A Dubious Peace

by Olan Thorensen

  “The Narthani are not exactly the Germans,” said Yozef.

  “No, but neither are the Landolin kingdoms a secure defense like the French thought the Maginot Line was. The French were so confident that they didn’t plan for the contingency that the Germans would bypass the France/Germany border defenses. What’s your contingency if the Narthani suddenly turn their attention back to Caedellium for unexpected reasons, or the Landoliners fall faster than you think is likely?”

  “Whatever happens, it won’t be overnight,” said Yozef stubbornly. “We’d have time to react.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But look at it another way. The longer the Narthani are a threat, the fewer will be our potential allies. Every nation they take over is one less ally for us. And what do you think will happen if . . . uh . . . ” Mark paused to check the Anyar map. “If Panhan and Munjor fall? I’d bet the last two kingdoms, Naskin and Mureet, either surrender or resistance evaporates almost overnight and the Narthani would control all of Landolin. The last map shows how precarious a position that would put the Iraquiniks, the rest of Ganolar, and Caedellium.”

  “Catastrophizing will always come up with such scenarios, Mark. So . . . where are you going with this?”

  “I’m just proposing that not enough consideration is being given to bringing down the Narthon Empire for good. Otherwise, the threat will always be here.”

  “And Caedellium is going to do that? All by itself?” Yozef said scornfully. “I’ve actually fought a war with the Narthani. It took amazing guts from the Caedelli, their commitment to pay the price, and mistakes by the Narthani for us to pull out the victory. But we weren’t a threat to the Narthon Empire then or now.”

  “I’m not saying Caedellium alone, and I don’t have a clear vision of what could be done, but I do have suggestions.”

  Yozef sighed. “All right, go ahead and lay them out . . . if it won’t take too long. I do have to get back to the hetmen.”

  “It’s a long list to consider, but these and more are worth thinking about. Some we’ve already talked about, looking well into the future. Breech-loading rifles and cannon, rocket-propelled grenades, rocket artillery, exploding shells, mortars, all of which need real fuses. That’s for ground warfare. At sea, steam-powered, armored warships.”

  “We’re already working on some of those,” said Yozef, “or waiting for technology, such as getting steam engines working before we think about warships.”

  “Yes, using steam engines in mining, steel production, textiles, and whatever is good, but you don’t seem serious about the warships. Unless we can defend the waters around Caedellium, the Narthani can eventually land armies.”

  “And what? We’ll become a naval power like England used to be? Even if I agreed with you, our population is too small, as is our industrial base, despite what we’re developing.”

  Exasperated, Mark drumming the tabletop with fingers of both hands. “I don’t understand why you don’t see this. Was the fight against the Narthani, especially the final battle, so traumatic you can’t see what’s right in front of you?”

  Yozef flushed. “And who are you to judge? You may have had fights to get here, but you weren’t in real battles with tens of thousands on each side, you didn’t witness dead and wounded as far as the eye could see, hear the screams of the wounded, all the blood, and know all the time that so many people looked to you to lead them.”

  Mark’s face turned stone cold. He quickly snatched the map paper from the table and stormed out.

  Yozef was angry, but not only at Mark. His fellow Amerikan had brought to the surface thoughts Yozef had not shared with anyone, not even Maera. What if the Narthani did eventually rule the entire world? Exactly how catastrophic would that be? There was no reason to think lessons from Earth’s history wouldn’t repeat on a different planet. Empires eventually fell. He believed what he had told Mark about his final meeting with Okan Akuyun before the last Narthani ship sailed from Preddi City. Internal rot and competition for power, the simmering hatred of conquered people, and the allure of features of other civilizations were eventually transformative. The Narthani had risen from being nomadic raiders to conquer more civilized peoples, but in the process, they had been civilized in return. He doubted the Narthani of the early expansion would have acknowledged kinship with the invaders of Caedellium.

