Grantville Gazette-Volume XIII

by Eric Flint

  Grantville Gazette, Volume 13,

  September 2007

  Grantville Gazette Staff

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

  Copyright © 2007 by Grantville Gazette

  A 1632, Inc. Publication

  Grantville Gazette

  P. O. Box 7488

  Moore, OK 73153-1488

  "The Anaconda Project, Episode 2" Copyright © 2007 by Eric Flint

  "Protected Species" Copyright © 2007 by Garrett Vance

  "A Tinker's Progress" Copyright © 2007 by Terry Howard

  "Nothing's Ever Simple" Copyright © 2007 by Virginia DeMarce

  "The Ear of the Beholder" Copyright © 2007 by Terry Martin

  "Out of a Job?" Copyright © 2007 by Iver P. Cooper

  "The Truth According to Buddha" by Terry Howard

  "Sailing Upwind" Copyright © 2007 by Kevin and Karen Evans

  "Joseph Hanauer, Part Two: These Things Have No Fixed Measure" Copyright © 2007 by Douglas Jones

  "Butterflies in the Kremlin, Part Five: The Dog and Pony Show" Copyright © 2007 by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

  "The Doodlebugger" Copyright © 2007 by Iver P. Cooper

  "Supply and Demand" Copyright © 2007 by Rick Boatright

  "Plugging Along" Copyright © 2007 by Kerryn Offord

  "The Spark of Inspiration" Copyright © 2007 by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

  "Sunday Driver" Copyright © 2007 by Laura Runkle

  "Turn, Turn, Turn" Copyright © 2007 by Virginia DeMarce

  "The Music of the Spheres, er . . . Ring" Copyright © 2007 by David Carrico

  "The Wooden Wonders of Grantville" Copyright © 2007 by Iver P. Cooper

  "Guilds 101" Copyright © 2007 by Karen Bergstralh

  What is this?

  About the Grantville Gazette

  Written by Grantville Gazette Staff

  The Grantville Gazette originated as a by-product of the ongoing and very active discussions which take place concerning the 1632 universe Eric Flint created in the novels 1632, 1633 and 1634: The Galileo Affair (the latter two books co-authored by David Weber and Andrew Dennis, respectively). This discussion is centered in three of the conferences in Baen's Bar, the discussion area of Baen Books' web site. The conferences are entitled "1632 Slush," "1632 Slush Comments" and "1632 Tech Manual." They have been in operation for almost seven years now, during which time nearly two hundred thousand posts have been made by hundreds of participants.

  Soon enough, the discussion began generating so-called "fanfic," stories written in the setting by fans of the series. A number of those were good enough to be published professionally. And, indeed, a number of them were—as part of the anthology Ring of Fire , which was published by Baen Books in January, 2004. ( Ring of Fire also includes stories written by established authors such as Eric Flint himself, as well as David Weber, Mercedes Lackey, Dave Freer, K.D. Wentworth and S.L. Viehl.)

  The decision to publish the Ring of Fire anthology triggered the writing of still more fanfic, even after submissions to the anthology were closed. Ring of Fire has been selling quite well since it came out, and a second anthology similar to it is scheduled to be published late in 2007. It will also contain stories written by new writers, as well as professionals. But, in the meantime . . . the fanfic kept getting written, and people kept nudging Eric—well, pestering Eric—to give them feedback on their stories.

  Hence . . . the Grantville Gazette. Once he realized how many stories were being written—a number of them of publishable quality—he raised with Jim Baen the idea of producing an online magazine which would pay for fiction and nonfiction articles set in the 1632 universe and would be sold through Baen Books' Webscriptions service. Jim was willing to try it, to see what happened.

  As it turned out, the first issue of the electronic magazine sold well enough to make continuing the magazine a financially self-sustaining operation. Since then, nine more volumes have been electronically published through the Baen Webscriptions site. As well, Grantville Gazette, Volume One was published in paperback in November of 2004. That has since been followed by hardcover editions of Grantville Gazette, Volumes Two and Three.

  Then, two big steps:

  First: The magazine had been paying semi-pro rates for the electronic edition, increasing to pro rates upon transition to paper, but one of Eric's goals had long been to increase payments to the authors. Grantville Gazette, Volume Eleven is the first volume to pay the authors professional rates.

  Second: This on-line version you're reading. The site here at http://www.grantvillegazette.com is the electronic version of an ARC, an advance readers copy where you can read the issues as we assemble them. There are stories posted here which won't be coming out in the magazine for more than a year.

  How will it work out? Will we be able to continue at this rate? Well, we don't know. That's up to the readers. But we'll be here, continuing the saga, the soap opera, the drama and the comedy just as long as people are willing to read them.

  —The Grantville Gazette Staff

  The Anaconda Project, Episode Two

  Written by Eric Flint

  Chapter 2

  "You look tired, Melissa," said Judith Roth sympathetically. She gestured to a luxurious divan in the great salon of the Roth mansion. "Please, have a seat."

