“How does that differ from what you’re already doing?”
“In a proper assembly line, whatever’s being built—assembled—moves down a line of workstations on a conveyor belt or a moving crane—or, if it’s a vehicle of some sort, on its own wheels, perhaps, once they’ve been attached. What matters is that it goes to the workmen, rather than the workmen coming to it. As it passes each station, the workman or workmen at that station perform their portion of the assembly process. They connect a specific part or group of parts, and that’s all they do. Whatever they’re building is brought to them. The workforce is sized so there’s enough manpower at each station to let that part of the assembly be done in as close to the same amount of time as every other part so that the line keeps moving at a steady pace. And because each group of workers performs exactly the same function on each new assembly, they can do their part of the task far more efficiently … and a hell of a lot more quickly.”
“I see.” Wylsynn sipped from his own glass, frowning, and rubbed one eyebrow. “I hope this doesn’t sound too obtuse, but why can’t you do that?”
“I can do something like that with relatively small items, like pistols and rifles. I have runners on the shop floor who wheel cartloads from one workstation to another. But to do that on a true industrial scale, I need to be able to locate machine tools—powered machine tools—at the proper places in the assembly process. Before Merlin, we really didn’t have ‘machine tools,’ although I’d been applying water power to as many processes as I could before he ever came along. Now my artisans’ve invented a whole generation of powered tools, everything from lathes to drill presses to powered looms and spinning machines for Rhaiyan’s textile manufactories. In fact, they’ve leapfrogged a hundred years or more of Earth’s industrial history—largely because of the hints Merlin and I have been able to give them. But all of them are still limited by the types of power available—they’re tied to waterwheels or the hydro-accumulators by shafting and drive belts. They aren’t … flexible, and they are dangerous, no matter how careful my managers and I try to be. The steam engines are going to help, but we still can’t simply locate machinery where we need it located; we have to locate it where we can provide power to it, instead. Electricity, and electric motors, would give us a distributed power network that would let us do that. Steam and water power don’t.”
“Um.”
Wylsynn nodded slowly, thinking about all of the patent applications he’d approved over the last four years. Probably two-thirds of them had come from Howsmyn or his artisans, although an increasing number were coming from Charisians who’d never heard of the Terran Federation. That was a good sign, but he hadn’t really considered the problem Howsmyn had just described. Probably, he reflected, because he’d been so busy being impressed by what the ironmaster had already accomplished.
Like the steam engine they’d just observed. Thanks to Owl—and Merlin, of course—Howsmyn had completely bypassed the first hundred or hundred and fifty years of the steam engine’s development back on long-dead Earth. He’d gone directly to water-tube boilers and compound expansion engines, with steam pressures of almost three hundred pounds per square inch, something Earth hadn’t approached until the beginning of its twentieth century. Oh, his initial engine had been a single-cylinder design, but that had been as much a test of the concept as anything else. He’d moved on to double-cylinder expansion engines for his first canal boat trials, but no canal boat offered anything like enough room for that monster they’d just watched in action. Still, the boat engines had been a valuable learning exercise … and even they operated at a far higher pressure—and efficiency—than anything attainable before the very end of Old Earth’s nineteenth century!
The advances he’d already made in metallurgy, riveting and welding, and quality control had helped to make those pressures and temperatures possible, but Safehold had always had a working empirical understanding of hydraulics. That was one reason Howsmyn’s hydro-accumulators had been relatively easy for Wylsynn to approve even before he’d been admitted to the inner circle; they’d simply been one more application—admittedly, an ingenious one—of concepts which had been used in the waterworks the”archangels” had made part of Safehold’s infrastructure from the Day of Creation. But the compact efficiency of the engines Howsmyn was about to introduce would dwarf even the hydro-accumulator’s impact on what Merlin called his “power budget.” So perhaps it wasn’t surprising Wylsynn had been more focused on that increase than on the even greater potentials of the electricity he still understood so poorly himself.
Especially since electricity’s one thing we can be pretty certain would attract the “Rakurai” if the bombardment platform detected it, he thought grimly. We’re lucky it doesn’t seem to worry about steam, but I don’t think it would miss a generating plant!
He shuddered internally at the thought of turning Charis into another Armageddon Reef, yet even as he did, another, very different thought occurred to him. He started to shake it off, since it was so obviously foolish. Even if it had offered any useful potential, surely Merlin and Howsmyn would already have thought of it! But it wouldn’t shake, and he frowned down into his whiskey glass.
“How’s the development coming on that ‘hydro-pneumatic recoil system’ you’ve been working on with Captain Rahzwail and Commander Malkaihy?” he asked.
