by Eric Flint
Mikhail was less happy about some of the policy changes that Sheremetev had come up with. Selling to the Turks especially bothered him.
Moscow, the Grantville Section
Boris filled out paperwork and tried not to think about what was happening. “Director-General” Sheremetev was an idiot who had no concept of how to treat people to get the best work out of them. He couldn’t inspire or motivate, save through threats. But, for now at least, the threats seemed to be working. Sheremetev had complete control of the Boyar Duma through a combination of bribes and coercion. Worse, he was what the up-timers called a micromanager, and his decisions were wrong more often than not.
It wasn’t that Boris disagreed with Sheremetev’s assessment of the general situation in Europe. The Swede was much more dangerous than the Pole. That had to be clear to anyone except an idiot. Boris had studied the history of the world on the other side of the Ring of Fire and one thing was clear: Poland had always been a nuisance to Russia and usually an antagonist, but never a mortal threat. Only twice since the Mongol yoke was thrown off had foreign powers come close to destroying Russia. First, the French; then the Germans. Never the Poles.
The key was economic development. The Poles had been too backward themselves to pose more than a middling danger. The real peril came from western and central Europe, not eastern Europe.
But economic development presupposed financial reform, and Boris didn’t think Sheremetev really understood paper money. Boris didn’t really understand it himself that well, but he’d seen it work in Grantville and knew it was the way forward. True enough, Sheremetev was supporting the new currency, at least officially. But where Czar Mikhail’s support had been genuine, Boris figured that Sheremetev was just using it to lure people into giving him gold and working for nothing.
The end result was likely to discredit the new money altogether, and so Russia would remain mired in poverty and ignorance. Sheremetev understood the threat from western Europe-but was making it worse, not better.
Grantville
“The”-Vladimir held up his hands and made quote marks in the air-“‘Director-General’ is teaching us a lesson,” Vladimir explained. “He’s also tempting us, putting pressure on to see if we will defect. Well, if I will defect. You hold dual citizenship.”
“What lesson?” Brandy asked.
“Don’t try to hold up the Russian government. Or, more accurately, don’t fail to cut him in on it.”
“So how bad is it?”
“Bad! For us here it’s the advances.” The ruble, now a paper currency, with the image of Czar Mikhail and the double-headed eagle on the face and the Moscow Kremlin and a Russian bear on the back, was valued at less than half the value of the Dutch guilder in spite of the fact that it was supposed to be equivalent to the silver ruble coin that had twice the silver of the Dutch guilder. Partly that was because the czar and Boyar Duma had issued rather more rubles than they really should have. But mostly it was because the Dutch merchants resented the paper ruble. The new currency had changed the whole trading landscape in Russia. Dutch merchants had gone from absolutely vital to convenient. And the price they paid at Arkhangelsk for grain, cordage, lumber, and other Russian goods had more than doubled.
So, the Dutch wouldn’t deal in Russian paper money or money of account based on Russian money. They would still accept Russian coins, but their refusal to deal in Russian paper had its effect. “If the canny Dutch merchants wouldn’t take paper rubles, there must be something wrong with them. Right?” So rubles traded in Grantville, Venice and Vienna at less than a quarter of face value. And that was if you were basing face value on the amount of silver in a ruble coin. If you figured it in the price of a bushel of grain at Arkhangelsk versus the same bushel at Amsterdam, it traded at less than a tenth of its face value.
It was hard to make a profit when you were losing more than nine-tenths of your money to arbitrage. Vladimir spent his rubles where they would buy something, then shipped the goods to the USE for resale, just as he had been doing from the beginning. And, like any good man of business, he tried to find buyers in advance rather than shipping the goods on spec. What Sheremetev objected to was how much of the money Vladimir was investing in Grantville and the USE. Sheremetev wanted Vladimir to buy silver and gold and send it back to Moscow. Which made no sense at all. If Vladimir was going to do anything along those lines, he would be buying paper rubles in Grantville with silver where he could get a lot of them, then shipping the rubles back to Moscow where they would buy more.
Vladimir had contracts to sell five thousand stacked-plate mica capacitors, plus several tons of other mica products. But what he didn’t have was this quarter’s shipment of mica and mica-based components. Also missing were a couple of hundred miles of cordage, several tons of Russian hardwoods, plus sundry other goods. In other words, several million American dollars worth of goods, which he was morally and legally obligated to provide. And about half of it had been paid for in advance. He was insured against loss at sea. With Swedish control of the Baltic, the insurance hadn’t been all that expensive.
What he wasn’t insured against was Sheremetev and the Boyar Duma preventing him from bringing out the goods. Goods that had never sailed from Nyen — St. Petersburg it would have become in that other history. Goods that had never even reached Swedish Ingria. It wasn’t just that money wasn’t coming in-money that had already come would have to be paid back with penalties for nondelivery.
Vladimir wasn’t broke exactly. He was now deeply in debt. In some ways that was better than being broke, but in others much worse. Partly to gain access to the developing tech and partly just because it was good long-term financial strategy, he had invested in some of the more long-term projects. He was, for instance, fairly heavily invested in three of the companies that were working on down-time manufacture of automobiles. And he was the major investor in a group that was working on the tubes for microwaves. They didn’t expect results for years, but they were working on it and Vladimir was the primary backer of the research. Microwave tech was just too useful to ignore because it was hard to do.