  Ancient history had been an interest of Yozef’s only as related to his circle of gamesters. Bobby Novak had been an aficionado of Hungarian history, his family’s ancestral homeland. At Bobby’s insistence, the group played Oriental Empires a disproportionate amount of time. Although the video game focused on China, the Mongols were evident enough to give Bobby leeway to tell, all too often, of how the Mongols had advanced into central Europe. There, they defeated a Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohi, the high-water mark for the Mongols in Europe. Bobby asserted, and Yozef had never been interested enough to check, that political turmoil within the Mongol royal family, overextension, the disintegration of central authority, and a gradual adoption of conquered people’s attributes ended the Mongol empire. Yozef trusted that the same would happen with the Narthani.

  Rather than focus on destroying Narthon, he believed Caedellium only had to outlast it. In a worst-case scenario, he might have to work with the conquerors in return for Caedelli safety, to then wait for the empire to fall on its own.

  Truce

  Yozef and Mark had not met for over a sixday since their argument about the Narthani. It hadn’t been a bitter argument . . . one of those that too often devolved into attributing negative personal characteristics. Nevertheless, it exposed two disparate positions. Yozef acknowledged the long-term threat but wanted to minimize Caedellium involvement in what should be referred to as a “World War.” He believed his argument that current events notwithstanding, the broad conflict had been mainly stalemated for enough years that he saw the Narthani attempts to take Caedellium and Landolin as desperation. Mark had sympathized but disagreed. His experiences painted a picture of Narthon as a continuing threat. The Narthani tentacles reached out to him in central Frangel all the way from Narthon, he passed through an occupied Rustal, and, to him, the news from Landolin provided no basis for optimism.

  Mark was inclined to be more proactive. He believed Caedellium might be small compared to the realms involved in the Anyar World War, but it could make an outsized contribution with what he and Yozef could develop. Mark had stewed for several days before coming to a realization.

  I have to face it, he thought. I’m not going to convince Yozef to come over to my view unless something happens in which I have no part. Much of what I’m doing would be the same if he agreed with me. At least, for the next year or two.

  Whether it be for a total commitment in the World War, for a program of limited aid to Landolin and Iraquinik, or for Caedellium’s internal development, they still needed what Mark could help develop after the telegraph: rails, steam power, machine tools, and a steel industry. In the meantime, he needed to get along with Yozef, both because the Paramount’s support was so critical and because they were two of the only three Amerikans they knew of on Anyar.

  Besides, Mark acknowledged, I like him, and I can’t ignore what he’s accomplished.

  Such thinking led to the situation today. Mark had never visited Yozef’s chemistry laboratory, though Yozef had described it to him several times and extended an invitation for a tour even more times. Mark figured it would be a good ploy to break the thin ice between them, and, if he suspected right, he would be impressed with what Yozef was planning and had already accomplished.

  During the new Amerikans’ first sixdays in Orosz City, Yozef had grilled Mark twice, and presumably Heather, about chemistry. He admitted he was probing how much they knew. After the second time, he had seemed disappointed and never probed again.

  “I guess I was hoping you remembered some things I didn’t,” Yozef had said when Mark asked why the interrogation.

  Mark had seen the Chemistry Insti
tute, as Yozef called it, regularly since his arrival in Orosz City. It was hard to miss. Extensive multi-paned glass windows and large skylights with mobile covers set it apart from any other building Mark had yet seen on Anyar.

  “Without electricity, I want as much light as possible inside,” said Yozef when describing the building. “We have to have small flames in the laboratory sections. You know . . . primitive versions of Bunsen burners and heating mantles when needed for reactions, but I want to minimize the dangers. The number and the amount of combustible chemicals will only increase. That’s also why there are concrete or brick firewalls to contain fires that do break out. I didn’t blow anyone up when we were making gunpowder, napalm, and flares, but I worry people won’t fully appreciate my being anal about safety until something terrible happens.

  “The window and the skylights minimize the need for lanterns, and that includes the sections for study, lessons, and the chemistry library that’s being developed.”

