Vasily & The Works (Tales from the Middle Empires Vol III), Page 2

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  Vasily’s great-grandfather had inherited a dowdy naval componentry works and enlarged it into a shipworks. The shipworks began accidentally when he built himself a yacht that he had no time to fly (plus, no local worlds at which to moor or refuel). A wealthy trader with an interest in oddball custom ships bought it on the cheap (more as a favor to his old friend than anything else) and quickly recognized it as a potential commercial smash. With a few alterations to bring the price down, the Alexseyev Zylph sold briskly, leading to commissions for other sorts of small craft and then, also accidentally, a commission from an admiring rear-admiral for a naval pup-ship. Alexseyev Componentry & Shipworks still made such pup-ships, along with pods and cutters for military and mercantile ships, and the small private craft and yachts that had begun it all.

  Vasily’s grandfather Nicolai, wanting to expand to include both larger craft and greater volume sales, designed the multicore, which he built and tested in secret so as not to arouse suspicions and jealousies among the Linnet oligarchy. Pleased with the results, and nervous he should be found out, he planned the defensive scheme for the Works and oversaw the initial phases of its construction. The great bunker housing the multicore processors was the first item of business. He lived to see his multicore, buried beneath a ti-metal ribbed plascrete cap, control a robot arm in the new Works manufactory floor, half a league distant. He felt triumphant, then died.

  Vasily’s father completed the construction at the Works (so far as such things were ever really complete), made some innovations of his own with the multicore’s programming code and also the creation of a distributed monitoring network, and survived long enough to know an Alexseyev heir who lived. The casual discussion on Linnet was that by the unwritten ethical code among the oligarchs, Arseny Alexseyev was not a fair target until his blood lineage had been determined, one way or another. In a sense, then, it was Vasily, age twelve, who killed his father. (Though surprising to naifs on certain Imperial worlds, on Linnet patricide in the more literal sense occurred often enough to pass without comment, at least, by those who valued the peace and their own well-being. Was it any better to die at the hands of one’s brother than by one’s son? Even infanticide was not unknown here. Let Linnet be Linnet, and you will get your product, so stow your gob — such was the Linnets’ feelings on the subject.)

  For all Arseny Alexseyev’s work and suffering to conceive a living heir, there had been a general hope that the results would be more promising. From an early age, Vasily showed himself incapable of that affectless, literal-minded determination to find out how things worked; how they had been put together; how they could be improved. Some errant strain — no doubt from the mother’s side — had interceded in the bloodline. Arseny had faulted himself, for trying too hard and tempting fate. Ten times? Even back-alley trollops let go with a live birth after a half-dozen go's, even if only half of those lived.

  Vasily’s mother faulted the father as well, in so many muttered asides and snide insinuations concerning “the blood running downhill.”

  It seemed to some on Linnet that Arseny Alexseyev had been peculiarly heedless of his own life at the end; that he took unnecessary risks and exposed himself too plainly. For, they said, if he could build an impregnable bunker for his fancy multicore, why not for himself? The answer was plain enough: a marksman’s shot stopped his heart, but it was Vasily who broke it.

  Idle commentary, of course, since Arseny was dead, Vasily was the heir, and Vasily’s mother oversaw the Works as the regent.

  Mrs. Alexseyev took to the new assignment. It suited her sense of self-worth, to say nothing of her wardrobe — stiff, cinched, and bound, and expensively tailored to within an inch of her life. She glided around the offices and shop floors of the works like some terrible, vaporous spirit, her displeased gaze portending doom — or at a minimum, extended shifts.

  Vasily wasn’t subject to these so much as to pleading remonstrances that he make himself useful, instead of fiddling around with the expensive collection of modeling and prototyping gadgets he had assembled at one end of the componentry warehouse (the “R&D Lab,” as he had named it). He had somehow managed to trick the com-eyes so that whichever one had the best vantage point on him was always switched off. Mrs. Alexseyev had had some stern words for Inchrises, the most senior shop supervisor, about this, but she had no way of proving that Inchrises had been involved. She herself lacked the technical resources to correct it, and she suspected it would profit her nothing to command a minion anyway: in the end, Vasily always got what he wanted. In this, he was most surely his father’s son. That was some comfort. The Alexseyev willfulness had kept things going for a very long time. Perhaps this seedling, this fragment of Alexseyev genius, if nurtured and encourage in the right way, would mature into an able head of the Works.

  So she dared hope.

  Vasily had, as usual, disappeared into the R&D lab after first-breakfast. His mother hadn’t seen him this morning — he had slunk out, no doubt in league with Nisus. Well, that was all right. Nisus was a true friend, and quite handsome enough in a lower-class, rakish sort of way. He was certainly no traitor or threat, as so many oligarchs’ children (Vasily’s peers) were.

