something really unique, I would recommend the handiwork of our knotters, as well as our designers.”
“Are they truly hand-knotted?” Max asked. “It would not be good for Wayward’s reputation among the Space Trade Lanes, if it turns out that our producers sell one thing while claiming it’s another. I want to make sure that if she deals with your company, Captain Katerina, here, gets what she is paying for.”
“Ah, you are an exacting customer, Sieur!”
The young woman laughed coquettishly.
“The Captain is fortunate to have found a shopping companion in the best tradition of the Families of the Continent Nord! What can we do to convince you, Sieur...?”
“Lordz,” Max finished her question absently, and added: “How about if we look at a sample of the finished product? And then tour the part of your facility where the hand-knotting is done, just to be doubly certain of the authenticity of what you are peddling?”
He had donned an expression of hauteur which Kati had not seen until now. An Old Family noble, determined to defend his world’s reputation from being besmirched by the fast-buck operators of a manufacturing centre, that was the image he was projecting. Kati grinned at him with delight; what he was doing struck her as exactly right under the circumstances. And he was having an effect on the young woman who was dealing with them; she was looking at him with a degree of uncertainty.
“I can bring out samples for you to look at, of course,” she said, “but a tour, I can’t authorize that. I’d have to check with the Chief of Operations about that.”
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Max responded immediately. “Get in touch with your Chief of Operations, and arrange the tour. And, in the meantime, bring us some samples of your hand-knotted wares.”
The woman nodded, swallowing. She turned to the other young lady behind the counter.
“Taya,” she said. “Get the samples of the new line from the back cupboard, and show them to these customers. I’m going to have to go to Tarig’s office, and talk to him.”
She left by a side door, while the other young woman abandoned her machine, and went to a closet from which she pulled out a small pile of carpet squares.
“These are only a sample of our designs,” she said as she spread them out on the counter. “Since these are hand-knotted, they vary a bit from carpet to carpet, even when the design is the same.”
Kati and Max examined the samples. They were not up to the standards of the work in the first three shops that they had visited, in Kati’s opinion. Perhaps the children who had done the knotting had been hurried too much by their supervisor, or—and Kati’s throat constricted at the thought—perhaps the working conditions that they had to endure were abominable. She dared a glance at Max; his face was grim. Had the same ideas crossed his mind?
Still, Kati had to concede, had she not seen the products of the better craftsmen, sh
e would have admired these bits of carpet. The colours were vibrant, the fibres were abundant; there was a nice feel to the pieces. A full rug underfoot would have felt luxurious to even a demanding bare foot. She was looking at quality that her imaginary customer would definitely have accepted, even as the wealthy of Strone had quickly picked up the carpets that Lovale had been selling.
“How much do you charge for an average-sized carpet?” Max asked in his best Old Family accents.
Taya quoted a price. It was considerably lower than what the other hand-knotting establishments had asked for.
“That’s the wholesale price, of course,” she added. “Normally you would be buying from a retailer, and paying for his mark-up, too. However, we do sell individual rugs at the wholesale price to customers who take the trouble to come to our door. That’s one of Tarig’s policies.”
Kati was not sure if Tarig was Yaroli, or a hired manager. The building had looked large enough from the outside to have a number of people managing different areas. It did not matter anyway; apparently this Tarig—whoever he may have been—was in charge of the hand-knotted rug production. He was the one they needed to persuade to let them see the children at work.
The door through which the first woman had left opened suddenly, spilling out a man and the woman. The man was a typical Waywardian, dark haired, olive-skinned, somewhat stocky and of medium height. Max looked patrician in comparison, with his slimmer body build, grey hair and an intellectual air.
“I am Tarig,” the man introduced himself, “and in charge of the craft sector of Yaroli’s Fine Carpets. I understand that the two of you want to look at our operations to make certain that we do what we claim to do, which is sell hand-knotted rugs.”
He did not seem particularly pleased with them.
“Yes,” Max replied. “I am Max Lordz, Head of my Family, and this young woman is an off-world merchant, and a space travelling friend, the Captain Katerina.”
“A Free Trader,” Tarig interrupted before Max could continue. There was a slight sneer in the voice.
Kati stiffened her back and glared at the man. Obviously he did not think that he needed to ingratiate himself to her.
Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers Page 41