Ring of Fire IV

by Eric Flint

  Gerry was getting exasperated. “Bro, I get it. You get one disease—usually because an army’s been tromping through the area wrecking everything—and you get all the others piling on top. Get. To. The. Point.”

  “We’ve got to build a big pharmaceutical industry in Hesse-Kassel. We can’t do that unless we can stimulate other people besides ourselves to invest in it.”

  “Ah.” Gerry leaned back himself. “Oh.”

  Now it was his turn to run fingers through his air. “You know Dad’ll have a shit fit.”

  “Yeah, I know. But Dad’s in Padua, for starters. Secondly, he put me in charge of the business because he’d rather be teaching. Thirdly, much as I love him he’s not always real practical.”

  Gerry chuckled. “Tell me about it.”

  “We’ve been talking to Melissa Mailey,” said Missy. “Even before this Hesse-Kassel thing came up, your father’s policy was becoming a headache. She says the problem is that Tom basically wants a socialist pharmaceutical industry—but without any of the other prerequisites for it.”

  Gerry didn’t have trouble following the logic. “Yeah, I agree. He wants medicine made at cost—‘the profit motive’s got no business mucking around with people’s health.’ I’ve heard him say it at least a dozen times—but what that really means when the industry’s this small is that it stays small.”

  Ron nodded. “If we had a well-developed advanced industrial society, you could probably do it the way Dad wants it done. Most of the money up-time Big Pharma spent on so-called ‘research’ was spent developing copycat drugs so they could slide around some other big pharmaceutical corporation’s patents. The real medical advances usually came from university research funded by one or another government. But that’s just not true in this the year of our apparently absentminded Lord 1635. If you want a drug developed by anybody except us, they’ve got to be able to make money at it. And we’re just not big enough to do everything that’s needed. Not by a long shot, even with all the money we make in dyes and chemicals.”

  It was a little amusing the way he and Missy got simultaneously disgusted looks on their faces. “And any time we want to siphon money from the dye and chemical works, we’ve gotta have a knock-down fight with your dad’s asshole father-in-law,” said Missy, almost snarling.

  “All Dad’s policy is really doing is stifling the development of a pharmaceutical industry. Well, slowing it down, at any rate. We are doing a lot on our own, even doing it at cost.”

  Gerry stood up and went to the window. The hotel fronted on Hans Richter Strasse and was within sight of the Dom and the southern part of Hans Richter Square. As vistas went in Magdeburg, it was pretty good. He pushed open the window to get some air. The capital of the USE was already notorious in Europe for its pollution and poor air quality, but unlike most large cities it didn’t smell that bad. The pollution came from industrial smoke and soot, not open sewage. Magdeburg was one of the few places on the continent that had a functioning sewer system, and even the ever-present horse manure was cleaned up on a regular basis.

  “Dad is going to have a shit fit,” Gerry repeated. “I’ll back you up if it comes down to a real fight with him, but I don’t know if Frank will. He’s usually pretty sensible but after spending all that time with the Marcolis…”

  He made a little twirling motion with his finger next to his head. The Marcoli family that their oldest brother had married into wasn’t exactly crazy, but when it came to their political views they could do a pretty good imitation. They might react to what Ron was proposing with a furious denunciation of blood-sucking profiteering.

  “Well, if comes to that I’ve got a secret weapon,” Ron said. He pointed to Missy with his thumb. “She calls it the nuclear option. I quit and tell Dad and Frank they can damn well run the business themselves instead of sticking me with it.”

  “’Course, it’d be kinda nuclear for us too,” said Missy, “seeing as how we’d be plunging from the heights of ye upper boo-joi-zee to whatever pitiful class you belong to on a librarian’s salary. Which I don’t even have yet because I’ll still studying.”

  She didn’t seem the least bit fazed by that prospect, though. Gerry wasn’t surprised. One of the many things he liked about his new sister-in-law was that she didn’t seem to share any of the snotty attitudes of so many members of her family. Her father was okay, but her grandmothers…

  It was as if Missy had been born into the Stone mindset, not just married into it. Well…within reason. She was more levelheaded than any Proper Stone, but she didn’t care about money all that much.

