1634- the Galileo Affair

by Eric Flint

  "There is according to the Inquisition, seigneur. They fear that His Holiness will undertake to co-opt the Catholic presence in the United States of Europe to press further reforms in the Church. There is talk of correspondence already passing between Rome and Magdeburg."

  "Ah, so those rumors have reached Venice, have they?"

  "Seigneur?" Ducos inclined his head a little. It was rare that d'Avaux's factotum was caught by surprise.

  "A briefing at the highest level . . ." No sense in naming His Eminence. "I am given to understand that Mazarini made a number of trips to Grantville shortly after its appearance, and proceeded from his last trip there straight to Rome. It is also reported that the priest was moved to send a great deal of material to the Vatican, although we have been unable to discover precisely what. It centers on what the Americans claim is the future development of the Church, that much we do know. Doubtless the Holy Office is suitably concerned, since many of them in Italy are creatures of Spain, or at least under their direction."

  Ducos nodded. "They certainly wish Buckley to be silent, for the moment."

  D'Avaux smiled. "Well, if it assists in saving the Church from American heresy at the very highest level, I see no good reason why they should not be suitably obliged. See to it, Ducos."

  "As the Seigneur le Comte directs." Ducos acknowledged the order with a bow. "There is further intelligence," he went on. "I am informed that the Venetian Committee of Correspondence, such as it is, has some notion of taking further action over Galileo."

  "Further than printing copies of his book? How significant could they be, here in Venice?"

  "The seigneur is most perspicacious. Indeed, they are said to be a rather pathetic grouping. Not much more than one malcontent and his family. My assessment is that even with the aid of the youths with the American party they will proceed no further than making tedious speeches to each other in draughty rooms. But my informer tells me they are at least talking about a scheme to rescue Galileo from his impending trial."

  "Are they, now?" d'Avaux mused. "You say some American youths are involved with them? Is there not then an opportunity to further divide the Vatican from the Americans?"

  "As I observed to the seigneur, there is perhaps little prospect of these particular radicals taking any effective action. They are regarded as something of a joke by virtually every organ of the Venetian state and by the Holy Office."

  "And yet more unlikely groups have delivered themselves of great coups in the past, have they not?" D'Avaux stroked his beard, thinking furiously. "Are we certain that there are Americans with them?"

  "Yes, seigneur. The three sons of Doctor Stone. They have attended several meetings." Ducos was firm on this point.

  "Perhaps they might be impressed with the desire to proceed further?" D'Avaux could hardly hope for a result like that, although Ducos' resourcefulness had surprised him before. "Perhaps a new member with some spirit and drive, a spark of, dare I say, competence?"

  "If the seigneur gives leave, I might serve as such an agent provocateur, yes." The idea seemed to amuse the cold factotum, as much as anything did. "I regret I have no operative in Venice who would pass as a genuine adherent, not on such short notice."

  "So be it, then. Except I think that perhaps we might press them to go further than simply attempting to spirit Galileo away. The first objection to any such accusation would be that the Americans had sent an advocate to the trial and would hardly cheat themselves of victory. I feel sure that so radical and dangerous a group must be plotting some greater outrage against a prince of the church. Perhaps—perish the very thought—another plot against His Holiness' life?"

  "Perhaps, Seigneur le Comte. But again, I would suggest that such a plot might not be considered very credible, even compared with the last such. These are not hardened revolutionists, seigneur, but a small group of wild-eyed artisans and rebellious youths. Competence is not easily to be found among them."

  "True," reflected d'Avaux. Indeed, the last publicized plot on the pope's life had been a farce, an attempt to do him to death with image magic, sticking pins in a doll dressed as the pope. "Nevertheless, if we add a soupçon of competence to their armory?"

  "I still hold out no great hope of success, seigneur." Ducos sounded almost disappointed.

  "That will not be necessary, Ducos. Simply a spirited effort will do. All I ask is that they appear to have intended a prominent outrage. For our purposes, a near thing will be better since it will achieve all of our aims without bloodshed."

