CHAPTER 9
Rollin’ on the River
September 1634
Regensburg
“Emperor Ferdinand II has died and Vienna mourns, but it is time for us to move,” Istvan Janoszi said.
“It’s weird,” Hayley whispered to her father as Janoszi turned away. “He was . . . I don’t know . . . the bad guy. Ferdinand II signed the Edict of Restitution that has been the justification for so much war and out-and-out banditry that it had halfway trashed central Germany before the Ring of Fire.”
“I know what you mean, Hayley, but go light on the bad guy part of that thought once we get to Vienna. For that matter, go light on it here. Because he was their emperor, and whatever their politics, there will be a hole in the heart of most of Austria for a while.”
Hayley nodded. After that, everything went smoothly for the rest of the trip to Vienna. Sonny’s little steam engine barely produced enough way for steering. On the other hand, they were going downriver, so the current was with them.
On the Danube
“Honestly, Hayley, I don’t understand how you girls managed to get rich,” Mrs. Sanderlin said as they were steaming down the Danube the first evening out of Regensburg. Hayley looked at the shore going by, muddy banks and green grass with a small herd of cattle coming down to the river’s edge to drink. The chug-chug of the steam engine made a background to the conversation. The question had come up before and there were standard answers that Hayley and the rest of the Barbies had put together.
“We didn’t have anything else to do,” was the one that Hayley used this time, but Mrs. Sanderlin’s look suggested that she wasn’t going to let it go at that.
“Well, it’s true,” Hayley insisted. “Right after the Ring of Fire, everyone was busy and no one had much money. Then Judy found out about Mrs. Higgins’ doll collection selling for so much. We didn’t have anything like that many dolls, but we had some. And . . . well, everyone—and I do mean everyone—in Grantville was really busy. There was a lot of ‘just take care of yourself, kids’ right around then. As long as we weren’t getting in trouble, our parents had other stuff on their minds. Some of the kids in Grantville got in trouble just for the attention, but most were trying to pitch in in some way. Our way was to take our doll money and invest it. We didn’t know all that much about investing, but we got some good advice from Mrs. Gundelfinger and from Judy’s parents and sister.”
“So you had the advice of Helene Gundelfinger, the Secretary of the Treasury for the USE, and a renowned scholar of economics who works for the USE Federal Reserve Bank? No wonder you got rich.”
“Not to mention Karl Schmidt, David Bartley, Franz Kunze, and half a dozen other members of what has become the financial elite of the State of Thuringia-Franconia and the USE,” Hayley admitted with a grin. “The real question is: with all that good advice why aren’t we richer?”
Mrs. Sanderlin looked at Hayley for a minute, then shook her head. “No, it’s not, Hayley. The real question is: how did a small West Virginia coal-mining town have Mike Stearns and Ed Piazza. How did it have Fletcher Wendell and Tony Adducci, not to mention David Bartley, the Stone family, Dr. Nichols and all the rest? One or two, sure. But dozens, even hundreds?”
“I’ve asked myself that question every day for the last year and a half or more.” Sonny Fortney interrupted their conversation.
“Any answers, Dad?” Hayley asked.
“The best I can come up with is ‘people rise to the occasion.’ Or, put another way, ‘talent is a lot more common and opportunity to express it a lot less common than we tend to think.’”
“I’m not sure it’s just opportunity,” Hayley said. “I think it’s need, too.”
“Maybe, darlin’, but you and your young friends argue for it just being opportunity. You didn’t need to become investors. You could have just sold your dolls and bought dresses. A lot of kids did. Which, I guess, argues against my point.”
“It doesn’t matter, Sonny.” Mrs. Sanderlin bit her lip in concentration. “Even if only ten percent took advantage of the opportunity when it happened, that’s still a lot more talent than we expect. Or at least than we expected, up-time. How many inventors, statesmen, businessmen and entrepreneurs were washing dishes and sweeping floors up-time? Because there wasn’t an opportunity for them to shine.”
“Down-time was no different. Even worse, probably,” Hayley said. “Look at Karl Schmidt. Without the Ring of Fire he would never have been anything but the owner of a minor foundry in a small town. Anna Baum would still be spinning thread at starvation wages if she hadn’t actually starved by now. Or Mrs. Gundelfinger. Well, she might have owned her shop, but never much more than that, I think.”
“So how did the Ring of Fire change things?” Mrs Sanderlin asked. When Hayley and Sonny Fortney looked at her in confusion, she tried to explain. “Look, up-time America and Europe had all this stuff and Africa and South America didn’t. So it can’t be just the know-how, otherwise Peru would be building super jets and Zambia or wherever would be building rocket ships and computers. I mean, they could even order the parts that they couldn’t make themselves.”
