She felt a tap on her shoulder. A man was shouting at her, so she pulled out the little earplugs.
“I thought you up-timers used to fly all around the world. This should be commonplace to you.”
Mary turned and looked at man with a pleasant, round face who was speaking to her in English with an Italian accent. She shook her head. And shouted. “Not this up-timer, Sir. No way. This is the first time I have ever been on an airplane, if you can believe it.”
He was standing, stooped over next to her in the aisle and peering over her shoulder at the tiny window. “I don’t think you have taken your nose away from the window the entire time we have been in the air!” He smiled again. He seemed to do it a lot. “I understand you are our special passenger, today. With a special landing all for you.”
She felt her cheeks flush, and nodded. “Yes sir, I guess it’s pretty special. That’s what they told me anyway. I thought I was going to fly into Venice, then head upriver, or overland or something. Had no idea ’til a couple of days ago we were going to make the stop.”
“Please stop calling me ‘Sir’, I'm Aldo. I travel this route many times a year for my employers. You sound like someone who just got out of the Army. All of that ‘No Sir’ this and ‘Yes Sir’ that.” He extended his hand, and she shook it. He was a student of up-timers, as most down-timers would have bowed formally.
He was watching her face intently. She smiled back. “The whole graduating class was put into the Army, right after the ring happened, sir. At least all of the boys were. And I didn’t think it was fair that only the boys had to go. So a few of us girls signed up too. Frank Jackson didn’t like it at the time, but there wasn’t much he could do about it once we decided. Most of us ended up with desk jobs though. But I’m done with that, and on to new adventures.” She allowed her smile to get bigger, and rolled her eyes a little. He continued to smile and watch her reactions with hawk-like care.
Her creep radar started to go off.
“And your name, Fraulein…?”
“Mary.”
“I see,” said Aldo, as he crowded her at bit, she assumed to hear better. It was awkward in the cabin. “I have heard that many up-timers are moving out of their little town of the future, but they will only go as fast as the spread of indoor plumbing.” He chuckled at his own joke. “At least that’s what they say.”
“I guess so. If that’s what they say. Sir. Sorry-- Aldo. What is it you said you did for a living?”
“A merchant, I buy, sell, a little of this and a little of that, try to make a profit wherever one can. You know.” He smiled. Again.
“Yes sir, I do.” She matched his smile, as if it were some kind of contest. “Now, if you don’t mind, I really want to look at the Alps. They are spectacular.” With that and a nod, she turned and pressed her nose to the window again, popping the earplugs back in.
Watching the mountainous terrain roll by slowly beneath her, her mind replayed the brief conversation. The guy, Aldo, who she mentally christened ‘Mr. Smiley’, was probing her for information. He appeared friendly enough. Once word got out that they were making a special stop, and she was the passenger to be delivered, it didn’t take long for the Fugger name to be associated with the deal. Which would make anyone wonder, she supposed.
Since she had some time to think, she thought more about the Fugger. The more she learned about her new job, the more she realized the family amounted to a massive sophisticated corporation. They even had newsletters that went between the different branches of the family that reported market conditions and political intrigues. The guys from the Nasi clan who did her training had secured outdated copies. They were fascinating. The Fugger were a diversified banking, mining, smelting, manufacturing, weaving, dyeing, and research corporation that were also a family. Plus, they were not in complete agreement about up-timers. Some of the more conservative parts of the family in Augsburg and Munich had been extremely reluctant to associate with Grantville. While others, the intelligence guys told her, actively embraced it. One hand wasn’t always in agreement with the other. But Mary was from West Virginia hill country where the Hatfields and McCoys had a slight disagreement a just few years ago, and she was from a boisterous Italian family. The fact that there were family arguments scarcely surprised her. It would have been more surprising if they were in complete agreement. That would be really strange.
She allowed the vistas passing majestically below to lull her into a kind of visual overload trance. Landscape just kind of floated by. West Virginia Mountains were a dark green, shadowed, undulating, a series of draws, hollows, streams, and low round peaks. Trees everywhere. The Alps were green. In spring, as they were now, they were very green. But the color was different from West Virginia, Mary decided. The green was, well, greener somehow. More like grass. More light. More meadows rather than hollows, more lakes and open streams, rather than narrow draws and bottoms. And the scale. The scale was immense. West Virginia was hill country; this was mountain country. As the giant airplane droned on, Mary had a hard time getting her head around the sheer size of the whole thing. At the beginning of the journey, the peaks looked miles away, but soon they were cruising among them, flying the passes between peaks, looking up at — or across to — the mountains from her window. Back up-time, they would have been four or five miles above the peaks, looking down on them as if they were a relief map. But in this plane, at these speeds, about the same as a car on the highway, they were awesome. Simply awesome. Each passing mile provided a new tableau below her. She could see small towns and villages as they flew, and people would come out to look and wave. It must have been loud on the ground too, people hearing the drone of the engines from miles away. Back up-time these would have been described as quaint alpine villages. Hiking destinations and tourist traps. Now, in the down-time here and now, there were simply villages. Homes. Places where people lived. Worked. Died, sometimes harshly, unfairly, or quickly.
