StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Prologue

I stood, tired and dreary under an overcast sky. It was a moment which should have been quite cheering, but it was not. There was just a vague sense of pleasure that we had finally come this far. The band was playing Britons Strike Home. It was ironic music, but Admiral Upton had insisted upon it, and for that old and respected man even the PLA officers did not begrudge a bit of humouring. It was my second Consulate, and there was much to be done other than simply then attend these gala ceremonies. But as Drake said, there was something for tradition.

The music ceased, and the order was shouted out: “Clear the blocks!” The gangs were up in a moment, wielding heavy sledgehammers against the blocks under the hull of the grand ship to free her, so that only the cables would hold her in place upon the slip. They sang Swamee River and Guide, Kindly Light as they worked, sweating despite the cool of Autumn in Port Arthur. The leader of the gang was an old Gurkha, and he worked them as though they were an army, and indeed, they were; they were the army of shipyard workers who supported the rise of our navy. And it was that prospect which brought forward in me more than a bit of happiness, for it would relieve the greatest fear that had gripped us for nearly a decade, the fear that our domains should be cut in two.

In another few months, this ship of scarcely 200ft in length upon her waterline, and displacing less than two thousand tons when fully loaded, would guaratee that forever. I felt a vague smile form, without meaning to, and looked out over the length of the iron hull which was now prepared to launch. The turrets had yet to be fitted, the masts and bowsprit were not yet in evidence. Neither a rudder nor screw were in place. She would be the first screw-driven ship that we had built, and the bronze casting was going along as a tedious affair, even with all the scale of the Shang artisans in the field and the prodiguous addition of western science of the most advanced kind.

I followed it carefully because it was, of course, a matter of national importance, and for the last ten years I had lived nothing except for matters of national importance—even though the nation which they served was a scarcely formed entity, more a collection of rapidly diverging interest groups as success compounded success and our wildest dreams were realized. That brought about the burn of ambition in many, and ambition was, I feared, the sin that would undue us—even as I felt the tug of it myself. The ship was now ready for launching. The band struck up the national anthem--The March of the Volunteers, of course, for the PLA men would have allowed nothing else.

“Admiral Upton?” I asked graciously.

“Your Excellency?” The man with his full white beard turned and bowed respectfully to me. I was close personal friends with his daughter, and that was the only thing that had saved his life, and guaranteed the retired commander in the Royal Navy—and veteran of the Falklands War—survival into this new age. He would not live long beyond this, a decade at most, but in the meanwhile he was part of the precious cadre of naval officers who would guarantee that the creation of our steam navy was a sound and smooth process.

“Let's go up and christen the ship now,” I answered simply, pulling my long overcoat about myself more closely and buttoning it, for I was not getting any younger myself. We walked forward to the national anthem, the officers crisply saluting as the ranking commander of the navy and one of the two Consuls of the Republic—if it was to be a Republic—walked up onto the podium built on a bridge of wood out over the jutting ram-bow of the great iron ship.

The music stopped, and I turned to face the crowd, ranging from naval personnel to members of the press, to the proud workers of the yards, and assorted political dignitaries. Some of the southern nobility in their colourful silk clothes appeared distinctly out of place here, but they were probably the most enthusiastic in the crowd, for Commodore Yuan had particular success with the Yangtze peoples in his promotion of the Navy League. It had been quite the remarkably achievement to get a culture which, when we had arrived, had not even thought of crossing the Strait of Formosa, to think in terms of naval weltmacht.

“Those gathered here today,” I said, speaking in Mandarin—English was the technical and diplomatic language, but it was Mandarin which would serve to unify the people, and placate the PLA men—out to the assembled. My voice did not seem to carry as it usually did, though I was better than most at captivating an audience. Still, I sorely wished for a speaking trumpet, but it would look undignified. As I spoke, however, the sun began to appear through the clouds and with it the words became more resonant.

“We have come to christen this fine ship, the product of the greatest and most modern industry in the whole of the planet. A thousand tons of pig iron from Shanxi and Manchuria! Two hundred tons of steel from the Bessemer furnaces of Shandong, Anyang, and Shenyang! A kilometer of copper wiring, spun in the capital! This is how we shall safeguard ourselves for the future—a battlefleet of iron which shall shelter the commerce of the Pacific from the vagarities of War.

“Even now the west is embroiled in flames. Squadrons of sailing warships battle each other in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean, and armies clash on the Anatolia plain; the newly established cities of Sicily are besieged, and the Hittite farmer suffers while his King musters for war. The reign of the Empire of Greater Greece is cruel, but the Republic of Nantucket has made intolerable demands as to the sanctity of a whole continent, and seems intent on leaving a thousand peoples to wallow in poverty when our greater resources could uplift them with the culture and the industry of China.

“We are committed to preserving the peace, and it is the peace to which this warship shall be dedicated. Four 100pdr Parrot rifles in two barbettes! Two 32pdr carronades and four 1in gatling guns upon the deck! Four and a half inches of laminated steel plate,” I flung my arm toward the ship and smiled triumphantly. “Capable of steaming at eight knots, and cruising for two thousand kilometers under steam alone. She is no monitor, but a fully seaworthy vessel in her own right who shall boast a bark rig when completed.

“That is the face of peace! That is how countries are secured from foreign dangers—by the might of a battlefleet! She is just the first of a series of ships which shall secure our peaceful commerce, so that the thousand languages of ten thousand tribes shall salute the Chinese nation as one, and pay homage to us not at point of bayonet, but because our Navy insures their material prosperity and industrial Progress. By the weight of her shot shall every nation of the world know—either the hungry victors, or the defeated who desire to remake their power elsewhere, perhaps upon our shores—that our interests shall never be restrained, that the sovereign Will of the Chinese Nation cannot and will be held back from control over the Pacific, the Ocean which has been granted to us by the Hand of Providence.

“Let this ship therefore be a Resolution, a Resolution that we shall, for all time, preserve the nature of the Pacific ocean as a realm of free and happy commerce for all the nations, and let not any prideful declarations or marauding privateers retard the enlightenment and prosperity of the peoples who ring her shores. Unto that..” I turned, grasping the bottle of fine old champagne—champagne from a France that was never more to be and was as precious as gold—and dashed it against the solid iron of the ram-bow. “I christen thee Resolution!” The crowd erupted into cheers as the bottle sprayed out the champagne upon the ship's bow, and I grasped from its place the last symbolic link—a mallet and chisel made from the wood of the Victory, pilfered from the naval museum at Portsmouth a decade before, the same as had cut through the symbolic rope of Dreadnought.

Ten years of hardship had left my arms more than capable of the task. The rope was shorn in one blow, and as it swung free, the cables holding the Resolution in place were released. The ship began to move on the slipway as a Buddhist monk chanted blessings to protect her and all who sailed upon her, and steadily the great hull slide down with gathering speed into the waters of Port Arthur, a great St. George's Cross flag fluttering at her sternpost as she took to the water as though born in it, and indeed she was now born into it. She drifted out into the bay as the band played Rule Britanni--stirring, as long as the words were omitted—and Admiral Upton looked on brightly, his eyes almost glistening at what would be the crowning achievement of his life, here in the past into which we had sailed to save civilization, in the only way we knew how.

Now we had a steam navy, and those Parrots would defend the trade of the Great Companies from any power—Nantucket, Achaea, Babylon—so that our equally great hope for the future would be guaranteed. Civilization had fallen in the lands that we had left, and perhaps humanity was dead entirely. But from Anyang it would spread anew, a flowering across the Pacific to rival the greatness of old Britannia, a third of the globe poised to fall within our sway.

It was still going to take a lot of work. I smiled one last time out to the sight of the Resolution being corraled by one of the small harbour tugs, engine and paddles puffing merrily as she guided the great iron hull of the armoured ram toward her berthing. But I knew that for all the accomplishment that the Resolution was, to stay ahead we would be laying down ships three times her size in less than five years. Oh well.

I sighed faintly, and the mournful sound of the steam whistle of a train leaving the Port Arthur station for Shenyang brought be back to the world. “My apologies, Admiral,” I said, “But I must leave immediately for the capital, as I have business there.”

“Of course, Your Excellency. Shall I provide you with an honour guard back to the Consular Yacht?”

“No, that is quite alright, but thank you. I have been shot at to many times to worry about some anarchist in a crowd.” With that I turned away, and headed back to the carriage which would take me immediately to the wharf at which I had arrived only earlier this same time, and to the clipper-bowed sidewheeler which would convey me across the sea and up the Yellow River to our capital, even now rising in granite and marble where there had once been wood and mud. So much had been accomplished, but I would not see the fruition of our work even upon my deathbed.