  Gerry smiled and turned away from the window. “It won’t come to that. Dad and Frank would rather lose an arm than give up what they’re doing and come back up here to deal with Herr Pain-in-the-Ass Karl Jurgen Edelmann. They’ll throw a hissy fit—Dad will, anyway; I’m not sure about Frank—but they’ll give in once you make clear you’re really serious about it.”

  He resumed his seat. “Speaking of which—being serious about it, I mean—are you ready to do what’s needed yourself, Missy? It’ll mean quitting school, at least for a while.”

  Missy made a face. “I don’t like the idea, but that’s mostly due to my innate caution. You know me: measure five times before you cut, and I got the feeling I haven’t measured library work more than three and a half times yet.”

  “You’ll do fine,” Gerry reassured her.

  “Yeah, I figure I will too.” She gave Ron a quick but very affectionate smile. “It helps that I know I won’t have to pinch any pfennigs if I don’t need to.”

  There was a knock on the door. Ron got up. “That’s probably Eva,” he said, moving toward the door. “That’s Eva Katherine von Anhalt-Dessau, Gerry, so try to be polite. Harry managed to talk her into being his agent as well as his not-so-ghostly writer and she’s been spending the last three days going from one printer to the next trying to talk them into the deal.”

  He opened the door and a very well-dressed female figure came charging through,

  “Swine!” she hissed. “All of them—no! I insult honest pigs, who, say what else you will about them, are not cowardly.”

  She snatched off the scarf which had been covering her head. The head now exposed was topped with hair so dark it was almost black, tied up in a bun at the back of her head but with curls clustered around her face.

  Gerry thought the face itself would probably have been very pretty if it weren’t for the smallpox scars. But as pox scars went, hers were not that bad. Some pox-scarred faces were hideously ugly, with the features distorted and in some cases effectively destroyed. This young woman’s scars were all over her face and especially heavy on her cheeks, but they were simply scars. She looked like an up-timer who’d suffered from really terrible acne as a teenager.

  She was of average height for a seventeenth-century woman and had a rather buxom figure, which was well-displayed by the bodice she was wearing. Many women with pox scars didn’t expose any part of their bodies but this woman’s bodice was cut low enough to display most of her shoulders and the upper part of her chest. That was perhaps because she didn’t appear to suffer from much in the way of scarring except on her face. Gerry could see a few pox scars on her left shoulder but none anywhere else. There were no scars at all on her forearms and hands, which were exposed by the sleeves ending just below her elbows.

  “I take it you had no success,” said Missy. She’d also risen to greet the newcomer and now gestured toward one of the chairs in the room. “Please, Eva, have a seat.”

  Nodding her thanks, the young woman sat down. She moved very gracefully, Gerry noticed. He couldn’t discern any part of her figure below the waist, given the voluminous skirts she was wearing, but he was pretty sure that if she’d been wearing up-time female athletic clothing that the body thereby exposed would be quite shapely.

  He wasn’t surprised, though. In the time that had passed since the Ring of Fire, Gerry had observed that upper class women suffering from pox scars
tended to react in diametrically opposed ways—they either withdrew into quietude, rarely venturing outside their family homes, or they became vigorously active. A fair number of them were accomplished equestrians, and some even hunted. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if this woman did herself.

  “What happened?” asked Ron.

  Eva looked a bit weary. “The same as all the others. They don’t want to take the risk. When I pointed out that we were offering to sell all rights, they all respond with”—her voice got a little sing-songy—“‘we don’t know what will happen with the new copyright laws.’” She shook her head sharply, sending the curls back and forth. “We’d be better off if we still had the old laws,” she said.

