Vasily & The Works
(Tales From The Middle Empires Vol. III)
by J. Patrick Sutton
Copyright 2010 by J. Patrick Sutton
All rights reserved.
www.jpatricksutton.com
[This is a version of the founding myth of that class of middle-empire planetary systems’ controllers (“PSC’s”) who would come to be known, after their epoch closed, as the Voces Orbes, or just “Old Ones.” — Eds.]
A very long time ago, when people were people and machines were machines, Vasily Alexseyev, a mercantile prince of Linnet, heir to an ancient name, awoke from a troubled sleep and rubbed reassuring reality back into his eyes. He had dreamed of a great and terrible consciousness smeared across the sky, bounded only by the physical constraints of the universe. Vasily disliked religion and metaphysics, so anything that invoked things greater than himself caused him palpitations. Finally catching his breath, he flipped on the lamp (great sun’s dawn being an hour away, and little sun enfeebled in this season). He dropped his legs over the side of the large, canopied bed that had been his father’s and grandfather’s. He looked towards the node terminal, its comforting blue telltale indicating sleep. He blinked, frowned, and slid off the bed.
“Terminal, where is Nisus?” he demanded.
The node instantly awoke and spoke in a genderless, synthesized voice: “Nisus is sleeping at his flat, accompanied by a serving wench from Arrondissment 8.”
“Wake him up. I can’t sleep. Tell him to meet me at the coffee shop. Alone.”
“Complying,” spoke the node. “Noted for your information: Troy’s has not yet opened.”
“Is anyone there?”
“A part of the first shift has arrived.”
“Tell them I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“Complying.”
The people at Troy’s would let Vasily in. They couldn’t refuse the heir to the Works, even if his mother the regent still technically ran things.
Vasily pulled on some undershorts and searched around the floor for presentable pants. There were none. The night-servant must have removed them. Vasily depressed the sensor for the autocloset door. On the slide-out shelves were stacked a dozen identical ruud-silk trousers and a crisp pile of softly shimmering grey shirts. He took one of each along with his morning jacket, dangling from a nearby peg in the shape of a seagerd’s head. He idly looked out the penthouse windows as he dressed. Seeing himself in dim reflection, he sucked in his stomach. He avoided looking at his face, which was his father’s but less coherent. His ancestors did him no favors. Looking past himself, the stars beyond were so many shiny beckoning sugar crystals, reminding him of breakfast buns with crisp, fragrant crowns. He looked down at his paunch and resigned himself to what pleased him more.
He padded down the hall barefoot, passing his mother’s room (her snores clearly audible) and the servant’s pantry, where Portia sat smoking a surreptitious cheroot and blowing smoke into the air intake. She glanced at Vasily but wasn’t otherwise impressed. He had never been able to read her, even after . . . . But that didn’t matter. She was losing her looks, anyway. He walked on. He slipped into comfortable loafers, coded out, and took the private lift down to ground level.
The tower where he and his mother lived stood just inside the Works’ great circular wall, easily accessible to both the main gate and the below-grade tram terminus. The top five tower floors, including the penthouse level, served as the Alexseyev residences, though to Vasily’s knowledge only two levels had ever been used. Below the residences scurried the office help, spread out among a dozen floors and two-score departments. Below that, the bottom five floors held reception and the museum of rings and gears his father had curated and endowed. A superannuated grease-jobber from the Works came in each day to dust the exhibits and test the self-tour system for the benefit of visitors who never came.
Below all this, in an impregnable bunker deep under the tower, lay the multi-core: the computational heart of the Alexseyev manufacturing empire. Its trunk lines extended up into the tower and out to old the underground machining and assembly chambers — the heart of the Works, the essence of the manufactory. Small access tunnels radiated out from there, carrying lower-bandwidth lines to auxiliary operations aboveground and below. (These included the pristine, angular sales showroom, which was a dramatic ti-metal and diamond-pane building done up in the old style, with soaring lines and crisp, odd-angled geometries.) The thick, reinforced ramparts surrounding the Works extended far underground, their footings angling outward ever wider until striking ancient bedmetal. Apart from these battlements with razor-beams along the top, and then a small main gate of three-span-thick alloy, the ramparts had no penetrations. The multicore’s tentacles could not stray beyond the Works — nor be tapped from without by hackers or invaders. The “new” defense system had lasted over a hundred years without challenge, a long period of peace by the standards of feudal Linnet.
Vasily exited the tower at ground level and made the short walk to the gate. A sensor scanned his eyes and read his alphas and betas. Sensors on the street side registered nothing, so the great gate slid open just enough for Vasily’s passage. It retracted shut before he could even turn around to watch it.