  "Yes, Seigneur le Comte. With your permission, I shall be about it. You understand, this will almost certainly require me to absent myself from Venice?"

  D'Avaux nodded and waved him away. He steeled himself to do without his factotum for a few weeks. In some ways, that would be a relief. Having Ducos around was more than a bit like having a mad dog on a leash. Taxing to the spirit.

  * * *

  D'Avaux's spirit would have been considerably more taxed had he seen the smile on Ducos' face after his factotum left the comte's chamber. All of Ducos' careful planning had finally come to fruition. Every piece of his scheme, finally in its place.

  The smile of a man, finally slipping the leash.

  Part IV: April, 1634

  —and if she let

  Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

  Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,

  —E'en then would be some stooping, and I choose

  Never to stoop.

  Chapter 29

  Stoner began to realize, as he stared at the forbidding stack of documents in front of him, the truth of two essential propositions.

  First, that there was a very real value in the rejection of materialism, which was that it saved you a lot of work.

  The second was that a cheerful willingness to be helpful was going to get taken cheerful advantage of sooner or later.

  Magda and Sharon and Benjamin Luzzatto had come in grinning from ear to ear. Well, Sharon was grinning from ear to ear, Magda was smiling demurely and Benjamin was wearing his professional po-face with a hint of cheer. It didn't matter. Sharon was grinning enough for seven or eight people, let alone three.

  "We have been shopping," Magda said brightly.

  "Exactly," Sharon added, "when the going gets tough, the tough go—"

  "—shopping," Stoner capped the quotation, just as he went weak at the knees because Benjamin had produced what looked like about thirty kilos of paper and actual by-God parchment, done up in no-messing-around by-God red tape. He dropped the package on the table with an expensive-sounding thud.

  Benjamin then cracked a smile himself. "We have been very busy, but we need some signatures and seals to make it proper and legal."

  Stoner looked from the paperwork to the short, bright-eyed Jewish lawyer and commercial agent. And back again. And back to Benjamin. At least Benjamin wasn't grinning his head off, although Stoner suspected that was because he took money seriously and not because he wanted to help Stoner mourn his final passage into the world of bread-headdity. Nevertheless, the sight of a lawyer, smiling—even a short, runty, friendly one like Benjamin—would normally have sent Stoner diving through the window into the canal. Had Benjamin been grinning as widely and sharkily as Sharon was doing, he doubted whether he'd have bothered to open the window first.

  "So, what is all this?" he asked, gesturing weakly.

  "Money," said Magda, uttering the code-word that told him to more or less leave it to her. "And commodities for all of the industries at home, and some other deals to make it all work."

  "All this just to buy stuff?" he asked, fishing for a full explanation of some kind. He supposed short words and a diagram were too much to hope for . . .

  "Ah," said Benjamin. "I have here—" He reached inside his kaftan. Benjamin sometimes found it convenient to get by in Venice by dressing as a Turk rather than wearing the distinguishing marks of his Jewish faith, and the Venetian authorities seemed willing to tolerate the minor s
ubterfuge as long as he didn't overdo it. Stoner didn't understand the social complexities involved in the little dance, but he always found that garment a bit amusing. The garb of a hippie back up-time had originally been the garb of a rich Muslim.

  What wasn't so amusing was what Benjamin was pulling out. Stoner felt his heart sink as Benjamin produced one of Grantville's precious stock of laptops. Powerpoint slides and spreadsheets had been treated as the direct Word of God by every seventeenth-century businessman who had arrived in Grantville. The Sephardim, though, had been particularly enthusiastic; the Viennese scion of the Abrabanel clan, Don Moses, was widely known as a slideshow bore of truly terrifying proportions. Stoner held up his hands. "Benjamin, can I just have the edited highlights?"

  Benjamin looked perplexed. "Signor Stone, all of it is important. And the Signora Stone, she has made some most excellent trades in your behalf. There is, first the share in the Mocenigo fleet to—"

  Sharon put a hand on Benjamin's shoulder and the birdy little lawyer ran down to a halt. Stoner realized, with the first spark of joy he had felt since the three of them had walked in, that she was genuinely, freely grinning, not just keeping her end up for company.

