Part #226: A Beginning
The country’s official name is: UNITED PROVINCES OF SOUTH AMERICA, UPSA (Meridian Spanish:
PROVINCIAS UNIDAS DE SUDAMERICA, PUS).
The people are known as: MERIDIANS (Meridian Spanish:
MERIDIAÑOS).
Capital: Cordobá, Cordobá Province
Largest city: Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires Province (2.9 million citizens plus many non-citizen residents)
Flag: A canton with two white ragged horizontal lines on red (based on the Burgundian Cross) and red text reading ‘Provincias Unidas’; a golden/yellow field bearing the Torch of Liberty symbol in red, surrounded by the national motto
Libertad e Independencia (‘Freedom and Independence)’.
Population: ca. 39 million. Note this figure is uncertain due to some sources citing citizen population and some citing resident population: a significant number of residents of the UPSA were non-citizens either from semi-autonomous native states and reservations or from other Hermandad states, either seasonal workers or permanent settlers. It could be as little as 37 or as much as 46 million depending on one’s interpretation.
Land area: ca. 490,000 lcf.[1] At this point delineation of borders in the Amazonian interior was sufficiently vague to introduce some uncertainty, particularly given the land-lease agreement with the Guayanese Republic.
Economic ranking: Estimated at 4th in the world, although the reliance of the Meridian economy on trade with the Hermandad makes separating its national wealth from the wider economy of the Hermandad someone difficult.
Form of government: Executive Republic, largely unitary in character with some more recent federalist innovations. The President-General (or simply President), directly elected by the people in a two-round system for a single six-year term, is the head of state and sets executive policy, selecting a cabinet. This must however be agreed with the legislative Cortes Nacionales which must authorise budgets and can veto domestic legislation. The President of the Cortes (often called Prime Minister in English) is the leader of the largest party in the Cortes and is responsible for negotiating between the Cortes and President-General. The President-General has more direct control over foreign policy. When the Cortes and Presidency are held by different parties, this is referred to as ‘coparticiaption’. The leader of the second largest party is informally called the ‘President of Asturias’, a reference to the crown prince of Spain traditionally having the title Prince of Asturias, as they are in line to become President of the Cortes if an election changes control. Deputies are elected to the Cortes for four years, although an early dissolution (and procedural tricks to extend the term somewhat) are possible. The Provinces have their own, largely rubber-stamp Cortes Provinciales and Intendants which are currently popularly elected, formerly being appointed by central government.
Foreign relations: The UPSA is at the heart of the
Hermandad de las Naciones (Family of Nations), a bloc based on socio-economic trade links and mutual defence. Other members include the Republics of Pernambuco, the Philippines, Guyana, Capeland and Batavia, and the Kingdoms of Carolina, Peru, New Granada, Kongo and Brazil (or Portugal-in-exile). Due to the Seventies Thaw in political relations between the UPSA and its former enemy the ENA during the Araníbar administration, some countries are members of both the Hermandad and the American-led Philadelphia Bloc,[2] such as the Kingdoms of Mexico and Guatemala, the Republics of Cuba and Jamaica, and the Free City of Nouvelle-Orléans. More legally debatable is Meridian influence over the Siamese Empire and over ‘Senhor Oliveira’s Company’ in India.
Military: The
Fuerzas Unidas (Armed Forces), divided into the Meridian Army, the Meridian Armada (navy) and the Meridian Skyfleet (
flota del cielo, i.e. aeroforce). The Skyfleet was only separated from the other two branches in 1888. In addition to these regulars, the UPSA can call upon
Milicias Provinciales (provincial militias, although many of these have fallen into decay) and privately-owned
Brigadas Auxiliares (Auxiliary Brigades) drawn from the Hermandad nations but generally led by Meridian officers.
Current head of state: President-General Carlos Priestley (Unionist Party)
Current head of government: President of the Cortes Miguel-Azcuénaga Perales (Adamantine Party)
Note: A presidential election is underway in October 1896.
– Taken from APPENDIX: GUIDE TO THE WORLD’S NATIONS AT THE EVE OF THE PANDORIC WAR, OCTOBER 1896, from
The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME I: THE GATHERING STORM (1981)
*
From: The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME I: THE GATHERING STORM (1981):
Mount Zhangqihe, Feng Chinese Empire/Siamese Empire (disputed border)
October 24th, 1896
Piet Vanhuizen spat out his cigarette butt with the annoyed, incoherent sound made by a man raised to count the pennies who was reluctantly giving up on a bad investment. “That stuff stinks—literally,” he muttered to himself in Batavian Dutch.
“Did you
regret your
cigarette?” asked Emiliano Rosales with a broadening grin. Piet resisted the urge to punch it off his face. Aside from his fondness for bad English puns, Emile wasn’t that bad a comrade. Born in the Cuban Republic on the same day it had reunited as an independent nation (or so he claimed), Emile considerably broadened the corps’ linguistic abilities with his English.
