by Eric Flint
“Yes, I know,” the czarina said. “It’s still the talk of Moscow. You should be aware that there are factions in the church that want to burn Bernard Zeppi as a witch. Mostly in response to those who want to saint him. Saints are much more convenient when they are safely dead.”
“The words ‘saint’ and ‘Bernie’ don’t really belong in the same sentence,” Natasha said, smiling. “But something happened in Moscow that changed him, or changed his attitude anyway. For a little while after Moscow, he was fierce in his focus on study. But that’s not the sort of pace that can be maintained. Now he’s mostly gone back to being Bernie, but there is a core of fire there that wasn’t there before. He’s pushing everyone in the Dacha to learn something. Servants, craftsmen, scholars, even our guards, and it’s catching.
“Honestly, it started before Moscow just from having all the scholars and craftsmen together but with Bernie’s fire it’s changed. There is an awareness that what we are doing is important. It helps that a cook from the Dacha who has learned techniques from the future has better opportunity. But that’s not all of it, not even most of it. We are saving and improving lives and the people at the Dacha know it. There is a feeling around the place that this is the most important thing any of us have ever done or ever will. You can smell it in the wood chips and lacquer, see it in the new things being built and modeled, hear it in the conversations. You breathe it in with the air and all you want to do is get on with it.” Natasha ground to a halt, embarrassed by her outburst.
The czarina kindly changed the subject. “I find the possibilities of the future amazing,” she said. “Do you believe they sent someone to walk on the Moon?”
Natasha considered. “Yes. I do believe it.”
“Why?”
“Partly because Vladimir confirms it in his letters, but mostly because Bernie talks about it the way we would speak of Ivan the Terrible or the Mongol rule. Not a fantastic tale, just something that happened in the past.”
“Can you imagine? And women went, too. Russian women.”
“Valentina Tereshkova. Vladimir wrote about her and Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin. Bernie didn’t remember her name but didn’t dispute that the first man and the first woman in space were Russian.” Natasha paused and looked at the czarina. There was a look in Evdokia’s eyes. A dreamy, hungry look. To Natasha the fact that the first man and woman in space were Russian was an interesting piece of information and made her feel good about being Russian. For the czarina, it seemed more somehow.
“I have always dreamed of flying,” Evdokia’s voice had a soft faraway tone. “Since I was a little girl. Floating up to the clouds and looking down to see the whole world spread before me.” She visibly pulled herself back from dreams of flight, but a bit of the smile lingered. “Child’s dreams, but it warms me somehow that it was done, and by Russians first.”
“Who knows?” Natasha offered. “What those people from the future could do, we can learn to do. Petr Nickovich says we can fly. He thinks he understands gravity and has built model hot air balloons that work. You may fly yet.”
Evdokia laughed a bit sadly. “Even if we learn to fly, it will not be allowed. It is a pleasant thought, though. Now tell me of the progress of the Dacha.”
Natasha grinned as she began her report. “As I said, Petr Nickovich thinks he understands gravity. Fedor is not convinced…” Not of the feel of the Dacha this time, of the particulars. Then there were the letters from Grantville. Natasha almost always had a new one to share and now the czarina had her own.
“Thank God,” Bernie said when Natasha handed him the latest batch of letters. “There wasn’t anything about plumbing in those books. I hope I’ve got an answer to that problem.” Natasha had made a rare foray into the kitchen, searching for him. He was having his usual sandwich lunch.