But then, Drake and I, who as friends had so long ago brought our mad and desperate plan to fruition, when the impossible had been proven to be a reality, had really had nothing to live for when we had left our own time. Here, then, the Purpose would at least outlive us, and though we might die with the work of our lives unfinished, we should at least not live in aimless sorrow ever again. No, for the optimism of a reborn industrial age, without the doomed nihilism of what we had left, that optimism had at least restored our hope. But for all the hope, there was still danger, and mostly that danger was indeed in the west. We were not ready to face Walker, and it seemed like he was going to win upon the Mediterranean. That would lead to a conflict which might upset the whole of the civilization we had built, with worse consequences for our tenuous seed of progress and culture. But we would deal with it, as we had everything else before.

After all, we had not given ourselves any other choice, and we had never preferred it differently anyway. From the start, failure had not been an option, and under the pomp and splendour it still was. Those of us who had led the expedition—those of us who had survived—could and would not see it any other way. But success, dear Marina, I though to myself, means so many different things for the lot of us that the greatest danger is not without, but within.

This project lives???

It seems it does.

Steel, steel's the key. Make steel, and the world bends. But after that, you gotta get complex....

What universe is this? Hmm, the references to Nantucket in the same breath as Babylon and the Hittites make me think it's maybe Stirling's series (I forget the name, the one where Nantucket gets sent back in time mysteriously). Always wondered what kind of planet would eventually emerge from that. Or is this your own creation? Or something else?

Junghalli wrote:What universe is this? Hmm, the references to Nantucket in the same breath as Babylon and the Hittites make me think it's maybe Stirling's series (I forget the name, the one where Nantucket gets sent back in time mysteriously). Always wondered what kind of planet would eventually emerge from that. Or is this your own creation? Or something else?

It's indeed set in the Island in the Sea of Time series, except where a physicist friend of Drake's (the old moderator here, IDMR) discovers that the Event is going to happen in advance, and rewrite the physical laws of our universe in the process. So we assemble a group and travel back in time. More will be revealed as further sections are posted.

The Duchess of Zeon wrote: It's indeed set in the Island in the Sea of Time series, except where a physicist friend of Drake's (the old moderator here, IDMR) discovers that the Event is going to happen in advance, and rewrite the physical laws of our universe in the process. So we assemble a group and travel back in time.

So the industrial revolution will come to Earth back in 2,000 BC? Interesting. I'll bet somewhere out there Q is watching this little science project of his raptly. I always did wonder what the world would look like if that happened.
Hmm, I wonder what stage of development Earth would be at in this universe today. My guess is it would have had an interstellar empire for several thousand years by 2005 AD <drools at the thought>.

Junghalli wrote: So the industrial revolution will come to Earth back in 2,000 BC? Interesting. I'll bet somewhere out there Q is watching this little science project of his raptly. :P I always did wonder what the world would look like if that happened.
Hmm, I wonder what stage of development Earth would be at in this universe today. My guess is it would have had an interstellar empire for several thousand years by 2005 AD <drools at the thought>.

1,250 BCE to be precise. And there is already industrialisation happening elsewhere.

Wait, 1,250 BC and there's a Buddhist monk blessing the ship?, how does that work?, the Buddha lived in the sixth century BC.

Good story, this is indeed a bizarre universe. I look forward to future instalments so that I can piece together exactly what's going on.

speaker-to-trolls wrote:Wait, 1,250 BC and there's a Buddhist monk blessing the ship?, how does that work?, the Buddha lived in the sixth century BC.

Maybe some Buddhists were among the guys who went back in time, and they got the religion going early. It did occur to me that there must be plenty of Christian in Nantucket, and it would be seriously weird to be one when Jesus won't live for another 1200 years and probably won't exist at all in your universe thanks to the dramatic changes that you're going to bring about by letting the planet fast-forward 3,000 years of technological development.

Junghalli wrote:

speaker-to-trolls wrote:Wait, 1,250 BC and there's a Buddhist monk blessing the ship?, how does that work?, the Buddha lived in the sixth century BC.

Maybe some Buddhists were among the guys who went back in time, and they got the religion going early. It did occur to me that there must be plenty of Christian in Nantucket, and it would be seriously weird to be one when Jesus won't live for another 1200 years and probably won't exist at all in your universe thanks to the dramatic changes that you're going to bring about by letting the planet fast-forward 3,000 years of technological development.

Well, if Jesus is truly divine, there's going to be a big fucking crowd in Bethlehem waiting for him.

Junghalli wrote: Maybe some Buddhists were among the guys who went back in time, and they got the religion going early. It did occur to me that there must be plenty of Christian in Nantucket, and it would be seriously weird to be one when Jesus won't live for another 1200 years and probably won't exist at all in your universe thanks to the dramatic changes that you're going to bring about by letting the planet fast-forward 3,000 years of technological development.

Yes, but there is a Christianity, bizarre but understandably.

Re StT:

We decided on what sort of religion to start for our nation in advance, of course. Buddhism seemed ideal in that respect. Especially since it's already an accepted part of Chinese culture, important for appeasing the PLA faction. You can scarcely expect bronze-age peasants to become atheists, so it is the next-best thing. However, the Nepalese are Hindu. That means that we had to learn toward the schools and traditions which draw heavily in a syncretic fashion from Hinduism so that they can continue to worship in an unimpeded fashion (effectively a traditional Vajrayāna revival).

The private religion of those who maintain christianity among our own original uptimers is of course tolerated, but functionally irrelevant. Buddhism proves neatly capable of, as well, incorporating the various primitive superstitions of the absorbed peoples with little difficulty, and of course a monastic system is an ingenious way of dealing with political opponents, which highly recommends itself in our situation.

Chapter the First


“Tea?”

“Of course,” I replied idly to the servant before me. He was a southern man, probably from the Sanxingdui culture—we had overrun them only the year before, and it showed in his poor accent. The off chance that revenge boiled in his heart was an irrelevancy at the moment; my bodyguard, Balbir Singh—a Sikh man who stood at least six foot two, a whole foot taller than the servant--was more than sufficient to provide any protection that I might require.

There were two finely appointed VIP suites aboard the Victoria and Albert, but the ship in fact had a primary purpose as a training vessel for the navy—a navy which needed to become acclimated with concept of steam navigation at sea fairly quickly. As I watched my tea being poured—comfortably hot out on this day of near-storm upon the verge of the Yellow Sea—I had a chance to reflect on the importance of the event at which I just officiated.

The nav which had seen the launch of the Resolution had to protect a burgeoning commercial enterprise, for in the past ten years there had been constructed hundreds of small vessels ranging up to a hundred feet in length which traded with all the islands of East Asia; these ships were usually simply fitted with a lanteen rig and very simply built. The loss rate was high, but skills were gained fast, and with the daring of the merchantmen came an every growing need to support the commerce that naturally followed.

For the moment the navy was still very small. It included a single twenty-four gun frigate (from uptime), four ironhulled steam paddle sloops, and four sixteen gun brigs of war; along with three old cruising yachts (also from uptime), each of which mounted but two pivot guns but were very fast, the scouts of the fleet. And that was it. The gunboats of the Yangtze and the Huang and the minor rivers might also be counted—there were thirty altogether—but these ships doubled as cargo carriers and with their sternwheels and shallow drafts were scarcely seaworthy. For that matter, most were badly built and are in terrible shape, I thought with a sigh that was only relieved by the pleasant sensation of the hot tea.

Though there might be hundreds of the little boats privately owned about they were in truth not any larger than anything the Minoans had built in the Mediterranean a few centuries earlier, on the rig was different. The Trans-Oceanic trade of the Viceroyalty of Victoria and the recently established Peruvia Company was thus carried out by the Merchant Marine. It included five steelhulled seven-masted schooners of the Thomas W. Lawson type, built in Korean yards before the Event; five iron-hulled windjammers, a three-masted pilot ship of the type, and four four-masted giants bearing great sheets of canvas which each weighed more than one ton when dry. Then there were the wooden schooners, seven in all; the C.A. Thayer, which we had foisted by creating a nonprofit to restore it, and then never giving it back (before the calamity of the Event ended civilization for all time, and rendered such irrelevancies as robbery moot before the need to survive); one four-master, the first of the great wooden schooners built here, and then five huge six-masters of wood, based on the design of the long-lost Edward J. Lawrence, built by Percy & Small of Maine in 1908.

