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The Porcelain Throne

Written by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

Kurt Vest didn't know what he was doing at the party except that he had been informed by his mother, his father, his elder sister Elisabeth and his brother-in-law that he would attend. He was just back from university, having completed his studies in natural philosophy. The party was being held in the courtyard in spite of the rain earlier that day. Gertrude Krüger was talking about the latest Italian fashion, a subject that interested Kurt not quite so much as how the local cattle were chewing their cud. Kurt wondered what had happened to Trudi while he looked for an escape. Trudi had been such a sensible child before he went off to university. He had always liked her, back then. They'd done all sorts of things together when they were children, but now at twenty she seemed to have lost all practical sense. He was only twenty-five years old himself, but his brain still worked.

How had such a smart, sensible girl turned into such a social butterfly with nothing on her mind except fashion? Kurt didn't know how to talk to her anymore. He wasn't sure she had any intelligence left, what with all that giggling and eyelash batting.

****

Between his ruminating on the dead past and searching for escape, he honestly never saw the fine lace handkerchief that Gertrude dropped. "Excuse me, Trudi. I want to talk to your cousin about the new load of clay."

Kurt stepped on the kerchief. His booted foot picked it up and deposited it neatly in a mud puddle. He hadn't meant to kick it into the puddle. At the time, he didn't even realize he'd done it. He went off to talk to Carl Krüger, Gertrude's second cousin, about clay.

He thought his note of apology was wholly appropriate and his recommendation that she show more caution in how she handled such finery was simply good advice. His sister and mother, for some incomprehensible reason, didn't seem to agree.

****

"Don't you pay any attention to anything other than your experiments? You're going to Grantville. Probably tomorrow. So go pack."

Kurt tried not to sigh. The conversation had reached familiar ground, but that didn't make it any more pleasant. The patterns of his interaction with his sister Elisabeth had been set at the infamous party seven years before. At thirty-two, Kurt was something of a disappointment to his family. A useful disappointment, but a disappointment nonetheless. He didn't understand—or even want to understand—politics or social niceties. Kurt liked his work and his experiments. He was something of an alchemist, although he wasn't trying to produce gold from lead. He just wanted to produce pottery in the Chinese style. The experiments were interesting, if frustrating. And if he hadn't found the key to China stoneware, he had found a number of useful bits of information. He very much did not like social flibbertygibberty, when you could start a scandal by failing to pick up a dropped hanky. Kurt was unmarried, and by all estimations—including his own—certain to remain in that state until his dying day. It wasn't that he was uninterested in the fair sex. Well, not entirely. It was just that the whole business was really quite confusing, and he had better things to do. "Very well, Elisabeth. Who did I offend this time, and why does it entail me going to Grantville? Wouldn't a nice note of apology do?"

"Because Grantville has information we need!"

Kurt turned back to his records. Elisabeth took Kurt by his ear, something she hadn't done since he was twelve. It hurt rather more than he remembered. Dragging him by his ear, Elisabeth brought him out of his workshop and to a table on which were stacked wonders. Chinese porcelain was something he had been working on for the last several years with little success. But it turned out that the Chinese porcelain was the least of it. One of the family's factors had gone to Grantville and returned with examples of stoneware, something called bone china which was much like Chinese porcelain, but subtly different, along with several examples of something called plastic and several new types of glass.

****

That was how Kurt ended up in Grantville, researching the making of china. And that's how he met Melba Sue Davis and her husband, Garth Freeman.

Kurt was grateful that the sign outside of the dwelling said that translation was available. Trying to understand English was a lot of effort.

The man who greeted him was apparently a former soldier. He had a gunpowder tattoo on the right side of his face and considerable scarring. But he spoke German with a Swedish accent and at least some English.

"Ian McCormick," the man introduced himself. "How can I help you?"

"I am looking for information on the Chinese method of making ceramics."

"Then you've come to the right place," Ian said with a gap-toothed grin. "No one this side of China knows more about ceramics than Frau Davis and Herr Freeman. You wouldn't believe the stuff they make."

