1636 The Kremlin Games (44 page)

Mikhail knew that he should be fighting “Director-General” Sheremetev because of those suspicions and for the good of Russia. But he wasn’t. He knew virtually nothing of what was going on in the wider world. He had no basis to plan and, for now at least, he and his family were being treated quite well. Also, from what he did know, Sheremetev’s plan depended on his continued safety.

Life was full of strange twists of fate and even more so when you were living in a time of miracles. The Ring of Fire had seemed a wild rumor when they had first heard of it. Sending Vladimir to confirm it—or rather, disprove it, which was the outcome they’d expected—had just been a precautionary measure. But it had all proved to be true. Vladimir had stayed in Grantville to learn the secrets of the up-timers and Boris had brought an up-timer back with him. Bernie Zeppi had started out as little more than a dictionary of up-timer English on legs. But being used as a dictionary has side effects. Poor Bernie had found himself in school. Mikhail laughed a little at that thought. One student and hundreds of anxious teachers, each insisting that he learn enough to explain some other artifact of a language that was foreign even to those who spoke seventeenth-century English. Mikhail could sympathize with Bernie’s predicament; he wasn’t a scholar by choice, either.

And he, like Bernie, had been forced by circumstances into a role he wasn’t well prepared for when he had been dragooned into becoming czar of Russia.

Come to that, Vladimir wasn’t a trained spy. Still, the young prince was doing an excellent job—aided and abetted by the up-timers’ free way with their knowledge. He and Boris had kept Russia from the Smolensk War, even before Boris brought Bernie to Russia. Vladimir had married a up-timer girl and was well situated in their community. And quite openly, for the most part, sending tons of copied books to Moscow, along with information on innovations made since the Ring of Fire as down-time craftsmanship had combined with up-time knowledge. That part was harder, from what Mikhail understood, because some of the new businesses were much more secretive than the State Library of Thuringia-Franconia. Still, Boris had left Vladimir a good core organization and Vladimir had expanded it. So the Dacha and the Gun Shop, Russia’s industrial and military research and development shops, were well supplied with up-timer knowledge.

That knowledge, combined with Russian ingenuity and a willingness to go with simple, workable solutions rather than slavishly copy everything the up-timers were doing, plus a brute force approach that involved putting lots of people to work on projects that the up-timers could probably do with a lot less, had stood Russia in very good stead. Both industrially and in the recent battle over Rzhev. Russia had the beginnings of an electronics industry at the price of several people accidentally electrocuted. Telegraphs and telephones in the Kremlin and spark gap radios. And they were experimenting with tubes and transistors, Mikhail was told, although so far unsuccessfully. A test dirigible built and used at Rzhev and a much larger one under construction. Plumbing at the Dacha and starting to appear other places, including parts of Moscow. New rifled muskets with replaceable chambers for the army and a few new breech-loading cannon as well. New pumps for clearing mines of water and for creating vacuums. Which apparently had a myriad of uses. Improved roads, steam engines . . . the list went on and on. Sucking up labor almost as fast as the new plows and reapers freed it, perhaps faster. The free peasantry—what was left of it—had been among the first to go to the factories and set up their own, along with the
Streltzi
who were Russia’s traditional merchant class.

Mikhail was less happy about some of the policy changes that Sheremetev had come up with. Selling to the Turks especially bothered him.

Moscow, the Grantville Section

Boris filled out paperwork and tried not to think about what was happening. “Director-General” Sheremetev was an idiot who had no concept of how to treat people to get the best work out of them. He couldn’t inspire or motivate, save through threats. But, for now at least, the threats seemed to be working. Sheremetev had complete control of the
Boyar Duma
through a combination of bribes and coercion. Worse, he was what the up-timers called a micromanager, and his decisions were wrong more often than not.

It wasn’t that Boris disagreed with Sheremetev’s assessment of the general situation in Europe. The Swede was much more dangerous than the Pole. That had to be clear to anyone except an idiot. Boris had studied the history of the world on the other side of the Ring of Fire and one thing was clear: Poland had always been a nuisance to Russia and usually an antagonist, but never a mortal threat. Only twice since the Mongol yoke was thrown off had foreign powers come close to destroying Russia. First, the French; then the Germans. Never the Poles.