Those seventeen big sailing ships—eleven built here in but ten years!--conducted the whole commerce of the Serene Republic of the Pacific, as we had styled ourselves for the purpose of diplomatic correspondence. In this they were aided only by eight steam sidewheel packets, these much smaller vessels, none of more than two hundred feet, which had been built for plying the Yellow Sea and down the coast as far as Hong Kong. It was impressive, but the born Mariners of Nantucket, with their uptime shipyards, had built half as many ships—for their navy alone. Of course, it might fairly said they had cheated, for they had won the voluntary aide of the numerous and adaptable peoples of the British Isles, whereas we had established our rule upon the back of Gurkha steel.

Ah! For those days! I gave a heady shudder, and looked out the glass porthole to see the grey expanse of the sea begin to give way to the land of the area about the mouth of the Huang, which the Victoria and Albert could handily ascend to the point of the Anyang railroad. It brought back memories, for it was along this route that I—hardly the best mariner of our gallant company, but with more experience in riverine navigation than any of the blue water officers—had led our first three paddlewheel gunboats up against the current of the Huang, 8in cowhorn mortars standing ready on the foredeck and gatlings and carronades to the sides, their destination exactly the same as that to which I now traveled: Anyang, the capital of the Shang Dynasty.

At the battle of Dongying, thirty thousand Shang warriors with two hundred and fifty chariots had attacked our allied army of 5,000 native warriors—backed by eight hundred Gurkha riflemen, eight gatling guns, and thirty-six 12pdr Napoleons. We had mustered everything for a single decisive battle so that we might make ourselves the masters of the Shang. They had come on very bravely, charging again and again under the eye of their Emperor, a boiling mass of humanity. Our allies had fallen back in panic, but the Gurkhas stood firm under their elderly Colonel, himself a veteran as a young leftenant of the Malayan Emergency. Firing fifteen aimed rounds a minute as they coolly worked the actions of their Lee-Metford Mk.IIs, they presented an indomitable wall of steel, the two-foot sword bayonets upon their long battle-rifles drifting in and out of sight in the great clouds of smoke thrown up by the rapid-fire of the blackpowder cartridges.

The band had played the British Grenadiers. The Shang came on. Then, just as it seemed that we might be overwhelmed, the Napoleons switched to case. Their roundshot had offered little effect at range, due to the muddy condition of the ground, but opening commencing fire with case they had decimated the ranks of the Shang army. Hundreds of men fell from the first massed salvo. Our enemy wavered, but our gunners did not. The great mass of the charging foe pushed them closer, reluctantly, but closer; at fifty yards the gunners let at them with double-case. The enemy broke. The men in the front ranks clawed their way to the rear against the effort of the men in the rear trying to push on ahead. All the while, the gatlings and the Lee-Metfords never ceased to maintain a rapid and continuous fire. As all cohesion in the Shang force was lost the men broke enmasse to the rear, and with fife and drum playing the Gurkhas advanced--Ayo Gorkhali!--merrily upon the Emperor's camp.

We had killed five thousand men on the field of Dongying, and lost fourteen. The Shang Emperor himself had fallen on that day before the massed fire of the Gurkha Regiment. With this signal victory my path up the Huang was secured, and moreover, the seeds were set for a peasant revolt as we distributed the word that the land of the Shang itself should be redistributed, and each farmer made the lord of his own plot. At this I had, more often than not, found the Shang cities (just towns, really) along the river besieged by the peasantry and there had been more cheering than fear when the mortars upon our gunboats commenced to action upon a station beset with more than the usual truculence.

After securing the towns along the Huang, we had returned to safeguard the crossing of the army over to the far side of the river, and then I had been given the fortuitous opportunity to witness the spectacle as a battery of Ordnance Rifles demolished the gates of Anyang. The city promptly surrendered to spare a sack, and we had ridden in upon our mounts—chariot ponies crossbred with the genetic stock of heavy draft horses brought back with us in an effort to produce a proper cavalry horse—to gaze upon the squalor of the barbarous capital and the awe of the people who regarded us as semi-divine, possessed of the power of the Gods.

Now the river that we were approaching was peaceful, and I daresay that I felt some pity at that. It had been glorious, an indescribable rush of blood, to put one's self within arrow-shot of the enemy and direct all the fire of modern technology down upon him, often outnumbered more than thirty-to-one, but never defeated. We had carried ourselves as conquistadors then, and I do not think any of us regretted it. But we were more enlightened than the valiant company of Hernan Cortez. We had come not simply for wealth, but to bring civilization, and if it was civilization at the point of Gurkha steel, then so be it.

I headed up on deck, Balbir Singh following in his polite silence. I knew that he—a strapling lad of a powder boy for a Napoleon battery when we had first arrived--scarcely thought it appropriate for me to expose myself to the elements my current light dress, and the slight look of reprovement was sufficient for me to call for my greatcoat after all as I headed up and out into the wind. A servant brought it just as I arrived topside and I shrugged it on against the nip of the cold, loosing my hair from it as I looked out over the mouth of the Huang.

It was quite the thing, to be sure, to adapt to the idea that twenty kilometers per hour was an impressive speed, but this was all that the Victoria and Albert could achieve (barely, no less), and it was, indeed, very, very fast for our time. The Huang-Anyang railroad could exceed it, to be sure, but a mere decade ago I had regularly driven cars at even twice the speed the trains upon it could make. This all had forced a degree of a change of perspective upon us. Our future was, for perhaps the first time, going to be slower than our past. It was an important thing to remember, for here—though we had modern maps—our knowledge about the rest of the world was uncertain at best.

The world population, it turned out, had been higher than most thought; perhaps one hundred and five million altogether. Several truly devastating diseases of history had not yet appeared at this point in much of the world, and hunter-gatherers proved to be fairly thick upon the ground the whole planet over. Likewise, we had discovered some fairly densely packed areas which archaeologists had only been beginning to research when we had left; the Casma Valley in Peru, for instance, and southwestern China was equally more populous than expected, both much more useful than the hunter-gatherers (whom we had still had a fair degree of success in introducing civilization to, particularly in the Pacific Northwest where an already fairly sedentary life had developed around the predictability of the Salmon runs, greatly increasing the population there as well).

Out of this we controlled rather than less than a fifth at the moment, perhaps eighteen million people in all obeyed the government in Anyang. Or, in ten years we had equalled the conquest of Cortez in Mexico, which had been achieved in a fifth of the time. But we had not destroyed as he had; with a compliment of doctors and pathologists we had arrived, but more importantly with engineers. Lots of engineers. The Victoria and Albert was proof of that, her engines built at Wong Family Ltd.--the first private steam engine fabrication firm in the Empire, situationed at Tsingtao. That brought back another memory, which the time of the slow passage and the bite of the wind allowed me to indulge as if a guilty pleasure.

'He is relentless,' Drake said as if paying a particular sort of compliment—a voice, for the moment, only in mind, and of a time twelve years prior. And so he had been: when the situation had been explained and the appropriate proofs provided, it had been hard for anyone in the company to match the absolute relentlessness of Michael Wong in taking the necessary steps to secure the life of his family from the scientific inevitability which had been explicitly demonstrated as coming to our universe, and the only hope for salvation which lay in a thin ellipse of sea around Nantucket Island. It was there that we had concentrated little more than a hundred thousand tons of shipping and then waited for the fateful hour—which had, as science dictated, come and picked us up and flung us into the unknown, into the past of another reality.

The past which we had taken and made our own. Farmers on those shores now all had all of the bronze tools they needed, for all bronze production—and the Shang had the finest bronze production in the world—in the Empire had been developed to farming implements once we had arrived. We did not need it for anything else, as we had iron. Now it was the turn of iron to be made accessible to farmers, in the form of reaping machines and sturdy plows, devices would give us the labour to indefinitely sustain a new industrial revolution, an industrial revolution already glowing with the energy that was symbolized so mightily by the rising factories in the five northern centres. At Port Arthur, Tsingtao, Yantai, Shenyang, and Anyang, there was industry. There were factories and smelting plants and textiles production via the mechanical loom. And every day, hundreds more young men streamed into the factories to seek out jobs, jobs which the constant expansion of the industry made guaranteed to them.

But that was with our existing population base. And that was not going to stay the same. The true bottleneck was people, labour. Machinery was freeing it rapidly, and thus allowing us to produce even more machinery. But there was more than that. The average peasant woman here—by a sad necessity which I had forced myself to recognize, and tolerate, though I had dearly wished we might chance it—gave birth to between eight and ten children within her lifespan. They paid a terrible price in health for doing so, but it was not something that we could dream of changing for some time in the future; for if a world population of seven billions was unsustainable, so was a world population of one hundred millions.