  Melissa Mailey went over to the divan, hobbling a little from the effects of the ten-day journey from Grantville, and plopped herself down. Her companion James Nichols remained standing, after giving the couch no more than a quick glance. Instead, his hands on his hips, he swiveled slowly and considered the entire room.

  Then, whistled admiringly. "Well, you've certainly come up in the world, folks."

  Judith smiled. Her husband Morris looked somewhat embarrassed. "Hey, look," he said, "it wasn't really my idea."

  "That's it," scoffed his wife. "Blame the woman."

  The defensive expression on Morris' face deepened. "I didn't mean it that way. It's just . . ."

  The gesture that accompanied the last two words was about as feeble as the words themselves.

  "The situation," he concluded lamely.

  Nichols grinned at him. "Jeez, Morris, relax. I understand the realities. What with you being not only one of the King of Bohemia's closest advisers but also what amounts to the informal secular prince of Prague's Jewry. Half the Jews in eastern Europe, actually, from what Balthazar Abrabanel told us."

  Looking a bit less exhausted, Melissa finally took the time to appraise the room herself. And some more time, appraising Morris' very fancy-looking seventeenth-century apparel.

  Then, she whistled herself.

  "Et tu, Brutus?" Morris grumbled.

  "Quit complaining," Melissa said. "That is why you asked us to come here, isn't it? With 'Urgent!' and 'Desp'rate Need!' oozing from every line of your letter."

  "Asked you," qualified Nichols. "Me, he just wanted to come here to give some advice to his fledgling medical faculty at his fancy new university. I'm just a country doctor."

  "From Chicago," Melissa jeered. "South side, to boot—which has about as much open land as Manhattan."

  James grinned again. "Oh, you'd be surprised how much open land there is in Chicago's south side. Vacant lots, I'll grant you. Nary a crop to be seen anywhere except the stuff handed out by drug dealers, none of which was actually grown there. My point remains. I'm here in Prague as a modest medical adviser. I'm not the one who just landed a prestigious position at Jena University as their new—and only—'professor of political science.' I'm not the one Morris asked to come here to explain to him ho
w to haul eastern Europe kicking and screaming into the modern world, which is one hell of neat trick seeing as how that half of the continent didn't manage to do it in our old timeline."

  "They got there eventually," Judith pointed out mildly.

  Melissa's expression got very severe. "Yup, sure did. In most places, because Stalin forced them to, after World War II."

  James looked surprised. "Since when did you become a Stalin fan?"

  "Not hardly," said Melissa. "He was a monster. But I'm not blind to historical realities."

  She leaned forward a little. "Poland's the center of the problem—and the opportunities—here just as it was in the world we came from. A brilliant nation, in lots of ways, but one that was completely crippled by three factors."

  Now she began counting off on fingers that looked far too elegant for a former sixties radical. "First, they were dominated by the szlachta, a huge class of noblemen that, for my money, ranks as the sorriest and most worthless aristocracy in the historical record. They paralyzed Poland politically for centuries with their petty self-interest, greed and pretensions. In the real world, their so-called 'Golden Freedom'—which some people even have the nerve to claim was a form of democracy which it only was in the same sense that South African apartheid was 'democratic' provided you belonged to the master race—"

  James and Morris were frowning, trying to follow the convoluted presentation, but Melissa continued blithely onward. "—simply made them patsies for every nation surrounding them. All a Russian tsar or Prussian king or Austrian emperor had to do was keep a few szlachta on the payroll to guarantee that their absolute right of individual veto meant that Poland couldn't do anything effective politically. Secondly, and largely as a result, Poland was locked into a form of serfdom that was every bit as bad as anything that ever existed in western Europe in medieval times. In the sixteenth century—less than a hundred years ago, in the here and now—Poland was one of the centers of the Renaissance. Two centuries later, it was one of the few countries in Europe that managed to wind up poorer and with fewer and smaller cities that it had when it entered the so-called 'early modern era.' And with its industries in decline, to boot. That's because the nobility, especially the great magnates, locked the whole nation's fortunes to the Vistula grain trade. They believed in 'King Grain' just as vehemently as the slaveowners in the American south believed in 'King Cotton'—or those stupid rich bastards in Argentina believed in 'King Beef.'"

  Now, Judith was looking a little cross-eyed. "How does Argentina figure into this?"

  Melissa flashed her a smile. "History's a comparative science, insofar as it's a 'science' at all. It's like a lot of biological study, or even some aspects of astronomy. You can hardly do 'controlled experiments' on history, anymore than you can on the evolution of dinosaurs and trilobites—or stars on the main sequence. Right? So, what you do instead is study the material by comparing it with similar phenomena."

  She shrugged. "Of course, that's a lot easier to do with astronomy and even biology than it is with history. Stars are simple things, compared to human societies, and there are trillions of them to compare to each other and against a vastly longer time frame. Still, the principle's the same."

