Grantville Gazette-Volume XIV

by Eric Flint

  "I hate this century," she said.

  Nothing was going according to Sunshine's plan. If it hadn't been for the Ring of Fire, she would be looking at colleges in sunny spots far away from Grantville and spending her weekends letting Phil Jenkins, who probably would have been a football star, take her out on dates.

  But Phil was gone on some adventure halfway around the world. Most of the guys already had girlfriends or the downtime equivalent of a girlfriend. Sunshine couldn't understand what the guys, especially the ones who were getting to be successful, could see in the local girls. Stupid peasants! Their clothes are so ugly and dull.

  Not a single one of those guys had paid any attention to her. Except Gary Rose, whose schoolboy crush she had tried to stamp out from the day she learned of it. Now, he might be her only hope to get out of the town and into someplace better . . . if he made it big selling plows.

  Sunshine couldn't help but laugh at that. Back up-time, football, baseball, and basketball stars were a girl's meal ticket out of town. But here, it was some geek who made plows or sewing machines. The irony hadn't escaped her.

  As she jogged down the street, she could hear some commotion over in Jost Neubert's shed. They're up early. I wonder what they're up to. She rounded the corner and started down the road that would take her into town.

  Sunshine was half a mile up the road when a bicycle rounded the hill she was heading up. She strained to see who the rider was, but the light on the front of the bike, combined with the pre-dawn twilight, made it difficult to see.

  When she was halfway up the hill, she finally recognized the rider. "Hey Gary!".

  The brakes on Gary's bike squealed as he came to a stop almost right in front of her. "Hey Sunshine," he said groggily. "How are you?"

  She flashed him a quick smile and tried to get a quick read on him. "I'm doing all right," she said. "What have you been up to?"

  ***

  Gary's sleep-deprived brain didn't know what to make of the situation. Sunshine had never been this nice to him. He yawned. "I've been busy. Jost and I are going to test my plow design today."

  "That's . . . cool," she said.

  There was an awkward pause after that, and Gary could see that she was looking for something to talk about. Instead of waiting in silence, he seized the initiative. "I'm sorry, but I really need to get going. I was supposed to be at the Neubert's five minutes ago."

  "Oh," she said. "Well, I guess I'll talk to you later." She started to run up the hill, but only got a couple of yards before she stopped. "I was wondering . . . if . . . you had anything planned this Friday night. Maybe we could go get a pizza or something?"

  "I can't. I promised Mina I would take her stargazing."

  "What about me? You used to . . ."

  Gary's old feelings for Sunshine started to surface. He wanted to express them, and for a split second, he wanted to forget about Mina and follow the girl he had pined over for years. But he couldn't. Mina was everything that Sunshine wasn't, and he didn't want to give that up for a girl who ignored him until he was worth something.

  He let the brake out and started to roll down the hill. "You had your chance," he said. "A lot of them. And now it's too late."

  March 1635

  "You wouldn't believe it, Jost," Gary said. "Ernst was great. He managed to sell three plows before he finished his demonstration. That's our fifth client so far this year, not including the tools he sold to the mining camps."

  "I told you he'd be a great asset to you," Jost said. "But we can talk business later. There is someone waiting for you upstairs."

  Gary didn't need to be told twice. He started to run.

  The door to her room was wide open, but her head was buried deep in a book. He waited there in the doorway for a while, a wide smile on his face. "Hey, you," he finally said.

  Mina's eyes opened as wide as he had ever seen them. She set her book down on the bed and nearly sprinted to the doorway. "Gary! When did you get back?"

  "Just a little while ago," he said. "I missed you."

  She kissed him. "I missed you too."

  ***

  Songs and Ballads

  Written by Virginia DeMarce

  Judith Roth claimed no expertise at the piano—only lessons from the seventh through the sixteenth years of her life. She had been profoundly grateful when the last teacher to whom she had been assigned at the Levine School of Music had concurred with her own assessment of her abilities and persuaded her father to let her pursue something "more in line with her natural aptitudes." He had suggested field hockey as a possibly more appropriate outlet for her talents.

  She had given their hardly-ever-touched spinet to the elementary school when they moved to Prague. Somewhere in her soul, she had rather hoped that she would never have to get up close and personal with a piano again.

  In spite of that, once Morris discovered that new pianos were being manufactured down-time, he had insisted on having one transported to Prague, along with Ingram Bledsoe to tune it once it arrived. Ingram stayed for two weeks, of which he twice spent four hours tuning the piano. To show some benefit from the rest of his time, he went home with orders for several more.

  So. She might as well get some use out of the thing. Looking out over the neat rows of tapestry-upholstered, lightly gilded, chairs in the salon, occupied by the leading women—or, sometimes, just by the wives of the leading men—of Prague's Jewish community, she decided that she might as well open the first session of "Introduction to the Jewish Culture of the Up-time United States of America."

  * * *

  "You're not really going to?" Morris came close to strangling on his pickled beets when she explained her plan.

