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“Here comes one of the guards.” Chenille pointed.
“I was lying on one, and I didn’t have any clothes on. Perhaps I shouldn’t talk about this, Patera.”
“Go ahead. It’s not immoral, and it could be important.”
“I was trying to boot, and I remember that the girl next to me sat up and said she was naked, which she certainly was. When she did, somebody brought her a dress.”
The guard halted with a clash of armored heels, one hand leveled across his slug gun. “Follow me, Calde.”
“No wet,” Oreb muttered.
“He has a point,” Silk remarked as they set out. “Could we borrow umbrellas? If we’re going to have to walk between these buildings, as I expect we will.”
“I’ll get some while you’re talking to the director,” the guard promised; he trotted ahead to open the door of a brick structure not much different from a modest house.
“We can wait outside,” Chenille told Silk. “I mean, in the hall or whatever, just as long as it’s out of the rain.”
He shook his head, entering a reception room presided over by a woman rather too large for it. She smiled. “Go right on in, please, Calde.”
“Will there be enough chairs? There are four of us.”
From the room beyond, a short man begi
Swallow nodded, still smiling. “Sit down, please, ladies, Calde. You’re lame, I hear, and I see you’re limping.” He shut the door. “Everybody’s got some tidbit about you. You’re lame, you’ve got that tame bird, and you predicted the downfall of the Ayuntarniento. I’m sure you’ve heard it all.”
Silk took a leather armchair near Swallow’s table. “And now you’re surprised to see how young I am, and would like to ask my age.”
“Why, that’s none of my affair, Calde.”
“I’m twenty-three. You must be,” he glanced at Swallow’s hands, “in your forties. Forty-five or forty-six. Am I right?”
“I’m glad you’re not, Calde. I’m forty-three.”
“Twenty years older than I am, precisely. You must think I’m very young and inexperienced to head the city government. I am, and I realize it. I have to depend on the judgement of more experienced men and women. That’s one reason Maytera Marble’s with me today; it’s also the reason I’m here talking to you, an older man with experience I haven’t got but need to draw upon.”
“I’ll be happy to help you any way I can, Cald — . Would you like something before we get started? Coffee, wine, tea? Would the young ladies? Chamomile can fetch us some.”
Chenille shook her head; Silk said, “No thank you. You build taluses here?”
“We do. That’s our business and our only business.”
Oreb offered his judgement on taluses. “Bad things!”
“Be quiet, silly bird.” Silk leaned back, the tips of his fingers together. “I know nothing about business, and this must be a remarkable one.”
“Not to me.” Swallow smiled. “I grew up in it, working in our shops. But you’re right, it’s unique. That’s the word we like to use. Call it self-promotion if you want, but it fits.”
“Because a talus is a person,” Silk continued, “both in law and in fact. There are boatyards along the shore of the lake, where I was a few days ago. The boatwrights build a boat there; and when they’re through, the fishermen paint eyes on it and call it ‘she’. They give it a name, as well.”
Swallow nodded.
“A boat has a certain character, just as this chair does. This is comfortable and solid, brown, and so forth. A boat may be a willing or a reluctant sailer, it may be stable or prone to rock. But a boat isn’t a person.”
Maytera Marble cleared her throat, a rasp like the scraping of a crusted pan. “Are you going to ask how they can build a talus with a certain character, Patera? I don’t think they can, really. I’ve never…”
“Go on, Maytera.”
“Never built a child. With a man, you know. But — but from what I understand, we can’t either. We do our best, give the child all the advantages we can. But after that, it’s up to the gods. To Molding Molpe and Lord Pas, principally.”
Swallow nodded again. “It’s no different here, Maytera. The layman thinks taluses are all alike. That’s because they all sound the same to him. When you’ve spent a while talking to them, you find out they don’t really talk alike even if they all sound like taluses. When it comes to ingenuity or honesty, that kind of thing, they can differ pretty widely. As you say, it depends on the spirit they get from the gods.
“They’re all boring,” Mucor told him; he seemed about to reply, but meeting her corpse-like gaze quickly looked away.
“There is another difference I wanted to inquire about,” Silk interposed. “I mean between taluses and boats, or any other man-made object. If I were to go to Limna with a case full of cards, I could buy a boat; and once I had paid for it, it would be mine. I could sail it or leave it tied to a pier. I could burn or sink it if I wanted to, or give it to Maytera here, or to Chenille or anyone I chose. A talus is a person, and I would assume that in cities in which slavery is legal, anyone with sufficient funds could go to a facility such as yours and order a talus built—”
“You can do that here, Calde,” Swallow put in.
“Ah. That’s interesting.”
“Good thing?” Oreb inquired.
Maytera Marble said, “It seems to me that all this applied to me once as well, Patera. No one owned me. I’ve always been free, I’m sure, and yet I did what I was told. I still do, for the most part. I respect authority, and when I was younger, I don’t think it even occurred to me to question it.” She looked thoughtful, her head down and inclined to the left.
To encourage her Oreb croaked, “Talk now.”
“Most bio — do you really want to hear this, Patera? I could tell you later, if you like.”
“Of course I do. Tell us.”
“I was just going to say that most bio children are like that, too. I don’t mean that there are no bad children, though foolish people say that because it makes them feel virtuous. But there are really very few. I’ve taught children for a long time, and most can be controlled quite easily with a few little scoldings and a few words of praise.” She paused, lifting her head and squaring her shoulders. “So can most grownups. Not quite so easily, but it isn’t a lot more difficult.”
Swallow chuckled. “She’s right, Calde. I boss almost two hundred employees here, and as a general thing a good chewing out now and then and a pat on the back for good work are all it takes. Once in a rare while we take on somebody that doesn’t work out, stealing tools or whatever, and we’ve got to get rid of him. But it doesn’t happen often.”
“I’ve been thinking about Marl, Patera.”
Silk nodded, noting as he did the first large drops of the rain that had been threatening; they were tapping on the window panes tentatively, but with growing urgency.
“Marl doesn’t receive any wages at all. I told you.”
Swallow raised an eyebrow. “Black mechanics, Maytera? It sounds like it.”
“I don’t know. I really hadn’t considered it. I was just going to say that Marl seems like an extreme instance of — of pliability. I suppose you could call it that…”
Maytera Marble’s remaining hand tightened its grip on the handle of the small basket in her lap. “And if you can make use of that pliability to control others as you do, Director, with a little money and scoldings and praise, then it seems to me people like you don’t really need slaves, except as sops to their egos. I’m expressing this offensively, I know, but I think you see what I mean. As for black mechanics, aren’t they legendary? Largely legendary, I should have said. I know that some people practiced the black art in the past.”
“There’s still a bit around in my opinion, Maytera. In my business we hear things, and that’s one of the things we hear.” Swallow turned to Silk. “I’m a blunt man, Calde, and I’m going to ask you straight out. Are you interested in getting a new talus for the Guard? Is that why you’re here?”