Ring of Fire IV

by Eric Flint

  To many, the answer would seem obvious—that it was a simple trade.

  A swap!

  And hence, the bemused neighbors of Grantville—West Virginians of the United States of America, in the year 2000—received, in exchange for their departed metropolis, a few bewildered, terrified seventeenth-century Germans, hopelessly archaic and primitive, of no practical use at all, except as recipients of kindness and largesse until—amid the welcoming spirit of that blissful nation, they would merge, adapt and transform into boring-but-content citizens. Of little import, other than as curiosities.

  A trade? A swap? Oh, perhaps it was so.

  Only, dear reader, let me endeavor to persuade you that—in the immortal words of the up-time bard and balladeer Ira Gershwin—it ain’t necessarily so.

  * * *

  Kurt, Baron von Wolfschild, stared down upon a long column of refugees.

  For that, clearly, they were, hundreds of them, shambling with meager possessions balanced atop heads or strapped upon backs. And, alongside the road, for as far as he could see with his foggy spyglass, many articles the migrants had abandoned, so that children might ride shoulders, instead. Those scattered discards were punctuated by an occasional old man or woman, shrilly insistent to be left behind, so that a family might live.

  Such telltales were all too familiar to a knight whose own demesne suffered this very same fate, not so long ago.

  People…my tenants, villagers and farmers…who counted on my brothers and me, to protect them. Cut down like wheat, or else scattered to the wind.

  These fugitives were a grimy lot, as clouds of dust hovered in both winding directions along the bone-dry road. In a bone-dry land, he pondered, rising on his stirrups to scan every unfamiliar horizon. This hilly countryside wasn’t exactly a desert—Kurt had seen the real thing, guarding a Genoese diplomatic mission to Egypt, almost a decade ago. Here, trees and shrubs dotted every slope. Indeed, some distance below, through a southern haze, he could make out green and fertile fields. At least, I think that’s south. And far beyond, the shoreline of some lake or small sea.

  Still, the scouts had not been drunk or lying. This was clearly not the green-forested dampness of central Germany. Nor were these Germans, shambling below on open-toed sandals. Both women and men wore robelike garments and cloth headdresses, scarves, or turbans—it was rare to spot exposed hair, except among the weary-looking children.

  Now, some of the more alert refugees appeared to take notice, pointing uphill toward Kurt and his men—twenty Landsknecht cavalry in battered helmets and cuirasses, with two dozen pikemen and ten arquebusiers marching up from behind. Murmurs of worry arose from the dusty migrants.

  Not that Kurt could blame them. His own company of mercenary guardsmen had a pretty clean record, protecting merchants through the hellscape that recently stretched from Alps to Baltic. But no civilian who still had any grip upon reality would be placid at the sight of armed and armored men.

  “What’s that language they’re gabbling?” complained the young adventurer, Samuel Burns, from his oversized charger to Kurt’s left.

  The Hollander sergeant, Lucas Kuipers, shrugged broad shoulders, looking to his commander for orders.

  Kurt listened carefully for a moment. “It…sounds a bit like Hebrew…or Arabic…and neither. Perhaps something in between. I can’t speak either of them well enough to tell. You’d better send a rider back to fetch Father Braun.”

  “Hebrew? So many Jews?” Burns shook his head.

  “Braun won’t want to come,” Sergeant Kuipers said. “The villagers are terrified, since we all passed through the Mouth of Hell.”

  A good name for it, Kurt thought. Just over an hour ago, it had seemed that Milda and its surroundings were, indeed, being swallowed by some fiery gullet, amid a shaking, noise and painful brilliance that just had to be infernal.

  “They think that it’s the end time,” Kuipers went on, in thickly accented Low German. “Especially after hearing what happened to Magdeburg. Half of the peasants seem bent on setting fire to their hovels, then throwing themselves on the flames.”

  Kurt shrugged. It was all right for the sergeant to raise a point. But a commander’s silence should speak for itself. And so, with hardly a pause, Kuipers turned in his saddle to shout for a courier. Two, since one horse would be needed to bring the priest, if the Jesuit was wanted in such a hurry.