“It’s bad for us here but what I’m really worried about is Natasha. Sheremetev can make me go out and get a real job, but that’s not much of a threat. The real threat is that he can kill my sister. What I would like to do is get Natasha out of Russia. But I don’t see any way to do it.”
“How much time do we have?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I can send a fruitcake,” Brandy said, “You know the kind with a saw in it. A metaphoric saw in this case. Instructions about how to arrange an unauthorized immigration.”
“It’s a worthy thought,” Vladimir agreed, “but I don’t think she’d come. Aside from everything else, Sheremetev needs me as much or more than I need him. If he didn’t have Natasha I’d be able to tell him to shove it.”
Chapter 73
April 1636
“So how are they doing out there?” Natasha asked as Anya came in.
Anya had taken to sleeping in Natasha’s room. Partly that was because neither Natasha nor Filip liked it when she slept in Bernie’s room and Anya had discovered that she cared about that in more than purely practical terms. She still didn’t know what if anything would develop with Filip, but her friendship with Natasha was genuine and mattered to her.
Bernie was no longer comfortable with their old relationship anyway. That much was obvious even if he never said anything. Anya figured his discomfort came from the fact that he knew it bothered Natasha-not that Bernie would ever admit to his feelings about the princess, or probably even understand them well in the first place. From the future or not, men were still men. Stupid, when it came to such matters.
But the main reason Anya had moved into Natasha’s quarters was that she was better protection against Cass Lowry than Bernie was. Bernie was too likely to lose his temper and attack Cass, which would just make the situation worse. Natasha was a Gorchakov princess and Cass
had learned the hard way that it was dangerous to cross her.
“Not well,” she said in response to Natasha’s question. “Mr. Lowry insists that the Dacha should limit itself to strictly practical applications.”
Natasha snorted. “What he calls practical. He wants fixed-wing aircraft! How is that practical?”
After they’d talked about the Dacha and the scientific future of Russia for a bit-bad and getting worse by the day-they switched over to more personal matters.
“So Filip seems interested in you?” Natasha asked.
“Which might have meant something if this were still the Dacha,” Anya said glumly. “I mean your and Bernie’s Dacha, not Sheremetev and Cass’s Dacha. You know what I mean. Anything seemed possible then. We were all working to change the world. It made anything seem possible.”
Anya saw Natasha’s nod of agreement and understanding. “Before Bernie I was a caged pet,” Natasha said. “Then Bernie arrived and there was the Dacha… a place to work, to read, full of people who understood. Who wanted to understand. Who thought about how things worked and how they might be made to work better. All because of Bernie. Almost by existing, he made the world bloom. For four years we had a scholar’s paradise. They’ve been the best years of my life.”
She was a young woman but in that moment sounded very old, as if she were talking about a time long ago.
“Can you imagine what it would have been like if it were Cass instead of Bernie?” Anya said.
When Natasha didn’t answer Anya looked over and saw her thinking. Then Natasha spoke. “Yes, I can. I hadn’t before now, but I can and the frightening thing about it is that if we didn’t have Bernie to compare him to, Cass probably would have seemed quite acceptable. The Dacha would still be here. Cass would have insisted that we concentrate on fixed wings so Testbed wouldn’t have been built and Czarina Evdokia wouldn’t be nearly finished. But we might have a couple of working one- or two-person airplanes with hand-built engines. The real difference, though, would be the sense of the place. Less freedom, academic or otherwise. Less trying to get the job done and more, as Bernie would say, trying to cover their asses. And we wouldn’t even notice what was missing. We wouldn’t realize what we might have had and Cass Lowry would seem quite a useful, if obnoxious, foreign employee. Without Bernie, the Dacha would still be of benefit to Holy Mother Russia. But it would have been just technical benefit. The subtle torch of freedom that Bernie lit in all of us just by being Bernie would be gone.”
Anya nodded, remembering a night when Bernie, Filip, and she had talked about freedom, slavery and serfdom. How many conversations like that had there been? How many quiet words and beliefs had Bernie Zeppi dropped like seeds into fallow ground, not because he intended to create a revolution but simply because of who he was.
And what would Cass Lowry have dropped in place of those seeds? The man might be an up-timer in his origins, but he thought like a nobleman. Lowry believed, deep inside, that he deserved more and better than anyone else. From what Bernie had said, that had been true of him even when he was a teenager with no greater title than that of an athlete.
“You’re right. Cass Lowry would have fit right in with the service nobility, and we never would have seen that there was a better way.”
“That’s what bothers me the most. How quickly the people here are giving up on that better way. How fast ivory towers can come down. Exchange Bernie for Cass Lowry, Mikhail for Sheremetev, and heaven is whisked away, with only memory of it making what we have now seem an annex of hell. My knight in shining armor arrived four years ago and by the time I noticed he was here, it was too late,” Natasha said.