“Forget it,” Piet said in their lingua franca, Meridian Spanish. He ground the butt into the stony ground of the mountainside with his bootheel. Someone in Santiago de Chile, at the corporate headquarters of the Second Garcíá & Denoailles Auxiliary Brigade, probably owned a nice little print of what each auxiliary soldier’s uniform should look like. Piet liked the idea of looking at it one day—he could do with a laugh. Practically every part of what he wore had started out life on someone else. His boots were salvaged from the body of a comrade who had bitten it in a landslide three mountains ago: conveniently the only part of him left sticking out from beneath the rubble. They were a little tight, but rather less patchy than the ones he had traded them for.
“Did you hear about Rodriguez?” Emile asked conversationally, also in Meridian Spanish. Rodriguez was a common name in Hispanophone countries, but Piet immediately knew that Emile could only mean one man by that name: Major Alejandro Rodriguez, that strutting lovechild[3] from Rosario, whose family hadn’t got the century-old memo about the abolition of[ i]peninsulare[/i] privileges.
“No, what about him?” Piet said, hunting through his pockets in search of a less disappointing pouch of tobacco. The whole customs standoff with Virginia might have already been resolved by now, for all he knew, but even with steamships accelerating the pace of trade, there would be a knock-on effect on the quality for years to come.
Emile giggled to himself for a moment, reminding Piet of his tender twenty years, for all the bitter conflict he had seen. “Well, you know Pablo put up that sign pointing to the toilet pit[4] and the Colonel’s tent?”
Piet saw where he was going with this. “Someone decided to give it a bit of an…adjustment?”
Emile roared with laughter. “And how! You know what Rodriguez is like, chest out, eyes fixed on the ceiling…”
Piet shared in his laughter for a moment. “Of course, when he’s cleaned up, you do know he’s going to flog his way to finding out who did it?”
“You’re always looking on the dark side.” Emile shrugged. “We’ll think of something. Blame it on faulty longitude calculations! I didn’t trust that solution engine in Ayutthaya…”
The conversation continued. Emile was right about him, Piet reflected. He was one of nature’s pessimists. Or perhaps, no matter what the blastic theorists claimed, his life had made him that way. It would make sense. Piet’s grandfather had fled the dying Dutch Republic sixty years ago, on the last VOC ship (so he had always told Piet’s father) to leave The Hague before it became part of that lie of a nation called Belgium. Piet had never seen The Hague, had no idea what it might look like today. For that matter, he had never seen Europe. Born in Sumatra where his father had followed his grandfather in service to the Batavian Republic, Piet had spent his whole career in Asia, Antipodea and the Novamund.
He was a soldier. The Batavian Republic had no regular army as ‘traditional’ nations did. It was the old VOC, the old Dutch East India Company, without a homeland. The company had corporate regiments, where officers bought commissions and recruited both poor Dutchman, East Indies natives, and anyone else willing to serve. And the thing about corporate regiments were that they were like any other kind of corporate asset—they could be bought and sold.
Hence the García & Denoailles company, owners of cinchona plantations around the world, needing troops to protect them, had decided to invest in purchasing such a regiment. Piet had seen more than enough disease-infested jungles and pressure-controlled glass houses to last a lifetime. But then, as many of the Hermandad lands where the plantations were located began to politically settle down, the regiment had seemed superfluous again. Señor García and Señor Denoailles weren’t stupid, though—they knew that situation could change and leave them defenceless if they just sold the regiment on again, as less foresighted corporate directors might have done.
So instead they decided to
rent out the Second García & Denoailles Auxiliary Brigade. Piet still wasn’t entirely certain who was paying his salary now—whether it was G&D themselves still, whether it was the Ayutthai Railway Company (actually a fellow Chile-based concern), whether it was the Emperor of Siam himself. He didn’t care too much providing the money actually arrived, which had been increasingly less reliable of late. He almost had to admire the ARC’s strategy: when you had built the only route capable of bringing all but the most experienced explorers from Ayutthaya city to this rocky, inhospitable frontier, you also ensured your workers were unable to desert when they got there. Unfortunately, that also applied to soliders like himself.
Piet looked around, ignoring Emile’s chatter, and allowed himself to see the landscape again as if for the first time. It was a world of contrasts, verdant forests carpeting the warm, humid ground far below only to give up halfway up the mountain slow in favour of bleak bare rock. Then, as though laughing at the maps that placed this area in the Torrid Zones, the uttermost peaks were coated with snow.
These were the mountains surrounding the great river called the Lacang Jiang by the Chinese and the Mae Nam Khong by the Siamese. Many of the European and Novamundine visitors finding themselves up here shortened the Siamese name to Mekong instead. The river, which even the jaded Piet had found impressive, was not visible from here, though. Here instead was what the ARC engineers had described as the most workable pass to continue the railway line through the mountains. Piet had laughed when he had seen the pass in question, laughter that had faded as he realised they were serious. The engineers had already expended more explosives than both sides in the Great American War (or so Emile claimed) and the so-called pass still looked about as penetrable as the Great Hall of the Pure Latin Race in Lisbon.