Mary had re-calibrated reasonably well to down-time life. At first, it was just an inconvenience, living the life of an insulated high school student. Things changed, sure. There was the obvious stuff, like cable TV and her favorite shampoo. But things were really not that much different. She still went to school. Still hung out with her friends. Still talked about boys, about who was dating who, about the AP Calculus test. But the Croat raid on the high school, where she found herself cowering behind a locked door in the second floor math classrooms, waiting to die, and then Wurzburg with the Army, where she was exposed to the holy terror of a witch hunt aftermath, she made a serious mental adaptation.
She thought back to Wurzburg for a moment, and another one of the mundane horrors she experienced. When she arrived in town, she and the other up-timers were housed in a vacant building. The building was vacant because the people who had owned it before, were, as a family, burned as witches. The original owner was a burgher in the town, very well to do. Not the Hoenegg family. He and his family were burned at the stake in the town square for witchcraft. The locals believed, with all of their hearts, that the devil was walking among them. They had absolute proof, sworn testimony, that Satan had walked the earth and presided, in person, over an outdoor service, a mockery of the Eucharist, in which at least a thousand people had taken part. Turnip rinds were used to mock the holy wafers. There was a book, signed by the thousands who were there, that they were still searching for. The room she shared had holes in the wall, where they had torn out the plaster to search for the satanic book of names. She had picked at the plaster with her fingers, imagining the horror of the family as they bashed holes into the walls, while the children watched, terrified.
The dark reality of religion, and life in general, in Wurzburg had made her think. She had never been as big on religion as her mother, but she hadn’t questioned things, or thought about things very much. Catechism was another class, taken after school, just something to do, something you did as a kid growing up Catholic, hanging out with your friends. The brutal and sad rea
lity of Wurzburg was enough to make her question everything. And it forced her to understand, on a level that was basic and bloody, that religion in the down-time here-and-now was a game played for keeps. Not something one did for a while only on Sundays, followed by coffee in the fellowship hall behind the church. But something that was all week, all day, all night, tangible as concrete, and inflexible as granite. This had an impact on her that she was still processing. Religion was a contact sport. A war, which they were in the middle of. She wasn’t sure if it was going to drive her towards religion, or further away. If she was being honest with herself, she was pulled in both directions. Back up-time, it would have been easy. She would have run away from organized religion, become an agnostic or simply fallen away from the church like so many of her older up-time friends had done. But now, well, it was different. You almost had to pick a side. Not playing wasn’t an option. She wasn’t certain which side she would choose.
She heard a substantial change in the drone of the engines that pulled her out of her trance. Everyone’s first reaction was to look around the cabin nervously. Aldo caught her eye, and since he was an ‘old hand’, he gave her a reassuring nod, and of course a smile. After a moment, one of the pilots peered out of the flight cabin, and announced at the top of his lungs and using hand gestures, they would be landing in less than thirty minutes.
The plane descended, and flew down the length of a long dog-leg shaped alpine lake, across a small meadow, and then out over a large valley. Mary knew from the seat-back guide they had just flown the downwind leg of a landing pattern which allowed the crew to check the lake for logs and debris. The sides of the valley were covered with dense pine trees, that particular shade of green. As the plane banked to the right, she was able to see the valley stretching far to the east, with a sparkling blue-white ribbon of water that she knew must be the Inn River.
The plane was clearly making a turn, so she was able to get a good look at the valley. At the bottom of the valley, almost in line with the lake, was a village. That’s Schwaz, or maybe the other town, Jenbach, she thought. Her heart began to race. She knew the castle should be on this side of the valley, overlooking the village, and below the lake. She stretched her neck to see, but all that she could see were the sides of the valley and pine trees. And more trees. Then, she spotted a road coming out of the valley as the plane finished the turn. The road climbed the steep valley sides, switching back and forth multiple times. Then the castle came into view. She gasped.
Breathtaking. That was her first thought. The site of her new home truly took her breath away. From the air it looked toy-like. It wasn’t a harsh massive fortress, like the castles she had seen in Thuringia. Brutal and ugly instruments of war. But this wasn’t the Magic Kingdom castle either. It was hard to tell from the sky, but it looked big. Really big. There were round turrets that looked about four or five stories tall and the castle was roughly rectangular in shape, with the long sides parallel to the sides of the valley, and the short sides running up the slope. Like most down-time architecture, it didn’t make a perfect square, it was uneven, each side longer or shorter, taller on one side than another, as if it grew out of the valley walls. There was a slender turret at each corner, a fifth one in the center of the side that faced the valley, and others scattered around that looked as if they were absorbed as the castle grew over the years. These weren’t the thick squat round turrets like she had seen in Germany, but more delicate, less military looking. It helped that it was painted a bright white color, which stood out dramatically against the green of the slopes.
As the plane passed almost over the top of the castle, she could look down into the courtyard. There wasn’t a keep to the castle. It was really one large building, with a big courtyard in the middle. She could glimpse a gallery or two wrapping around the interior, acting as an exterior hallway on the upper floors. A big, white, beautiful building built on the side of the mountain. As she peered down into the courtyard, she could make out a pink color, as the interior walls were covered with designs, and the courtyard had a garden in the middle, still not in bloom.
