Hamish X and the Cheese Pirates (3 page)

Everyone had to wear a mask on the factory floor. Without protection, the fumes generated by the maturing cheese could overwhelm a person in seconds. The masks sealed tight all around, with a window of clear plastic framing the wearer's face. Viggo tightened the straps on his mask as he descended.

Viggo was an extremely knobbly individual. When he walked, it seemed as if all the bones in his body were straining to leap out of his skin and escape. His hair was greasy. He never washed it, and so it stood up on end most of the time, like a ghastly albino hedgehog. His nose was long and pointy, almost touching the inside surface of the face mask he wore. His mouth was drawn in a perpetual scowl.

Hammerface was in every way the physical opposite of Viggo. He was loutish and large, a shambling, scruffy ogre of a man. At his belt hung a Ticklestick. Long and black with a bulging knob at the end, it delivered a powerful jolt of energy to the central nervous system, flooding the brain with a tickle reflex so profound that it reduced a person to a giggling, helpless blob in an
instant.
¹⁶
The weapon slapped against Hammerface's wide buttocks as he shambled after Viggo.

As Viggo approached the factory floor the children avoided his watery grey eyes. One didn't look at Viggo directly for fear of bringing down some punishment.

Viggo reached the bottom of the stairs and looked with satisfaction at the cheesing floor. He felt a swell of pride at the grim efficiency displayed before him. For he had integrated all the children according to their ages and abilities into the cheese-making process. First, the caribou milk was fed into a large vat about the size of an above-ground swimming pool. In a sense, it was a swimming pool. For this first stage of the process, all the toddlers aged three to five were tossed into the milk vat wearing water wings. The toddlers would thrash and tread water, their water wings excreting rennet
¹⁷
and causing the milk to thicken until they could no longer move. When the milk was thick enough, the children were extracted by robotic crane arms attached to the ceiling, scraped off, and prepared for the next batch. The vat was then upended and the thickening milk poured into a pressing chamber.

The pressing chamber was the province of the children aged six to ten. First the mixture was trowelled out onto a large, flat, perforated floor. The children wore huge
paddles like snowshoes on their feet. Hour after hour they trudged 'round and 'round, pressing down with their foot paddles and forcing the liquid out of the thickening curds.
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The liquid, whey, is a watery but nutritious byproduct of the cheesing process. Viggo designed the floor with perforations so that the whey was channelled into a vat near the kitchen, where Mrs. Francis could use it in preparing her bland but nourishing meals for the orphans. Nothing was wasted in Viggo's operation. The children also carried baskets filled with salt and tossed handfuls of it over the curds to preserve the cheese.

When the cheese was pressed and free of liquid, the children aged eleven to fourteen came with picks and saws. They sawed the cheese into blocks a metre square and fifty centimetres deep. Using their picks, they flung the slabs onto a conveyor belt that ran along the wall of the factory. The work was back-breakingly difficult, and so the children took turns cutting and heaving.

The cheese chunks travelled along the conveyor belt to a hole in the floor where they fell into darkness. Below, the cheese was stacked in the dank, musty vault. The walls of the vault grew thick with a greenish-blue mould that impregnated the cheese and provided its distinctive marbling and aroma.

The finished cheese was then shipped throughout the world on freighters to markets hungry for the delicacy. An ounce of Caribou Blue sold for twenty-seven dollars. Viggo was quickly becoming a very rich man. Unfortunately,
very little of the wealth trickled down to the orphan workers at the factory. They received the bare minimum necessary to keep them alive. Their clothes were bought second-hand by the pound. Viggo made sure the children were strong enough to work, but nothing more. Their diet consisted principally of oatmeal porridge and the whey recovered from the pressing process.

Viggo was very, very strict in his accounting practices. He always kept track of every ounce of cheese. No one could have pilfered and gotten away with it. Not that anyone really wanted to—the smell of the cheese factory floor was enough to put a child off cheese for life.

Viggo smiled as he surveyed the children at work. The grey and lifeless faces pinched behind the masks pleased him. They looked defeated, and a defeated child was a productive child.