Even as he formed the thought, the ground shook and a part of the cliff face collapsed in yet another artificial avalanche. A few moments later, the sound of it rumbled past them. Emile reflexively held on to a nearby tree, as if that would help. The more experienced Piet just shrugged. “We’ll have to see how it looks when the dust clears.” He was speaking literally—the rock dust and smoke from the xylofortex charges had concealed the cliff face for now. With Piet’s usual attitude on life, he assumed the pass would look even worse when it was cleared. And then it would be time for the poor blighters who had been pressed into work—poorer Siamese from the outer provinces like Pegu and Luang Prabang—who would have the dangerous job of clearing the smashed chunks of rock from the blast zone. If the last few attempts had been any guide, at least one of those workers would not make it back to the camp tonight.
Meanwhile, Piet thought selfishly, it was muggins here who had to stand here looking important while the workers threw their lives away. As though the threats of unsafe ground, unexploded charges, disease, malnutrition and starvation weren’t enough. No, in the tiny minds of the ARC directors back in Valdivia, there were hordes of violent natives ready to burn any sign of progress and civilisation if it peeped cautiously into their homelands—
“
Gott im Himmel!” cried a voice Piet recognised. He instantly abandoned his search for tobacco and stood to attention, as did Emile. A familiar figure absently pushed past the two soldiers, a telescope held to one eye. Half of his chin was still coated in soap suds—soap a rare luxury up here—and a cut-throat razor speckled with blood had been stuffed absently into his uniform pocket. But that uniform bore the insignia of a full Colonel in the Auxiliary Brigades.
The Colonel focused the telescope impatiently on the hillside, looking at an area just over the shoulder of this mountain (Piet still didn’t know its name) which would presumably overlook the blasting area. The Colonel swore again in his native German. “That idiot Rodriguez was right—there
are men there!” He shook his head frantically, sending soap suds everywhere; Piet suppressed a smile as one splattered the front of Emile’s uniform. “Faded old-style Chinese uniforms…I’ve heard of these…Yunnan bandits. Descended from General Yu’s army, after they gave up on the whole pretender ruse. Still hang out in the mountains today.”
“Sir?” Piet queried when the Colonel paused for a long moment, staring again through the telescope. “Orders?”
Martin Hiedler nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes—we need to drive them off. Artillery?” He dismissed the idea with a thought. “No artillery. No artillery but…” he paused. “Those old cycloguns. The range…” he measured it with his eyes. “It’ll do. Get me Basurto and Molina!”
Those two soldiers were of good Meridian blood. It was rare for even an old, Great American War-vintage cyclogun to be entrusted to an Auxiliary from outside the UPSA. Which made it all the more curious that Hiedler had managed to inviegle his way into commanding the very Brigade. Piet wondered whether it had been more his famous name or his experience in this part of the world: Hiedler had worked for the Feng Chinese for years before his friend Hao Xingjian had lost favour at court and both had moved on. Regardless, Hiedler certainly had the famous mercurial temper of his grandfather, who had been tearing Bavaria apart when Piet’s own grandfather had been fleeing Maximilian’s armies.[5]
Under Hiedler’s impatient gaze, Basurto and Molina assembled their cyclogun atop a suitable vantage point. The weapon had had to be disassembled to bring it up the mountainside and Piet was privately sceptical as to whether it would fire. As Basurto checked the alignment of the barrels, Molina built up a head of steam in the attached steam engine. There was another potential point: like the other engines used for less martial purposes down in the ARC camp, it was being fuelled not by good coal but by damp local wood of questionable quality.
Therefore Piet had some misgivings when Hiedler squinted through his telescope, called out a series of numbers to Basurto, and gave the order: “Very well, let’s scare them off. Fire one burst over their heads, if you please, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir,” Basurto said, “one burst over their heads”. His hand went to the lever which would open the steam valve, allowing the engine to drive the rotating barrels.
Piet exchanged a glance with Emile, suddenly feeling uncertain. The range was great and complicated by distances being deceptive in the thin air of the mountains, as he knew from experience. If Hiedler thought they could fire a warning shot without killing anyone, he was likely wrong. On the other hand, did it really matter if they slew a few Yunnan bandits? But what if…
What was it Hiedler had said? Faded Chinese uniforms?
Hiedler was very experienced with Chinese uniforms. But had he ever served in a mountainous region like this before? Did he know how colours swam and faded in that same mountain air—
Piet’s reverie was interrupted as the cyclogun ground into life, every component working despite his pessimism. The barrels rattled and banged, nothing like the smooth tearing sound of a modern cingular gun. But then they were the Auxiliary Brigades. The Auxiliary Brigades never got modern equipment, unless bribes were applied or if the company that owned them made arms itself.