There was, however, a small comfort. It pleased both the heartless statisticians in our midst and those propelled by more romantic sentiment. Those children were no longer dying at rates which sometimes reached 50%. The child mortality rate had fallen to 10% and it was still falling, indeed, plummeting dramatically. Over the next thirty years our workforce might very well increase fivefold. Ironically, that thought brought me back to the present, and to the duties to which I would have to attend in the capital, after what had been veritably a vacation to go christen the Resolution. A lot could happen, after all, in thirty years.

Interesting story, good prose, but will you please make a decision on whether to use the Wade-Giles spellings or the Pinyin spellings for the transliteration of Chinese characters? All this switching back and forth between the systems gets annoying after a while.

Personally, I recommend the Pinyin system-- it's what modern China uses now, anyways.

Sidewinder wrote:Interesting story, good prose, but will you please make a decision on whether to use the Wade-Giles spellings or the Pinyin spellings for the transliteration of Chinese characters? All this switching back and forth between the systems gets annoying after a while.

Personally, I recommend the Pinyin system-- it's what modern China uses now, anyways.

Hah! Alright, I'll fix it, but only reluctantly, because the first person who told me not to was Drake, and so I do it now from time-to-time to annoy him. Should have thought of my readers, my apologies.

Chapter the Second

Clarion did the horns sound. They were massed in their thundering peal, one for each of the fasces of Consular dignity that were paraded before me. I could scarcely say that I was ashamed by the sight, for I am particularly vain for displays of military paegentry, and the rituals we have created are distinctly based upon these preferences. There is something awe-inspiring about the barbarian fervour of combat being wielded to the discipline of modern society, a fact which was obscured in the time before the Event but came back, drifting in sublime passion through the clouds of blackpowder smoke which separated us from the Barbaricum, a canvas of death which in whole formed a picture as dangerously enticing as the voice of a siren.

Many of the natives had still not gotten over the old forms of worship, and the ceremonies proferred to their rulers had been far more crude than the sublime and splendid paegentry of our own adulation. People dropped to their knees as I left the Victoria and Albert, occasionally coming back up as someone more knowledgeable ordered them to their feet; some of them did not, until I had passed out of sight. Ignoring such displays was best, and they made me uncomfortable, for I had no desire to overturn the system in favour of monarchy: Even should I desire it, creating an adoptive Empire would just mean chaos and civil war as a fact of life. Those interested in the messy business of siring heirs were more dangerous, but in our shared rejection of monarchy both the Americans and the Chinese, aided by the stalking-horse of Emilie's clique, had essentially guaranteed a Republic. The pressing question of the age was what kind of Republic it was going to be.

The Zhengzhou Train Station was right at the docks, of course, a large integrated complex partly of wood and partly of stone. Simple, functional, and efficient, but still in its way marvelous: the grand waiting room with its incredibly large wooden beams reminded me of Yellowstone Lodge. I would never see that structure again, but we would build many others like it. It was the end of the line, and demanded a grand station--but, in truth, it was more a waiting room. There were several railroad ferries now in operation across the river, and it was possible to travel to Wuhan with only a short delay around the unfinished section of the railhead. Within another year, regular service would be possible, though there was no plan to build a bridge here; ferries sufficed for now, and bridging the unpredictable Yellow River would be diffcult in the extreme.

A train for Anyang was waiting for me in the station--of course—with a baggage car and two coaches. A company of the local garrison was arrayed in parade order on the platform as I passed. The salutes were given with an old familarity, sternly guarded over by the Gorkhali NCO who looked with a sort of grim expression over the awed Shang conscripts. The parade of fasces went before me, and at last I climbed onto the train with Balbir Singh at my back. The car was just a normal one that had been pulled off one of the express runs; long lines of hard wooden benches, though someone had scrounged up some blankets for padding for me and for someone else.

"Vladimir!" I cried in delight at the sight of the dour Russian Jew.

"How was the vacation?" he grunted back in reply.

"Oh, charming. Cold, rainy, light seaway at least. Nice to watch the launch of the Resolution, of course, though I think Admiral Upton was about to die at how I played on her name during the launch." A chuckle. "I'm friends with his daughter, you know, that's how we ended up bringing him along those years ago."

"Now she's a captain on the transpacific route, yes?"

I nodded, and sat across from the governor of Shandong. It was a long road up for a man who had originally been an enlisted sailor in the navy, but he had proven competent, albeit an endless source of depressing anecdotes. He was unusually dour even by those standards today.

"Something amiss?"

"Trouble with the protectorates again. Grumbling by the nobility over the introduction of steam threshers, to be precise, except that it's getting more threatening now. They're not idiots, they read the People's Daily, too, and they're sophisticated enough to know that they don't like what they hear. You really should assign a specific political officer to the Shandong protectorates; I scarcely can waste time traveling directly to Anyang over these matters when operations at the ports are already so busy, and the Zhou have one."

"I apologize, Vlad. The problem, of course, is that I can't really stop People's Daily from writing whatever it wants, firstly, and secondly, the Shandong protectorates are frankly each smaller than an American County back home, and relatively trivial in the scheme of things. I am not pleased with their conservatism, either, but we can scarcely go around betraying allies for ideological motives. And at any rate, the situation with the Zhou is scarcely the same. They are much more powerful, and sitting on some important industry.” A smirk. “But you know all that, and you're just complaining anyway.”

“Which doesn't mean my request for a specific political officer isn't legitimate. Certainly the Senate could find one? These people do not need an uptimer, they would be quite happy sending all their complaints through some duke of Zhou or another.”

The train lurched forward as the 4-4-0 Standard ahead began to pull the coaches, gradually building speed from scarcely a walking pace. The bell was clanging constantly and the whistle blowing a mounrful howl as people hastily moved clear of the tracks ahead. As we got used to the interruption I answered at last. “It actually might be possible, if you can stand to deal with this grievance, as it will require a hearing in the Senate, which will take at least another month to arrange with the current backlog.” In truth, as surprised as I had been to see a provincial governor heading to Anyang in the middle of his term, it probably was a good idea to switch the competencies now; the responsibilities of Shandong provinec were simply to great to force Vladimir to deal with such trivialities any longer.

Silence, save for the engine and tracks, reimposed itself, and soon we were going at a steady pace of fifteen miles per hour and leaving the city of Zhengzhou for the northeast. Soon the tracks turned—picking up a few industrial sidings in the process—and began to head north-northwest, toward Anyang. The wooden shanty towns for the industrial workers seemed to spread as far as the eye could see, and the air outside of the train was sooty not only with the exhaust of the wood-burner but with the plumes from a dozen smokestacks belching forth into the sky. Sooner or later we would have to clean it up, but with our limited resources and technology at the moment, it was simply an unaffordable luxury.

We past a freight waiting at a controlled signal to my left as the car attendants came in, serving me and Vladimir with tea; Balbir, as always, declined. “Thank you,” I said to the petite woman who served me. She was sufficiently used to the politeness of uptimers not to be surprised, and I indulged myself in idle curiousity over the sort of life she had had, and would have. I took a sip of the tea, and concealing my surprise, looked to Vladimir.

“I see you already got to the serving staff.”

“Not even the Chinese have tea as strong as Russia's,” he crowed back, and I rocked my head back and groaned to myself: It would not to well to experience the situation in Y7 in which I had to endure a banquet with Vladimir, Yefim, and Ye all present ever again. The train, though, was accelerating now, which diverted our attention. Soon a maximum safe speed for the line of about fourty-five miles per hour would be reached. Since the new city of Anyang was somewhat to the south of the old location, and Zhengzhou rather further north (on account of the different course of the Yellow), the trip would take not more than two and a half hours on a black ball express like this.

The journey mostly passed in companionable silence. We both had a stack of newspapers to read through, as the information in them was often politically important. The topics were sundry:

People's Daily

Extension of land reform to Sichuan slowing

Reports from officials of the Ministry of Agriculture suggest that efforts to improve the lot of the peasantry in Sichuan have been hurt by the mischief of certain individuals who, initially, provided important support for the incorporation of these areas into Zhongguo. Their actual goal was not, however, the common good, but rather to insure the protection of their vested interests, which they now perceive as threatened by the continuing progress of land reform.

