1636: The Viennese Waltz

CHAPTER 17

June 1635

Aboard the Jupiter, en route to Vienna

Judy looked at Susan, three seats up and across the aisle. They were all in the Jupiter. It was surprisingly quiet, but not silent, and she could hear the engines faintly.

Susan Logsden needs to get laid, thought Judy with seventeen-year-old certainty. She thought this in spite of the fact that she herself was still technically a virgin and intended to remain one till someone developed a trustworthy means of contraception or she got married. Neither of which looked to be happening anytime soon. But Judy wasn’t Susan, or perhaps more to the point, Susan wasn’t Judy. Judy looked at the prospect of eventual intercourse with pleasant anticipation, but suffered very little frustration over its present lack. There were, after all, other things you could do.

Perhaps something could be worked out in Vienna. The pilot had just told them that they would be landing in a few minutes.

Vienna

Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, Bishop of Passau and brother to Emperor Ferdinand III, went over the papers and tried to forget that he was at least nominally a bishop. Leo had never thought of himself as overly religious. The church just was. But now the church wasn’t. Urban had retreated from Rome. Borja was butchering cardinals, whether to conquer the church or to save it no one seemed to know. True churchmen, the monks and the real bishops, couldn’t decide which side to be on. Order fighting order, priest condemning priest. He tried to retreat into the facts and figures that Gundaker von Liechtenstein and Moses Abrabanel had provided to ready him to meet Karl Eusebius and his bride.

“It’s here, Your Grace,” Marco said.

Leo, looked up from the report. Just as well. There was little good news in it anyway. The treasury was essentially empty. The people who were supposed to be putting money into the treasury wanted things in return. Mostly they wanted products from the United States of Europe kept out of Austria-Hungary. The soldiers wanted to be paid, as did the bureaucracy. “Calm yourself, Marco. Calm yourself,” Leo said, trying to sound like a bishop was supposed to. The title was political, a way of keeping lands that were nominally the church’s in the family. Not that his father would have ever admitted such a thing, even to himself. To his father, Leo had been something of a human sacrifice, a child given to the church to ensure salvation.

Leo could hear a buzzing from the sky. He kept a straight face as he rose and moved to the window. Keeping a straight face when he was really just as excited as Marco was second nature. Habsburg training. By natural inclination, Leo’s preference was for leading armies rather than prayers, but it didn’t do to show that to the people surrounding him, any more than it would do to show excitement about the plane.

“But look at it, Your Grace!” Marco was still excited and a bit irrepressible. Leo hid a smile.

The plane had indeed arrived. It was turning, slowly it seemed, making a circle around Vienna before it landed on the hastily-built new airstrip near Race Track City.

“Karl is certainly making an impressive entrance,” Leo murmured. When word came that Prince Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein would be arriving on one of the Jupiter aircraft, Neil O’Connor had provided the information on its needs. Provided it with much bragging. To hear Herr O’Connor tell it, the Air Cushion Landing Gear had been wholly his innovation and much of the rest of the plane as well. It didn’t need an airfield prepared, just a flat piece of ground or, even better, water. Then a place to park. Markers had been placed on the south bank of the Danube where it was to pull out of the river.

Then, unfortunately, the news had arrived had arrived that one of its sister ships had crashed in Italy. It seemed the peculiar landing gear had failed. Apparently there had been many maintenance problems with the landing gear even before the crash. As a result, the Royal Dutch Airlines, which owned the Jupiters, had refitted all of them-more precisely, the only one still in service at the moment-with more conventional landing gear.

So, a landing strip needed to be constructed. Happily, the land around Race Track City had many flat areas and there were now a number of Fresno scrapers on the site. Happier still, from the instructions sent ahead by the airline company, the Jupiter’s new landing gear, like the plane itself, was quite sturdy. The strip didn’t need to be macadamized, although that would certainly be an advantage in the future. They just needed to make sure the strip was smooth, level, and cleared of any rocks or stones.

Neil O’Connor offered his advice on that subject as well. Maintaining all the while that he’d never trusted that weird ACLG landing gear, nohow.

* * *

“Come, Marco,” Leo said. “We’re the greeting party.” Leo headed to Race Track City.

Landing Strip, near Race Track City

“Back, there. Back, back. You want to get run over!” Neil O’Connor had reached the landing strip ahead of them and was shouting in poorly accented German. With the help of half a company of the city garrison, he seemed to be shooing most of Vienna out of the parking place of the aircraft. The guardsmen were having difficulty keeping the crowd back.

“Move,” Marco shouted. The crowd parted, mostly because of the guards who surrounded Archduke Leopold. As the path appeared, Leo moved forward. “Would you look at that?” another guard whispered when they got to the front.

The Jupiter was sitting at the far end of the landing strip and slowly turning around in the wide area that had been leveled for that purpose. Then, it began moving slowly back to the strip’s beginning where it had first set down and where the crowd was gathered.

