He had a thick Upper Saxon accent, with extra umlauts where most German speakers would put a simple short vowel, and used dereelnz for “tell” rather than the standard erzählen. That probably meant he’d been born within a day’s journey of the Schloss, and had acquired his skills by a combination of technical school and learning-by-doing while apprenticed and self-education. His sort were the indispensable NCOs of German industry, and a large part of the reason for its prowess.
“Alas, no, I’m a complete amateur,” Luz replied. “But I try to keep current with developments. Electricity is the master technology of our century, as steam was to the nineteenth, after all! So flexible in distribution and division, and with so many uses—light and communications, of course, but also mechanical power in industry and transport and even homes, and then all the electrochemical applications, and more uses are being discovered all the time. Obviously, tomorrow belongs to electricity!”
From their looks she obviously couldn’t have offered better praise from all the world’s store of flattery, the more so as it was well-informed praise directed at the thing they loved rather than themselves. Even the genuinely humble were vulnerable to that. Herr Böhm’s whiskers bristled happily, and he produced a bottle and small glasses of some fiery local plum brandy for a ceremonial toast to the spirit of electrical progress—though his own glass was not merely small, but the amount in it was entirely ceremonial. So, under his eagle eye, was that of his bald attendant who would obviously have liked a good-sized tot, working hours or not. The shock-haired apprentice simply blushed without daring to speak, obviously struck dumb with an agony of adolescent admiration for the two comely young women. Luz gave him a nod and a smile, at which he almost hid behind his superiors, then remembered himself and gave a half bow in return, shapeless cloth cap clutched in his hands.
A tour of the little plant followed, replete with terms like Voith-made Francis turbine, and the names of the manufacturers of the generator and transformer, Siemens & Halske—which she did recognize simply because you couldn’t read any military intelligence about Germany without running across the company—and details of how the water intake had been modified.
“We have a two-hundred-fifty-kilowatt capacity, which was ample, when the Freiherr had the plant installed for the Schloss and the village six years ago,” Böhm said. “Our good Freiherr is very progressive! Then it was almost all for lights, the Schloss first of course, then the church, clinic, and school in the village, and the pastor’s house. We were due to add another turbine generator set in 1914; there is enough water flow, but . . .”
He shrugged; a Frenchman would have done that more broadly and murmured c’est la guerre.
“Our problem now with the additional demand is that we are simply at the maximum capacity. So when there are surges . . . well, we have been running short of fuses, and there are so many complaints when the fuses blow, we tell them to try not to put more load on the circuits than it will take, but so many people still think electricity works like magic . . .”
The bald man muttered something like Piefkes and cast a resentful glance in the direction where the military-occupied Schloss would lie from here. Luz hid a grin behind the bland incomprehension of someone who hadn’t caught the mutter or that of a foreigner who spoke very good German but didn’t know the little idiosyncratic bits that never got into the books. In fact she’d heard that term before fairly often, in Austria and Bavaria. Piefke was a personal name, and the best known bearer was the Berlin-born composer of some well-known imperial German military marches. But in a southern German’s mouth it also meant either pompous stuck-up ass or Prussian or more commonly both.
“Trees,” the young apprentice said, and retreated behind more blushes. “Falling branches.”
Böhm nodded and tugged angrily at his whiskers. “Ja, ja. The grounds and garden staff, and the woodsmen, are very shorthanded. With the war, you understand . . . there is simply not enough careful trimming in the forest where the line runs up to the Schloss. In heavy weather we have had problems there, too—and we lose more fuses if the line shorts. Never has it taken us more than half an hour to restore power after an overload, often as little as twenty minutes, but each time we lose fuses, wire, everything is in short supply these days . . . and damage to the line itself in storms is more serious. I told the Herr Ingenieur that it would save effort in the long run to re-route the power line along the road even if it was longer, but there hasn’t been time . . .”
Ciara and he went into a technical discussion of base and maximum loads, the meters-per-second capacities of the flue and how it was altered to balance the load and the best way to keep flotsam out given how careless the woodsmen and peasants upstream were, the difficulties of getting sufficient high-quality lubricants for the bearing races . . .
