Eric Flint - [Grantville 04] - 1634 The Ram Rebellion, Angielskie [EN](4)(2)
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PART I:
RECIPES FOR REVOLUTION
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me
down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very
many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I
answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.”
Ezekiel 37:1-3
Cook Books
Eric Flint
June, 1631
After Melissa Mailey ushered Mike Stearns into her living room and took a seat on an armchair facing
him, she lifted her eyebrows. The expression on her face was one that Mike still remembered from years
earlier, when he’d been a high school student and Melissa had been the most notorious teacher in the
high school.
Which she still was, for that matter.
For the adult population of Grantville, Melissa’s notoriety stemmed from her radical political opinions.
For her students, however, that notoriety had an entirely different basis. Whatever flamboyantly
egalitarian views Ms. Mailey entertained regarding society as a whole, there was not a shred of evidence
for them in her classrooms.
The students who thought she was basically okay—Mike himself had been one of them—called her
either
The Schoolmarm from Hell
or
Melissa the Hun.
Behind her back, of course. The terms used by
other students went downhill from there. Very rapidly downhill, in many cases.
Granted, all of her students would admit that she was fair. But
fair
is not actually a virtue admired in a
schoolteacher, by her students, especially when it was almost impossible to slide anything by her.
Merciful
, yes;
easy-going
, yes;
absent-minded
, best of all.
Fair
, no.
As one of Mike’s schoolmates had grumbled to him at the time, “Who cares if she’s ‘fair’?” The boy
pointed an accusing finger at the book open before him on the cafeteria table. “So she’s making all of us
read this crap, equally and with no favoritism. Gee, ain’t that great?”
Mike grimaced. The volume in question was Dante’s
Inferno,
a book he had soon come to detest
himself. Ms. Mailey’s notions of “suitable reading” for teenagers bore no relationship at all to what
teenagers thought themselves.
“’Fair,’” his friend continued remorselessly, the accusing finger still rigid. “Sure she is. Just like Satan
himself, in this miserable book.”
The expression on Melissa’s face today was the same one Mike remembered from years before. The
aloof, questioning eyebrow-lift with which she greeted a student who approached her with a problem
after class. A facial gesture which, somehow, managed to combine three different propositions:
One. You wish?
Two. Yes, I will be glad to help you.
Three. You will almost certainly wish I hadn’t.
“You’ve got the oddest look on your face, Mike,” Melissa said, bringing him back to the moment.
“What’s up?”
He smiled, a bit sheepishly. “Just remembering . . . Ah, never mind. I need your advice.”
“Yes?”
That was point one. Fearlessly, Mike plowed on.
“It’s fine and dandy for me to give a fancy public speech about launching the American revolution ahead
of schedule, now that our town is stranded in seventeenth century Europe. I even got elected head of the
emergency committee, because of it, thanks to you. But now, ah . . .”
“You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is. And you don’t really know where to start, other
than with some fine generalities – very vague, very politician-like – about freedom and equality.” She
leaned forward in her chair, lacing her long fingers together. “Yes, I understand. I’ll be glad to give you
whatever advice I can.”
Point two, coming like the tides. Paralyzed for a moment, Mike studied her fingers. Very elegant and
aristocratic fingers, they were. Absurdly so, really, for a woman with her political attitudes.
“Ah. Yes. I was thinking maybe . . .”
But Melissa was already shaking her head. Another characteristic Mike remembered. Melissa Mailey
was no more likely to let a student frame their own question than she was to provide them with an answer
they wanted.
“Start with the land problem,” she said firmly. “It stands right at the center of any revolution that shatters
the old regime and ushers in democracy and the industrial revolution. That was true even in our own
American revolution, though most people don’t realize it.”
He couldn’t think of anything better to say than he had as a teenager.
“Huh?”
She smiled. Very coolly, as he remembered her doing. “Mike, it’s complicated. Land tenure is always
complicated, especially in societies with a feudal background—and there’s nothing dumber than trying to
carry through a revolution based on misconceptions. For instance, you’re probably assuming that
seventeenth century German farmers are a bunch of serfs toiling on land owned by the aristocracy. So the
simplest way to solve their problem is to expropriate the land from the great nobles and turn it over to the
peasants.”
He emitted the familiar response he remembered from high school. “Uh. Well. Yeah.”