“They call that ‘taxi-ing,’” said the same guard. “I don’t know why. Thurn and Taxis has nothing to do with airplanes.”

The approaching airplane looked enough like a monster that the guards had no great difficulty getting the crowd to move back off the landing strip and onto the grounds beyond. Once they’d done so, the aircraft moved the final distance and came to a halt. There was a peculiar noise of some kind and the blurry things on the wings-they were called “propellors,” Leo knew-began to slow down. Eventually they stopped spinning, and Leo could now see that they looked like long and twisted oar-blades.

The door on the side of the airplane opened and Prince Karl stepped out onto the lower wing, followed by a pretty young woman. “Leo, ah, Your Grace!” Karl waved, then bowed, and nearly stumbled as the young woman pulled him aside to clear the door. Leo held back a snort of laughter, and moved forward a bit. Others had exited the plane to stand on the wing, including a young man carrying a ladder, which he attached to the rear of the wing.

“Your Grace,” Karl said, coming down the stepladder. Leo had known Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein most of his life, but Karl had been away for several years now.

“Prince von Liechtenstein.” Leo nodded, then glanced at the young woman who had followed him down.

Karl took the hint. “Your Grace, may I introduce my fiancee? Assistant Secretary of Economic Forecasting for the Federal Reserve Bank of the USE, Miss Sarah Wendell von Up-time. Sarah, His Grace, Bishop and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm von Hapsburg.” The girl, Sarah, performed a small dip of her knees, not a bow, not a curtsy. Just a dip, of sorts. She was much, much different than the young woman who had come to Austria with the defectors. No tattoos he could see, and not a single facial piercing. That was a relief. Leo had begun to wonder about these up-time women after seeing Suzi Barclay.

More young women joined them. “And the rest of our visitors, Your Grace. This is Sarah’s sister.”

Leo took his eyes off Sarah. He turned his head and suddenly felt like he’d been struck by lightning.

Karl was still talking. “Judith Wendell von Up-time.”

“Your Grace,” the vision said. “So pleased to meet you. Call me Judy, please. Everyone does.”

Beauty incarnate, Leo thought. It was strange, really. She wasn’t that attractive by the artistic standards of the seventeenth century. Too thin by half, he would have said if he were looking at a painting. But this wasn’t a painting. She flowed, she floated, she waved to the crowd. She smiled and you were welcomed into heaven.

Leo went through the rest of the greeting in a haze. He performed his function in a daze, which proved the value of years of training in protocol. Judy had a soft, furry voice. Leo felt like everything she said was a secret shared with him, and him alone.

The rest of the young ladies came forward. Karl pointed at each. “Victoria Maureen Emerson von Up-time, Susan Elizabeth Logsden von Up-time, Gabrielle Carlina Ugolini von Up-time, Millicent Anne Barnes von Up-time.” Leo worked at remembering all the strange names. Then Gundaker von Liechtenstein arrived, and brought Leo back to the present. It was Prince Karl who was important here. More important than the plane, even.

Gundaker had made it all quite clear. The empire was broke. Worse than broke. Without the taxes provided by Bohemia and Moravia, Austria-Hungary didn’t have the assets to cover the loans already outstanding. Almost as bad, many of their potential loan sources had instead invested money in the new businesses in the USE. Including the Liechtensteins, in the person of Karl. In spite of which the Liechtenstein family in Austria had, under considerable pressure, made further loans to the royal purse. And that money was now mostly spent to keep the Austrian government from appearing as broke as it was. When asked for more, they had pointed out that there wasn’t any more, at least not in Austria-Hungary. They had lost a lot of their income to Wallenstein at the same time the Austro-Hungarian empire had. Karl, however, safe in Grantville in the USE had investments of considerable worth.

“My lord of the Exchequer.” Leo bowed precisely the right amount for a younger brother of the emperor to a member of the highest nobility who was many years his senior. Gundaker was a stickler for protocol. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

“Your Grace,” Gundaker answered, even more precisely than usual. Leo wondered what had him upset. Then he realized it was the up-timer girls. Sarah Wendell von Up-Time to be precise. Gundaker was not one of those who subscribed to the notions of up-timer nobility. Gundaker was a bit of a prick even if he was a highly efficient organizer and quite bright. He had long since appointed himself the job of seeing that no one show the Liechtenstein family lese majeste. Gundaker was happy enough that Karl was making a morganatic marriage. It opened up the inheritance of the Liechtenstein lands to his branch of the family, after all. On the other hand, Gundaker didn’t approve of jumped-up peasants. He didn’t approve of Sarah Wendell and was only willing to put up with the marriage at all because it removed any potential children from the succession. That, and the fact that most of Prince Karl’s money was sitting comfortably in the USE, where the rest of the family couldn’t get hold of it, at least not without Karl’s acquiescence. The Liechtenstein family and the Austro-Hungarian Empire needed that money. It was a weak bargaining position for Gundaker, a position he found less than comforting.

