TITLE: Grantville Gazette.Volume XVIII (ring of fire)

  TITLE: Grantville Gazette.Volume XVIII

  ( Ring of fire )

  Eric Flint

  Eric Flint

  TITLE: Grantville Gazette.Volume XVIII

  What is this? About the Grantville Gazette

  Written by Grantville Gazette Staff

  The Grantville Gazette originated as a by-product of the ongoing and very active discussions which take place concerning the 1632 universe Eric Flint created in the novels 1632, 1633 and 1634: The Galileo Affair (the latter two books co-authored by David Weber and Andrew Dennis, respectively). This discussion is centered in three of the conferences in Baen's Bar, the discussion area of Baen Books' web site. The conferences are entitled "1632 Slush," "1632 Slush Comments" and "1632 Tech Manual." They have been in operation for almost seven years now, during which time nearly two hundred thousand posts have been made by hundreds of participants.

  Soon enough, the discussion began generating so-called "fanfic," stories written in the setting by fans of the series. A number of those were good enough to be published professionally. And, indeed, a number of them were-as part of the anthology Ring of Fire, which was published by Baen Books in January, 2004. (Ring of Fire also includes stories written by established authors such as Eric Flint himself, as well as David Weber, Mercedes Lackey, Dave Freer, K.D. Wentworth and S.L. Viehl.)

  The decision to publish the Ring of Fire anthology triggered the writing of still more fanfic, even after submissions to the anthology were closed. Ring of Fire has been selling quite well since it came out, and a second anthology similar to it is scheduled to be published late in 2007. It will also contain stories written by new writers, as well as professionals. But, in the meantime… the fanfic kept getting written, and people kept nudging Eric-well, pestering Eric-to give them feedback on their stories.

  Hence… the Grantville Gazette. Once he realized how many stories were being written-a number of them of publishable quality-he raised with Jim Baen the idea of producing an online magazine which would pay for fiction and nonfiction articles set in the 1632 universe and would be sold through Baen Books' Webscriptions service. Jim was willing to try it, to see what happened.

  As it turned out, the first issue of the electronic magazine sold well enough to make continuing the magazine a financially self-sustaining operation. Since then, nine more volumes have been electronically published through the Baen Webscriptions site. As well, Grantville Gazette, Volume One was published in paperback in November of 2004. That has since been followed by hardcover editions of Grantville Gazette, Volumes Two and Three.

  Then, two big steps:

  First: The magazine had been paying semi-pro rates for the electronic edition, increasing to pro rates upon transition to paper, but one of Eric's goals had long been to increase payments to the authors. Grantville Gazette, Volume Eleven is the first volume to pay the authors professional rates.

  Second: This on-line version you're reading. The site here at http://www. grantvillegazette. com is the electronic version of an ARC, an advance readers copy where you can read the issues as we assemble them. There are stories posted here which won't be coming out in the magazine for more than a year.

  How will it work out? Will we be able to continue at this rate? Well, we don't know. That's up to the readers. But we'll be here, continuing the saga, the soap opera, the drama and the comedy just as long as people are willing to read them.

  – The Grantville Gazette Staff

  FICTION:

  Gifted with Pascal

  Tim Roesch

  Mary Timm hated church steeples.

  There was no glass in them. They blocked the light in odd ways, cast shadows where shadows had no place being. They stabbed the sky and mocked the sun. They interfered with her art.

  Having a boy hanging from one didn't help either.

  "Boys!" Mary snarled as she marched into the fire department.

  Mary couldn't help but pause a moment when she walked inside. Now here was a place that was worth coming to. There were bright colors and shiny pieces of metal and reflections and windows. She would very much like to linger on this late fall morning but she knew she couldn't. Whatever Blaise was screaming from up there, hanging from the steeple, it would have been cruel to leave him.

  "Shouldn't you be in school, Mary?" one of the firefighters asked. Though Mary was only eleven, she had a look of frustration and forbearance of one much older.