That firm, detestable headshake.
“Not in the least. That’s true in eastern Europe, if I remember correctly, but it’s not true here. Mind you,
my memory of the details of German social history in the early modern period is a little vague, now. I
haven’t studied the subject since college, because it’s not something we teach in this high school. Or any
high school in America, so far as I know. But I remember enough to tell you that land relations in
Germany in this day and age are a tangled mare’s nest. If we approach it the wrong way, we’re just as
likely to infuriate the farmers as the nobility, which is the last thing we want to do.”
She rose, moved over to one of the bookcases in the living room, and deftly plucked out two of the
volumes there. “I’ve still got some of the relevant books, fortunately, and I’ve been refreshing my
memory these past few days.”
Then, as Mike feared she would, she came over and handed one of them to him.
Blessedly, the more slender volume.
“Start with this one. It’s Barraclough’s
The Origins of Modern Germany
and it’s still—for my money,
anyway—the best general history on the subject, even though it was written half a century ago.”
Quickly, and as surreptitiously as possible, he flipped to the end of the book.
Not surreptitiously enough, of course.
“Oh, grow up,” she said. “It’s not even five hundred pages long. You can read it in a few days. What’s
so funny?”
Despite himself, Mike had started chuckling.
“Dante’s
Inferno
was shorter than this, and you gave us a month to read that one.”
“You were a callow youth, then. Besides, it was in
terza rima
and this is simple prose. So stop whining.
Now . . .”
A moment later, the other book—the great, fat, monstrous tome—was deposited firmly in his lap. It was
all he could do not to groan.
“Then read this one.”
The size of the thing would have been bad enough. The title—
Economic History of Europe
, for the
love of God—made it even worse.
“For Pete’s sake, Mike, it’s just a book. Stop hefting it as if I were asking you to lift weights.”
“Be easier,” he muttered. “What’d they print it on? Depleted uranium?”
She returned to her seat. “Make fancy speeches, get elected the big shot, pay the price. No pain, no
gain. And if you think that book looks like a bitch, wait’ll you—we, I should say—run into the real
world.”
And that, too, he remembered. Such an oddly contradictory woman.
“Isn’t that word politically incorrect?”
“Sure is. Ain’t life a bitch?”
She was grinning, now, nothing cool about it.
* * *
Walking back to his house—listing, some, from the weight of the books tucked under his arm—Mike
started muttering to himself.
“Point three. I almost certainly wish I hadn’t.”
* * *
The worst of it, of course, was that it wasn’t true, and Mike knew it. In the times coming, the books
would look like a piece of cake, compared to the real world.
It’s complicated
. . . coming from Melissa Mailey . . .
“Damn,” he muttered. “Can’t we just dump some tea leaves in a harbor somewhere, storm a famous
prison or two, and be done with it?”
Birdie’s Farm
Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett
Part I:
June 1631
Birdie Newhouse stood on his back porch and looked over his farm. Looked over, in fact, what was left
of his farm. The farm was a little chunk of Appalachian valley, which was abruptly cut off by a German
granite wall. The farm had been about half again as big before the Ring of Fire, but even then it hadn’t
been big enough to make a real living.
Birdie had everything a man needed to make a real farm. There was a tractor, a plow, the works. He
even had some livestock, chickens and a couple of hogs. The only thing he didn’t have was the land.
Out to one side of the remainder of the farm, there was a little bit of field that you could plow, if you
were real careful about the contouring. Most of his farm, though, consisted of skinny trees holding on to
the hillside for dear life. A dry creek ran through the middle of the property. The creek was going to stay
dry, unfortunately. The German land on the other side of the cliff tilted the wrong way to feed the creek.
Birdie’s eyes lost some of their worry as he again noticed the wellhead for the natural gas well on his
land. He was more thankful every day that he had gone ahead and converted his equipment to work on
natural gas. Willie Ray Hudson had made that suggestion several years ago. Birdie was glad he had
listened.
Much to his disgust, Birdie simply didn’t have enough land. Even worse, the little bit of land that the Ring
of Fire had left him was mortgaged to the Grantville Bank. There was plenty of land on the other side of
the cliff created by the Ring of Fire, including a village about a mile beyond it. It wasn’t much of a village,
according to Birdie’s sons Haskell and Trent, who’d been patrolling the area with the UMWA guys. But
they said the land was good.