  Gerry understood the point she was making. Traditionally, since there were no copyright laws in existence, an author sold whatever he’d written to a printer for a flat sum. Thereafter, it was up to the printer to sell the copies he produced, either directly or through intermediaries. Eventually, if a work was popular enough, pirated editions would appear—except they weren’t really “pirate editions” since there were no laws regulating them—and would soon undercut the printer’s sales. But if he’d carried out his business energetically, he’d have made a nice profit by then.

  Under the influence of the Americans, the United States of Europe had adopted up-time copyright laws, although without the absurd timespans that had come into effect by the end of the twentieth century. The term of a USE copyright was twenty years, renewable for another twenty. But nobody yet knew if the new laws would work as intended.

  “Never mind, Eva,” said Ron. He nodded toward his wife, who had resumed her seat next to him. “Missy and I have been talking it over and we decided that it would make sense to add a publishing industry to the mix we’re going to propose to the landgravine of Hesse-Kassel.” He smiled thinly. “If nothing else, we figure we can get her to enforce the copyright laws in her own province. Between Hesse-Kassel and the SoTF and Magdeburg, we ought to make out okay. So we’ll publish Harry’s book—well, your book and Harry’s, I should say—and we’ll do it the way it ought to be done. We’ll pay you an advance against royalties which will be big enough for Harry’s fifty percent to take care of his niece for at least three years. By then royalties should start coming in.”

  Missy sniffed. “We figure most readers willing to buy a book will live in one of those three provinces. Enough of them, anyway. We’ll have to see how the Crown Loyalist provinces do. Meaning no offense.”

  Eva’s face was split by a wide smile. She had excellent teeth, Gerry noticed. Much better than those of most down-timers, even those of the upper nobility.

  “I am naturally a supporter of my brother-in-law,” Eva said. “But I fear the support weighs more lightly on me than it perhaps should.”

  That made Gerry laugh. She turned to look at him and for the first time he got a good look at her eyes.

  Which were, quite simply, extraordinary. They were a shade of bright green somewhere between shamrock and emerald which made a striking contrast with her very dark hair. Gerry realized that his initial impression had been skewed by the scars. Eva was a beautiful woman whose appearance had been distorted by smallpox, but was not defined by the disease.

  The distortion was a shame, of course. But he didn’t think it was really that great a one. This was a person who’d make her own way in life, he thought, no matter what the circumstances.

  One of the many things Gerry Stone liked about being a pastoral student was that he wasn’t as much of a smart-ass as he’d formerly been. Still not given to fawning-over-established-truth, granted; but he was a lot better at extending goodwill toward people in general than he’d been as a smart-ass.

  So, silently, he extended his goodwill toward Eva Katherine von Anhalt-Dessau.

  Loudly, he extended his goodwill—such as it was—to his older brother. “Just give me a little warning before you go public with your new pharmaceutical company, will you? So I can head for cover before Dad finds out. What are you going to call it, by the way? Medicines By Mordor, Incorporated? Gouge, Fleece and Plunder, LTD? Or you could go with a simple family name, embellished a little. Stoneheart would work nicely.”

  “Ha ha ha,” said Ron.

  PART II

  Kassel, capital of the Province of Hesse-Kassel

  Chapter 6

  February 17, 1636

  On some subjects, the captain is extremely reticent. “Close-mouthed,” in the American idiom. Of nothing is that more true than his reputed—I can even say, notorious—exploits in the amatory field. If the tales are to be believed, Captain Lefferts’ only rivals in this area are figures of ancient myth or the legends of the up-time universe regarding such men as Casanova and Don Juan.

  Yet, press him as you will, the captain maintains his reserve. The issue is one which both amuses and exasperates him.

  There are only two such matters on which Captain Lefferts is willing to speak, and then only about the men involved. Those have to do with his famous duels with the Italian patrician Agnelli and the French comte de Champcourt. In both cases, the captain felt compelled to “set the record straight,” as Americans would say.

