From this cluttered courtyard, a narrow door opened upon an even narrower iron stair, which twisted its skeletal length upward through roaring, dust-filled spaces to a loft. This space, tall as a church, was lit by grimed windows and a few scattered bulbs whose filaments alternately glowed and dimmed as the mechanicals below grumbled and howled. There, at a brokenlegged table, the Cloth Merchants’ Council of Bloome sat upon rickety chairs at its interminable meetings. It was here they were assembled while the fireworks shop burned on Shebelac Street, unable to hear the sirens for the endless growling of the looms below.
If one looked out the dirty windows by daylight, one could see the hoppers at the rear of the building where the carts lined up each day to dump weeds and trees, trash and old furniture, last night’s costumes and banners and tents into the huge, shaking hoppers. The hoppers emptied into a steel enormity where no man had ever gone alive and from which only fabric emerged at the other end. There were only two rules of life so far as the Cloth Merchants’ Council was concerned. Never let the machine run out of stuff to weave. Never run out of ways to use the weaving up.
The machine had run out of raw materials only once.
Bloome had learned then that the machine had its own ways of collecting materials if it was not sufficiently fed.
Babies, geese, fustigars, tame zeller, houses, people: the machine did not discriminate. Since that time (called “The Exemplary Episode” in the minutes of the council) the machine had not been allowed to run dry.
That was practical politics, that rule.
The other rule was religious.
Bloome had been a cloth-making town as long as anyone remembered. The mill had always been there. It was assumed to have been put there by a god or by the ancestors, either to be equally revered. Since neither god nor the ancestors did things without purpose, the cloth, arriving in quantities ever greater and always far more than could be used in Bloome, must have a purpose. It had been up to the people of Bloome to find it.
They had found it at last, after many trials. Festivals.
At first only once or twice a season, later six or eight times a season, most recently every few days. Every few days a new festival, to deck the city with new banners.
Every few days a new festival, requiring new costumes for residents and visitors alike. Every few days a new festival, with new tents and marquees to be sewn. And in the quiet times between, weary cleanup crews laboured to gather the materials to take to the hoppers again. A precarious balance, but better than another “Exemplary Episode”.
“I’m not selling the pink stuff,” said a banner maker, who, as he often mentioned apropos of nothing, had been a member of the council for fifty years. “It won’t go. They don’t want it. Everyone is sick to death of it.”
“Bonus points,” remarked a heavyset, dark-skinned woman, scratching her nose and making notes at the same time. “We’ll award bonus points for pink. The way we had to do with the puce chiffon three years ago. Machine made it for two seasons, and we couldn’t give it away.”
“How about lining the streets with it? We did that once, I remember. In my mother’s time.”
“Trouble is, the stuff tears so. Shoddy. You’d have half Bloome tripping and rolling around on the cobbles. No, we’ll award bonus points and double to tent makers if they’ll quilt it in layers. Next?”
“Arahg,” growled the long-faced banner maker, referring to his notes. “Everyone’s running out of thread. Machine hasn’t given us any thread for three seasons. We’re going to have to set up to ravel if we don’t get some soon.”
“We saved out a thousand bolts of that loose, blue stuff last year,” said the heavy woman. “The thread pulls right out. No weave to it to speak of. We can put the children on it.”
“Going to look like hell,” growled the banner maker.
“So what else is new?” The door opened to admit a wizened man in a violently striped cloak, notable for its inclusion of the pink stuff in wide, bias-cut borders. “Evening,” he said. “Mergus. Madame Browl. Gentlemen. Sorry I’m late. Stuck around my front door for a little extra time tonight waiting to see if Brom’s guests came out. I think he may have found a naïf.”
“Evening, Philp. I didn’t know anyone came to town today. Why, when there was no festival?”
“Wasn’t till early this morning. Don’t think they came for festival. Four of ‘em. Wagon with birds pulling it. Haven’t seen anything like that before. Two older fellows. One young one, one girl. Brom got to ‘em before anyone could stop him. They didn’t exactly look simple. Brom may have a time with ‘em.”
“The problem is,” said Madame Browl, scratching her nose once more, “whether we want to let Brom off the platter. He’s been a good Merchant’s man, all things taken into account.”
“Gettin’ restless, though.”
“Well, restless is one thing.”
“Mad is the other. Don’t want him doing anything silly. We had one once who did, remember?”
“Tried to blow up the machine, by Drarg. Got a hundred or so of us killed.”
“Still, I’d be disinclined to let Brom go. A visitor simple enough to accept the honour might be too simple to do the work!”
“Might have been an honor once,” said Mergus, the droopy cheeks of his long, lined face wobbling as he spoke, one tufty eyebrow up, the other down in a hairy diagonal that seemed to slide off his face near his large left ear. “Since the Dream Merchant’s been in on it, it’s less so.”
“Dream Merchant only took advantage
