Grantville Gazette Volume 93 Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Story So Far . . . by Walt Boyes

  Giants in the Earth by Virginia DeMarce

  Cassini at the Plat by Robert Waters

  I Have a Proposal For You by George Iconomou

  A Puritan Voice, Part 8 by Michael Lockwood

  Flags of the World: The USE, Part 3 by Mike Nagle

  Life at Sea in the Old and New Time Lines, Part 6: Lest You Drown by Iver P. Cooper

  Notes from The Buffer Zone: Heroic Lazy Sods by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Hot Off Ring of Fire Press! by Walt Boyes

  A Matter of Choice by Eric Flint

  Adrift in Space-Time by Edward M. Lerner

  Grantville Gazette, Volume 93

  Editor-in-Chief ~ Walt Boyes

  Managing Editor ~ Bjorn Hasseler

  Grantville Gazette, Volume 93

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this magazine are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Grantville Gazette

  A 1632, Inc. Publication

  Grantville Gazette

  P. O. Box 7488

  Moore, OK 73153-1488

  The Story So Far . . .

  by

  Walt Boyes

  Happy New Year! May 2021 be far better than 2020 was. We can help a little with that right here. We have a terrific collection of stories and articles, just for you!

  And we have a special treat! We have a piece of flash fiction written by Eric Flint! Called "A Matter of Choice," you'll find it in the Annex.

  We wondered what finding fossils would do to the religious in the New Time Line, and Virginia DeMarce has given us an answer in "Giants in the Earth." No, it isn't just a funny looking porcupine.

  The Grand Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn has just finished in our sky, so Robert Waters has found something else for Cassini to do: baseball in Grantville! "Cassini at the Plate" has us wondering if he'll grow up to be an astronomer after all.

  George Iconomou continues to shake up the Venetian leaders and the up-timers in "I Have a Proposal for You."

  In Serials, Michael Lockwood gives us the next installment in "A Puritan Voice, Part 8."

  In Non-Fiction, we have "Flags of the USE, Part 3" by Mike Nagle, and "Life at Sea, Part 8" by Iver Cooper.

  Kris Rusch gives us another edition of "Notes from the Buffer Zone," and Edward M. Lerner gives us "Adrift in Space-Time."

  The Grantville Gazette and Ring of Fire Press is continuing our monthly series of Virtual Open Houses. The next one is Saturday, January 9th. Look for the Zoom invitation on www.ringoffirepress.com and on the Gazette and 1632.org.

  ****

  Sömmerda, SoTF

  Spring, 1636

  "Hans, can you come over here?"

  Hans Bechstein frowned. Slowing down production in the travertine quarries was not smiled upon by the foremen. They were taking stone out of the Steinrinne here at Bilzingsleben much faster than they had ten years before. The Ring of Fire had been good to the local economy. There was so much building going on that it was even hard to find enough horses and wagons to haul it all out to the buyers.

  "Do you have a real problem?"

  "I've found something strange. Look here, where the stone broke away."

  Hans looked, frowned, kneeled down, and ran his hand across what Georg Barchfelder had uncovered.

  They were on a kind of terrace, part way down. Some people thought that maybe there had been a river here once to carve the valley, but not that anyone could recall. Not one that was on any map that any surveyor had ever seen.

  He ran his hand over it again. "That is strange. We'd better call the foreman. It's not as if the stone is usable with something like this in it. Maybe we'll have to shift the whole line."

  So they called Martin Schröder.

  "Ja, very strange. Perhaps it would be best to ask Herr Trempling. So we must ask the manager to send for him."

  That involved climbing all the way to the top of the valley, because the quarry offices were up on the rim.

  The manager was not pleased to see three men coming over the edge. No disturbance in the regular routine of production was welcome news. There was very little room for slack in the commercial enterprises run by or in the name of Count August of Sommersburg, who was not precisely what most people thought of a nobleman as being. So Hans Guenther Schlinck, from Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, who had been a miner until a better opportunity at the count's quarries came along, heard them out, but climbed back down with the others to take a look for himself before agreeing to anything drastic.