  "There is a boy hanging from the church tower."

  The five men standing in the large garage stopped and looked at her.

  "What?" one asked in English.

  "There is a stupid boy hanging from…"

  She jumped when the alarm went off.

  "Just got a call!" Another man ran into the garage. "Some crazy kid is hanging from the steeple at the Catholic church!"

  "That's what I was trying to tell you!" Mary yelled.

  The small garage erupted into activity and Mary fled to a corner to stay out of the way. With an explosion of noise and activity the fire trucks raced out of the garage.

  In the quiet after the last truck drove off Mary glanced up at the windows high on the walls then at the nice, neat squares of light on the clean floor of the garage.

  "What a waste of light." she muttered to herself. With a sigh she turned and walked back to the church with the crazy boy hanging from that stupid, light-blocking steeple. If God truly loved her, He would have Blaise Pascal knock the steeple down so that at 9:30 in the morning the light would hit the window of that nice building a block over and…

  ***

  Julie Drahuta hated mornings.

  Mornings should be calm, pleasant times. If she had her way, the day would begin slowly, comfortably. There would be time to sip some coffee, read a newspaper, have a nice quiet breakfast.

  "But no! I have to be here asking myself why a smart boy like you was hanging from a church steeple! Jesus God! What were you thinking?" Julie tried to calm herself. She glanced up at the steeple then back at the tear-stained, rope-burned, bruised, angry boy before her. In her admittedly grumpy opinion, he was being tended to much more carefully than he deserved.

  "It did not work! It did not work!" Blaise waved a plastic ruler at her. Then he threw it on the ground and stamped on it.

  "Hey! Stop that!"

  "It didn't work!" Blaise shouted. Julie pulled him away from the object of his tantrum. The rest of his comments were muffled and in French; a very foul French one might not expect to hear coming from the mouth of an eleven year old. She wrapped him up in a hug.

  To a casual observer it might appear that Julie was trying to suffocate the boy.

  "Should I call a child protection officer?" a firefighter asked as Blaise screamed, muffled by Julie's hold on him.

  Julie turned with a slow, reptilian grace that wiped the smile from the firefighter's face.

  "That will be all, Gus," Julie chirped with her best brutal, violence-promising smile.

  "You know…" Chief Matheny scratched his head then replaced his helmet as he looked up at the steeple then around the base. "I've seen kids do the oddest things and get themselves into situations the experts can't write about in textbooks because no one would believe the book. Gus, look around for any loose equipment."

  "I'm sorry you had to go to all of this trouble, Chief Matheny." Julie sighed as Blaise Pascal, the world's greatest mathematician, sobbed and cursed in her arms.

  "This beats all. Wiley Coyote couldn't have done better with two credit cards and a direct number to ACME. What's worse, the darn thing almost worked. The crossbow worked, the block and tackle worked, even the attempt to counte
rbalance his weight with that bag of rocks worked. The harness slipping up around his neck was a mistake anyone could have made. That definitely didn't work."

  Julie looked at the bruises on Blaise's neck. They looked similar to the sorts of marks a victim of strangulation might have.

  "He's a handful." She tried to smile.

  There was a flurry of cursing; some of it in a broken English that made the curse words sound less vulgar and more humorous. Blaise tried to stamp on the plastic ruler again.

  "Blaise! Enough!"

  "Of course, getting up is a lot different than getting back down. Cats sometimes have that problem and they're excellent climbers." Chief Matheny shook his head.

  "What has the imp of Satan done now?" a distant female voice screeched in French.

  That had been one of the first complete French sentences Julie Drahuta had learned. Considering the relationship between Blaise and his governess, she could understand why.

  Watching Madame Delfault approach one might think Blaise was going to be the very much "former" greatest mathematician in the world.

  Julie wasn't concerned. No one would argue that Madame Delfault always sounded one moment away from going psycho on the boy. She treated Blaise with the sort of loving care one might have expected from his mother, who Julie knew from history books had died before Grantville had appeared.

