Chapter 18
With Rita’s promise to come and fetch her when Aaron arrived, Margaret returned to her rooms. Even if another invitation to an evening reception appeared, she decided to stay in, perhaps stepping out to dine in the cafeteria for a small, informal meal. Although the computers in the Treasury had not given her good news, perhaps if she took home one of those gray clay boxes, they could use it to make economies within the manor and stave off further losses.
It was nice to have a comfortable evening, curled up with a book. She decided to tackle a thick tome about the history of processing cotton. The inventors’ biographical notes were presented in such a slow and dull fashion that her eyes threatened to close every other paragraph, but she forced herself to keep going, in hopes of finding detailed directions on how their devices were made. This period that was yet to come, over two hundred years from then, was a whirlwind of design and competition that rivaled the Renaissance. How the author of the book could make it dull dismayed her.
Hettie had taken out their mending, and sat close to the lamp on the other side to fix the hem of a petticoat that had come unstitched. She glanced at Margaret from time to time, as if anticipating any need her mistress might have. Margaret smiled at her in appreciation.
She reached for a corner of the diagonal-cut sandwich on the shared plate between her and Hettie, when a wild, whining noise made her jump and drop it. She sat upright. The howl reminded Margaret of a grain mill running out of control just before the windmill vanes snapped off in a high wind. She ran to the open window to look down and see where it was coming from.
Out on the street, a bronze-colored horseless vehicle came weaving through the slower carriage traffic at a speed that rivaled the train engine. It fishtailed to a halt in front of the presidential palace, back end forward, and a trio of boys leaped out of it, laughing. Margaret’s eyes shone. This motorcar was even louder than the one that she had seen leaving the train station. Its casing shone, and silver pipes protruded through the lid at the front. What a marvelous thing!
The boys disappeared beneath her view as they entered the front of the building. In a few minutes, a servant came their door. Hettie let him in.
“Fräulein, Frau Simpson requests your presence in the entry hall.”
Margaret rose in excitement. “They’re here! Rita didn’t expect them until morning!”
She almost ran after the messenger, but Hettie dragged her back.
“Your lady mother would make me sleep out in the field with the sheep if I let you go out in such a mess!”
She began to tidy Margaret’s hair and straighten her gown. Margaret stood, fidgeting impatiently until Hettie released her, then all but ran toward the great staircase. Hettie came behind at a more stately pace.
As they rounded the lintel halfway to the ground floor, Rita spotted them and waved. The three boys were with her, looking a little sheepish.
“…And I thought I told you to take the train in,” Rita was saying to the middle boy, a brown-haired, blue-eyed lad about the same age as Margaret’s brother, Nathaniel.
The tallest boy, a lanky youth in the trousers Margaret had learned to call blue jeans and a yellow cambric shirt, cleared his throat. “Well, Miz Rita, when my mama heard you’re in town, she wanted me to bring you some of her blackberry jam.” He held out a thin brown bag to her that clanked at the movement.
“Well, thank her for me, Trent, but it didn’t take three of you to bring it in,” Rita said. “And isn’t that Mr. Dodge’s car out there?”
“Aw, Mrs. Simpson, we just wanted to take a road trip,” the shortest boy said, with a winning smile.
“Zachary Cooper, you know better than to waste fuel like that,” Rita said. She sighed. “I get it. I was a teenager not that long ago. All right. I suppose it’ll be easier to for you to take Aaron home again in a while.”
“Can we get some snacks?” Trent asked. “We’re starved! We all came right after school.”
She waved them toward the stairs. “Go to the cafeteria,” she said. “We’ll meet you there later.”
“Yes, ma’am! Thank you, ma’am!” The two boys vanished into the hallway. She turned to the last boy, a youth of medium height with brown hair and a square jaw.
“Margaret, this is Aaron Craig,” Rita said.
Aaron wiped his palm down the thigh of his jeans and stuck his hand out to her. Margaret took it and was the receiver of a hearty if awkward handshake.
“I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said. “Miz Rita, the principal didn’t say. Is something wrong with the aqualators?”
“No, but Miz Margaret might be interested in some to help run her family’s business, and everyone here thinks you’re the best person to figure out what she needs. Will you show them to her and explain how they work?”
“I’d be proud to, Miz Simpson!” The boy’s face was shining with excitement at the importance of the moment as they walked up the stairs toward the Treasury department. “So, aqualators are water computers.”
“I saw that,” Margaret said. “What I couldn’t understand is how they work. How they accept information and how they produce, er, results.”