Main dawn loomed as a glowing suggestion over the high walls and dully-gleaming towers and manufactories of the industrial quarter of the metropolis. There were no palanquins tethered nearby, so Vasily walked from pool to pool of glowing lamplight toward Lowering Lane and its shops and eateries. He thought he could smell it already. A burp from some mechanized device off to his right betrayed activity in Bilicus Optical Works, situated behind a flimsy defensive wall of reinforced plascrete shot through with light fiber and faintly glowing. The Bilici had been on the rise of late, though no threat to the preeminence of the Alexseyevs here in the home district. The oldest Bilicus daughter, Mina, had been furiously — and recklessly, in the Alexseyev view — adding processing power to their multicore, which lay highly vulnerable aboveground in an ordinary plascrete-and-glass cleanhouse. Why Mina had been doing this was anyone’s guess, though Vasily had heard something about a trove of new ore-worlds somewhere distant along the Arm, indicating rising demand for deep-mine visual systems. But no doubt that also meant more orders for Alexseyev Systems & Components, since mining transport either lost or ruined ships at a steady clip. (It might take awhile, since the ship order and fulfillment cycle always trailed new markets for a score years or more. Vasily could wait. The orders on hand were good for at least that long.)
Vasily sighed. Mina. They had started off in school together. Her people had packed her off to some special academy in Fiber District, across the sea in a placid, unremarkable corner of Linnet. Vasily would still see her during holidays, at formal occasions when he escorted his mother. Had things been different, it might have been a union of families. More useful to the Bilici than to the Alexseyevs, but still — she was pretty. He had never forgotten how she looked that time . . . .
Bother.
Vasily looked up and realized he had arrived at the café. A very young girl with blooming red cheeks and black hair stuffed into a white baker’s cap awaited him on the other side of the glass door. She averted her gaze and let Vasily in.
“Was it just you then, sir?” she said, looking at the floor.
“Certainly not. Don’t you people listen? My chum will be along. Just you look out for him.”
Vasily took his favorite booth, a worn wooden affair in a back corner. A ray of first light advanced and retreated across the ancient plank floor (imported from who knew w
hat world) as the girl opened the door for Nisus. He arrived sleepy-faced, his hair jutting out at odd angles. It only made him more raffishly handsome, curse him.
“Hail, Vas,” Nisus said with the faintest of smiles. Mockery always played around that sensuous lip. Vasily had seen girls go inexplicably weak.
“You’re late,” Vasily said. “But it doesn’t matter. Buns aren’t up yet. Who was she?”
“Nobody. It doesn’t matter.”
“You’ll break Mother’s heart.”
“Only if you tell her,” Nisus said. “Anyway, she’d forgive us, eh? Fancied a bump in her youth, didn’t she? Old stories.”
Vasily stiffened. “You presume too much, Nisus. Let’s not talk about my mother. How about yours?”
A fine, momentary hatred shot from Nisus eyes. “Nice shooting, Vas. Give us yours, then, would you? So plump, so nice.”
Vasily looked glum. “She would, you know. It’s lucky for her I don’t let it happen. You’d break her heart like you do all the others. Besides, you’re not an Alexseyev.”
“So,” Nisus moved on. “What’s news? Why so early?”
“Bad dreams.”
“Again? Too bad, Vas. The big, blue-eyed devil again?”
“Sort of.”
Nisus’ eyes darted to the young serving girl, who appeared with a curtsy and a plate of buns and muffins. She felt Nisus’ lean, ravenous gaze and blushed furiously. None of this escaped Vasily’s notice.
“A pot of coffee, girl,” he said. “Run along.”
“You were saying, about your dream . . .” Nisus said, absently grabbing a steaming muffin as he watched the girl go. “Ow!” he said, burning his mouth.
“Bigger, this time. Worse. It was like . . . how can I describe it? It was like our world was a screen, false. I looked at myself in a mirror and I knew, in that way you ‘know’ things in dreams, that I was flat and two-dimensional, not quite real. There was something real, all around me, occupying the rest of the universe. I had lost myself. None of this” — Vasily waved an arm indicating the coffee shop and, perhaps, more besides — “none of this mattered.”
“Well, it doesn’t, does it?” Nisus said. “Just what we experience right now.” He cast a brief glance to where the girl, now joined by another, worked at the coffee extractor, her white apron bunched up behind her and tied in a great knot.
Vasily looked at Nisus reproachfully. “That’s what people who don’t have anything believe. That’s why they never made it to the top.”
Nisus shrugged. “That’s most people. And some day, they’ll have everything. Just wait.”
“You’re not listening to what I’m saying. This is important, Nisus. This is the third time. Someone’s trying to tell me something.”
Nisus now looked at Vasily interestedly. “Yeah? Go on, then.”
“Well, not someone. My brain, maybe.” Vasily jabbed at his temple for emphasis. “It’s telling me I have a destiny to fulfill.”
Nisus rolled his eyes. “And what is your destiny, Vas?”
“Well, since you ask: to re-make the Works. To do what my father and grandfather did. Renewal, re-creation, change.”
“That’s a laugh,” Nisus said. “The other oligarchs ganged together and killed your dad once they got wind of his big bunker over there, and all the manufacturing power it gave him.”
“But they didn’t get to the multicore. They didn’t and they can’t. It’s got ten overlapping defensive systems.”
“Don’t you be too sure they can’t get it. What if all of Minoas and Tertia joined in? Three continents against one — just a piece of one, at that? Add in the archipelago, too — just for fun.”
“It’s never happened. Besides, what if . . .” Vasily looked away dreamily.
“Yes?” Nisus said.