“Birdie,” his wife called, interrupting his thoughts, “staring at that wall won’t undo the Ring of Fire. Come
inside. It’s time for dinner.”
“Be right in, Mary Lee,” Birdie answered, all the while thinking,
There’s land on the other side of the
Ring Wall, if only I can get it.
“What do you think Mr. Walker will say?” Mary Lee asked as he was sitting down to dinner. When she
was worried about something she couldn’t just leave it alone, she had to talk about whatever it was.
“Don’t know. Coleman’s a decent enough sort but he’s still a banker. The Ring of Fire took a third of
our land. From where he’s sitting, that means we have two-thirds the collateral for our loan. On the other
hand, there’s a fair bit of property that the bank is gonna get, chunks of land where the owners were
outside the ring. Anyway, I think he’d rather extend the loan if he can see his way clear to do it. Maybe
he’ll give us six months to work something out.”
“And what will we have in six months that we don’t have now?”
“Well, I’ve been giving that some thought while I was staring at that damn wall. Maybe, just maybe, I
have a solution.” He then refused to say another word on the matter, much to Mary Lee’s dismay. Birdie
loved teasing her like that. It still worked, even after almost thirty years.
* * *
Birdie had an appointment with Coleman Walker, but didn’t get to talk to him. Coleman was busy trying
to set up some kind of money changing business for the Emergency Committee. Instead, Edgar came out
to meet him, and escorted him to an office, chattering all the way.
“You know, Mr. Newhouse,” Edgar said, “here at the bank, we know that the farmers are going to be
really important to the success of Grantville. There’s been a lot of talk about that. The Emergency
Committee got involved and asked, well, demanded, to tell the truth about it, that the Bank put a hiatus
on calling in any farm loans for at least a year. Mr. Walker agreed to it, right smartly, too.”
Birdie thought that was something of a miracle, all by itself. Getting Coleman Walker to agree to anything
“right smartly” hadn’t ever happened in Birdie’s experience.
“Don’t get me wrong, Edgar,” Birdie responded, “Coleman’s always been a good sort. But, there’s got
to be a catch in there, somewhere. Spit it out.”
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zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl upanicza.keep.pl
PART I:
RECIPES FOR REVOLUTION
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me
down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very
many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I
answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.”
Ezekiel 37:1-3
Cook Books
Eric Flint
June, 1631
After Melissa Mailey ushered Mike Stearns into her living room and took a seat on an armchair facing
him, she lifted her eyebrows. The expression on her face was one that Mike still remembered from years
earlier, when he’d been a high school student and Melissa had been the most notorious teacher in the
high school.
Which she still was, for that matter.
For the adult population of Grantville, Melissa’s notoriety stemmed from her radical political opinions.
For her students, however, that notoriety had an entirely different basis. Whatever flamboyantly
egalitarian views Ms. Mailey entertained regarding society as a whole, there was not a shred of evidence
for them in her classrooms.
The students who thought she was basically okay—Mike himself had been one of them—called her
either
The Schoolmarm from Hell
or
Melissa the Hun.
Behind her back, of course. The terms used by
other students went downhill from there. Very rapidly downhill, in many cases.
Granted, all of her students would admit that she was fair. But
fair
is not actually a virtue admired in a
schoolteacher, by her students, especially when it was almost impossible to slide anything by her.
Merciful
, yes;
easy-going
, yes;
absent-minded
, best of all.
Fair
, no.
As one of Mike’s schoolmates had grumbled to him at the time, “Who cares if she’s ‘fair’?” The boy
pointed an accusing finger at the book open before him on the cafeteria table. “So she’s making all of us
read this crap, equally and with no favoritism. Gee, ain’t that great?”
Mike grimaced. The volume in question was Dante’s
Inferno,
a book he had soon come to detest
himself. Ms. Mailey’s notions of “suitable reading” for teenagers bore no relationship at all to what
teenagers thought themselves.
“’Fair,’” his friend continued remorselessly, the accusing finger still rigid. “Sure she is. Just like Satan
himself, in this miserable book.”
The expression on Melissa’s face today was the same one Mike remembered from years before. The
aloof, questioning eyebrow-lift with which she greeted a student who approached her with a problem
after class. A facial gesture which, somehow, managed to combine three different propositions:
One. You wish?