To this end rumours have been propagated in the region against the Agricultural educators, with the aim of creating feelings of distrust. Many farmers have been scared away from claiming what is their rightful land on account of the stipulation attached that the agricultural educators provide assistance. Though efforts to clear up misunderstandings are working, this has forced the ministry to keep specific educators in single villages for long periods of time to build up trust. The result has been that over the past two months the progress of agricultural reform in Sichuan has been slowed by up to a third over that in the prior six months since the successful integration of the region.

In this situation it is very important that the networking of the assorted collaborators among the proto-bourgeoisie of Sichuan be sternly broken up, so that effectual mass-education tactics can be revived and the propaganda and rumours being spread about eliminated so that the aide to the peasantry will continue in a swift and orderly fashion. The government, however, remains hesitant to take this step. The officially given reason is that with Sichuan only fully under central administration for the past eight months, a real danger of revolt would arise if popular members of the proto-bourgeoisie are moved against in any stern fashion, despite the general understanding of all sides that punishment is not necessary, only swift coercive action.

Though fears of revolt are understandable, it is more probable that certain rightist elements in the Senate feel that the economic interests of the remaining large landowners of Sichuan would be threatened by the move un-constitutionally. This is clearly not the case. Throughout the integration process for Zhongguo we have seen that the economic interests of the bourgeoisie have, according to understood theory, in fact improved as they shifted their capital resources to industry, which is a suitable field by which the bourgeoisie can contribute to society.

Large property holdings are unnecessary to the agricultural development of the nation due to the practice of the sharing of modern farming equipment to handle the needs of all individually held small-farmer plots equally through “granger” co-operatives at the village level. The economic decline of mid-range farms, to large to qualify for the granger machinery-sharing programs while still not large enough to fall into the ranges specified for distribution to the peasantry during the Sichuan peace arrangements, is not such a swift process as to preclude the profitable selling of this land to the peasantry, and the inclusion of the midlevel farmers into the bourgeoisie-industrial class, where their capital can be used to continue industrial growth as-is necessary for the expansion of socialist protections.

In conclusion, neither revolt nor the protection of constitutional economic rights precludes taking a hard but conciliatory stance toward the proto-bourgeoisie of Sichuan, who may be targeted for a programme of encouraged asset-transfer toward industrial investment without any illegalities or security concerns. Certainly the issues at stake for a very limited number of midrange farmers are, at any rate, strictly secondary to the goal of uplifting the great mass of the Sichuan peasantry who are currently being duped into hampering their own development by these malicious theories and propaganda-networks.

“Vladimir, why the hell did the Sichuan land-reform programme become such a big deal, anyway?”

“Policy issue,” he grunted in reply. “A few hundred big headmen in Sichuan realized what machinery in the hands of the peasantry would do to their farms, and their arguments coincidentally set off the educated Zhou nobles and the fossils like Soren...”

“Who unhelpfully manages to keep on churning out the Daily Standard despite his bout with skin cancer, god help the invincible old bastard,” I answered with a wry and perhaps admiring chuckle.

“Well, it was more everyone looking for a fight,” Vladimir replied—as usual, pessimistic. “Since, at any rate, the same time that the Sichuan issue tweaked the tails of the Imperialists and the Zhou nobles it fired up the PLA as the perfect excuse for driving through a standardization of the agricultural system, which plays into their hands neatly. Small, private farms linked by large co-ops, with all the other wealth turned into capital for the industrial development to provide the steam traktors for those selfsame co-ops. There's nothing really wrong with it, but it is the sort of thing which makes the middle class—such as it is!--very upset.”

“Contrary to everyone's belief, the actions of the Sichuan headmen have completely undermined their arguments, however. A few backbenchers are going to raise a ruccus about this, but they've essentially forced us to use exactly the methods this editorial in the People's Daily is advocating. Not like I really care much about this lot of goons.”

“Wasn't Contessa's father a headman along the Yangtze?”

“He's dead, and she's my kid now.” One of the problems—and, some like Chris would argue (for he liked the idea of personal relationships among the powerful), benefits--with politics in the uptimer class was that we were such a small group that personal issues often entered matters, and it was much more like running a small town Mayor's campaign than the affairs of twenty millions of people. But the tendency was dying, to the gratefulness of almost all involved. “And you're just trying to change the conversation, anyway.”

A grunt. “As a matter of fact, yes. You've already stated the policy you're going to push through, and I scarcely see your co-consul bothering with it, since he hates sniping little rumour-mongers like what the Sichuan headman are behaving as just as much as you do. But a more interesting thing has happened, anyway. A Nantucketar ship pulled in to Qingdao several days ago; the diplomatic mail bag probably got to Anyang yesterday.”

“Chris is going to be in marvelous form for our cabinet meeting this evening, no doubt,” I replied with a just the necessary trace of sarcasm. “A meeting with Madame Hurlo”--referencing the Nantucketar Ambassador of Fiernan origin--“is something he enjoys about as much as receiving the latest news of endless Egyptian prevarication from Abdul Pasha, which is to say not very much at all.”

“It is probably just carrying another official protest over Valparaiso,” Vladimir observed.

“Which is annoying, but not bad.” I agreed, but then added after a moment's thought: “Of course, I always worry that it's something more, and sooner or later it will be.”

Vladimir just shrugged his shoulders, and really, it was the right attitude to take about the whole thing. One could only do so much to create certainties when dealing with human beings. I found myself smiling wryly. “Oh well. At least the latest mail from Arik shall no-doubt be interesting.” But then the food cart arrived with our sandwiches, and the conversation ended until such time as we were approaching the smokestacks of the industrial southern half of New Anyang, our capital of wood trying to remake itself into stone.

Very nice Duchess. Seems very a day in the life-ish, which is just dandy by me.

You have to be careful about cultural differences. Chinese consider the number 4 unlucky, because its pronounciation is similar to the word "death"; you're unlikely to find a train numbered "4-4-0" in China because of this superstition.

Sidewinder wrote:You have to be careful about cultural differences. Chinese consider the number 4 unlucky, because its pronounciation is similar to the word "death"; you're unlikely to find a train numbered "4-4-0" in China because of this superstition.

In this case, the 4-4-0 is a specific type of steam locomotive. I doubt the train itself would be called that outside of any technical manuals.

4-4-0 refers only to the wheel arrangement; it would never be the designation of the locomotive type. In any case, steam locomotives where almost always individually named, with the name prominently displayed, and those names could be chosen with Chinese culture in mind.

Thanks for the clarification. I honestly don't know much about locomotives-- my interests are military technology, i.e., fighters, bombers, tanks, and battleships. I'll try to avoid talking out of my ass when it comes to technology, but the note on culture still stands.

This has been quite interesting to read. I've not read any of the fiction that it is based upon, but a picture of the times is emerging. I look forward to more.

~Black Wolff

I've finished "Island in the Sea of Time" and now I'm working on the second of the three, "Against the Tide of Years".


*pounds fist on table*

Our sovereign mission to preserve and promote civilization demands action! With the strength of our glorious Republic, let us travel across the ocean and crush the scourge that now darkens the lands from which constitutional governance such as our's was born! Walker Delenda Est! Ave Imperium Pacifica!

*pounds fist again*

This could be fun. I get dibs on shooting Alice Hong.

Chapter the Third

Anyang Fort was a construction of wood and stone on the lines of the frontier palace of Marcus Aurelius in Vindabona where he held court during his long campaigns in Germania. It had been built to decently modern lines, and also so that the seat of power of the government would not occupy the old Imperial palace. That was now a combination army barracks and series of offices for the civil service. Anyang Fort was impressive, but ultimately intended as only a temporary home for the government. Anyang fort was built to the north of the city proper; in the central portion of what was now Greater Anyang the Forum was rising, along with the buildings of culture. The city was amply provided with a museum, a library, a theatre, and an orchestra hall, along with a provision for a national buddhist temple, in addition to the government forum.

Anyang was the largest city in the world at the time it had been conquered; the population had been around seventy thousand. An additional fourty thousand had flooded into the newly built apartments and shanty towns to the extreme south, which clustered around the great factories now rising up there. Between them was the central portion of the city. Here there lived less than ten thousand people, but it was the largest portion of the city. It held the houses of the rich, of the nobility, of the uptimers, and of all their servants. And it housed construction. A proper city in granite and marble was being raised, a majestic and brooding construct of neoclassical architecture. The total population was now around 125,000.

Many of the old palaces in the city had been converted to other use—medical centres, barracks, the beginnings of the colleges (though the great buildings of proper universities would rise in the center of the city ultimately, as well). The temples had mostly been taken up by other religions. To the north of the city, around Anyang Fort, were more military facilities. The whole of the city was connected by a railroad laid down to run north-south along its length, with a Y at each end to effect the turning of the small commuter trains. Horse-train railcarts were used as feeder lines, with wooden rails. Ultimately there would be an elevated commuter railroad, but that was two more decades off.

