Raising Steam (Discworld 40)

In the silence Moist thought he heard a curious sizzle, like the sound made by Iron Girder when she was relaxing after a heavy day on the straight and curves. You could perhaps call it a kind of metal purring, but it had now gone, leaving doubts that it had ever been there.

Harry looked Moist up and down and said gravely, ‘They said you flew under the train, holding two little kiddies in your arms. Did you?’

‘You know, I have absolutely no idea. I did see the kids with their heads on the tracks, listening to the funny noises on the rails, and I distinctly remember myself saying Oh bugger! Then something whacked me on the side of the head and I don’t remember a thing until I woke up in the Lady Sybil, on a bed, and that’s the truth. I am a liar for the purposes of amusement, publicity, trivial one-upmanship, personal profit and the gaiety of nations, but I’m not lying to you now.’

There was silence, broken when Harry said hoarsely, ‘You know I’m a granddad, don’t you? A little boy and a little girl, courtesy of my eldest, and I don’t often shiver, my friend, but I’m shivering now.’ Harry stood up, with eyes running tears, and said, ‘You’re the man for this, Mister Lipwig, so you tell me what I should do, please.’

Moist hadn’t expected this, but he managed to catch the metaphorical ball. ‘Clean up your act, Harry,’ he said. ‘Engineers and suchlike know all about hot steel, high speeds and wheels spinning fast, right! For most people, exhilarating speed is a runaway horse. Many people get hurt in this city every year when dear old Dobbin the dray horse suddenly feels his oats and heads for pastures new down the middle of the road.

‘My advice is to shut down the Iron Girder rides for a week, for “maintenance”. Tidy up, keep all the sharp stuff out of the way, stick up some barriers and have a few lads wandering around in uniform looking like they mean business. You know the kind of thing. Make a show of being safe.’

And now Moist heard the little sizzle again, and it seemed to sizzle in his soul, filling him with ideas, and in the theatre of his head he sat up in the gods, watching the stage of his imagination, agog to see what he came up with next.

‘It’s not just around the compound that there could be incidents like this, Harry – we need to keep an eye on the whole line. Someone to spot if there are kids on the track, or cows, or a train going the wrong way.’ He saw Harry blanch at the thought of all the things that could go wrong, but he was in full flow now. ‘They’ll need a good view – some kind of watchtower would do the trick, with a clacks attached to signal to the drivers … Ask Dick – that brain of his is coming up with new designs faster than his hand can get them down on paper.

‘And here’s a tip: do something about those greasy old cattle wagons you’re running behind Iron Girder. They’re okay for a circus ride, maybe, but all of your rolling stock should be as good as the special ones we’re using on the Sto Lat line.’

Sizzle. ‘Yes! More posh carriages for the nobs, and …’ here Moist saw the money smile and continued, ‘here’s a thought, for those who aren’t quite nobs but aspire to be like them, well, why not give them carriages that are not quite so plush, but visibly better than the very cheapest coaches which are, perhaps, open to the weather. That would give them something else to yearn for, and you’ll have made yet another money pump.’

Moist now found himself caught in the glare of one of Harry King’s most dangerous expressions.

‘Mister Lipwig, damn me if you ain’t a most dangerous man, yes indeed! You’re inciting people to have ideas above their station, and that sort of thing makes people suspicious and anxious and, above all, very, very nervous.’

To Harry’s surprise, Moist almost sprang into the air, spinning. ‘Yes! Yes! That’s the way! Lord Vetinari’s way, too. He believes that people should strive to be better in every respect. I can see it now, Harry. Picture a young man taking his young lady on the train and hazarding an extra sixpence to go in the better-class seats. Well, he’s no end of a swell, and he’ll look around him and think, This suits me down to the ground and no mistake, I could do with more of this.

‘And when he goes back to work he’ll strive, yes, strive, to become a better, that’s to say, richer person to the benefit of both his employer and himself, and not, of course, neglecting to thank the owner of the railway, to wit, your good self, who allowed him to have ideas above his railway station. Everybody wins, nobody loses. Please, please, Harry, allow people to aspire. I mean who knows, they might have been in the wrong class all this time. Your railway, my friend, will allow them to dream, and once you have a dream you’ve got somewhere closer to a reality.’

Throughout all this Harry stared at Moist as if he’d just seen a giant tarantula, but he managed to say, ‘Mister Lipwig, a little while ago you were under a railway engine with fifty tons of rolling stock going past your ears and now you spring up like a jack-in-the-box, full of vim and vigour and schemes! What is it you’ve got? And how can I get some of it?’

‘I don’t know, Harry, it’s just me being normal. You just keep going, whatever happens, and you never stop. It works for me. And remember: clean up your act – our act – to make sure that the public don’t get caught up in the mechanisms.’

