1637_The Volga Rules Read online

  Izabella looked over at Artemi. “See? That’s not stainless steel. It’s high-carbon steel, but not stainless.” She looked over at Petr. “Isn’t that right?”

  Petr wiggled his hand. “Medium-high carbon steel. About point seven percent. But no chromium or anything else that would prevent rust.”

  It wasn’t cool on the shop floor by any means, not even at this time of year. But it wasn’t like standing at the gates of hell, either. That was another advantage of induction heating. It helped keep the heat where it was needed.

  “But the up-time books said that you had to have stainless steel for induction cooking. That copper and even aluminum won’t work.”

  “Really?” Petr asked. “Myself, I can’t read. At least not much. Never had a chance to learn. But it makes sense that copper and bronze won’t work. Hey, maybe the chromium in stainless makes the induction not work as well, so the pot doesn’t melt.”

  “Perhaps.” Izabella shrugged. “On the other hand, there might be better, cheaper ways to cook without ash getting in the food. I don’t object to the expense of induction heating, not for what we do here. This place is dangerous enough as it is. Having a bunch of open flames hot enough to melt steel would make it a disaster waiting to happen. But I don’t think kitchens are quite so deadly.” She saw the looks that she was getting from Petr and Artemi. “What? Did I say something stupid?”

  “Well, let’s just say I doubt you ever spent much time working in a kitchen,” said Artemi. “Honestly, I hadn’t either, not till I got here and received this posting. For the first two weeks, I sat in a corner and watched. A kitchen is a dangerous place, and no two ways about it.”

  It was probably true. Izabella had never been all that interested in kitchens, except for what came out of them. And she had never needed to work in one, not even while they were on the road.

  Across Zeppi Road from the factory was the chem shop run by Alexis Khristianovich Patrikeev, who had studied chemistry at the Dacha and was making the caps for caplocks. It took him months to get into production, but now they were taking sheets of refined copper and turning them into nipples, then loading them with a carefully measured compound. It wasn’t fulminate of mercury. It was the other stuff. Alexis had told Izabella what it was several times, but for some reason the name of the new process never stuck in her mind. Perhaps because people didn’t die nearly as often using it as they did making fulminate of mercury caps.

  Izabella knocked on the door of Alexis’s office and then went in. Alexis was a skinny man with a short cropped beard and thick bushy hair. He wore glasses because he was nearsighted and always had been. It meant that the world away from him had been a blur for most of his life and encouraged him to read while making more manly arts like shooting out of the question. “What is it this time, Izabella?” He sounded irritated.

  “What has you so upset?”

  “The generator is out again,” Alexis told her. The new process used electrical current in brine to make some chemical. Izabella didn’t know what chemical and didn’t care. Alexis didn’t get along with electricity. His generators were always getting broken and one of the guys from the New Dacha had pointed out that making a generator was on the order of a thousand hours of labor and it wasn’t labor that was easily divisible since most of it consisted of winding coils. There was a coil winding machine in Murom but it hadn’t made the trip. They had made a new one here but it kept breaking down. So a lot of the coils for generators, alternators, induction devices, transformers, and the like, were hand wound.

  “I heard they had the coil winder up and running again.”

  “It’s not the coils this time. It’s the brushes.”

  That was good news, sort of. The stamp forges could be used to make graphite brushes and mostly the factory made its own. But the process wasn’t simple. It involved the right mix of carbon and copper and heat treating in an non-oxygen atmosphere. It was a complicated process, and expensive in its own right. Also the ones they could make here didn’t last nearly as long as the ones she was told they made up-time. They didn’t even last as long as the ones that they made at the Dacha or in Murom.

  “We might be able to get you some new brushes. We still have a few from the last brush run.”

  The look Alexis gave her at that news was neither relieved or grateful. It was more like she had offered to let him stick his head in a wolf’s mouth. “What do you want in exchange?”

  “They need caps out at New Ruzuka.”

  “Forget it,” Alexis said automatically. “The army needs those caps. They need them in Kazan and they need them at…”

  “And you can’t get them there. Besides, Kazan has its own cap factory.”

