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Butterflies in the Kremlin, Part Eight: As the Bear Turns

Written by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

 

Sheremetev laughed. "Leontii is a fine man, but not nearly subtle enough for this. The new political officer for the Dacha is . . . Anya."

 

****

 

It was all Anya could do to keep her face still, even though she knew that very stillness was a tell in its own way. Sheremetev had to have done this on purpose; it was his way. Even his carrots were sticks. A promotion and a betrayal all in one. His means of keeping loyalty, to make any other loyalty impossible. She glanced at Natasha and the look of shocked enlightenment on her face gave Anya courage in a strange way. She knew that Natasha would be telling herself that she had always known, but Anya knew better. Natasha hadn't liked Anya because Anya was a peasant and was better at math than Natasha was. And especially because Anya was fucking Bernie, not going to bed alone.

 

That last thought sent Anya's gaze to Bernie who was looking at her like she had two heads. She turned her eyes away. Looking at Bernie was dangerous. Anya couldn't afford to let what she felt show on her face. Which brought her back to Sheremetev. He was examining her like she was one of the scientist's butterflies. A dead insect pinned to a plank for examination. She stood, bowed and smiled an easy, friendly smile. It was a smile she had practiced for years. "Thank you for your trust, my lord. You may depend on me."

 

"I was quite sure I could," was Sheremetev's smug reply. Then he turned to Natasha. "The Dacha will continue to run very much as it has in the past, save that projects must be cleared by Anya. To make sure that the results are, ah . . . desirable." Anya knew what that meant. Projects which would enhance Sheremetev's wealth, status or power would be approved. Those that detracted from those things would be disapproved. She tried not to look at Bernie. She tried not to think of Bernie.

 

****

 

Bernie, for his part, wasn't thinking very much at all. His time in Russia had taught him enough to keep him from trying to go across the table at Anya. No, he wouldn't have done that anyway. Maybe storming out of the room. Yep. That was probably what he'd have done back up-time. Mostly what he was doing was trying to take it in. Anya was a spy for Sheremetev. Funny, he couldn’t even figure out why that would be such a betrayal. Sheremetev was just another Russian, a member of the high families just like Natasha and Vladimir. He was in the Duma and had as much right to information from the Dacha as anyone in Russia. Besides, the Dacha leaked like a sieve anyway. It was supposed to. The Dacha wasn't supposed to keep stuff secret; it was supposed to take the knowledge freely given by the up-timers and put it in a Russian context so that it could be used to make Russia a better place.

 

Somehow, in spite of all that, it was still a betrayal. Anya had been lying to him all along. Everything she had said or done since he got to Russia had been a lie.

 

****

 

Well, I suppose I should have expected this, Anya thought. She reached for one of the boxes. "Tell me, Irina, why my things are all over the place here."

 

Irina was a bit of a snot, one that Anya wasn't at all fond of. So she pretty well expected the girl's smirk, even though the words hurt.

 

"Bernie said that the Comrade Political Officer could requisition whatever room she wanted," Irina said. "And that if it was his room, he'd just as soon sleep with one of the horses."

 

Of Bernie himself there was no sign. He was out checking on a new steam engine. Which, Anya knew perfectly well, didn't need checking on. So the political officer requisitioned a room in the Dacha. One of the good ones. Not Natasha's . . . though she thought about it. She was angry enough.

 

At an undisclosed location somewhere in Russia

 

Mikhail Romanov, Czar of all the Rus, bounced his daughter on his knee with a mixture of relief and profound loss. The relief was because he and his family were safe—at least for the moment. The loss was not for the loss of power, but for the loss of his father.

 

Mikhail had been told that his father had died of a stroke during the riots and that was entirely possible. Filaret, Patriarch of Russia, had in fact had a series of minor strokes before the riots started and his response to the riots was quite likely to have led to another one, quite possibly fatal. Still, the timing was suggestive. Filaret would never have gone along with Sheremetev's takeover and he had the connections to fight back. Mikhail couldn't help the belief that one of Sheremetev's agents had managed to get close enough to the patriarch to help the stroke along. The possibility that Filaret was still alive was no more than a fantasy.

 

Mikhail knew that he should be fighting Sheremetev because of those suspicions and for the good of Russia. But he wasn't. He knew virtually nothing of what was going on in the wider world. He had no basis to plan and, for now at least, he and his family were being treated quite well. Also, from what he did know, Sheremetev's plan depended on his continued safety.

