Grantville Gazette, Volume X

by Eric Flint

  Bernie Janovich grinned. "You speak English? Wow, that's great."

  "Only little." Anya struggled with the words a bit more than was really necessary. "I learn. You wish beer? I get beer."

  "Just one for me, please. I'm going to study a bit more, then I've got to get some sleep. And have one yourself, if you like."

  Anya wondered for a moment if she should, but decided she might as well. She went to the kitchen, poured two beers and placed one in front of Bernie Janovich when she got back.

  He motioned toward a chair. "Have a seat. I get lonesome sitting by myself. And even if you don't understand everything I say, you're company." When Anya hesitated, he urged, "Come on. Have a seat."

  Shrugging, she complied. Bernie Janovich was an important person even if he didn't know it. A complaint from him might anger her employer, both her employers. Besides, she was supposed to get close to him. He took a good look at her. Anya lowered her head and peeked at him from under her lashes. She wanted to show interest but not appear too easy to get. She needed him to work at seducing her. Throwing herself at him as some of the girls in the Dacha did would not get her what she wanted. Then what did he do? He buried his nose in the book. What was wrong with the fool?

  * * *

  All the things he didn't know meant Bernie had to study. It was worse than being in school, as far as he was concerned. All the stuff that he had been sure that he would never need once he graduated high school, he needed now. He was having to interpret words he'd never heard and in contexts he'd never dreamed of. What the hell was calcareous grassland? Calcareous turned out to be to do with chalk or calcium, at least that's what the dictionary said. But calcareous grassland? How could there be chalk grass? He had to go to the dictionary all the time to find the weird stuff that the Russian nerds wanted.

  Then there was Bernoulli's Law. Pter Nickovich had found a description of how wings worked in one of the books. The explanation described a wing's dependence on Bernoulli's Law. Then they had looked up Bernoulli's Law, done the math and come to the conclusion that it couldn't work that way. Bernoulli's Law, Bernie was assured, would require a small plane to be traveling at over three hundred miles an hour to fly. They wanted to know if powered flight was really possible and if so how.

  Bernie knew it was possible; he had flown twice and seen planes flying more times than he could count. But he didn't know how they worked. He built paper airplanes and wooden airplanes that flew, based on the rubber band powered airplanes he had played with as a kid, but he couldn't explain how they worked.

  What Bernie didn't know, and for that matter most people in the Ring of Fire didn't know, was that planes flew through a complex mix of Bernoulli's Law, Newton's Laws and the complexities of air flow. The mathematicians and natural philosophers who surrounded Bernie now would have understood the complex explanation but Bernie didn't have it. He had seen the drawings of air flow over a wing and assumed that they were accurate. They weren't. This didn't mean the shape of the wing was wrong. They weren't really inaccurate either, just simplified. Using the drawing out of those books for the cross-section of the wing would produce a wing that would fly quite well. Assuming, of course, that you added the ailerons and the rest of the plane.

  Every day he had people asking him questions that he didn't have the answers to. They weren't meaningless questions that didn't really matter, like how many planets there are in the solar system. Well, most of them weren't. The astrologers were nuts to know the locations of Neptune, Uranus and Pluto. Mostly, though, the questions were about how things worked and how to treat injuries and diseases.

  "I just don't know enough. I don't know if anyone does." The candles were half burnt and the girl was dozing in the chair. She jerked awake at the sound of his voice. He looked over and saw how tired she looked. "Oh, Lord. I've kept you up when you need to sleep. I'm sorry. I lost track of the time. I'll get out of your way and let you get some sleep. I'm really sorry."

  * * *

  The outlander grabbed up a candle and hustled away. Anya watched him go in amazement. He was strange this, this Bernie from the future. That strangeness was giving Anya pause. What was his game? What was he up to? It hadn't occurred to her that Bernie might simply be a nice guy. She hadn't met many nice guys in her life. She worried about him possibly being onto her, but there wasn't really any evidence for that. This is just too easy. Anya didn't trust easy; easy usually meant a trap.

  Anya had never seen the man her reports went to and didn't know his name. He was simply referred to as "the prince." The Dacha was filled with experts, but it was also increasingly filled with spies. She thought half the servants in the place, and more than a few of the craftsmen, must report to someone. This didn't in any way diminish the quality of the service. It was just as important for agents to provide good service as it was for a normal servant. In fact, most of them were normal servants just making a bit of extra money on the side.

  For the ones, like Anya, who were agents, quality was even more important. The people who had trained and placed the agents had a pretty unforgiving attitude. If an agent got fired for spilling the soup, the result could be a tragedy for that agent and his or her family.

  * * *

  Filaret's forehead was creased with concentration. He was writing something, as he usually was. Mikhail sat quietly and waited for his father to lift his head. Filaret eventually did. He smiled when he realized that Mikhail had come in the room.

  "Listen to this." Filaret picked up the sheets of paper. "I'll be reading it at the services next Sunday. I'll have copies printed. A lot of fair copies."

