Grantville Gazette VI

by Eric Flint

  Grantville Gazette

  Volume Six

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Eric Flint

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  DOI: 10.1125/0016

  First electronic printing, March 2006

  Production by WebWrights, Newport, TN

  EDITOR'S PREFACE

  Volume 6 of the Gazette is coming out three months later than we'd projected. There are three reasons for that, which are closely connected. The first reason is that our copy editor fell behind, for various reasons including some health problems. The second reason is that she's also one of the copy editors for Baen Books, with many other assignment. And the final reason is that the launch of the new online magazine, Jim Baen's UNIVERSE, further complicated the situation because the Gazette's copy editor is now also one of JBU's copy editors.

  To put it another way, the Gazette was the runt of the litter.

  On the bright side, the long delay due to production problems also means that the editorial staff of the magazine is way ahead of the game. We've pretty much got the next volume already put together, and most of the one that comes thereafter. From a purely editorial standpoint, therefore, we could publish Volume 7 very quickly, and Volume 8 soon thereafter.

  However...

  We'd likely run into the same bottleneck and logjam with the process of copy-editing and proof-reading. The tie-up with Volume 6 was not the first time that's happened, and it's very likely to happen again. Being the runt of the litter is never any fun, and, alas, the runt is what the magazine shall remain.

  Facts are stubborn things, and it's just a fact that while the paper editions of the Gazette generate a significant income for Baen Books, this electronic magazine does not. Yes, yes, granted—it's the root source. But publishers are no different from you or me or anyone else, when they are faced with that nastiest of all nasty eight-letter words:

  Cash flow.

  Okay, it's two words. But, as everyone knows, they roll right into each other, like a mudslide approaching a town of people who have their budgets neatly in order. Abstractly.

  In a pinch—and there's always a pinch in publishing—the work of copy-editing the electronic edition of the Gazette keeps getting pushed aside in favor of other, more financial pressing projects. So it has been, and so it will continue to be.

  There's only one way to solve this problem, and that is to boldly go where...

  Well, actually, where Baen Books has been going for years now. Henceforth—beginning with Volume 7, not this one—we are going to start publishing the electronic edition of the Gazette the same way Baen publishes e-books through Webscriptions. Using the same basic approach, at least.

  We'll simply put up the volume for sale as soon as the editorial staff has it ready—except we'll put it up all at once, not serialized across three months the way Webscriptions does. But, like Webscriptions, we will produce the final copy-edited version after the volume goes up for sale.

  How soon thereafter? I don't know. Unlike Webscriptions, we can't guarantee that we'll have it ready within three months. But it shouldn't generally be much longer than that—and, as with Webscriptions, anyone who has paid for the magazine will automatically get the later, copy-edited version free of charge.

  Mind you, the text will have been proof-read, at least once, before we put it up for sale. We're not going to be putting up raw text. But "proofing it once" is not the same thing as the normal, time-consuming, and very laborious process of copy-editing, querying authors, and two rounds of proof-reading that is standard practice in commercial publishing for paper books.

  But that's really the key: paper books. Publishers have to put the time and money into copy-editing and extensive proof-reading before they produce a paper edition, for the good and simple and obvious reason that once tens of thousands of printed and bound volumes have appeared on the shelves of bookstores, it is effectively impossible to call them back.

  That is not true, however, with an electronic edition. Molecules are not electrons—and electrons respond just fine to a recall notice. With electronic publishing, the difference between "in production" and "in print" is a continuum, it's not the Chinese Wall that it is in paper publishing. It is perfectly possible to keep making corrections in a text after it's been made available for public sale. With the proviso, of course, that you have to make sure your customers are informed of that.

  You are hereby informed—and we will repeat the information regularly.

  If any reader spots a typo or what they think is an error, and has the desire to do so, you can inform us in any one of three ways:

  1) Send an email to Paula Goodlett, at: paula@1632.org

  2) Post a notice to that effect in the 1632 Tech Manual conference in Baen's Bar.

  3) Post a notice to that effect in the 1632 section of the discussion area in my own web site: http://www.ericflint.net/forum/

  On a periodic basis, we will incorporate the corrections. (Assuming the reader is right, anyway. Not all "errors" are actually errors.) And, of course, we will replace the existing edition with the copy-edited edition when that finally becomes available.

  Granted, it's not an ideal solution. But it seems a far better one to us than continuing to have the magazine delayed for long stretches of time by purely production problems.

  * * *

  One final note. In terms of the editorial work, this volume 6 is a transitional volume. Paula Goodlett and I co-edited it, essentially. Beginning with Volume 7, however, Paula has become for all practical purposes the editor of the magazine, not me. I say "has become" rather than "will become" because the transition has already happened. When I said toward the beginning of this preface that "we've pretty much got the next volume already put together," I could just as easily—and considerably more accurately—have said that Paula has pretty much got the next volume put together.