  Mark entered the building and found no one in the large entrance foyer. Cloaks hung from wall pegs . . . the sky suggested rain later in the day. A woman exited a doorway, glanced at Mark, and continued across the foyer to another door. He had no idea what went on behind either door. Hallways stretched in three directions, left, right, and straight. It occurred to him that he had seen the building only from a single view.

  Must be multiple single-story wings, thought Mark. Maximizes light and minimizes fire danger.

  He glanced down all three hallways. Each seemed to be about fifty yards long, with doors on both sides only for the hallway straight ahead. The right and left hallways had doors on the inward sides. Half a minute passed while he wondered how to find Yozef. The obvious solution was to ask. Individuals walked between doors or down the hallways. He waited until a young man came into the foyer from the right hallway.

  “Can you tell me where to find the Paramount?”

  “Yozef? He’s teaching a class,” said the man, pointing down the left hallway. “Second door. Should be about finished.”

  “Thanks.”

  At the indicated door, Mark peered into the classroom through the door’s window. Yozef stood at a blackboard, talking to eleven or twelve seated listeners, mainly male, all with paper, quill, and ink. He couldn’t hear what was being said.

  Mark smiled. I guess taking class notes doesn’t change. He moved slightly to his left for a better view of the blackboard. Chemical symbols covered most of the surface. He recognized the element symbols. They were simple reactions. A woman raised her hand. Whatever was asked and answered, Yozef turned to the board and wrote with chalk. Mark couldn’t make out the new writing. Whatever was written and said, the woman appeared satisfied. Yozef laid down the chalk, his mouth moved, and the session was apparently over because attendees began gathering their notes and standing.

  Mark waited until the last “student” was headed to the door before he walked in.

  “Well, it certainly looked like you had their attention.”

  Yozef glanced up, surprised. “Mark. Is something up?”

  “No, no. I wanted to take you up on the tour invitation. I always seemed to have something else that needed doing, but I'm interested in how this is going.”

  Not all that much of an exaggeration, Mark thought. Chemistry might not be my thing, but it’s important, and we’re lucky to have Yozef. He seems to know his stuff.

  Mark looked at the blackboard. “Chemical reactions?”

  “The Law of Constant Composition,” said Yozef. “Anyar chemistry was . . . is, about fifty to a hundred years from establishing that atoms make up compounds. A key step on Earth happened around 1800 when several men, Richter, Berzelius, Dalton, and others, showed that the ingredients for simple chemical reactions were always consumed in the same proportions. This can only happen when the result of the reaction had specific ratios.”

  “Yeah,” said Mark. “Like, water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. So . . . are you telling them that’s the case, or are you showing them in the lab?”

  Yozef scowled. “Some of both, plus having them work out experiments on their own to prove it. I’m trying to ram through in months what took many brilliant scientists decades, and that was built on centuries of prior work I’m trying to skip over. There may come a time where I can say what’s true without being questioned, but it’s an iterative process for now. I take what’s currently believed, state it’s not quite accurate, and say how we know a little more in Amerika. There’s inevitable skepticism, so I suggest experiments to settle the matter. If it works out, my credit goes up, and we move to the next principles. Of course, I have to be careful that what I introduce can be proved. It won’t help if experiments don’t work, so I think hard about it.

  “Another good example is the periodic table. It was around 1870 when the Russian Dmitri Mendeleev proposed the first model of the table. He put the elements in rows by atomic weight and columns by the elements’ features. You know . . . copper, silver, gold in one column, fluorine, sodium, potassium, iodine in another. One of Mendeleev’s great insights was leaving positions blank when no element was known. He predicted they simply hadn’t been discovered yet. That’s what I’ve done. I’ve given them a periodic table with all the elements known to Anyar science and told them that ‘Amerikans’ believe in the missing elements.” Yozef grinned. “Our new chemists are gung-ho to make discoveries of elements known only to the mysterious Amerikans. One of our Caedelli chemists has ‘discovered’ bromine, and a Fuomi is well on the way to confirming cadmium.”