“Good, good,” Hiedler said, looking through his telescope as the bullets sliced down in an arc at the distant, indistinct figures atop the ridge. Even to Piet’s unaided eyes he saw a few of them fall. “Well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eyes,” Hiedler muttered. “That’ll…no, maybe a little more, that’ll teach them a lesson!” He frowned. “They’re really keen to rescue that one fellow at the front. He looks pale for a Ch…”
Again, even without a telescope, Piet could just about see a single speck of colour out of place, even if it was nothing more than a single iota on one of the great colossal shutterbox advertising boards some companies still used. He guessed that a cap had rolled away from that fallen figure, revealing the hair beneath. It was the only way to explain the sudden appearance of a speck of yellow, straw-blond hair which no Chinese that Piet had ever met had sported.
“Cease fire,” Hiedler said, muttering in confusion. “Where did they get a white man from?”
A white man. With Yunnan bandits.
Or, perhaps, Chinese regulars seen in an unfamiliar setting. Chinese regulars who sometimes had American advisors seconded to them.
Piet looked down at his hands.
Could I have said something in time?
He had a feeling that thought would haunt him for the rest of his life…however long that would be.
*
Near Fort St. George, Alyeska, Russian America
November 2nd 1896
Vsevolod Ivanovich Badeyev clutched his fur coat more tightly around him and tried to ignore the wind whistling around the improvised blockages he had lined the door with. It didn’t seem to help. At this time of the year, the tiny shack twenty-five versts[6] from Fort St. George really felt the bitter winter, and it was only November. There was worse to come, which on reflection could be the motto of Russian America. He laughed bitterly to himself for a moment and took a swig of the makeshift and probably half-poisonous vodka he made himself from the little potato garden in the rare summer months.
Vsevolod couldn’t afford to get roaringly drunk, though, not when he had a job to do. At least in the old days of optical telegraphy (‘Optel’, as some kids were calling it these days), you needed a tower with a few men to man it, blind men to encode and read the cryptograms, perhaps even a girl to court.[7] But with the advent of the Electric Telegraph, he was stuck here in the middle of nowhere – no, twenty-five versts
from the middle of nowhere – waiting to copy down and duplicate Lectel messages in case there was a fault in the grand trunk. And then whose job would it be to fix it?
He sighed and risked leaving his desk for a moment to peel a few strips of salt beef from his stash and set up a pan of water over his crude little stove. At least he didn’t have to worry about food spoiling in this whether, but he’d still have to hunt soon before the deer moved on. His makeshift stew was marginally better than dying of starvation, though he’d kill for a little spice. But, unless a Hermandad trade ship went
extremely off course and beached itself up here, the chances of that were remote.
His diet wasn’t the only thing that could use a little spice. Vsevolod was of the peasant stock which naturally saw excitement as equivalent to trouble and would much prefer a nice boring life, but there were limits. If only there was an opportunity to break out of this dead-end RLPC job and—
Even as he thought, his Lectel apparatus sparked into life and the bicker began rattling away.
Bicker-bicker-bicker. Vsevolod was not educated and assumed that the metal arm was so called because of the sound it made: he had never heard of Willem Bicker and his dot-dash code, a variant of which was used by the RLPC. Not as plaintext, of course—only after being run through one of the increasingly elaborate crytogrammes developed using the new solution engines.
Usually. This time, however, someone had clearly got so excited that they hadn’t waited for the machine to spit out its new code and had instead used a simple substitution cypher that Julius Caesar would probably consider to be nicely secure, but was child’s play for Vsevolod to break:
REPORTS FROM YUNNANFU VIA AGENTS IN HANJING STOP BROUGHT VIA STEAMSHIP TO LEBEDEVSK [8] STOP REPORTED ATTACK ON FENG TROOPS YUNNAN PROVINCE BY TROOPS WITH MERIDIAN EQUIPMENT STOP AMERICAN OBSERVERS AND TROOPS ON MANOEUVRE WITH FENG STOP COLONEL DAVID BRAITHWAITE REPEAT COLONEL DAVID BRAITHWAITE REPORTED KILLED STOP POSSIBLY CASUS BELLI STOP INFORM ALL AGENTS TO PREPARE FOR CONDITION ZELENYY KRASNYY ODIN STOP MESSAGE REPEATS…
Numbly, Vsevolod put down the piece of paper where he had been decoding the message. Acting automatically, he had already sent on the encoded version to ensure the original would make it through the still unreliable Lectel cable. But his mind was not on his job. His mind was churning through possibilities.
David Braithwaite! Even Vsevolod had heard of the nephew of the great American President Braithwaite who had been the first to properly work for peace with the Meridians after the Great American War. In this era he was one of many to explore the shrinking world and its diverse peoples. With the Supremacists in power in Fredericksburg, the younger Braithwaite had been among the voices criticising their more martial stance on world affairs, using his predecessor’s name. There had even been talk of him standing for the Continental Parliament himself.