  Making it a point to check up on her son, Mrs. Alexseyev crossed the ring-works shop floor on her lev-cart. She spotted Inchrises going down the stairs from a supervisory tower. It didn’t matter that a dozen other workers criss-crossed the shop paths below him, that the loud drone and shocking burps of metal-fab machines made insistent demands, that the high-heeled boots of a pert girl from the receivables office clicked incongruously on the greasy shop floor as the girl rushed away on some errand. None of this fooled Mrs. Alexseyev. She recognized the look on Inchrises’ face: indulgence. He was doing something for Vasily when there were far better things he should be doing for the Works.

  She veered suddenly — nearly clipping a gasket trimmer floating a pallet from station to station — to intercept the old supervisor.

  “I’ll take that, if you please,” she said, not getting up.

  Inchrises looked up sheepishly. “Message from up front,” he said, jerking a thumb to indicate the booted girl now disappearing through a doorway far across the shop floor. “‘Special delivery,’ they says. Hand-download with signature.”

  Mrs. Alexseyev’s hand was out, insistent. Inchrises tipped his forehead and laid the little tablet upon the soft, shi-boar glove. A lash-mark scar along the top, near the pearl button, evidenced the herdsman’s cruel discipline on some faraway world.

  Rather than seem mean, low, and prying in a manner beneath her dignity, Mrs. Alexseyev scooted off towards Vasily’s “lab.” When she had put Inchrises well behind her, she pulled up behind a pallet-load of platinum coils and powered up the tablet.

  “Vid-message from Ramflow, Etienn. Enter private key.”

  “Not him again,” she sighed. “Arseny should never have let that man into the school. ‘Algorithmics,’ indeed! At our own college! And still sucking at the teat of the Works. What on Linnet can he want now?”

  In the mists of time (by Linnet reckoning), an Alexseyev long dead and barely remembered had endowed a small college of informatics. It overlooked the sea near the then-new colony of Krasnoyarsk, before Linnet’s five main districts — continents, really — had organized into political units. Alexseyev College, a liberal-sciences school within the now-great Krasnoyim University, maintained little connection in this late era to the pioneer family who had got it going, apart from guaranteed admission in perpetuity for Alexseyev legatees. Even this, one suspected, owed less to respect for history and the founding spirit of early Linnets than to the annual gift from the Works to the school and the family sponsorship of a gifted, lower-class youth admitted into the old College each fourthyear. The legacy meant very little now, with few Alexseyevs left to claim it. The sponsorship, however, regularly churned out talented hard-coders and architects, several of whom had shown their appreciation over the centuries with
important export programs, usually code-named in artful wordplay on “Alexseyev.” Not every Alexseyev-sponsored youth had gone on to greatness — Nisus, for instance, had graduated mid-pack and done nothing more than occasional code-jobbing since. And more than a few ingrates had abandoned Linnet for the risky sojourn to cleaner worlds. Still, the Alexseyevs prided themselves on the historical resonances, and they noisily advertised to their rivals the college’s occasional invitation for an Alexseyev to serve as grandee at this-or-that event. The ensuing half-day traverse to the remote edge of the home district was always bother, as well as a risk, but no Alexseyev in memory had been molested or assassinated en route.

  Thus, Mrs. Alexseyev was engaging in some hyperbole in suggesting that her late husband had had any say in the college’s hiring of Professor Ramflow. The name had not arisen at all prior to Vasily’s first Rivetday break from college. (By then, of course, Arseny had already passed on to the Great Works.) On that fateful first visit home, Vasily had gone off at breakfast on the gossamer beauties of “pure” software and the speculative relationship between coding art and function. Mrs. Alexseyev had summarily quashed this naive, unseemly enthusiasm by invoking the spirit of her late husband. She went on to openly scorn those who wasted precious years of college looking for “meaning” in the soft sciences. She held up as example one of the Alexseyev rivals:

  “It is something a Chernow would do,” she sniffed. “We will never be like the Chernows. Not as long as I am here to keep these works going.”

  Vasily had dropped the subject, apparently chastened, but the rift between mother and son had begun. Vasily scraped through college with a nominal hard-science degree in process efficiency, all the while loading up his electives with soft-science courses with names like “Metrics & Mimesis,” “Comparative Encoding,” and “Software Modes of Poesy.” And of course, all of these had been taught by Ramflow. (There had also been a course in interpretation called “Gender and Base Code (Machines & Sexuality),” taught by a strikingly lovely, older woman from Fiber connected in some undefined way to Ramflow. Vasily got too absorbed in the instructress to remember much about the course, and in any case, the exotic Prof. Irigary refused to submit to the “oligo-patriarchist system of marks.” Vasily did little but occasionally speak up in class — as well as rather earnestly in private after each class — to get a passing grade.)

