Tom stood in the middle of it all holding a small stack of books with the air of a man who would definitely remember where he meant to put them in but a moment. He regarded his wife's drill-mastering of the all-out effort to get order out of chaos with blatant bemusement. He had explained to Mazzare, once, that chaos was not always disorder and dirt not necessarily mess. The natural order of things, per good organic principles, could be persuaded to suck in the gut and make itself useful, but could never be hammered into line.

Magda hewed to a different line, though. The "hash ranch" as the Lothlorien Commune was oft known had looked uncommonly neat and tidy since she moved in.

Finally, Stoner saw Mazzare standing in the doorway. "Hi, Father!" Tom called out, his face a sudden plea for rescue.

Mazzare repressed a smile. "Tom, could I have a word?" He led a relieved Stoner out into the corridor.

Stoner closed the door behind him, leaned on it and sighed, then shook his shaggy head. His hair was graying now, but just as thick and bushy and disheveled as it had always been. "I had me some bizarre domestic arrangements in my time, man, but this just about beats them all. I am o-fish-ully boor-jwah now, henpecked and everything."

"Stoner, that's kind of why I'm here to talk to you."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, it's Hanni." Mazzare chewed his lip a moment. "I, ah, promised her-"

Stoner frowned. "The boys were saying that they might go out for a drink or two with Gus, after he dropped by. I kind of wondered."

Mazzare nodded. It was no wonder Stoner knew. News from Hanni tended to get around fast, and everyone knew Father Heinzerling. It was obvious to anyone with more brains than God gave a rabbit what he suffered from, as well. Even by the standards of a time when drunkenness was the norm, Gus could put it away. And, left to his own devices, he did. It was Mazzare's guess that without Hanni all these years, he would have wrecked himself long since. Not as fast, perhaps, as he would have without Jesuit discipline, but still wrecked. For all his playing of the long-suffering henpecked husband, he actually clung to Hanni like the rock she was.

"Tom," he said, "I promised Hanni I wouldn't let Gus hit the sauce too hard. Now, I persuaded him to persuade the boys to cool it for a few days, since I'm sure they're planning to contact the CoC here in Venice-small as it probably is-but I don't think it makes sense to keep everyone grounded for the duration."

Tom smiled. "Wouldn't work, anyway. Not with my kids. Chips off the old block."

Mazzare managed not to wince. "So, could you ask the boys to keep an eye on Gus? Keep him talking, at least, since that seems to keep him from drinking so much?"

Stoner nodded. "I'll tell them. They're good about that sort of thing. And they like Gus; they consider him a superannuated jock but without the attitude."

Mazzare walked back down to the embassy reception room in a thoughtful frame of mind. On the way, he turned the corner on the staircase and bumped into a small, dark-haired man wearing a pointed yellow hat. Literally bumped into him, since it seemed neither of them was paying much attention to where he was going.

"Please, forgive me," Mazzare said, "Can I help you?" The man was short and slight and looked-yes, Jewish. He was wearing a distinctly lawyerly gown and had a tooled-leather briefcase under his left arm. That would mean he was-

"Signor Luzzatto?"

"Ah, yes," said the little man. "Benjamin Luzzatto, at your service. Might I assume that you are Father Mazzare, of Grantville?"

"Indeed. Were you at the ceremonies earlier today?"

"No, Monsignor. Jews were not permitted to be present at that. I watched from a window. Do I find you settling in here?"

Mazzare frowned. "Should I take it up with the doge? I mean, if you're to be our permanent man here-"

Luzzatto waved a hand. "Oh, please, Monsignor, take no trouble on my account. We must live apart, and are thus subjected to severe overcrowding in the ghetto, but otherwise we suffer only minor disabilities in Venice."

"Really? I thought the restrictions on Jews were severe."