  Again, she flashed that quick smile. "So, that's what Poland and the antebellum South and Argentina have in common. In all three cases, societies that started out with lots and lots of potential got crippled by the greed of their elite, and their fixation on a single crop. Most people don't realize it—Americans, anyway—because they think of Argentina as a 'third world' country. But in the late nineteenth century, it wasn't. Measured by almost any important social or economic indices, Argentina was more advanced than most countries in southern Europe. Then, especially during World War I when the price of beef went through the roof, Argentina's upper crust locked the country into monoculture—just like the Poles did with grain in this century and the American slaveowners would do with cotton in the nineteenth. The specifics varied a lot, naturally, but they all resulted in stagnation—and a political structure where an elite of not more than ten percent of the population lorded it over everybody else."

  She leaned back in the couch. "So that's it. In our timeline, Poland was hamstrung for centuries, and since it's the center of gravity in eastern Europe it more or less pulled half the continent down with it. Not without lots of help from the Austrian Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns in Prussia, of course, who were no prizes themselves."

  Morris had never stopped frowning. "I'd think Russia was more in the way of eastern Europe's 'center of gravity.'"

  "Actually, no. Not yet, I should say. There's a misconception among Americans, mostly because of the Cold War, that Russia was always the aggressor against Poland. But here in the early seventeenth century—and for at least two centuries earlier—it's actually the Poles and Lithuanians who've been seizing their neighbors' lands. Besides, it's something of a moot point anyway. I don't see where there's much you or me or anyone could do in October of 1634 to start turning around that mess called 'Russia.'"

  Morris grimaced. "Well, thank God for small favors. I've got enough to deal with as it is. Especially since you seem bound and determined to plop Poland into my lap too, right after Wallenstein and Pappenheim dropped everything south of there."

  "Sorry, Morris, but there's no way around it. In the long run, nothing you accomplish here or in the Ruthenian lands will be stable if you—or somebody—doesn't transform Poland. Poland and Lithuania, I should say."

  Morris finally took a seat himself, looking very tired. "Talk about the labors of Hercules," he muttered.

  Melissa started to say something, but Judith interrupted. "You said there were three factors. What's the third one?"

  "Huh? Oh. It's implicit in what I just said. Their protestations of always being the victim of history notwithstanding, the fact is that in this time period it's usually the Poles who are aggressing against their neighbors. So, on top of their existing problems, they added the third one that so-called 'Poland' was never coterminous with where Poles actually lived—until Stalin came along. To get back to the monster I started with."

  Again, she started counting off her fingers. "First, he destroyed the szlachta. They'd officially been abolished after World War II, but they still had a lot of power. He destroyed them literally, in some cases. A big percentage of the fifteen thousand Polish officers he had massacred in Katyn Forest were noblemen. Mostly, though, he simply destroyed them as a class by expropriating their property. Secondly, he ended serfdom. Brutally, of course, the way he did everything. And stupidly too, in the long run. But, say whatever else you will about his forced collectivization of agriculture, one of the products was the elimination of serfdom. And, finally, for the first time in centuries, he made Poland's boundaries coincide with the actual lands of the Poles. The Poland we knew in the post-World War II period was something like ninety-seven percent ethnically homogenous, which it had certainly never been prior to that. That's the reason that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nobody actually proposed to change any of the national boundaries Stalin created. Not Poland's, anyway."

  Morris wiped his face. "Wonderful. Stalin as my role model."

  "Oh, cut it out, Morris," said Melissa impatiently. "I was simply pointing to what Stalin did, not how he did it. Creating a modern Poland—forestalling its decline, I should say, which has only started—can be done by other means, too. It certainly should be. But the prerequisite is that you stop thinking of 'role models' in the first place."

  "Meaning . . . ?"

  "Forget Hercules and his labors. Meaning no offense, Morris Roth, but you bear as much resemblance to Hercules—or Stalin—as I do to the man in the moon."

  "Just what I tried to explain to Wallenstein and Pappenheim!"

  "So quit thinking in those terms altogether. The one thing eastern Europe does not need is another damn overlord. Instead, approach the problem like a political organizer. You don't really do anything. You just organize other peo
ple to do it."

  "Like who? And to do what?" He looked a bit sullen, and more than a bit like a twelve-year-old.

  "Stop pouting, Morris," said his wife. "I can figure that much out, and so can you."

  She started emulating Melissa's finger-counting. "First, get some people who know something about military affairs, which you don't. Whatever else, you'll need a real army, and you can't call on Pappenheim. He's tied up facing the Austrians to the south and the Saxons to the north, which is the reason Wallenstein handed you the assignment in the first place. Failing anything else, hire somebody. You're rich enough, these days. Europe's got plenty of mercenary officers, many of whom are quite good and some of whom are even loyal to their employer."

  Another finger got wiggled. "Second, the Jewish so-called problem runs all through the area. That, you can handle directly insofar as politics goes. But you really need to get a lot of rabbis on your side to handle the rest of it."

  She gave him a cool smile. "You do know some rabbis, right? I'd recommend starting with Mordecai Levi and Isaac Gans. And Jason, for that matter, and his fellow students."