“Look,” Judy Wendell said. “All you really need to do is come up with stuff that they need in the USE and Bohemia. And, well, you’re farther south. Can you guys grow oranges and stuff?”
“No. It does freeze here in the winter,” Hayley told her.
“But they grow citrus fruits in the Ottoman Empire,” Karl pointed out.
“Marvelous. You wish us to provide Murad the Mad with the silver to pay his armies by shipping oranges from Istanbul to Magdeburg by way of the Silesian railroad?”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Susan Logsden said. “We already get coffee from there. Why not orange juice to go with it? In exchange, we can sell them aspirin and machine-made boots and shoes. Vienna isn’t rich because of what it produces. It’s rich because of what flows through it.”
“You need the railroad,” Sarah Wendell said. “You need it more than Bohemia does, and in the meantime you need steam barges on the Danube up to Regensburg and down to the Black Sea. But you also need native industries for value-added products.”
Judy moaned theatrically. “Value-added,” she whined. “The buzz words are attacking.”
“That is what I have been saying,” Gundaker said.
“No. What you were saying was that you wanted to prevent imports from the USE, not that you wanted to encourage local production,” Sarah said. “It’s not the same thing.”
It was, Karl thought, the next battle in the ongoing war between Sarah and the more conservative economic theorists of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sarah was chipping away, but they were holding out for a regulation-based structure that tried to protect their industries from foreign competition by outlawing that competition. Sarah, on the other hand, wanted the government to invest in local businesses to encourage development of industry, as was being done in the USE, because some of those businesses wouldn’t develop without government intervention. At least, she was convinced that they wouldn’t, and Karl was willing to take her word for it.
Race Track City
Days later, in Race Track City, the fourth showing of Singing in the Rain, dubbed in German with Els Engel voicing and singing the Debbie Reynolds part, was sold out. The machine shop was up and running with the new equipment, and the howling of Vienna’s merchant class could almost be heard over Els’ singing.
* * *
Father Lamormaini enjoyed the movie, though he found the music strange and a little disquieting. What he resented was where it came from. More and more, the Ring of Fire was getting its hooks into the world, spreading something that his agent in Grantville had described as humanism. Placing humanity above God. Repeating Satan’s sin of pride, and feeding it to every peasant.
There was a natural order in the world that reflected the order of Heaven, with God at the top and the choirs of angels ranked below. So, on Earth, the emperor above, and below—ordered by their natural ranks—the great nobles, then the lesser nobles, the merchant classes, and at the bottom of them all, the peasant. But the up-timers would reverse that order, overturning it like Satan tried to overturn God’s order.
It was the job of the church to prevent that from happening, and that was the answer to Maria Anna’s vexing question, “Is it more important that the Church regain all the temporal worldly goods that she once held? Or that she be free to practice her faith unhindered in Protestant territories? If these were placed before a Catholic ruler as a choice, which way should he go?” It was a false question for it still allowed the Protestant heretics to lead others into heresy, and not just in Protestant lands, but in Catholic lands as well. The restoration of property to the church was not for the church, but to give the church the power to enforce God’s will on the ungodly. It was to the ultimate benefit of the heretic that he be forced to renounce his heresy, and if his renunciation was not heartfelt it still protected another from following him into heresy, and so condemning another soul to perdition.
Hence, Father Lamormaini watched a pleasant movie and resented not the movie, but those who provided it. He managed to justify again the Edict of Restitution . . . and take a further step along the road to fanaticism.
Liechtenstein House, Vienna
A few miles away in Liechtenstein House, Gundaker von Liechtenstein was taking a similar trip by a different road. Karl’s investments in Bohemia were extensive and confusing, but Gundaker was nothing if not thorough. The Liechtenstein Investment Corporation would spend a fortune on building a railroad from Vienna to Cieszyn, then give that rail line to the Liechtenstein Railroad Company, which would be given to Sarah Wendell as her dower right. It was obvious that the great expense of the railroad was the building of the line. The grading of the line was expensive enough, and even using wood rails instead of steel, the cost of the rails were impossible. But once the rail line was built, the railroad would be profitable. Highly profitable, if not so profitable as to pay for the building of the rail line in the first place. But Sarah Wendell would not be paying to build a rail line. She would pay just to run the trains along the line that the family would pay to have built.