  Mark laughed. “And what about the names? Is the mysterious Yozef Kolsko going to magically come up with bromine and cadmium as names?”

  Yozef laughed even harder. “I did with bromine, but the Fuomi beat me to it. He’s already convinced he’s identified cadmium, and he’s asserting the name will be fuominium. I suppose I could invoke my status, but letting them do the naming encourages them.”

  “So, how far along are you? Were these typical students?”

  “This particular group is fairly new. I started off by picking potential students from clans as they came to my attention or were suggested to me. As you can imagine, every time a new person joined, I had to start over. It quickly became impossible, so I quit taking new people for most of a year until that first batch had gotten to a point where I figured they could teach the basics, and I could focus on the more advanced students. That’s how it’s been going.”

  “And you’re not tempted to just tell them, ‘Yozef Kolsko, the Paramount and Septarsh, says that’s the way it is’?”

  “Believe me, it’s tempting all too often, but I restrain myself. First, it’s got to be accepted. Too far outside what’s believed, and it might be disregarded. Then there’s the big secret of where we came from. Too much magical knowledge will draw more attention than I could predict the consequences of. Steady progress is better than too much risk.”

  Mark’s first impulse was to argue that Yozef was being too cautious. The number of people involved in his pushing chemistry knowledge had to be so small as to have little, if any, influence on the bulk of the population. Also, even if what he said was initially disbelieved by some of these “students,” some would run with it, and others would come to believe. However, Mark wasn’t there to start another argument.

  “Well . . . I can see that there’s more background needed for basic sciences like chemistry than engineering. A tool is a tool, and once it’s known, humans will grab it for applications and not worry about how it came about. So . . . where do you get your students?”

  “I call them students, but the ages vary. The older ones have a bit of life experience that has given them some combination of knowledge and mental pliability. That’s needed for people to accept new ideas from what was previously known. Of course, there are those who perceive it as too threatening. We’ve had a few of them. They usually quit within a month. Then there are the younger ones who are true scientists, in that they can acc
ept new ideas if the logic and evidence are enough. Those are the ones I really aim for. I wish there were more of them, but right now, I have four who really took off. Two of them teach most of the new students. Another six or seven are on their way. Besides any teaching, those I mentioned are involved in various projects, such as developing the new dyes we talked about or more refining of the holowar sap for sweeteners. Oh . . . and here’s one you’ll like. We have made progress on producing mercury fulminate that can be used in firearm primers.”

  Mark thought the tone of Yozef’s last comment hedged toward condescension, as if he’d thrown it off to placate a nag. Mark bit his tongue. He also stopped himself from asking whether guncotton was being investigated. However, he was interested in the mercury fulminate project.

  “Are you producing the mercury here or importing it?”

  “Here in Caedellium. There’s a rich source in Selfcell Province. Random testing of cinnabar from the site shows five to ten percent mercury.”

  “That’s pretty high. I thought mercury was rare in the Earth’s crust. Oh . . . I guess I’m assuming Anyar and Earth have similar histories, and I should say ‘Anyar’s crust.’”

  “Yeah, it’s probably the same here. It’s rare, but it also doesn’t mix well with most elements. The exceptions are some metals like gold, silver, and zinc. That means mercury tends to collect, especially into cinnabar. There’s a site in Spain that has been producing mercury for two thousand years and recently has produced a quarter of the Earth’s output.

  “It can be isolated as a by-product of producing those other metals, but the best source is cinnabar. Besides being such a high percentage in the ore, it’s almost ridiculously easy to isolate. That’s assuming you take precautions. The health effects of mercury vapor are no laughing matter. Cinnabar has a high amount of mercury sulfide. All you have to do is heat the cinnabar, and the mercury comes off as a vapor that can be condensed into a pure form.” Yozef smiled. “Of course, that’s easy to say, but it took some time to work out doing it safely.