by Eric Flint
"Pain?" Sharon was the only one of the three to say anything, but the looks Stoner was getting from the other two clearly implied the question.
"Pain," Stoner repeated, as the text of a little sermon he hadn't given in a long, long time.
"You see," he said, straightening the pile of documents and shoving it across the table to Benjamin, "all of this stuff is about pain and when and how we can inflict it. It's the big problem we all have—uh, we all had, I should say, back up-time with the bread-heads and money and all that junk. Every one of those contracts was just a charter for pain and sadism."
He let that one linger a moment.
"Run that by me again?" Sharon said, wearing a grin that had definite undertones of I'll keep him talking, someone call the guys in the white coats.
"It's simple, Sharon. Guys like Benjamin here write a whole bunch of stuff down about what the deal is, and we call it a contract, which is just a deal written down on paper or whatever. But because of this insubstantial substance we call law—ha! and they called me an impractical flower-child who believed in mystical nonsense—the deal becomes stupid serious and metaphysical instead of just a simple matter of trust and friendship."
Sharon frowned. "Well, you've got to make busting a deal more painful than keeping to it, or—"
"Or what?" Stoner demanded. "Outbreaks of gratuitous promise-breaking and other asshole behavior everywhere? Sharon, if I bought that depravity of mankind propaganda I never would have started in a commune in the first place, much less stuck with it. It's just pain-worship, that's all it is; totem and taboo; superstitious dancing before golden idols. I've had nothing but contempt for most of this stuff since, oh, before you were born, and so it doesn't surprise me that debtor's prison is a lot nearer the surface here in the down-time. It's the same deal, it's just in the shop window instead of out back for the special customers."
Stoner looked around the room again. Benjamin's face had gone very professional indeed. Magda was used to his foibles, and was giving him a look that promised a pleasant rebuttal later. Sharon's grin was now just relaxed. She obviously still thought he was nuts, but wasn't looking over her shoulder for the guys in the white coats.
"So, let's recap some, hey, guys? Stoner said. "We've got, what, all the feedstocks that the guys back at Grantville wanted?"
"Yes. The people who wanted zinc will be pleased in particular," said Magda. "We will have two hundred tons of Japanese zinc within a year of midsummer's day."
"Oh." He wasn't too thrilled to hear that. Zinc was handy stuff, all right, but Stoner wondered about the market for galvanized buckets in a time that still had as many coopers as it did. Of course, the stuff could be used for making brass and batteries too, but—he bit down, hard. It was nearly a year and a half before that zinc arrived, and a lot could happen in that time.
"What else?" he asked, in lieu of the rant he could feel building. "Or, perhaps you should say what we didn't get?"
"Well, thorium," said Sharon. "We're probably going to have trouble with the borax, too. The Turks seem to be the only ones who've got it, and they're not being real friendly so far."
"Right," said Stoner, "that's not actually much of a downside, is it?" Apart, he thought, from all that goddammed zinc.
"We have done well, I think," said Magda. "The telephone people are particularly pleased that we were able to source good English graphite, they thought there was not any. Sharon saw it in a pencil from Naples, and asked around about where it came from, and it seems that we should have been asking for wad from England. We have ordered much of that. We also have much lac coming from India, which will come soon. There was a difference between what they said that they needed and what was the smallest lot we could buy. So we have sent a trade fleet with English fustians—"
"What?"
"Cloth," Magda explained, "made with wool and cotton, and woven in the north of England. The return trip will bring batiks and spices and some other things we can sell on for profit."
"Some of the phone stuff," Sharon interjected, "we got right here in Venice. All of the insulators are being made in Murano, just across the lagoon. They're doing them to quality standards to train apprentices, they said, rather than working to the tolerances that the people at Prague said would do." She smiled. "I sent a wireless message to Tanner and Ellie telling them about the tolerances we'd gotten on the samples, and they sent back asking how we'd mechanized so quickly."