  ****

  Then he sent a boy over to the school. Christian Trempling, born in Saxe-Weimar, put on his oldest clothes before following the boy back, climbed down carefully, not being as accustomed to strenuous physical labor as the others, and stood there for a few minutes, pulling on his goatee. "If anybody found something like this near my home, the dukes would want to look at it," he diagnosed. "Noblemen are curious that way. Especially Duke Ernst."

  "So do you think the count would want to look at it?" the foreman asked.

  "Ja, it's very strange."

  So they sent a message to Grantville, where Count August von Sommersburg lived most of the time now. He had developed a deep affection for central heating, indoor plumbing, and running water.

  Count August did not go to take a look at it himself. Five years earlier, he might have. Fifteen years earlier, he would have. Over the past couple of years, however, his health had not been all that reliable. He was pulling back, dropping public responsibilities, resigning from offices he held, and occasionally wondering whether it was a worthwhile effort to make it out of bed in the morning.

  But if it was strange, he definitely wanted it investigated.

  So he told his factor Hartmuth Frisch to see about it

  Which was why Frisch's chief clerk, Valentin Rebenstock, found himself at the Sömmerda quarries the next morning. Which were not to be confused with the count's quarries near Schwarza, which were slate quarries. Or any other of the count's quarries.

  Travertine was prettier, he thought, as he watched the sun rise, the light gradually making its way down the slopes and walls. The limestone, for that's what travertine was, really, but a certain specific kind of limestone, was deposited by hot mineral springs. Depending on the minerals in the spring, it might be white, or cream, or tan; sometimes even a deeper shade that was almost rust-colored. Which made for pretty buildings when an architect combined them in courses, or used one kind for the walls and another kind for the trim. The Romans had used it; the Italians still did. He'd seen some old buildings at Langensalza that were constructed mostly of travertine; now it was getting popular again, all to the good of Count August's bottom line.

  His associate yanked at his sleeve. "Are we going down or not?" Idelette Cavriani asked impatiently.

  They went down.

  ****

  Grantville

  Spring, 1636

  "So," the count asked, "what have they found?"

  "It looks like a bone," Frisch reported. "An extraordinarily large bone," is what Idelette said, "turned to stone itself and buried right in the layer of rock.' Valentin said it was bigger than any animal he's ever seen in his life, except maybe an elephant he saw once in Turkey. They're over at the National Library at the high school now, looking up bones in rocks."

  Count August nodded. "They say that there were giants in the earth in those days, before Noah's flood. Miners bring up these oddities, now and then. Once, when I was over in Eisenach years ago, someone showed me a huge block of coal with what looked like a Stachelschwein in it,
quills and all outlined right there in the coal. A sort of odd-looking one, but a man could tell it was a porcupine."

  "What do you want me to do now?"

  "Go back to work until we know more."

  Ah, if only he had gone back to work. Instead, he went home for lunch. He enjoyed lunching with his up-time wife.

  ****

  For an ambitious man with no expectation of children, Jenny Rae Maddox had been a true prize. Tall, big-boned, a fine figure of a woman. Manager of the funeral home; manager of the Grantville Bureau of Vital Statistics; member of the influential Fourth of July Party (which demonstrated that although he was himself every whit a Crown Loyalist, he was not a bigoted one); a finger in every pie. They had been married for three-quarters of a year. He would be elected to some office in West Virginia County, yet.

  The lunch was lovely until his two nieces from the Palatinate showed up unexpectedly. Dressed as the peasant girls they were. They had walked. From the Palatinate. From the Rhineland. Somehow, they had found their way to Frankfurt am Main and then followed the Reichsstrasse. Fallen in with, of all people, Martin Wackernagel . . . who was married to . . . a niece of Clara Bachmeierin . . . who was married to . . . the up-timer Wesley Jenkins . . . who was director of the SoTF consular service. . . . He had agreed to be their guide and delivered them to the funeral home as casually as he might drop off any other package along his route. They had walked 225 miles, give or take a few, and looked like it.