Aaron was only too happy to explain. “A computer is a machine that asks really simple questions, but several at a time, and analyzes the data that you put into it via these keyboards here. I wish I could show you the real computers we used to work on. I’ve got a Pentium at home, but the unstable electricity in Magdeburg has burned out a bunch of other people’s desktops, and I didn’t want to risk mine.”
“I understand,” Margaret said, although she didn’t. He went nattering on, throwing in unfamiliar words, and peppering his discourse with stories of his interaction with computers, and how each one he had had was better than the one before.
She was surprised by how young he looked, yet how much he knew. Her own brother Nathaniel, about the same age as Aaron, couldn’t possibly have explained anything this complex, even if he understood it. As much as she loved Nat, he was a mystery to his own family. Their father had been trying for a couple of years to figure out what kind of job he could do in the future. He had no gift for scholarship, falling even behind their two younger sisters at lessons. He couldn’t do sums, couldn’t negotiate or get along with the people in the manor, and he would have gotten himself killed if he joined the king’s army or navy. Trying to picture him offering a treatise in an advanced science just could not fit into her imagination.
Aaron went on. “…So, most people who need the power of a computer and don’t have access to the electronic ones we still have left are using aqualators. Say what you like, but they are pretty stable. You just have to clean them out with a little brush, at least once a week, or use triple-distilled water in a closed system, because the calculations go funky if you don’t, with the buildup of silt. So, Dr. Wetmore and some other people came up with this system, and it works pretty well. It goes back to the earliest of computing systems, which I guess is like almost two hundred years ago—I mean, not now, two hundred years ago.” He made an apologetic face. “It’s hard thinking in two time periods at once. Aqualators are slower than anything, but they work. The ones here in the Treasury can do about the same work as a HP 12C.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Aaron looked abashed. “Uh, well, it’s a computer that some of us used to use. I belong to the Computer Club in school. There are still a few HPs around, but they won’t last forever. But the function is the same.
“Anyhow, these can be made to do complex calculations, depending on how many of them you put in parallel or sequence. It’s based on that technology, practically older than civilization. They can operate anywhere there’s a steady stream of running water, like I said, or in a closed system using glycerin. I’ve got an Aquarius aqualator at home I’ve been modifying. I’ve been trying to duplicate the video games I used to play.” He looked sad. “It’ll be a long time before I can get anything like that. And they run really slow, but probably fast enough for your purposes. If you need something like that, like a business computer for record keeping. That’s what they have here.”
“I don’t really know yet,” Margaret said. “How complicated would it be to make one?”
“It’s pretty straightforward.” He led her to the wall of dripping trays. “See? There’s one set at each workstation. These are stacks that make up a series, and they’re joined together with piping to form parallel arrays. That speeds up their computing power to about double what they’d be capable of on their own. It’s easier when you’re doing simple mathematical calculation, not design or gaming, so these don’t have to have a lot of variation in function.”
She found herself listening to his explanation with some degree of skepticism and a large dollop of confusion.
“May I touch one?” Margaret asked. Aaron nodded and showed her one stack that seemed to be nearly dry at the moment. She ran her fingertip along the edge of the shallow tray at the bottom. It was very smooth for a pottery dish, reminding her of the gray ware that was made from deposits in the hills near her home. Most of the pieces that had been bought from farther away in England had visible pinpoint bumps of sand. “So, they are fired clay?”
“Right! They’re mostly from St. Malo, where there’s a factory set up to cast the trays. Everybody needs at least six for a simple calculator, and probably twelve so they can run in parallel, so there’s a massive demand. Everyone who hears about them wants one, and they want it right now! Okay, so, this is how they work,” Aaron said. He pulled a ladder from against the wall and propped it so Margaret could climb up a couple of steps and look in the top of the stack. He was tall enough to stand beside her and point.
A very thin pipe let a trickle of water into the tray, where it seemed to flow in pathways like a very tiny box-hedge maze before it dribbled through holes into the tray underneath.
“You see the little bars molded in there? Well, they direct the water to indicate, ‘If in this case, yes, then, or if not, not.’” He pointed to each pile of the trays through which water trickled. He showed her the channels and the holes in each, explaining what they were there to do. By the time he had launched fully into a description of “binary,” Margaret couldn’t take in any more information.
“I cry surrender!” she said. She climbed down the ladder and looked up at him. “Aaron, I give all respect to your expertise, but I haven’t even the least means to understand anything you said after ‘this is how they work.’ Or before that, if I am honest.”