 

Life was full of strange twists of fate and even more so when you were living in a time of miracles. The Ring of Fire had seemed a wild rumor when they had first heard it. Sending Vladimir to check it out had been a precautionary measure. But it had all proved to be true. Vladimir had stayed in Grantville to learn the secrets of the up-timers and Boris had brought an up-timer back with him. Bernie had started out as little more than a dictionary of up-timer English on legs. But being used as a dictionary has side effects. Poor Bernie had found himself in school. Mikhail laughed a little at that thought. One student and hundreds of anxious teachers, each insisting that he learn enough to explain some other artifact of a language that was foreign to even those that spoke seventeenth century English. Mikhail could sympathize with Bernie's predicament; he wasn't a scholar by choice either. And he, like Bernie, had been forced by circumstances into a role he wasn't well prepared for when he had been dragooned into becoming czar of Russia.

 

Come to that, Vladimir wasn't a trained spy. That was Boris. Still, Vladimir was doing an excellent job—aided and abetted by the up-timers free way with their knowledge. He and Boris had kept Russia from the Smolensk War, even before Boris brought Bernie to Russia. Vladimir had married an up-timer girl and was well situated in their community. And quite openly, for the most part, sending tons of copied books to Moscow, along with information on innovations made since the Ring of Fire as down-time craftsmanship had combined with up-time knowledge. That part was harder, from what Mikhail understood, because some of the new businesses were much more secretive than the State Library of Thuringia Franconia. Still, Boris had left Vladimir a good core organization and Vladimir had expanded it. So the Dacha and the Gun Shop, Russia's industrial and military research and development shops, were well supplied with up-timer knowledge.

 

That knowledge, combined with Russian ingenuity and a willingness to go with simple, workable solutions rather than slavishly copy everything the up-timers were doing, plus a brute force approach that involved putting lots of people to work on projects that the up-timers could probably do with a lot less, had stood Russia in very good stead, both industrially and in the recent battle over Rzhev. Russia had the beginnings of an electronics industry at the price of several people accidentally electrocuted. Telegraphs and telephones in the Kremlin and radios—soon—with experiments on tubes and transistors, Mikhail was told. So far unsuccessful. A test dirigible built and used at Rzhev and a much larger one under construction. Plumbing at the Dacha and starting to appear other places, including parts of Moscow. New rifled muskets with replaceable chambers for the Army and new breach-loading cannon as well. New pumps for clearing mines of water and for creating vacuums. Which apparently had a myriad of uses. Improved roads, steam engines . . . the list went on and on. Sucking up labor almost as fast as the new plows and reapers freed it, perhaps faster. The free peasantry—what was left of it—had been among the first to go to the factories and set up their own, along with the musketeers who were Russia's traditional merchant class.

 

Mikhail was less happy about some of the policy changes that Sheremetev had come up with. He didn't mind the wood railroad to Smolensk, but selling to the Turks bothered him.

 

Moscow, the Grantville Bureau

 

Boris filled out paperwork and tried not to think about what was happening. Sheremetev was an idiot who had no concept of how to treat people to get the best work out of them. He couldn't inspire or motivate, save through threats. But, for now at least, the threats seemed to be working. Sheremetev had complete control of the Duma through a combination of bribes, coercion and outright threats. Worse, he was what the up-timers called a micromanager, and his decisions were wrong more often than not.

 

It wasn't that Boris disagreed with Sheremetev's assessment of the general situation in Europe.

 

The Swede was much more dangerous than the Pole. That had to be clear to anyone except an idiot.

 

But Boris didn't think Sheremetev really believed in paper money. Boris didn't really believe in it himself, in spite of the fact that he had seen it work in Grantville. But Sheremetev was pushing it as hard or harder than Czar Mikhail had been and the czar had believed in it and at least seemed to understand it. Boris figured that Sheremetev was just using it to sucker people into giving him gold and working for nothing.

 

Just outside the Ring of Fire, near Grantville

 

"Sheremetev is teaching us a lesson," Vladimir explained. "He's also tempting us, putting pressure on to see if we will defect. Well, if I will defect. You hold dual citizenship."

 

"What lesson?" Brandy asked.

