(Cross-posted from my Substack; Written as part of Halfhaven virtual blogger camp.)

My dear friend Holy Samuel urged me for months to buy a tractor before I finally gave in. They called him Holy Samuel because of his habit of wearing dozens of crosses and other holy symbols around his neck. Hedging his bets, apparently. He was a first adopter through and through, and if anyone was getting into heaven first, it was him. He was one of the only peasants in the valley using his tractor to increase his farming output, taking on extra work with Mark Albertson’s widow. Most of the other men in the valley who had come by a tractor said they used it to save time, which they spent playing dice and afterward praying for forgiveness.

It’s a half-day walk into town from my land, so by the time I arrived my legs were already aching, and I was thirsty. On the way, I’d seen a few other farmers out in their fields with tractors, but they were far from the road. Until I met with the men from the Liberty Company, I’d still not seen one up close.

The display tractors were impressive. The latest model was a boxy wooden behemoth which stood on four stout wheels, not unlike a wagon. Above the rear axle was a driving seat, with a wheel for steering the tractor. There was no hitch at the front for a horse. Instead, the tractor would drive itself. This was good, because I was not wealthy enough to own a working horse and a horse-drawn plough. While still expensive, these Crown-subsidized tractors were within my price range.

The entire front of the vehicle was enclosed except for two wooden grilles which allowed air to flow through the patented Liberty engine — a marvel of modern engineering.

“I see our display model for the t4 has caught your eye,” said the portly Liberty man. He was clean-shaven and well-dressed in a teal suit — the trademarked color of the Liberty Company. My father taught me never to trust a bald-faced man, but I hardly expected to be mugged by this fine gentleman. Not used to dealing with such wealthy, refined folk, I removed my hat out of respect.

“The t4,” I asked, “That’s better than the 4t?”

“Yes, quite. The 4t was our previous model. The t4 has been shown by a third-party benchmarking company to be over twice as effective at ploughing.”

“And before that was the 4.5?”

“Yes. No ‘t’,” the man patiently explained.

“So how does the engine of this new model compare with the older ones? Perhaps you could put it in terms of horse-power. That is, the power of a single horse.”

“Well,” said the man, launching into a well-rehearsed explanation. “You can’t simply make a one-to-one comparison between tractors and horses. After all, a horse may eat your hat, but a Liberty tractor will never eat any of your belongings!” This was apparently supposed to be funny, and I smiled politely. “A horse goes where it likes, but our tractors only go where you direct them.”

I could tell my question had been evaded, so I asked again. “But in terms of the power output?”

“We estimate the average farmer using our tractors will be ten times more effective than using a hand plough at ploughing.”

“Truly?” I asked, still skeptical. For me to be ten times as effective at ploughing, I would be almost flying up and down my field. It would be a great relief to be free from the burden of that backbreaking task.

“One day, we imagine farmers won’t need to plough their fields at all,” said the man. “In the future, tractors will be advanced enough to do our farming for us. All the tilling, the seeding, the fertilizing, and the harvesting. The farmers will only have to tell the tractors where to work, and then collect the bounty!”

That sounded far-fetched. “But today, they only do ploughing?” I asked.

“Err… yes,” admitted the Liberty man. It was no matter to me. If this machine could make ploughing easier, that alone would be a great help. “But the future is looking very bright for tractor technology. Just this week, the Liberty Company received an investment from the King himself of ten zillion crown coins.”

“Truly, ten zillion crowns?”

“Ten zillion crown coins, and not one less,” smiled the Liberty man mirthlessly. I noticed he had a gold tooth.

I was excited. Maybe I wasn’t thinking objectively, since ploughing season had arrived, and I would otherwise have to spend long days ploughing by hand, as I’d always done. Out of curiosity and residual skepticism, I asked to see the engine.

“It’s patented technology, I’m afraid,” said the Liberty man. “And you wouldn’t be able to understand how it worked just from seeing it. It’s quite sophisticated machinery.”

I felt somewhat insulted. I was a resourceful man, and quite capable of understanding how things functioned. When something didn’t work, I would take it apart, find the issue, and put it back together, good as new. “I am an intelligent man, sir. Surely, if I could just take a look, maybe I wouldn’t understand the whole thing at once, but I might at least grasp the basics.”