Böhm frowned again when the discussion was over. “Our Ingenieur was a most capable man, with plenty of practical experience with this system in particular as well as the rest of his responsibilities. But he was recalled to the colors with a Pioneer battalion—he has a reserve commission—and now there is only the young man from Marienbad, who comes in occasionally with many other responsibilities. He has his degree, yes, but . . . sometimes these recent graduates . . .”
He sighed and shrugged. “We manage. When all these extra people are gone, perhaps we will have fewer interruptions!”
The tour of the plant was interesting; it usually was, to see an expert doing things he really knew and cared about.
“Thank you very much for your time, Herr Böhm,” Luz said. “I know you are extremely busy. Please accept this as evidence of my gratitude.”
She handed the three of them each a bar of chocolate, ones she’d packed in a recess of her trunks. Money might have offended him, but three pairs of blue eyes lit at the sight of the treat, unobtainable in wartime but, like coffee, dear to the German heart. Even more so, if possible.
“Thank you, gracious miss,” he said, as the youngster stripped off the paper and tinfoil and crammed some of his into his mouth with muffled sounds of joy. “I will save my portion for my children—the little ones have not had chocolate since last Christmas.”
As they walked back to the Schloss along a footpath used by the maintenance crew, Luz’s eyes followed the looping path of the power line. Someone had taken considerable trouble to keep it inconspicuous; the poles were creosoted pine logs about eight meters tall, the bases buried man-deep and often braced with a ring of rocks and taking an irregular path uphill.
“So fallen branches are a problem?” she said meditatively.
“Yes, particularly in bad weather, Herr Böhm says.”
Ciara chuckled a little. “Evidently the von Herder family, progressive or no, didn’t want too much of an unsightly path cut through their forest or spoiling the view from the castle windows. They mostly lived here in the summer, and in their town place in Dresden in the winter except for hunting trips. And just before the war they laid up their carriage and got an automobile. A Mercedes 37/90 touring model—a very fine car.”
Luz looked around. The yellowing leaves of the beeches rustled overhead with a tattered autumnal loveliness, but add in six feet of snow and a blizzard . . .
“Yes, I can see them living in town in the winter,” she said. “This estate would be yokeldom’s homeland once the snow fell, hardly anyone to see or talk to except the villagers even with the railroad. With the car they could visit in the neighborhood in good weather, but not once the blizzards begin.”
Ciara snorted with a democratic American impatience, and Luz nodded. Though in fact the two groups might simply not have much to talk to each other about, except for the weather, rents, Lady Bountiful charity by the squire’s wife, and a little extramural frolic and fornication by the von Herder menfolk now and then.
“I’d guess the lords lived here year-round except for some attendance at court or service in war before the rails
came through,” Luz said. “Now they winter in Dresden, which is a truly lovely city; they call it the Jewel Box of Germany for the buildings. The Frauenkirche, the Church of Our Lady, I had a tour through once and it was far too short; you could look at it for days.”
Ciara sighed. “I’ve traveled only in my books.” A wry smile: “Well, except for this! That was a boat to Copenhagen, and right on to the train for here. Seeing a genuine castle is something, I suppose. I envy you so, having seen all these places.”
“Travel by book is the best preparation for really doing it, so that you understand what you finally see,” Luz said. “And there are a lot of places I haven’t seen yet . . . not Spain, oddly enough, nor much of Italy, just a flying visit to Venice. And only London in England; never Yorkminster or Stonehenge. Nor Constantinople, nor Egypt . . . Well, something to think about after the war’s over. But it is great fun to travel just for its own sweet sake, especially in the right company.”
“Oh, yes!” Ciara said. “Auntie Colleen and Auntie Treinel and I did go to San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific Exposition last year; they got the Party discount and managed to sneak one for me too. And oh, that was lovely, to see so much of our country. And the mountains, and the bay was so pretty, and the Jewel City. You?”
