by Eric Flint
"Y'see," he went on, "I figure never to need any of this stuff. On the other hand, I figure Darryl figured on that, too, and look where he ended up." He paused. "I sure wish I knew what that guy is doing, still locked up in the Tower. I figured he'd have taken it on the lam by now, but maybe he's waiting for—"
"Gerry!" Frank said, pointing. "The bag?"
Gerry visibly wrenched his train of thought back off the track of the mayhem he was missing elsewhere. "What? Oh, sure. The bag. Well, lessee now. We got pistols, six of, modern, for the three of us. Well, not 'modern' modern; I mean state-of-the-art seventeenth-century-style flintlocks. Made by the fellers good old Mister Santee is trainin' up. They're small and look down-time, only they got rifling and they take minie balls. To look at, nothing much, but way better than anything here and they don't say up-time to anyone who sees 'em."
"Messer Gerry?" Giovanna interrupted, "those English words you used? 'Up-time'? 'Down-time'?"
"Oh, sorry," Gerry said. "Up-time is anyone from the twenty-first century. Americans, like us. Down-time means everyone else."
Giovanna nodded. Frank found the effect distracting. Somehow a girl could be a lot sexier buttoned up to the collar than in shorts and a T-shirt. It was all very mysterious. He could see out of the corner of his eye that Ron was not paying a whit of attention to their brother Gerry. It was a mercy his tongue wasn't hanging out.
"Anyway," Gerry was continuing, "we got some explosives and detonators, slowmatch, some corned power for reloads, rope, some tools for bullet-making—oh, and that reminds me, Captain Lennox let me put the ammo crate on the Marines' packhorse, I gotta collect that later."
"Eh?" Frank said. "How much ammo did you bring?" He was surprised that Gerry had brought more than three guns. Still another surprise was that he'd brought enough ammo to show he was expecting to use them seriously, because Gerry wasn't anyone's notion of a good shot. Some plinking and a few sessions with borrowed pistols was all the practice he'd had. Gerry's talents ran more toward pyrotechnic pranks, booby traps and practical jokes. It seemed that Gerry was forgetting that he'd been raised on a hippie commune, not in the hillbilly-hard-ass school that had turned out the likes of Harry Lefferts and Darryl McCarthy. It was kind of sad to watch.
"Just a couple of boxes for the pistols, mostly the special bullets. We can buy powder here, but obviously we won't find any minie balls. I got some sulfa drugs, too. Dad's shop is turning that stuff out at a pretty good clip nowadays, and I figure it'll be a while before we can get set up to do the same down here. Wish it was as easy to make chloramphenicol." He seemed wholly matter-of-fact about it.
Ron beat Frank to it. "Gerry? Are you expecting to fight a war or something?"
That made two mental sighs of relief for Frank. First, that if Ron was spotting it as well, Gerry was clearly off the deep end. And, second, that Ron was finally paying attention to his surroundings and not just drooling down his shirtfront.
"Yeah," said Frank, "hadn't you noticed we have Marines along to do that sort of thing? Like, professional soldiers? Remember? Big, gloomy Scots guys on horses?"
Gerry waved a hand. "Sure, sure. Though Billy's as American as you and me and I'd hardly call Conrad a 'Scot,' much less 'gloomy.' But like I say, better to have and not need, than—"
"Whatever," said Frank, exasperated. "What else'd you bring, Rambo? Nerve gas? Nukes? Punjee sticks?"
"Mock all you want, flower-child." Gerry said it flatly.
Frank could feel the mood turning ugly. All three of them had had to listen to talk like that back up-time, and had gotten a rep for the elaborate revenges they humiliated the offending jocks with. Hearing it from his own brother was . . .
He forced it down. "Cool it, okay, man? Just because I think you're overdoing it, no need to get heavy, all right? Just my opinion, is all."
Gerry took the hint. "Ah," he said. "Mayhem is still on the menu, which is, like a bummer. But the whole destruction trip is just outsville. Because, like, I brought this, in case it turned out this was the bag we were all, like, into, maaan."
