Going Postal - Terry Pratchett [98]
“Your brother?” said Moist. On the far side of the huge room, the evening’s fight began with a well-executed Looking-At-Me-In-A-Funny-Way, earning two points and a broken tooth.
“He and some of the people who used to work on the Trunk before it was pirated—pirated, Mr. Lipwig—were going to start up a new Trunk,” said Miss Dearheart, leaning forward. “They’d scraped up funding somehow for a few demonstration towers. It was going to be more than four times as fast as the old system, they were going to do all kinds of clever things with the coding, it was going to be wonderful. A lot of people gave them their savings, people who’d worked for my father. Most of the good engineers left when my father lost the Trunk, you see. They couldn’t stand Gilt and his bunch of looters. My brother was going to get all our money back.”
“You’ve lost me there,” said Moist. An ax landed in the table, and vibrated.
Miss Dearheart stared at Moist and blew a stream of smoke past his ear.
“My father is Robert Dearheart,” she said distantly. “He was chairman of the original Grand Trunk company. The clacks was his vision. Hell, he designed half of the mechanisms in the towers. And he got together with a group of other engineers, all serious men with slide rules, and they borrowed money and mortgaged their houses and built a local system and poured the money back in and started building the Trunk. There was a lot of money coming in, every city wanted to be in on it, everyone was going to be rich. We had stables. I had a horse. Admittedly, I didn’t like it much. But I used to feed it and watch it run about or whatever it is they do. Everything was going fine, and suddenly he got this letter and there were meetings and they said he was lucky not to go to prison for, oh, I don’t know, something complicated and legal. But the clacks was still making huge amounts. Can you understand that? Reacher Gilt and his gang acted, oh yes, friendly, but were buying up the mortgages and controlling banks and moving numbers around and they pulled the Grand Trunk out from under us like thieves. All they want to do is make money. They don’t care about the Trunk. They’ll run it into the ground and make more money by selling it. When Dad was in charge, people were proud of what they did. And because they were engineers, they made sure that the towers worked properly, all the time. They even had what they called ‘walking towers,’ prefabricated ones that packed onto a couple of big carts so that if a tower was having serious trouble they could set this one up alongside and start it up and take over the traffic without dropping a single code. They were proud of it, everyone was, they were proud to be a part of it!”
“You should’ve been there. You should’ve seen it!” Moist said to himself. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
Across the room, a man hit another man with his own leg and picked up seven points.
“Yes,” said Miss Dearheart. “You should have. And three months ago my brother John raised enough to start a rival to the Trunk. That took some doing. Gilt has got tentacles everywhere. Well, John ended up dead in a field. They said he hadn’t clipped his safety rope on. He always did. And now my father just sits and stares at the wall. He even lost his workshop when everything got taken away. We lost our house, of course. Now we live with my aunt in Dolly Sisters. That’s what we’ve come to. When Reacher Gilt talks about freedom he means his, not anyone else’s. And now you pop up, Mr. Moist von Lipwig, all shiny and new, running around doing everything at once. Why?”
“Vetinari offered me the job, that’s all,” said Moist.
“Why did you take it?”
“It was a job for life.”
She stared at Moist so hard that he began to feel uncomfortable.
“Well, you’ve managed to get a table at Le Foie Heureux at a few hours’ notice,” she conceded, as a knife struck a beam behind her. “Are you still going to lie if I ask you how?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Good.