“Claro que sí, several times. It’s only an afternoon from Santa Barbara to San Francisco by rail.”
“It made me sad, to think that those beautiful, beautiful buildings would be torn down, and I cried with happiness when the president said they’d be made to last in that great speech he gave. I read the whole text, three times.”
Luz chuckled; that had been a typical bit of Uncle Teddy’s approach to life. She’d applauded his impulsive decree that it all be rebuilt for real too, even though some of the buildings had been a bit too-too as the English said, or possibly not quite-quite. But the Court of the Universe was exactly the way Teddy and the École des Beaux-Arts and the City Beautiful movement—and hence the Party—thought a great city’s core should look, anyway, Tower of Jewels and all. The opportunity to bring it to lasting life had been too much for him to resist.
“The Palace of Fine Arts is certainly lovely, as fine as anything I’ve seen that was built in the last half century,” she said aloud. “It would have been a sin to let that vanish, and it’s perfect for an art and design school, which is what they’ll be using it for. The three of you had a good time?”
“Oh, yes! We saw all the art, and we had a wheeled chair for Auntie Colleen when her foot started to hurt—and those little electric carts . . .”
“The Electriquettes?”
“Yes, such dear things—and I went on all the rides in the Joy Zone. And we came back in the evening twice to see the light shows, the Scintillator, and those lovely glowing pillars in the Court of the Universe and the dome of the Palace of Horticulture. It was like something in the sidhe-mounds then. And oh, the Palace of Machinery had the most fascinating things . . . particularly from Westinghouse and the Institute. They had one of the new turbo-alternators for the Twelve Dams project on the Colorado River, and it was amazing! The degree of transmission loss is amazingly low with voltages like that, and Tesla solved the insulation problem. The three-phase poly—”
“I was impressed,” Luz agreed, before it could get more technical. “And with the big scale model of the Panama Canal. Shhh!”
Luz put her left hand on the other’s arm and her right went inside her coat to fall on the pistol, and they halted. She used her eyes to indicate the source of the rustling she’d heard; it was a boar, black and bristly and low-slung, rooting about for the fallen acorns the pig breed loved. His long curling white tusks clattered and champed as he caught their scent, glowered at them out of one wicked little eye, then trotted off.
I really wouldn’t like to have had to stop four hundred pounds of armed porker with this popgun. A nice Remington bolt-action with the new .338 high-velocity magnum round, maybe!
“Not much like a farm pig at all!” Ciara said, a bit breathless. “Sure, and ripped up by the boar in the old epics makes more sense now!”
“They’re good hunting, and good eating,” Luz said. “But taking one on with a spear . . .”
Her eyes went skyward. The early-afternoon sky was thickening with cloud in a rippling, undulating pattern.
“Un cielo empedrado,” she said. At Ciara’s look: “A cobbled sky, that means.”
“Mackerel sky, in English,” Ciara said.
“Schäfchenwolken, as the Germans put it; sheep’s sky.”
“Weather moving in, whatever it’s called.”
“What a pity,” Luz said with a brief feral grin. “Falling branches will probably mean another power interruption.”
“My head feels a bit heavy,” Ciara said. “And there’s a barometer we can take a look at.”
She looked halfway between frightened and excited, but she’d switched back to the subject of just how Schloss Rauenstein’s power—and Colonel Nicolai’s alarm—might fail without prompting.
Smart girl, Luz thought; she felt both, but she grinned at the clouds.
“I’m very glad you cultivated Herr Böhm, Ciara,” she said.
The younger woman nodded. “He’s a nice old soul, and far more fun than the soldiers. Safer, too! Young men in uniform, if you give them the slightest encouragement, just ordinary friendliness, honestly you’d think you’d thrown up your skirts over your head and were doing that scandalous French dance while you wailed like a lady cat wanting a tom . . .”
“The cancan?” Luz said, and then said it again using the English pronunciation with the hard n.
“Is that the way the French say it, then? Yes, that’s what I meant.”