Dear Bernie, Vic Dobbs says you left out the vent stack for your plumbing and that’s most likely the problem. I typed out the sections he suggested in some of his plumbing books. Without the vent stack you get a buildup of pressure or a vacuum in the septic system and it forces the dirty, yuck, water back up or clogs up the system. He made a drawing to show you what you did wrong. I’ve included that along with the notes I typed. He also said you’d probably never seen one, since they’re usually inside the walls, so don’t feel bad about it. This ought to fix the problem. Just in case, you might want to have that Vladimir guy contract to have some books on plumbing that Vic recommends copied or scanned and reprinted. A list is included. I saw your father in town yesterday. He said to tell you hello and wants to know can he sell your car? It’s in the way, he said. But, Bernie, a car engine is worth a small fortune these days. He also said you should write him and your sisters. They want to hear from you, too. Old Grantville is rocking along just fine right now. We’ve got, I swear, thousands and thousands of people around here now. It’s so different from before. I hope you’re doing well and I hope the plumbing helps. The docs think your slow fever is typhoid, and that you’re right. It’s shit getting into the water supply that causes it. I bet it’s a lot different than working on cars was. But then, who’d have ever dreamed I’d wind up working in a research center, of all things? For both of us I think it’s more important work than we would have had up-time. Well, gotta go. I need to have this done before I get to work so Mom can drop it off at your Russian spy’s place to be sent on. Tell Natasha I said hi! Best, Brandy
“You have wood in your hair.” Natasha grinned. Bernie needed some management and she found she liked that. She peered at his hair. “Quite a bit of wood. What have you been doing out there in that shop of yours?”
Much to Natasha’s surprise, Bernie went outside to shake off the wood shavings. “Sorry about that,” he said when he came back to finish his lunch. “I didn’t realize. I brushed myself off, but didn’t know I had it in my hair. We were working on the pattern lathe. Finally got the setup for that connecting piece Ivan the Tolerable wanted.” Bernie had gotten into the habit of giving various people at the Dacha nicknames. “Now I need to talk to the guys about this vent stack thing. Maybe we can get the bathroom back in operation.” Bernie gulped down the last of his sandwich and beer and rose from the table again. “Excuse me. I really want to get the plumbing working. We can’t persuade anyone else to install it till we get it working and winter is coming on pretty quick. I really don’t want another spring typhoid outbreak.
“Oh, Brandy said to tell you hi. And I’m going to be up late studying, again.”
Natasha barely repressed the snort. Studying, he said. Studying that little blonde, more likely.
She shouldn’t mind it, Natasha knew. It was common with men. But this was Bernie, and for some reason it bothered her.
“Could you light a couple more candles?” Bernie smiled at Anya. “I can’t tell you how much I miss good lighting, I really can’t.”
Bernie liked Anya. She was smart, willing and practical. Bernie was perfectly aware that she was using him. He was using her, too, but it was friendly and fun. Anya went off to get more candles.
Bernie sat down with the book, a hand-typed and drawn copy of freshman algebra. Algebra had been one of his “did well” courses. One of the ones that he had found fun. But it had been a few years and the nerds were desperate to get through algebra so that they could get on with calculus. Not one of Bernie’s good courses.
“Bernie, could you teach me math?” Anya asked. Her English was still far from good but it was getting better every day.
“Sure. Algebra?”
“No. Math of accounts.”
“Accounting?” Bernie stopped and considered. Actually it made quite a lot of sense. Russia was trying desperately to move from a primarily barter economy to a moneyed economy. That would require bookkeeping and accounting. A growth industry, they would have said up-time. “Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure I have all the stuff we’ll need. In fact, I’m darn sure that I don’t. But we can make a start. I don’t know all that much about double-entr
y bookkeeping, but I’m pretty sure it involves something like this.”
Bernie pulled over a sheet of paper and drew a grid. “The item bought or sold. The amount it’s bought for here or sold for here that way you have a record as it comes in and goes out so…”
They got a start on it, then Bernie got back to refreshing his memory about algebra.
All the things he didn’t know meant Bernie had to study. It was a lot more intense than school had been and he had come to think of it as much more important. Importance didn’t make it easier or more fun. But, as with anything, practice did. All the stuff that he had been sure that he would never need once he graduated high school, he needed now. He had to interpret words he’d never heard and in contexts he’d never dreamed of. What the hell was calcareous grassland? Calcareous turned out to be to do with chalk or calcium; at least that’s what the dictionary said. But calcareous grassland? How could chalk grow grass? He had to go to the dictionary all the time to find the weird stuff that the Russian nerds wanted.