“Jozef.” I bowed slightly to my Co-Consul, and the gesture was returned. “Let's call the meeting to order.”

He had a dangerous cossack look to him, suitable for his ancestry; a rough group, suited to our rough sort of democracy. Ataman to Consul, it matted altogether little. “Of course.”

We sat in chairs at opposite ends of the table. The lowest in seniority were seated in the middle, those higher, drawing closer to us, with the exact order rotating from meeting to meeting. Everyone else stood until the lictors brought the meeting to order. Even then, the bearers of the fasces at our backs remained standing. It was an imposing sight, the militant splendour of those meetings in a grand hall with that long table. Oil lamps lit the room all around, and light was let in by several glass panes upon the slanted ceiling as well; there was a ventilation system to deal with the fumes of the oil lamps.

“Well,” I began after order had been called. “I do believe that the first order of business is the diplomatic report. Mister Purnell?” I looked to my friend, dapper in his Poincare beard and black formalware, which indicated he'd probably only just finished up the meeting with the Nantucket ambassador.

“We have some interesting news. Tartessos has come to terms with Nantucket. The Republic's Navy and Marines have succeeded in forcing King Isketerol to seek peace. Her Excellency Ambassador Hurlelo provided us with a copy of the peace treaty on the request of Tartessos, since its terms are going to temporarily interrupt the Tartessian trade with our nation due to the commandeering of Tartessian ships for the duration of Nantucket's war effort.”

“We should certainly succeed in keeping Pharaoh Ramses out of the conflict, then,” the Minister of the Interior—General Yang—observed quietly. “All indications from our agents in Egypt are that such a great blow to Walker's cause as this would make the Egyptians most certainly reconsider their arrangements with Greater Achaea.”

“Our resources are waiting in the wings for him, and he knows it. Especially since his interest in technology is strictly military,” the Minister of Defence observed mildly from a white-mustachioed and elderly visage of an English gentleman. “Your Excellencies, I daresay we have reached a point where we can press a diplomatic resolution to the Cofflin Doctrine within a few months.”

“Mister Purnell?” Jozef Czarnecki asked mildly—a very deceptive thing, from him. “Do you agree with that assessment?”

“I do, Your Excellency. Nantucket did indeed bring another protest over our continued buildup of Valpairaso base, but I think that at this moment they are just maneouvring for good bargaining terms with the issue of modifications tp the Cofflin Doctrine. They do not want us to forget their claims for a heartbeat. But a comprehensive arrangement would require us to reveal details about Victoria—they certainly suspect we are there, but I am equally certain they have no real ideal of the scale of our settlement.”

“We have greatly strengthened the garrison of Tartessian California..” Yang began, then paused, and looked to Christopher Purnell. “I trust that the terms of the peace do not mention their base in California?”

“That is correct, General,” Purnell replied. “Since it is a secured peace treaty, there is little that they can do about it now, of course. They may not be pleased with the Tartessian deception in that regard, but if it was a sin, it was a sin of omission. Nantucket, as we had hoped, did not know about Tartessian California, and so made no demands in regard to it. In turn we now have the comfort of knowing that any intervention by Nantucket into the area would be a diplomatic effrontry that their allies would scarcely be pleased about. We can, of course, also present a vigorous front against Nantucket in the interests of maintaining traditional diplomatic law.”

“Would you then assert it unnecessary, however, to reveal additional details about Victoria in any arrangements with Nantucket over the cessation of the Cofflin Doctrine, as we now have a suitable and somewhat permanent shield for the colony?”

“I do not, General. I believe that our best claim to control of the whole Pacific Northwest region of the North American continent is based on long usage—that we have controlled the area for longer than the Cofflin Doctrine has existed. The fact that it was the second of our initial major settlements implies a great deal about the scale of Victoria. We have little choice but to acknowledge enough to make Victoria seem on the appropriate scale for the date of settlement, though of course further details are unnecessary.”

“Nantucket may regard the scale of those facilities as being unacceptable in the context of the Cofflin Doctrine. Our assets in the city—fortunately there are many unscrupulous people there who have not been raised in a nationalistic environment—have demonstrated to us quite clearly that the nature of direct democracy in action in Nantucket can bring about unfavourable and irrational decisions before much forethought can be made on an issue. Revelations about Victoria to such an unstable government containing very worrying possibilities.”

“Mister Purnell,” I began after Yang had fallen silent. “What do we know about the progress of the war in Anatolia?”

“The armies of Achaea and their barbarian allies are marching upon Hattusas. It is questionable if they can reach the city before the winter halts their progress and forces them back to encampments on the coast, where they can be resupplied, or not. The government of the King of Cyprus has been excellent about arranging intelligence at our behest, and we have a fairly good picture through those diplomatic sources of the nature of the conflict. Walker does risk becoming a new Napoleon if he takes Hattusas; his supply lines are heavily dependent on the sea due to the lack of good roads in Anatolia, and he is pressing to their very limit even now.”

“But the armies of the Triple Alliance continue to fall back, yes? There is no sign of that course being reversed, save by the intervention of General Winter?” Admittedly, I was pressing, but the information was quite important.

“No, Your Excellency, there is none.” My old friend answered with a slightly generous expression.

“Then we must press the issue of the Cofflin Doctrine now. Our best chance to have a peaceful resolution is to take advantage of their distraction in a war which, irregardless of the surrender of Tartessos, appears to be going quite badly for them. Preferably we should secure an agreement before the arrival of the Republic's Navy has made a noticeable impact on the course of the war with Achaea proper. We probably have several months to do this, as I suspect that the Achaean position in Sicily will delay them for a considerable length of time, but communications difficulties make it necessary for us to nonetheless act swiftly.”

“I agree,” Jozef said. “Nantucketar knowledge of Valparaiso unfortunately forces our hand on this issue, General Yang, so it is better to act when they are distracted in a bloody war than when they might feel ready for a second.” He then began shuffling some of his papers in front of himself. That settled it; save for the confirmation vote for a treaty by the Senate, as was required, with the Consuls in concurrence the action would be pursued as instructed. After a pause, he continued: “Well, I believe the next order of business is the advance of our forces into the Ili River Valley. Elements of the western Camelry Brigade have been sweeping further and further west from Jaiyu Fort and it's entirely possible that one of the more recent expeditions has already reached the Ili Valley, though we won't know for a while yet. Irregardless, the time has long since come for us to settle on the resources that we're going to commit to establishing control over Xinjiang in the short-term.”

I observed that Ye Di Wen—the Colonial junior Minister in the Foreign and Colonial Office—was present at that time. Jozef had been rather generous in delaying the issue long enough to let him return from one of his frequent long inspection trips to press this issue about which he was the most eloquent supporter. Naturally he started talking right away, too, but then Ye had quite the reputation for bluntness.

“Your Excellencies, control of Central Asia is absolutely vital to our gaining strategic influence over the population centres of the Indus valley, in addition to the extensive economic opportunities they offer us. We must control the high road into Kashmir, and that requires a system of forts and strong camelry patrols through central asia. The region may be very lightly populated in this time, but that simply makes it an easy approach, particularly for foreign powers. I should not need to remind Your Excellencies that the Babylonians have been keeping their new vassal in Elam from revolt during their current troubles by aggressively using the Elamite army in an eastward expansion movement, at once keeping it away from the centres of power and simultaneously bringing great swathes of Persia under Babylonian control.”

“The Elamite Army is equipped with little more than crossbows, and iron chainmail for the officers, along with a scattering of iron-tipped spears and arrows,” General Yang observed. “Intentionally, of course, to keep the King of Elam from getting ideas about a revolt; but it scarcely shows such superiourity as might allow for a lunge across the eastern wastes of Persia. Arg-e-Bam should be a formidable obstacle, nevermind the logistical issues of the terrain, about which the Elamites or even the Babylonians are scarcely yet fully competent.”

“That is quite so, General,” Ye agreed readily. “But the Babylonians have a second threat in their steam vessels which Nantucket has provided them in great numbers.”

“These are only shallow-draft river vessels, suited for Mesopotamian commerce,” the economics minister broke in with a observation born more of curiousity than anything else.