  “We’ll get them there as soon as the ice melts.”

  “If we can build mines, so can they.”

  “You know that the guys at the New Dacha are working on a mine sweeper.”

  “Fine. Maybe it will even work. In the meantime, the villagers out at New Ruzuka have AK4.7s and they can’t use them because they don’t have caps.” No one had come up with an automatic method of charging the pan for a flint or wheel lock, so the slide-action AK4.7 had to use a cap chamber.

  “And how many rounds does it take those people out at New Ruzuka to shoot a rabbit?”

  Suddenly, Izabella’s mind was back on the road on the way here watching that stupid idiot murdering Irina because no one in the wagon train had a gun. It was just for a second, but any thought of smiling at Alexis’s quip was gone. “Alexis, you came here straight from the Dacha on a steamboat. It took you, what? Three days? We were on the road for three months. I watched as a little girl died because a boy wanted to prove how bad he was. Fine, so the duma’s army is on the other side of Ufa from New Ruzuka. But what about bandits? What about drunken idiots trying to prove they’re real Cossacks? Those are my friends out there. I want them armed.”

  She got her caps. Not as many as she wanted, and Stefan spent the next week complaining about having to stop the chamber line so they could make another load of green brushes and bake them. He complained, but not too much. He remembered Irina too.

  CHAPTER 23

  Blueprint

  Ufa

  March 28, 1637

  “Welcome back!” Czar Mikhail grabbed Bernie in a Russian bear hug. “Did you and Natasha get any alone time?”

  “Oh, shut up,” Bernie said, then—clearly as an afterthought—added, “Your Imperial Majesty.”

  The czar of Russia—at least this part of it—laughed. Then he looked over the rest of the new arrivals. It was a sunny day in Ufa, and there was a wagon train of sleighs stretched out from the gates of the Ufa kremlin. Natasha wasn’t looking a lot more pleased than Bernie, but Vladimir was displaying a truly sinister smile. Beside Prince Vladimir was a young woman holding a baby and so wrapped up in furs that it was hard to tell much else. Behind her was General Izmailov with aides. And a gaggle of others. “Where did all these people come from?” Mikhail whispered.

  Bernie gave a slight grimace, then said quickly and quietly, “These are representatives from tribes and towns from here to Mangazeya and Vlad thinks you should spend some effort in showing them respect. It’s part of his plan.”

  Czar Mikhail was a bit surprised by that comment, but went along and spent the next hour greeting each delegation and insuring that they be quartered. Not easy. Ufa was by now pulling in people considerably faster than it was producing room for them.

  An hour later, in Czar Mikhail’s office, it was just Bernie, Natasha, Vladimir and his wife, Brandy. And, of course, Evdokia. “So, no firm agreements, not even from General Shein?”

  “Especially not from General Shein,” Brandy Bates said. “We had to give him fifteen of the tubes just to get him to send Izmailov.”

  “Tubes?”

  “Vladimir brought amplifier tubes,” Bernie said. “And designs for making them. With the tubes, we can extend the range of the radios.”

  “And you had to give them
to General Shein?”

  “Not all of them,” Natasha said. “Only fifteen. And there are another ten that we will be using to produce a chain of radiotelegraph stations between the Gulf of Ob and Tobolsk. Shein will be using the ones we gave him to set up a link from Tobolsk to Solikamsk along the Babinov Road, across the Ural Mountains.”

  “That’s fine for General Shein, but what does it do for us?” Evdokia asked.

  “It gets us a link,” Vladimir started, then corrected himself. “Well, it will get us a link, once the radios are actually built from Solikamsk to Mangazeya. And we have arranged the construction of other radio stations, so that we will have communications from here to Mangazeya in a few hours, once all the stations are up and running. Solikamsk to Dobryanka, a touch over eighty miles. Then to Yagoshikha, which at thirty miles is almost close enough to make it without tubes. From Yagoshikha to Osinskaya Nikolskaya, just under sixty miles straight line distance, if twice that by the River Kama. From Nikolskaya to Voznesenskoye was around eighty miles.