“Oh, I do not doubt your intelligence, good sir, and I didn’t mean to imply any insult. It’s only that I myself don’t understand how the machine works. I’m told even the wood carvers who create the engines don’t know how they work either. The designs of the Liberty engines are produced by an automatic step-by-step process which eventually results in the design of an engine, but at no point does any man understand the workings of the engine for himself.”

“That makes no sense,” I said.

“It’s just part of the genius of Lord Liberty that he was able to devise such a method for producing engine designs without first understanding how engines worked,” smiled the Liberty man.

“But surely not knowing how engines work means improving your engines over time will be challenging?”

“We can always just generate new designs until we find a better one. We find if we use more steps to generate the design, it leads to more complex designs, and these seem to work better.”

“So each model is not an improvement on the last, but a completely new, unrelated design? And wait a minute, you said the engine is crafted by wood carvers? Is it not made of metal?”

“Not as such, no,” said the Liberty man.

I didn’t know the internal combustion engine wouldn’t be invented for another few centuries or how one would possibly work, but I knew enough to know that if you’re burning fuel, you don’t want to be doing that inside an engine made of wood. “Don’t you need metal to withstand the combustion of fuel inside the engine?” I asked.

“Ah,” smiled the Liberty man, regaining confidence as he returned to a familiar talking point. “But the Liberty t4 engine uses no fuel.”

“Then how does it run?”

“You’d have to ask the wood carvers,” the Liberty man admitted. “Look, are you going to buy one or not? I do have other customers. This time of year, we sell hundreds of tractors, and the newest model is very high in demand.”

I bought one. What could I say? I knew the man was full of it, but that’s what I’d come to expect from the Liberty Company. I once bought a so-called electric light bulb from the Liberty Company, hoping it would allow me to see at night, but I later discovered it apparently only works when in direct sunlight. When I put it in direct sunlight, I still couldn’t tell if it was also emitting a bit of light or not. I still have the Liberty Light in my closet, gathering dust. I didn’t trust the Liberty Company any more than I’d trust any fat, shaven merchant, but the entire valley was raving about these tractors, and I had to have one. I handed over a stomach-wrenching amount of money and was given the key to my tractor.

I still remember the grumble and purr of the engine when I turned the key. That moment when I felt in control of more power than man was meant to handle. I had never owned something this expensive or sophisticated before, and I was in awe. I must have looked an awful fool, sitting in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel, grinning ear to ear. I looked around for some kind of gas pedal or accelerator knob, but found nothing. After a while, I got down and flagged down the Liberty man.

“I’m sorry, but I’m having a bit of trouble. How do I make it go?” I asked.

“Excuse me?” said the Liberty man.

“How do I drive it?” I asked.

“Ah. First you get on top and insert the key—”

“Yep, I got that far.”

“Then you dismount the vehicle and push it from behind.”

“Huh? I don’t sit on top?”

“Unfortunately, on this model, the seat and steering wheel are purely decorative. In future models…”

I dismissed the Liberty man with a grumble. I turned on the tractor, and like the man said, if the tractor was running you could push it from behind. Now, maybe I’m a simple man, but even with the disappointment of not being able to ride the tractor, pushing such a heavy machine with such little effort made me grin. The tractor must have weighed over a hundred stone, yet I was able to push it with ease. It was only somewhat harder than walking unburdened.

The Liberty man looked proud when he noticed my mirth. “There you go, sir! That’s the way you do it! You can really feel the power of the Liberty t4 engine, can’t you?”

I had to admit I could. I allowed the tractor to come to a stop, then turned it off.

Before I left, he asked if I’d also like to buy the picnic table attachment. Apparently you just put it over top the tractor, and it could seat up to four people, essentially turning the tractor into a raised outdoor table.

“No thanks,” I said. “I pretty much just want to use it as a tractor.”

I bid the Liberty man well and departed. I couldn’t wait to get home to use it on my field. The top speed of the tractor was nearly twice my walking pace, and in theory it should have taken me half the time to get home than it did to get into town in the first place. But steering from behind was a bit tricky, and it kept going off course. In the end, I think the return journey took me more time than the original had. But boy, did I enjoy it more. There were times when I was flying down the road, running to keep up with the tractor! Then it would hit a rock or a soft patch of dirt, and it’d slow to a crawl.