Just as he turned towards the big doors that led to the cafeteria section of the complex, he felt a tug at his trouser leg. He turned and looked down to find a little brown face with large eyes blinking up at him. The face belonged to Parveen, an eight-year-old, feet laced into his curd-pressing shoes.

“What?” Viggo groaned. “Speak up!”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” Parveen said in his flat, emotionless voice, “I was wondering if I could speak to you about possible improvements to the assembly line.”

He was a small boy with brown skin that bespoke his South Asian origin. He wore spectacles that made his eyes owl-like and wide behind his breathing mask. Parveen was quiet and didn't really mix with the other kids, preferring to spend his off-duty time in the orphanage's meagre library reading anything he could get his hands on. He amused himself (though no one had ever seen him smile)
by devising machines and gadgets and drawing blueprints and plans, even though he'd never had the opportunity to put his ideas into practice in the Spartan
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world of the Windcity Orphanage and Cheese Factory. Still, at eight years old, he was clever enough to make most adults uncomfortable, and Viggo, who despised cleverness in anyone but himself, particularly so.

“Improvements?” Viggo said through gritted teeth. “Im
prove
ments?”

Parveen was unaware of the menace in Viggo's voice. He wasn't a very empathetic boy; that is to say, he couldn't read people's emotions. The other children moved away to distance themselves from the coming storm. Parveen rummaged in the pocket of his overalls, digging out a small pad of paper. From behind his right ear, he pulled a stub of a pencil.

“I've drawn up a couple of schematics that would definitely cut down on the number of hands on the floor at any given shift.” Parveen pointed with his pencil at the figures on the paper. “According to my calculating, we could cut down the workday for each shift by three hours and still maintain the same level of production.” He looked up at Viggo expectantly.

Viggo glared down at Parveen. Suddenly he grabbed him by the front of his overalls, lifting the boy up to eye
level. Viggo pressed his face into Parveen's until their masks clicked together. “Why would I want to shorten the shifts? Why should I make anything easier for you lazy little children?” he shrieked, spraying spittle onto the inside of his mask. “You orphans are lazy enough as it is without my giving you opportunities to slack off any further.”

Parveen dangled in Viggo's grip, calm and emotionless, blinking mildly, foot paddles flapping. His passivity enraged Viggo even more. He shook Parveen, making the little boy's feet jig in the air.

“Don't waste my time with your stupid ideas. The only thing I want you to do is get back in that chamber and stamp those curds.” With that, Viggo hurled Parveen into the pressing chamber, where he skidded across the greasy surface of the curds and bounced to a halt against the far side.

Two guards stepped towards the fallen boy, grinning foully and hefting their Ticklesticks. They advanced on Parveen, but before they could reach him one of the children stepped in to bar their way.

“Back off, ya big galoots!” The girl stood with her hands on her hips, defying the guards to make a move. She was one of the older orphans. Although tall and thin, she was strong and wiry, with a fierce light in her eyes that let the two men know she wasn't scared of anything. The guards faltered and looked to Viggo for guidance.

Viggo knew the girl only too well. Her name was Mimi and she was one of his rare failures. He had managed to completely destroy the spirit of all the children in the Windcity Orphanage and Cheese Factory, but in all the seven years Mimi had been there he'd never managed to
break her completely. She got into fights, sassed back to the guards, and generally made a nuisance of herself. The Ticklesticks were useless against Mimi. She laughed when they used them on her. And somehow she managed to laugh defiantly rather than helplessly, which was the real point of the Ticklestick.

Mimi had adopted little Parveen as her personal project. Viggo often toyed with the idea of asking the ODA to take her back, but he didn't want the grey-suited agents to think he couldn't handle himself. In two years she'd be carted off anyway to wherever the grey agents took the fourteen-year-olds, so he tried to be patient and endure her annoying behaviour.

Right now, he didn't have time to deal with her antics. Viggo sneered and waved his arm dismissively. “Back to work!” he shouted at the children.

“Back to work!” the guards parroted.