  Filaret read:

  Patriarch Filaret's Advisory

  on the

  Ring of Fire

  It is clear through multiple sources that God, in his infinite wisdom, has chosen to take a hand in the conflict among the German States. He provides through this example clear evidence of both His infinite power and His will, that the Roman Church and the Protestants, whether Lutheran, Calvinist, or other peculiar sects, are wrong. God has endeavored to make clear to them that which of their errors is most wrong is not a matter worth fighting over.

  That is clearly God's message to them. But what is God's message to us? It is obvious that we are not in need of the sort of correction the German States required, else surely God would have placed the Ring of Fire here in Muscovy. While His admonishment, gentle as it is, is for the Germans, the gifts which He sent with it are clearly for all the world. Willingly or not, the knowledge the up-timers bring is spreading to all the world. To their credit, the up-timers themselves seem willing enough to share most of the knowledge that God gifted their ancestors and our descendants with. This is an especially gracious gift to Holy Rus. For, while we have been strong in our adherence to scripture and the true faith, circumstances have left us behind the more western nations in some of the more mundane and earthly matters. We have been blocked by Poland from sharing in the technical advances made in the west.

  The czar, in his wisdom, has long had a policy of trying to correct that problem so that we, the true heirs of Christianity and the Roman empire, could maintain the faith in relative safety, while at the same time limiting the corrupting influences from the west. God has smiled on Czar Mikhail's endeavor by providing new skills developed over time; many of them developed right here in Holy Rus. Yet like greedy children we complain "Why an American village? Why not a Russian village?" We know, after all, that in the twentieth-century Holy Rus was one of the two great powers. After studying the history, it is obvious that God chose an American village to protect Holy Rus, especially the church. The Russia of that time had fallen into corruption. For most of the twentieth century the Russian Orthodox Church, in fact all Christianity, had actually been banned. It was to protect us from this corruption that God chose an American village.

  He placed it in Germany to remind us that He sees the whole world and cares about even those who have fallen away from the true church. More than that, He placed
it in Germany to remind us that we have to work at it. To remind us not to be too proud to listen and learn from others and to protect us from too much of their direct influence, so that we might learn from them without becoming them. To protect our great Russian culture and still allow us the benefits of the good things they brought with them. As to the German culture, well, they don't really have one so it doesn't really matter.

  "Well?" Mikhail raised an eyebrow. "Is that really why God did it the way he did it?"

  Filaret looked at his son severely for a moment. Then shrugged. "I have no idea."

  "Not exactly what one wants to hear from the patriarch of the church." Mikhail's grin was full of mischief.

  "It wasn't my idea to become patriarch," Filaret complained. "It wasn't my idea to become a monk, for that matter. I'd much rather have been left out of Godonov's revenge."

  "Wouldn't we all?" Boris Godonov had done his level best to exterminate the Romanov family. He hadn't been that far from succeeding, either.

  Filaret shook his head. "God remains mysterious and beyond human understanding. He could have placed the Ring of Fire anywhere from anytime and the same questions would arise: why there, why not here?" Filaret shook his head again. "I'm not by nature a theologian. I have never much cared how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But God chose to do this while I was patriarch, so I had to come up with something. It had to be something the people could mostly accept. Which was not that easy to do."

  "If it only helps us modernize," Mikhail murmured.

  "It should, I think. The idea is that God was correcting the Germans but giving the gift of knowledge to the whole world. Hopefully, it lets people feel that we aren't barbarians taking German scraps." Filaret grinned. "Besides, to go with it will be the design for the turning plow. A gracious gift from Czar Mikhail. Complete instructions on how to make them and the czar's permission to use them as needed—a gift to all the people."

  * * *

  Filaret read about the so called "Old Believers" in the up-timer histories and was disgusted. It would rip the church apart the way that idiot Nikon handled it. There were some arguments about minor matters of ceremony, true. Mostly among scholars—people who probably had too much time on their hands. He couldn't understand why anyone would fight over it. Nikon's scholars were probably technically correct, but it was a "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" question. Who cared?

  "Have you read this, Ivan Fedorovich?" He motioned toward the book.

  "Yes, Patriarch."

  "Do you have any idea what they were fighting about?"

  "No, Patriarch."

  "Tell me about the small village churches." Filaret needed to know this. He had been in them and authorized them but they were from a different class. Ivan Fedorovich's class.

  "They are the centers of the villages." Ivan Fedorovich was a priest, a fairly new one. "The priest is chosen by the villagers and often helps them with writing letters and such. When villagers get together to celebrate or to mourn, to rejoice or complain, it is the village church where they gather."

  Filaret considered what Ivan Fedorovich was saying as he considered the article on Nikon from the Encyclopedia Britannica 1911. He seriously considered having the young man, who according to the article was twenty-seven years old and might or might not be in a monastery, murdered. "I don't understand. What do the peasants care about whether the priest uses two fingers or three when he blesses them?"