  “That gets us almost to here. We put in a station at a little place with four farmhouses and a church that is called Letyaga, apparently named after the Flying Squirrel pamphlets. That one, once it gets built, will reach us here in Ufa and from what Bernie tells me, will also link into the chain that goes to that hidden valley you have the dirigible hangars in.”

  “Also from Voznesenskoye,” Bernie said. “We sent a mission to Mamadysh, on a tributary of the Kama River. They’re going to build a radio station there and smuggle tubes to Kazan. And, if they can, to Kruglaya Mountain. Given the right weather conditions, an amplified station on Kruglaya Mountain has a good chance of sending to, or receiving from, Bor.”

  “So the radio network will connect a very large chunk of Russia, at least in terms of communications.” Mikhail nodded. “That’s good. And we have a stock of some of the components that we can send back the way you came to hurry things along. Batteries, generators, that sort of thing.”

  “So Natasha told me,” Vladimir said.

  Mikhail turned to Vladimir. “I guess that brings us to your plan, young man.”

  “Yes, I guess it does.” Vladimir picked up a cardboard tube and removed one end, then pulled two large sheets from it and unrolled them. He laid them out on the desk and then had to use the pen stand, an ink well, and a couple of books to hold the corners down.

  “This is the plan that Brandy and I, with the help of Ed Piazza and several of the teachers at Grantville High came up with. We’re not sure how much of it we’re going to be able to get. And, for that matter, it’s all subject to Your Majesty’s approval. The basic structure is based on the up-time federal model. Two houses, an upper and a lower, a judiciary, and—especially—a tiered government system, so that some laws are made locally, some by the states, and some by the federal government. It all comes together in you, Your Majesty. You are the last court of appeal, administratively, legislatively and judicially, but not the head of any single branch. The administrative head of government will be a president, who I want to be elected by popular vote. But we may not get that. The bureaus will be part of the administrative branch of government and will want some input in selecting the president. We expect them to insist on some say in the legislative branch as well. The judiciary will be a supreme court that is only superseded by you. And lower courts that the legislative branch shall determine are necessary will be established. Judges will be proposed by the administrative branch, but approved by the congress and will require your consent.”

  “Why so complicated?”

  “Partly to keep any one branch from gaining too much power,” Brandy said, “but also so that there will be offices to give to people.”

  “This is the most important part,” Vladimir said. “The grant of rights. This is a set of restrictions on what the government can do.”

  “Can anything this confused ever work?”

  “Something very like it worked in the up-time United States for over two hundred years. And was still going strong when the Ring of Fire happened,” Brandy said. “But we are going to have some problems getting all of it accepted. See this section? ‘All people in Russia shall be held equal before the law.’ The boyars aren’t going to like that. And it could be interpreted to include you. And everyone having the right to vote may cause problems as well. I’ve talked to General Izmailov some on the trip here, and a big part of the reason that General Shein isn’t on your side is the emancipation proclamation. But it’s also a big part of the reason that we got support from Ron Stone and a loan from Millicent Anne Barnes.”

  “Who?”

  “Ron Stone is a major industrialist, and may be one of the richest individuals in the USE. Or maybe not. It’s hard to tell. Her Serene Highness Millicent Anne Barnes is a member of the Barbie Consortium and runs the branch of the Royal Bank of Austria-Hungary in Grantville. Between them, but mostly Ron Stone, they backed the construction of the icebreaker Catharine the Great, and paid for the further supplies that will be coming once the ice in the Arctic gets a bit thinner.”

  They discussed the proposed constitution and the international politics of Mikhail’s emancipation proclamation well into the night. The next day, they called the constitutional convention.

  CHAPTER 24

  Convention

  Ufa

  March 30, 1637

  “The convention will come to order!” proclaimed Patriarch Matthew in a deep ringing voice.

  That had taken arrangement. The president of the convention had yet to be selected and they had already been through a heavy round of squabbling. The Muslims didn’t like Patriarch Matthew taking the lead role. Czar Mikhail had been considered, but the truth was that Mikhail wasn’t a great speaker—which wasn’t something they wanted to advertise. Letting Matthew do it was a concession to the Russian Orthodox church that was necessary after Czar Mikhail had declared Islam legal in Kazan and Ufa. And it was even more so, now that the convention had collected a bunch of tribal representatives who were Buddhists, Taoists, Zoroastrians, or sometimes even out-and-out pagans.

