Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel, #1)

by Josiah Bancroft

“Well, thank you. To my point! There are many men in the Basement who spend all day pumping water on these machines called beer-me-go-rounds. The name says it all, really; the men pump and are paid a pitiful amount of bad beer. Even so, there is never a shortage of men willing to pump, and there are dozens of beer-mes, so amounts of water are being drawn every hour from the deep wells under the valley.” “I don’t care,” Iren said. “In the Parlor, people pay to roam around in costumes, acting important, and bickering, sometimes with swords. For this privilege, they must do two things: pay, which is diabolical, and work. The real task of the ‘visitor’ is to keep the fires stoked. The whole thing is an elaborate means of making and maintaining fires to produce heat, and cheaply so. The pumped water is heated inside the chimneys through what must be the most esoteric system of plumbing in the history of the world. The heated pipes run all throughout the Parlor, up to the Baths, where they converge into a single source. The Baths act as both a regulator of heat and pressure. Excess steam is vented, and tourists pay to romp in the byproduct of this immense engine.”