“Karl Eusebius is not his father.”
* * *
“Welcome to Eisenberg house,” Sophia said, looking past her guests at the carriage on the street.
“We were going to come in the Steamer,” Sonny Fortney said, “or maybe the Range Rover. But they are made for the track, not the streets of Vienna. So we borrowed Bob’s carriage.”
“It looks like the emperor’s new carriage,” Sophia said.
“It should. It’s basically identical to it, except for the crest on the doors and some of the interior touches. It has the same air shocks and lamps.”
Sophia and Peter looked out at the carriage again. On the door were painted crossed wrenches, a monkey wrench crossing a crescent wrench. Not that they could tell what kind of wrenches. They were just tools done in silver on a red shield background.
“Are you allowed a crest?” Peter asked.
“The emperor didn’t seem to mind. He got a good laugh out of it. Started calling Bob the knight of the monkey wrench.”
Peter looked at Sonny Fortney and tried not to show his shock. If Emperor Ferdinand had named Bob Sanderlin a knight even in jest, how long was it going to be before the joke was made legal reality? “Well, please, come in,” Peter said with a gesture.
They all went into the house. It was a mix of condescension and curiosity that had brought Peter and Sophia to the door of their town house. They knew that greeting your guests at the door was the custom in Grantville, where servants were still much less common than elsewhere in the USE, much less the rest of Europe. And after seeing the hayli bill, Peter and Sophia were being careful not to give offense.
“So what are you working on now, Herr Fortney?” Peter asked once they got settled in the receiving room.
“The railroad-mostly the road part at the moment, not the rail part, because the permission for a railroad in Austria is still held up in committee so far. But we don’t need permission to do the grading and preparing. All that is, is road improvement.”
“There are serious concerns about the railroad, as you are no doubt aware. And it’s not just the potential military threat, but concerns over Austrian silver pouring into Bohemia at an even faster rate.”
“Well, Hayley. .” Sonny Fortney turned to his daughter.
“Even if that were a problem, all the railroad would do is make it quicker. What you need are your own industries, so the silver will flow the other way.”
“What sort of industries?”
“All sorts. Mining, manufacturing, farming. .” Hayley and Peter talked about the potential industries in the Austro-Hungarian empire for a while. Peter was impressed and a little terrified. Especially when Hayley ended with, “But you really need to talk to Susan Logsden and Sarah Wendell about that. I’m mostly a tech geek.”
“What is a tech geek?” asked Sophia.
“I mean, I mostly handle the mechanical parts of the industries. How to make things.”
“So, how do airplanes work?” asked Count Marton von Debrecen, their son-in-law. He had been married to Polyxena, their daughter, and wasn’t sure to what extent the up-timers were responsible for the death of his wife at the hands of Maximilian of Bavaria’s executioners.
Hayley looked at him, surprised. Peter couldn’t tell whether it was the question or the challenging tone. He was about to apologize, but it proved unnecessary. The girl, after only a slight pause, explained. “Lift is a function of the shape of the wing and something called Bernoullie’s Principle. Bernoullie lived in the eighteenth century in our timeline, and will probably never be born in this one. But he figured out how air flowing over a surface or through a pipe acted, and later people used that to figure out how to shape wings and get lift out of them without flapping. I have the figures at home and can show them to you, if you’re interested. In fact, Dr. Faust, our tutor, and my little brother are building a glider. Just to test the principles.”
“You’re building an airplane?”
“Just a glider,” Dana Fortney said. “It’s to teach Brandon the theory of aeronautics and it’s based on a design that Hal Smith has vetted back in Grantville. Frankly, I would have been more comfortable if they hadn’t ever started the thing. And I am thankful for the farm, and the up-time plants, and even the bugs, that keep distracting him from the deathtrap.”
“It’s not a deathtrap, honey. It’s quite well built,” Sonny said.
“So it’s a well-built deathtrap,” Dana said with some heat, apparently going over a long-running argument. “You know perfectly well that the danger is pilot error and with no qualified pilots to teach them, pilot error is a virtual certainty.”
Peter looked at his wife, and his wife looked back at him. He sympathized with Dana Fortney’s concerns, but at least no one was going to chop her daughter’s head off. Then he thought about the BarbieCo stock that was just starting to circulate and realized that that wasn’t necessarily true.
They had a five course meal and the Fortneys politely thanked the servants with every course, often asking them to carry their compliments to the chef. It made Peter feel boorish not to be doing so, especially since first Amadeus, then Marton, started copying them.
Discussion was wide-ranging. Politics and engineering, economics and medicine, nutrition and vegetables. Sophia was surprised when Dana mentioned that her family had a vegetarian meal at least once a week, which often included beans and cornbread, made from corn imported from Spain.
“But surely you can afford meat if you are paying for maize from Spain.”
“It’s not a matter of cost, but of health. Too much fat is bad for you and the occasional vegetarian meal helps clean the system.”
All in all, it was a confusing evening, vaguely uncomfortable, but highly intriguing. The stock certificates were brought up and Hayley Fortney rolled her eyes, then the boy Brandon said, “Moo,” only to be admonished by his mother.
Then Dana turned to Sophia and asked, “Was Amadeus as silly as Brandon is when he was eleven?”
“I don’t understand?”
“Brandon has noted that a hayli is the price of a cow or close to it. And, not yet being civilized, he has latched on to that to tease his sister. And it wasn’t her fault. Heather Mason, back in Grantville, decided who went on which bill.”
“Which one is Heather Mason?” asked Peter. “I thought they were all in Vienna. Which certificate is she on?”
“Heather, the rat,” said Hayley, “isn’t on any of them. But she’s going to be. I’ve written Dave Marcantonio a letter insisting that we need a half-pfennig coin and Heather would be perfect for it.”
“Coin?” Marton asked. “I thought you disdained silver.”
“Yes, we do, mostly. But this won’t be a silver coin. It will probably be made of iron or copper, maybe bronze. No more metallic value than the paper. Just a marker like the rest of them are.”
Sophia was running the conversation through her head and suddenly she laughed. Everyone turned to her and she said, “Yes, as it happens, Amadeus was just as silly as Brandon when he was eleven. He put a garden snake in Polyxena’s bed one time.”
Suddenly Hayley was looking very severely at Amadeus. Sophia laughed again, and almost decided she liked the young woman. “That was the first time I have been able to laugh like that since it happened,” she said.
“Since what happened?” Dana asked.
“My wife. .” said Marton, “. . was a lady in waiting to Princess Maria Anna when she went to Bavaria to be married to Maximilian. She was executed after Maria Anna ran away. I don’t see how she was implicated in that escapade. Polyxena could be a bit silly about social position, but she wouldn’t have done anything so insane.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Dana said. “We were on the road when all that happened, so we never learned what was going on.”
That put something of a damper on the evening for a while. Still, Marton did promise to go out to Race Track City and see the glider.