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Grantville Gazette Volume 93

Page 2

by Bjorn Hasseler


  ****

  Four days later, Hartmuth Frisch's life was complicated by the appearance of an Italian painter, who arrived at the factor's office with a friend and a couple of students in tow, saying that the count had hired him to paint portraits of his daughters, "which came at a convenient time, since I was working for Urban VIII and the Barberini in Rome as of May last year when chaos descended on everything. I decided to get out while the getting was good, and got, but was rather short on paying commissions for a while. I was already interested in the possibility of Grantville. I'd heard about it by way of my colleague Joachim von Sandrart, who is a client of the Huguenot ducs, Rohan and Soubise, who know Mr. Ron Stone." He looked hopeful.

  "Ron's out of town," Frisch said, a little shortly.

  When Frisch phoned the house, Count August admitted that he might have forgotten to mention the project. "Slipped my mind, don't you know?" So he sent Mario Balossi and company over for an interview.

  Thinking that if he were Sommersburg, he'd be a bit wary about letting Balossi, probably not much over thirty and with those Italian good looks, anywhere near the count's bodaciously red-haired daughter Elena. He certainly had no intention of letting the man, much less the man's apprentices, anywhere near his own nieces.

  Except that Jenny Rae invited the whole lot of them over for Sunday dinner the next week.

  "I have no desire to offend," Balossi said, "but when the count contacted me last year, he mentioned two daughters. Has there been a bereavement?"

  "Not one that involved a funeral," Jenny Rae answered, "but so you don't put your foot in your mouth, Louisa, the older girl–well, she's a grown woman–is married to a man named Marcus von Drachhausen. He's old enough to be her father, but they had three children. The youngest must be about two now. Drachhausen cut quite a swath here, got as far as being Deputy Secretary of Transportation under Dennis Stull, but blotted his copybook–arrested for attempted rape, got involved in a corruption scandal, and ended up in prison. Flipped on his colleagues, cut a deal, and got out early on the understanding that everyone would be happier if he went somewhere else.

  "After he was arrested, the count announced that Louisa was going to divorce him and he got the proceedings started, but she didn't follow through. When Drachhausen got out and headed back to Saxony, which is where he came from, she went with him and took the children.

  "Better career possibilities, he proclaimed. Which, all things considered was true, because he had no more career possibilities at all in the SoTF. But I don't think you'll be painting her portrait this summer."

  "I see," Balassi said. "And thank you sincerely for the information."

  The two apprentices offered that they would be delighted to paint the portraits of Hartmuth's nieces, just for the practice.

  He frowned. "And who would chaperone these sittings?"

  "Not I," Jenny Rae said firmly. "I have work of my own."

  Balassi's friend just sat there quietly.

  "What will you be doing?" she asked, trying to bring him into the conversation. He didn't have much to say for himself. "Portraits also?"

  "Probably not."

  "Tomasso isn't a portraitist," Balassi said. "He studied with Jacopo Ligozzi, who died close to a decade ago. I'm sorry to say that he has no talent at all for painting in the modern style. He's mostly an illustrator; does all these tediously detailed little line drawings for copper engravers by preference– animals, plants, even rocks!"

  "Rocks?" Jenny Rae said. "I think, actually, that we might have a commission for you, too."

  ****

  Sömmerda, SoTF

  Summer, 1636

  For their sin of having found and reported the strange rock to start with, Hans Guenther Schlinck assigned Hans Bechstein, Georg Barchfelder, and Martin Schröder to assist the geologists. Since their assistance came in the form of cutting rock, but with great care and more slowly than would otherwise be the case, with frequent breaks in the shade while the geologists conferred with each other, they had no particular objections. Christian Trempling came to observe whenever he could steal a bit of free time. This was more of a thrill than a village schoolteacher usually had in his life. He wrote letters to a lot of his old school friends, making it sound just a little more exciting than it really was–which approximated watching paint dry. Several of them managed to make the trip and join everyone else who watched the preliminary excavations get under way.

