The Count of Rudolstadt's problem, obviously, was how to resolve the quarrels among the disputatious groups of Lutherans encamped upon his doorstep.

Surely, the two of them thought, something could be arranged.

Count Anton Guenther proffered the first hypothetical suggestion. If Ludwig Guenther could see his way to granting the exemption to let Grantville's Philippists take communion at St. Martin's near Grantville, he suggested, then, in view of the upcoming marriage alliance, he himself might extend feelers through his new cousin-in-law that could possibly lead to an alliance of Oldenburg with the CPE.

If Anton Guenther were interested in an alliance, Ludwig Guenther replied, he was sure that Gustavus Adolphus would be happy to discuss terms. He cleared his throat. It was possible, of course, that such terms might include support for young Anton's succession to his father. There might ways for an interested ruler to legitimate his status, since neither of his parents had ever been married to anyone else. If it should be found that the mother's family were to have been raised into the higher n.o.bility prior to the boy's birth, but that somehow this had been inadvertently overlooked...?

Once the hypotheses were out in the open, more or less, the conversation advanced to procedural concerns. Count Ludwig Guenther commented that he would be willing to invite the King of Sweden's personal observer, Margrave George of Baden-Durlach to dinner the next evening. If Margrave George proved to be open to further discussion, the American secretary of state, Mr. Piazza had a radio operator from Grantville here in Jena. There was a radio operator from Grantville with the King of Sweden. With a judicious use of these marvelous radio communications, one might...

The conversation continued for several hours, every sentence carefully kept in the subjunctive. It never referenced the doctrine of ubiquity. Not even once.

Both men were, in their own ways, very sincere, faithful, practicing Lutherans. Ludwig Guenther, to be sure, was considerably more pious, but, still, Anton Guenther was also. The doctrine of ubiquity had never played a large role in either of their religious lives, any more than it did in the religious life of Carol Koch.

If men are from Mars, then Carol is from... some planet outside the solar system. (Attributed to her husband, Ron Koch.)

Privately, Ron did think that she might be from Venus. But also, as a good Lutheran, he thought that the Venus aspect of her life wasn't anyone's business except her husband's. Besides, it didn't have anything to do with the way she conducted a debate.

Ron never argued with Carol. Over the past twenty years, he had realized that there wasn't any point in it. It wasn't that she pouted. It wasn't that she sulked, or screamed, or threw things. It wasn't that she didn't fight fair.

She just didn't follow the argument script. A proper argument was like a minuet. The first speaker performed a step. The second speaker responded with the appropriate riposte. The first speaker took the next step in the dance. The second responded with the expected answer. In Ron's view, a proper argument was almost liturgical in form.

It didn't work with Carol. If he advanced with the first minuet step, she offered a mental pirouette. If, disconcerted but persistent, he nevertheless performed the second step in the minuet, Carol did a bit of a tango and added some cha-cha-cha as a codicil.

Just because they were on opposite sides of the official debate, Gary, Jonas, and Carol didn't see any reason why they shouldn't eat supper together. It was a relief just to speak plain American English for a change. While the two counts were dining with one another, the three of them occupied a corner bench at the Freedom Arches.

"They're going at it all backwards," said Carol with annoyance. "If the confirmation cla.s.s mothers had taken this, 'I won't give an inch' sort of att.i.tude, we'd never have agreed on a cla.s.s time that everyone could make."

"I think," said Jonas cautiously, "that the schedule for a confirmation cla.s.s really is adiaphoral. Possibly even from Professor Osiander's perspective."

"Not if one person digs in her heels and says it will be nine A.M. on Sat.u.r.day or else and four of the kids can't make it then. Men! They go in and toss all these demands on a table. 'This we've got to have.' Well, they can't both eat the whole cake, so even when they negotiate a compromise, they all go home with a grudge, thinking that they've lost something."

If d.i.c.kens had been writing Carol's dialogue, she would have added, "Bah!" Bah! was inherent in her tone of voice.

"Er," Gary said. "That's the way negotiations are done. It's laid out in all the business textbooks."

"No." Carol was firm. "Yelling, 'it was at 9:00 on Sat.u.r.day morning when I was growing up' or 'we always had it on Tuesday in our church' just causes fights. The way to do it is to make up a paper with squares, right at the beginning. The days of the week and the hours of the day. Then you take a red hi-liter and mark out what's impossible-like school hours, or when the pastor holds services at the retirement home. Everybody gets a copy of that. Then, at the first meeting, all the mothers say what's impossible for them-like Kevin's sports practice or Alyssa's flute lesson. Mark those out in orange. Then everyone says what would just be a little difficult-like, 'We might be ten minutes late some days if the traffic gets tied up.' Mark that in yellow. When you finish, you look at the white s.p.a.ces that are left and you know what you have to work with. It might be that n.o.body in the whole room would have suggested 'after supper on Thursdays,' but if everyone can make it then, it'll do. You're down to what everyone can agree on, or at least work with. And n.o.body goes home mad."