Somehow Kurt thought this wasn't the first time that Ian had said that. There was something a bit rehearsed about it. Which didn't mean it was untrue. Just on the shelves in the front room were some of finest examples of the potter's art that Kurt had ever seen. Still, Kurt wondered just how many people Ian had told about their skill and how many people had learned the secrets of Chinese-style pottery from them.

A tall, skinny woman with graying hair and spectacles entered the room and said something in English. Worse, it wasn't even an English that sounded like the English that Kurt had heard before.

Ian said something back to her in English much more like the English that Kurt was used to, then said to Kurt, "I was telling Frau Davis that you were here to learn the up-timer secrets about pottery and working in clay. And I realized that I don't know your name?"

"I am Kurt Vest, from Creussen."

"Kurt Vest babble babble Creussen. Creussen babble babble babble."

Gradually, over the next few minutes, Kurt got used to the translation and it was almost as though he was talking to Melba Sue; she insisted he call her that, directly. Ian was still very much there, occasionally inserting his own opinion.

"We offer training in the mixing and making of ceramics in both the true Chinese style and in other forms of ceramics that have been developed over the last four hundred years or so. Unfortunately, we can't provide the really advanced stuff that was being done up-time . . ."

"They made ceramic knives up-time," Ian put in. "Sharp as broken glass but strong as steel." He pointed to a wide-bladed knife hanging on the wall. The knife was white, not the gray or silver of steel, then went back to translating.

"A lot of the exciting new advances were still proprietary information and unavailable to hobbyists like us."

"You were hobbyists?"

"Yes. Given six months and some training, you'll be better than we are, I imagine."

"I don't think so, myself," Ian interjected. "Frau Davis and Herr Freeman are artists. They are real artists."

"So, would you like a tour?" Melba Sue asked.

"Oh, yes."

And during the tour, Kurt met several acquaintances from towns and villages in central Germany where clay was worked. They made everything from the beer steins made in Creussen to roof tiles. And all of them were here learning the up-timer techniques. Kurt realized that they wouldn't be able to keep this a secret to Creussen, much less the Vest family, but he didn't realize what that would mean in terms of the price of Chinese-style porcelain. It simply never crossed his mind.

Over the next few weeks, Melba Sue and Garth, with Ian interpreting, showed Kurt how they did things in the latter part of the twentieth century. And they were things of amazing value in terms of saving fuel and work while at the same time increasing production.

He also learned the formula for hard paste and soft paste china and bone china, which was actually developed in England from a misinterpretation of a Jesuit text on the Chinese method of making porcelain.

Kurt didn't care where it had been developed. He cared about the fact that he could see the shadow of his hand though the bone china, it was so fine.

He spent three weeks there on his first visit and returned with two pamphlets copied from some of the up-time books on pottery and a new-found faith in God. Kurt's faith faded, but the pamphlets he would keep for the rest of his life.

****

Back in his lab, Kurt worked with kaolin, feldspar, quartz and pottery shards, grinding and mixing to produce a soft paste porcelain that vitrified at around 1300ºC. After he got it working and figured he had the formula down, he showed his family. They were quite impressed.

"This is marvelous," Elisabeth said. "We must keep it secret."

Kurt chose to assume that she meant the particular mix he had come up with and his particular procedures, because he knew that there was no way that they could keep the basic formula secret.

****

"It's beautiful, Kurt," Elisabeth said. And this time her voice lacked its normal edge. As a member of the Vest family, Elisabeth, like the rest of them—and virtually everyone in town—had grown up with stoneware pottery and an appreciation of what it was and what you could and could not do with it. This almost translucent tea cup with the delicate handle had, until now, very much been in the category of "could not."

"Thank you, sister. With what I learned in Grantville it only took me a few months to get the formula right. Not just something that would work but something truly beautiful. I think this is as good as what Melba Sue Davis makes. And frankly, it's better than anything I have seen that comes from China. At least outside of the things I saw in Melba Sue's books." Honestly, Kurt thought it was better than what Melba Sue and Garth made. Just as she had predicted.

"You have talked about this Melba Sue quite a bit, brother." Elisabeth's voice had taken on a teasing tone.

