Chapter Fifty-Two (Patreon)

Despite the northerly climes, Siberian summer was a warm affair. Temperatures in July reached the eighties (Fahrenheit) with regularity. During the midday break thousands of Irkutskers stripped to their underwear and leapt into the cool waters of Lake Baikal. When schools let out between at four their place would be taken by schoolchildren, many of whom delighted in playing jokes upon the fishermen as they came back to the docks with the day’s catch.

“It’s a serious problem,” Carl Hehn, the Director of Agriculture, insisted even as the rest of the council smirked at the image of naked schoolboys swimming away with nets full of whitefish. “The omul harvest in July was down twenty-six percent compared to last year.”

“What do you want us to do?” Anosov asked. “Prohibit the children from swimming? That will only make them wish to swim more.”

“A separate beach, just for swimming,” Hehn proposed. “And a prohibition on swimming near the docks.”

“How would such a prohibition be enforced?”

“Let the fishermen do it,” Gretsch suggested. “If they catch a boy trying to steal their catch, they can make him haul it back for them. Might teach the lad something about honest work.”

“On a more serious note,” Alexander intervened, ignoring Hehn’s reddening face. “What progress has been made on the University?”

Gretsch shifted awkwardly. “Progress is being made,” the Director of Education said.

Alexander’s eyes narrowed. “How much progress?”

“We have hired a Chair of Applied Mathematics.”

Anosov leaned forward. “A chair is good. How many do you have?”

“We have forty-four chairs,” Gretsch said stiffly. “One for each department.”

“And how many of them have been filled?”

Gretsch looked to Alexander, whose eyes narrowed. “How many have been filled, Gretsch?” Alexander demanded.

“Sixteen,” Gretsch whispered.

“Sixteen?” It was not Anosov who spoke in triumph, not Alexander with viciousness. It was Haass, that most gentle doctor, who spoke with horror. “Only sixteen chairs have been filled? How are we meant to fill the schools with teachers, the hospitals with doctors? My God man, what have you been doing?”

“I have been working to ensure that the children of Siberia know how to read!” Gretsch exclaimed. “Do you know how many illiterates we had even four years ago, not only in Russian but in their own language as well? Millions is the answer, millions upon millions. That has been my primary focus, not a single university but a series of schools intended to grant learning to all who reside within.”

“And when those students arrive at the level for a university education?”

“By then I will have a full faculty,” Gretsch promised. “We have hired four chairs this year alone, and a great number of your Imperial Highness’ researchers have agreed to teach part-time.”

“That falls well short of the Five-Year Plan,” Alexander noted. His eyes were cold, ice blue drilling into Gretsch’s head.

“The first classes will be able to take place next year,” Gretsch promised. “Not for every major, but there will be sufficient classes for a University. One that can rival the Imperial University of Moscow or Saint Petersburg by 1850.”

Alexander held his gaze for a minute. The room was silent. None dared breathe. “See to it that you keep your word,” Alexander said at last. “I am not in the habit of employing liars.”

*

Maximilian had never visited his ancestral homeland. Born in Bavaria two years after the Empire’s final fall, Maximilian had been subject to the same laws that banned his father, Marshal of the Empire Eugene de Beauharnais, from ever visiting French soil. The laws had been repealed after the July Revolution, yet Maximilian’s Bavarian relatives had shown little desire for him to associate with the Orleans monarchy. Destiny and love had taken him east and, for a time, Maximilian had contented himself with the knowledge that his future lay far and away from the lands of his ancestors.

Yet today he stood at the heart of Paris, the Champs-Elysees. He stood on the same ground where crowds larger than those his brother in law drew heralded his father’s victories. The lands where his grandmother once walked as Empress, a daughter of far-flung Martinique made the equal of the Romanovs and Habsburgs. It was intoxicating, until Maximilian remembered that it was not coincidence, nor divine providence that brought him here. It was not family business, nor idle curiosity much as he might pretend otherwise (though he did seek to satisfy some of his more inquisitive pursuits).

None of the trip was his idea, for all that he delighted in it. Nor was he paying for it. The costs were borne by his brother-in-law. The ships that took him and his family from Saint Petersburg to Stockholm, where he saw his sister for the first time in years, now the Queen of Sweden watching over her eldest son as he paid court to a Romanov. The hotels he stayed at in Paris, with meals that surpassed those found in the Winter Palace of Saint Petersburg, though the lacked the surfeit of spices found in Busan and Mukden. The trains that would bring him to see his sisters in the Germanies, in Bavaria and Wurttemberg. The great steamships with cabins of luxury that would bear him and his family to Portugal, where they would spend the fall with Maximilian’s sister Amelie, widow of the late and rarely lamented Pedro I of Brazil. All of it was paid for by Alexander, and none of it came for free.

Maximilian’s work here was but one example of the cost. Accompanied by the young engineer Étienne Lenoir and the aging physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier, Maximilian toured the Industrial Exposition of 1844. Dedicated to displaying the great products and abilities of the French people and nation, the three Russian employees were under strict orders to hire the best of the former while weakening the latter. Maximilian felt only a little sorrow at this. While he disliked mistreating his father’s homeland so, France had abandoned him long before he turned on it. From what Maximilian could tell, Lenoir thought similarly. The Belgian engineer had lived in France for only a precious few months before being recruited to Irkutsk with that most essential of promises for those born with little: food, shelter, and a steady paycheck. No, it was Peltier that Maximilian would need to keep his eye on, though he rather suspected the ‘servants’ Alexander had assigned him would take care of the physicist long before Maximilian spotted anything awry.

The exhibition itself was at once awe-inspiring and disappointing. To see so many scientists in a single place–nearly four thousand exhibits!–was a source of wonder. To see how precious few of them amounted to more than them most basic reorganization of what was already known was soulcrushing. Who cared about Monsieur Durand and his pump which (as far as Maximilian and his companions could tell) contained precisely zero new inventions and still needed to be powered by men rather than machine? Who cared about the new deposits of iron and coal found by the Lot and Garonne, or the methods used to extract them? They bragged of seventy-two tons of pig iron a day. Russia had steel mills larger than that, Maximilian had seen them with his own eyes.

There were some inventions worthy of praise. The King’s own optician was present with improvements to his microscope. There were examples of Moroccan-style leather and a new device capable of performing addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and even the calculation of square and cube roots with mere presses of a some buttons, enabling even an uneducated officeworker or staff sergeant to do the work of an accountant or artillery spotter. Maximilian attempted to hire the man, whose small dull product went largely unnoticed amidst the large and glamorous exhibition. Alas, he was both a wealthy man and a patriot. Maximilian was only able to purchase a dozen of the machines, though he did not doubt that would be enough for some of the researchers to figure out how to construct them. It was not as if Alexander lacked the wealth to pay fines for patent infringement.