  "Do you suppose any of them have the slightest idea what they're doing?" Mike Tyler asked one of his professors at Jena.

  He might be self-taught, but he was, at the ripe old age of nineteen, the closest thing that Grantville had to a field archaeologist. With a couple of digs under his belt.

  Though that was historical archaeology, he admitted to himself. Nowhere near as old as this site might be, if it really did have fossilized bones.

  So he and the professor went over for a look.

  The professor spouted an impromptu lecture about somebody named Albert of Saxony. Nobody else had heard of him, or wanted to hear about him.

  Tomasso somebody-or-other, who was sketching the rock formations before Mariah let the workers cut the stone, responded with Leonardo da Vinci, asserting that he had depicted numerous fossils in his drawings, especially marine fossils.

  As these most obviously were not marine fossils, the relevance was not clear.

  In any case, Mike and the professor went back to Jena and the rest of the crew went back to work.

  And found bones.

  Then more bones. Even larger bones than the first one that Barchfelder had noticed.

  ****

  Grantville

  Summer, 1636

  Frisch sent Valentin Rebenstock to take a look again.

  Rebenstock, an excellent scribe, had once accompanied a diplomat on an expedition to the Divine Porte. There, in Istanbul, he had visited a zoo.

  "Some of these bones might belong to deer," he reported dubiously. "There are antlers. Some are horse-like. Some are cow-like. Maybe some bear. But most of these bones belong to animals that didn't come from anywhere around here. I think more than just the first one might be from elephants. And this."

  He opened a book he had checked out of the public library, displaying a photograph of a rhinoceros. "Not exactly like this, but close. Very close. What ruler of Thuringia centuries ago would ever have had such a large zoo?"

  "Very strange," Mario Balossi commented. "I didn't think the Romans ever extended their campaigns this far into Germania. And in any case, it was Hannibal, the Carthaginian, who used war elephants. Not the Romans."

  "What we need," Christie Kemp wailed, "is a paleontologist."

  "Grantville doesn't have a paleontologist," Lolly Aossey pointed out reasonably enough. "Grantville never had a paleontologist. It never needed a paleontologist. Nobody in this day and age is a paleontologist. Neither up-timer nor down-timer."

  "Then we're going to have to invent paleontology all over again."

  "Who has the time?"

  Both of them turned around and looked at Christie's daughter, Anne Penzey, who was scheduled to start college at the University of Prague in the fall. Anne flinched.

  "Mariah Collins can help you. This has to be much more interesting than checking foundation sites for silos."

  "The silo corporation pays her," Anne pointed out.

  "Surely someone will be willing to pay her for this," her mom answered. "The count, if he's the one who wants it investigated, I suppose."

  "Do you plan for him to pay me? Cora's pays me. Not a lot, but the tips are good and the gossip is better."

  "I'm a geologist, not a paleontologist!" Mariah protested.

  "So are we," Lolly pointed out. "Up-time, paleontology was in the geology department at a lot of universities, but that sure doesn't make it the same discipline. For example, I've heard of molecular phylogenetics, but I've never even seen a demonstration of one of the machines. Much less having anything that might do it!"
r />   "How on earth," Christie asked, "are we going to date these things?"

  "Do we even have anybody who might have a book that will tell us more about how to do it than the general encyclopedia articles?"

  "Probably not. Kids have books about dinosaurs, but those are books for kids. These aren't dinosaurs. Old, but not that old!"

  "How old?"

  "Right now, I'm not even willing to make a guess."

  They went back up to Sömmerda. And flinched.

  "I cannot believe," Lolly groaned, "that we're trying to conduct an important archaeological excavation in the middle of a working stone quarry with gawking tourists wandering by."