Both Gary and Jonas looked deeply saddened. There had to be something wrong with that, philosophically. Politically. Somehow, such a procedure reflected a lack of strong convictions. A guy who thought that confirmation cla.s.ses ought to be at nine A.M. would stick with it, come h.e.l.l or high water-a firm ideological commitment. If Carol Koch was a reasonable specimen of the workings of the female mind, they could only reach one conclusion. Women were frighteningly, terrifyingly, pragmatic.

Gary had started to suspect that already, during the eighteen months of his marriage to Sheila. The all-too-short eighteen months-Sheila had been left behind by the Ring of Fire.

Jonas leaned forward, resting his chin on his good hand. "Have you guys noticed that we've got a problem?"

"Yeah," said Gary. "That's why we're here."

"No," said Jonas. "A new problem. The Tuebingen people weren't here yet when the conference started. They missed the opening statements. They had heard that Carol spoke before she delivered the ELCA response today-that I guarantee. But they hadn't seen it. They hadn't sat there when it was happening. We could get a rerun of the first couple of days of the colloquy."

Gary rested his chin on both hands. "Well, I don't care what the Saxon chancellor said, Carol, they can't have you beheaded. Two swords or no two swords. I went down to Rudolstadt last Sat.u.r.day and looked it all up in the count's library. According to the law, they beheaded those crypto-Calvinists in Saxony for treason, not for heresy. You can't commit treason to the Elector of Saxony or even to the Duke of Wuerttemberg. You're not one of their subjects. He's just blowing smoke. And I'm inclined to tell him so."

"Oh, I never really thought that he would have me beheaded here." Carol looked a little reflective. "But if I ever went up there, I think he might actually try. His mouth was pretty frothy. And the professors from Wittenberg were just egging him on. But these guys from Tuebingen are even more so."

"It was the 'Philip had four daughters who prophesied' reference that really got to him." Jonas grinned. "Especially since Melanchthon's name was Philip."

Carol looked injured. "He annoyed me with the 'women should keep silence in the church' bit. I still don't understand, though, why he slammed that baton on the table so hard when I pointed out that we were in a lecture hall and not a church."

"Umm," said Jonas. "Carol, has it ever occurred to you that you have a rather literal mind?"

Gary referred back to her earlier comment. "The guys from Tuebingen are 'even more so,' in a way. But they didn't ever try to behead Kepler. They just excommunicated him and wrote lots of letters. It really wasn't even them that were involved with having his mother tried for witchcraft-that was accusations from her neighbors and a local judge who didn't like their family. It's not as if these guys were out to get her..."

His voice trailed off. "I think, maybe, I'm getting an idea. Give me a couple of days to work it out."

As the colloquy droned on the next morning, Gary sat quietly at his place on the bench, fingers laced in front of him with his thumbs going around one another in circles, first clockwise and then counterclockwise, closing out the speeches and examining his idea. Gary didn't come up with a lot of ideas. He didn't have one of those sparkling, scintillating minds that threw out innovative concepts right and left. Consequently, when he did have an idea, he tended to react with a certain amount of apprehension. He was looking at this one very carefully-sort of the way that Red Riding Hood would have examined the wolf if she'd been on high alert.

The weekend came. Ed, who had conscientiously refrained from asking Tanya why the counts of Oldenburg and Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt had needed four hours of private, uninterrupted, radio communications with Magdeburg, nevertheless rode home for a long talk with Mike.

The weekend went. Ed dutifully returned to Jena. With every day that pa.s.sed, those benches got harder.

Monday evening, the "personal observers" again met for supper with Margrave George. Later, Ed would describe the conversation to Mike as "acrimonious," although, in fact, as the representative of the state that had dumped the problem in the lap of the others, he had rather enjoyed it. The German word was Schadenfreude: delight in the tribulations of others.

It ran late. In seventeenth-century Germany and Scandinavia, religion was a matter of doctrine, but for the rulers, it was more. From the perspective of the princes, religion was important in the "here and now" because religion here and now was a way of making the population behave. In Lutheran countries the church was, if not simply, at least also, a branch of the executive government. Any change in church practice would affect the maintenance of public order-which was the reason, for example, that Christian IV of Denmark promoted orthodox Lutheranism although he privately favored Calvinism. The chancellor of Hessen-Ka.s.sel had made more than a few pithy remarks about the unsettling effects of religious change-he had lived through Ka.s.sel's switch from Lutheranism to Calvinism.