Not now, though. David Braithwaite was dead, attacked by troops with Meridian equipment. Was that enough for a
casus belli, as the agent who had written this message believed? Perhaps, perhaps…at the very least it would lead to shocks and uncertainty and—
Vsevolod sat bolt upright for a moment. A wild idea came into his head. Could he do it? If he was found out, it would be the worst punishment that the Governor-General in Baranovsk could think of. But it would have to be pretty bad to be worse than his normal life, he thought…
He acted with sudden resolve. He got a second piece of paper, warmed his inkwell in his hands to make the ink liquid again, and scratched away industriously for twenty minutes. The message he sent used the same simple cypher as the last—again, his counterpart along the trunk would think, clearly sent through haste. Important to seize the moment, act while this knowledge was the sole province of the Russian Empire, for the only Lectel trunk joining Asia with North America was under Russian control. It would take longer for news to cross the Pacific the old-fashioned way, even with steamships.
Vsevolod scratched out parts of his message and rewrote them, nodding. He had to make it look genuine. No talk of ‘tell my cousin in Cometa to sell his stocks in X, Y and Z’ – make him sound like a mysterious agent doing Emperor Paul II’s work.
His third draft satisfied him. He had to act fast or it would make no sense to use the simple cypher, and he certainly couldn’t create a usual solution engine code himself.
Bicker-bicker-bicker went the bicker as he tapped away, encoding his message in dots and dashes.
The world might burn, but at least the Badeyev family would make a profit off the ashes…
*
El Pueblo del Cometa, Adamantine Republic of California
November 5th 1896
Carolina Deakin pumped the pedals of her celeripede with renewed vigour as she climbed the foothills of Telegraph Hill towards her destination. Her dress, businesslike and daringly short by all but Californian fashions, whipped up as she accelerated up Fowler Street,[9] exposing fleeting glimpses of tanned, muscled calves. She ignored the lewd whistles she attracted from boys and young men, many of them ’peders themselves. She allowed herself a grim smile when one overbold youngblood decided to try to pursue her on his own ’pede, only to give up two blocks along and pull over to cough up his lungs in furious confusion. That lad might have one of the newest models, a rich idiot’s toy with four gears and spring suspension, but a ’pede was only as good as its rider, and in all of Cometa, there was none to match Miss Caro Deakin.
Not only was she experienced and physically fit, she also knew her hilly city from a celerepedist’s perspective like no other. This was why she was avoiding the rookie mistake of Veliky Street,[10] whose seemingly smoother path was invariably clogged by crowds and other obstacles, preferring the narrower, steeper but ultimately easier Fowler Street which ran parallel to it. The streets’ names were not entirely coincidental. While Veliky Street had countless vitches[11] living in and around it, Fowler Street was the heart of Yankeetown. Almost all the signs she saw were in English, barring the multilingual street signs that the Consuls had recently implemented (despite much protest from the opposition in the Senate). From the fleeting glimpses she caught as she sped past, Caro guessed that few of the Fowler Streeters shared the views of their more bombastic Senate partisans; none of the signs appeared to have been vandalised. Of course, language brinksmanship was complicated by the fact that more than one country spoke Spanish or English, whereas Russian was more unambiguous. She passed another innovation of the Consuls, a statue of the once much-neglected La Zorra, on her left.
Despite Caro’s local knowledge, she realised she’d failed to take one thing into account. It was the Fifth of November. Almost three hundred years earlier, the Catholic terrorist Guy Fawkes had failed to blow up King James VI and I in London. The Anglophone side of Caro’s family was Carolinian (hence her name), not American, and hence she had grown up among people whose sensitivity towards Catholics in their midst had led to them quietly dropping the more…rambunctious elements of the celebration.
Not so the Fowler Streeters. While continuing to cheerfully wave to any confused passers-by from California’s Catholic plurality, the Yankeetown men, women and children were lighting street bonfires in violation of the fire code, letting off fireworks probably originally made over in Little Cathay for the upcoming Chinese New Year, and wheeling around effigies of Guy Fawkes—and, yes, the Pope himself. Caro rolled her eyes at that and pedalled harder, trying to ignore the blasts of hot air and sparks from the bonfires.
The chants of ‘
Burn him in a tub of tar! Burn him like a blazing star! Burn his body from his head – then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead!’ had dissolved into confused, drunken huzzahs by the time Caro emerged from Fowler Street. Telegraph Hill now loomed behind her, a dark and vague shape in the November mist, the great Optel towers which gave it its name only occasionally flickering and fluttering into life these days now that Lectel was everywhere. There were exceptions, though. People had been shocked a few years back by the scandal in Las Estrellas where a bank’s Lectel line had been successfully tapped and used to facilitate a robbery. Some had gone back to Optel, even though that was obviously far easier to intercept. And some had gone back to the good old-fashioned human courier, who could carry a physical message with them. Back in the day there had been horseback messengers. Now, celeripedes allowed keen young men to race through every nook and cranny of a city, powering through blockages and jams that would bring a supposedly faster steam-mobile to a halt.
