Eric Flint - 1636:The Kremlin games

Boris shook his head. “I didn’t want to believe it either, but after the reports we’ve sent, I would have thought-” At his wife’s look, he hesitated. “I guess it is an unbelievable story. But you can’t not believe after you’ve seen the glass-smooth cliffs of the ring wall.”

“Is it really that special?” Mariya sounded a bit wistful. Unlike Boris, she had never been out of Russia. “I got your letters but.. ”

“Yes and no.” Boris tilted his hand back and forth. “In some ways it is the most miraculous thing you could imagine and in others quite mundane.” He shook his head. “Enough of that for now. I will tell you all about it later. Now I need to know what is going on in the bureaus.” So they discussed the different factions that were shifting around the miracle in Germany. The fraud faction, the work of the devil faction, the God’s will faction. Which bureau chiefs were leaning which way. How the great families were lining up. The most common reaction was “wait and see,” then “how can my family benefit or be harmed,” followed closely by “how will it affect my bureau?” All of which was flavored with the question: What’s wrong with us that God would leave us to cold harsh winter and give the Ring of Fire to the Germanies?

“From what I hear-” Mariya lifted the pot of water. “-the czar wants to see the outlander as soon as he can but the bureaus want a chance to talk to your Bernie first so they can formulate policy. They have managed to fill the czar’s schedule for the next week or so to give them a chance to do so.”

“And the patriarch?” Boris asked.

“The czar’s father has made no public statements and he’s even been quite reticent in private, at least according to rumor. I imagine that’s part of the reason you’re to report to him.”

Half an hour into the conversation with the patriarch, Boris felt wrung out. Patriarch Filaret apparently remembered every fact he’d read about Grantville, not to mention every bit of the history he’d read. They’d already been through the butterfly effect and every bit of Boris’ knowledge of the spies in Grantville. Now, Filaret changed the subject.

“So, this Bernie Zeppi, he has come to work for us?”

“Ah… not quite.” Boris twitched in his seat. “In fact, he has come to work for Prince Vladimir. Who has paid-and is paying-his salary, so far. And there is a personal contract.” Boris produced the contract for the patriarch’s perusal. Filaret took it and read through it rapidly. Several times during the reading he gave Boris sharp looks.

His brow creased. “A rather large salary. Do you feel it will be worth it?”

Boris was surprised at the choice of first question. By custom, outlanders were always hired to work for the czar, not members of the court or the bureaus. “I can’t say for certain. The up-time knowledge is worth a thousand times that salary. Patriarch…” He paused. “They could fly up-time. I have seen the movies, heard the stories-they could fly. And I have no doubt they will again, if they survive another five or ten years.”

Filaret leaned back in his chair. This was the reason he’d called for Boris Petrov to see him. He wanted to hear, first hand. “Yet they don’t fly now. None of the machines, the airplanes, was it? None came with them.”

Boris nodded. “True. It was a poor village of peasants that was sent back to us. Yet even there they have miracles in every art and philosophy and in things we had not even dreamed of. Undreamed of wealth, Patriarch. The products of mass production, they call it. Everything identical, made by machines. If we can make the machines, we should be able to do the same.”

Filaret raised an eyebrow. “Yet you say you’re not sure?”

Boris sighed. “You know the problems with hiring outlander experts. If they were really experts they would be getting rich where they were. What we get are the less adept or the ones no one is willing to hire for some reason. We have seen that, time after time.”

“Your outlander is a mal-adept?”

“You must remember that there were only around three thousand people brought back in the Ring of Fire. That includes babes still at their mothers’ breast and those so… sick that they could not survive without constant intervention from their medical practitioners.”

Boris had, Filaret was sure, almost said “so old” but caught himself in time. Filaret hid a smile. He was over eighty and Boris was afraid to offend.

“By their standards,” Boris continued, “it was not a particularly educated group. Most adults had high school diplomas… never mind. The point is that anyone who had much in the way of special skills or unusual talent was already employed by their government, or getting rich right there in Grantville, or both.

“Bernie is friendly, willing, and doesn’t lie about his abilities. That, above all else, Vladimir insisted on and I agreed. We have had too many master cannon makers who were more familiar with gold than bronze.”

Boris paused and Filaret considered. Boris was good at his job and Vladimir was clever. He didn’t think that Vladimir was planning anything against the czar, partly because Vladimir was a good lad and a friend of the family, but mostly because he was staying in Grantville. Manipulating court politics from such a distance was almost impossible. Not entirely impossible; Filaret had done it from imprisonment in Poland. But that was a special case and hadn’t worked out the way he had wanted. At the same time, Filaret realized that Vladimir was beginning to play politics, albeit at a remove. This project was to be the Gorchakovs’ entrance into the ranks of the high families and Filaret thought he could use that. There was a great deal of tension in the Boyar Duma, in part because of the Ring of Fire and the general uncertainty of what it might mean, but also because the word from Grantville had weakened the war faction and given hope to the Polish-lovers like his own cousin, Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev.

By this time Filaret had almost decided to approve the project, but he had a few more questions.

“Then-” Filaret leaned forward with his fingertips steepled. “-if he is so unskilled, what is he doing here? And why did Vladimir hire him into the Gorchakov family’s service instead of the czar’s? Why agree to pay him so much?” He motioned toward the contract. “This is what we would pay for a colonel of artillery.”

“His salary is the least of the expense of this project,” Boris admitted. This was one of the most important parts of the plan. “Vladimir had an idea. He will be having copies made of the books in Grantville. They will be sent here. But they are only copies, Patriarch, not translations. Not even Latin translations, much less Russian. He doesn’t have the staff, or the cash on hand, to pay to have it done and the time it would take would put us years behind. The books will have to be translated here or our experts must learn up-timer English.”

“I still don’t understand what we need this outlander for. Not that I object to his presence. The czar has been anxious to meet an outlander from this miracle and I am curious myself. That, however, doesn’t justify this salary or this change in our traditional ways.” The patriarch waved a hand at the contract again. “Contracts like this

… well, I suppose I can understand the idea. But it’s not the way we have done things and I don’t like the precedent it sets.”

“I speak the English of England in this century quite well,” Boris said. “The American English of the end of the twentieth century is full of words that I don’t even have the concepts for. What is an electromagnetic field?” Boris used Russian for field and English for electromagnetic.