  Ivan Fedorovich snorted and Filaret looked at him with a raised eyebrow. "Won't make any difference." Ivan Fedorovich shook his head and fell unconsciously back into the accent of his peasant village. "Parish priests work for the villages; they're the ones that pay 'em. Whatever this Nikon says, they'll do it the way the villagers want."

  "Oh . . ." Filaret paused, struck by a thought. "That's why." The house-to-house searches mentioned in the article on Nikon. "He took away their priests. He must have. Had them appointed from outside, not hired by the villages." It was starting to fit together. "It wasn't about ritual. It was about control. He would have had the same fight if he had insisted they use two fingers instead of three. The leaders would have changed but not the fight."

  Ivan Fedorovich was nodding. "It must be. It's the one thing that really belongs to the peasants; their faith. The one thing that they control."

  "I'll have to think about this." Filaret thought a moment. "In the meantime, have this Nikon or Nikoles located. Just in case."

  * * *

  Anya watched the balloon with the multi-wicked candles suspended below it as lifted into the air. Pter Nickovich was doing "a preliminary experiment into the lifting power of hot air." In other words, he was playing. It was his third balloon so far; each larger than the last. This one was a tall as a man and as wide as it was tall. And it trailed a series of lead weights. Lifting first one then the next into the air below it. It lifted five of them, then stopped rising, proving that hot air is lighter than cold air. Which any five year old in any peasant village in Russia could have told him. The balloon was pretty enough, she guessed. Pter Nickovich's was holding his "experiment" in a corner behind the main building of the dacha where it would be out of the wind. Which also meant out of the sun. It might have been prettier if his balloon was in the sunlight.

  What had really brought her out into the cold to see it was the idea that, some day, a much bigger thing like this might let people fly. Pter Nickovich wasn't looking at the balloon; he was writing out calculations. Then he looked over at Filip Pavlovich. "I was right. The heated air lifts a little more than a quarter of an ounce per cubic foot."

  Filip Pavlovich just nodded.

  "I must have the hydrogen you promised me." Pter Nickovich insisted.

  "Yes. Fine. We'll talk about it, but inside." Filip Pavlovich was visibly cold even in the heavy clothing. "Where it's warm."

  Anya smiled, though she didn't let it show. Pter Nickovich was not one to take being laughed at well. As they blew out the candles that were heating the air for the balloon, Anya tried to figure out what was going on at the Dacha. Bernie, the person that this was all about, had had very little to do with the development of the balloon. Nor with many of the experiments that were going on. There was a guy, the son of a fairly powerful bureaucratic noble, who was sitting in one of the buildings, winding wires in a coil. Slowly, carefully making what he said would be a generator of electric. He carefully painted the wire and laid one circuit around the coil, then waited for it to dry before he did the next. He was a volunteer, here because he wanted to be.

  * * *

  "What was it like to live in the future?" Anya asked as much for herself as for her controllers.

  "I don't know." Bernie shrugged. Anya had noticed he did that a lot. "Funny thing, I never thought much about the future when I was living in it." He snorted. "I was in no hurry to grow up. There was no real need. I had a pretty good job. Enough money for most of what I wanted. Never found the right girl, but had a lot of fun looking."

  Bernie paused a moment and his eyes got a distant look. "I think that was what hit me so hard about the Ring of Fire. It wasn't that I lost family. I lost my future."

  "Your future?" Anya leaned back in her chair and considered. "I don't understand."

  "Yep." Bernie nodded. "Losing your future isn't like losing your kids or your wife or stuff like that. You feel like a jerk complaining about it, but I couldn't help it. Like everyone else, I was in shock at first. I just couldn't come out of it. People started doing things. Things that mattered. President Stearns, Jeff Higgins . . . everyone was making it work and I was still sitting around doing what I was told. The same old Bernie. No direction, no drive."

  Anya let Bernie talk.

  "I just couldn't think of anything useful to do. Then Vlad and Boris offered me this job. I had no idea if I could do it, but I couldn't take much more of Grantville. It wasn't home anymore, but it was too much like home." Bernie looked at Anya blearily. "Know what I mean?"

  Anya ha
d no idea but she nodded anyway.

  "I think the trip out was the first time I had been sober for three days running since the Ring of Fire." Bernie certainly wasn't sober at the moment, but she got his point anyway. Bernie preferred beer to vodka and the truth was had rarely been drunk since he had arrived at the Dacha. He barely drank at all by Russian standards, which were the only standards Anya had.

  Anya thought about what Bernie had said. It sounded like he had had his life all planned out but just didn't realize it. She hadn't considered what it would be like for the outlanders from the future. She wondered briefly what it would be like to be sent four hundred years into the past. Briefly, because she had no real idea what the world had been like four hundred years ago.

  "And now?" She wanted to keep the outlander talking.

  "Now, I'm too busy to worry about it that much." Bernie grinned. "Too much to do. The Nerd Patrol is always hitting me with new questions and I spend so much time reading and helping out that there isn't that much time to mope anymore. That's the secret to a happy life, kid. Have something to do. Better something that matters. But something."