  “Gut.” Kurt nodded. A sergeant who thinks is worth his weight in coppers. Maybe even silver.

  Watching the riders depart, he only half listened as Kuipers began shouting at the infantry, arraying them in some kind of presentable order. Of course, the pikemen and arquebusiers weren’t part of Kurt’s landsknecht company, which had only been passing through Milda, escorting a small commercial caravan, when the calamity struck. These footmen were a motley assortment of local militia and grizzled veterans, augmented by deserters—from both Tilly’s Catholic army and Protestant Magdeburgers—fleeing the atrocities to Milda’s north. That siege, according to breathless reports, had come to an end as forces of the Austrian emperor and the Roman Church performed a feat of butchery surpassing the massacre of Cathars at Beziers in 1209. Perhaps even matching horror stories from the Crusades.

  Hell’s mouth, indeed. What more do we deserve, for allowing such things to happen, and murderers to enrich themselves?

  The new infantry recruits seemed grateful to have found employment with Kurt’s company, not the richest guard unit, by any means, but one that seemed at least free of taint from this latest soul-killing crime. Moreover, Kurt, Baron von Wolfschild had forbidden any man to ask religious questions of any other. There would be none of that.

  Kurt watched the couriers gallop across a broad pasture, then ascend a rough, recently blazed trail over a shrubby hill, disappearing beyond the crest to where…

  The terrain beyond that point was stark in Kurt’s mind, if just out of sight. There, a new, shiny-smooth ridgeline jutted a few feet above the natural topography. A perfect circle, it seemed, a couple of imperial miles across, centered half a mile west of little Milda. Within, the pines and birches of Thuringia still trembled from recent disruption, in stark contrast to these slopes of cedar, cypress and scrub oak.

  Now that I think on it. This does resemble the Levant…

  From here, he could see the true extant of Milda’s plug, taken fiercely out of Germany. A large hill or small mountain loomed on the other side. There, the circle’s shiny-sheer boundary loomed above the plug, and even seemed to arc a little over one of Milda’s hamlets, surrounding the local mill.

  We’ll have to survey water sources, not only for drinking but to reestablish the pond and millrace, he pondered, then shook his head over the strangeness of such thoughts. Clearly, he was keeping a shocked mind busy with pragmatic fantasies, rather than grappling with what’s obvious…

  …for example, that the refugees below could only be another group of damned beings, like the hapless Germans who had come to join them, through Hell’s Mouth. This outer circle did not much resemble the description in Dante’s Inferno. But then, Kurt’s Latin had been rudimentary when he read it.

  At a cry, he turned his head to see young Samuel pointing south, not at the refugees but upslope-east a way, where clusters of figures—several score, at least—were descending rapidly from a rocky passage, perhaps a narrow pass through the hills. An ideal lair for bandits, he realized.

  Metal flashed in the sun. A woman screamed. Then another. And then several terrified men.

  My heart. Should it be racing like this, if I am already dead? How could a corpse or damned soul feel this familiar mixture—of fear, loathing and exhilaration—that sweeps over me, before combat?

  Hell or not, this situation offered a clear enough choice. Pure evil was afoot, and Kurt, Baron von Wolfschild had means at his disposal to deal with it. Indeed, he reckoned it unlikely that there was anything better to do.

  “Sergeant. Please get the infantry moving. Cavalry on me.

>   “Then have the bugler announce us.”

  * * *

  “Wow,” John Dennis Flannery said as he turned a page, and noted the hash or pound symbol “#” denoting a minor scene break, at exactly the right moment in this story. His left-hand prosthetic slipped and the sheet went floating off his desk…to be caught by the author, who gently placed it atop the pile, face down.

  “Wow,” John repeated. “It’s even better on second reading. The rhythms, the beat and tempo of prose. They’re…very modern.”

  “Modern, truly? Like fictions of the twentieth century? I am so glad. I tried to break so many down-time habits of what you call ‘flowery prose,’ concentrating instead upon the main character’s point of view.”