The key was economic development. The Poles had been too backward themselves to pose more than a middling danger. The real peril came from western and central Europe, not eastern Europe.

But economic development presupposed financial reform, and Boris didn’t think Sheremetev really understood paper money. Boris didn’t really understand it himself that well, but he’d seen it work in Grantville and knew it was the way forward. True enough, Sheremetev was supporting the new currency, at least officially. But where Czar Mikhail’s support had been genuine, Boris figured that Sheremetev was just using it to lure people into giving him gold and working for nothing.

The end result was likely to discredit the new money altogether, and so Russia would remain mired in poverty and ignorance. Sheremetev understood the threat from western Europe—but was making it worse, not better.

Grantville

“The”—Vladimir held up his hands and made quote marks in the air—“‘Director-General’ is teaching us a lesson,” Vladimir explained. “He’s also tempting us, putting pressure on to see if we will defect. Well, if
I
will defect. You hold dual citizenship.”

“What lesson?” Brandy asked.

“Don’t try to hold up the Russian government. Or, more accurately, don’t fail to cut him in on it.”

“So how bad is it?”

“Bad! For us here it’s the advances.” The ruble, now a paper currency, with the image of Czar Mikhail and the double-headed eagle on the face and the Moscow Kremlin and a Russian bear on the back, was valued at less than half the value of the Dutch guilder in spite of the fact that it was supposed to be equivalent to the silver ruble coin that had twice the silver of the Dutch guilder. Partly that was because the czar and
Boyar Duma
had issued rather more rubles than they really should have. But mostly it was because the Dutch merchants resented the paper ruble. The new currency had changed the whole trading landscape in Russia. Dutch merchants had gone from absolutely vital to convenient. And the price they paid at Arkhangelsk for grain, cordage, lumber, and other Russian goods had more than doubled.

So, the Dutch wouldn’t deal in Russian paper money or money of account based on Russian money. They would still accept Russian coins, but their refusal to deal in Russian paper had its effect. “If the canny Dutch merchants wouldn’t take paper rubles, there must be something wrong with them. Right?” So rubles traded in Grantville, Venice and Vienna at less than a quarter of face value. And that was if you were basing face value on the amount of silver in a ruble coin. If you figured it in the price of a bushel of grain at Arkhangelsk versus the same bushel at Amsterdam, it traded at less than a tenth of its face value.

It was hard to make a profit when you were losing more than nine-tenths of your money to arbitrage. Vladimir spent his rubles where they would buy something, then shipped the goods to the USE for resale, just as he had been doing from the beginning. And, like any good man of business, he tried to find buyers in advance rather than shipping the goods on spec. What Sheremetev objected to was how much of the money Vladimir was investing in Grantville and the USE. Sheremetev wanted Vladimir to buy silver and gold and send it back to Moscow. Which made no sense at all. If Vladimir was going to do anything along those lines, he would be buying paper rubles in Grantville with silver where he could get a lot of them, then shipping the rubles back to Moscow where they would buy more.

Vladimir had contracts to sell five thousand stacked-plate mica capacitors, plus several tons of other mica products. But what he didn’t have was this quarter’s shipment of mica and mica-based components. Also missing were a couple of hundred miles of cordage, several tons of Russian hardwoods, plus sundry other goods. In other words, several million American dollars worth of goods, which he was morally and legally obligated to provide. And about half of it had been paid for in advance. He was insured against loss at sea. With Swedish control of the Baltic, the insurance hadn’t been all that expensive.

What he wasn’t insured against was Sheremetev and the
Boyar Duma
preventing him from bringing out the goods. Goods that had never sailed from Nyen
—
St. Petersburg it would have become in that other history. Goods that had never even reached Swedish Ingria. It wasn’t just that money wasn’t coming in—money that had already come would have to be paid back with penalties for nondelivery.