Two. Yes, I will be glad to help you.
Three. You will almost certainly wish I hadn’t.
“You’ve got the oddest look on your face, Mike,” Melissa said, bringing him back to the moment.
“What’s up?”
He smiled, a bit sheepishly. “Just remembering . . . Ah, never mind. I need your advice.”
“Yes?”
That was point one. Fearlessly, Mike plowed on.
“It’s fine and dandy for me to give a fancy public speech about launching the American revolution ahead
of schedule, now that our town is stranded in seventeenth century Europe. I even got elected head of the
emergency committee, because of it, thanks to you. But now, ah . . .”
“You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is. And you don’t really know where to start, other
than with some fine generalities – very vague, very politician-like – about freedom and equality.” She
leaned forward in her chair, lacing her long fingers together. “Yes, I understand. I’ll be glad to give you
whatever advice I can.”
Point two, coming like the tides. Paralyzed for a moment, Mike studied her fingers. Very elegant and
aristocratic fingers, they were. Absurdly so, really, for a woman with her political attitudes.
“Ah. Yes. I was thinking maybe . . .”
But Melissa was already shaking her head. Another characteristic Mike remembered. Melissa Mailey
was no more likely to let a student frame their own question than she was to provide them with an answer
they wanted.
“Start with the land problem,” she said firmly. “It stands right at the center of any revolution that shatters
the old regime and ushers in democracy and the industrial revolution. That was true even in our own
American revolution, though most people don’t realize it.”
He couldn’t think of anything better to say than he had as a teenager.
“Huh?”
She smiled. Very coolly, as he remembered her doing. “Mike, it’s complicated. Land tenure is always
complicated, especially in societies with a feudal background—and there’s nothing dumber than trying to
carry through a revolution based on misconceptions. For instance, you’re probably assuming that
seventeenth century German farmers are a bunch of serfs toiling on land owned by the aristocracy. So the
simplest way to solve their problem is to expropriate the land from the great nobles and turn it over to the
peasants.”
He emitted the familiar response he remembered from high school. “Uh. Well. Yeah.”
That firm, detestable headshake.
“Not in the least. That’s true in eastern Europe, if I remember correctly, but it’s not true here. Mind you,
my memory of the details of German social history in the early modern period is a little vague, now. I
haven’t studied the subject since college, because it’s not something we teach in this high school. Or any
high school in America, so far as I know. But I remember enough to tell you that land relations in
Germany in this day and age are a tangled mare’s nest. If we approach it the wrong way, we’re just as
likely to infuriate the farmers as the nobility, which is the last thing we want to do.”
She rose, moved over to one of the bookcases in the living room, and deftly plucked out two of the
volumes there. “I’ve still got some of the relevant books, fortunately, and I’ve been refreshing my
memory these past few days.”
Then, as Mike feared she would, she came over and handed one of them to him.
Blessedly, the more slender volume.
“Start with this one. It’s Barraclough’s
The Origins of Modern Germany
and it’s still—for my money,
anyway—the best general history on the subject, even though it was written half a century ago.”
Quickly, and as surreptitiously as possible, he flipped to the end of the book.
Not surreptitiously enough, of course.
“Oh, grow up,” she said. “It’s not even five hundred pages long. You can read it in a few days. What’s
so funny?”
Despite himself, Mike had started chuckling.
“Dante’s
Inferno
was shorter than this, and you gave us a month to read that one.”
“You were a callow youth, then. Besides, it was in
terza rima
and this is simple prose. So stop whining.
Now . . .”
A moment later, the other book—the great, fat, monstrous tome—was deposited firmly in his lap. It was
all he could do not to groan.
“Then read this one.”
The size of the thing would have been bad enough. The title—
Economic History of Europe
, for the
love of God—made it even worse.
“For Pete’s sake, Mike, it’s just a book. Stop hefting it as if I were asking you to lift weights.”
“Be easier,” he muttered. “What’d they print it on? Depleted uranium?”
She returned to her seat. “Make fancy speeches, get elected the big shot, pay the price. No pain, no
gain. And if you think that book looks like a bitch, wait’ll you—we, I should say—run into the real
world.”
And that, too, he remembered. Such an oddly contradictory woman.
“Isn’t that word politically incorrect?”