The engines changed their pitch again, the plane turned, and the castle slid from her view. The ground came abruptly closer as they descended to the alpine lake above the valley. The lake, Mary knew, was called the Achensee, and in places was supposed to be over four hundred feet deep. The plane, oddly enough, didn’t use floats or landing gear, like she was used to up-time. Instead, there was what amounted to a big rubber gasket on the bottom of the plane that was pressurized by a separate motor. One of the pilots came out of the cabin and went to an area behind the cabin in the floor. He opened a hatch and started pulling on what looked to be a big lawn mower engine. He tugged the pull handle a couple of times, and the cabin was filled with the scream of an un-muffled two stroke engine. The pilot waved to the passengers and closed the hatch. The noise diminished only slightly. She noticed the pilot looked to have a wooden leg from the way he limped. The big plane eased its way down to the surface of the lake. The drone of the engines competed with the rush and gurgling of the water and the raspy buzz of the separate motor.
With an efficiency that surprised her, she was hustled off the plane as soon as it came to a pause at the southern shore of the lake. They kept the engines running. One of the pilots handed her her small suitcase as she pulled her backpack over her shoulder. “We didn’t see anyone when we came around on final approach. But where you are going is the big white castle about halfway down the valley. We saw a path that way.” He pointed towards the valley. “We gotta go, this is burning extra fuel and time. Good luck!” The pilot hopped back on the plane and closed the flimsy plywood hatch. A second later the engines revved up and the plane pivoted, and with no hesitation, ran from the land to the water, and in the next moment was airborne. She watched it climb ever so slowly as it turned, and headed back over her out into the valley, next stop Venice. It grew very quiet, especially after the thunderous noise from the trip. She pulled her earplugs out and put them in her pocket. It seemed wrong to just toss them on the ground, it was so beautiful.
“Mary,” she said, “You are most certainly not in Kansas anymore.”
She was standing on the edge of the lake and a large grassy meadow, which looked as if it was part of the lake at different times of the year, depending on the water level. To her back was the long lake, and in front of her the vista of the Inn valley. To either side sat peaks, higher yet. There was still snow at the tops, and she could feel the thin, clean air in her chest. She stood for a few minutes, just looking. Breathing in the air, which had quickly cleared from the exhaust fumes and oily smoke of the plane. Pristine, was the word that came into her head. The air was pristine. She could see for miles.
And she could see for miles. Way down the lake, way out into the valley, way up into the peaks, and there was nothing moving at all. There was nobody else for miles. No houses. No roads. No smoke from a chimney. There was quite a lot of wind, and it was much cooler here. She saw a foot path leading around the lake, and another that joined it leading off towards the valley below. She dug into her backpack, and put on her warm jacket, a longer military style one her father had given her. She checked the laces on her boots, put on a baseball cap from UVA to keep the sun out of her eyes, wished she hadn’t worn her best blue jeans, and began to make her way down the mountain.
After about a mile, she came to a small clump of outbuildings and an alpine style cabin, just like a postcard, where the meadow ended at the forest. A couple of dogs came out to greet her, barking but wagging tails. From out of the quaint cabin came a woman, three kids, an elderly woman, and a very young teen boy. She stopped about a fifty yards away and waved. She spoke loudly in German. “Hello the cabin!” She’d been told she had picked up a Franconian accent from her short time in Wurzburg, but she couldn’t tell. She moved closer, smiling and trying to look as non-threatening as possible. “Hello! I am looking for Schloss Tratzberg. Is it this way?” She pointed down the hill,
towards the tree line, where a path was visible entering the woods.
Mary could see the heads of the kids swivel, all looking to the ‘Mom’, and then the mother speaking to the older teen. He came towards her, and began speaking. He looked as if he was trying to be braver then he was feeling. Mary was trying to figure out what was so scary about her. As he spoke, Mary wasn’t sure what he was saying. It sort of sounded like the German she was used to in Wurzburg, which was a bit different than what was spoken in and around Grantville, but this accent was almost unintelligible to her. He finished speaking.
Mary blinked a couple of times. “I’m not sure what you said. Is the castle this way? Schloss Tratzberg?” She pointed and spoke clearly and slowly, and the teenager came closer. She took a few more steps towards him, and he hesitated. It’d been a while since Mary went through what she called a “first contact.” The first time a down-timer met an up-timer, it could be unpredictably tense. And with the witchcraft fears, it was one of the reasons the up-timers almost always traveled in groups in Wurzburg. She smiled and raised both hands so the boy could see them. “Hello. My name is Mary. Mary Russo. I am looking for Schloss Tratzberg?”
The boy blurted out a phrase in heavily accented German, too fast for Mary to catch. The Tyrolese dialect was very different from the lowland German she was used to hearing. It was clear she was going to have to retune her hearing. Her German wasn’t too bad, full immersion will do that. True, she didn’t think in German, but she figured after a few weeks at her new job she would. She spoke slowly. “Mary.” She pointed to herself. “Schloss Tratzberg?” She pointed at the path.
Up-Time Pride and Down-Time Prejudice Page 4