  The Convention Hall, a new building in the expanded Ufa kremlin, was a big log cabin. More a long house than anything else, and it was warm inside. Almost hot, because of all the bodies crowded in.

  Wham! Patriarch Matthew banged the gavel on the desk. Wham! Slowly, the conversation started to yield. Then he opened the floor to nominations for president of the convention. And for the next hour, people were nominated.

  Everyone was nominated. Bernie was almost sure someone nominated Sheremetev. Natasha, Bernie, Brandy, Vladimir, Czarina Evdokia…they were all nominated.

  When Vladimir was nominated, he stood up and asked that his name be removed from the nomination, because he had a proposal for the convention and didn’t want anyone to feel that he had used the position of president to force through his agenda.

  His nomination was removed with a flowery speech of regret by Vera Sergeevna, who had nominated him. Vera had never actually met Vladimir, but she had agreed to put his name up in talks with Anya. In return, Anya had arranged for a representative from Kazan to nominate Vera. A lot of what was going on here was political theater that had been carefully arranged in advance by Czarina Evdokia, Anya, and Natasha.

  General Izmailov was proposed by a Don Cossack from near the Caspian Sea, so it was clear that the ladies weren’t the only ones playing at political theater. General Izmailov thanked the man, but also declined the honor on the basis of his doubts about whether Siberia would be able to sign on. “I would feel obligated to support the final document if I were the president of the convention, and since I don’t know what the convention will come up with, I don’t feel I can accept the honor.”

  Which was a pretty clear statement that General Shein wasn’t committed to Czar Mikhail, even if he had sent a representative to the convention. It went on like that. All the major players stepped aside, including Patriarch Matthew and a mullah from Kazan.

  That got
them down to the second tier candidates and Vera Sergeevna made a surprisingly good showing, getting support from the manufacturers of Ufa and the village leaders from seven of the twenty-three villages that had sent representatives. It finally came down to Alexander Nikolayevich Volkov, Georgii Petrovich Chaplygin, Petr Vasilievich Yazykov and a tribal leader from Siberia, who bowed out because he was unfamiliar with the rules of order for the convention.

  After two more ballots, the president of the convention was Alexander.

  “Thank you for your trust,” Alexander said. “Now I will open the room to proposals.”

  Vladimir and half a dozen others raised their hands.

  “Prince Vladimir, you said when you removed your name from contention that you had a proposal for the constitution, and I know that Czar Mikhail was waiting to convene this convention till you were here, because of what you have learned of the up-time governmental systems. So what knowledge of governance have you brought us from the future?”

  Vladimir stood, opened his up-time style briefcase and removed a document. “When Czar Mikhail informed me of his desires, I consulted with the up-time experts and I have been working on an outline of what might work for Russia on the trip from there to here. This document is the result. The up-time constitution of the United States of America set up two houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate. By the time of the Ring of Fire, the senators were elected by popular vote, but Ed Piazza explained to me that it had not always been that way. Originally, the senators had been appointed by the state governments. And, for now at least, I believe that the governments of places like Siberia and the Don Cossacks will be more willing to accept the laws of their new federation of Russian states if each state is allowed to select their representative to the Senate in its own way…”

  Vladimir went through the whole document that way, explaining not just what was in it, but why it was that way. And then the council was opened for debate and debate happened. Serfdom was the first major issue. Even with the new tools and techniques that had come with the up-timers, the labor shortage in Russia was acute. That being the case, the people with the guns—that is, the upper and lower nobility and the gentry, otherwise known as the Streltzi—were not happy with a peasantry that was free to quit. Especially when it could quit or threaten to quit just when everyone was most needed like, say, harvest time. On the other hand, the former serfs who had run east to escape their ties to the land and their debts weren’t at all happy with the power that the nobles had had over them since the time of Ivan the Terrible and how much that power had grown over the ensuing years.