I had a similar experience using the tractor to plough my field. At times, I was moving unbelievably fast. But many times I’d turn around and realize the tractor hadn’t been ploughing deeply enough for the past hundred paces, and I’d have to turn it around and do that section again. All the turning around and backtracking made the task take all evening. It was frustrating, but I also wondered how much my use of the tractor would improve as my skill with it grew. If only I could catch its failures sooner, and do better at keeping it moving in a straight line, I could plough my field very quickly indeed.

I went to bed having made less progress than I’d hoped. The next morning, Holy Samuel stopped by to check out my purchase, his many crosses and other bobbles jingling as he approached the barn where I had the tractor parked.

“By the many Gods, John! I didn’t expect the t4 to be so large! It’s a colossus! And you say it’s not hard to push?”

“No harder than using a normal hand plough,” I said. “Or maybe a little harder actually.”

“It’s got wheels that turn left and right! What I wouldn’t give to have a tractor like that,” Holy Samuel said. “By the virgin mother, you didn’t tell me there was a seat on top! You’re riding up and down your field in comfort while I’m out there sweating like a pig?” He did seem to be sweaty and red, as if he’d just been ploughing his own field.

“Well, the seat’s just decorative, whatever that means. I still have to stand behind the tractor.”

“Still!” said Holy Samuel. For a while he ogled my tractor, expressing jealousy at all the new features. He nearly fainted when I told him I turned down the picnic table attachment.

“It keeps driving off course,” I complained, “And I have to keep checking that it’s ploughing deeply enough. Sometimes it’s not making contact with the soil at all.”

“Yeah, that’s tractors for you,” said Holy Samuel. “Don’t worry, you sort of get a feel for them. Soon enough, you’ll be ten times more effective than you were. The only question will be what to do with all your free time!”

“And you have lots of free time, now?”

“Well, I think I’ve just started doing a more thorough job than I used to, and I’m taking on more projects, like helping out Mary Albertson.”

“I see.” I wasn’t sure whether to believe his life was really so much easier with a tractor, having seen how exhausted he always seemed to be. I imagined him sweating, huffing and puffing, pushing a tractor with wheels that don’t turn up and down his field, pulling it by the front whenever he needed to adjust its trajectory. If my own tractor barely seemed like an improvement over hand ploughing, I didn’t see how his older model could be any better at all. “Did the King really invest ten zillion crowns into the Liberty Company?” I asked. Holy Samuel would know that kind of news better than anyone.

“Oh, yes! Well, not crowns as in the silver coins, but rather CrownCoins, a new unofficial currency created by the Liberty company, kept track of on paper rather than using silver and gold. It’s based on a clever mathematical trick that lets you keep track of who has how many CrownCoins with no disagreement. I purchased a million CrownCoins myself when they first released. Were you interested in buying some? They’ve gone up in value a lot since I bought them. I could give you a good deal.”

“That’s alright,” I said. I knew talking to Holy Samuel further about my purchase wouldn’t be much help, so I went to Douglas by the Woods, who bought a tractor a few weeks ago. I always respected his intelligence, as he was one of the only other men in town who had been taught his letters.

“I hear you bought the new t4! Wasn’t too expensive was it, with the subsidies?” the hardy man greeted me.

“No, it wasn’t more than I could bear,” I said. “But I’m having some concerns. It doesn’t seem to be living up to the ballyhoo. Everyone’s saying it makes farming ten times easier, or ploughing at least, but that’s not lining up with my experience.”

“Well, most people aren’t farmers, John. They don’t know. Or they’re farmers like Holy Samuel — believers in anything.”

“So you’re saying it’s all a ruse?” I asked.

“Not as such. It’s just overblown. I still use my 4t tractor when I plough. It helps, I think. I’ve been trying to keep track on paper how long it takes me to plough every day, and I’m nearly certain I’m seeing at least a ten percent boost compared to hand ploughing. It’s a good tool, John, but it’s just a tool.”

“So tractors won’t be farming our fields in two years, like they say?”

“What, and sing you lullabies and tuck you in at night? It’s a tool, John, like I said. Nothing more, nothing less.”

I sighed. The cold reality was disappointing. A tool, it turns out, could be very impressive without being very effective. I found Douglas’ warm resolve to be some comfort, at least. I thanked him and started back toward my farm. I still had a lot of ploughing left to do.

I wondered on the way back how I could get more use out of this tool. Maybe I could adjust the way I was pushing on it, or use ropes to guide it. Or perhaps if I got my hands on some CrownCoin, I could get Holy Samuel to do my ploughing for me. Now there’s an idea!