 

"Don't try to hold up the Russian government. Or, more accurately, don't fail to cut him in on it."

 

"So how bad is it?"

 

"Bad! It's the advances." The ruble, now a paper currency, with the face of Czar Mikhail and the double-headed eagle on the face and the Moscow Kremlin and a Russian bear on the back, was valued at less than half the value of the Dutch guilder in spite of the fact that it was supposed to be equivalent to the silver ruble coin that had twice the silver of the Dutch guilder. Partly that was because the czar and Duma had issued rather more rubles than they really should have. But mostly it was because the Dutch merchants resented the heck out of the paper ruble. It had changed the whole trading landscape in Russia. Dutch merchants had gone from absolutely vital to convenient. And the price they paid at Arkhangelsk for grain, cordage, lumber, and other Russian goods had more than doubled.

 

Partly out of resentment, the Dutch wouldn't deal in Russian paper money or money of account based on Russian money. They would still accept Russian coins, but their refusal to deal in Russian paper had its effect. "If the canny Dutch merchants wouldn't take paper rubles, there must be something wrong with them. Right?" So rubles traded in Grantville, Venice and Vienna at less than a quarter of face value. And that was if you were basing face value on the amount of silver in a ruble coin. If you figured it in the price of a bushel of grain at Arkhangelsk versus the same bushel at Amsterdam, it traded at less than a tenth of its face value.

 

And it's really hard to make a profit if you're losing more than nine-tenths of your money to arbitrage. Vladimir spent his rubles where they would buy something, then shipped the goods to the USE for resale, just like he had been doing from the beginning. And, like any good man of business, he tried to find buyers in advance rather than shipping the goods on spec. What Sheremetev objected to was how much of the money Vladimir was investing in Grantville and the USE. Sheremetev wanted Vladimir to buy silver and gold and send it back to Moscow. Which made no sense at all. If Vladimir was going to do anything along those lines, he would be buying paper rubles in Grantville with silver where he could get a lot of them, then shipping the rubles back to Moscow where they would buy more.

 

Vladimir had contracts to sell five thousand stacked-plate mica capacitors, plus several tons of other mica products. But what he didn't have was this quarter's shipment of mica and mica-based components. Also missing were a couple of hundred miles of cordage, several tons of Russian hardwoods, plus sundry other goods. In other words, several million American dollars worth of goods, which he was morally and legally obligated to provide. And about half of it had been paid for in advance. He was insured against loss at sea. With Swedish control of the Baltic, the insurance hadn't been all that expensive.

 

What he wasn't insured against was Sheremetev and the Duma preventing him from bringing out the goods. Goods that had never sailed from Nyen, Saint Petersburg it would have become in that other history. Goods that had never even reached Swedish Ingria. It wasn't just that money wasn't coming in—money that had already come would have to be paid back with penalties for non-delivery.

 

Vladimir wasn't broke exactly. He was now deeply in debt. In some ways it was better than being broke, but in others much worse. Partly to gain access to the developing tech and partly just because it was good long-term financial strategy, he had invested in some of the more long-term projects. He was, for instance, fairly heavily invested in three of the companies that were working on down-time manufacture of automobiles. And he was the major investor in a group that was working on the tubes for microwaves. They didn't expect results for years, but they were working on it and Vladimir was the primary backer of the research. Microwave tech was just too useful to ignore because it was hard to do.

 

Vladimir hadn't been particularly extravagant in his investments, or at least he didn't think he had. There was room in his financial structure for occasional delays or even an outright disaster. Most of the time. But not just now. Just now he was, ah, making a movie. "Well, the advances and the movie."

 

"Oh! Now don't blame me!" Brandy said.

 

"I didn't say a thing," Vladimir protested. "You asked."

 

Brandy, or rather Judy the Younger, had introduced him to the producer. Gino Bianchi, a down-timer from Italy who had a great deal of experience in producing plays and extravaganzas. He also had Els Engel to play Rebecca Stearns, Agnes Engel to play Kathy Melton, for whom the Las Vegas Belle was named, and Karl Shubert to play Hans Richter. Der Falke,The Falcon, wasn't really the Hans Richter story, though he had a major role. It was the story of the forming of the USE. In fact they had almost called it The Birth of a Nation, but the mixture of laughter and disgust from the up-timers had killed that name.

