The embassy was quickly settling into a routine of drinks before dinner, which was just getting going when Sharon and Magda got back. The down-time Marines had been introduced to the pleasure of accompanying ladies in a serious retail frenzy; thereby proving, to Sharon's satisfaction, that blank-faced stoical response was hardwired into the male genetic code. Born three hundred years before the invention of the mall, they had developed the stance and the face without even having to think about it. Sharon had been amused, despite herself. And besides, shopping was just plain fun.

They'd gotten back, squared accounts from their own funds, and changed for dinner.

"Any success, ladies?" Father Mazzare asked.

"Not yet, no," Sharon said. "Explored a blind alley this morning, and took the rest of the day just exploring. We're going to get hold of Maestro Luzzatto as soon as we can and work up a real plan of action."

She and Magda hadn't just been shopping, actually. They'd crossed and recrossed the Rialto district as they'd picked up souvenirs, clothes and assorted pretties, and watched deals go down left, right and center. Venice was a town that, however tight margins currently were, lived and died by dealing. When the weather was good, Venetians came out and did it in the street, strolling across the piazza and in taprooms and tavernas everywhere. Wander into the right part of town and you heard everything being bought and sold. They'd even taken a look at the Palazzo Ducale, and walked through the Imbroglio, which had given its name to the kind of insanely complicated political and commercial deals that were put together there.

Eavesdropping had been fruitful. Sharon and Magda had gotten some idea of the kind of trading they wanted to do here, and they were already revising their plan of attack.

Tom was over by the fire, sprawled sideways across an armchair and perusing his notes. Given the volume of requests that had poured in as soon as the embassy arrived in Venice, Stoner had decided to postpone setting up his own laboratory in favor of purely educational work. He was about to start his lectures with a series on the practical problems of scaling lab processes to industrial ones, right here in Venice. He would be going to the university in Padua later, to do the more academic stuff on scientific method and real chemistry. He was absorbed in his material, so much so that he wasn't paying any attention to the room around him.

"I should go reassure my husband," Magda said. "He seems nervous."

"I think you're right," Sharon agreed. "And Magda?"

"Ja?"

"I think we maybe ought to turn out for Tom's lectures, don't you?"

"Well, naturally . . ." Magda said, frowning at the implied suggestion that she hadn't been going to support her man.

"No, that's not what I meant. I mean we should go with our trading hats on. Not every chemist is as unworldly as your Stoner." She smiled to take any possible sting out of the words. To hear Magda tell it, as well as being the most frustrating thing about Stoner, his impracticality was one of the things she loved most about him. "And maybe there's a slice of that action to be had."

Magda, grasping what Sharon was driving at immediately, grinned back. And it was not a friendly grin, either. Sharon realized that there was something deeply predatory about her friend, something that had been aroused to a terrible hunger by the scent of deals in the water.

She suspected that the next few weeks were going to be very interesting indeed. As Magda crossed the room to mop Tom's fevered brow, Sharon began looking around for Luzzatto to make an appointment.

Chapter 23.

Singing. Some damned idiot was singing, somewhere in the street below. He'd been at it for some time, too, long enough to wake Buckley up. Joe rolled over and grabbed his watch. No need for the backlight function, it was already full day.

That helped wake him up as well. The fact that he'd gotten a suite of rooms with a nice, big, east-facing window that gave him a view of the Isola di Sant'Elena and its cathedral, and beyond that the Lido and the sea, was all very well. But the sun came up right in the window and the first thing it did in the morning was heat the room up to somewhere near boiling point. The bull's-eye panes in the window didn't help; they focused the sunlight onto the far wall in a strange and eye-watering pattern of rippled light.

Just after midday, he saw from his watch. He could probably have figured that by the position of the sunlight on the wall. Joe lived in a permanent paranoia of his watch breaking. He'd had the good fortune to have a self-winding model, nothing fancy, but it was one of the few timepieces from the old universe that was still working. He'd only been half-joking with himself when he'd thought to mark the position of the sun on the wallpaper at every hour. A couple of times he'd had scares that his watch was about to wind down. He wound it anyway, for the reassurance of having the time right.

He rolled out of bed, and stood swaying for a moment before rooting around for the chamberpot. He hadn't gotten into bed before about four o'clock that morning. He'd stayed light on the sauce, but that didn't mean he felt particularly human this morning. Afternoon, rather.

This was a town that liked to party, and party good and hard at that. Would it be too much, he wondered, to do a tourist guide piece? Venice could certainly use the income, and there were plenty of people in Europe with money who might want to come down here for a week or two.

He coughed, good and hard. Those tavernas could be damned smoky. The prevalence of tobacco in seventeenth-century Europe had come as a surprise to Joe, as it had to most of the up-timers. But where many up-timers had been relieved that their addiction could still be fueled, Joe had quit smoking as soon as the cigarettes ran out. Unlike some others, he'd not been able to bring himself to try what passed for pipe tobacco in this day and age. The stuff was so wretched that just sitting in a tavern was as good as going through a whole pack in an evening.

Buckley opened the window and spat out of it, watching the phlegm drop four floors to the canal. Then he sent the contents of the chamberpot after it, flinging it out so it didn't land on the footpath that ran along the edge of the water. He wasn't supposed to do that, but everybody did anyway.

He was right at the other end of downtown Venice from the embassy, now, up under the roof of a mostly empty tenement block. The rent wasn't bad, as no Venetian really wanted to live this high up if he could afford to be lower down. Besides, after the plague tenants were thin on the ground. The landlord had been almost ecstatic to find a renter.