"Perhaps I should restate the matter. Yes-officially-the restrictions are indeed severe. We are required to live in the ghetto; may not pursue many vocations; are required to lend money at unprofitable rates. Oh, indeed, it goes on and on." He shrugged. "In practice? They like to pretend that they have no Jews in La Serenissima, but so long as we are discreet and the pretense is maintained, we are usually left unmolested. In business matters, 'being discreet' simply means finding a Christian partner to be the, ah, what is the expression-?"

"Front man," Mazzare provided, using the English term.

"Yes, precisely." Luzzatto smiled wryly. "Such a devious language, your dialect of English. I have grown quite fond of it. As I was saying, so long as we are discreet the Venetian authorities ignore most of it. For all their pretensions at nobility, you know, the Case Vecchie are merchants before they are anything else. To tell the truth, other than the overcrowded conditions of the ghetto-which makes it very bad for us in times of epidemic-the only regulation which causes real aggravation is the requirement"-he gestured at his headgear-"that we must wear yellow hats or veils."

Here, his good humor seemed to slip. "For quite some time now, we have petitioned to have that color changed. It sometimes causes unpleasantness for our women-my own wife was solicited, just yesterday!-since prostitutes are also required by Venetian law to wear yellow veils when practicing their trade on the streets."

"Oh." Mazzare thought on that a moment, and decided to drop it for the time being. "Come, let us go to the reception room. There are some people I should like you to meet."

"That would be the Reverend Jones and Father Heinzerling and Dottores Stone and Nichols, yes?"

"Yes, and some others." They walked back down the stairs. "Are you from Venice originally?"

"No, I was born in Oporto, where my father was a doctor. We left when I was eight years old, for the City, after the great pardon freed him from jail. Then when I was eighteen I came to Italy to study law at Padua. Ever since, I have been a lawyer and a commercial agent here in Venice." Luzzatto smiled. "Much less exotic than your own origins, of course."

"Well, I don't know," said Mazzare. "Until less than three years ago I was nothing more than an ordinary small-town priest. Here we are." He opened the door.

Back in the reception room, some more of the delegation had finished unpacking and had come down to wet their whistles. "Everyone!" Mazzare said loudly. "This is Maestro Benjamin Luzzatto, the man Don Francisco picked to advise us once we arrived."

Luzzatto gave a little half-bow to the people there.

"I guess it's introductions all round, then," said Mazzare. "We decided that the thing to do was to hand off as much of Grantville's knowledge as we could, to help Venice be as effective a trading partner as possible and to give an earnest of our good faith. We'll be advised by you about that, of course, but for the time being we have a few people with us who're going to be able to help. Doctor Stone, as you call him, is still upstairs getting settled in. No doubt he'll be down later. With him is-ladies first-Sharon Nichols. She's really our doctor here."

Sharon nodded solemnly, as she had done everything for the past months. The statuesque young woman was not wearing "widow's weeds," true-and never had-but she was still grieving deeply.

"Sharon's a doctor of medicine where Tom Stone is a doctor of chemistry." That was something of a fib, designed to augment her status. Sharon wasn't an MD. She wasn't even technically an RN, although she had the equivalent training and experience-even real expertise, when it came to battlefield traumas. But Mazzare had learned early on that nursing when it wasn't done by nuns was regarded as low-rent scut-work in this day and age. Even the nuns only did it as a sort of self-mortification in most places. Besides, given the state of seventeenth-century medical knowledge and practice, a mostly trained twentieth-century nurse was considerably better than a doctor by local standards. A lot better, in Sharon's case. She seemed to have inherited her father James' skill as well as his very dark skin color.

If the Jewish lawyer was surprised to see a Moorish woman in their midst-and he probably wouldn't think of Sharon as anything else-he gave no sign of it. "An honor to meet you, Dottoressa Nichols," said Luzzatto, half-bowing again.

Sharon nodded. "Charmed, Maestro Luzzatto."