Stoner nodded. He'd been surprised himself a few times by that sort of thing, since he'd assumed that craftsmen around Thuringia from whom he'd ordered glasswork for the dye factory could do quality or volume but not both, and been pleasantly surprised. Of course, if you watched how fast a competent journeyman could work and then sat down and did the math, it wasn't so surprising. And if they had to turn out a big batch of something quickly, they reorganized the workshop to throw man-hours at the project until it was done.
"Tell him about the aqua vitae, Sharon," Magda said.
"Oh, yeah, that's a good one. There's a fair bit of wine gets rejected when it's imported here, and some of the local product is pretty poor too. There are a fair few good old-fashioned 'shiners as well. When I drew a Liebig condenser for them, there were a few guys slapping foreheads, and a couple of the glassware shops did a roaring trade in the things for a couple of weeks. They use copper pipes and leather fittings, but they work. Now they're making alcohol a lot cheaper and purer than anywhere else, and with about eleventy-seven businesses back in the USE fighting over the supplies of good alcohol there's a good market. We did middleman trade on that for a while, and got a cut out of nearly a whole year's production even before the factories we took shares in turned a profit. Anyway, we got paper for most of those payments and cash for some of them, which was good, since we fed that back into the mill on the Rialto. Some of the alcohol factories have managed to do mail-order deals back to the USE and cut out the middlewomen, but that's okay, we'll make it up elsewhere. For now we've got cash flow."
"And what are we doing with that cash flow?"
"Servicing the term loans," said Magda promptly, with the air of a woman who regarded memoranda and ledgers as management tools for lesser minds. "With the term loans we underwrote the stock issues. The ghetto already has SEC rules and—"
"What?" Stoner began to feel he was really, really overusing that word.
"Ah," said Benjamin, sitting forward in his chair. "Perhaps I can explain this one best. There was a brief description of your Securities and Exchange Commission and your stock exchanges in several of the management and business textbooks in Grantville, and Admiral Simpson was kind enough to furnish some excellent seminars in the matter. We already had most of the things they variously described, and combining them into more organized and consistent markets impressed many of us as a good idea, if it could be made practical. So we circulated the ideas we found most helpful."
"How?" asked Stoner, pleased at a chance to vary his vocabulary a little, "and who to?"
"Well, first we passed it—ah, I should mention that Don Francisco Nasi wrote a most incisive monograph on the matter, which we had printed. It was circulated here in Venice first, since the Rialto is such an important market among those to which we had easy access in these troubled times. It also went to Genoa, and by some less direct routes, I hear, to Antwerp and Amsterdam and Paris. It has also gone to the City and some other places further east. Everywhere I have mentioned has done some of the things in Don Francisco's monograph and now a few of them are doing more. On some subjects, Don Francisco can be very . . . persuasive, when he is minded to."
"Persuasive?" Stoner chuckled. He had gone in to see Mike Stearns about maybe writing some stuff up to go to the doctors in Venice and Padua and Florence and so on, and maybe make himself available to do seminars and classes for visiting alchemists who wanted to raise their game. If he had time, he'd thought, he might volunteer to train some folks up to teach basic chemistry of some kind. Pay forward a little, he'd thoug
ht.
When he came out, he'd agreed—he wasn't quite sure how, but he was certain he had agreed—to learn Italian, decamp his family to Venice for a year, give lectures until his throat was dry and his feet hurt to, as it turned out, chemists and doctors and alchemists and natural philosophers and heaven only knew what else from all over Europe who wanted to hear the new learning from Grantville but thought Venice was a much less chancy prospect for a working vacation than Germany in wartime. They had heard some alarming stories about Croats, it seemed.
Not that Stoner was complaining after the event, of course, what with Venice being a nice town and some of the professors being great guys. But Benjamin was still talking.
"—and so the underwriting and market-making rules proved to be good innovations, and the most widely practiced. Here and at the Antwerp Bourse they have been making daily quotes in this way for nearly six months now. It remains only to persuade the Wisselbank at Antwerp to issue proper banknotes instead of just deposit certificates, although with the manner of their recent move they can hardly be blamed for feeling inclined to conservatism."
