"Maybe not for that, but what is really needed is a household electrical plant."

"What's up?" asked Sarah.

"Huh?" said Brent. "Oh, we got to looking at that list. You know, the one we made up last year, before we decided on the sewing machines. A bunch of stuff on it that seemed impractical at the time might be doable after all. I think a pedal-powered washing machine would be good."

"But what we really need is a home or small business power plant," said Trent. "It opens the way for everything from toasters to TV."

Brent and Trent were off into their argument again. David and Sarah drifted off a ways.

"We're still kids," Sarah pointed out. "The bank probably still won't give us a loan, and I don't want Mrs. Higgins to sell any more dolls."

"True," said David. "But now we have the stock in HSMC, and it's really gone up since Karl took over. I think he was right about the problems people have with kids running businesses. What we need are fronts. People that will nominally be in charge, and won't scare investors away. Uh, Sarah, you wanna go out sometime?"

It just sort of slipped out when he wasn't looking. He had planned and replanned how he was going to ask her out. Then before he realized what was happening, he had opened his mouth and out it popped. That half smile, and the twinkle in her eyes as they figured ways and means of financing the terrible twin's new project. It just happened.

It took Sarah a few moments to a.s.similate the sudden change in conversational direction. Once upon a time, back when she had been focused on Brent, she had been sort of vaguely aware that David was interested in her. But as they worked together on the sewing machine company she had gradually gotten over her crush on Brent. She had forgotten about David's interest. Apparently he hadn't.

Pretty constant guy, David; not exactly boring, either.

While Sarah was thinking it over, David was sinking into the grim certainty that he had put his foot in it.

Here it comes, he was sure, the dreaded words: can't we just be friends?

"Okay," said Sarah. "When?"

THE RUDOLSTADT COLLOQUY.

by

Virginia DeMarce

April 1633

Ed Piazza squirmed as inconspicuously as possible on the hard bench of the University of Jena's anatomy amphitheater, as the debate on differing Lutheran views of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, both up-time and down-time, flew over and around his head in three different languages. Before he'd made the acquaintance of the different parties that existed among Grantville's new citizenry, he had just been naive in his a.s.sumption that only his own Roman Catholic church encompa.s.sed communicants with views as divergent as those of Francisco Franco and Dorothy Day.

The brightest idea that anyone-anyone at all-had had last winter had been Samantha Burka's suggestion that the growing tensions among the Lutherans of the United States could be dodged by taking advantage of political geography. Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt had not only built St. Martin's in the Fields Lutheran Church, of currently uncertain orthodoxy, for the benefit of Grantville's huge influx of Lutheran citizens but had also built it on his own land. True, Rudolstadt was part of the new little United States; but, on the other hand, the United States was a confederation and that territory was not the responsibility of Grantville itself. Thus, the Grantville government could take the high road, virtuously declaring that it did not interfere in ecclesiastical disputes, and dump the whole squabble into the lap of the Rudolstadt administration.

Consequently the count, with the a.s.sistance of his chancellor and consistorial advisors, was presiding over this circus, while Ed was watching. In any station of life, a man can find something to be thankful for.

Somebody made another reference to the Formula of Concord. This, Ed had learned in his desperate pre-conference dash through the applicable chapters of the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, supplemented by a briefing book that the new Grantville Research Center had pulled together for him from the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, had been produced fifty years earlier as part of a major effort to get all the Lutheran theologians on the same wavelength. It still served as a sort of measuring-stick for orthodox Lutheran views in 1633-and had in the twentieth century as well.

Ed glanced down toward the floor as the conscientious young man at the chalkboard, using his one good arm, quickly wrote the page reference for the audience to follow along. Jonas Justinus Muselius had been in Grantville for almost the whole two years since the Ring of Fire and had a pretty swift head and hand when it came to getting around in three languages at once. He now taught at the new Lutheran grade school next to the controversial church just outside Grantville's borders.