This was something that Leo had already talked to his older brother Ferdinand III about. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had no particular objection to recognizing the title “von Up-time.” Marriages, after all, were significantly cheaper than wars. Ah. Here it came. Karl was introducing his harem, ah, the young ladies, to his uncle. “Sarah Wendell von Up-time, Judith Elaine Wendell von Up-time, Victoria Maureen Emerson von Up-time. .” With each introduction Gundaker’s face got a little bit stiffer.

“Hi, guys!” came from out of the crowd.

“Hayley!” Judy shouted back. “Let her through!”

Leo nodded, though it wasn’t really necessary. Whether it was Judy’s voice, which carried a natural assumption of obedience or the obvious fact that several of the nobles gathered around the plane knew Hayley Alma Fortney or some other reason, Hayley was already through the guards. Hayley Fortney, the daughter of one of his brother’s mechanics, joined them next to the plane.

“So!” Victoria Maureen Emerson von Up-time asked in English, “how is life in the sticks?”

Leo felt his face stiffen up. Gundaker’s was already stone, now it turned to iron. The plays and even movies had spread rapidly-not all of them, but some. Granted, the remark was in English and up-timer English to boot, but sticks and hicks had been translated as slang expressions for villages and villains/villagers.

“It’s a translation issue,” Judy said.

Leo looked at her, wondering what she was talking about, and she continued, looking back and forth between Leo and Gundaker. “It’s one of the most difficult issues we’ve run into since the Ring of Fire brought us here. It’s not the direct meaning of words, though that has been a problem. But the indirect unconscious meanings that people attach. The implications can be quite different than we expect.”

“And what was mistranslated?” Gundaker asked.

“I have no idea, but from your expression something was.” Then she grinned like an imp and winked at Gundaker. And Leo found himself trying not to laugh.

“Sticks, perhaps?” Leo asked.

“How would you translate it?”

“Out among the villagers, probably.”

“And why would that be so very insulting?” Judy asked.

Now Leo was caught. What exactly was so insulting about being called a villager? Were they not as much children of God as the citizens of Vienna? Yet Leo knew that he did feel insulted and he knew why. He was the younger son of the last Holy Roman Emperor, and whatever the Bible might say, he was no peasant and didn’t appreciate being thought of as one.

“Perhaps you don’t see the insult because you were born in a village yourself,” Gundaker offered. “Uncultured, without the benefit of civilization.”

“In a way you’re absolutely right.” Judy grinned. “But not in the way you mean. I was never a ‘villain’ in the sense it is so often used here and now. I was always a citizen. A citizen of the United States of America. I never met a ‘villain’ till after the Ring of Fire.” Her voice put quotes around villain. “As to the uncultured part. . Well, the truth is we have nearly four hundred years more civilization than you do. Great art, great music, great generals, engineering, medicine, mathematics, economics, all sorts of stuff. Things that are available in and near the Ring of Fire, even to an extent in Magdeburg. That part was sort of valid, I guess. But we don’t hold their lack against you.” Judy smiled again, a thoroughly condescending smile. “At least, we try not to. It would be uncivilized to do so.”

Leo had never seen Gundaker von Liechtenstein so thoroughly put in his place.

Hayley Fortney had apparently been explaining to the young ladies what it was like in the sticks. There was quite a bit of giggling going on. Leo suddenly wondered how she knew the other girls. “How is it that the daughter of one of my brother’s auto mechanics knows you and your friends, Judy?”

“Because the daughter of your brother’s auto mechanic is,”-and now Judy’s voice became quite cultured, almost a parody of cultured-“Hayley Alma Fortney von Up-time. A member in good standing of the Barbie Consortium.” Then Judy’s voice returned to its normal friendly, welcoming tones. “And a friend of all of ours since before the Ring of Fire.” Then in a whisper, “She’s loaded!”

“‘Loaded’?”

“Rich.”

“If her family is,” Leo grinned and whispered back, “‘loaded!’ why is her father working as my brother’s mechanic?”

“Oh, her family’s not rich. Comfortable, even well off, okay. Quite well off, what with the family money she’s been investing for them. But Hayley is the one who’s rich. Besides, her dad likes cars.”

Which gave Leo a whole other set of things to think about. Not just “what was her father doing here,” but “what was the daughter doing here?” It was known, or at least suspected within the family, that Herr Fortney was probably a spy and he was being watched. But if the daughter was the spy, what was she spying on? Neither she nor either mechanic or their families had made any great effort to insert themselves in the top rung of Viennese society. Instead they talked with the artisans and merchants of Vienna. Which is precisely what one should expect from someone who was keeping Ferdinand III’s race cars in working order and building steam engines. But not exactly what you would expect of “Hayley Alma Fortney von Up-time, a member in good standing of the Barbie Consortium.” Whatever that was.