Mazzare thought for a moment about how to continue. Then: "As well as the medical side of the health mission we have brought with us, we propose offering some of our learning in the matter of public sanitation. Venice has a unique position in this regard, having the lagoon to drain into, but there is a deal more that can be done. The experts in these matters in Grantville are of the opinion that improved health begins with improved public sanitation, which is why Herr Mauer has come with us. Ernst has spent the last two years as one of the lead contractors in the reconstruction of Magdeburg's sewer system."

Mauer stood up straight from his habitual slouch and made a half-bow of his own. "An honor, Maestro Luzzatto." The greeting was one of the few bits of Italian that Mauer had reliably learned; half of the challenge in his passing anything to the Venetians would be the translation. Mazzare didn't think the translator would be worked too hard, either. Mauer was, at his most voluble, a laconic man. He was, however, a man with a reputation as a civil engineer. A master builder before the Ring of Fire, he had leapt at the opportunities offered by the rebuilding of Magdeburg and grabbed them with both hands. He had not been the only one to do so, but he had been the first to specialize, and had the kind of detailed mind needed to plan and execute a huge sewer system. Over six months he had educated himself in sanitation engineering and the English language, found his metier and laid the foundations of a modest fortune in civil engineering.

"Next," said Mazzare, "it was thought by our principals in Grantville that advances in shipbuilding might usefully be communicated to the shipwrights of Venice's Arsenal. Perhaps some of those advances will prove less than useful, but we anticipate a great volume of trade through Venice. If it can be carried in improved Venetian hulls there is a greater opportunity for the merchants of La Serenissima to profit. Hence we have with us Lieutenant Ursinus from our naval yards at Magdeburg. He has brought plans for a number of different kinds of vessels and has experience in building several types of craft. The young officer standing next to him is Lieutenant William Trumble, part of our Marine escort."

Billy simply nodded. Conrad Ursinus made appropriately polite noises, and Mazzare wondered again how he would go over with the Arsenal. The guildmasters and workers there were said to be notoriously jealous of their skills and prerogatives. Young as he was, Conrad Ursinus was as senior a man as the ferociously busy Magdeburg shipyards could spare, and another trained down-timer.

He was also a man who had grabbed opportunities; in his case, three of them. First, he was an officer in the growing U.S. Navy. Second, he'd parlayed his nearly completed carpenter's apprenticeship into a job as a shipwright and then as a slip foreman, and had the beginnings of credentials as a naval architect. On top of that, he had been part of the first wave of baseball players when the sport had gotten going in Grantville. The heavily plebeian and often-radical German population of Magdeburg had also adopted baseball, with all the ferocious enthusiasm with which they adopted most things American. Conrad was one of the stars of the Magdeburg Yard Dogs, for whom he played first base-and his friend Billy was the star pitcher for the Marine Corps team.

Whether the two of them would succeed in introducing the sport to Venice was another question. Mazzare knew that baseball was a popular sport in up-time Italy, if a minority interest, but it was as nothing to the Italian national religion of soccer. The Stone boys were enthusiasts for that sport, and Mazzare knew they had plans to introduce it in Italy. They might well succeed, despite Conrad and Billy. Mazzare could remember turning out for a game or two when he'd been in Rome, and the sheer mania that a Lazio crowd was capable of . . .

First, of course, they'd have to figure out where to play either game. Venice was not exactly a city with lots of parks and open space-and Mazzare had already firmly explained to all the young men involved that the Piazza San Marco was strictly off-limits. He foresaw enough problems, without having to deal with a doge aggravated by a baseball or a soccer ball breaking one of his windows. Or, worse yet, one of the windows in the Basilica.

He shook his head and went on with the introductions. "Captain Lennox here-"

"Good day to ye," said Lennox. He had a glass in his hand, and was visibly trying not to stand at attention.

"-is head of our embassy guard, which is a function our Marine Corps discharges for reasons of tradition. We also have with us my good friend and colleague the Reverend Simon Jones-"