  “It is not true that I disemboweled Agnelli to demonstrate my savage nature, which is just a fancy way of saying I was showing off. I did it for the good and simple reason that Agnelli was a noted swordsman and the sword is not a weapon that is very familiar to Americans—although it has become familiar to me since that duel. So, not being stupid, I saw no reason to try to match his skill with a sword. Instead, I met him with my trusty Bowie knife. The realities of sword-against-knife being what they are, I had no choice but to grapple with the man and the rest came as you might expect.

  “As for Champcourt, the duel had nothing to do with his wife. I did not even know the woman at the time. The duel happened because he accused me of cheating at billiards—a game in which it is impossible to cheat. The man was just angry that he lost and looking to pick a fight.”

  The sounds of horsemen entering the courtyard below distracted Eva, but just for a moment. She wasn’t sure whether she ought to include in her account the fact that Captain Lefferts had most certainly come to be acquainted with the comte’s wife after the duel.

  In the course of their journey to Kassel, she’d come to know the captain quite a bit better. One thing that was clear to her by now was that Lefferts considered it exceedingly uncouth for a man to speak at all on the subject of his sexual liaisons, much less boast about them. A gentleman doesn’t talk about such things was the way he put it once, when he was in a formal mood. Only an asshole brags about getting laid was his alternative version, spoken after he’d had perhaps too many drinks in the tavern they’d been staying at.

  As was true of all Americans whom Eva had encountered, to one degree or another, Captain Lefferts fit rather poorly into down-time conceptions of proper human behavior. Very gallant, in some ways; quite coarse, in others. Sophisticated one moment, the next…what the up-timers themselves called “a country rube.”

  Lefferts was more acclimated to the seventeenth century than most of his countrymen. But there were still ways in which his up-time origins surfaced. Sexual attitudes were perhaps the most prominent of those, and so she decided to leave off any further discussion of the comte of Champcourt’s wife. The captain would only be irritated if she did otherwise. And…

  As time passed, she found herself increasingly unwilling to aggravate the captain. One of the ways in which Harry Lefferts’ sexual attitudes were different from those of down-timers—you might almost say, exotic or esoteric—involved Eva herself. She was unsettled by the growing realization that the captain was attracted to her. Even quite attracted, she thought.

  Why? Were he a down-timer, Eva would assume the attraction was due to her probable dowry. And while an up-timer would view such an attraction as being repellent, even repulsive, Eva herself would simply view it as logical. For people of her class, marriage was usually a practical m
atter. Partly political, partly financial—and always with a view in mind to continuing the family lines. There being no other mechanism for that purpose than sexual intercourse, marriage became the legitimate vehicle for the activity. The whole thing was about as “romantic,” to use the term Americans were so fond of, as a farmer breeding his livestock.

  If she thought Captain Lefferts were eyeing her from the standpoint of advancing his interests, Eva would know how to respond. Favorably, yes—it was not as if she were likely to have any other prospects—but also with caution. Not caution about his “honorable intentions”—another peculiar American concept—but about his thrift and financial competence. Would he squander the dowry or use it to good purpose? Would he provide for their children or leave them, and her, at the mercy of the fates?

  But Eva didn’t think Lefferts was thinking in those terms. She didn’t know what he was thinking about her.

  Her own thoughts on the subject, though, were quite clear to her—and quite inappropriate. They mostly involved feverish fantasies which until the past few weeks she hadn’t known she was even capable of having.

  What to do?

  She pushed the issue aside and took up her pen again. It was one of the marvelous up-time “fountain pens” which were such a pleasure to use. Missy Stone had given it to her as a gift. One of the byproducts of the long and sometimes arduous journey to Kassel in mid-winter had been that Eva and the up-time woman had become friends.

  Eva decided she’d written enough about the amatory reputation of Harry Lefferts. There was already sufficient material on the subject to satisfy most readers, and she wanted to return to the subject which the captain was much more willing to discuss—the exploits that had made him famous in the first place. Those, with the notable exception of the catastrophic events in Rome, were something in which Lefferts took genuine pride, even if his accounts were laconic and understated.