“Sure is. Ain’t life a bitch?”
She was grinning, now, nothing cool about it.
* * *
Walking back to his house—listing, some, from the weight of the books tucked under his arm—Mike
started muttering to himself.
“Point three. I almost certainly wish I hadn’t.”
* * *
The worst of it, of course, was that it wasn’t true, and Mike knew it. In the times coming, the books
would look like a piece of cake, compared to the real world.
It’s complicated
. . . coming from Melissa Mailey . . .
“Damn,” he muttered. “Can’t we just dump some tea leaves in a harbor somewhere, storm a famous
prison or two, and be done with it?”
Birdie’s Farm
Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett
Part I:
June 1631
Birdie Newhouse stood on his back porch and looked over his farm. Looked over, in fact, what was left
of his farm. The farm was a little chunk of Appalachian valley, which was abruptly cut off by a German
granite wall. The farm had been about half again as big before the Ring of Fire, but even then it hadn’t
been big enough to make a real living.
Birdie had everything a man needed to make a real farm. There was a tractor, a plow, the works. He
even had some livestock, chickens and a couple of hogs. The only thing he didn’t have was the land.
Out to one side of the remainder of the farm, there was a little bit of field that you could plow, if you
were real careful about the contouring. Most of his farm, though, consisted of skinny trees holding on to
the hillside for dear life. A dry creek ran through the middle of the property. The creek was going to stay
dry, unfortunately. The German land on the other side of the cliff tilted the wrong way to feed the creek.
Birdie’s eyes lost some of their worry as he again noticed the wellhead for the natural gas well on his
land. He was more thankful every day that he had gone ahead and converted his equipment to work on
natural gas. Willie Ray Hudson had made that suggestion several years ago. Birdie was glad he had
listened.
Much to his disgust, Birdie simply didn’t have enough land. Even worse, the little bit of land that the Ring
of Fire had left him was mortgaged to the Grantville Bank. There was plenty of land on the other side of
the cliff created by the Ring of Fire, including a village about a mile beyond it. It wasn’t much of a village,
according to Birdie’s sons Haskell and Trent, who’d been patrolling the area with the UMWA guys. But
they said the land was good.
“Birdie,” his wife called, interrupting his thoughts, “staring at that wall won’t undo the Ring of Fire. Come
inside. It’s time for dinner.”
“Be right in, Mary Lee,” Birdie answered, all the while thinking,
There’s land on the other side of the
Ring Wall, if only I can get it.
“What do you think Mr. Walker will say?” Mary Lee asked as he was sitting down to dinner. When she
was worried about something she couldn’t just leave it alone, she had to talk about whatever it was.
“Don’t know. Coleman’s a decent enough sort but he’s still a banker. The Ring of Fire took a third of
our land. From where he’s sitting, that means we have two-thirds the collateral for our loan. On the other
hand, there’s a fair bit of property that the bank is gonna get, chunks of land where the owners were
outside the ring. Anyway, I think he’d rather extend the loan if he can see his way clear to do it. Maybe
he’ll give us six months to work something out.”
“And what will we have in six months that we don’t have now?”
“Well, I’ve been giving that some thought while I was staring at that damn wall. Maybe, just maybe, I
have a solution.” He then refused to say another word on the matter, much to Mary Lee’s dismay. Birdie
loved teasing her like that. It still worked, even after almost thirty years.
* * *
Birdie had an appointment with Coleman Walker, but didn’t get to talk to him. Coleman was busy trying
to set up some kind of money changing business for the Emergency Committee. Instead, Edgar came out
to meet him, and escorted him to an office, chattering all the way.
“You know, Mr. Newhouse,” Edgar said, “here at the bank, we know that the farmers are going to be
really important to the success of Grantville. There’s been a lot of talk about that. The Emergency
Committee got involved and asked, well, demanded, to tell the truth about it, that the Bank put a hiatus
on calling in any farm loans for at least a year. Mr. Walker agreed to it, right smartly, too.”
Birdie thought that was something of a miracle, all by itself. Getting Coleman Walker to agree to anything
“right smartly” hadn’t ever happened in Birdie’s experience.
“Don’t get me wrong, Edgar,” Birdie responded, “Coleman’s always been a good sort. But, there’s got
to be a catch in there, somewhere. Spit it out.”
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