"Yes. She is an expert on the chemistry of clays and glazing, though Garth, her husband, is better with the kiln and the potter's wheel."

****

It took more time to get into production. Porcelain can be worked using basically the same techniques that are used in stoneware. Basically. Bone china is a soft paste porcelain, but at the same time stronger than most after firing and can use a thinner cross-section. But that takes a very delicate hand when throwing a pot or bowl. Some of that Kurt had been able to explain but a bigger part required practice to get right. They spent quite a lot of time and more than a little money gaining that skill. It was more than a year after Kurt's first trip to Grantville that they thought they had products good enough to sell.

****

"They aren't selling," Friedrich said. "Everyone is impressed, but no one wants to buy at the prices we can offer."

"Why not?" Elisabeth asked. "Our new line of dinnerware is lovely."

"Yes. I got more compliments than I have had on any sales trip I have ever taken. It's the price that is causing the problem. They, the people I tried to sell to, say that with the up-timers and the knowledge they bring, everyone will be making bone china in a year or so. All they have to do is wait and the price will come down."

"Not from us it won't. It takes extra processing of the clay and the addition of bone ash. That doesn't come cheap."

Elisabeth was overstating the case and Friedrich knew it. In fact, while the price wasn't going to go down as much as most of the people he had talked to thought it should, it was going to have to go down. They had expected the bone china to be a high profit item—had counted on it, in fact—but they were going to have to drop the price and take less profit if they expected to make any sales. Still, this definitely wasn't the time to argue the point, not with Elisabeth. "I know that and you know that but the customers all think that everything made with the new knowledge is cheaper to make than the old way. So they figure that we can make bone china for less than stoneware."

He held up his hand before his wife could interrupt again. It had been a cold and disappointing two months on the road and when Liesel got on a tear it could take a while for her to cool off. "I told them, but they don't believe me. They don't want to believe me. And they aren't entirely wrong. The bone china is lighter than the stoneware and uses less clay. Which, they pointed out to me in several towns, means we can use less clay. And that there were other savings that we were no doubt making from up-timer knowledge. And there are. You know how much we are saving in fuel by pre-heating the air with the reverse-flow heaters.

"It doesn't matter that they are wrong. What matters is that they believe the price will fall and are waiting for it to do so. Also, Peter Krump from Annaberg showed up with bone china that was pretty good. Not as good as ours, I don't think, which is why I am convinced that they didn't steal our formula. Even so, it was still bone china."

"Other people can make bone china?"

"Yes. Kurt isn't the only one to consult the up-timers. Apparently Melba Sue and Garth have a nice little business telling people how to make porcelain."

****

"How could you?" Elisabeth shrieked.

Kurt jumped. He hadn't even heard her come in. "How could I what, Elisabeth? I have no idea what you're talking about. Have I yet again offended some flighty girl you want me to marry?"

"No. How could you? You haven't been out of your workshop for weeks, I think. But other people are making bone china. If this keeps up, we'll be out of business in a few months. No one is buying!"

"It was hopeless to think we could keep it a secret, sister," Kurt said. "We can keep some of it to ourselves, but anyone with any desire to make better products can find out the same things I did. And even if they didn't consult with Melba Sue and Garth, there's still the library. It has information on ceramics. For that matter, there was a ceramics factory in Grantville, or at least near it, before the Ring of Fire. Garth was telling me about it. You know, that's an idea . . ."

"What's an idea?" Elisabeth shouted.

"Well, they made toilets."

"They made what?"

"Toilets. Indoor plumbing."

"What's plumbing?"

"This is going to take some explaining. Up-time and in Grantville, they have indoor outhouses. That don't stink," he added quickly, before Elisabeth could interrupt to tell him how bad an idea that was.

"Chamber pots? You want us to make chamber pots?"

"Not exactly. They use water to flush away the waste to . . ." Kurt stopped. "Well, I don't actually know where it goes, but the toilet flushes it away. The thing that interested me in them was that they are porcelain and they have complex shapes that can't be thrown on a potter's wheel. I read a little about how they do it and we do some things that are similar but not quite the same." The truth was that most of what was written about slip-casting was still in English and he hadn't trusted the translations of the little there was in German so far.

