Sir Robert do the purchasing and they now owned eleven Chatovarian firms, each one specialized in what they needed. There had been no dearth of firms for sale and no lack of engineers and workers in that heavily overpopulated empire– forty-nine trillion!
They had left the main offices in Chatovaria and only working sections were here.
No, there'd been no new good news about all that! Rather, a bit of bad news. The main offices of those firms were costly to maintain as they couldn't fire key staff there. And the problem of what they should now manufacture at home was coming up.
Their technology and ability were good. Jonnie had a little trouble with their math– they used a binary system as everything they had ran on computers and circuits. But everything they built was just great. With one exception.
Jonnie could not abide reaction engines. Flying one was a drag. And they required special runways and pads to land. They were fine out in space but not for atmosphere transport. You couldn't even stunt them really.
The Chatovarians themselves were all over the place at Luxembourg. They were nice people. They stood about five feet tall, had somewhat flat heads and big buck teeth. They were a bright orange-tan. Their hands were a trifle webbed but very nimble. And they were strong. Jonnie had found that out when he was fooling around wrestling with one of their engineers. Jonnie had come within an ace of not being able to throw him. And they were always going fast. Work, work, work!
They ate wood. And the first thing they did when their crews arrived was plant about fifteen thousand acres of assorted trees, planted with the speed of machine guns into what they called “catalyst pots.” This was so they could have something to eat.
They had a bit of conflict with the three Chinese engineers that were here. The Chinese like to build out of wood and the Chatovarians thought that was an awful waste of good food.
The Chatovarians loved to work with stone: they had small beam tools, like swords, and they cut stone with splice-notches so it would hang together with no mortar. Then they annealed the stone and made it join molecularly so it was armor-hard. And the whole grain of the stone came out in bright, glossy colors. Very pretty. They taught the Chinese how to do it and the Chinese taught them how to weave silk, so all was forgiven and it came out with smiles, but it was
touchy for a while.
Going to a Chatovarian dinner was like walking into a lumber yard. Jonnie had to make them promise not to gnaw down all the trees in sight.
The Chatovarians tended to overstaff. And unless Jonnie dreamed up some consumer product for the home offices to build, the red ink on their balance sheets would splash into blood.
He wanted to get them building teleportation motor cars and planes. But he didn't know how to make a teleportation motor and all efforts to work it out failed. Those blasted Psychlo mathematics! Nothing ever balanced.
The thought made him restless. The bear had caught another fish. The sunlight played over Jonnie's buckskin shirt.
He had been sure something nice would happen today. Well, the day wasn't over.
He touched Windsplitter's shoulder and the horse decided it was a signal to run, which it wasn't, and went tearing up the trail for home.
Chapter 2
They burst out of the forest and rushed toward the palace and then Windsplitter made a huge show of how hard it was to stop– it wasn't– and reared and pawed the air.
“Show-off,” Jonnie accused him.
It hadn't been all that much of a run-only half a mile. But Windsplitter was content. The row that was going on in the middle of the ten-acre lawn attracted him.
Stormy, the lame Blodgett's colt– he looked just like Windsplitter even with his much-too-long legs– and a huge tan dog that had recently trotted out of the forest and adopted Chrissie, were romping and plunging and racing away and pretending to stomp and bite, always missing. Blodgett was looking on without much concern and Windsplitter walked over to her.
Jonnie slid off and raised his hand to the Russian in the control turret hidden in the right-hand tower. A flick of a white sleeve as the guard waved back.
This place had really changed. The only trouble with it was, it looked too new and shiny and it certainly now would never age. The Chinese engineers had understood, but the Chatovarians just couldn't grasp that a place should show a little age.
Jonnie remembered when Chrissie had first spotted the place. They were in a small plane and Jonnie, having just bought the duchy, was trying to get some idea of its layout. Chrissie had all of a sudden leaned out the window and shouted, “There! There! There!” and nothing would do but that he land and let her look at the place. She had still been gaunt and he couldn't refuse her much.
The building had stood in the middle of a wilderness that might have once been parks. Hard to tell. Hard to tell even that the piled ruin of stone had ever been much but rocks.
Chrissie had raced around, heedless of the briars that plucked at her buckskin leggings, shouting back at him in wild excitement. She pointed to a fifty-acre plot crying, “And that's just the place for a cattle yard!” And to another place, "Ideal for your horses!” And spreading her arms, indicating some pits, “Perfect for tanning vats!” And then tracing a stream that was bubbling along minding its own business, “And this can be diverted to run right by the kitchen door and we can have running water all the time!”
She had gone tearing around on the cracked remains of what might have been room floors and pointed to outlines Jonnie could not see, “A fireplace here. And one here! And another there!”
Then she had stood in front of him and said, “Here we will never be hungry, we will never be snowed in, we will never be cold!” And then defiantly, as though he might say no, “This is where we are going to live!”
Jonnie got the Chatovarian chief engineer who had arrived with the two-hundred-Chatovarian first construction contingent and told him to build something modern on the site. He thought he was rid of the problem but the following day he found himself confronted by a very irate Chatovarian architectural team.
When a Chatovarian became incensed he sort of whistled through his teeth, quite distinct from the gurgling sound, like air coming up through a water bottle, when they laughed. The leading architect was whistling his indignation.
It didn't matter whether Jonnie owned the company, but Jonnie was really a Chatovarian, proven by the fact that he had his title direct from the Empress Beaz. And he had to be told that he should know better!
Completely at sea, Jonnie was treated to a dissertation on architecture. They had studied Earth forms and many were all right. Classic Greek and Roman were known in other systems and, if impractical, were still acceptable. Gothic, neo-Gothic, and Renaissance architecture they actually thought quite novel. They could even strain their artistic sensibilities by going along with Baroque.
But modern? They quit. Send them back to Chatovaria. Send them back even though they would starve there. Some things one just couldn't do!
It was only then that Jonnie found that “modern” had been a type of architecture prevalent on Earth about eleven hundred years ago; that it consisted of plain, straight up-and-down walls on a rectangular base; that it often was a vast expanse of glass windows; that it had been conceived by somebody dedicated to stamping out all indigenous architecture of an area. In short, “modern” was an architecture that wasn't architecture but just a cheap way to throw rubbish in the air and get paid for it.