Vladimir wasn’t broke exactly. He was now deeply in debt. In some ways that was better than being broke, but in others much worse. Partly to gain access to the developing tech and partly just because it was good long-term financial strategy, he had invested in some of the more long-term projects. He was, for instance, fairly heavily invested in three of the companies that were working on down-time manufacture of automobiles. And he was the major investor in a group that was working on the tubes for microwaves. They didn’t expect results for years, but they were working on it and Vladimir was the primary backer of the research. Microwave tech was just too useful to ignore because it was hard to do.

“It’s bad for us here but what I’m really worried about is Natasha. Sheremetev can make me go out and get a real job, but that’s not much of a threat. The real threat is that he can kill my sister. What I would like to do is get Natasha out of Russia. But I don’t see any way to do it.”

“How much time do we have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I can send a fruitcake,” Brandy said, “You know the kind with a saw in it. A metaphoric saw in this case. Instructions about how to arrange an unauthorized immigration.”

“It’s a worthy thought,” Vladimir agreed, “but I don’t think she’d come. Aside from everything else, Sheremetev needs me as much or more than I need him. If he didn’t have Natasha I’d be able to tell him to shove it.”

Chapter 73

April 1636

“So how are they doing out there?” Natasha asked as Anya came in.

Anya had taken to sleeping in Natasha’s room. Partly that was because neither Natasha nor Filip liked it when she slept in Bernie’s room and Anya had discovered that she cared about that in more than purely practical terms. She still didn’t know what if anything would develop with Filip, but her friendship with Natasha was genuine and mattered to her.

Bernie was no longer comfortable with their old relationship anyway. That much was obvious even if he never said anything. Anya figured his discomfort came from the fact that he knew it bothered Natasha—not that Bernie would ever admit to his feelings about the princess, or probably even understand them well in the first place. From the future or not, men were still men. Stupid, when it came to such matters.

But the main reason Anya had moved into Natasha’s quarters was that she was better protection against Cass Lowry than Bernie was. Bernie was too likely to lose his temper and attack Cass, which would just make the situation worse. Natasha was a Gorchakov princess and Cass had learned the hard way that it was dangerous to cross her.

“Not well,” she said in response to Natasha’s question. “Mr. Lowry insists that the Dacha should limit itself to strictly practical applications.”

Natasha snorted. “What
he
calls practical. He wants fixed-wing aircraft! How is that practical?”

After they’d talked about the Dacha and the scientific future of Russia for a bit—bad and getting worse by the day—they switched over to more personal matters.

“So Filip seems interested in you?” Natasha asked.

“Which might have meant something if this were still the Dacha,” Anya said glumly. “I mean your and Bernie’s Dacha, not Sheremetev and Cass’s Dacha. You know what I mean. Anything seemed possible then. We were all working to change the world. It made anything seem possible.”

Anya saw Natasha’s nod of agreement and understanding. “Before Bernie I was a caged pet,” Natasha said. “Then Bernie arrived and there was the Dacha . . . a place to work, to read, full of people who understood. Who wanted to understand. Who thought about how things worked and how they might be made to work better. All because of Bernie. Almost by existing, he made the world bloom. For four years we had a scholar’s paradise. They’ve been the best years of my life.”

She was a young woman but in that moment sounded very old, as if she were talking about a time long ago.

“Can you imagine what it would have been like if it were Cass instead of Bernie?” Anya said.

When Natasha didn’t answer Anya looked over and saw her thinking. Then Natasha spoke. “Yes, I can. I hadn’t before now, but I can and the frightening thing about it is that if we didn’t have Bernie to compare him to, Cass probably would have seemed quite acceptable. The Dacha would still be here. Cass would have insisted that we concentrate on fixed wings so
Testbed
wouldn’t have been built and
Czarina Evdokia
wouldn’t be nearly finished. But we might have a couple of working one- or two-person airplanes with hand-built engines. The real difference, though, would be the sense of the place. Less freedom, academic or otherwise. Less trying to get the job done and more, as Bernie would say, trying to cover their asses. And we wouldn’t even notice what was missing. We wouldn’t realize what we might have had and Cass Lowry would seem quite a useful, if obnoxious, foreign employee. Without Bernie, the Dacha would still be of benefit to Holy Mother Russia. But it would have been just technical benefit. The subtle torch of freedom that Bernie lit in all of us just by being Bernie would be gone.”