  Jenny Rae said they looked like they had just finished through-hiking the Appalachian Trail. He wondered what that was, but not for long. He had more immediate problems.

  Hanna and Elisabeth reported that their father had died. The landlord was trying to force them to marry their stepbrothers before he would renew the lease on the farm, to which they objected, because they have no doubt that their stepmother had every intention of continuing to be mistress of the farmstead and would have held them under her thumb as her combination stepdaughters/daughters-in-law and personal slaves until the day she died!

  Jenny Rae told the chambermaid to teach them how to use the bathroom and see that they got cleaned up. She told the cook to leave the dishes to the kitchen maid and go buy them some clean clothes. "From the skin out; draw around their feet on a piece of paper for shoes and buy them sandals if that's the best you can manage," she tossed back as she headed out the door.

  Then she went back to work. But on the way, she stopped by the public library and told her lifelong best friend Marietta Fielder that She Did Not Need This At All. "When I finally got married, I signed up for a highly successful man who left the farm and did well—not to be surrogate mother to two grown farm girls who Have No Clue!"

  "They had enough of a clue to get themselves here," Marietta pointed out.

  "Tell me, do I have a tattoo on my butt that says ‘nurturing'? Is there a bone somewhere in my body that if the skeleton were boiled and wired, prepared for an anatomy lesson after I die, would clean up to display an engraving that proclaims ‘nurturing'? I mean, Hartmuth already has two nieces and a nephew in Grantville, but they're safely fostered with Orval and Karin McIntire. If I'd ever wanted to nurture anyone, I'd have done it twenty-five years ago."

  "Still, Hartmuth would never even have come to town if he hadn't been hunting for his brother's orphans. You got some benefit from it."

  "But, good grief, Marietta. Two more! At least they're twenty or so, which means we're not legally responsible if they get themselves into trouble. And fourth-grade educations in a village school only. I guess I'll talk to Cora. She's always hiring kitchen help."

  Supper was quiet.

  After supper, Hartmuth told Jenny Rae about the bones.

  ****

  She got much more excited than he expected. "You're going to need a geologist," she exclaimed. "Let me call Lolly Aossey and Christie Kemp to see who's available. And tomorrow you should send someone over to the quarry here." She disappeared from the living room, hurrying downstairs to the funeral home office.

  Over breakfast, she reported back. "Of the kids who did the geology survey with Lolly early on, who are the only ones with any real experience under their belts, most are out of town. Sara Colfax joined the Marines! Morgan and Ann are at Wietze. Dina Merrifield is gone, along with Bonnie Weaver and Amanda Boyd. I can't even keep track of them all.

  "The ones still in town are almost all working for Hugh Lowe at the Grantville-Rudolstadt-Saalfeld Railroad and Tramway Corporation, I think. If you want them, you'll have to sweet-talk Hugh into giving them some time off. Ashley Hill married Jonathan Lund last year and just had a baby, so she's not going to want to go racketing around a rock quarry this summer. I have no idea what Micaela Garrett's plans are. Her older sister Jennifer did that course, too, but she's in Magdeburg."

  "What about Mariah Collins?"

  "She got married last year."

  "I know," Hartmuth said. "She married Hans-Fritz Zuehlke, and we went to the wedding."

  "But I don't think she's expecting yet. So maybe she could."

  "Are there any down-timers who have qualified? Lolly's run the summer course two or three times since that first year."

  "I'm not sure. You could check out at the slate quarry. Everybody there works for the count anyway, so you'd not have a problem borrowing them."

  Jenny ended up going out to the quarry with him and talking to Nina Daoud and Winnie Utt. They were both older than her mother, but in her job–jobs–you got to know a lot of people. Just last year, she'd filled out the death certificate and conducted the funeral for Winnie's husband, Vance. It had been a nice service, if she did say so herself. Nina's husband hadn't kicked the bucket yet, but looked like he might be business in the offing, so to speak.

  After Hartmuth had talked to the men, he came back with a couple of leads on down-timers who completed the geology workshop and might be available. None on this site, which had already been thoroughly surveyed from a geological perspective, but somewhere in the count's extensive enterprises.