"I still don't understand. What is the idea?"

"We could make toilets and perhaps other plumbing supplies. Like the sinks. Melba Sue had a toilet and sink, as well as a bathtub, that were all pale blue. Quite lovely in its way."

"And they were all porcelain?" Elisabeth asked.

"Well, the bathtub was fiberglass, I think they said. But I think it could have been porcelain. Oh, and the pipes were mostly copper or perhaps stainless steel. I'm not really sure." Kurt was trying to remember. His interest, aside from the fact that it was convenient not to have to go out in the cold, was mostly that the bathing room, they called it, had several ceramic components, unlike the kitchen, which had a steel sink. He had wondered casually why. "In the bathing room the tiles were ceramic. So were the sink and the toilet, which was, I guess, a self-emptying chamber pot. It just struck me that that room had more ceramics in it than the rest of the house. Or at least that's how it seemed.

"So when you reminded me of it, it occurred to me that we might be able to branch out into making the toilets and tiles and sinks. Perhaps the bathing tubs, which are long enough to lie down in so that the water will cover your whole body. A bit like having a bath house in your home. That's it!" Kurt hit himself on the forehead. "I knew I was misremembering something. It was a bathroom, not a bathing room. A bathhouse room in your home, but with a self-emptying chamber pot and wash basin that can be filled and emptied with the twisting of a lever."

"It sounds like an amazingly expensive addition." Elisabeth sniffed.

"Why? A basin isn't that expensive, nor is a chamber pot."

"Because where does the water go? The water from the basin and the bathing tub and . . . is there water in the toilet thing? I think you said something about flushing and that implied water to me."

"Yes, there is. In fact, there is a water tank behind the pot part of the toilet that refills on its own."

"Refills from where? Where does the water to fill the tank come from?"

"I don't know," Kurt admitted, suddenly realizing that his obsession with clay and pottery had done a fair job of blinding him to the other miracles that the up-timers had brought with them.

For a few minutes Elisabeth was quiet and Kurt let her be as he tried to remember what little he had noticed about the bathroom in the Freeman home. And, for that matter, the other bathrooms he had seen in the various homes and public buildings.

"I think," Elisabeth said finally, "that you are going to have to make another trip to Grantville. We don't know enough. This may be the answer to our problems or it may be another bone china fiasco. Only worse, because who will be able to afford bathrooms?

"Listen, Kurt. We thought that the bone china was going to be a high profit product. We calculated based on that belief. And in order to get the greatest profit, we went ahead and spent money on things like rebuilding the kilns and promised the council that we would spend even more hiring more people to work in the shop. Now it turns out that we aren't going to make nearly as much as we thought on bone china. But we still have all those obligations. People we promised jobs, artists and refugees who came to us and who we accepted. We have agreements with those people, Kurt. I don't know how things worked in that future world that Grantville comes from, though I've heard some things. It doesn't matter, anyway. In this century you don't just throw people out when things aren't working. We need something for those people to do, Kurt, something that will make a profit."

****

Back in Grantville, Kurt quickly discovered that Melba Sue and Garth weren't really the people that he needed to talk to about plumbing. Well, not the only people. Water pipes, he was told, should not be made of lead.

"Every one is telling me I can't make the pipes out of lead," Kurt complained to Garth. "I wasn't thinking of making water pipes out of lead. I was thinking of making them out of ceramics."

"Not a good idea," Garth told him, "because the pipes have to have some flex to them and can't be too stiff. Ceramic pipes would break as the house walls expand and contract on warm days and cold nights."

"Buildings expand?"

"Yes. So do pipes, both metal and ceramic. The issue is how much, and the fact that the metal pipes can flex but the ceramic pipes, not so much. They get stressed and they fracture rather than bend."

"So while we can make the sinks and the tubs and the toilets, we can't make the pipes that make the system work." Kurt shook his head. "It seemed like such a good idea."