For his own part, Joe liked it well enough. Someone who'd had the room before him-could have been any time in the last couple of centuries, from the rickety feel of the place-had liked to have plenty of light in the mornings, so they'd enlarged the windows. That kept the rent low, as well, because Joe was quite sure the rooms would be very cold in the winter. But he didn't care; he liked the light himself and planned to be gone by midsummer anyway.

The only real downside to the place was that his guidebook stopped working hereabouts. The map in the back had been drawn in the twentieth century and according to the street plan he was living in what would be, from the nineteenth century onward, a park. Finding the embassy was tough, too-where that stood would be Venice's railway station in three hundred years' time.

Buckley opened the package of laundry that he had picked up yesterday afternoon. That was an odd business. The modern clothes generally came back ruined, other than jeans, but the contemporary stuff usually got through fine. He guessed that was due to the local folks knowing how to deal with what they were used to, and not having a clue with care labels. That said, he'd never had a clue either. He'd gotten used to shapeless pullovers and faded colors in college.

Another change for the better in the seventeenth century: he was dressed better now. Natural curiosity had led him to go find out how they did it before the invention of the Laundromat. It turned out that they took the clothes apart to launder them, and then put them back together, an effort that made him appreciate all the more the pleasant sensation of pulling on clean clothes. Not that he did that as often as he used to. Wearing a shirt once and tossing it in the hamper was a luxury he couldn't afford any more.

What to do with the day, he wondered? He got his little stove going and began to brew breakfast. He'd gotten hold of one of Grantville's supply of primus stoves early on in his travels. He'd read a quote from Casanova's memoirs-a local boy, that one-some years before the Ring of Fire, and been mightily impressed by the old seducer's habit of carrying with him a bag packed with a stove and breakfast fixings wherever he went so he could "break his fast like a gentleman."

Living out of a suitcase in upper-floor garrets, Buckley appreciated it more for the ability to get hot coffee down him first thing in the morning without having to lay a fire he wasn't going to need to keep warm.

Still, as the coffee perked, he had a day to fill and no clear plan for what to do with it. And that idiot was still singing by the canal-side. He wished he'd spat on the caterwauling fool. Or worse. Something about love and the springtime, a folksong of some sort.

That put Buckley in mind of Frank Stone, and he grinned. What a perfect illustration of teenage maleness that was! Off at all hours hanging out with the Marcolis, a family of complete loons, because he was besotted with Giovanna. Okay, sure, the girl herself was gorgeous, but still. And hauling his brothers along with him every time! The three of them were fixtures at the Casa Marcoli these days, helping to spread the word of the coming new world order to the largely indifferent population of Venice.

Although . . .

Now that Joe actually thought about it, there was something a little odd about that picture. The two younger Stone boys weren't even Frank's brothers. They were really step-brothers. And Giovanna was the only Marcoli daughter, so what the hell were they getting out of it? Hanging out with an obvious crank while their brother tried to get into the pants of the crank's daughter?

Odd. Was something else going on out there? Something more exciting than just sitting around and jabbering about politics?

Joe decided he'd find out. If nothing else, he supposed, it would be a way to spend the day. Besides, it was probably time he took a look at the Committee of Correspondence in Venice, even if he was pretty sure it was mostly a joke. He checked his watch again. There was plenty of time to get there for the daily public meeting they tried to get a decent turnout for-and failed miserably, from what Joe had heard.

And the idiot was still singing. He'd reached the end of the song and started again! The way it echoed up from the canal and the buildings opposite made it doubly, trebly annoying. Buckley found himself wishing for some traffic noise, a sound he hadn't heard in nearly three years. Definitely, he decided, time to get out of the house. Even if he got nothing from the Venetian committee, he could mooch about Murano and play tourist.

A boat over to Murano was easily had, and getting out from among the filthy canals of downtown Venice and into the seabreeze and the salt air of the lagoon did Buckley a world of good.

Murano, even in midafternoon with the sunlight across it, looked like a seedy and disreputable pile. Sure, it had its nice neighborhoods, and the glassblowers had always been one of the better-off classes of Venetians. Not dirt-poor, anyway. But like almost everything in Venice, Murano was looking down-at-the-heels. The smoke from the kilns gave it a positively brooding air.

He got off the boat at the right pier for the neighborhood he wanted. Looking around, his imagination immediately painted a set of tracks along the water's edge with a big sign, saying: You are now entering The Wrong Side. All of the clues were there. Peeling stucco, even more than usual for Venice. Great patches of plaster missing, the brickwork grinning through from underneath like the teeth of bleached skulls. The laundry strung across the streets-alleyways, in any other town-was gray and patched. More rats than in the neighborhoods that could afford catchers. And, above all, a hunched, wary surliness about the inhabitants, such of them as there were.

He was almost immediately accosted by a grimy little kid. Urchin, to the life, he thought. Sighing, he dug in his pocket for a coin before realizing that the kid was holding out a piece of paper. He took it. It was as grimy as the kid was, the print slightly smeared.

He looked back down at the kid. The look of pathetic gratitude and the thick sheaf of handbills still in his hand spoke volumes. Buckley looked around. So did the litter of discarded . . .

He checked the paper in his hand again. Ha! Yes! Committee of Correspondence flyers scattered along the path and floating dejectedly in the water.

"No one interested, kid?" Buckley returned his hand into his pocket for that coin. For some time now he'd been keeping a hefty handful of small change in his pocket for just this sort of occasion. Besides, the poor little brat looked like he could use a meal.

"No, messer," the kid said. "Messer Marcoli, he is a good man, he gives me soup and money to give out the papers, but no one wants them." The tone was mournful and the big, brown, hang-dog eyes positively heartbreaking.

"Something for you, then, kid," Buckley said, handing over the coin.

The eyes started to glisten, the lower lip started to tremble. "Aw, hell, here's another. Take a break, on me."