“I understand,” Susan said. “It puts you in an uncomfortable position. You want to get the best deal you can for your friends, but you’re concerned that we’ll pay too much and put your family out of pocket. Don’t let it worry you. I don’t intend to let any more of the Barbie preferred out of my hot little hands than I have to.”
Hot little hands. Moses had to forcibly bring his mind back to the business at . . . hand.
Susan was still talking. “. . . I’m going to send Judy and Vicky after them.”
And that’s just what she did.
Beauty Shop at Race Track City
“Fräulein von Up-time,” Frau Lechner rushed up and gave a rough curtsey. “Welcome, welcome.”
Trudi was so shocked it took her a few moments to react, by which time she had been gently hustled to the head of the line. “Wait! I’m not von Up-time. I’m Gertrude von Bachmerin.”
Everything stopped. Suddenly Frau Lechner was looking at her like she was a fraud or a liar. She examined Trudi’s face then looked at the wall, then back at Trudi, then back at the wall. Trudi followed her gaze to the wall, where there was a list of services. And tacked next to each service were bills. BarbieCo stock certificates. Several of them were the six pfennig notes with Trudi’s face on them. A shampoo was one trudi, a set was one trudi, coloring was a trudi and three millies.
Trudi tried to explain. “Yes, that’s me. It’s my prom picture from the senior prom. I did attend school in Grantville and I am a Barbie, I guess. But I’m not an up-timer. I was born in 1617.”
Everyone was looking at her.
Frau Lechner asked, “How can you be a Barbie and not an up-timer?” She sounded quite suspicious, and from the mutters around the room she wasn’t the only one.
“Because the up-timers don’t care!” Trudi blurted. There was silence again. Trudi looked around the room at the shocked faces, and she was back in Grantville on her first day in high school. Being shown around the school by a girl who spoke the most atrocious German that Trudi had ever heard, but still managed to get across the basics and introduce Trudi to the rest of the little group of girls who were not yet known as the Barbie Consortium. The girl suggested that she should try out for the junior varsity cheerleading squad. Being accepted by the Barbies had meant the world back then. Not all of the up-timers had been so accepting.
“At least, the good ones don’t,” she continued. “The ones like General Stearns and the Barbies. The up-timers are people. Some are mean and some think too much of themselves. But mostly they are good people who will look at you, not your blood lines. Just like they accepted the daughter of an imperial knight who barely owned a village into the Barbie Consortium.”
“What is the Barbie Consortium? Is that the BarbieCo on the money?”
“No,” Trudi shook her head. “BarbieCo is an investment corporation. A consortium is sort of a partnership. Judy Wendell found out how much the dolls were worth from her older sister Sarah and told her friends. When I met the Barbies, they knew how much their dolls were worth but hadn’t sold them yet. They were holding onto them, waiting for the right opportunity. That opportunity came when the Higgins Sewing Machine Corporation went public.
“I didn’t have any Barbies.” Trudi paused a moment at their confused looks. “The up-time-made dolls, I mean, and I didn’t have much money. But when Judy and the rest decided to invest, I managed to scrape together enough to buy a few shares. Not that I was part of the Barbie Consortium back then. I was just sort of on the outskirts of it. I was teaching them German and down-time social conventions and they were teaching me English and cheerleading and stuff like that.
“Over the next several months, I got invited into several deals. Some I could afford to invest in, others I couldn’t. But they had enough stuff going on that it took some keeping track of and that job mostly fell to Millicent. And she hired me to help her because I’m good with accounts.”
Every face in the beauty shop was turned to Trudi as she reminisced. “The wedding between Karl Schmidt and Ramona Higgins was a big deal for the Barbies and Millicent got me into it. After that I had some money. And there was the germanium.” Again she had to explain. “Germanium is a material like iron or copper. It’s used in electronics. Anyway, there was a small deposit of it on our family lands, tailings from a worked-out mine. The Barbies found a market for it and that got my family out of debt.
“For the last couple of years, I have been investing with the Barbies in most of the deals. But I’m not the only one. I don’t know why Heather decided to put me on the stock certificate, not one of the others.”