“Pretty well,” Houseman replied. “We had a little trouble with the gaskets and seals initially, and the machining tolerances are awfully tight. We have to do more of it with hand tools, handheld gauges, and individually fitted pieces than I’d really like—the templates in the different manufactories aren’t as consistent as I could wish, even now—but I suppose that’s inevitable, given how recently we got around to truly standardizing measurements. Amazing how much difference there was between my ‘inch’ and, say, Rhaiyan’s! That didn’t matter as long as we were only worried about what we were making, and not about how well parts from our shops would fit anyone else’s needs. And those machine tools people like Zosh and Nahrmahn have been putting together still aren’t quite up to the tolerances I’d prefer. They’re getting there, and quickly, but we’ve still got a ways to go. Why?”
“But your fittings and steam lines and air lines are holding up? Meeting the pressure levels you were describing to me last month?”
“Yes.” Howsmyn eyed the cleric narrowly. “It’s still more of a brute-force approach than I’d really like in some cases, but they’re working just fine. Again, why? You’re headed somewhere with this, Paityr.”
“Well, I know you and Merlin deliberately steered Master Huntyr and Master Tidewater towards reciprocating engines because you want them for ships, and I don’t really disagree with your logic—or with what I understand of it, anyway. But I’ve been thinking about how they’d actually work. The turbines, I mean. About the way steam pressure would drive the vanes to provide power.”
“And?” Howsmyn prompted when Wylsynn paused.
“Well, what if instead of steam, you used air? And what if instead of turning the turbine to produce power, you used air power to turn something like a turbine to do work?” Wylsynn grimaced, clearly trying to wrap the words around a thought still in the process of forming. “What I mean is that the machines you’d run with electric motors if you could … couldn’t you power them with compressed air, instead? If you built air lines to the workstations you’re talking about, couldn’t you use air compressed by steam engines—like the way you’re powering the forced draft on your blast furnaces—to drive the ‘machine tools’ your ‘assembly line’ would require?”
Howsmyn stared at him, his expression completely blank. He stayed that way for several seconds, then shook himself and sucked in a huge breath of air.
“Yes,” he said, almost prayerfully. “Yes, I could. And without all that damned shafting and all those damned drive belts that keep crushing hands and arms no matter how careful we are! My God, Paityr.” He shook his head. “I’ve been so fo
cused on other aspects that this never even occurred to me! And it would be a perfect place to develop turbines after all, too. Running compressors, high RPMs would actually be good!”
His dazed expression was fading rapidly into a huge grin, and he punched Wylsynn on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger the priest.
“You can’t run a turbine efficiently at low RPMs, and you can’t run a propeller efficiently at high RPMs. That’s why Domynyk and I went for reciprocating engines. They run a lot more efficiently at those lower RPMs, and trying to cut the reduction gears we’d need to make turbines work for the Navy would’ve put an impossible bottleneck into the process. Either that or we’d have to run them at such poor levels of efficiency fuel consumption would skyrocket. We’d be lucky to get half as many miles out of a ton of coal. But for a central compressor to power a manufactory full of air-powered machine tools, the higher the RPMs the better! I wasn’t worried about that when we were talking about powering the blast furnaces or pumping water out of the mines. I was too busy thinking about the need to get the Navy’s engines up and running, so of course we concentrated on reciprocating machinery first! After all, turbines were mostly the way to power those electrical generating stations we can’t build anyway—it never occurred to me to use them to power compressors! That’s brilliant!”
“I’m glad you approve,” Wylsynn said, rotating his punched shoulder with a cautious air.
“Damned right I do!” Howsmyn shook his head, eyes filled with a distant fire as he considered opportunities, priorities, and difficulties. “It’ll take—what? another five or six months?—to get Zosh and Nahrmahn headed in the right direction to put it all together, but by this time next year—maybe sooner than that—I’m going to have a genuine assembly line running out there, and I’ll be able to put it in from the very beginning at Maikelberg and Lake Lymahn!” His eyes refocused on the priest. “Our efficiency will go up enormously, Paityr, and it’ll be thanks to you.”
“No, it’ll be thanks to you and Master Huntyr and Master Tidewater,” Wylsynn disagreed. “Oh, I’ll gracefully accept credit for pointing you in the right direction, but what Merlin calls the nuts and bolts of it, those are going to have to come from you and your greasy, oily, wonderfully creative henchmen.”
“I don’t think they’ll disappoint you,” Howsmyn told him with another grin. “Did I tell you what Brahd suggested to me last Tuesday?”
“No, I don’t believe you did,” Wylsynn said a bit cautiously, wondering what he was going to have to bend the Proscriptions out of shape to permit this time.
Brahd Stylmyn was Howsmyn’s senior engineering expert, the man who’d designed and overseen the construction of the canals for the barges freighting the thousands upon thousands of tons of coal and iron ore Howsmyn’s foundries required down the Delthak River. His brain was just as sharp as Zosh Huntyr’s, but it was also possessed of a bulldog tenacity that had a tendency to batter its way straight through obstacles instead of finding ways around them. The term “brute-force approach” fitted Stylmyn altogether too well sometimes, although there were also times, to be fair, when he was capable of subtlety. It just didn’t come naturally to him.