  "I'd still try to get Lolly Aossey or Christie Penzey, or both of them, to at least take a look," Jenny Rae said. "To go up to Sömmerda and clue in whatever youngsters you hire as to what they should be doing."

  Which he did.

  Both of them in tee-shirts and cargo pants, hiking boots and Indiana Jones hats, purring and cooing, much to the entertainment of the quarrymen.

  They concluded that it could be a pretty big find.

  The count perceived a possibility for favorable publicity.

  That was followed by reports in the newspapers.

  Christie saw them and shrieked about issuing open invitations to vandals and thieves.

  "It's a quarry," Jenny Rae said soothingly. "A quarry with lots of expensive equipment. That's why the count hired Vance Utt and Joe Daoud for the quarry here in Grantville to start with. That was three or four years ago, already. To milk them of everything they knew about up-time stonecutting methods for all they were worth before they died, and it was too late."

  "What does that have to do with anything."

  "Expensive equipment means security. Armed guards. Already on site and no extra expense."

  ****

  Lolly and Christie looked at each other. "Simone Onofrio did the geology course, the second summer. Chris insisted. If we can get her back from Bamberg . . ."

  "But if we ask Simone, that means dealing with . . ."

  "Yes. Terry."

  At the Tech School, Chris Onofrio looked up. The girl at the door wasn't one of his students in marketing and entrepreneurship. His forehead wrinkled. He looked again.

  "Hi, Pa!" Simone said.

  "I thought you were in Bamberg."

  "I have a chance at a summer job here. At least, one up at Sömmerda. I just got in on the train and came here before I went home. You're going to have to run interference."

  "You're of age."

  "Raffi isn't. Man up, Pa. You're mostly out from under. You have Mary Rose and four mor
e kids. Us three? We have Terry."

  "How is she?" he asked cautiously.

  "Well, working, of course. She's never had all that much trouble holding a job. She doesn't hear voices when she's focusing on paperwork. Taking care of Gran, with whatever bits of time and advice she can get from Aunt Rosie to help her. Uncle Perry chips in what he can on that, but with Rosie in nursing school and three kids, the Mechanical Support Division pay doesn't go a long way. It's insane, the way people proclaim that all up-timers are rich. Some, who had something to start with. Not to mention the way the cost of living has gone up."

  She focused back on her father's question. "Otherwise, she's as crazy as ever."

  Chris considered. Terry Abruzzo had married him, gotten the three kids she had decided she wanted out of marriage, left him, taken the kids with her, and divorced him. Then she'd discovered that even if the marriage was annulled, the Catholic church would count the kids as legitimate, so she petitioned for annulment, too, freely informing the canon lawyers that she'd never intended to stay married in the first place.

  Which had been a boon for him, since it was over and done when he married again; all was well with the church and the Kubiak family.

  But.

  "Still hearing voices?"

  "Yep. Father Mazzare, when he was her confessor, managed to keep the way she handled them sort of under control. Unfortunately, Father van de Ende, who's her confessor of choice now, is sort of your ultimate Catholic Reformation Jesuit and thinks it's entirely possible that saints do talk to her. At least Christine will be out of high school as of this spring." She paused. "Planning to go to her graduation?"

  "In the interest of all-around peace . . ."

  "Go, dammit."

  He sighed. "All right."

  ****

  "Okay. And keep an eye out for Raffi, if she tries something weird. Like sending him to this new Jesuit collegium they're starting instead of high school. She already yanked me back from the normal school at Amberg by saying she wouldn't pay, using the Saxon uprising as an excuse, and stuck me with Bernadette Adducci at St. Elisabeth's in Bamberg last year. Who is not putting a teacher training program into her curriculum–it's pretty standard liberal arts, designed to funnel girls into cubicles in state office buildings, maybe into social work–or into modernized nunneries that do social work. Not that I actually ever wanted to teach grade school. I'm about to the point of giving up on getting a degree and just finding a job. Or joining the army. Or something. But about Sömmerda. Ms. Kemp and Ms. Aossey . . ."