 

"It's going to make a fortune once they finish it," Brandy added. Der Falke was over budget and behind schedule, in part because the differences between staging a play and making a movie were so great and in part because it was just plain hard to do the air scenes. They knew what they wanted—they had all seen Star Wars after all—but getting it was another matter.

 

"I know and we could cover the cost well enough if it weren't for . . ." Vladimir waved vaguely eastward indicating the political events in Russia. "As it is, the money we put into the film, and more, is needed to cover the missing shipment. We've got to find a way to get the goods from Russia to the USE. And I can't set anything up with Natasha because anything I send will probably be seen by Sheremetev before Natasha gets it. If she gets it at all."

 

"How much time do we have?"

 

"Several months, perhaps three to six. But that's only if we can be sure that we can get the stuff out of Russia. If we can't, we need to start cutting back as soon as possible."

 

"Well, I can send a fruitcake," Brandy said, "but given how well secured the Dacha is, I don't know if she will get it. And I don't see how we will know until the stuff shows up or doesn't."

 

****

 

"We will be having guests."

 

Natasha looked up at Anya's comment. "Guests?"

 

"Yes. Representatives from the Ottoman Empire. They have been looking at factories on the Don and Volga rivers and we have been told to be circumspect in what we show them."

 

Natasha hated to ask Anya but she needed to know. "What is going on?"

 

"The government is looking for new allies in case Gustav Adolph and the USE decide to look east for new lands to conquer."

 

"Insanity!"

 

"Actually, it's not," Anya said with what sounded like real regret. "You know that Sweden is perfectly willing to bite off pieces of Russia. Our access to the Baltic is now Swedish Ingria and we pay taxes to Sweden on every cargo that sails from Nyen. And peasants run from Ingratioto be serfs in Russia, while the Swedes complain and threaten about their running and our use of Arkhangelsk, even though it's iced in half the year. Suddenly Gustav has all these new weapons, the USE is rapidly becoming the richest, most industralized, nation in Europe . . . Yet still he complains about our holding back the grain shipments when he knows we lost a quarter of this year's crop to the early storm."

"But the up-timers would never let . . ."

 

"Let? 'Let' is not a word used with kings, Natasha. Besides, Mike Stearns is not the prime minister anymore. Do you really think Wettin would even try to stop Gustav?"

 

"You really don't care about anything, do you?" Natasha spat. "Whatever your master says, you parrot . . . the party line!"

 

Anya looked at her and Natasha realized that their relative positions were not what they had seemed. She was still a princess, but Anya had the ear of a boyar and—for now at least—the most powerful man in Russia. It also occurred to her that pissing off someone with the ear of what amounted to the shogun of Russia might not be the best idea in the world. Since Sheremetev had taken power there had been a purge of the bureaus the like of which hadn't been seen since Ivan the Terrible. The Dacha and the Grantville Bureau had gotten off fairly lightly—in large part because between them they were the goose that was laying the golden eggs. But even they weren’t untouched. Boris had lost several people who were considered politically questionable and the Dacha remained under guard.

 

Then Anya said, "Actually, I despise him. Both because of what he has done to me and because he is, in general, a nasty piece of work. Unless you happen to be a close friend. However, that doesn't blind me to what he is doing. The Limited Year hasn't been repealed and the bureau men aren't screaming about it anymore. They're too busy covering their asses by kissing his. The purge in the bureaus has been extreme, but it hasn't been entirely political. A lot of the deadwood has been removed and there is greater opportunity for those with more talent and fewer family connections. Peasants aren't just going to look for gold in the mountains, they are finding factory jobs all along the Volga. The jobs suck, but they are better than being a farmer.

 

"As to Sheremetev's foreign policy . . . However noble of character the up-timers may be, they aren’t in control of the USE. They have influence out of proportion to their numbers, but those numbers are miniscule. Poland is probably less of a threat to us than the axis of Sweden and the USE. From where we sit, the biggest difference between Napoleon or Hitler and Gustav Adolph is that his army would probably do quite well in a winter war in Russia. He was born and raised in Sweden, after all. If King Gustav should decide to take Poland and keep coming east, we will be facing a force that outnumbers us and outguns us, led by a man who is quite possibly the greatest general of the seventeenth century. We will need allies. All of them we can get.

 

"Natalya Petrovna," Anya said, "I take no joy in the thought of war with Bernie's people. But I learned at an early age that what I want doesn't control what happens."