Then Ciara looked thoughtfully at the tower that stuck up from Schloss Rauenstein’s highest roof.
“You know, really there ought to be a way to have an alarm system keep functioning despite a power interruption . . . chargeable batteries perhaps? But they’re so heavy and require so much attention it would be easier just to keep a man standing there every hour of the day! Edison never did solve the battery problem . . . perhaps Tesla?”
“Perhaps if you could focus on getting me in safely?” Luz said, smiling a little to take any sting out of it. “Rather than perfecting the alarm to keep me out . . .”
Ciara nodded seriously, and they walked through the damp duff of the forest floor, holding up their skirts a little. Once or twice Luz had to catch the other by the arm. She wasn’t naturally clumsy, but she was much less used to walking through forests and broken ground, and the higher, narrower heels of her shoes weren’t as adapted to it either. At last Ciara nodded and pointed.
“If that branch there fell, it’s heavy enough to take the line down—take it right out of the insulator set on that pole, I’d say.”
The twisted oak limb was about twenty feet up, overhanging the line of poles where they made a switchback to avoid a clifflike piece of stony steepness that seeped water from its reddish sandstone. The problem was that the branch looked fairly sturdy; the tree wasn’t a giant, given where it was growing—she could see roots where they’d driven themselves into the rock—but it was healthy. Still, limbs did break off in storms, and anyone who’d done any forest work knew that an oak that looked healthy might have any number of internal problems that could set branches dropping, sometimes on your head with no warning. The clouds had thickened, the wind was still out of the northwest, and the temperature had been dropping since noon.
“Watch out for anyone else coming this way,” she said.
It wasn’t likely, since this path along the power line’s right-of-way looked a bit overgrown, but it wasn’t impossible that one of the officers would find time to commune with the ancestral spirit of the forest—Germans did things like that if they’d been in the Wandervögel movement, or just liked taking a stroll the same way anyone might.
&nb
sp; Ciara responded by swiveling her head both ways. “No,” Luz said, and took her by the hand. “Here. Stand with your back against this rock, in the shadow. Now you can look both ways up and down the trail without turning your head much, and if you don’t move, chances are nobody will see you. Plus you’ll be visible to me while I climb. See?”
Ciara squeezed her hand before she released it. “And did they teach you that in the Chamber?” she said, obviously fascinated.
“My father did when we were hunting,” she said. “The Chamber sort of refined it.”
And didn’t add aloud: And later, experience ground it in when I was hunting men, who were hunting me too.
“Ah, and I wanted to be a Girl Scout and learn woodland lore so badly,” Ciara sighed. “There was a troop in my neighborhood before I was too old. But there was never the time to spare from the shop, and some of the Clann na nGael didn’t like it, because it was started by an Englishman.”
“A very worthy organization, the Scouts,” Luz said, more or less sincerely.
Back home people were just starting to talk about making the Scouts compulsory for girls too, or at least free and heavily encouraged and subsidized through the Party, as part of a scheme to extend a less military form of national service to young women before the courts forced the issue. Some disgruntled male conscript would have the money and connections to get a case all the way to the Supreme Court, and the wording of the Sixteenth was very, very unambiguous.
So that’s probably going to happen eventually, even if it makes a lot of people unhappy, she thought, with a brief flicker of Schadenfreude.
Those were people whose suffering she positively enjoyed, rather like a form of bear-baiting you could watch with a clear conscience. They included, in fact started, with the people who had tried to kill the Sixteenth Amendment by pulling a fast one in committee and altering the wording from a simple extension of the vote to full equal rights for women. They’d bet that even the triumphant Progressives in 1913 couldn’t or wouldn’t pass that, but wouldn’t dare offend their more radical supporters by walking it back, either. They’d regretted it immediately when Uncle Teddy and his congressional supporters had taken up the gauntlet and rammed it through in the changed form by a razor-thin margin and gotten it accepted by the states along with the other half dozen going up for ratification at the same time, mainly because everyone was too excited to really notice that it had been radically changed.
Black Chamber Page 24