  "Stoner," she said, "it breaks down nice and simple. We sold shares in all the potential mines that our exploratory crews have been finding. We sold metals futures in the mines that are ready to start producing this year. King Gustav's copper concessionaires have been coming through us for the Mediterranean market because we agreed to work—what was it, Benjamin?"

  "Del Credere," said Benjamin.

  "Del Credere, and maybe I'll explain that later. But we got a few good copper contracts and beat the price up here, which made our friend in Bohemia sweat a bit. He sent a couple of angry messages saying that we were messing up the market deliberately. I understand a number of folks back in Magdeburg told him not to be such a baby. Anyway, that's as may be. Once we started shifting the copper here, and the mining shares in all manner of other things, we had some seed capital and took up a number of margin loans to get into the serious action—"

  Stoner sank down to sit cross-legged on the floorboards, feeling rather the way he did after a good deep toke: a little dizzy with hypoxia before the real rush hit.

  "I surrender," he said in a weak voice. Then, more firmly: "How much of the stuff on the list could you get? You've been at this for nearly two months, but we haven't had anything delivered yet—"

  He looked up, from face to face. He couldn't quite read the expressions. "What?"

  Silence. First Sharon, then Magda, and finally Benjamin picked a chair and sat down. Looking harder, Stoner saw that Benjamin was looking faintly pleased with himself, but was waiting for his clients to talk. Magda looked like she had gotten the cream, and was now smiling as widely as a properly-brought-up guildmaster's daughter could. Sharon was back to grinning like a maniac.

  "What?" Stoner asked again. The grin was proving infectious, although he didn't know why.

  "Well, you know that the biggest item on the list was the hundredweight of lac?" Sharon asked.

  "That wasn't one of mine," Stoner said, "but, like, I'll take your word for it."

  "Well, we went for that one first and found a place downtown that had some."

  Magda sniffed. "That man was no gentleman." She uttered the phrase with the same tone and spin and venom some people used for the phrase baby-eating satanist.

  Sharon snorted. "The jerk told Benjamin that if his clients wanted a hundred pounds of anything but spice we could buy retail like the other peasants."

  "Ha!" Magda said. "Sharon does the poltroon too much justice. He used coarse language as well."

  Sharon looked hard at Magda.

  Magda looked back, perfectly calmly. "Well, I know what that word meant in Latin, and from the tone of voice he used I presumed he meant it in Venetian."

  "Oh," said Sharon, evidently surprised.

  Stoner wasn't; sufficiently riled, Magda could take the hide off a wild boar with her language, much of it from the classics at that.

  "Anyway," Sharon went on, "I said to Benjamin that we should buy in bulk and from source if we could."

  Benjamin nodded. "The signoras were mostly insistent that we not deal through that house for anything. Naturally, I was proactive on my clients' behalf."

  Stoner wondered if his wince had shown. Laptops and PowerPoint weren't the only things that the Istanbul Sephardim—and, apparently their Spanish and Italian cousins—had taken to. Godawful MBA-speak was catching among them like the clap in a whorehouse. Stoner recalled discussing that with Sharon's dad, Doctor Nichols. The good doctor's theory was that the Abrabanels had gone over Grantville's limited stock of legal and financial textbooks looking for any tricks they had missed. Whatever else they had found in the course of those studies, they had been particularly taken by the management jargon. The fact that they seemed to have an eye for the most anus-clenching excesses was, Doctor Nichols reckoned, their big joke at the expense of the twentieth century that most of the up-timers hadn't gotten yet.

  Stoner saw that there was a question expected of him at this point. "So, what did you do?"

  Sharon put an arm around Benjamin, who looked briefly alarmed and then appeared to force himself to relax. "Benjamin was magnificent," she said. "We spent a couple of days over in the ghetto picking up local information and making contacts, getting notes of introduction, that kind of thing. And then we went shopping. You see, Stoner, this is one of those towns where they don't make much of anything except the glass, which I'll tell you about, but they do make deals. You should take a walk through the Rialto sometime, it's wall-to-wall deals."