In his own copy of the Concordia Triglotta, Ed leafed over to the proper page in English. The tome not only had the Formula of Concord, Latin and German on the left-hand page and English with a blank column on the right-hand page, but most of the major Reformation doc.u.ments that had led up to it-the Lutheran catechisms, the Augsburg Confession, the Apology to the Augsburg Confession, etc. Ed guessed that they were lucky that the Lambert kid was a devout Lutheran. He'd had that book, with the whole thing conveniently lined up in all three languages so the content matched on each pair of pages-all 1,285 of them, index included. Every partic.i.p.ant in the Rudolstadt Colloquy now had one, included in the registration packet, which made for a hefty weight in the tote bags.

The publisher in Jena had been happy to get the order. He said cheerfully that if he had any copies left over after the conference, he'd just get someone to smuggle them into England and cause that half-Papist Laud some trouble.

Ed's pencil wiggled. A doodle bloomed on the upper left-hand corner of page 123 (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Art. IV. (II.), English version) and gradually expanded to become an ill.u.s.trated border all the way around the scholastics, the good works, and the "many great and pernicious errors, which it would be tedious to enumerate." The speaker, clearly, had no problems with tedium. It looked like he was going to enumerate them all. The full sleeve of his gown snagged on a corner of the book; its skirt scrunched up under him, even though he had smoothed it out before he sat down.

"What is a colloquy?" Ed remembered asking that question when the project of having a colloquy in Rudolstadt to smooth over the differences among and between the various factions of Grantville's up-time and down-time Lutherans was first brought up. Innocence, blessed innocence! Now he knew. Colloquies were events whereby someone put dissenting parties of theologians and their adherents into a room with spectators and insisted that they keep talking until they reached some sort of a resolution on the controversial issues.

Colloquies did not have time clocks.

This colloquy involved the Flacians, orthodox Lutherans on the model of Matthaeus Flacius Illyricus, and the Philippists, slightly less stringently orthodox Lutherans on the model of Philip Melanchthon-from the 1633 here and now. The two factions had been disputing since Luther's death, and they were disputing still. In addition to these by-now cla.s.sic components, it had as a plus factor those interesting up-time equivalents, the Missouri Synod, a largely German-heritage and theologically orthodox organization of Lutherans in the up-time USA, and the ELCA, or Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which appeared to Ed to be pretty much the outcome of a multi-stage amalgamation of the descendants of Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, and some portion of German Lutheran immigrant churches.

The colloquy was thus providing an excuse for half the academics on the continent, plus a few from the British Isles, to see the Americans for themselves while billing the trip to their employers. As a result, it had grown to the point that no place in Rudolstadt, a county seat that had a population of slightly over a thousand residents two years ago and only half again that many now, could cope with the attendance. Therefore, they were having the Rudolstadt Colloquy some twenty miles down the Saale River to the north, in the university town of Jena, whose permanent population regarded it as a great financial boon. A rousing theological colloquy was an event which attracted not only theologians, but politicians, visitors who came for the entertainment, souvenir salesmen, and food vendors. Outside, in Jena's market square, beverage booths were vying with street musicians, while booksellers displayed their wares next to pretzel bakers. Almost every house in the town was crammed to the rafters with temporary boarders.

Ed thought idly that if the debate should degenerate into a riot, anyone with a strong right arm and the three and a half pounds of the Concordia Triglotta in a tote bag could do a lot of damage to an opponent-though, luckily, it was a paperback. In the seventeenth century, book printing and book binding were separate trades, and anyone who wanted a cover on his book usually took it to a binder after he had bought it. True, Count Ludwig Guenther had a.s.sured him that any riot was more likely to take place outside in the streets rather than among the partic.i.p.ants themselves, but half the people outside-farmers and artisans, students and merchants, journeymen and apprentices, male and female-had bought a copy of the book, too. It was by far the most popular souvenir for visitors to take home.

The man next to him shifted restlessly. Ed looked over and saw that his Latin text had acquired an even more elaborate decoration than his own, in pen rather than pencil. The thin-faced little man returned the glance, with a surrept.i.tious grin, and penned a question in the margin of page 122.

You American?

Yes. Ed Piazza. Grantville.

Leopold Cavriani. Geneva. Beer when they stop?

