* * *
From there, the stories about the “Barbie” company spread through the upper servants and the lower nobility. It was all part of Trudi’s plan. They were going to introduce BarbieCo Preferred as an alternative to reich money, and to do that they needed a whisper campaign, not a proclamation. That was also the reason for the change of the name from AEC to BarbieCo. Barbies were expensive and valuable, so BarbieCo Preferred must be the same.
* * *
Anna, the new maid who was getting more money and getting paid on time, asked about getting some of her pay in stock from the Barbies. The girls said “sure.” The Liechtenstein under-servants asked about the availability of stock as well, apparently having heard about it from Anna.
But mostly the investors were the upper nobility. They had more money to spend. They got the word from Judy and Vicky.
The Hofburg Palace, Vienna
Karl Eusebius looked around the meeting room. It was small for the group, and crowded, and Karl was almost regretting bringing the Barbies. The rectangular room had thick walls with the windows set back to the exterior walls. There were two windows set high on the walls, and two lower. The cloudy day insured that the light was not particularly bright. A polished oak table sat in the center of the room, surrounded by chairs and covered with papers and reports having to do with balance of trade and the proposed railroad.
“We need to stop these imports from the USE,” Moses Abrabanel insisted.
Karl hid a wince.
“Just how do you figure on stopping them?” Sarah Wendell asked. “Are you hiding an industrial complex in your back pocket, by chance?”
Uncle Gundaker slapped a hand on the table. “We need to introduce sumptuary laws to counter the flow of silver to the USE.”
“What are you going to do? Make it illegal to own sewing machine-made trousers?” Susan snorted.
“If everyone will just calm down,” Karl tried.
It didn’t do a lot of good. Duke Leopold was representing the royal family in this meeting and being wisely quiet.
Gundaker, representing the court, and Moses Abrabanel, representing the mercantile interests of Vienna, were both pushing for the mercantilist viewpoint. The proposed railroad was fully mapped-out and construction had started in Silesia, but was being delayed in Vienna because of fear of even more silver flowing from Austria-Hungary to the USE. This time through Bohemia, with still more silver in fees and taxes going to Wallenstein. All in exchange for manufactured goods that the USE seemed to be producing at an ever-increasing rate.
“The Swede is trying to destroy the Holy Roman Empire by bankrupting it with cheap machine-made goods and the railroad will just make it work faster. Trainloads of silver will be going from Vienna, through Bohemia, to Magdeburg as the Swede gets stronger, Wallenstein gets stronger, and we get weaker,” Gundaker complained.
It was all very overblown. Yes, the balance of trade between the USE and Austria-Hungary was more than a bit one-sided, but it was far from the deadly dangerous problem that Moses and Gundaker were making it out to be. Even with the rail line, it wasn’t going to become killing.
“Look,” Judy Wendell said. “All you really need to do is come up with stuff that they need in the USE and Bohemia. And, well, you’re farther south. Can you guys grow oranges and stuff?”
“No. It does freeze here in the winter,” Hayley told her.
“But they grow citrus fruits in the Ottoman Empire,” Karl pointed out.
“Marvelous. You wish us to provide Murad the Mad with the silver to pay his armies by shipping oranges from Istanbul to Magdeburg by way of the Silesian railroad?”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Susan Logsden said. “We already get coffee from there. Why not orange juice to go with it? In exchange, we can sell them aspirin and machine-made boots and shoes. Vienna isn’t rich because of what it produces. It’s rich because of what flows through it.”
“You need the railroad,” Sarah Wendell said. “You need it more than Bohemia does, and in the meantime you need steam barges on the Danube up to Regensburg and down to the Black Sea. But you also need native industries for value-added products.”
Judy moaned theatrically. “Value-added,” she whined. “The buzz words are attacking.”
“That is what I have been saying,” Gundaker said.
“No. What you were saying was that you wanted to prevent imports from the USE, not that you wanted to encourage local production,” Sarah said. “It’s not the same thing.”
It was, Karl thought, the next battle in the ongoing war between Sarah and the more conservative economic theorists of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sarah was chipping away, but they were holding out for a regulation-based structure that tried to protect their industries from foreign competition by outlawing that competition. Sarah, on the other hand, wanted the government to invest in local businesses to encourage development of industry, as was being done in the USE, because some of those businesses wouldn’t develop without government intervention. At least, she was convinced that they wouldn’t, and Karl was willing to take her word for it.
Race Track City
Days later, in Race Track City, the fourth showing of Singing in the Rain, dubbed in German with Els Engel voicing and singing the Debbie Reynolds part, was sold out. The machine shop was up and running with the new equipment, and the howling of Vienna’s merchant class could almost be heard over Els’ singing.
* * *
Father Lamormaini enjoyed the movie, though he found the music strange and a little disquieting. What he resented was where it came from. More and more, the Ring of Fire was getting its hooks into the world, spreading something that his agent in Grantville had described as humanism. Placing humanity above God. Repeating Satan’s sin of pride, and feeding it to every peasant.
There was a natural order in the world that reflected the order of Heaven, with God at the top and the choirs of angels ranked below. So, on Earth, the emperor above, and below-ordered by their natural ranks-the great nobles, then the lesser nobles, the merchant classes, and at the bottom of them all, the peasant working his master’s field. But the up-timers would reverse that order, overturning it like Satan tried to overturn God’s order.
It was the job of the church to prevent that from happening, and that was the answer to Maria Anna’s vexing question, “Is it more important that the Church regain all the temporal worldly goods that she once held? Or that she be free to practice her faith unhindered in Protestant territories? If these were placed before a Catholic ruler as a choice, which way should he go?” It was a false question for it still allowed the Protestant heretics to lead others into heresy, and not just in Protestant lands, but in Catholic lands as well. The restoration of property to the church was not for the church, but to give the church the power to enforce God’s will on the ungodly. It was to the ultimate benefit of the heretic that he be forced to renounce his heresy, and if his renunciation was not heartfelt it still protected another from following him into heresy, and so condemning another soul to perdition.