  One of whom was Elena von Sommersburg, who was busy striking up an acquaintance with an old school friend of Christian Trempling while the rest of them looked at rocks. She was getting tired of wandering around on her father's arm looking decorative.

  Balossi had proved to be a disappointment to her, in a way. All he did was paint her portrait. It was very flattering, but still . . . One of the apprentices had informed her that the painter had a "delicate conscience" and was a charitable man–which was how come he, himself, had an apprenticeship, when his parents were servants and could not pay the fee.

  While they were gone, Count August called in a lawyer to make his will. Johann Georg Hardegg came highly recommended for his discretion by Duke Johann Philipp von Saxe-Altenburg. The count wanted discretion.

  "The title will go extinct at my death. The land I hold in feudal tenure will escheat back to Saxony." The old man smiled. "Henceforth, unless the Saxon government under Gretchen Richter decides to sell it off, the residents of Sommersburg who live on those estates will pay their taxes to the State of Thuringia-Franconia and their rents to the Province of Saxony. This should not be a problem."

  "No problem at all," Hardegg agreed. "It's not as if it's unusual for a Hochadel family to go extinct. That's how Brunswick got Hoya and Diepholz a half century ago, and still holds the land rights even though they have been placed in the Province of Westphalia. Families die out in the male line. The same thing happened to Gleichen right here, which is why it's a county in the SoTF now. The widow of the last count is living in a big mansion just outside of Grantville this very day."

  "As for my daughters," the count said. "They can and will inherit my personal property, my investments, whatever lands I own outright."

  Hardegg was making a list. The quarries, the Sommerda Flax Mill, the count's share in Sommersburg and Carstairs Construction, his share in Magdeburg Concrete, the investments on the stock exchange.

  "To be shared equally between them?"

  Count August frowned. He was profoundly annoyed with his daughter Louisa. He took a deep breath.

  "This is not to be repeated."

  "Of course."

  "Drachhausen is dead, killed in the course of the Saxon uprising. Louisa has claimed his inheritance in the name of her son, and there is no legal reason why he should not have it. Her mother was noble; she is legitimate; her son is entirely qualified to inherit from another Niederadel such as Drachhausen. But his brother is challenging the claim. She has moved in with a maternal uncle, one of my wife Eleanora's brothers, and set out to engage in a protracted lawsuit.

  "She has her dowry, so she and the children will not be reduced to begging their bread. But I will not have her wasting my money on what may be a futile process. Establish trusts for her children, from which she may at need draw expenses. I will not have her experiencing even the slightest shadow of want, but make the trusts unbreakable.

  "As for Elena . . . ."

  He began to tire.

  Hardegg said that he would put the material covered thus far into proper legal form and return the following week.

  ****

  Sömmerda, SoTF

  Fall, 1636

  It was time to end the excavation season and protect everything for the winter. Anne had left for Prague several weeks earlier, promising to devote next summer to proto-paleontology again but, sturdily supported by Idelette Cavriani, Carol Koch, and Aura Lee Stull, refusing to be deprived of a college degree by a batch of bones. "I don't care if Troy was found by a self-taught amateur enthusiast," Carol said. "Dilettantes can only indulge in expensive hobbies like archaeology if they have money to start with."

  Christie and Lolly went up, just for the weekend, to supervise the procedures. Not that they didn't trust Mariah and Simone; not that the down-timers weren't perfectly reliable, it was just . . . This excavation could be a very important find. They felt responsible.

  "Frau Mariah!" came a screech from Georg Barchfelder. "Hans! Martin! Frau Simone! Frau Kemp! Frau Aossey! Jemand, komm, bitte! Jetzt!"

  Nobody panicked. Quite. But they did come "right now."

  "Georg, what is it?" Christie asked.

  "Sieh, nur! Das ist ein Schädel!"

  And it certainly was. A human skull in among the animal bones, looking just as fossilized as all the rest.

  "We can call him 'Bilzi,' I suppose," Lolly said with some gallows humor at supper that evening.