Then there was Bernoulli’s Law. Petr Nickovich had found a description of how wings worked in one of the books. The explanation described a wing’s dependence on Bernoulli’s Law. Then they had compared that with Newton’s three laws and the effects hadn’t matched up. The nerds had come to the conclusion that it couldn’t work that way. Newtonian physics, Bernie was assured, would require a small plane to be traveling at over three hundred miles an hour to fly. They believed Bernie that powered flight was possible. They even believed him and the books about the size of the wings and the speed of the aircraft. They knew and understood that they were missing something, but they didn’t know what. Bernie didn’t know what either. He built paper airplanes and wooden airplanes that flew, based on the rubber-band-powered airplanes he had played with as a kid, but he couldn’t explain how they worked.
What Bernie didn’t know, and for that matter most people in the Ring of Fire didn’t know, was that Bernoulli’s equations were a way of describing the actions of large groups of air molecules that were in turn following Newton’s laws of motion. And when they had tried to integrate the two different ways of describing the same event they had, in effect, added everything up twice. The mathematicians and natural philosophers who surrounded Bernie now might have understood the complex explanation. They were still somewhat trapped by Aristotle’s assumptions but they were some really bright guys. It didn’t matter. Bernie didn’t have the science to explain it. He had seen the drawings of air flow over a wing and assumed that they were accurate. They weren’t. This didn’t mean the shape of the wing was wrong. They weren’t really inaccurate, either. Just simplified. Using the drawing out of those books for the cross-section of the wing would produce a wing that would fly quite well. Assuming, of course, that you added the ailerons and the rest of the plane.
Every day Bernie had people asking him questions that he didn’t have the answers to. They weren’t meaningless questions that didn’t really matter, like how many planets there are in the solar system. Well, most of them weren’t. The astrologers were nuts to know the locations of Neptune, Uranus and Pluto. Mostly, though, the questions were about how things worked and how to treat injuries and diseases. And that’s what kept him up late studying.
Chapter 27
Andrei had it. He was sure now that after months of experimentation, he had the right chamber shape. The outside of the chamber was shaped like a long barn with a peaked roof. The inside, of course, was a round hole of the same size as the barrel. After the chamber was loaded, it simply inserted into the rifle, roof down and muzzle forward, which put the touch hole on the right side, aligned with the pan. He had tested it on the firing bench, fired dozens of rounds through it with no real problems. He reported to Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev that they were ready to go into production. Granted, Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev wasn’t the official person he was supposed to report to, but he was Andrei’s patron, so he was who Andrei told first.
Sheremetev told him to make two dozen of the rifles and to have them sent to the Sheremetev estates. Andrei did so. It was a disaster.
In the field the chambers had a bad habit of slipping out of the guns. Even worse, sometimes they didn’t slip out of the rifle, not all the way. Instead they got shifted just a little so that the touch hole was still aligned enough to fire the charge, but the muzzle of the chamber wasn’t properly aligned. At which point the gun had a tendency to blow up. Any bit of dirt that got into the chamber lock misaligned the chamber and caused it to misfire or sometimes escape from the chamber lock when fired. One of the Sheremetev deti boyars had died when an escaping chamber had hit him in the head.
Boyar Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev was not amused. Worse, Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev was embarrassed, because the first guns shouldn’t officially have gone to him but to the army. Sheremetev excused the slip by saying that he was having the sample tested to help out his deti boyar and wasn’t it a good thing that he had. For if he hadn’t, the army might have got stuck with rifles that weren’t ready yet. The explanation was accepted but not believed and Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev resented Andrei. But even more he resented the Dacha and Natasha for the fact that he had to ask them for help.