On Tuesday morning, Count Ludwig Guenther opened the colloquy with the bland statement that since all views had now been given a sufficiently full and fair hearing, the morning would be free. He carefully failed to look at the Tuebingen delegation as he made the statement about a full hearing, for fear of observing any signs that there might be a contrary opinion. The afternoon, he stated, would be devoted to short summaries. He would permit four summaries only-each of the plaintiffs, the Philippists and the ELCA, might have one representative speak. Each of the opponents, the Flacians and the Missouri Synod, might have one representative speak. He would announce his decision in regard to St. Martin's Wednesday morning. Wednesday afternoon and evening would be devoted to the closing ceremonies and a state dinner. Any delegates who lived near enough to Jena were encouraged to bring their gracious wives to the banquet. Please notify his steward of the number of attendees from each delegation. He smiled and rose.

The down-time delegations started to buzz. Who would snag the prestigious opportunity to serve as closing speaker for each position? They adjourned to squabble.

The up-time delegations didn't have to wonder who would be speaking, since each delegation consisted of one person. Within ten minutes of the count's rising, the only occupants of the anatomy theater were Carol, Gary, and Jonas, who was leaning against the chalk board, looking a little deprived at not having a full morning of multilingual page references ahead of him.

"What now?" he asked. He dropped his chalk into the holder and sat down.

"I sure wish that I had some idea what the count's going to decide," said Carol.

"Me, too," said Gary. "But we don't."

Jonas looked at his pupils sternly. "Write! You've each got two hours to get down the basics of what you want to say. Then I've got one hour apiece to turn your English into German that says what you probably intended for it to say. Move it, guys."

"I've already got mine written." Gary started poking around in his pockets. "I knew this thing had to end some time." He fished out a sheet of paper, neatly hand-printed on both sides. "The points are in order, and I've numbered them." He handed it over to Jonas. "You can work on this now, while Carol's writing, and then you'll have more time for hers. I've got to go down to the printer's."

Gary Lambert believed, very sincerely, that he did not have the right words. If he had ever heard the maxim, "We are dwarfs, standing on the shoulders of giants," he would have subscribed to it on the spot. For the time being, he would be content if he could just achieve one goal-to sound as much like his grandfather in the pulpit as possible.

Gesturing toward the door, he said: "I have brought printed copies of the speech upon which my words are based. There are enough copies for everyone here. If you need more copies, you are certainly all welcome to have it reprinted. It was made by a far greater man than I-by the first president of the Lutheran synod that it is my honor to represent here. His name was C.F.W. Walther and he spoke these words in 1848. He spoke them just over a century and a half before the intervention of G.o.d transported Grantville to this place and time."

Gary glanced up at Count Ludwig Guenther a little nervously. The man had been good to him and had done many fine and commendable things for Grantville's refugees.

"These words are also mine, and I'm glad that I can say them before the honorable Count of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt announces the outcome of the colloquy. We don't know, yet, what his decision will be in regard to the church of St. Martin's. Yet, there is one thing that we do know. Whatever the decision is, it will have been taken by a secular prince-a Lutheran prince, but still, a secular prince. Because of that, whatever the decision may be, we must fear that it will not have been taken entirely upon the basis of Scriptural teaching. We must fear that it will have been influenced by considerations of political expediency and pragmatic necessity. That is the very nature of civil government."

In the chair, Count Ludwig Guenther kept his face very stiff. If the young American had been speaking defiantly, the count might have reacted otherwise. But Gary's words were said more in sorrow than in anger.

"The views expressed by Professor Osiander here," Gary continued, "are in great part the views of Synodical President Walther. The church must not compromise its doctrinal stance. It cannot accept being forced to grant communion to people who hold heterodox opinions."

He paused, straightened his shoulders, and drew a deep breath. "However, the Church has no proper authority but that of the Word of G.o.d. It must not try to use the State as a tool to force the consciences of others. The position of my Synod is that there is one proper remedy for the orthodox Lutherans-a remedy that will avoid the parallel danger that the State will try to use the Church as a tool.

"Gentlemen, it is the position of the Missouri Synod"-all one of us, you arrogant, stupid, idiot; what do you think you are doing? a niggling little voice in the back of his mind screeched at him-"after careful and conscientious consideration of the argumentation presented here, that the orthodox Lutherans of Germany should withdraw from the State churches and form an independent synod, neither funded nor controlled by the princes."

The a.s.sembled authorities of German Lutheranism looked down from their elevated benches. From the podium that had been set up on the floor of the operating theater, a not very tall, slightly stocky, prematurely balding, dishwater-blond man with a round face, thick gla.s.ses, and a very worried expression looked back at them, all the way around the circle.