  "I thought Bill was joking about some boy wanting to hook an indoor extension cord to the mains out at the power plant. I don't see it as funny now. He's going to kill himself by the numbers if someone don't make it clear to him that life's too short to die by accident. You figure out what he was doing, Julie?" Chief Matheny glanced quickly at the approaching governess.

  "I was called away from a late breakfast to find him being lowered to the ground by your very professional fire department." Julie sighed. She pushed Blaise away from her in such a way that he would be able to see his governess approach.

  Julie Drahuta might know that Madame Delfault loved the boy but Blaise wasn't sure about that, apparently. If Blaise was an imp of Satan then in his eyes Madame Delfault was the wrath of God approaching. Julie smiled. For a smart kid, he was easily fooled.

  "Tell me what you were doing or I give you to her" Julie said slowly.

  "It was the fault of that!" Blaise pointed with his chin. He was too smart to take his eyes off his approaching doom.

  "What were you doing?" Julie snapped.

  Blaise pulled a piece of notebook paper out of his pocket then hunched his shoulders to more fully hide behind her. He handed the paper, as bruised and battered as he was, to Julie.

  There were triangles and numbers and erasures and even a stab mark.

  "What is this?"

  "She is coming!" Blaise whispered. "Do something!"

  "You were trying to measure the height of the steeple with that piece of junk?" Chief Matheny laughed, pointing to the cheap plastic ruler.

  Blaise tried to stomp on the ruler again. With the foot that was missing a shoe.

  "Young man" Chief Matheny shook his head. "Next time come by the fire house. I'll get you the proper tools to do a similar triangle calculation. Hell, to avoid this mess, I'll get you the building blueprints. And this harness? You raise yourself up anything taller than a kitchen table with something like this again and I'll strangle you myself. And I'm taking that crossbow too. You make it yourself?"

  Blaise nodded silently.

  "Blaise Pascal! What have you done?" Madame Delfault had finally gotten past the crowd and rushed up to inspect her charge.

  "And I think I am going to inspect your 'laboratory,' Blaise." Julie looked at the crossbow and shuddered. Somehow she knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the markings on it were not for show. It was, for all intents and purposes, a sniper crossbow, if she was reading the markings on it correctly. It explained how the rope had gotten through the open cupola that supported the cross at the top of the steeple.

  Blaise tried to hide from both Madame Delfault and the chief of Grantville's fire department.

  A sudden thought made Julie ask, "Did you see a little girl around here?"

  "Mary's in the church. She's looking at the stained glass windows. She likes windows. That she does. She paints pretty pictures on glass. I hope she learned her lesson about glass and how sharp it is when it breaks." Chief Matheny shook his head. "Regular 'Our Gang' you got going, Julie. Try to keep 'em alive, would you?"

  "That's my job, Chief," Julie could smile too.

  ***

  Allan Sebastian hated education.

  Teaching would have been his dream job if it wasn't for all this 'education' stuff.

  He remembered his first classroom, the smell of it and how it felt to write his name on the chalkboard. He remembered his first stack of papers to be graded and the first report cards he had signed.

  He had assumed after the Ring of Fire struck that there would be no place for some middle school math teacher. He had figured that he would have to struggle to remain teaching.

  That last part was true. With all the offers and opportunities for someone who knew numbers it was a miracle he hadn't been kidnapped and taken by force to some royal court. Certainly the titles "Royal Accountant" or "Royal Engineer" had a certain ring to them, and he'd already been offered both positions. The loud bevy of relatives who had come through the Ring of Fire with him, including his eldest daughter, reminded him every day of all the opportunities there were available for a man with his experience.

  Why couldn't he just be left alone to teach?

  Then his youngest daughter had introduced him to Blaise Pascal. That had beenonly a few months ago.

  August? It seemed like decades ago.