The two men came out of the university grounds into what Ed still couldn't help thinking of as a picturesque, old-fashioned, German town that would delight any right-thinking tourist. It was, he reminded himself, a picturesque contemporary German town in which dozens of people who lived in what they considered to be modern times were standing around an old-time West Virginia fiddler. He was sitting on an upside-down keg that had once held imported Norwegian salted herring and playing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" A skinny teenaged German girl was selling the sheet music.

Ed chalked up one more "Benny sighting." Old Benny Pierce, a childless widower, had been 79 at the time of the Event. He must be 81 now, Ed thought. Benny kept wandering around south central Thuringia with the single-minded focus of preventing the legacy of Mother Maybelle Carter from being lost. Some people-especially his nephew's wife Doreen-worried that he was going to get himself into trouble. But, after all, even Doreen admitted, you couldn't keep a grown man pinned down. Still, Ed did sort of try to keep track of him. There was no predicting where, when, or if he might someday need to be bailed out, since the grandly-named Department of International Affairs was still doing double duty as the Consular Service.

The weather was nice: that is, it wasn't actively raining. Yet. Ed and Cavriani took their beers to an outdoor table behind the restaurant. "Ahh," Ed said, as he sat down.

"Do you prefer 'Signor' Cavriani?" The Italian that Ed had learned from his grandparents was rusty, but serviceable.

"Not for a long time," Cavriani replied in German. "My first language is French. Seventy years or so ago, my grandfather was a university student, thinking modern thoughts. Seventy years ago, those thoughts were about Protestantism, naturally, but he was in Naples. So he found it prudent to leave. Of course, it's much easier to leave Naples than to leave a lot of these inland places-he just took a boat to Ma.r.s.eilles and from there went over to Geneva. He wrote home, telling his family that if they would send him enough money to buy citizenship, he would open up a branch of the firm. They did, he did, and we're still there-Cavriani Freres de Geneve. Neapolitan politics are fun, of course. I still keep my hand in, a bit. Just as a hobby, you know."

"And Cavriani Freres deals in...?"

Cavriani waved his hand. "Oh, a little of this, a little of that. You could think of us as brokers, I suppose. I rather like your up-time word-facilitators. Smoothers of paths. Those who make the rougher places plain."

Ed's mouth quirked. "You're in road construction?"

"We can ensure that a road is constructed. Or that a boat is built and crewed. That an enterprise is financed. Or even, sometimes, that an idea is spread. As the fiddler whom you watched is ensuring that an idea is spread."

Ed c.o.c.ked his head. "Would it be indiscreet to ask just whom, or what, you have been facilitating in or near Grantville?"

"Ah," said Cavriani. "Not at all. My meetings with Count August von Sommersburg, if not public as to their specific content, have not been concealed. Nor has their general purpose, which is financing the expansion of his slate quarries southwest of Grantville. I a.s.sure you that my presence is known to your Saale Development Authority. I paid Mr. Bolender at the Department of Economic Resources a courtesy call as well."

Ed thought privately that if Count August was slick, his backer was likely to be even slicker. Nonetheless, Cavriani was a pleasant man to have as a new acquaintance. But "facilitators" usually were pleasant. Amiable. Courteous and easy to talk to. It was part of their stock in trade.

Cavriani was continuing. "If we could meet for dinner, I would be happy to explain the proposals we will be presenting."

But Ed had an out, at least temporarily. "Unfortunately, Monsieur Cavriani, I have a prior commitment." Ed dangled a tidbit of information to gauge Cavriani's reaction. "Margrave George of Baden-Durlach-who, as you know, is here as King Gustavus Adolphus' personal observer-has invited several gentlemen to a private supper this evening."

Ed was gratified to see Cavriani's eyes brighten, ever so slightly. He thought that, undoubtedly, the man would make it his business to find out just which among the "several gentlemen" in attendance at the colloquy would be meeting with the margrave, and equally undoubtedly would know the answer before the dinner even took place. And why not? Information would certainly be one of the major trade items purveyed by Cavriani Brothers of Geneva (not to mention by Cavriani cousins, current Cavriani in-laws, and potential husbands of Cavriani daughters, sisters, and nieces, wherever they might be found). It would be very surprising if the firm didn't have permanent correspondents at every major Imperial and CPE post office, picking up the news as fast as it came in.

Ed glanced down at his watch. "But our break is over. Back to the discussions."