"Eh? What about our greenbacks?" Stoner frowned. He actually liked those notes, not least because making the fast green ink was a good, solid government contract and they'd actually gone with his joke of putting Johnny Cash on the twenty-dollar bill. Hopefully that'd make people take the stuff less seriously, although he'd had long and bitter experience of how that kind of dream usually turned out.
"Keep up, Stoner," said Sharon. "We don't spend those outside the USE, we buy them. Because of the exchange rate it's cheaper to borrow Wissel notes. They're as good as bullion and everyone knows that. They absolutely do not issue notes for silver they don't have, and their letters of credit are watertight. We spend greenbacks where they will buy the most."
"Then what's the problem?" Stoner had an awful feeling that he was going to get an answer.
Benjamin saw his chance. "This is about a marvelous concept you had up-time called the money supply. You see, deposit certificates and bills for title to specie are well known in these times. Since Sweden uses those foolish copper plates for money, they must perforce use notes or spend more in carting their money around than it is worth. Now, if we can persuade the Wisselbank to go over to a fidu—"
Stoner straightened up. Time, he felt, to put into practice a little of that business management stuff he'd read about and mostly laughed at. Decisive, that was the key.
"I think I've heard enough," he said. "Benjamin, have we broken any laws?"
"No, signor," said Benjamin, plainly taken aback.
"Good. Sharon, is all the stuff we're doing going to, you know, help people get medicines and stuff?"
"Yes, Stoner."
He nodded and resolved that he would discuss the assorted warlike uses of zinc with her later.
He turned to Magda. "Magda, I think I've signed everything. Would you come for a walk with me?"
Magda grinned and practically skipped to his side as he stepped around the table toward the door.
Once outside it, he dropped from the straight-backed, square-shouldered, chin-lifted pose he'd struck. "Man, that is so, so, not where I'm at," he sighed in relief.
Magda nuzzled up to him. "But, Tom, mein schatz, see how it is you can be a tough and purposeful man of affairs?"
"Sure," he drawled, "I just don't want to make a habit of it, okay?"
"Just from time to time," she said, squeezing him a little harder.
"All right. Except I think tonight we should rent a boat and get some wine and go out on the lagoon in the spring moonlight, and maybe smoke a little. You know, stars, moonlight, rippling water. Because otherwise I'm going to get a haircut and start acting serious and probably get a regular job. Or something."
"I think I should prefer the something," she said.
Chapter 30
Buckley put down his pen. There, finally done. A complete write-up on the current activities—plight might be a better word—of the Committee of Correspondence in Venice. Tiny numbers, worthless budget, reliance on street kids, the lot. Combined, however, with a wild plan to liberate Galileo from the clutches of the Inquisition.
Damn, damn, damn, damn. It might be the greatest story of the year, maybe the decade—like being able to scoop John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry—and Joe wasn't sure if he could print it. No, scratch that. He could print it, all right. But the consequences . . .
He thought back ruefully to a conversation he'd had with Father Mazzare only a couple of weeks before. Worse than the consequences of keeping quiet, indeed.
He'd heard a lot from eavesdropping, and filled in the rest from conversations with Michel Ducos. The French sympathizer of the Committee was generally taciturn, but put a few drinks in him and he sometimes became downright loquacious. Joe had met Michel's type before. The kind of guy who, a few sheets to the wind, just couldn't help bragging about things.
Somehow they'd gotten news of Galileo being moved to Rome. Somehow they'd gotten hold of weapons, too. What kind and from where Joe hadn't been able to find out, except that he was sure that at least some of them had been provided by the Stone boys.
And that was an explosive element to the story, right there in itself. Even if the Stone boys hadn't provided weapons, the fact that they were knee-deep in the plot would be enough to connect it inseparably with the United States of Europe. Only the week before, Buckley himself had done a piece on the copies of Galileo's book that were flooding out of a press somewhere, and he figured he could guess the source now.