  Mrs. Alexseyev, in no humor to suffer soft sciences now, and lacking a private key to open the tablet message, floated on towards its intended recipient, whom she found attacking the knurled dials of a mock-up control panel.

  “Good morning, Mother,” he said, pushing his goggles up. He wore a stained, monogrammed smock over his usual shirt-with-pants combination. The smock tended to conceal the soft paunch that the over-tight shirt awkwardly highlighted.

  Mrs. Alexseyev ignored his greeting and averted her eyes from his appearance. “You’ve got a message. Hand-delivered.”

  “What hey? Damned inconvenient. I’m on the verge of a breakthrough here.”

  His mother thrust out the tablet. He glanced at it, badly concealed his happy surprise at seeing his old instructor’s name, and nonchalantly set the tablet down.

  “Aren’t you going to watch it?”

  “Of course, Mother. I’ll get to it presently. Once I rig up this . . . this.”

  She glared at the mindless, expensive, inconclusive construction project. She glanced around at the other half-finished projects, including hull models carved from plate-diamond, insectoid ship miniatures, mock-up control interfaces, and the constantly-evolving contraption of wires and plates he called a “de-grav shield.” The expense was ruinous.

  “Are you planning to make an inspection of the rest of the Works at any point in your day?” she said.

  “I’m really very busy, Mother. Can it wait?”

  She sighed resignedly. “It can’t wait forever, Vasily Alexseyev. These are your Works.”

  “Of course they are. And as soon as I’ve finished here, I shall see to it. Never fear, Mother. I have things well in hand. Plus, if things work out like I hope” — he tapped his forehead — “we’ll have the Works moving along briskly in no time.”

  “Another plan, Vasily? It’s nothing to do with this . . .” She glanced at the tablet, which blinked blue to show it was waiting.

  He looked insulted. “That? I have no idea why Professor Ramflow should see the need to consult me, though I’m not surprised. He often said I was the brightest of my year, just misdirected by the weight of expectations imposed upon me, trapped by society’s rigid orthodoxies. Anyhow, it’s not just a ‘plan,’ Mother. I’ve struck upon the very thing. More work than we could handle in several lifetimes, plus an end to these silly feuds, a clean planet, and a manufactory that will hum!”

  His mother looked hard at him for a moment, then turned away without another word. She backed her float, maneuvered around, and glided away, her stiff skirts rigid in anger.

  Vasily waited until she had rounded a tall barrier composed of crates, then tore off his goggles to get at the tablet. He tapped in his code and watched the vid message come up “within” the device, the display panel a small aperture into another realm.

  Ramflow seemed inexplicably older than the last time Vasily had seen him, just two years ago. Grey had overtaken his sideburns and temple, and his forehead had advanced upward leaving a V-shaped highlands in its wake. Vasily had noticed before that the line between student and graduate seemed to cleave the world between the old and the young. You were demanded to be on one side or the other. Certainly Vasily himself had aged far beyond his years during his time spent in the real world of hard labor in the manufactory. Vasily touched the crown of his head and smoothed the hair over the trifling spot of temporary sparseness brought on by the stress of work. The salve was taking forever to stimulate his hair.

  “Greetings, Vasily Alexseyev, most revered of former students,” Ramflow began. He sat resplendent in his tablet-filled office, clad in an epauletted academic gown. Vasily tilted and rotated the display to see if the office still looked the same — it did.

  “You have been sorely missed in this department,” Ramflow went on. “The importance of this field of endeavor still sadly gets downgraded in preference to sciences with ‘practical’ value. Too bad for those that ignore us! We shall inherit the Empire!

  “However, for the time being, to accentuate our stature and publicize our efforts in the wider community of academe, I have established the Ramflow Prize in Algorithmic Arts, to be awarded in odd years based upon submissions to . . . well, me. You will find the call for entries and entrance forms appended to this packet.

  “No doubt you have fully immersed yourself by now in the world of commerce & industry, and have little time to think on other matters. Still, it should surprise no one if you’ve maintained the interest and enthusiasm that so marked you as a collegian. I daresay you’ve kept the wheels turning without and within, and have any number of surprising creations secreted away in that notable organic processor of yours.

