The Kremlin Games(33)

Right at the moment, the problem was with the toilets. The manuals talked about a gravity feed. To the local experts, gravity meant “dignity or sobriety of bearing.” In fact, though Bernie didn’t know it, the gravity feed was something they already understood quite well. However, the terms were different. They would have called it a “natural flow feed” or something similar. That would have referred to Aristotle’s assertion that there were natural and unnatural types of motion. Water flowing downhill was natural motion. There was no force that made things fall. Things fell because things had a natural desire to go where they belonged. Steam went into the air and rocks onto the ground because that’s where they belonged. Water, as was the case here, just naturally wanted to travel to the lowest point. Granted, Galileo had chipped around the edges of Aristotle, but just around the edges. Besides, few people here had read Galileo.

Bernie didn’t know it, but an extension of this Aristotelian world view had led to many of the concepts that the up-timers thought of as superstition. After all, if water just naturally wanted to flow downhill, didn’t it make sense that a wheel would just naturally want to turn, that a candle would just naturally want to burn? That any device that was made well enough would want to perform its natural function and, given the opportunity, would do so on its own? And if water had a natural desire to flow downhill, what about people? Was it not self-evident that people were innately good or innately evil? Innately superior or innately inferior, good blood, bad blood?

It was a subtle but profound difference in the way people thought about the world. The early modern period, the period the Ring of Fire had thrust the West Virginia mining town into, was when that notion of a world where things did what they did because it was their nature to do so was being replaced—slowly, one chip at a time—with the notion that things happened because of external forces like gravity and drag. But it hadn’t happened yet. It would have been Newton who really shifted the world view and he hadn’t been born yet. Now, because of the Ring of Fire, he wouldn’t be born at all in this universe. Here it would be Grantville that the change spun on, and the change would come much faster. Worse, Russia, in general, was lagging about two hundred years behind the rest of Europe.

Bernie didn’t know any of that; he didn’t even know that Aristotle had gotten it wrong. He knew Newton had some laws—three, he thought. He sort of thought that Einstein had gotten it right and corrected the bits that Newton had gotten wrong with his theory of relativity. That was how the A-bomb worked. More importantly, Bernie didn’t know that the problems sprang from a difference in world view. Half the time he thought the people at the Dacha were playing with him. Half the time he thought they were idiots, and half the time he thought he must be the idiot. There were too many halves of Russia and not nearly enough working toilets. At the moment there weren’t any working toilets.

Bernie entered the kitchen of the dacha and sat at the table. “Marpa Pavlovna, may I have a beer, please?” When the cook nodded, Bernie leaned back and tried to figure out how to explain gravity.

The cook handed him a beer. His “thanks” was a bit absentminded. She also put a plate of ham and cheese sandwiches in front of him. He’d had a little trouble explaining that no, he didn’t want to stop work in the middle of the day and have a big meal, then take a nap. It was weird. Everybody in Russia took a siesta in the middle of the day. Bernie had thought that only happened in, like, Mexico. Well, not totally weird. Moscow in summer was as hot as Mexico, or at least he thought it was. Bernie didn’t have a thermometer. Bernie knew good and well that they could make a thermometer here but he needed an up-time thermometer to get temperature to make the marks on the thermometer made here. Not that he really needed a thermometer right now. What he needed was a plumber and the nearest one of those was in Grantville.

Bernie rubbed his temples with his fingers, trying to ease the headache he invariably got when he tried to explain a complex concept to Filip Pavlovich. In a few moments a pair of cool-feeling hands began rubbing his temples for him. Bernie leaned back against the chair and let one of the maids, Fayina Lukyanovna, take over. One of the things Boris had not lied about was the availability of willing women. Unfortunately, though, the woman who was increasingly working her way into his fantasies was unavailable. Bernie couldn’t quite imagine Natasha rubbing his temples for him. Well, he could imagine it, all too easily, but it wasn’t going to happen.

“What is now, Bernie?” Fayina’s voice was low, gentle. “‘Sewer system’ again?”