“Quite true, but their sea-handling characteristics,” Ye continued with a sort of stubborn tone that he was scarcely aware of, “are at least comparable to those of galleys, which have a long history of making successful voyages to India. Such ships could thus be brought forward and advanced up to the Indus. At the very least we should use our contacts there following the medical expedition of last year to commence an arms-trade which can retard Babylonian progress. Either as part of the Empire or as an ally in a favourable trading system, strategic control of northern approaches through Central Asia is very important.

“I would further remind Your Excellencies that we have already effectively been forced to cede Herat, the so-called 'gateway to India', and indeed all of Afghanistan and Baluchistan, as we do not have the resources to establish any presence there before the projected Babylonian assertion of such a similar presence. We can scarcely do the same with the Transoxus. It is much to close to traditional Chinese territory, and would effectively cripple our ability to establish influence in the Crimean basin and control over the Kazakh Steppe. Though I know that the expense of maintaining the forts will be very great at this early stage, the scale of the resources and the territory for demographic expansion over a long period of time can scarcely be ignored as such.”

“It's also going to be extremely expensive,” Industry broke in. “We have no transportation net to speak of beyond keel-boats beyond the Huang River falls, and they go only as far as Lanzhou. The cost of maintaining the Western Wall Fort System is already prohibitive.”

“Yes, it will be.” The cool English voice immediately brought attention to itself from everyone. There was Drake, tall, fit, with his graying hair at such a young age from the constant and vigorous strain of managing the whole of the nation and educating the next generation to boot. He was the perfect image of an English gentleman, and fell comfortably into the role of the ruthlessly efficient chief bureaucrat of the Republic. But I was saddened to see the toll that the Herculean efforts of his labours had taken upon him; on the other hand it could have scarcely been different.

Oh, Drake, you will get your chance to rest yet, but we need your great exertions for a while, still, I thought with a faint sigh that was only in my mind; in truth I was quite impassive at these meetings, and generally tried to appear a bit bored. Jozef did not bother hiding his emotions, but then he didn't need to.

“However, my calculations do suggest that a presence in the Ili Valley is not beyond our resources, nor is the establishment of an entrepot for trade with the Central Asian tribes at Urumqi and Kuitun, as town-trading centre-outposts. Blockhouses can be erected easily enough along a route from Yumen—where we have a large trading posting just weeks away from completion—to Urumqi at distances to allow for the passage of horse caravans, nevermind camels. But I fear that I cannot, Your Excellencies, support a short term investment in Central Asia which is any larger than that, or for the forseeable future. Until either a railroad to Lanzhou or a canal around the Hukou Cataract on the Huang have been completed, it is a great expense to ship merely to Lanzhou, and beyond the reach of the keelboats on the Huang, far, far greater.”

“How fast can we get those posts established, operating on a short-time schedule?” Jozef asked the Defence Minister.

“Fifteen or sixteen months to establish them and the supply route, Your Excellency, if we really focus on it. That's for everything, including completion of the necessary fortifications.”

Jozef looked next to Drake. “You have no objections to that?

“None, Your Excellency.”

“Neither do I,” I offered my assent on the matter helpfully.

“Well, the arguments for western expansion are convincing, I will admit,” Jozef concluded. “But we really cannot realistically do anymore, so control of central Xinjiang and the Ili Valley is sufficient for now, especially since it can be had in such a relatively short period of time. Since Her Excellency Consul O'Leary concurs, I do believe we have settled our short-term colonization strategy for Xinjiang.”

The meeting continued for a while, but the rest of the business was more comfortably mundane, as if anything could be mundane now.

Hey, this looks familiar...

Chapter the Fourth


After the meeting was concluded I went home. My daughter had been without her mother for some time on this voyage, after, and though it was scarcely longer than the absence which might be expected when she was off to boarding school, it was still an unpleasant thing. We had all adopted a great number of children; in this world there were far, far to many who needed to be adopted: Parents dead, parents killed for political reasons (a particularly nasty business) and so on. Or simply the children of the brutally impoverished who had to many other children to possibly care for. There was a slight imbalance in favour of girls for obvious cultural reasons (which we were in the process of changing), but this simply removed the guilt from my intent to adopt only girls.

Of course, we were not necessarily very affectionate parents. We were all very busy with the affairs of state and consequently rarely had the time to show our children—both adopted and natural (there were after all many couples among the uptimers by this point, either internal pairings or men, who formed the majority, with native women. To my knowledge no uptime woman had, conversely, married a native man)--the affection that they really deserved. On the other hand, we were all more than affluent enough to afford nurses, governoresses, and so on, so that the children were never lacking in a guiding hand.

It was not bad, and in fact safer than it would have been uptime, for we could easily induce a bit of fear in the housing staff should it be necessary, and none of them were prepared to be negligent at the prospect of offending what to many still seemed to be a half-supernatural master-race which had arrived out of the mists of the east and conquered the whole of the known world, and much of the unknown world besides. It was not really a pleasant thing, but if it kept a few governoresses inclined to negligence to be more careful in their duties, then it served its purpose. Many such compromises were being made elsewhere in the society we had created, after all.

Population growth was very important to us. Birth control was available only by word of mouth to a very limited elite, unlike with the Republic of Nantucket which distributed it freely. The rationale was obvious. With the infant mortality rate plunging as fast as we could drive it down, there would be a huge explosion in population directly coinciding with the point in time at which we had a sufficiently large educated bureaucratic/administrative class to force through mass industrialization on a very large scale. To guarantee the long-term success of our industrialization, we needed explosive population growth for the first sixty years or so. Only then could we begin to apply the breaks to exponential growth, a task which would be up to our children in general. None of us had illusions of immortality.

These were great concerns of mine, brought to mind naturally by the thoughts of my daughter as I rode home in one of the rickshaws omnipresent in the wealthy districts. I was not, personally, directedly involved in social reproduction—I laughed slightly at the thought—but the future for my adopted children (for I intended more in the future) was very much a going concern. The thoughts were only put aside for a moment when I saw passing by our good old labourite, Martin, the number two man in the Ministry of Industry and chief of the Steel and Iron Board, responsible for coordinating all production of the same. He was riding with his wife in a rickshaw on his way back from work, and he looked not unlike the old British Foreign Secretary, Bevin, a sturdy working man rather out of place in his high position, but competent and fitting in well enough.

“Martin, Katherine, how goes things!?” I called out cheerfully, filled with a sudden surge of pleasure at the thought of how I had maintained so many friends despite the severity of the political situation here in the 'Serene Republic'. Martin was generally an ally of the PLA, but had never been afraid to make his differences known with them.

“Your Excellency!” A cheerful look: “Marina! How are you doing?”

“Oh, quite well,” I answered as the rickshaw-men pulled us along at a brisk clip down the street. “Coming to the dinner tonight at the Anglo-Chinese Club?”

“Absolutely!” Katherine added before her husband could comment—or prevaricate. “How was the trip, Marina?”

“More relaxing than I could have hoped for. It was a good excuse for a vacation—of sorts. They sent along lots of paperwork with me, but I managed to eliminate it by the time we headed back,” I replied with a laugh. “Is your daughter doing alright?”

“Oh yes! Li is a very good governoress, you know.”

That said, Katherine took a more direct hand in the raising of her children than most of the busy professional women of the uptime elite (the great majority of those children being adopted), and it made me a bit guilty. “I'm going home to check on Contessa right now. It's very good to see her after such a long time gone—I rather regret it.”

“Well, you do run the whole bleedin' country,” Martin answered affiably. But then our rickshaws parted way, and he tossed a wave back to me as he disappeared from view, turning to the left. “See you tonight!”

I smiled fondly, an expression that held on my face as the sweating rickshaw man brought me to a halt outside of my house—unostentatiously, it was shaped like a glorified barn with an attached stables, and was being expanded. It had started at a very modest 2,000 sq. ft. for residential areas, but was sure to grow with my family. Stepping out with my attache case grasped in my left hand, I reached into a pocket on my baggy pantaloons and tossed the rickshaw man a silver dollar, which was caught with a most proud of looks, and left me with inane thoughts about Yang's continued pressing of our Exchequery to switch from a gold standard to a bimetallic standard, which Lellianna resisted with admirable fortitude.

Enough of that, don't let yourself be distracted when you meet [insert name here], she deserves that and far more I harshly commanded myself, and then walked up onto the veranda. The door was opened for me by Xia, one of my two servants whom I kept in addition to the stablehand and Contessa's Governoress, Li, who was the dispossessed princess of a minor Shandong nobleman who had ended up on the wrong side of the war with the Shang—it was not an uncommon fate for such nobility, the younger ones being adopted, the older ones brought in to serve us at the society level, the troublesome ones exiled. Some were also shot.