The other girl, older and less interesting to Nisus, set the clear canister of hot dark fluid on the table with two small, formed-diamond cups. Nisus continued looking at Vasily.
“What if I unified the planet?” Vasily concluded the thought.
Nisus snorted with laughter.
“What?” Vasily said innocently. “You think it can’t be done? Other planets run just fine with a unitary administration. Why do we have to be a feudal laughingstock — families, alliances, ganging up on others to cut them down to size?”
Nisus looked suddenly very serious. “You’re not kidding, then? Vas, you can’t even focus on your own Works. Flitting from . . .”
“Yes?”
“‘Project to project,’ I was going to say.”
Vasily was indignant. “It’s ‘R&D.’ And I’m the only one sticking my neck out to do it.”
“It would be nice if one of them actually flew, Vas.”
“A production detail. I’m a visionary. I create new things. I leave the details to others.”
“Uh-huh,” Nisus said. “Form first. Nothing you design will fly. At least, not in the physics of this universe.”
“Precisely. My imagination is greater in scope than that. People like you will never understand the creative impulse. My father never did. My mother certainly doesn’t. She cut me off for several days when I jumped from Engineering into Coding Arts. She called Ramflow a ‘charlatan.’ I had to pay him off to take me after that.”
“I’m the one who paid out for you, don’t forget. I pawned my comm. Missed a snap-test, almost failed a class for you.”
“I paid you back and got the other fixed. You see? It’s good to know us, Nisus.”
“Your mother wants someone to take over the Works.”
Vasily looked at Nisus suspiciously. “What do you care about it?”
Nisus ducked this. “Design a light-drive, Vas. That’s what the universe needs. Hard engineering. Then you’d truly be a hero. Millions die every year in shipwrecks.”
“I would, of course. But where would that leave us? We build ships and componentry. The more ships are lost, the better for us.”
Nisus, clenching his jaw, pretended to gaze idly around the room.
“Anyhow,” Vasily continued. “It might make things worse. Ships shooting off who knows where. Jump-rings are predictable — and we make parts for those, too. Each little step into space makes more work for us here. Ring components, ship components, ships themselves. This is what Mother never seems to grasp. If I could bring peace to the planet, the Works would get along swimmingly. I could clean the whole dirty planet up, too.”
“Not in your lifetime. Probably not even your own district. What’s the incentive for you, anyhow?”
Vasily shrugged. “Got to start somewhere. You get the enviro-groups with us, ‘clean manufacturing’ and all that rot, and you’d have something.”
“Why don’t you start by conveying over your parklands to them, along with your mother’s big gardens? She hardly uses them, and you don’t hunt. Good, clean lands — relatively speaking. Do it for the common good.”
“Because, smart fellow, they’re technically not mine to give. Besides, even if Mother were convinced, it wouldn’t work unless all the families and concerns did it together. Anything we give those icthyion-kissing idiots would just get raided and taken again, then converted into rival manufactories. This is what I’m saying, Nisus: we need a unifier, a hero, a visionary.”
“Uh-huh. I see. You don’t think they’d come after you, too?”
Murmurs and a laugh echoed through the coffee shop as the first of the regular patrons came in. It was a man and a woman. The woman wore an Alexseyev Works uniform shirt along with blue, flat-front work pants. She caught sight of Vasily and leaned in to whisper to her companion, whose glance also darted to Vasily. The man shrugged. The pair turned away and sat upfront at the bar.
Vasily, seeing all this, sighed. “Revolutionaries must take the high road.”
“You don’t think your mother might have something to say about it? About her ‘baby’ inciting a riot, getting mixed up in ideals?”
“I can’t help how many tries it took her ??
? they’re the ones that fouled this place, not me.” Vasily considered the implications of this and summarily ignored them: “Anyhow, my father, my grandfather, and others before them did what they had to do, what they thought best. I shall do the same — only better.”
“Engineers, Vas. They were engineers and makers. They were too good at that and oblivious of everything else. Your father died for the sake of the big, bunkered machine they built, not for the sake of anyone’s well-being. You think your mother’s going to let you leave the Works for something else, something artistic, or philosophical, or bolts-in-the-sky? You have to do what she wants, you know. You’ve got no choice while she’s alive.”
Nisus had hit upon Vasily’s sensitivities. “I shall make my own decisions, sir,” Vasily said. “And don’t you think you’ll get off easy either. You’ll be central to my plans. After all, you’re the only one I can trust. My lieutenant, as it were.”
Nisus coughed demurely into his hand and offered a pained, earnest expression. “Surely not me, Vasily.”
“I’ll decide that. I have decided it. Once I’m properly installed, and this tyrannical ‘regent’ sent packing, it’ll be just you and me. And maybe Inchrises, since he keeps the workers happy. What was once ‘Alexseyev Componentry & Shipworks’ will be ‘Vasily Alexseyev Systems,’ and through it we will re-make the the Works, and from there, the world. Don’t run from destiny, Nisus. Seize it.”
Nisus cleared his throat, as if history itself had been lodged unpleasantly in his pipes. He spat but offered no rejoinder.
“Girl!” called Vasily. “Water for my friend. He’s having trouble swallowing. Just the bill for me.”