  “Right. The hardest thing for a novice to grok, even back in America. Point of view. Show us the world, the situation through your protagonist’s thoughts and senses. And especially through his assumptions. Things he takes for granted. Heinlein was the master of that technique.”

  “Yes, I studied and copied many of his story openings, until the method became clear to me.”

  “Only next you segue…” John used his right-hand claw to shift five more pages to the other pile…“into a seriously cool battle scene, during which the baron character coordinates his landsknecht cavalry and the Milda militia to defeat bandits bent on rape and murder. Thereby winning devotion from a few of the most important refugees. Of course anyone will recognize your inspiration.”

  “Of course. From the way Michael Stearns rallied his West Virginian mine workers to defeat a horde of Tilly’s raiders, thus earning the admiration of his future wife. Do…do you think the homage is too blatant?”

  “Who cares!” John shrugged. “It’s seriously good action!”

  “I am so relieved that you think so. I know that I can still be prolix and garrulous. For example in my prologue—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that.” John waved away the author’s concern. “Prologues are supposed to be like that. Heck, it will help prove that the creator was an authentic down-timer, and not Jason Glazer or me, ghost-writing it.

  “Still, what I want to know is how you picked up these techniques for point of view and action so quickly. How did you learn it all so fast?”

  John’s left hook clanked against his spectacles as he pushed them back a bit. They kept sliding down his nose and he wanted to see this fellow, who could be everything he and his partners were looking for.

  Don’t get your hopes up too high.

  “The boardinghouse here in Grantville where I am staying…the landlord has a complete collection of Analog magazine, which he guards like a wolfhound! But I talked him into letting me read selected stories. Eventually, he warmed to me and began enthusiastically choosing—even explaining—the best ones for me.”

  “Old Homer Snider, yeah. He makes me wear gloves when I come over to copy a story for the zine. He must really like you.”

  The author wasn’t wearing clerical garb, today. Just a down-time shirt and trousers, modeled on up-time jeans and a pullover.

  “I believe he sees me as a…convert.”

  “To science fiction?” John laughed. “Yeah. I guess there’s always been an aspect of proselytizing religion to—”

  He cut off abruptly with a sharp hiss, as pain lanced up his arms from the stumps at both ends. Vision blurred for a few seconds, till he found his visitor leaning over him.

  “Mein herr…Mr. Flannery. Shall I go for a doctor?”

  John shook his head. “No, just…give me a second. It always passes.”

  The author returned to his seat and pretended to be busy with papers from a leather valise, till John finally shifted in his chair with a sigh.

  “You can see why we’re subsidized by the state, and by the USE Veterans’ Foundation. A man who loses his legs can still do skilled tasks like machinery assembly. But a man without hands?” He lifted both arms, letting the question hang.

  “Intellectual pursuits, of course.” The visitor had a choked tightness in his throat.

  “It’s busy work.”

  “I beg to differ, Herr Flannery! What you are accomplishing, with your zine, is so much more than giving war amputees something to do!”

  He gestured past John’s office, piled high with manuscripts and proofs, toward the main workroom, where a dozen men and several women bustled about the tasks of a publishing house, one of just a few that had not moved from Grantville to the modern, bustling, capital city of Magdeburg. All but two of the staff bore major disabilities, yet hurried busily to meet deadlines.

  “Well, my own disaster wasn’t from battle, but a freak industrial…”

  “Perhaps, as an up-timer, you underestimate the powerful effects that this literature is having, across Europe and beyond. Except in countries where it has been banned, for the insidious, underlying assumption of science fiction, that change is a permanent fact of life! And that any child, of no matter what mean background, can become an agent of change. No, Herr Flannery. You are still potent. Your ‘hands’ now guide minds upward, gently pushing them to ponder how things might be different than they are!”

  “Well, that can be dangerous in these times. There are many out there, in both low and high places, who consider science fiction to be heretical, blasphemous, and radically revolutionary.”

  “Making you popular with the Committees of Correspondence, of course.”