  "I, uh, heard."

  "Yeah, and part of it was all of those shares you got."

  "What? What shares?"

  Magda sighed, and she and Sharon looked at each other. Magda looked hard at Stoner. "You recall that you have been giving lectures and seminars on alchemy and physic—?"

  Stoner leapt to his feet. "Now hold on—you charged admission?" He realized as the words escaped that he had raised his voice. He took a deep breath. "Guys, I'm sorry and all for shouting, but I wouldn't have agreed to that."

  Magda was first to get over the shock of Stoner looking angry. "No, Tom, schatz, we did no such thing!" Stoner could see that she was a little upset that he might have thought so.

  "That's right," said Sharon. "It's just that when all those guys were asking to hire you on as a consultant, Magda was getting you stock deals instead of just the flat fees they were offering."

  "Eh? They have those here and now?" Stoner had hardly been up to speed with capitalism as she was spoke in the twentieth century, let alone the seventeenth.

  "Oh, indeed, Signor Stone," said Benjamin, drawing breath for what promised to be a serious lecture. "You see, we have had partnerships and anonymous societies and joint-stock companies for many, many years now and there are—"

  Stoner laughed. "Benjamin, please! Have mercy, man. Even if you explain it in short words I'm not going to grok it, okay?"

  Benjamin frowned the uncomprehending frown of someone whose learning of the English language had missed the word "grok" entirely. But he did shut up.

  "So, what now?" Stoner asked into the ensuing silence. "You got me a bunch of stocks. So. I just wait for my 401-K to mature?"

  Only Sharon got that, of course. "What we did was a hair less formal there, Stoner. We got everyone we had stock in to pool their buying through us, and that got us some excellent deals. They're all acting like our subsidiaries now, one big corporate group rather than a lot of little businesses that just feed their margins to middlemen. With which, I might add, this town is infested."

  Benjamin didn't even twitch.

  Stoner mentally vibed some respect for Benjamin; the poor guy had spent weeks in the company of two of the hardest chicks in Venice right now, and he still seemed to have it all together.

  Speaking of which, Stoner realized, he'd better take some positive actio
n before his old lady lost all respect for him. "So, all I gotta do is sign?" Stoner levered himself to his feet and reached across the table for a pen. "Is there a downside?" he asked, poised to sign the first paper. He grinned, trying to disarm his pretense at shrewdness.

  "Um, well—" Sharon looked at Benjamin, "do I have this right, Benjamin, that if we lose everything—"

  "This would be difficult, Signora Nichols. Very difficult, as we have interests in four fleets and nearly thirty ships."

  "Yes, but—" said Stoner, realizing that Sharon probably needed this, since she was in as clear a case of done-deal euphoria as Stoner had ever seen.

  "Don't worry," said Sharon, "it's hardly likely to happen. Thirty ships, all in different parts of the world sailing at different times. They can't all sink at once. Anyway, even if it all drops in the pot, we've got so many people in this town tied up in our deals that they'd never . . ." Sharon trailed off.

  "What?" By now, Stoner was fairly sure that he had punctured the balloon a bit, but he still wanted to know what the downside really was. "What do we do if we lose everything?"

  "Get imprisoned for debt."

  "Oh. Is that all?" Stoner immediately began to sign and seal where Benjamin had penciled for him to do so.

  As he did, he mentally counted off, and was up to twenty-eight before Sharon spoke up.

  "You don't mind?" she asked, apparently surprised.

  "Nope," Stoner said, pressing his Deadhead signet ring into soft wax.

  "Nope?"

  "Nope." Stoner was gratified that Magda hadn't been suckered. "How long do you think I've been in business, Miss Boojwah Nichols? You think the old hippie gets confused and scared around bread?"

  "Uh—" was all Sharon could manage.

  Stoner found this helpful, when Magda made him turn out to do business that she needed his face or signature at. Everyone expected Magda to be ruthless. When he did it, though, the shock somehow made it more effective. He finished the last indenture, and straightened up to look straight at Sharon. "Pain," he said.