“I think that may be the key,” Sonny said after a little thought, looking out over the Danube as the sun slowly set. “They could buy it. They didn’t need to build it.”
“But they couldn’t buy it,” Mrs. Sanderlin said. “They didn’t have the money.”
“But they could buy shirts easier than they could buy shirt factories. They could buy cars easier than they could buy car factories.”
Hayley’s memories of up-time were starting to get more than a little vague. Three and a half years is a much higher percentage of a teenager’s life than the life of her parents. But here, experience in down-time business was fresh. “Competition?” she asked doubtfully. “Competition isn’t that much of a problem, Dad. There is always more market than product to fill it.”
“Selling up-time products down-time, sure,” Sonny told her. “But up-time the competition of established industries was a real problem for start-ups.”
They continued to talk about the meaning of opportunity and the effect of the Ring of Fire.
* * *
“Here you go, Mrs. Simpson,” Brandon Fortney said as he poured some grain into the bird’s food dish. Mrs. Simpson was his favorite Rhode Island Red and was normally a good layer, but she was upset by the move. Brandon had four dozen fertilized eggs in a rosin foam incubator, a Rhode Island Red rooster, Captain Jack, and another hen, Eliza, also a Rhodie. He hoped that would be enough to establish a good up-time laying flock in Vienna. Meanwhile, the hens weren’t laying, and though he knew it was probably just the trip, it still worried him.
Well, that, and the whole business of heating water for the hot water bottles that had to be in the incubator. That was really a hassle on the road, but he had managed.
Once he was done with the chickens, he moved to the rabbit hutches. He had a pair of Satins, which had a good growth rate and a good meat-to-bone ratio. Some girls might make those silly Angora rabbits into pets, but in Brandon’s mind, you took care of the animals you intended to eat, only it didn’t pay to get sentimental about them. Besides, his big sister Hayley was rich and it was embarrassing not to have a business of his own. Animal husbandry was all he had been able to come up with, since there didn’t appear to be a lot of money in entomology.
Brandon sighed over that. He had a great bug collection and it was utterly unfair that Hayley’s Barbies had been worth so much more than his bugs. He’d been afraid that Mom and Dad might make him leave it in Grantville, since they were so concerned over weight. And honestly, on the overland trip before they got to the Danube, he had almost regretted bringing the bugs. They had a whole wagon train just of their stuff, not including the cars for the Austrian prince guy. But now that they were on the river, it was a lot easier. He had more time to take care of the chickens and rabbits, which was a good thing because it was getting real close to time for the eggs to hatch. It had taken them longer to get to the river than they expected, and then they had sat in Regensburg for a week, waiting for word that it was all right to come ahead. He was pretty sure the eggs were going to hatch before they got to Vienna. They were moving a lot faster now that they were on the river, but it was still only about nine miles an hour. They would still be on the river when they hatched, not situated in Vienna, according to plan. That was going to be another problem. The chicks would have to be kept warm, fed, and watered.
* * *
The next day Brandon’s concern became fact as the eggs started hatching. Before they reached Vienna, he had thirty-eight chicks. There were chicken sexers in Grantville now, but Brandon wasn’t one of them. The chicks would have to wait till they got older before he would know how many of each sort he had. He hoped for more hens than roosters, but it would probably be about even. Meanwhile he had all those chicks to take care of in circumstances that were hardly ideal.
“Brandon! When is that chicken pen going to be ready?” Dana Fortney was trying to sound severe, but it was hard. First, the chicks were cute as buttons. Chicks usually are. Second, it was hardly Brandon’s fault that the trip had taken longer than expected. He had expected to be in Vienna when they hatched. Meanwhile, he had hired one of the boatmen to help him weave a fence out of tree branches and currently had boxes containing the chicks. Well, almost containing the chicks.
Docks, Vienna, Austria
The barges pulled up to Vienna carrying two cars and several tons of up-time or up-time-designed goods. They were met at the docks by a royal factotum, who set about organizing the transport of the cars through Vienna and out to what would become the race track. Oh, and the rest of them, too.
“Chicks?” the official said, in slightly offended tones. “Why on Earth did you people bring chickens? We have chickens. What do we need with up-time chickens?”
“Not like my chickens, you don’t,” Brandon said stoutly. “My chickens lay bigger eggs and more of them. They are also bigger than your chickens, more meat. And they are my chickens, not yours. We just need a coop to hold them.”