He reached into the bag with both hands, grunted a little, and lifted out an oblong steel box with snap-catches holding it shut and wire handles at either end. It was army surplus, and at one time it had been painted olive drab which, along with the rust, still showed through in a few places. Most of it was covered in flowers and peace signs and a really drunken-looking mandala painted on in lurid enamel paint. The lid had Make love, Not war scrawled on it in bright orange balloon script.
"Cool," said Ron.
"Heaveeeee," added Frank, giving the voice everything he had before realizing that Giovanna was now looking at all of them funny.
"Yup." Gerry patted the lid of the box gently, grinning from ear to ear. "I brung the Hippie Flower Child Peace and Love Revenge Kit."
Frank nodded, savoring the memory of some truly outstanding pranks. In the years before the Ring of Fire, they'd often enough been confusion to the jocks. "The Lothlorien Hippie Ninja clan is once again ready to wreak havoc in the darkness." He turned to Giovanna. "On no account open that box."
"Please, why?" She looked worried.
"Because, milady," Gerry said, "this box contains everything you need to embarrass and humiliate anyone who annoys you. We are highly trained and highly motivated pranksters, and this box contains the old standards of our repertoire. Guys, it's all in working order, and what with Dad opening his lab I added a few new items."
The new items probably didn't include nitro, or the box would have exploded already. On the other hand, Gerry was inventive, smart, and had a mean streak in him to reckon with. Frank decided it was time to introduce calm and relaxation. "Say," he said, "now we've made out like we're a crew of madmen, where's the Freedom Arches in this town? Any chance of a few beers?"
Giovanna smiled. "No Freedom Arches in Venice! Not with the heel of the Council of Ten on the necks of the populace."
The words were said lightly, though, not with a snarl. Frank had learned enough of Venetian politics to know that the secret police of the Senate's clandestine governing body were nobody to fool with. On the other hand, they seemed to be more concerned with plots among the nobility than with the doings of Venice's working population. Not surprising, that. The artisans of Venice—especially the workers at the Arsenal—had a rather fearsome reputation themselves, and the Venetian powers-that-be had always been careful not to aggravate them.
Giovanna's smile kept widening and Frank found himself no longer thinking of politics at all. For a wonder, the girl even had straight teeth! Dimples!
He was lost, lost.
"We are free of our duties for the day at sunset—and it is Carnevale!" she announced. "We can meet my father and brothers and cousins at one of the taverna. I know which one they will be at, too, because it is right here in the palazzo."
Lost. And didn't care in the least. Even the prospect of meeting Giovanna's father and brothers on their first not-date didn't faze him at all.
"Frank?" said Gerry. "Do you have a problem with that?"
Frank frowned. "Problem?" How could there be any problems on this most sublime of all days?
"Astlay imetay ouyay amecay omehay unkdray, Frank," Ron said in a sing-song voice. "Aren't you going to have to speak with Dad about that?"
"Ah," Frank said. "No biggie. Dad calmed down, and I think you'll notice he didn't mind us staying up on the way down here as long as we were with Father Gus."
"Oh, yeah." Ron nodded. He could see the plan, right enough.
"Guys?" Gerry was looking worried. "If this is going to be anything like—like—" He gave Giovanna a nervous glance. "I mean like a date—"
Now the nervous glance came to Frank. "Okay, dates, I'm not trying to horn in on you but aybemay eshay's otgay riendsfay—I'd like not to bring the priest, okay?"
Giovanna was frowning. "I don't understand some of those words. But if you want me to give you dates, I warn you it is expensive. How much money you have?"
/> All three Stone brothers stared at her. Frank's heart stopped. The girl he was completely fascinated with—practically the love of his life already—turned out to be a prostitute!
She spread her hands, a bit exasperated. "What you expect? Dates have to be imported into Venice. From the Levant, I think."
Frank's heart started up again.
"Now, Gerry," said Ron, "leave it to your big brothers to be ahead of this situation. If Frank's thinking what I think he's thinking, I think we're thinking of the same plan." To Giovanna, he added: "Uh, the word 'dates' is just a slang expression. We'll explain it later. It's, uh, complicated. But it doesn't mean those fig things."
Gerry stroked his chin theatrically. "Hmmm. I think I think that I'm thinking what I think you're thinking, Frank, I really think so."
