Some people joked that the Thuringen Gardens ought to have been the location of the new Grantville mint. Since the place seemed to have a license to print money, they said, they might as well actually do it there and save on freight.
It was not that there was any shortage of places in Grantville for the hungry—and thirsty—to seek refreshment and unwind. There were places with fancier food, finer drink, and all manner of other selling points.
The Gardens, though, had been there first with the mix of up- and down-time comforts and customs, and had become something of an Official Institution in Grantville. In fact, from what anyone could tell it had become famous all over Germany. Now that central Germany had been politically stabilized—by seventeenth-century standards, anyway—and the armies that had ravaged it driven off, Grantville was not only a boom town but the central tourist attraction for anyone in Europe with the money and leisure time to afford to come there. And each and every one of those visitors sooner or later made a beeline for the Gardens.
The management of the Gardens had cheerfully—and haphazardly—kept expanding the establishment to match the clientele, to the despair of Grantville’s more snooty citizens and the sheer outrage of anyone with any sense of proper architectural design. It had become a sprawling giant of a “building,” growing up as well as out.
But, like most people, Frank didn’t care. If the owners were cavalier about the design of the establishment, they were quite careful to stay within Grantville’s building code when it came to what mattered. And, whatever else it was—usually overcrowded, loud, smoky and hot—the Gardens was almost always a good-humored and cheerful place. Even the inevitable and constant disputes over theology and politics always seemed to be friendlier in the Gardens than anywhere else.
Granted, that wasn’t perhaps saying much, looked at from one angle. A “moderate dispute” in the seventeenth century would have been classed as a “brawl” in up-time America. But at least, in the Gardens, people settled their disputes with fisticuffs instead of sabers, stones and the gibbet.
Frank pushed open the door and the noise and smoke hit him like a wall. The main bar-and-dining room was colorful and busy. Especially colorful, now that the bright hues that Lothlorien was turning out were making inroads into the brown and tan and goose-turd green of mass-market fabric. It looked like a good night in the Gardens, and it was a pity they hadn’t found Gerry and Ron. Frank called over his shoulder: “Get the beers in, Aidan, I’ll find us a table.”
It was usually as well to get a round from the bar, since the service sometimes got a little slow of a Saturday night. As Frank wandered in, though, he saw that the room wasn’t quite as full as it had looked. There were still some tables at the back. People hadn’t wanted to get too close to any of the fireplaces, where the fires were still roaring with fresh wood. Later in the evening, when the crowd had throttled back to the die-hards, they would cluster around the softer embers.
“Frank?” Somehow the voice cut through the hubbub and the tunings of the evening’s pickup band. That was all the more impressive because of the mellow and relaxed tone.
Damn. Frank looked around for his dad, panicking slightly before he realized, No, it’s cool, I told Magda.
He spotted his father’s table and headed for it, none too eagerly. Tom “Stoner” Stone was Grantville’s leading ageing hippie, general good guy, pharmacologist, recreational horticulturist and lately owner and CEO of the Lothlorien Farbewerk, the Lothlorien Commune as once was. And, on account of being the aforementioned hippie, almost impossible to generation-gap.
“Dad, hi, what’s up, what’re you—” Frank dried up. Around the table were Mike Stearns, Balthazar Abrabanel, Doctor James Nichols, Don Francisco Nasi, Frank Jackson, Father Mazzare, the Reverend Jones and—Frank’s attempt at calm assurance turned to cold gray slop in his guts—Mister Piazza. Now the secretary of state, but—more to the point—the former principal of Frank’s high school.
“Probably the same thing you are, Frank,” his dad said. “Did you tell Magda you were coming? Are Gerry and Ron here with you?” There was no note of accusation in his dad’s voice, just concern that proper procedure had been followed. He used the same tone of voice to run down the checklist when his sons helped in the lab or the greenhouse, confirming that the sensible things had been done and useful lessons learned.