“Well, you know he was the one who laid out the railways here in the works,” Howsmyn said, and Wylsynn nodded. Like many of Howsmyn’s innovations, the dragon-drawn railcars he used to transport coal, coke, iron ore, and half a hundred other heavy loads were more of a vast refinement of something which had been around for centuries but never used on the sort of scale he’d envisioned than a totally new concept.
“He did a good job,” Howsmyn continued now, “and last five-day he asked me what I thought about laying a railway all the way from here up to the mines. I told him I thought it was an interesting idea, but to be honest—given how much we were already moving with the canals open, especially now that we’re able to get steam into the barges, we were unlikely to be able to move enough additional tonnage, even with dragon traction, to justify the diversion of that much iron and steel from our other projects. That was when he asked me why it wouldn’t be possible to take one of our new steam engines, squeeze it down, and use it to pull an entire caravan of railcars.”
“He came up with that all on his own?”
“You just called my henchmen ‘wonderfully creative,’ Paityr,” Howsmyn replied with a broad, proud smile. “And you were right. I thought I might have to prod one of them with the suggestion, but Brahd beat me to it. In fact, he was practically dancing from foot to foot like a little boy who needed to go when he asked me if we couldn’t please divert some of our priorities to let him build his steam-powered railway.”
“Oh, my.” Wylsynn shook his head. Then he took another long sip of whiskey, lowered the glass, and his gray eyes gleamed at the industrialist. “Clyntahn’s going to burst a blood vessel when he hears about this one, you know. I guarantee it, this time, and I really wish we could have the opportunity to watch him froth when he does.”
“We won’t be able to watch,” Howsmyn agreed, “but I’m willing to bet we’ll be able to hear him when he finds out.” The ironmaster raised his glass in salute to the intendant. “Maybe not directly, but I can already hear the anathematization crackling down the line towards us. Makes a nice sizzling sound, doesn’t it?”
.VI.
Shairncross House, Marisahl, Ramsgate Bay, Raven’s Land
Weslai Parkair glowered out the window at the gray sky. He regarded the handful of soggy snowflakes oozing down it towards the equally gray steel of Ramsgate Bay through the chill, damp stillness of a thoroughly dreary morning with glum disapproval, not to say loathing.
Not that it did any good.
The reflection did not improve his sour mood, although the weather was scarcely the only reason for it. He knew that, but the weather was an old, familiar annoyance—almost an old friend, one might say. It was less … worrying than other, more recent sources of anxiety, and he was a Highlander, accustomed to the craggy elevations of his clan’s mountainous territory. That was why he hated the winter climate here in Marisahl. He neither knew nor cared about the warm current which ameliorated the climate along the southern coast of Raven’s Land and the northwest coast of the Kingdom of Chisholm. What he did care about was that winter here was far damper, without the proper ice and snow to freeze the wet out of the air. He’d never liked the raw edge winter took on here in Marisahl, where the drizzling cold bit to the bone, and as he’d grown older, his bones and joints had become increasingly less fond of it.
For the last dozen years or so, unfortunately, he’d had no choice but to winter here. It went with the office of the Speaker of the Lords, just one more of the numerous negatives attached to it, and as his rheumatism twinged, he considered yet again the many attractions of resigning. Unfortunately, the clan lords had to be here as well, since winter was when they could sit down to actually make decisions rather than dealing with day-to-day survival in their cold, beautiful clan holdings. It wasn’t that life got easier in the winter highlands, only that there was nothing much anyone could do about it until spring, which made winter the logical time to deal with other problems … like the Council of Clan Lords’ business. So all resigning would really do would be to relegate him to one of the unupholstered, backless, deliberately spartan benches the other clan lords sat in, thereby proving their hardihood and natural austerity.
Might as well keep my arse in that nice padded chair for as long as I can, he thought grumpily, and then smiled almost unwillingly. Clearly I have the high-minded, selfless qualities the job requires, don’t I?
“It looks like it may actually stick this time, dear,” the petite woman across the table said, cradling her teacup between her hands. Zhain Parkair, Lady Shairncross, was eight years younger than her husband, and although his auburn hair had turned iron gray and receded noticeably, her brown hair was only lightly threaded with silver. Twenty-five northern summers and as many winters had put crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes, he thought, but
the beauty of the nineteen-year-old maiden he’d married all those years ago was still there for any man with eyes to see, and those same years had added depth and quiet, unyielding strength to the personality behind it.
“Umpf!” he snorted now. “If it does, the entire town will shut down and huddle round the fires till it melts.” He snorted again, with supreme contempt for such effete Lowlanders. “People wouldn’t know what to do with a real snowfall, and you know it, Zhain!”
“Yes, dear. Of course, dear. Whatever you say, dear.” Lady Zhain smiled sweetly and sipped tea. He glowered back at her, but his lips twitched, despite his sour mood. Then his wife lowered her cup, and her expression had turned far more serious.
“So the Council’s reached a decision?” Her tone made the question a statement, and her eyes watched him carefully.