The sister state of Quirm comprised, like Ankh-Morpork, a major city, several theoretically autonomous satellites each vying with all the others for advancement, any number of squabbling townships, all bloated with self-importance, and a vast number of homesteads, parishes, farms, vineries, mines, hamlets, bends in the road that someone had named after their dog, and so on, and indeed, so on again.

Around the edges of the Ankh-Morpork hegemonyfn38 it was quite possible these days for a small farmer on the hypothetical outskirts of all that could be called Ankh-Morpork to lean over his own hedge and chat with a Quirmian farmer who was most definitely in Quirm at the time, without in any way considering that this was a political matter. The conversation would generally be about the weather, the abundance or otherwise of water and the uselessness of the government, never mind which kind, and then happily they would shake hands, or give a little nod, and one would go home to drink a pint of home-made beer after such a busy day, while the other would do likewise with a decent home-made wine.

Occasionally the son of one farmer would go to the hedge and see the daughter of the other one, and vice versa and that was why, in a few – but very interesting – places along the boundary, there were people who spoke in both tongues. This sort of thing is something that governments really hate, which is a very good thing.

Technically speaking, Quirm and Ankh-Morpork were bosom friends, after centuries of conflict mostly about things that turned out to be inessential, inconsequential, untrue or downright lies. Yes, you used to need a passport to travel in either direction, but since Lord Vetinari had taken office nobody really looked at them any more. Moist had been there many times in his younger days and in different guises and under different names and, on one very memorable occasion, a different sex.fn39

Moist mused for a moment as that triumph came back to him. It had been one of the all-time great scams, and, although there had been a large number of other fruitful escapades, he had never dared try it again. The nuns would have got him for sure.

But now, as the coach to Quirm finally reached the border, the only obstacle was a gate, theoretically locked and manned by a couple of officers, one on each side. However, such was the nature of inter-state relations that they were quite often asleep or, if not sleeping, were happily cultivating their little gardens on either side of the border. Some might ask what was the point? Everybody smuggled and, after all, the smuggling went both ways, and so a pragmatic approach was floating in the zeitgeist.

And today Moist had a list of people to see, oh yes, he always had a list. He knew that Quirm itself desperately needed the railway as it had lots of produce to sell or be left with heaps of stinking fish, and so Moist was expecting a happy week dealing with the lobsters,fn40 but right now he was dealing with people far from the coast who considered their tiny patches of ground to be sacred. Yes, they wanted the railway, but if it went across their land they wouldn’t have any land left that wasn’t railway.

Moist was assisted in his negotiations in Quirm by Acting Captain Haddock of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, presently seconded to the Quirmian force, who had learned the lingo, in an Ankh-Morpork kind of way. Acting Captain Haddock explained the dilemma created by Quirmian traditions of landownership over a pint of very weak beer.

‘It’s all to do with something they call le patrimony. It means that all the kids have to get something when mum and dad pass over. A big farm might have to be split into two or even three or more so everyone can get their share. Even the government knows this is stupid, but no one in Quirm takes any notice of what the government says. So it’s up to you, Mister Lipwig, to get them to understand, but that’s it, I’m afraid.’

Well, Moist tried, he really did, and after a frustrating fortnight haggling over every handkerchief-sized plot, he was ready to give up and head back to Ankh-Morpork. Harry wasn’t going to like this, he thought, and, worse still, neither was Vetinari, but he could probably talk his way out of it, possibly.

His gloomy mood was lightened when he reached a small but prosperous estate belonging to the Marquis des Aix en Pains, a well-known wine grower. The Marquis was one of the last landowners on Moist’s list. He had married a girl from Ankh-Morpork and was apparently extremely keen to have his very fine wines conveyed to customers as soon as possible with a minimum of jolting, which had a deleterious effect on the wine. Currently the coach journey, littered with potholes, required the wines to lie down in a dark cool cellar to settle for months afterwards.

The Marquis had invited Moist for lunch, which turned out to be something he called fusion cuisine, with pâté devoid of avec, a main course of lobster and mash, followed by a most excellent spotted dick, a combination of dishes that you would expect to live long in the annals of gastronomic infamy but which wasn’t too bad, especially when consumed in conjunction with the remarkably good house wines.

The Marquis was young and forward-looking and clearly taken with the idea of the railway, not only for the wine trade but also as a means of bringing people together. He winked at his wife as he said so, with the definite implication that getting people together was something very close to his heart; and he believed that the more people knew about one another, the better they got along. His views on Quirm’s curious and slightly bucolic attitude to the division of wealth after the death of the parents were of great interest to Moist.

‘Everyone wants to sell their wine and cheese and fish to Ankh-Morpork, zat is certain, but nobody wants to lose land. We all like our slice of Quirm: it’s real real estate, something you can pick up and crumble in your fingers, something zat you can fight for. It’s old-fashioned, I know, and of course its continued existence leaves the government ex