Young men, and a few young women. There weren’t many jobs available to a woman in the world, but this was California, the land of opportunity. Caro was forging her own path, taking information from A to B faster than any other courier, whether it be stock prices between rich brokers or bizarre orders for two tons of camphorite and a company of actors from the eccentric inventor Dr. Walgrave.
Caro had reached her destination. This was the Embarcadero, the docklands street, partly built on reclaimed land. Nowadays docks were expanding far beyond it, too – there was even talk of shifting shipbuilding to Encinal [Oakland] on the other side of the Hidden Bay to make more room for docks. Lectel lines sprouted through the air as well as underground, joining the customs houses with the stock exchanges and the headquarters of the trading companies. It was to one of these which Caro now raced, a bustling building with stone foundations, a brickwork ground floor and three additional wooden storeys rising above it. The sign above the big coaching door round the back (the old stables now filled with steam-mobiles) depicted two large old-fashioned cannon and three smaller ones, each of them prominently bearing the wooden plugs called tompions which had sealed up cannon when not in use. The larger cannons were crudely anthropomorphised and dressed up like a mother and father, the smaller in children’s clothes. It had nothing to do with the business transacted here at No. 44, which did not especially deal in arms, but was rather a crude and obtuse pun on the name of the august institution’s owner.
Young Mr. Tompkins, in his mid-fifties, was waiting for Caro, his hand outstretched. She stumbled to a halt, even her famous endurance at an end, but waited to carefully lean her ’pede against the stand provided before handing her satchel to the man. Tompkins extracted a small strongbox from the satchel and fumbled with the key on a chain around his neck, while using his other hand to impatiently wag his finger at the boy next to him. The boy, doubtless from one of the side branches of the vast and sprawling Tompkins family, hastily slid a large glass along a table as Caro collapsed into a seat before it. Mist condensed off the glass even in the relative chill of November, both suggesting the boy had raided the icebox and concealing the slightly unusual colour of the liquid inside. Panting measuredly, Caro nodded thanks, grabbed the glass and swallowed a mouthful of the liquid to ease the hot thirst that had built up within her on her journey. She almost gagged at the unfamiliar taste. “That’s no ice tea! What in tarnation is
that, Mr. Tompkins?”
Tompkins smiled at her but his eyes were still on the strongbox as he opened it. He wagged his finger again at the boy, who explained. “Hope you dursn’t mind, Miss Carolina. ’Tis a new innomavation from New Granada, ’tho they say the goodfolk in your pa’s country have been imbibin’ it for a while. They call it Aero-Kola, after the African nut which is said to give the flavour.”
“Well,” Caro said, smacking her lips thoughtfully, “it certainly has a certain…
zing to it. Hits the spot. Are you sure it’s only this African nut?”
“Well—” the boy began, only to be interrupted, not unkindly, by Young Mr. Tompkins. “Aul wright, little Mickey, let’s see you earn your keep. Go down to Mr. Williams and tell him to…” Tompkins pulled a pencil from his pocket and scribbled industriously, “sell this…sell that…buy this…oh, don’t forget that…” Caro caught a glimpse of his frantic shorthand before the note vanished into Mickey’s pocket. He threw Caro a confused salute, blushed and fled.
“The boy means well,” Tompkins told her, shaking his head.
“I’m sure he does,” Caro said politely. Unselfconsciously, she began to rub down her thigh and calf muscles, knowing they would seize up otherwise. “If you don’t mind me asking, what…?”
Tompkins glanced at the wall as though he could see through it. “There’s no harm, I guess the news should arrive in a day or so if they use their fastest steamships…and I might have more courier jobs for you, Miss Caro.”
Caro smiled wanly, pulling off her courier’s cap to let her chestnut hair cascade freely down her neck. “A girl’s job is never done.”
Tompkins ignored this, clearly engrossed in his own thoughts. “Yes, you might as well know. It looks like somebody’s sneezed and the Exchange has caught a cold. Not just hear but now it’s spread to Monterey and Las Estrellas too. Maybe further.” He must have seen Caro’s confused expression, for he elaborated: “I mean someone started selling some stocks and buying others, a Russian investor my sources think, and everyone else is following him because he might be on to something.”
“Little pebbles make an avalanche,” Caro murmured. “What is he buying and selling?”
Tompkins ran a hand through his thinning hair as he thought. “He’s selling shares in the Ayutthai Railway Company, that’s one of those Meridian concerns building railways in—”
“—Siam, yes I could guess that part,” Caro said with some asperity.
“That and similar companies. Meridian concerns abroad, some American ones too. Anything,” Tompkins said slowly, “anything that required reliable trade between the various global Meridian and American interests…”
“Anything that requires
peace?” Caro said quietly, filling the silence.