“We could run, you know,” Anya said. “I’ve done it before. We could go east to the wild lands. Russia doesn’t really control Siberia. No one does.”
“You ran away to Siberia?” Natasha blinked her eyes in astonishment.
“No. I ran away to Moscow,” Anya said. “I wasn’t even a serf. I was a slave. I ran and got lost in Moscow, found any work I could, anywhere I could. My point is we’re a lot better situated now. We have money and can get or forge travel papers. On the other hand, you’re an important person. I just had one slave owner looking for me. We’d have the whole government looking for us. We’d have to go farther.”
“What about everyone else? What about Bernie and Filip?”
“We could take Filip and Bernie!”
“And everyone else? We could run. We could even take Bernie and Filip, perhaps a few others. But what about the staff of the Dacha? We can’t all run. Not everyone would even want to.”
“I know.” Anya looked down at the bed they were sitting on. “But we may not have a choice. I don’t think Cass Lowry will change and I don’t think Boyar Sheremetev will back away from supporting him, certainly not for me and probably not for you. It may be run or submit to Cass. And I’m not sure I could do that, not anymore.”
Natasha knew that Anya was preparing to run, but took no action either to aid her or prevent her. Natasha couldn’t make up her mind. In a way the Dacha was a very effective cage. Its bars were of duty stronger than high carbon steel. She couldn’t abandon her scientists to Cass Lowry and Sheremetev. They had come here to work for Russia and all its people, to do good with their minds. Natasha knew that view was a bit simplistic, but it was true enough when it came down to it. So she stayed and worked and tried to protect the eggheads and the cooks. The philosophers and the gardeners. And died a bit as the dream she hadn’t even known she was dreaming died around her.
As punishments for idle comments, “wasting time on unprofitable hobbies,” or lack of progress on one of Cass or Sheremetev’s pet projects came down, she tried to act as a buffer between her people and their new masters. But it wasn’t working. Four years can be long enough to learn freedom, but it’s not always long enough for the lesson to stick. More and more the Dacha was reverting to the dog-eat-dog informer culture of the bureaus.
More and more Cass Lowry felt empowered and Natasha had to restrain Bernie and her armsmen several times. Even so, the only thing that kept Bernie alive was that Sheremetev wanted two up-timers at the Dacha. He had told Cass in no uncertain terms that Bernie was off limits. Cass had also been told that Natasha was off limits and that protection was effectively extended to Anya as long as she stayed with Natasha. The only way she had kept her armsmen alive was by ordering more and more of them out of the Dacha.
Chapter 74
June 1635
Cass Lowry was drunk again, Father Kiril noted with concern. So the Dacha, even the guards placed by Sheremetev, walked carefully. Lowry had poor control over his impulses even when sober. He had virtually none once he got drunk-and, unfortunately, he was a mean rather than cheerful drunk.
With someone else Father Kiril might have tried to restrain the drinking, but Cass Lowry had made his contempt for the Russian Orthodox Church quite plain. Lowry seemed to consider himself above any church. All of which meant that when the American went on a drunken rampage, all Father Kiril could do was watch. So he watched and became even more concerned as Cass headed for the apartments of Princess Natalia.
There was no warning at all. The door burst open and Cass came in, a bottle in one hand and a leer on his face. “Get out of here.” Natasha ordered. “You’re drunk.”
“I sure as hell am. I’m also the boss and you’ve been forgetting the new order. Interfering with my administration of the Moscow Institute of Technology. That’s a better name than just calling it the country house.”
Not a bad translation of the Dacha’s up-time usage, skittered through the back of Natasha’s mind, while the part of her mind that was supposed to be figuring out how to head off the disaster that was Cass Lowry was blank as a new sheet of paper.
Her rooms were being guarded by Sheremetev’s troops tonight. She’d had to send too many of her own away from the Dacha to maintain a loyal guard all the time. They might restrain Cass if she called on them but the fact that he was here at
all argued against it. She moved in front of Anya and Cass smiled. That was the moment she realized that Cass wasn’t here for Anya. He was here for her.
Her brain froze, not so much from fear as from simple confusion. He couldn’t possibly get away with it, valuable up-timer or not, touched by God or not. Not in Russia, not even in Germany. Raping Anya or any of the servant girls, even killing one of them, he could get away with. But a princess of Russia? Even Sheremetev, perhaps especially Sheremetev, would have him drawn and quartered for the offense against all the nobility of Russia.
Then he grabbed her arm and all doubt fled. “Stupid down-timer bitch. You think there’s any real difference between you and any of the other whores in Russia? You’re all down-timers, whatever silly-ass titles you give yourselves.” With his other hand he ripped open her dressing gown. “Time for you to learn your place, Princess, after what your guardsmen did to me when I first got here.”
Now he had a hand on her breast and she tried to shove him away. For just a split second it seemed like she had succeeded, at least in part. His hand left her breast and there was space between their bodies.
Then his fist hit the side of her face. She hadn’t seen it coming and it didn’t exactly hurt, not yet, though it would later. For now it simply stunned her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t react when that same hand reached down and grabbed her down there.