“We have the cars, the prince’s 240Z,” Bob Sanderlin said. “And ours as well, but there isn’t a lot of room for them here in the city. I doubt the 240Z could get through a lot of your streets. They ain’t wide enough.”
“The emperor!” the royal flunky said haughtily, and Hayley suppressed a grin.
“Where does His Imperial Majesty want us to set up?” her dad asked.
What followed was confusion and irritation for all concerned, till His Majesty, Emperor Ferdinand III, turned up and put matters right. The new emperor was there to meet them. Well, he was there to meet his new car. It was pretty clear that in his mind the mechanics were secondary. He swept in, asked lots of questions and swept out, leaving them in the care of the same official who now had a different attitude and clear directions.
Cars and wagons were unloaded and made a parade through Vienna.
* * *
Father Wilhelm Germain Lamormaini watched the parade through Vienna and knew that Prince Ferdinand had betrayed both his father and church by hiding his pet up-timers till his father died. Even the father’s death was the fault of the Ring of Fire. It had to be. The histories in the Ring of Fire had Ferdinand II living to 1637.
The Ring of Fire must be an act of great evil, not of the Good Lord, because if God had been a party to it the church would have been warned. No, the very fact that it was a surprise to faith was evidence of its evil nature. The Ring of Fire was an act of the great deceiver: poison coated in honey to distract the poor and weak-willed from eternal salvation. Satan walked the world as he always had, but his agents—knowing or unknowing—were the up-timers.
Yet everyone was being drawn in by Satan’s trap. Even Pope Urban had elevated the up-time priest Mazzare, making him a prince of the church.
Lamormaini turned back to the Hofburg. He still had his rooms there, but who knew how long that would last? He was no longer the emperor’s confessor and his influence at court was greatly diminished. What was the pope thinking to elevate that up-timer who was no true Catholic? Not if he followed the unholy strictures of Vatican II. There must be something he could do. There must be.
Liechtenstein House, Vienna
“Prince Gundaker, it is good of you to see me.” Father Lamormaini bowed as was the due to a person of Gundaker von Liechtenstein’s status, and perhaps a little more.
“You always gave the old emperor good counsel, Father. And I, for one, miss it.” The prince gestured Father Lamormaini to a chair with fine condescension.
“Thank you, Your Serene Highness. It is always good to hear that one’s counsel is appreciated and it’s something I have heard little of, of late. All I wish is that I didn’t feel that the restoration of Europe to the true faith hadn’t suffered a severe blow when the Ring of Fire happened. It has cast doubt on all our goals as I am increasingly convinced was its intent.”
“You do not believe that it was an act of God?”
“No. I can’t convince myself that God would force us into such a state of doubt. The effect of that event was to separate the wheat from the chaff. There will be an answer in Jerusalem. I think that the six mile circle is the beast itself. Six miles across in height, six miles across in width, and six miles across in length. A perfect sphere of evil to counter the celestial spheres of which it denies the existence.”
Father Lamormaini stopped in sudden realization. He had not thought of that before. He had had a feeling of evil from the place and what it stood for from the moment that he had heard of it. The notion of Catholic and heretic living together in peace was a betrayal of faith so basic as to demand abhorrence from any person who truly sought God’s grace. But until just now, he had never realized that the Bible actually spoke of the place, recorded its evil for those with eyes to see. But there it was.
Prince Gundaker was staring at him in horror. “How could you fail to to report this to the Holy See? How could you fail to report it to the old emperor?”
“I failed to see it, Your Serene Highness. I failed to see it till just this moment. The words came out of my mouth before their meaning reached me. They came out of my knowledge of mathematics and they were so simple, so straightforward, that I am shocked that we didn’t see it from the beginning. All of us should have seen it from the very first. The radius of the sphere was three miles, the diameter six. But it was called the Ring of Fire, not the Sphere of Fire. So the terms were wrong. A ring with a radius of three miles. What of six six six is in that? The devil was subtle, but God was more subtle still, and gave us a warning . . . if we had the native wit to see it.
“The American dollar. It rapidly comes to pass that you cannot buy or sell without possession of American dollars. Yet what are they? They are not gold or silver, not even copper or iron. No. They are just marks on paper. As Revelations warned us, it has come to pass that to buy or sell you must be possessed of those marks on paper.”
* * *
Gundaker wasn’t convinced that Father Lamormaini was correct . . . but it was a worrying thought. He decided that he would put a watch on the up-timers.