“No, Your Imperial Majesty, not in the least. I think you should take no official notice of it at all.”
“And if I am having linzertorte at the cafe and am offered a Barbie in change?”
“Take it,” Moses said. “As long as you don’t take too many of them, I’ll buy them from you. I don’t know if this will do any good or not. But if it all goes wrong, we get no blame. And if it works, it might help the economy. On the other hand, if we shut them down, we will get the blame for that.”
Eisenberg House, Vienna
Duke Peter von Eisenberg looked at his wife. “The emperor isn’t going to shut them down, at least not now. Neither is he going to endorse it.”
“What does that mean? We have that whole family coming here this evening. She has her face on money! Is it good money?”
“I don’t know! No one knows if the Barbies don’t. Moses Abrabanel thinks it might work. Gundaker thinks it will fail. Karl Eusebius wasn’t in the meeting and I would give three villages to know what he thinks.” Peter’s tirade cut off as though by a knife. For a very long fifteen seconds, he just stood there. “It’s good money.”
“What?”
“I do know what Karl Eusebius thinks about it, because there’s no way that they are issuing this BarbieCo stock without his consent.”
“Kipper and Wipper,” Sophia said.
“Karl Eusebius is not his father.”
* * *
“Welcome to Eisenberg house,” Sophia said, looking past her guests at the carriage on the street.
“We were going to come in the Steamer,” Sonny Fortney said, “or maybe the Range Rover. But they are made for the track, not the streets of Vienna. So we borrowed Bob’s carriage.”
“It looks like the emperor’s new carriage,” Sophia said.
“It should. It’s basically identical to it, except for the crest on the doors and some of the interior touches. It has the same air shocks and lamps.”
Sophia and Peter looked out at the carriage again. On the door were painted crossed wrenches, a monkey wrench crossing a crescent wrench. Not that they could tell what kind of wrenches. They were just tools done in silver on a red shield background.
“Are you allowed a crest?” Peter asked.
“The emperor didn’t seem to mind. He got a good laugh out of it. Started calling Bob the knight of the monkey wrench.”
Peter looked at Sonny Fortney and tried not to show his shock. If Emperor Ferdinand had named Bob Sanderlin a knight even in jest, how long was it going to be before the joke was made legal reality? “Well, please, come in,” Peter said with a gesture.
They all went into the house. It was a mix of condescension and curiosity that had brought Peter and Sophia to the door of their town house. They knew that greeting your guests at the door was the custom in Grantville, where servants were still much less common than elsewhere in the USE, much less the rest of Europe. And after seeing the hayli bill, Peter and Sophia were being careful not to give offense.
“So what are you working on now, Herr Fortney?” Peter asked once they got settled in the receiving room.
“The railroad—mostly the road part at the moment, not the rail part, because the permission for a railroad in Austria is still held up in committee so far. But we don’t need permission to do the grading and preparing. All that is, is road improvement.”
“There are serious concerns about the railroad, as you are no doubt aware. And it’s not just the potential military threat, but concerns over Austrian silver pouring into Bohemia at an even faster rate.”
“Well, Hayley . . .” Sonny Fortney turned to his daughter.
“Even if that were a problem, all the railroad would do is make it quicker. What you need are your own industries, so the silver will flow the other way.”
“What sort of industries?”
“All sorts. Mining, manufacturing, farming . . .” Hayley and Peter talked about the potential industries in the Austro-Hungarian empire for a while. Peter was impressed and a little terrified. Especially when Hayley ended with, “But you really need to talk to Susan Logsden and Sarah Wendell about that. I’m mostly a tech geek.”
“What is a tech geek?” asked Sophia.
“I mean, I mostly handle the mechanical parts of the industries. How to make things.”
“So, how do airplanes work?” asked Count Márton von Debrecen, the von Eisenbergs’ son-in-law. He had been married to Polyxena, their daughter, and wasn’t sure to what extent the up-timers were responsible for the death of his wife at the hands of Maximilian of Bavaria’s executioners.