  John shrugged. “A connection we don’t publicly encourage. We get more than enough death threats. And, only last month, a crude pipe bomb. Fortunately, we discovered it in time. Still, I try to open all the packages myself since, as you can see, I have little left to lose.”

  He lifted both prosthetics into the light.

  “Ah, but we shall soon put a stop to that!” commented a youthful voice from behind John. He turned to see Hercule Savinien casting a lanky shadow through the doorway. The sixteen-year-old editorial apprentice had survived Charles de La Porte’s futile infantry advance at the Battle of Ahrensbök, with only a severe limp, thanks to twentieth-century field medicine. He now flourished a poignard dagger of considerable heft.

  “An elegant blade like this may be obsolete for matters of honor,” the young man said, in thickly accented English. “But it still can suffice as a letter-opener!”

  John frowned, pretending more anger than he felt.

  “Hercule, go stick that prodigious proboscis of yours into someone else’s business. Unless you have some good reason to be bothering us?”

  The boy’s eyes flashed briefly with a mix of warning and fierce intelligence…but that heat swiftly lapsed into a tolerant grin.

  “Jason and Jean-Baptiste have galleys for the next issue ready, when monsieur l’editeur will deign to look them over.”

  “Hm. And I assume you already have?”

  “But of course.” A gallic shrug. “The usual mix of TwenCen reprints and hack melodramas from my fellow primitives of this benighted era, who could not emulate Delaney or Verne, if their very lives depended on a soupcon of creative verve. If you had any real taste, you might look closer to home. Possibly in-house, for—”

  “Your time will come. That is, if you drop some of your own preening pretentiousness. If you focus. Learn patience and craft, as the deacon here has done.” John gestured toward his guest. “Now get out!”

  Hercule Savinien’s grin only widened as he delivered a flourished bow that would have served in any royal court—though conveying a shameless touch of wry sarcasm—and departed. John stared after the apprentice for an instant, then shook his head. Turning back to the visitor, he carefully used the artificial gripper of his right-hand prosthetic to shift, then pluck up the next page of the manuscript, having to clear his throat, before he spoke.

  “Now, where were we? Ah, yes. What is…what’s so cool about this story of yours—unlike so much of the ‘sci-fi’ we get submitted here—is that you’ve taken a speculative premise based upon our own shocking and strangely transformed world, extra
polating it into a plausible thought experiment of your very own.

  “This notion, for example, that the Ring of Fire wasn’t a simple swap of two land-plugs, one of them shifting backward to become powerful and destiny-changing, while the other one, shifted forward to the year 2000, would be inherently harmless, pathetically unimportant…I never realized how smug that image was. How self-important and based on unwarranted assumptions.

  “In other words, how very American!” John laughed ruefully. “But you point out that it may not have been a swap, at all! It could instead be a chain. A sequence, shuttling a series of spheres of space-time ever-backward, one following the other, like—”

  He shook his head, unable to come up with a metaphor. The visitor nodded, though with some reticence.

  “At the Grantville high school, I never fail to attend Demonstration Tuesday. They once showed us a laser, whose magical medium is capped, at both ends, by inward facing mirrors. At the time, I was struck that perhaps the Ring of Fire was like such a device, only with destiny as the active medium…”

  “Whoa. What a way-cool idea!” John reached for his pencil with the special grip-end.

  “Only then, later the same night, it came to me in a dream…a dream that was so much more than…”

  The author paused, staring into space, then shook himself in order to resume. “Well, it came to me that perhaps there might be mirror after mirror, after mirror….”

  His voice trailed off again, as John scribbled.

  “Huh. Of course the implicit paradoxes abound. We’ve assumed that either Grantville’s arrival changed the former timeline, erasing and replacing the one we came from, or else it started a new, branching timestream that leaves the original one in place. The new one that received Grantville will gain advantages and get many boosts and head starts as a result, but also some losses. Either way, Grantville is making a huge difference.

  “In contrast, Milda Village would have very little impact, arriving in the year 2000—at most a few hundred confused villagers and traders, farmers and soldiers with antique weapons and antiquated technologies…