  “So please, Mr. Alexseyev, consider this my personal plea to submit an entry for consideration by the . . . uh, panel of judges. The winner necessarily receives no very valuable prize in terms of lucre, at least not in this inaugural year. However, I shall personally present the first prize here at Alexseyev, college of colleges at Krasnoyim, and the winner shall be tasked (and, I hope, honored) to join the judging panel at the next competition, two years hence, and invited to share in relieving the department of the costs of administrative overhead and even endowing the prize-credit for future winners.”

  Vasily, his heart racing, scrolled through the rest of the encomium-laced vid and pulled up the call for entries.

  Call For Entries

  Algorithmic Coding Arts Competition

  Submission Guidelines

  Entrants will submit a range of no more than 100,000 steps within an applied algorithm set to run for any total number of steps, but not to excee
d the step word-length capabilities of a category six multicore executed in standard run mode according to Linnet Joint Computational Protocol No. . . .

  Vasily skipped over the technical restrictions and read on:

  Submissions will be judged on novelty of algorithm formulation, symmetry of output, patterning and transformation of structures, and overall visual, aural, and/or tactile interest.

  Entry fee: 1,m Lcu or equivalent TECU (Trans-Empire Credit Units).

  Entries without the required fee will be discarded.

  His eye fell upon the last line:

  The winner will be publicly presented the Ramflow Prize, composed of a passive, dedicated film-tablet suitable for framing or transmission, along with publication of the winning entry in Journal of Automaton Arts (Ramflow, ed.) and service as co-judge in the next subsequent ACAC.

  A prize! What wouldn’t he give!

  Vasily had made it through school without undue effort (but with the occasional application of persuasion where testing had been an inadequate gauge of his abilities). Thus, he had been free to really experience college life in all its rich, besotted gaiety. (It had been expensive, true. He had the worst luck at die-and-memristor, and somehow the beverage bill always came round to him. But he certainly didn’t resent his lucky, penurious party chums.)

  What he still couldn’t live down, when he was reminded of his school days, was the ill-will he bore towards those nameless, faceless beings who had assaulted the podium so shamelessly at graduation ceremonies. What was that mousy girl’s name who had taken the departmental prize at informatics? He recalled having seen her a time or two during college, scurrying from one dark hole to another. Then it seemed like he saw nothing but her at the very end — prizes, awards, cups, certificates, tassels, societies . . . .

  He had remarked something to Ramflow at the time.

  “No, no,” Ramflow had responded through a cupped hand during some incessant flowery awards speech. “Not artistic in the slightest degree. All elbows and angles — you can practically hear the great numbers crunching in her work. Most functional, to be sure. She’ll rise near the top at some manufactory or other, always a handmaiden to an oligarch, never breaking through the diamond-pane ceiling.” He shrugged pityingly. “Which no doubt will make her parents proud. Ah well. We have eternity on our side, eh Vas? Immortal art?”

  Vas. Vasily was always “Vas” back then, to everyone, including Ramflow. Now, ensconced on his ancestral perch back home, he was Mr. Alexseyev.

  Vasily sighed wistfully. He had enjoyed being Vas, just Vas, mixing with the . . . well, not being an heir but just another well-to-do student. Now Vas was a man, doing a man’s work, with time for little else.

  But this, this was plainly something worth doing, something the young head of a works might do in his spare time to offhandedly illustrate his mature, polymathic abilities. Why, he would take a prize like this at the flick of a wrist! It wasn’t really fair to the workaday coding hacks and amateurs who would no doubt enter the contest thinking that some minor, over-wrought algorithmic effort could compete with the output of the titans. Perhaps it was unseemly and unfair for him to even enter. Yet Ramflow had taken special effort to notify him — had composed a special-delivery, secure vid-com just for the purpose. The leader in the field clearly felt that Vasily should stay involved, so was it really Vasily’s place to argue (rank notwithstanding)? Ramflow had shown Vasily a great deal of courtesy in school, crediting their deep, interesting talks in restaurants and bars towards the academic requirements; suggesting minor alterations to term submissions to fill in details that Vasily’s broader, more rarified take didn’t always reduce to specifics.

  Hang it all, he would do it! How much time could it require, after all?

  He set the tablet down on the terminal console he had ordered rigged up in his lab and looked up dreamily at the smudged clerestory windows whose light infused his workspace with a magical glow.

  “Terminal,” he said. “Shake hands with the tablet and then compile and link. Do you have my college scripts and programs? I gave them to you at the end of every term.”

  “Working, please be patient,” replied the terminal in a flat, uninflected voice.

  “Well, then. Alert me when you’ve found them — unless I’m napping, in which case, have them at the ready. I’m always at my most creative after a good nap.”