  They postponed closing down the dig for a week and sent a messenger to Grantville telling the school system to find substitute teachers for that long.

  "Lolly," Christie said. "Lolly, how old are these bones?"

  "A lot older than anyone else is going to believe."

  They took the skull, still in its piece of rock, cushioned and padded, back to Grantville for Jeff Adams and Susannah Shipley to look at. The physicians might be able to come up with the best-educated guess.

  Mike Tyler came down from Jena with his professor and began tearing through encyclopedias with the efficient assistance of Marietta Fielder at the library.

  ****

  Grantville

  Fall, 1636

  "It's not a homo sapiens," Jeff Adams said.

  "What is it then? I was so sure it was a human skull. Not a great ape; not a monkey," Christie said with considerable disappointment.

  Dr. Adams looked at Mike Tyler. Tomasso whoever-he-was began to place drawings on an easel. Ten or a dozen drawings.

  Mike worked his way back through them, explaining.

  From the modern skull. To a Neanderthal. To . . .

  "Jeff . . ." Christie said, her voice shaking.

  Mike got to the final drawing–Bilzi.

  "He's a homo erectus, we think," Jeff Adams said. "About 150,000 years old."

  "You can use the winter to get organized and make better plans," Mike said. "This is never going to be my thing, but I can help. What kind of funding are you going to have next season?"

  Mariah looked up. "I can't dig next summer. I'm pregnant."

  "I have no idea what I'll be doing next summer," Simone said. "Since I'm still here, I'm obviously not going back to Bamberg. For the moment, I'm working for Uncle Perry out of his garage–he does repairs on his own time when he's not at work at Mechanical Support–and I've signed up as a researcher at the National Library, just to have some income. Aunt Rosie said she could get me into the nursing program, but I don't want to be a nurse. Or a doctor. Pa thinks I should get a degree at the Tech College in something mechanical. Which would be all right, I suppose, but I can't afford to go to school unless I work and when I'm working two jobs, I don't have time to go to school.

  "I'll never get another cent from Ma. The saints that live in her head don't like your bones. I don't see any way that I could afford to quit two jobs just to do another summer stint for you, and then have to find two others to keep myself afloat for the rest of the year. And I think I'd better stay around. In case Raffi needs me to get him out from under. I had a pretty big argument with Pa, about paying more attention to his oldest son even if it does mean he would occasionally have to deal with Terry. We're not exactly on the best of terms right now.

  "I hear everyone saying that all up-timers are rich and I laugh. The only thing that has kept us afloat this long is that real estate prices have gone through the roof, so Ma's com
missions are bigger. But when Gran lost her Social Security and coal mine widow's pension after the Ring of Fire, and then the owner of the little house she rented put her out because he could get a lot more by renting it to a dozen down-timers, so she had to move in with Ma . . ."

  Christie drew in a deep breath. Anne would be back next summer. Not pregnant. Maybe Ashley and Jonathan wouldn't have another baby right away. There were down-timers. The dig would go on.

  Count August von Sommersburg saw to it that there was more excitement in the newspapers.

  Overall, the down-timers were calmer than the up-time fundamentalists.

  "Miners find very strange animals, from before Noah's flood, caught in the coal all the time," Pastor Kastenmayer's wife Salome said to Jenny Rae. "Not usually as big as these bones, though, and I'm not sure there's ever been a human skull from those times found before this one."

  Athanasius Kircher agreed generally that the fossils were giant bones belonging to extinct races. And not even giants in the earth. "The animals there are very large," he explained to his fellow Jesuits at supper. "The human bones, however, are not. They are a quite ordinary size for a man, although the skull is a bit odd-shaped. There are quite adequate frameworks to explain the differences in both the philosophy of Aristotle and that of the Neoplatonists."

  The skull added to the existing stress at the First Baptist Church and didn't thrill the other up-time churches with fundamentalist members.

 

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