All the other children instantly turned to their tasks. He watched for a moment to make sure they were doing as they were told. Viggo smiled in satisfaction, but when he remembered the waiting visitors, his happiness evaporated. He spun on his heel and stalked off through the big double doors.

Parveen slowly raised himself to the sitting position. He tucked away his little pad and stuck the pencil back behind his ear. Mimi hauled the little boy to his feet.

“You gotta keep yer mouth shut, bub!” she said. Her voice had a flat Texan drawl. “It'll only get ya into trouble around here.”

“I merely wished to improve production quotas,” Parveen answered, rubbing his sore shoulder.

“Whatever!” the girl said. “Just keep yer head down.” Her green eyes narrowed as she glared at the doors Viggo
had just exited. “He'll get his one day and I hope I'll be givin' him some of it.”

A guard stepped up. In his hand he held a long black club with a bulb on the end: a Ticklestick. He menaced Mimi and Parveen.

“Stop talking!” he shouted. “Back to work!”

Mimi flexed her fists, glaring at the man. Finally, she turned back to her task of slicing up the cheese.

VIGGO STRODE BETWEEN THE TABLES
of the cafeteria, empty at this time of day, and came to a locked metal door. He pulled a card out of his pocket and held it up to a small pad on the door's right side. A tiny light went from red to green. He pulled on the door and it opened easily, admitting him to the hall that led to the processing area.

He collided with Mrs. Francis, who was hurrying from a side corridor. Hammerface, right at Viggo's heels, then ran into Viggo.

“Watch where you're going!” Viggo snapped at the flustered woman.

Mrs. Francis was just about as wide as she was tall. Everything about her was round. She had a round white face and round little sausage fingers. A scarf over her head failed to deter strands of grey hair from escaping at all angles. She lived in a tiny apartment attached to the kitchens. Of course, Viggo deducted room and board from her minuscule salary, but she didn't complain, couldn't complain for fear of losing her job. Jobs were scarce in Windcity these days. Never mind that the only other person who actually still lived there was that crazy Mr. Nieuwendyke who thought he was a cat, Viggo wouldn't hesitate to hire him despite all his meowing and licking his hands. Ever since Mr. Francis had been attacked by that rabid owl twenty years before, Mrs. Francis
had had to look out for herself. And since there wasn't a lot to spend money on in Windcity she bought the children little treats, careful to hide her philanthropy from Viggo.

“I-I-I'm sorry, Master Viggo. It's hard to keep track of everything, what with one hundred children to feed and clean up after every day. I'm run off my feet.”

Viggo towered over her, leaning in like a rickety scaffold. “Are you suggesting that you can't handle the workload, Mrs. Francis?”

Mrs. Francis threw up her hands in dismay, “Never, Master Viggo! I can manage!”

“I hope so,” Viggo smiled sweetly, “because I'm sure there are many who would be glad of the work should I advertise for a new Chief Domestic Supervisor!”

“Of course, Master Viggo. I appreciate that.” The bell rang again, more insistently, and Mrs. Francis hurried off down the hall past the kitchens (her tiny domain). Satisfied that he'd struck fear into her heart, Viggo strolled after her through the hall that led to the processing room. Hammerface puffed after him.

The Orphan Processing Room (the OPR for short) was a large warehouse space where children fresh off the boat were processed. A huge door slid up on rails to admit fresh arrivals. When new children arrived, they stood in lines to be sprayed with delousing agent and receive their uniforms. Then they watched a video telling them about what they were expected to do and what punishments they could expect if they failed. Finally, they stepped through a metal detector to ensure they carried nothing dangerous into the factory. When all these processes had been executed, the thoroughly depressed children were marched off to their assigned cots in the dormitory to prepare for their lives as cheese factory workers.

The arrival today was highly irregular. To save money and time the ODA usually delivered orphans in groups, but today was different. ODA Headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island, had called to say they had a special child for Viggo to take on, and he had lain awake for the last five nights fretting over it. Everything was running so smoothly now. The last thing he needed was to have
that
boy to worry about. Again, he wished he'd refused to take him, but one didn't refuse the ODA. Bad things happened to people who did.