  "I don't need to see the damn book, Allan!" Archie Clinter slapped his hand down on his desk. Allan had known the principal of Fluharty Middle School long enough to know it wasn't a sign of anger but of frustration. Archie didn't deal with frustration very well. Oddly enough, considering his job, he didn't have to.

  Allan slid the encyclopedia closer to Archie; taunting him with it. There was a picture on the page of a much older Blaise. He was probably thirty in the picture and dead almost four hundred years. That same Blaise was eleven now and outside Archie's office waiting for doom to descend on him.

  How the world had changed.

  "I understand, Allan! I get it. Blaise Pascal; world's greatest mathematician. Do you understand me? You will note that he died at a ripe old age in this here book! But he almost died at eleven hanging from a church steeple! What the hell was he doing up there and not in class? What the hell happened? And why are you here and not Owen? Blaise is his responsibility. He's the Gifted and Talented Education teacher… more or less. We agreed with you, Allan. Blaise is gifted. Okay, I admit that. We admit that."

  "Yes. Where is Mr. Maddox?"

  "Look, he has his hands full with the normal special ed kids."

  "Normal special ed?"

  "You're confusing the point! You are not special ed qualified. If we were… if this was…"

  "Blaise would be four hundred years dead and Owen Maddox would still need a special ed teacher for himself." Special ed qualified or not, Allan knew he was a better teacher than Owen Maddox, at least when it came to kids like Blaise and his sister.

  "And he would have you before the school board!"

  "Lucky for Blaise the school board has less time to play petty politics. It actually has to perform now, not sit around and bicker about things it knows nothing about, like education."

  "That is not fair."

  "David Weller."

  If Allan had slapped Archie across the face it might have had a lesser effect on the man.

  "Look, you want him, fine. Maybe you can keep him out of everyone's hair. Okay? Case closed. It's probably moot. Julie wants a piece of him. Steve is annoyed with the boy. That toy he had, that crossbow, put a steel tipped bolt…"

  "He made it."

  "That's the point. He should be in school, not making crossbows
. Gifted child or not, he has to be like everyone else."

  "Do you listen to yourself?" Allan asked quietly. "I mean, really listen. Blaise isn't a theoretical 'gifted' child. The mentally-challenged need someone who knows mental challenges. Leave them with Owen. He likes them and does a fair job with them. He is so far out of his depth with Blaise or kids like him that it is almost funny. I want Mary and Jacqueline too."

  "You are not…"

  "We are not in West Virginia anymore."

  "That is no excuse for… "

  Allan placed a piece of crumpled and bruised paper over the picture in the book.

  "What's this? Your resignation? His suicide note?"

  "The boy you want to be like everyone else was trying to demonstrate the theorem of similar triangles. He wasn't pulling a prank. He was trying to apply a mathematical theorem with a crossbow and a cheap ruler. Looks like he might be more than one kind of genius."

  Archie took in a deep breath and closed his eyes. "Allan, how can you do that dead? I can have Blaise put in your class. I don't know about Jacqueline and Mary. They are elementary school kids."

  "You can't keep someone like him in a regular classroom. You'll kill him in a regular classroom. Jacqueline might kill in a regular classroom. She hates the Fluffy Bunny reading series. I don't blame her."

  "Second graders love the Fluffy Bunny reading series."

  "You are missing the point! Jacqueline, like her brother, is gifted. Have you seen some of the stuff she's written?"

  "I've heard some of it. Her reading teacher gives me a synopsis. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Some of the words she uses… I thought we were talking about Blaise."

  "We were talking about me taking Blaise, his sister and Mary."

  "I can probably give you Blaise…"

  "All of them."

  "Allan… he is a child. Okay… a smart child… "

  "We failed, Archie. In the year 2000, we failed. We failed kids like him. We were looking to save a few bucks and free up some class space so we ignored or didn't fund the gifted programs. Nobody felt sorry for 'gifted' kids. Who the hell did they think they were anyway? Acting so smart. Suck it up and deal, smart ass! Stop being so smart and be like everyone else!"