“Xia, it's good to see you again.” Her name was not of course original, but most of the upper-class and the domestic servants of the families had been encouraged to take more normalized Chinese names; my own, for that matter, was Ma Lin Na.

She giggled brightly. “I welcome your return, mistress. The household has faired well in your absence, please come in.. Let me take off your coat and boots..”

I waited patiently as she did so, guiltily admitting to myself that I had grown to enjoy such assistance far to much for my own good. It was a long way to go for the daughter of an iron worker in Philadelphia and granddaughter of a riveter at Harlann & Wolff, but with my schedule I could say it was as much necessary for me to keep up with work and my daughter as it was simply a luxury of being a ruler of the largest nation on earth.

There was a sudden explosion of energy into the room. “Mommy! Mommy! You're back!” Contessa flung herself into my arms with all the precocious delight of a to-intelligent ten year old, just on the verge of becoming reserved around one's parents but not quite there yet. I grabbed her, Xia stepping deftly aside, and hugged her tightly against myself, spinning a bit and grinning. “I am indeed back,” I answered, the grin belying my slight words and carrying with them a sentiment of great pleasure.

“I missed you. But we had roast duck last night,” she added with a guilty pleasure, “and it was very good. Xia and Li were good to me.” Her features were those of a growing fawn, oriental in whole (and she was quite petite, a legacy of her poor diet in the beginning years of life), with a brilliant set of healthy teeth and the budding of an athletic figure.

I laughed, and tweaked my daughter's nose teasingly. “Good of you to say that. I imagine they appreciate your loyalty as much as I do. Roast duck aside---after all, you can enjoy myself when I'm not around.”

“I know,” she answered with that secretive voice a girl of her age can so well adopt.

“Good, then. Shall we sit and have tea? I'll tell you all about the voyage to Port Arthur and back, and the launching of the Resolution.”

“Of course! You made a speech, didn't you mommy?” She was clearly amused, for she had long since divined that for some reason my place in the world originated around my ability to talk, in those speeches which she found so very boring. But I didn't mind that, for she was an avid reader and that was enough; oratory came later.

“Yes, I made a speech,” I admitted with a slightly sheepish voice. “A long speech, designed mostly to be published many times over in newspapers and Navy League bulletins, and to impress some noblemen there whom we need to make like ships.”

“Ships are cool,” she said by way of agreement as I carried her—a bit of an effort as I grew older, but one I bore with a sort of cherished pride—into the sitting room, where my other servant was already preparing tea at Xia's behest.

“Then it shall be a navy life for my daughter,” I teased with a hint of danger. “You can't escape it now, with that confession!”

“Aiee! I like the riverboats, mom, but there are great storms at sea. Like the scary story you told me about how all our ships had to..” A pause, as she searched for the nautical terminology. I held my tongue so that she could have the pleasure of remembering, and thus she did: “Beat 'round the Horn, for two months,” she concluded, and then added in the twinkling delight of a youngster at such a story, when the fright has passed: “With water washing over the decks the whole while, and tacking so far that you sighted the rocks of Antarctica.”

“All quite true,” I agreed with a grin. “But you can serve on the riverboats. After all, remember the first time we were together, kiddo?” The tea was brought, and I poured a cup for my daughter—who took the responsibility of preparing and drinking her tea quite seriously—and then myself. “Before I became Consul, when I commanded the gunboat flotilla on the Yangtze.”

It had been a strange thing, that. I had long been in the habit of navigating my motor yacht on the canals and rivers of America when I was uptime; so though I was hardly the best blue water mariner in the group, my skills in riverine navigation, particularly in confined spaces, were quite unparalleled. Thus I had commanded the riverboat flotillas during both the Huang and the Yangtze campaigns, and the diversion of the passage up the Hui as well. That had been, primarily, the extent of my military commands and exploits before attaining the Consulship, though of course in the early days I had been on the Council of Five as well.

“Well, of course,” she answered—she had been seven at the time—and her face scrunched into a frown. “How could I forget?” She had lost her mother two years prior when the poor woman had been giving birth to yet another child for the headman of their village, and upon her death had been briefly raised by a distant and cruel second wife of his, before I had taken her in after the short dispute we had indulged in with that village, which ended poorly for the Headman but practically nobody else. Contessa had never minded; her father had been a distant, scarcely existant figure who thought lowly of her, as he had of all his girls. The conclusion to that little entanglement was hardly perfect, but perhaps to the ultimate benefit of all involved.

It took Contessa only a moment longer to draw the conclusion which I had intended, and her face brightened when she did so. “You mean I can serve in the navy on the rivers? Command the flotillas like you did, mommy?”

“It's certainly a possibility, if you study hard. The Navy likes 'em smart, after all, the Army takes anyone who can jump up and down and nod their head.” I laughed, and my daughter soon fondly joined in.

“I don't much like to study,” Contessa admitted. “But I do so like to read. Is that enough?”

“Well, you must keep up with your studies, but a great deal of knowledge can be got from reading, for I learned much of what I know the very same way. A person who knows how to read can teach themselves nearly anything, whereas a person who learns something by rote can do only that one thing.”

“Then I shall read as much as I can,” Contessa said, and I didn't press the matter of her studies further, for she was not doing bad in them at all; all A's and B's, no C's yet, though in some subjects that might not last, but such concerns for the moment might be placed aside.

We drank our tea in sips, savoring it thoroughly as time passed, and I asked her of school and her friends. They were all of our social class, of course, for the schools were still quite limited in scope at the moment, particularly in the capital. The curriculum was brutally exacting, designed to the high British standards of their boarding schools, and the fascimiles of those which we had constructed would soon be receiving my daughter and many others, for that matter. Hell, I run St. Mary's for Girls, I thought to myself with a faint laugh.

“Mom, are we going to be able to spend tonight together?” Contessa asked, interrupting my thoughts quite pleasantly on the subject of education.

“Not all of it, I'm afraid. I've got to attend a dinner at the Anglo-Chinese Club. I shall not be back until later—but since tomorrow is Saturday I shall tell Li that you might stay up late, and when I come back, I'll read to you before we go to bed, alright?”

A grin of cleverness struck Contessa's lips. “No, mom, let me read to you.”

I laughed brightly. “But of course, then. You may choose the book, then, as well, and you can read until you're tired.”

“Thanks muchly, mom!” Grinning: “I'll be waiting...”

I laughed. “Of course, dear. I'll try to leave early at the Anglo-Chinese tonight, but we'll see how things go. You know how the government can get to me—everyone wants to talk, and talk for the whole night, just to me, and they can't do it all at once, so I've got to struggle my way out of every conversation.”

“You should order them to stop,” came the mischevious riposte.

“If only! But you know that our government isn't like that. Anyone can speak their minds, as long as they don't talk about classified matters, and sadly your mother deals in more than just classified matters.”

“Well, alright. I'll need some time to pick out the best book, too,” Contessa said agreeably after a moment—she was long past the stage of pouting at such news, though sometimes she affected such for my amusement, knowing just the right buttons to push... I was fortunate to have Contessa in the care of a governoress, really, for I had come to realize I was the sort of parent who was far to much inclined toward spoiling, and only mental force of will prompted me to proper and discipline her where I realistically knew it to be necessary.

We finished tea, and sat looking at each other for a moment. The room was enscoured in fine tapestries, many of silk, and the floor was comfortable around the low-slung tea table, good padding under the carpet. A picture was on the wall above, as well, painted by Pick and showing the naval squadrons blasting their way through the resistance the Three Gorges peoples while simultaneously running the rapids. It was a marvelous image which brought for glorious memories, and I lingered upon it for a moment before turning my attention back to my daughter.

“Dear, I'm afraid that I must go and get ready for dinner at the Anglo-Chinese now. As I said, I'll hurry back, so don't trouble Li to much, but take as much time as you want on finding that book.”

“Of course, mommy!” Contessa replied courteously. “Take care, and don't let yourself get cold!”

I laughed, leaning forward and giving her a fond kiss upon each cheek. “I promise I won't, my daughter, I promise I won't.” I then rose, waved jauntily to Contessa as she got up also, with an energetic jump, and then I headed to the downstairs bathroom to freshen up. Xia was, with quiet efficiency, already laying everything out for me, and so I could get down to the Anglo-Chinese looking appropriate for the evening in perhaps only twenty minutes. After today's cabinet meeting it would no doubt be an... Interesting... Dinner, indeed, and my thoughts now turned to considering what might take place, and what might be discussed at it, and these things occupied my mind as I proceeded to get ready.