Filip, Bernie and the team came out to look at the AK2 and discussed how they might be fixed. There were a lot of problems with it. The upside down barn shape of the chamber was supposed to provide a guide to position the chamber. And it sort of worked, but a bit of dirt in the chamber lock or a burr on the chamber took the chamber out of position and there was still the gap between the chamber and the barrel. Unlike a six-shooter, the way a rifle was shot put that gap altogether too close to the face of the person firing the weapon for comfort. So the barn was modified. Just the back of the chamber was shaped like a barn. Just enough to allow the chamber to be positioned in the dark. The rest of the chamber was basically cylindrical. That went a long way to fixing the dirt and imperfections problem, but made the alignment problem worse.
One of the team members, who had been in charge of the actual installation of the plumbing at the Dacha, remembered that they had used pipe sections inserted into the expanded end of the next pipe section. He suggested that the back inch or so of the barrel be resized so that the chamber could be shoved into it.
As stated, the idea wasn’t workable, but it suggested possibilities. Rather than inserting the whole front end of the chamber, a round lip, not very big, that could be shoved forward might work. It would have the problem that it couldn’t simply be slotted in like the chamber of the AK2, but maybe a lever that opened up the slot that the chamber fit into then closed it back might be the answer. But Andrei didn’t like that way of doing it. It introduced moving parts and, worse, introduced them right where a great deal of force would be exerted. It was clearly not yet ready for the army
Chapter 28
October 1632
The Ring of Fire had happened a year and a half ago and Bernie had been in Russia the better part of a year when he was given the first official pronouncement on the Ring of Fire. It was far from the first pronouncement. Monasteries had pronounced first that it hadn’t happened at all and later that it was the work of the Devil because if God had done it He would have put it in Russia, not the Germanies, for not even God could care much for those barbaric people. Certainly not more than he cared for Holy Russia.
Through it all, the office of the patriarch had made no pronouncement, taking a wait-and-see attitude. From what Natasha had told him, that had been a very near thing. But here it was. In Russian, of course. Bernie could struggle through Russian writing by now, but not well. Natasha read it to him.
Patriarch Filaret’s Advisory on the Ring of Fire
It is clear through multiple sources that God, in his infinite wisdom, has chosen to take a hand in the conflict among the German States. He provides through this example clear evidence of both His infinite power and His will, that the Roman Church and the Protestants, whether Lutheran, Calvinist, or other peculiar sec
ts, are wrong. God has endeavored to make clear to them that which of their errors is most wrong is not a matter worth fighting over. That is clearly God’s message to them. But what is God’s message to us? It is obvious that we are not in need of the sort of correction the German States required, else surely God would have placed the Ring of Fire here, in Holy Rus. While His admonishment, gentle as it is, is for the Germans, the gifts which He sent with it are clearly for all the world. Willingly or not, the knowledge the up-timers bring is spreading to all the world. To their credit, the up-timers themselves seem willing enough to share most of the knowledge that God gifted their ancestors and our descendants with. This is an especially gracious gift to Holy Rus. For, while we have been strong in our adherence to scripture and the true faith, circumstances have left us behind the more western nations in some of the more mundane and earthly matters. We have been blocked by Poland from sharing in the technical advances made in the west. The czar, in his wisdom, has long had a policy of trying to correct that problem so that we, the true heirs of Christianity and the Roman empire, could maintain the faith in relative safety, while at the same time limiting the corrupting influences from the west. God has smiled on Czar Mikhail’s endeavor by providing new skills developed over time; many of them developed right here in Holy Rus. Yet like greedy children we complain “Why an American village? Why not a Russian village?” We know, after all, that in the twentieth-century Holy Rus was one of the two great powers. After studying the history, it is obvious that God chose an American village to protect Holy Rus, especially the church. The Russia of that time had fallen into corruption. For most of the twentieth century the Russian Orthodox Church, in fact all Christianity, had actually been banned. It was to protect us from this corruption that God chose an American village. He placed it in Germany to remind us that He sees the whole world and cares about even those who have fallen away from the true church. More than that, He placed it in Germany to remind us not to be too proud to listen and learn from others and to protect us from too much of their direct influence, so that we might learn from them without becoming them. To protect our great Russian culture and still allow us the benefits of the good things they brought with them.