"Then you don't exist," said Frank firmly, "on the best authority, Descartes himself—who's still alive, remember—and so your opinion can and should be discarded. Just try and keep up, okay?"
"We are done here, yes?" asked Giovanna. "When can we go to the taverna?"
Frank hesitated. "Well . . . We won't be unpacking any of the stuff for the pharmaceutical lab today. Dad told me he wanted to make sure we had a safe place to set it up first. But I promised Magda we'd go help them get moved in downstairs and we'll probably run into Father Gus while we're down there. Giovanna, I suspect it's where you're going to get sent next anyway. Our stepmom travels with enough stuff for a medium-sized army and it'll take some doing to get them squared away. Sharon's no piker either, widder's weeds or not."
Giovanna tilted her head on one side. "What is a 'piker' and a 'widder' and why would either of them want weeds? Your father is the buon Dottore, yes?"
"Uh, yeah—but he's a chemist, not a doctor."
Giovanna frowned. "We were told that Tomas Stone was a maker of medicine, the Indian Hemp?"
"Well, yes, he makes medicines, and he sets bones and some other simple stuff, but he's not what you'd call a doctor. Sharon Nichols is really the Dottore in our delegation—uh, I think that should be Dottoressa, actually."
That made her eyebrows shoot up. She rattled off something in Italian that Frank couldn't follow at all.
"What? I mean, please say that again, slower?"
Giovanna tried it in English. "You have a lot of doctors—even female ones—that your father seems like nothing special?"
"Uh, I guess," said Frank, unsure where this was leading.
"From what we hear, you see, he makes physics and medicines that are better than anything we have ever known. The mist that kills lice—the diditi, I think it is called—and the specific against all illnesses, the clorfeniculo—"
"Chloramphenicol," Ron said.
"Si—chlorafenico, we hear that your father makes all these."
"He makes some other stuff, too," Frank said. His father would want to be modest, but Frank thought he overdid it. "He makes hash for pain, and some disinfectants and some herbal medicines. He consults for some of the other chemists on the drugs they make. Dad knows a fair bit about making medicines, but it's not what he does for money." He scratched his head a moment. "I guess you could say he's the best . . ." He searched for the word in Italian, but couldn't find it. "—drug-maker in Grantville, but that's practical industrial chemistry. He's one of the two with the theoretical training to understand how it all works, though. Dad's good at research." He grinned. "You won't get what this means, but he made LSD in the sixties."
"No," said Giovanna, looking thoughtful, "I do not know what it means. Do I need to?"
Frank exchanged a look with Gerry and Ron. "On the whole," he said, "I don't think you do. Let's just say it was a hard thing to do, and he did it. Now he makes dye and disinfectant and some other things. Yes, and medicines."
"Anyway," said Gerry, "what were you saying about Dad?"
"Oh," said Giovanna, "only that it is always the way with the natural philosophers that they have a huge amount of baggage. There are many in town, and we have been working in many places that have needed extra chambermaids, and we see a lot."
Frank nodded. "True enough. So let's go see how they're getting on."
Chapter 11
"Tom?" Mazzare put his head around the door. Within was the kind of controlled chaos that Tom Stone either liked or just seemed to generate by his mere presence. The man still clung firmly to his relaxed sixties-era hippie ethics, principles and aesthetics—although he now owned the biggest and most profitable coal-tar dye works in Europe.
Which was to say, the only one. So far, at least. Years of recreational pharmacology on top of a nearly completed masters' degree in the real thing made Tom Stone—also known as Stoner, for reasons that were not hard to deduce—the leading research, industrial and medical chemist in seventeenth-century Europe, if not the world. Not much in the way of spectacular dyeing chemistry was "scheduled by history" to happen until after the Napoleonic period—which meant that Stoner had better than a two-century lead on his competition. In their old timeline, dyes along with soaps had been the first real make-money-hand-over-fist branches of chemistry. So Stoner had a very profitable business ready-made once circumstances—and Magda and her money-minded father—had rubbed his nose in it.
For that matter, the man could probably be making a second fortune in pharmaceuticals, since he was also the principal manufacturer of the new medicines the Americans had introduced into the world. But on that subject, Tom Stone had drawn the line—quite firmly, too, despite the mild squawks of his wife and the loud splutters of protest from his father-in-law.