 

****

 

"Bernie seems to think so, but our research has shown that you spend much more in fuel for moving the same weight with heavier than air craft," Grigorii Mikhailovich explained rather more fully than Filip Pavlovich Tupikov thought was really necessary.

 

"Bernie?" Lufti Pasha asked.

 

"A member of our staff hired from, ah, central Germany," Filip said. Bernie was gone while the Turks were visiting the Dacha. This was for three reasons. First, the Turks didn't officially acknowledge that the Ring of Fire had happened. They knew about it. Filip imagined that every beggar in Istanbul knew about it. But they didn't acknowledge it. So, it made it easier for the delegation if he wasn't there. It would help to avoid slips of the tongue. The second reason was that it would be much easier to keep the topics of conversation to what they were doing and avoid giving away technical details of how they were doing it if Bernie wasn't around. At least it was supposed to. Filip gave Grigorii a look. And finally, Bernie was just likely to say something stupid about the Turks and their presence if he was here. He had been difficult to live with since Anya's promotion and the revelations of her previous job.

 

"I understand." Lufti Pasha smiled at Filip. Clearly a man who knew how to play the game. "Will we be meeting him?"

 

"I am afraid not," Filip said. "He is supervising the installation of a phone system at Dedovsk." Not that the phone group needed Bernie's supervision. "Now, if you will come this way, we will show you the chemistry labs, where we do not attempt to turn base metals into gold. Rather we make dyes and medicines . . . and if we can get better access to your naphtha, we will be making fuels and plastic materials."

 

****

 

"Send him a jar of Sofia's special borscht," Anya said. She was getting just a little tired of Natasha unloading on her about the actions of Sheremetev. It wasn't her fault that he wanted to make the point that Vladimir was still under his authority even in Grantville.

 

Natasha looked at her, clearly confused. "What?"

 

Amateurs, Anya thought. "Like the onion apple pecan cake." She watched as Natasha went so pale that she wouldn't even need the white pancake makeup that, in spite of everything, was still popular in Russia among the upper class. It was quite enjoyable to see. "Surely you didn't think I wouldn't know?" Anya kept her voice light and even managed to put a bit of surprise in it. Sort of like a teacher explaining to a student that yes, she was aware that two plus two equals four.

 

"Sheremetev? Does he . . ."

 

"No, I don't think so. Your sister in-law seems quite a bright young lady. The cakes are good because it is quite unavoidably obvious if they are tampered with. All that crust. And, considering the list of ingredients, it's unlikely that anyone would filch one to eat at home."

 

"Then how?"

 

"The hole in the middle! You failed to eat the evidence . . . which is understandable, I guess. But you also failed to crumble up the cake remains, which was just plain stupid!"

 

"Who examines table scraps?"

 

Anya looked at her. Could Natasha really be that naïve? Then she realized that in just that one place, Natasha could be that naïve.

 

"I'm sorry, Princess, truly I am. I didn't realize how sheltered you have been." Anya paused then spoke in as dry and dispassionate a voice as she could manage. "People who live on the border of starvation examine table scraps as automatically as breathing. We do it in the hopes of easing the constant pain in our bellies. And we keep right on doing it even after the threat of starvation is gone. It becomes a habit that can stay with us the rest of our lives. At least, it has with me. Besides, when my time at the edge of starvation ended, my time of training began. There, failure to notice things was severely punished. I never knew what I was supposed to notice so I tried to learn to notice everything."

 

Anya had spoken more than she'd meant to. Which didn't invalidate her training or experience. She still watched Natasha, noting the reaction. It wasn't understanding that she saw in Natasha's face, but perhaps the first realization that there might be something in Anya to understand. That the labels "spy" and "traitor" weren’t all it took to define Anya in her totality. And that, in turn, sparked a realization in Anya that there might be more in Natasha than was encompassed by the up-timer expression "rich bitch."

 

It wasn't much, but it was a beginning. It was unlikely that Natasha and Anya would ever become bosom buddies. However, something approaching mutual respect might be possible. Perhaps even an alliance of sorts. Even so, that was for later. For now . . .

 

"Actually, I doubt that the restrictions on your brother's exports are aimed as much at you or him as they are at the king of Sweden. What are capacitors used for?"

 

"Radios mostly, the ones we're sending. A few ...