Tompkins nodded tightly. He opened a cupboard and pulled out something rather stronger than Aero-Kola, pouring himself a glass. “And that fits with the rest of it,” he said. “Buying shares in companies that make weapons, steel foundries, powder mills, xylofortex plants, guano mines in the UPSA…”
“Then it’s war!” croaked a new voice from the corner. Tompkins sighed and rolled his eyes as the voice continued: “War again, between America and Luppi’s little backstabbers! Time to take back what’s rightfully ours! Time to crush those southron traitors!”
“
Please, Dad,” Tompkins said through gritted teeth, “not when Caro’s here.”
“Eh? What?” The gnarled figure of Old Mr. Tompkins emerged from the shadows. He had come to California in the Great American War as a soldier, Caro recalled, and had never left. “Speak up, sonny! And who’s your lady friend?” he added, leering horribly at Caro. It was no worse than she got when she ’peded through the city, but at least then she was a moving target.
“
Dad!” Tompkins said frustratedly. “Go back to your beer and baccy, please!”
Old Mr. Tompkins sighed but complied. “And we’ve got good baccy,” he added triumphantly, “not like those yellow-bellies and their tariff war! About time old Virginny did something right,” he added approvingly.
“Sorry about this,” Tompkins told Caro. “Listen, you can have a bonus if you get this to the Volkov Ironworks by eight o’clock.” He handed her satchel back, a new message inside.
Caro nodded. War, then? War between the ENA and the UPSA, as Old Mr. Tompkins evidently thought? California would be in a tough position, but she trusted the Consuls to keep the Adamantine Republic neutral throughout the conflict. A decade from now, she thought, the world might be in ruins, but at least her city would still stand...[12]
*
Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires Province, United Provinces of South America
November 19th 1896
Ignacio Cabrera reluctantly folded up his favourite sequent as the Plaza de la Unión[13] continued to fill with people. There must be tens of thousands here, if not hundreds. The square was packed. It might have seemed a tempting target for the enemies of the people, but even the private corporate armies milled around uncertainly on the edge of the square, reluctant to get involved. For the first time in years, a politician had got the companies scared. When Corominas had backed down from the PAWC over a decade ago, everyone had known that democracy no longer meant anything in the United Provinces. What they hadn’t realised was that the people would, at long last, fight back.
And their champion was the man who now took the stage before the statue of President-General Riquelme, accompanied by blaring cheers and waving flags. The flags were diverse. Some were plain red banners. Some bore the classic inverted black fleur-de-lys that had flown over Europe a century before, or imitative symbols from the more recent Jacobin period in Portugal. (Some even dared blacken and invert the Torch or Sun of the UPSA itself). Others, though, had different banners: the old yellow-black flag of the Volksrepublik Deutschland with its red double-decapitated eagle, similar banners redone in Meridian colours, or even white diamonds to suggest Adamantianism. The politician on the stage seemed to take in the same things Ignacio did. “We’re a motley crew, aren’t we?” he remarked with dry humour, projecting his voice well. Despite that, Ignacio guessed the people near the edges of the square could scarcely hear him. He wondered if there was a way around it. Perhaps there was something to that silly Ventriloquist Machine from Ireland which the papers had been mocking, after all.
“We’re a motley crew,” continued Álvaro Monterroso. “At other times, we’d be at each others’ throats, wouldn’t we?” He smacked his fist into his other palm, a shocking clap of noise to contrast with his convivial words. “And THAT is why they have grown so strong!” he barked. “THAT is why the vile money-counters have been allowed to undermine our livelihoods, to steal our country from beneath our feet, to poison our water and ruin our land!” The crowd roared in approval, Ignacio among them. Monterroso was saying what they wanted to hear, and he was saying it with charisma which no politician on the Cobrist side had offered in years.
“One hundred years ago, some of your forefathers decided that they had been driven too far.” He gestured at the statue of Riquelme behind him. “They had been badly mistreated by their distant Spanish overlords, who had abandoned and betrayed them once too often, caring only for storing up their own treasure on earth. Well, ‘where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’,[14] and those Spaniards learned that they had buried their hearts in the earth where they found that treasure, buried it where moths and vermins destroy, where thieves break in and steal. What is Spain today? What do the Spanish people have to show for their rulers’ long days of treasure-hunting? Nothing!” Monterroso surveyed the crowd. “The moth-eaten heart of Spain was stolen long ago, and all her past glories now count for nothing. The same will come to pass of we in the United Provinces if we do not declare that here, and no further, shall the line be drawn!”
He raised a hand. “Trust in one thing, my brothers and sisters.
We have already terrified them.” He allowed himself a cold smile. “This isn’t how it was meant to be, is it? No, no. You were meant to do what you’ve done for the past few miserable decades, split between yourselves and argue over petty points, and let the Unionists and the Adamantines take the top two! They’re the only
real parties, you know!” The crowd booed. “You have to pick one or the other, or your vote’s
wasted!”