  "I have to start somewhere. It's the only LP I can think of that every single one of our friends from Hillel in Morgantown owned. Well, we were on the tail end of the phenomenon. The album came out in 1962. Couples ten or fifteen years older than us tended to have everything that Sherman ever recorded and some pirated stuff from his nightclub acts."

  "That's pretty much the case."

  "I don't want to use just that one album. I'll do the 'Ballad of Harry Lewis,' of course, since it connects to both 'John Brown's Body' and 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.' And I have to have, 'Won't You Come Home, Disraeli.' How much of the lyrics do you remember? I can use that not just to talk about assimilation. It will also be a good lead-in for all of nineteenth-century British imperialism. Not to mention African-Americans and the blues. 'Harvey and Sheila.' Do they already sing 'Hava Nagila' down-time? Everything Sherman did is a classic, in its own way. Somewhere, I think, I used to have a privately made tape of his version of My Fair Lady. That would give us the whole Broadway musical scene to talk about. And the Borscht Belt."

  "I suppose." Morris put his knife down. "Maybe you can do 'You Went The Wrong Way, Old King Louie' for the CoC."

  * * *

  She had never taught anything like it before. Of course, she had never taught adults before. She had spent her career with first graders. The closest she had ever come to adult education was, really, parent-teacher conferences. And ladies' book clubs. But. . . .

  "Do you all have your hand-outs? If not, there are extra copies by the door. The text is in English, with

  translations in parallel columns. Thanks to my auxiliaries here in the household, the translations and annotations are available in Yiddish, German, and Ladino." She waited a moment while a few women got up and went back to the tables set next to the entrance. Then she sat down on the piano bench and, to her own accompaniment, rendered "Sir Greenbaum's Madrigal," sometimes known as "Sir Greenbaum's Lament" by Allan Sherman.

  ". . . that's no job for a boy who is Jewish . . .

  ". . . when I marry Miss Guinevere Schwartz . . ."

  * * *

  A month later, having covered to almost everyone's satisfaction the questions about Sherman's use of the English madrigal tune "Greensleeves," other derivative uses of the tune such as the SCA version, a brief intr
oduction to the Society for Creative Anachronism (to the accompaniment of many disbelieving exclamations), and why the name "Sir Greenbaum" was considered funny in itself, with excursuses into the history of the adoption of surnames by the Jewish population of the Germanies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they moved on. To the next verse.

  Judith had written up a short—relatively short, it amounted to about forty pages by the time she was done—synopsis of the Robin Hood ballads.

  So why, given that Robin Hood had been an archer, was there an armored knight in Sherwood Forest in the song?

  And why was the knight righteous? In what sense was he righteous? Was he righteous in that he kept the law perfectly? How could he keep the law perfectly while running around Sherwood Forest with a batch of gentile knights?

  There were no dragons in the Robin Hood ballads. Why were there dragons in this song? Why did he need to smite them? What was the place of dragons in the up-time fantasy tradition?

  With digressions ranging from Anne McCaffrey to Chinese art, Judith finally got dragons properly situated in the up-time fantasy tradition. Not without causing a great and unexpected demand for the Pern series in Prague. The printers, ever alert for a profit, were taking care of it.

  She breathed a sigh of relief as she prepared for the next of the weekly class sessions.

  The thought of Jewish knights continued to boggle their minds. A Jewish knight rescuing a fair maiden digressed into a discussion of Don Quixote that just would not quit.

  Sir Greenbaum's reluctance to be a knight boggled their minds even more. A world in which no one was outraged by the very idea of Jews as part of the chivalric world and . . . the young ingrate . . . he didn't like the job? Forlorn? Heavy laden heart? He objected? Just because of . . . aluminum pants?

  Hannah's husband had heard of aluminum. In fact, he had heard of Dr. Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz and his search for the perfect aluminum pyramid. He had heard of crystal therapy. Aromatherapy. He had heard of . . . a lot of things that Hannah had her doubts about. Hannah checked every single one of them out. At length.

  * * *

  Even with the translations, extensive annotations in regard to the topic of puns, and the fact that a lot of down-timers from King James I of England, now dead, to Margrave Christian of Bayreuth, still alive, were strongly opposed to tobacco, it still took a whole afternoon to explain the cultural context of, "Oh, would'st I could kick the habit, And give up smoting for good."

  * * *

  Shaker Heights. Judith had a coffee table book with some pictures of houses and lawns in Shaker Heights. It was in storage in Grantville, but she sent a letter to Gillian Chapman at the jewelry store, explaining which box it was in and asking her to dig it out and express it to Prague by courier.

  During the wait, she discussed resorts in the Catskills and Adirondacks. Because of Wallenstein's reforms, it was now legal for Jews to own real estate in Bohemia. Chava's uncle began to pursue a potential development in the Boehmerwald.

  Connections in dry goods were self-explanatory. Working for one's father-in-law turned out to be a universal trope that transcended time and place, from the days of Laban and his daughters to the present day that was Prague to the future that had been the twentieth century.