  Henceforth, starting with Volume 7, she will select the stories, she will edit them, she will make all final decisions regarding the magazine except whatever few decisions might need my overall input. My own position with the magazine will no longer be "editor" in any real sense of the term. I will simply be what amounts to the publisher. Yes, I retain final control over the magazine and, yes, I'm the one who writes the checks. But, like any sensible publisher, I will leave the regular operation of the magazine in the editor's hands. If I didn't have confidence in Paula, I wouldn't have asked her to do the work in the first place.

  Mind you, that reality might not be reflected in the official titles in the masthead. I don't want to use the term "publisher" officially, because it's a complicated situation, in that the magazine is distributed through Baen Books even though it's independently financed. That doesn't matter much with regard to the electronic edition, but it would become an obvious problem if any electronic edition of the Gazette wound up—as the first three now have—being produced in a paper edition by Baen Books.

  Jim is the publisher of those editions, not me, because what ultimately defines a "publisher" is that he or she is the one who pays the bills to get a volume produced. I pay the bills for the electronic edition—one of which is the commissions I pay Webscriptions and Baen Books to use their existing electronic outlet—but Jim pays the bills for the paper editions.

  It would be more accurate to label my position with the magazine from now on as something like "ch
airman of the editorial board" or "editorial director" or... whatever. In practice, I suspect we'll just keep using the term "editor" for me and "assistant editor" for Paula.

  Why?

  Well, because it's time to introduce you to the nastiest nine-letter word in the English language:

  Marketing.

  If you didn't know already, producing Immortal Prose, from the commercial standpoint, is not much different from producing sausages or 1/4-20 nuts and bolts. It's just a fact that the names that get plastered on a cover make a difference in terms of how many copies distributors and major retailers order to begin with.

  No, that's not a big problem with an electronic edition. But we always have to keep an eye out for a possible later paper edition.

  That said, "marketing" is what it is. A nine-letter word that you take seriously enough, in its own terms—but nothing more than that. The best depiction of marketing in the English language, that I know of, are the following words of wisdom from "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll, the author of the Alice in Wonderland stories:

  Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe

  Those same words—albeit not as brilliantly—could have been penned by any marketing department in the world since the advent of generalized commodity production, lo these many centuries ago.

  Eric Flint

  March, 2006

  STORIES

  A Taste of Home

  by Chris Racciato

  It was raining. Daphne Pridmore was getting thoroughly sick of the rain. It meant that she had to stay inside for the most part. Going out to check on the hives was pointless. If they could use the truck, it might be worthwhile, but they'd decided to save the wear and tear on their only truck for emergencies. As much as she hated to admit it, cabin fever wasn't a real emergency. If she really wanted to go out, it would mean getting the horses hitched to the wagon. And driving the team in the rain. And dealing with very agitated bees, who would be less than amused at the stupid human who wanted to bother them when they were all snug in their hives. Even the bees knew when to stay inside.

  Noises occasionally filtered up from the basement. Ikey, her husband, was no doubt puttering down there with one of his many projects. Everybody else was gone for the day. The kids were at school, both hers and those of the families living with them. If the rain didn't let up between now and the time they got out of school, the kids would end up going to her brother-in-law's house for the night. She missed having Zeke and Evie living with them, but it was nice to have a place closer to town for the kids to stop in at. Several of their down-time boarders were out on a route collecting honey in the caravan and wouldn't be back for a few more days. The caravans had been built with exactly this kind of situation in mind. The large wagons held all the comforts of home and enough supplies for a couple of weeks. The seventeenth-century version of an RV. She listened to the rumbling thunder and hoped they were all okay.

  She wandered around the house looking for something to do. Eventually she ended up in one of the smaller upstairs bedrooms. At one time it had been Ikey's grandmother's sewing room. Now it was the repository for all of the oddball projects that they had worked on over the years. There were scraps of leather in various states of being tooled or made into different items. Boxes of fabric were bulging out of the closet, often spilling their multihued contents over the ones below. A lone spinning wheel sat abandoned in the corner, covered with dust and strewn with pairs of hand-dipped candles. In short, it looked like a craft store had been caught in a tornado and then had all of its contents dumped in the tiny room. Daphne spotted one of their project books peeking out from under a macramé plant hanger. She picked it up and thumbed through it. It listed all of the things on their "To Do" list, month by month. This one was from a year before the Ring of Fire. She smiled as she read it to herself. So much had changed.

  Clean fireplace

  Clean out car

  Finish spring quilt

  Go shopping for groceries

  Drop Mariah with Grandma Mamie and have movie night . . .

