“Or the Devil,” Countess Aldringer countered. “Even Urban has not said they are God’s handiwork and Cardinal Borja has made his opinion clear.”
“Pope Urban!” Liana said hotly.
Gundaker’s daughter by his first wife was, in Katharina’s opinion, what the up-timers would call a suck-up. She was surprised that the young woman wasn’t parroting her father’s attitude toward the up-timers. She guessed that Liana was coming down on the Urban side of the issue. And that was strange. The girl’s confessor was a Dominican, after all.
* * *
Anna was wondering whether she was going to get in trouble for the up-timer lady talking to her. “I didn’t invite it,” she assured Stephen, the chief butler, who confronted her in the kitchen.
“You didn’t smile at her?” Stephen, who ruled the servant’s quarters with an iron hand, didn’t seem entirely convinced that Anna was innocent in the affair. “Look her in the eye?”
Anna’s head shook like it was about to come off. But Stephen didn’t hit her. Which came as something of a surprise.
“I will check with Their Serene Highnesses to see if you are to be dismissed,” he warned ominously. And that’s what he did.
* * *
Karl and his uncles were still discussing the effects of the up-timers when Stephen knocked politely on the door.
“Enter!” Stephen heard Prince Gundaker’s voice call. From the sound of it, it seemed unlikely that Anna would keep her position, which Stephen regretted. As harsh as he sometimes was with the under-servants, he did feel a responsibility to them.
“About the incident at supper?” he asked. Normally he would have dealt with the matter on his own and simply kept Anna out of sight of the nobility for a while. But he wasn’t at all sure how the up-timers would react.
“Now see!” Gundaker glared at Karl. “Your girl’s lack of manners mean we have a discipline problem among the servants. We’ll have to let the serving girl go, and it wasn’t really her fault.”
“There is no need to discharge the girl, Uncle.” Karl snorted. “If you discharge every girl Sarah is polite to, you’ll soon run out of servants.”
“Maybe it will teach your young woman a lesson,” Gundaker huffed. “Let the girl go and tell Sarah Wendell von Up-time why you’re doing it.”
“Stephen,” Karl interrupted. “Tell Sarah first.”
As Stephen left, he saw young Prince Karl looking at his uncle and shaking his head.
* * *
While Anna was wondering what her fate would be, the young ladies of the Barbie Consortium—now joined by Sarah—were finishing up their discussion. “Come on, Sarah,” said Susan. “You’re the economic theorist. Industrialization is not a cure for serfdom. If all that is going on is industrialization, it’s going to make things worse. Look at what’s happening in Poland.”
“You need a big consumer base,” Sarah insisted, “and without industrialization you can’t get that.”
“Eventually,” Susan said. “But at least in the short run, industrialization means a labor glut, because you need fewer farmers and craftsmen to produce the same amount of goods.”
“Yes and no. That same labor glut means you have the labor you need to get new industries off the ground. The real issue is whether you have a class of people ready and able to invest in those industries. In Poland, you don’t, because the great magnates would rather plow their wealth back into grain production—and to make sure they have the labor force they need, they’ve reimposed serfdom. They do some industrialization, but it’s more or less an afterthought and they use serfs as a labor force. The political and social situation is different in western and central Europe and the Ring of Fire is giving a big boost to the factors that keep pushing things forward here. It’s just . . .”
“You didn’t expect to run headlong into Polish attitudes here in Austria,” Judy said.
“It makes sense, though,” Susan said. “Information has been flowing out of the Ring of Fire like mad ever since it happened. And for the most part, the lords of Europe have said yes to the technical stuff and a resounding no to the social stuff. So Austria-Hungary has the new plows, but all it means is that the lord of the manor can afford to throw half his peasants out and have that much more profit.”
Sarah’s expression got exasperated. “What ‘lords of the manor,’ Susan? Land tenure in Austria isn’t medieval. The core of the farming population is a class of prosperous farmers—peasants, not nobles, but they’re well-off peasants—who hire local labor on an annual basis. They’ll replace some of that labor force by adopting new equipment and techniques, sure, but they haven’t got enough money to do it quickly. Hell, even back up-time you didn’t see a massive mechanization of agriculture until the twentieth century.” She remembered the figures because she’d been struck by them at the time. “In 1900 almost forty percent of the American population was still engaged in farming. By the time of the Ring of Fire at the end of the century, that had dropped to three percent.”