  But. . . . Where did Guinevere come from? She wasn't in the synopsis of the Robin Hood ballads. That involved King Arthur, and the knights of the round table. Would it really be acceptable to choose "Guinevere" as a gentile name for one's child? What about Arthur? Or Allan? Which necessarily brought up "Shake Hands with your Uncle Max" and plastics.

  Followed by an afternoon in the kitchen, with cheat sheet, demonstrating how easy it was to make casein boxes and buttons like those being manufactured in Jena. Followed by Jason Gotkin and a rabbinical delegation, worried about the kosher nature of items placed in casein boxes or fastened with casein buttons. And, shortly thereafter, by the appearance in Prague of three baby girls named "Pearl."

  The printers of Prague brought out A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

  Judith had expected one weekly class session for each song. "Sir Greenbaum's Madrigal" all by itself required six months of weekly class sessions.

  * * *

  Gitele, who had twenty-five years, four surviving children, and the best English in the room, had been reading ahead. She raised her hand. Judith nodded.

  "Do you perceive a teleological connection between the 'Granada' of this camp we will start studying next week and the Granada in Sepharad from which our people have been expelled?"

  Judith swallowed. She had never given any thought to teleological connections. She wasn't entirely sure what a teological connection might be and was pretty sure she wouldn't recognize one if she met it on the street.

  "Ah. None had previously occurred to me. I assure you that I will give the matter serious thought between now and the next meeting."

  Before . . . well . . . before anyone else could think of anything else, she added hastily, "Adjourned. Class dismissed. There are refreshments in the dining room."

  "With a Little Bit of Lox?" Gitele grinned.

  * * *

  The New Romantics

  Written by Kerryn Offord

  Grantville, February 1634

  Hazel Patton couldn't stand not knowing what the giggling was all about a moment longer. She poked her head around the corner to find three of her teacher trainees giggling over a book. Walking over to them she held out a hand for the book. Marcie Haggerty passed it over. Hazel sighed. It was by one of the worst of the up-time romantic novelists. Hazel absolutely refused to have her on the shelves of her personal collection. "Why are you wasting your time reading that rubbish?"

  "I wasn't reading it, Mrs. Patton."

  Hazel's raised her eyebrows.

  "Honest, Mrs. Patton, Anna and Elisabeth were asking about some of the descriptions of up-time culture. They wanted to know if . . ."

  Hazel held up her hands "I wouldn't trust anything that woman had to say about culture."

  "Well, no, neither would I. But they sold, Mrs. Patton. That's what I was telling Anna and Elisabeth. Up-time they published hundreds of her books. I suggested they should look at Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer if they wanted examples of good romances."

  Hazel looked at Anna and Elisabeth. "And why are you two so interested in good romances?"

  Anna bit her lips and looked guiltily at Hazel. "My cousin works for a printer. He says the romantic novels sell well. We want to try and write one."

  "You want to write a romantic novel?" Anna and Elisabeth nodded. Hazel checked Marcie. "And you? Are you trying to become the next best-selling author as well?"

  Marcie grinned. "I'd like the money, but it's not easy."

  Hazel settled her hands on her hips. "Of course it's not easy. They say write about what you know. What do you three know about romance?" Hazel stared at Marcie, daring her to claim she had experienced romance. Hazel knew all about young men, and romantic they weren't.

  "Could you help?" Marcie asked.

  Hazel froze. Then she smiled. Back up-time she'd often thought she could write a better story than some of books she received in those monthly bundles. "Yes, I very much think I can. Come round to my place after school and we'll start researching the good stories to see what makes them good."

  The Schmucker and Schwentzel Print Shop, April 1634

  Ursula Fröbel ran her red pencil through line after line of the reworked Abbreviated Manual of Statistical Principles. Pretty soon she had to stop to sharpen it again. Pen knife in hand she glared at the manuscript. Why can't the fool learn to listen to his editor?

  Ursula looked at the eight hundred odd pages yet to be reviewed and sighed. Now would be a very good time to take a break from editing Norris Craft's manuscript. She put it back into its envelope and tossed it into the pending basket. The way she was feeling about Herr Craft right now, it could go into the recycling bin, and to hell with the advance he'd already been paid. To t
ake her mind off the author from hell she turned to her in-basket. Maybe someone had come up with another good idea, like the Grantville Genealogy Club's suggestion that they write a Who's Who of up-timers who came through with the Ring of Fire.

  She sighed in fond remembrance. That had proven to be a real gem. They had sold out of the first print run of a thousand copies within the first week, and had done three more print runs since then. And unlike Norris Craft, the genealogical club had been happy to follow their editor's suggestions. But no, only a few bills and queries about advances on royalties populated the basket. That left the "lucky dip" of the "unsols," the unsolicited manuscripts. Why anybody would waste time and energy to write a manuscript without having a contract Ursula didn't know, but plenty of people did. Too many.