Knee-deep? Joe smiled to himself. Say better: up to their elbows in it. He remembered Gerry, smeared up to the elbows with oil and ink, the very image of a hillbilly jackleg mechanic. He must be running one of the Committee's presses into an early trip to the great scrapyard in the sky. How they were getting them out and to the Inquisition was anyone's guess. On the whole, given Joe's record in finding out things he'd rather not have known, he wasn't sure he wanted to make any efforts in that direction.
Buckley himself had spoken out in his article in favor of Galileo, of scientific freedom, of freedom of speech. And here he was with an opportunity to make damned sure the man stayed in the toils of the Inquisition and do himself a good turn into the bargain. On the one hand, the scoop of the year, maybe the decade. On the other, Galileo-Gali-freaking-leo!-in a damp cell somewhere. That was a nice clear image in Buckley's mind. Galileo's fierce, bearded visage, unbowed and defiant, glaring out through the bars of some dank cell.
It was all horsepuckey, of course. Buckley knew about the house arrest and the soft treatment the old guy was getting. No slouches in the PR department themselves, the church, they weren't going to give the man at the cutting edge of seventeenth-century science any treatment anyone could describe as medieval. In truth, there was something more than a little comical about the idea of the Marcolis and the Stones busting him out of a luxury apartment in Rome.
Buckley sighed deeply, looking at the tablet full of notes from which he'd compiled the story. Many of those notes he'd scribbled from hiding under that window. He'd managed to divert any suspicion by spending quite a bit of time in the open with members of the Committee on Murano and elsewhere. Interviews with Marcoli and Massimo, the lot, all of it purporting to be—which was truthful enough, in itself—material for an article on the Committee's overt work.
Well . . . Joe decided he'd send that part of the story in the mail to Magdeburg. He'd send it in the morning, after a good night's sleep. And when he'd done that, he'd think about the rescue story. Maybe he'd send it, too. Maybe he wouldn't. He was too tired to think clearly right now.
He got up from his desk and went to bed.
* * *
The shock brought him awake. He blinked to clear sleep out of his eyes and then focused them. Floorboards. He was lying on the floor. How did I get out of bed? Then someone grabbed the back of his nightshirt and hauled on it.
"What?" he yelled, and scrambled to get his legs unde
r him. Pistol under the pillow, he thought. He made a dive for it, got a hand on the bed, and then pain exploded through the back of his head and he went out again.
* * *
Drowning! Buckley came to from a delirium vision of suffocating under water, to find himself soaked and cold. Something was over his face, clinging and wet, over his whole face; he couldn't see. He couldn't get his breath through it, not properly. He tried to rip it away, but his hands were tied to something, down by his lap. Only a nightmare, I can wake up at any time.
"Good, you are awake," someone said. Murmured, rather, into his ear.
"Who?" It sounded blurred even to Buckley, as he gasped it out through what he could now identify as wet cloth.
"You don't know me?" There was a trace of sly amusement in the voice. "Ah, but no one really knows me any more."
The cloth was whipped away. There was no one there. Looking down, Joe saw that he'd been tied to a chair, wrists and ankles both.
Then the click of boot heels on floorboards, and a figure stepped between Buckley and his desk lamp. Even in silhouette, there was no mistaking that file-thin build.
"Michel?" Buckley asked. His guts sank as he realized what this was about. "Marcoli sent you, right? Look, I wasn't going to publish, all right? I got the notes right there on the desk, you can read the piece I was gonna file. It was just about the Committee, I swear to God. I wasn't gonna say anything about the rest of it. I want Galileo busted out as much as you guys—"
A slap across the mouth silenced him. Bare-handed, but a hand that somehow seemed clawlike, bony and callused. Callous, Buckley thought. Not a flicker had crossed Ducos' face. Suddenly he was Ducos, not pleasant, friendly-if-a-bit-reserved good-old-Michel. The slap hadn't hurt much, more insult than injury, but there was a huge, brimming reservoir of hatred behind the dam that was Ducos' face. And Buckley realized he was starting to see cracks in the concrete. Ducos' eyes, and Buckley could see them now as his eyes adjusted to the light, were boring into Buckley. Intense. Mad.