Aaron’s cheeks reddened. “I’m sure sorry, ma’am,” he said.
“Can you make a system for Margaret’s father and teach people how to use it?” Rita asked. “With an owner’s operating manual written for absolute beginners?”
The boy perked up. “I bet I could. I taught my dad to maintain the system that runs the accounting system in the high school. It does inventory for supplies and materials. He’s not a computer guy, so if I can get him to understand it, I could probably teach anyone.”
“Can it reckon prices and change coins?” Margaret asked, picturing the ledgers that lined the shelf of her father’s office. “Of every woolsack we produce, we must pay a portion of it to the crown. And from that, we owe the spinners and weavers their portion, as well as a fee to the dyers. There is also the cost of transport.…”
She found herself spooling out the list of potential debits, credits, and losses. To his credit, Aaron didn’t look blank, as she had, but took a sheet of the pure white paper from a stack on a table and began to scribble. When Margaret ran out of credits and debits, potential losses, the cost of feed, and anything else she could think of that went into the production of woolen cloth, it was a daunting list.
After what seemed like a year, Aaron clapped the pencil down on the page.
“It’s basic accounting,” he said. “That’s all. Nothing fancy. Entering a change upstream, if you get it, changes the output to reflect that. We can twist the numbers in all kinds of ways depending on what you need. Then you send the output to the printer, and there’s your ledger.”
“A printer?” Margaret looked around for a screw-down press, but nothing that large was in the room.
“Uh, yeah, like the one over there.” He pointed to a small black box no larger than a pillow. Heralded by clattering noises like faraway hoofbeats, a sheet of the white paper slid out of it. “But they’re pretty expensive,” Aaron admitted. “And they take a really long time to make. And maintenance is tricky. Uh, maybe just a readout would give you what you need? Write them down yourselves? They’re making some small monitors, even though I know there’s a waiting list, but it’ll be shorter than a printer.”
“You probably don’t need a printer. You already keep a ledger on paper, don’t you?” Rita asked Margaret.
“We do. Perhaps all this can help us to be more efficient,” she replied, looking at the list Aaron had scrawled. “We don’t do anything ‘fancy,’ but I know my father would welcome any aid in closing up gaps in the oversight of our finances.”
“Okay, I can show you how we run spreadsheets,” Aaron said. He put on a winning expression. “Frau Brauner, can you help Miz Margaret out?”
Frau Brauner, a woman with brown sausage curls and a stern expression, snatched the sheet of paper out of his hand.
“It is lucky for you I am not working on the month-ending reports,” she said, and turned to Margaret. “There are no numbers here.”
“I can only furnish you with estimates from the last quarter-day,” Margaret said, a bit taken aback by woman’s terse tones.
“Then, do!”
As best she could, Margaret recalled the numbers that Sir Timothy’s reeve had entered into the Churnet House journals. As she gave Frau Brauner the information, more variables occurred to her, and added them in, hoping that it wouldn’t confuse the calculations. Frau Brauner only nodded and entered them in, adjusting the flow of a number of the water trays. After a few minutes, she wrote down some figures. She pointed to the totals at the bottom of the pages.
“Here is the gross, less the amounts that are tax. These are wages, feed costs, and haulage,” the accountant said, pushing the paper toward them. “At the bottom is the net income. It is a negative.”
Margaret compared her notes to the sheets. The water machines had confirmed what the reeve himself had told Sir Timothy: that the manor would run into the red, over and over again.
“How close is it?” Rita asked.
“It is exact,” Margaret said, torn between woe and admiration for the water tray system.
The calculations did nothing but confirm for Margaret that the situation was as bad as she feared. “Our expenses are so high. We can’t lessen the reliance our people have on us. Perhaps with these…devices, we can find any way to balance them better.”
She knew she was babbling. Her tutor thought she ought to be more conversant with poetry and history, but he could not fault her grasp of mathematics. The figures were right there, confirmed by the water trays. If anything, more expenses kept popping into her mind, driving the deficit deeper and deeper. To buy wool from other manors was to add an expense and court losses for more transportation, as well as negotiations for higher wages from the spinners, dyers, and weavers for the increase in work to be done. It would be a long time before the machines that she had seen in the library books could become a reality and increase Churnet House’s productivity without putting a strain on the people who worked for them, who relied upon them, who trusted them. Sheep plus wool plus time plus people plus the cost of bringing wool or cloth to market equaled one number. Sales equaled another number. The latter minus the former left very little, almost nothing. And when the tax was added in, less than zero. The water trays told her nothing she didn’t already know.