Actually Trudi did know, or at least could make a good guess. This whole “preferred stock as money” was her proposal and it was a safe bet that when Judy had written Heather she’d made that clear. The Barbies had never had a truly fixed membership. Each deal was a new arrangement and none of the Barbies had been in on all of them. For that matter, very few of the deals included only the Barbies. Still, she wondered how the rest of the down-timer Barbies were going to react. Trudi took a vicki from her purse and handed it over, collected her change, and sat down for her wash and set. And through it all, she talked about the Barbies and the up-timers.
Not that the conversation remained one-sided. These women weren’t ignorant of up-timers. While most of the customers were from the Them of Vienna, some of them lived and worked in Race Track City, and all of the staff lived here.
But a combination of circumstances had locked the Sanderlins and Fortneys into a sort of pseudo-lords of the manor role. They owned, or owned in part, many of the businesses in Race Track City, including this one, and people had been coming to them indirectly for loans for the better part of a year now. Besides, they were the emperor’s representatives, so far as the race track and the 240Z were concerned. At the same time, there were only a few up-timers here, so they had to be more careful about offending the powers-that-be than up-timers did in Grantville or Magdeburg. So whatever their preferences might have been, the up-timers were treated as upper Hofbefreiten or lower nobility.
This was a complete up-time style beauty shop. Gayleen Sanderlin had insisted on that. They provided washing, setting, perms and dye jobs, with the chemicals and dyes shipped in all the way from Lothlorien Farbenwerk in the Ring of Fire. By now, after a year of practice, they were pretty good at it. They also did manicures and pedicures with clear or colored nail polish. There were eight chairs and a waiting area. The shop had six hairdressers and fifteen customers either getting something done or waiting to have something done.
Trudi had expected to wait, but had been rushed to the head of the line. Seated now, in the shampoo chair, with her neck on the neckrest and one of the hairdressers using what amounted to a watering pot to wet her hair with warm water, Trudi proceeded to tell them how up-timers acted in the wild. So to speak. As she was describing Grantville High and TwinLo Park, she in turn learned about the founding of Race Track City and the up-time style beauty salon that Gayleen Sanderlin had insisted upon, and who came here and how often.
Princess Maximiliana von Liechtenstein was a regular with a weekly appointment, as were perhaps half a dozen others. The salon was a place where ladies of high standing could, literally, let their hair down and chat. It wasn’t good to get too familiar, whatever Frau Sanderlin said, but it was acceptable for the staff, with all proper deference, to share the latest gossip and express their opinions.
Trudi realized as they talked that this place was another center of revolution—not overt like the Committees of Correspondence—but a whisper here, a wink and a nod there, repeating opinions along with reporting on the latest scandal. A place where the female They of Vienna could exchange information and affect opinion without ever meeting.
“I was at the beauty salon and I heard that von Dorkfish was having it on with his wife’s maid,” followed by “Did you hear the emperor is going to shift troops to the south? Sadi von Linden said her husband is being sent to Hungary, rather than the border with Bohemia,” followed by “The Sonny Steamer can be used as a model for a bigger engine that will pull several wagons behind it, if they get permission for the railroad,” followed by, followed by . . . for a year now. Juicy gossip, politics, technology, and attitudes, especially attitudes shared by the woman washing your hair repeating and reinterpreting what she has heard.
By the time Trudi left the salon, she had a much clearer view of what had been going on in Vienna since even before the Ring of Fire. And the women in the shop had a much clearer view of how up-time investment worked and the value of BarbieCo stock. If that view lacked some of the mathematics and scholarly accuracy that Sarah Wendell would have insisted on, it was still much more reassuring for these women, shop girls and great ladies alike.
“Gresham’s law says that bad money drives out good,” Trudi explained, “because people hold onto the good money and spend the bad money. Well, in the USE people hold onto American dollars and spend silver.”
Von Hatch Apartment, Vienna
“You turned them down?” Elena von Hatch shouted at her husband, “They offered you BarbieCo for that damned useless mine and you turned them down! My mother told me you were an idiot and she was right!”