“What down-timer attitudes are those?” asked Márton von Debrecen, who apparently had good hearing.
Judy turned to him. “The whole notion of good blood and not good blood, the judgment by blood that is common in this century. We can’t make that belief go away because everyone we have met in this century has had it, at least to an extent. The reason that Archduke Leopold felt that he had the right to grab me was the belief that his blood and birth entitled him. But, he wouldn’t have tried it with another archduchess, because her blood and birth would have protected her. I can’t change that. All I can do is make it clear that he’s not entitled to me. He’s going to interpret that to mean that my blood protects me.” Judy shrugged. “There’s not much I can do about that. But Trudi’s a Barbie too, so she gets some of that protection. And Gretchen Richter, in her own way, is making it plain that her something—certainly not blood, but something—makes it unwise to start feeling entitled to her. It chips away a bit at the entitled notion. It will be a generation or more before it’s seriously diminished. In the meantime, I have to look out for myself and my friends. That means making sure that when someone draws a rank line, my friends and I are on the right side of it.”
“I don’t think Gretchen sees it that way,” Vicky Emerson said. “And frankly Judy, I’m not sure I do either.”
Judy looked back at Vicky and shrugged again. “I’m not sure I do either, Vicky. But the only other option is to start the revolution right here and right now, and we don’t have the muscle for that. We can’t even be really sure that we have the muscle to pull off what I did. It was just the minimum that I could live with.”
“We really are barbarians to you, aren’t we?” Amadeus said about half to Judy and half to Hayley. He sounded chagrined and at least a bit resentful.
“No!” Hayley said quickly.
Judy considered him for a moment. “Yes. A little bit, at least. But don’t feel too bad. You’re the noble barbarian sort. The sort that can be civilized.”
“Judy!” Hayley objected.
“Don’t be rude,” Millicent chimed in.
“Judy is rude whenever she wants to be,” said Vicky. “And I wish I knew how she gets away with it.”
“It’s because I’m not rude when I want to be, only when I need to be. There’s a difference. So, since you gentlemen were unwise enough to rank yourselves with the evil up-timers, why don’t we go up to the Fortney house and try to figure out how you’re going to survive the contamination?”
Fortney House, Race Track City
Amadeus had known he was in over his head before he had left the boat. But what else could he have done? Over the next few hours he mostly kept his mouth shut as Márton and Judy and, increasingly, Vicky Emerson talked about reasons and consequences. He learned that Vicky had been engaged to a town guard in Grantville and that the town guard had died doing his duty when Mayor Dreeson was killed. He learned that, in Vicky Emerson’s mind at least, Bill Magen was as noble as any man born. He saw that the mutual loss shared by Vicky Emerson and Márton had somehow produced a bond between them.
He wasn’t sure what it all meant, but somehow as he listened he came to believe, to know, that getting off the boat had been the smartest thing he had ever done. Because he was on the right side.
Royal Steam Yacht
Archduke Leopold was having a very different experience. No one was even talking to him. The truth was they were frightened to do so, lest it be taken as lèse majesté, but it seemed like they were condemning him and he resented it. He even more resented the knowledge that dozens of people had seen him bending over in agony after that puffed-up peasant had kneed him in the groin. Normally Leo would have been more understanding, but normally his balls weren’t distracting him. It took the boat around twenty minutes to get back to Vienna from Race Track City, and by the time it docked he was coldly furious at the up-timers and their arrogance. He went directly to his rooms and didn’t speak to anyone he didn’t have to for the rest of the day.
The Hofburg Palace, Vienna
“What on earth were you thinking?” Ferdinand III asked his little brother the next morning.
“It was nothing. Or it should have been, if that up-timer slut didn’t have delusions of grandeur.”
“I hardly think slut is the appropriate term,” said the empress of Austria-Hungary, “considering the events as they were relayed to me.”
Leo didn’t say anything. Not only was there little he could say, it wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to talk about with his sister-in-law.