1636:The Kremlin games

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.”

Anya nodded, remembering a night when Bernie, Filip, and she had talked about freedom, slavery and serfdom. How many conversations like that had there been? How many quiet words and beliefs had Bernie Zeppi dropped like seeds into fallow ground, not because he intended to create a revolution but simply because of who he was.

And what would Cass Lowry have dropped in place of those seeds? The man might be an up-timer in his origins, but he thought like a nobleman. Lowry believed, deep inside, that he deserved more and better than anyone else. From what Bernie had said, that had been true of him even when he was a teenager with no greater title than that of an athlete.

“You’re right. Cass Lowry would have fit right in with the service nobility, and we never would have seen that there was a better way.”

“That’s what bothers me the most. How quickly the people here are giving up on that better way. How fast ivory towers can come down. Exchange Bernie for Cass Lowry, Mikhail for Sheremetev, and heaven is whisked away, with only memory of it making what we have now seem an annex of hell. My knight in shining armor arrived four years ago and by the time I noticed he was here, it was too late,” Natasha said.

“We could run, you know,” Anya said. “I’ve done it before. We could go east to the wild lands. Russia doesn’t really control Siberia. No one does.”

“You ran away to Siberia?” Natasha blinked her eyes in astonishment.

“No. I ran away to Moscow,” Anya said. “I wasn’t even a serf. I was a slave. I ran and got lost in Moscow, found any work I could, anywhere I could. My point is we’re a lot better situated now. We have money and can get or forge travel papers. On the other hand, you’re an important person. I just had one slave owner looking for me. We’d have the whole government looking for us. We’d have to go farther.”

“What about everyone else? What about Bernie and Filip?”

“We could take Filip and Bernie!”

“And everyone else? We could run. We could even take Bernie and Filip, perhaps a few others. But what about the staff of the Dacha? We can’t all run. Not everyone would even want to.”

“I know.” Anya looked down at the bed they were sitting on. “But we may not have a choice. I don’t think Cass Lowry will change and I don’t think Boyar Sheremetev will back away from supporting him, certainly not for me and probably not for you. It may be run or submit to Cass. And I’m not sure I could do that, not anymore.”

Natasha knew that Anya was preparing to run, but took no action either to aid her or prevent her. Natasha couldn’t make up her mind. In a way the Dacha was a very effective cage. Its bars were of duty stronger than high carbon steel. She couldn’t abandon her scientists to Cass Lowry and Sheremetev. They had come here to work for Russia and all its people, to do good with their minds. Natasha knew that view was a bit simplistic, but it was true enough when it came down to it. So she stayed and worked and tried to protect the eggheads and the cooks. The philosophers and the gardeners. And died a bit as the dream she hadn’t even known she was dreaming died around her.

As punishments for idle comments, “wasting time on unprofitable hobbies,” or lack of progress on one of Cass or Sheremetev’s pet projects came down, she tried to act as a buffer between her people and their new masters. But it wasn’t working. Four years can be long enough to learn freedom, but it’s not always long enough for the lesson to stick. More and more the Dacha was reverting to the dog-eat-dog informer culture of the bureaus.

More and more Cass Lowry felt empowered and Natasha had to restrain Bernie and her armsmen several times. Even so, the only thing that kept Bernie alive was that Sheremetev wanted two up-timers at the Dacha. He had told Cass in no uncertain terms that Bernie was off limits. Cass had also been told that Natasha was off limits and that protection was effectively extended to Anya as long as she stayed with Natasha. The only way she had kept her armsmen alive was by ordering more and more of them out of the Dacha.