"It might still be," Melba Sue interrupted. "You're not really used to the level of interconnectedness of a modern society. Mostly we didn't pay any attention to it up-time, either. You could get pipes because there were thousands of people making pipes. You could get toilets because there were thousands of people making toilets. There wasn't an issue because there were multiple suppliers for all the parts needed to make a bathroom. Or just about anything else, for that matter."

"But that's not the case here," Kurt complained. "We can't afford to start making toilets and just hope someone will make the pipes. That could easily ruin my family."

"Which means that you need some sort of guarantee." Then Melba Sue stopped and Kurt knew why. There was no such guarantee.

"Look, Kurt," Garth said. "I know you can't afford to go into full production, but you could do some of the set up, some of the experimentation, that would let you get into production."

"I don't know. It's the expense. With the disaster that bone china turned out to be, I don't think the family will be willing to invest another fortune into this on speculation." Which was a truly disheartening thought, because Kurt had gotten really fond of bathrooms going back and forth between the up-time world of Grantville and down-time world of . . . well, the rest of the world.

"We might be able to help some with the bone china thing," Garth said in badly accented German. "We've gotten a lot more on slip-casting translated."

****

"Kurt's back," Trudi's younger sister, Margretha, said with clear malice.

"I really don't care," Trudi tried, but she knew that she hadn't quite carried it off. Since Kurt had kicked her handkerchief into the mud all those years ago, Trudi had had a couple of suitors. Had even considered a betrothal. But the truth was, she wasn't that much better in the romance department than Kurt was, it being beyond the merely human capability to be worse at romantic things than Kurt Vest. Most of the young men in the town bored her to tears and, unfortunately, she didn't flutter well. Dropping her handkerchief was not a bad example of that, but it was hardly the only one. What people like Margretha did with apparent naturalness and consummate ease, Trudi couldn't do to save her life. Somehow it always felt like she was a little girl playing dress-up in her mother's clothes.

So Trudi turned back to her accounts. She would end up an old maid, just as Kurt would, no doubt, turn out a crusty old bachelor. If there was one slight touch of light shining through the whole gloomy mess, it was that she wasn't the only woman Kurt ignored. Kurt was, financially at least, something of a catch, but showed even less interest in other women than he did in Trudi.

"Well, you should care. Even if you're not interested in Kurt himself," Margretha continued, halfway letting her off the hook. "He's back from his second trip to Grantville and he went there to learn about toilets and stuff because with the up-timers stopping the war—at least around here—and opening up trade again and building roads and railroads and—"

"You've never seen a railroad in your life. They are all going north from Grantville."

"Just because there aren't any around here yet, doesn't mean we can't learn about them on the radio. Besides they'll send a railroad this way to reach the Danube. They have to."

"Maybe. But so far they seem to be focusing on the Elbe and Magdeburg. That's where the capital of the USE is. We are a backwater and likely to remain one," Trudi said severely, hiding a grin. Margretha was Grantville mad and had been even before the townspeople had made a bunch of crystal radios. She was utterly gone on the fictional Robin of the CoC, and was actively disappointed in the prosaic nature of the local males. Margretha also spent every pfennig she could get her hands on buying romance novels.

"We should send someone to Grantville," Margretha said. "Our family is as important as the Vest family."

Which wasn't entirely true, though with the reverses that the Vest family had taken over the bone china, they were closer. Still, Margretha had a point. There was knowledge in Grantville. As the Vest family had shown, it was knowledge that was not without risks. But they had produced bone china and it was beautiful, truly beautiful. The knowledge was there and useful. It just had to be used with caution and common sense. "I'll talk to Father about it. But I wouldn't expect to go if I were you."

****

Kurt was ambushed that night. It was supposed to be a family dinner, but turned out to be a family meeting. With Kurt's many failings as the subject.

"Well, son," Papa started with faint praise, "I agree that the slip-casting does indeed provide a standard product. It's simpler than our old techniques and saves on labor. But all those molds do cost. Quite a lot, in fact. And with the extra people we have taken on, the labor savings is not translating into much money savings. We have master craftsmen whitewashing the stables for something to do."

Kurt tried to offer them work in his experimental shop, but Mama was speaking. "And you haven't paid any attention to any of the girls I've introduced you to, ...