  The more she read, the more homesick she became. Here was her life, written down on paper. The week by week retelling of what had been an ordinary life in a small town. She thumbed a few pages ahead. It was the same. Some of the items were different, but there was so much that they couldn't do now. Tears welled up in her eyes as she went through page after page of what they had considered important enough to write down at the time. So much of it was meaningless to her daily life now. How could she worry about getting oil for her car when there was no gas to run it? Or go to a Renaissance Faire, when they were living in a time that was scant decades from when Shakespeare wrote his plays? The tears started rolling down her cheeks as she went through May, June, July . . .

  A small note in the end of July caught her attention. It was scrawled in Ikey's handwriting "Check on peppers, add salt if needed." It took her a moment to figure out what he was writing about. Then it hit her. That was the summer they had grown so many peppers that they didn't know what to do with them all. They had found an article talking about Tabasco sauce, and decided that it would be fun to try. They had filled up one of Ikey's wooden five gallon barrels with the pepper and salt mixture. Then they had put it away to ferment. It was right before Ikey's dad had been in a car accident. Daphne quickly flipped through the remaining pages. There was no mention of them bottling the sauce. Nor could she remember ever finishing them. That meant they might still be around someplace, assuming that Ikey hadn't thrown them out.

  It had been over a year since the last of their Tabasco had run out. Many of their other up-time spices were gone as well. There were many other things that they could get down-time. Herbs were the easiest, either from their garden, the local markets, or trading with another up-timer who was growing something they didn't already have. Even bay leaves and several kinds of ginger could be found if you knew where to look or who to ask. Salt was easy to find as well. And there were many new things that she would have never considered as spices, like juniper berries and rue. But when it came to adding heat and flavor to dishes, they were severely limited. Curry powder was unheard of. Black pepper could be found, at exorbitant prices. True, they had plenty of chili peppers, but every time she had used them when it was her turn to cook, the down-timers complained about the food being too hot. She put them on her own food, but for the most part they added more heat than flavor. The mere thought of Tabasco sauce was enough to make her mouth water. She tossed the book back on the corner of the table and headed for the basement. If the peppers were still around, Ikey would know where they were. He had barrels of stuff stashed all over the place from brewing and was notorious for not putting labels on anything, so the only way to track them down was to go find him. She wiped away the tears and hurried off. She was a woman on a mission. Her day was looking up.

  * * *

  Locating Ikey wasn't an overly difficult task. One simply had to go down the stairs and follow the sound of banging. That usually meant he was at his workbench tinkering with one of his gun projects from the store. This time was no different. He had his back to the door, and was prying on something with a large wrench. Daphne paused for a moment to consider the best way to approach him.

  "Honey, dearest, snookums?" she asked sweetly.

  "Uh-oh." He turned cautiously. "What am I going to be doing for you this time?"

  "Oh, nothing major, dear. I just need you to help me find something."

  "Uh huh," he said noncommittally. Daphne knew he was trying to figure out the best way to escape from the basement. Fortunately, she was between him and the stairs. And there was no way for him to make a dash for the storm doors without being incredibly obvious. There was no helping it, he was well and truly trapped. "Ummm . . . What do you need me to find?"

  "Do you remember the barrel of peppers we were going to make hot sauce out
of a few years ago?" When he nodded, she continued. "Do you have any idea where that might be?"

  The relief on his face was almost comical. "No problem. It's up the hill at the old house. I think I put it in the basement next to some mead and cysers. Why?"

  "We are completely out of Tabasco sauce. I figure I have time today, and it's probably ready by now. I wanted to finish it up. Could you go up and get it for me?"

  "But it's still raining."

  "I know, but the golf cart has a roof. And it won't take you that long, will it?" she asked innocently.

  "Aww crap. I guess I'm running up to the old house, huh?"

  "You don't have to, dear . . . I could do it by myself." She smiled. "If you don't feel up to it.

  "He rolled his eyes "Yeah, like I'm going to fall for that one."

  * * *

  "How do I get myself into these situations?" Ikey said to himself as he drove up the hill through the pelting rain. True, the cart had a fabric roof. But when the rain was coming in almost horizontally, that didn't help much. The ancient golf cart worked its way up the muddy track that led to the small modular home at the top of the hill. It had been Ikey and Daphne's house, a gift from his family shortly after their wedding. It had a barn and a small corral for their livestock, now moved down the hill to his grandparents' farm. Weeds grew in the front yard, and the whole place had an abandoned air to it. One day soon they would have to come up here and clean all of their stuff out. There was no point in keeping it vacant. With as tight as housing was in Grantville, there were bound to be people willing to live there despite its relatively remote location. But that would be a project for a later day. Preferably one that was a bit drier. In the meantime, he had a job to do. He pushed the button on the garage door opener and pulled in out of the rain.