Medicines, Tom Stone made at cost—and, even there, tried as much as possible to cover his costs through barter rather than money. Given that the electricity he used that was produced by Grantville's huge power plant was essentially free anyway—the power plant produced far more electricity than Grantville could possibly use—he was in effect subsidizing his own pharmaceutical business.
As Tom Stone put it, he was not about to become a bloodsucker on the misery of others. Just about everyone agreed with Stoner's wife and father-in-law that he was a hopelessly impractical man, to be sure. But it was no accident that he was also becoming one of the most popular people in central Europe, especially with the poor German immigrants who were still flooding into Thuringia. If anything, he was even more highly regarded by the rapidly growing population of Magdeburg, the new capital of the United States of Europe rising out of the ruins on the Elbe.
There was even a rumor that one village in Catholic Franconia was petitioning the pope to declare him a saint. Not even a rumor, really—Father Mazzare knew it was true, although he'd seen fit to keep the knowledge to himself. No point in disappointing the villagers prematurely, he felt, with such picayune details as the fact that canonization was reserved for dead people. And had never been extended to someone who was not only not a Catholic but whose religion—such as it was—revolved largely around mandalas and alternative states of mind.
"Tom?" the priest repeated.
Again, Stone didn't hear him. Mazzare wasn't surprised. Frau Stone was somewhere in the background marshalling Frank, Gerry and Ron, a couple of shanghaied soldiers and what looked like a platoon of chambermaids—where had they come from?—into arranging the medical mission's quarters. Although more of a bluestocking than Hanni, Magda conceded the dreadnought-class hausfrau nothing in haus-pride.
Tom stood in the middle of it all holding a small stack of books with the air of a man who would definitely remember where he meant to put them in but a moment. He regarded his wife's drill-mastering of the all-out effort to get order out of chaos with blatant bemusement. He had explained to Mazzare, once, that chaos was not always disorder and dirt not necessarily mess. The natural order of things, per good organic principles, could be persuaded to suck in the gut and make itself useful, but could never be hammered into line.
Magda hewed to a different line, though. The "hash ranch" as the Lothlorien Commune was oft known had looked uncommonly neat and ti
dy since she moved in.
Finally, Stoner saw Mazzare standing in the doorway. "Hi, Father!" Tom called out, his face a sudden plea for rescue.
Mazzare repressed a smile. "Tom, could I have a word?" He led a relieved Stoner out into the corridor.
Stoner closed the door behind him, leaned on it and sighed, then shook his shaggy head. His hair was graying now, but just as thick and bushy and disheveled as it had always been. "I had me some bizarre domestic arrangements in my time, man, but this just about beats them all. I am o-fish-ully boor-jwah now, henpecked and everything."
"Stoner, that's kind of why I'm here to talk to you."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, it's Hanni." Mazzare chewed his lip a moment. "I, ah, promised her—"
Stoner frowned. "The boys were saying that they might go out for a drink or two with Gus, after he dropped by. I kind of wondered."
Mazzare nodded. It was no wonder Stoner knew. News from Hanni tended to get around fast, and everyone knew Father Heinzerling. It was obvious to anyone with more brains than God gave a rabbit what he suffered from, as well. Even by the standards of a time when drunkenness was the norm, Gus could put it away. And, left to his own devices, he did. It was Mazzare's guess that without Hanni all these years, he would have wrecked himself long since. Not as fast, perhaps, as he would have without Jesuit discipline, but still wrecked. For all his playing of the long-suffering henpecked husband, he actually clung to Hanni like the rock she was.
"Tom," he said, "I promised Hanni I wouldn't let Gus hit the sauce too hard. Now, I persuaded him to persuade the boys to cool it for a few days, since I'm sure they're planning to contact the CoC here in Venice—small as it probably is—but I don't think it makes sense to keep everyone grounded for the duration."
Tom smiled. "Wouldn't work, anyway. Not with my kids. Chips off the old block."
Mazzare managed not to wince. "So, could you ask the boys to keep an eye on Gus? Keep him talking, at least, since that seems to keep him from drinking so much?"