“Well, we know that our votes would be wasted on either. They’re the same. Once upon a time they weren’t, and both had some good people in, but now they’re just hollow shells, indistinguishable lobbying machines for the venal capitalists who put money before men.[15] You can see it now.” Monterroso gestured. “Herrera’s trying to appeal, the fool! He thinks it’s his God-given right to have second place! He can’t see past the end of his nose: all Priestley’s little friends are abandoning him and the Unionists. They’ll just back Santos and the Adamantines instead, and why not? That was the plan! ‘Let the Adamantines be the heroic opposition, and then maybe we can let them win, the people will be happy—and we, the capitalists, stay in real control!’” The Intendant of Buenos Aires Province sneered. “That’s what they think of you. They think you’re stupid. They think you can be divided against one another, have your little fights while they take all the spoils.”
Monterroso ran a hand through his hair. “The trouble is, too often they’ve been right. We’ve allowed ourselves to be divided. Should we oppose poor immigrants undercutting our wages, or welcome them as fellow oppressed brothers?” He looked around the crowd, saw the groups with their disparate flags watching him raptly. “I say neither – all the men of South America are brothers but they should never be oppressed!” Uncertain cheers. “In my grandfather’s day, it was true—poor immigrants came across the River Plate,” he jerked a thumb in the direction of the river, “took jobs for lower wages than Meridians would take, and put people out of work.” His eyes narrowed as only some parts of the crowd cheered. “I know this because my grandfather
was a Cisplatine immigrant.” Some shocked intakes of breath. “He wanted the same rights and the same wages as his Meridian friends, but he was denied them by the government which saw an opportunity in turning them against one another. Let us fight over cents while they keep the dollars for themselves!”
He paused. “Or, no. Let us unite, as one, and overthrow the ruling classes. Not by fire and the sword, but by the means that our forefathers gave to us: not by the bullet but by the ballot. Let us bring down the vile corporations that have enslaved our land and put a girdle of dollars to enchain the world. Let men walk tall once again—and women, too,” he added, to some surprised reactions. “The UPSA was once the envy of the world in progress, but now we lag behind. There’s no money in liberty,” he added, and though it was almost an aside, Ignacio already knew that these were the five words, spoken in tones of increasing outrage, that would come to summarise the speech.
“Now,” Monterroso said softly, dangerously. “Now, the Americans demand apologies and reparations. And for what? Because one of the company’s private little armies, with troops from all over the Hermandad, used a Meridian weapon to kill an old American President’s relative in Siam. That is sad for his family. But what does it have to do with us?” He raised a hand threateningly. “Now you see the true invidiousness of the companies. They have dragged us into a conflict that has no connection with our country, a country they barely even acknowledge anymore, and now they want to pay reparations out of
OUR TAXES to pay their own debt!” he roared. “Meanwhile, the Supremacists in America please their own voters by seizing our ships in dock and firing on our traders on the open sea – not corporate ships but Meridian ones manned by good honest people!”
There was another roar of anger from the crowd. For the first time, Ignacio felt uncertain. Everything Monterroso had said was true, but… “And the capitalists want us to crawl on our bellies to apologise to the Americans in the face of this outrage, brushing everything under the carpet so their precious trade is not impeded, their nice little graphs in their financial papers do not dip a single
ligne!”
Monterroso simply shook his head. “No. NO. When the polls open tomorrow and Señor Santos face off…that is your word. NO. We have taken enough and we shall take no more.” He spread his hands. “I do not want to fight the Americans, but their aggression must be answered—as well as the negligence and evil of those who provoked it.”
The candidate paused, taking one last look around the crowd. He finished on a familiar formula. “Tell me, now: are you Colorados, are you Mentians, are you independents?
“
NO!” the crowd roared, Ignacio among them, despite his misgivings about Monterroso’s hotblooded stance against the ENA.
“Then who are you?” Monterroso said with a smile.
“
THE PEOPLE!” they bellowed according to the exchange they had heard many times. “THE PEOPLE! THE PEOPLE! THE PEOPLE!”
“The People’s Party,” Monterroso said softly. “And now, to arms!”
[1] lcf = lieue carré française or square French league.
[2] This term is being used a bit anachronistically.
[3] The language is likely bowdlerised by this appearing in a family magazine.
[4] See above.
[5] In fact Michael Hiedler was dead by this point, a mistake by the author.
[6] An imperial Russian unit of measurement very close to one kilometre.
[7] See 3 and 4.
[8] OTL Vladivostok.
[9] Roughly where OTL Pacific Avenue, San Francisco, lies.
[10] Approximately OTL Broadway.
[11] A mildly disparaging Californian slang term for Russians, derived from their –ovich male patronymics.
[12] Clearly a rather ham-fisted attempt by the author to allude to the Cometa Earthquake of 1906, which happened almost ten years after this.
[13] This developed from the earlier Plaza de Armas, which in OTL eventually became the Plaza de Mayo.
[14] Matthew 6:21.
[15] Note the term ‘capitalism’ is not used in TTL, but ‘capitalists’ in the sense of ‘those who work with money’ is an older term – it predates Marx in OTL.
