“Not so well,” Olga admitted. “But it’s nothing like as large as these huge metropoli.”

“Fine. We’ll go to the railway terminal, cross over, and walk in bold as brass. There are two of us and we can look after each other. Right?”

Olga nodded. “We’ll be back in my apartment by afternoon. It will be a small adventure.” She put her spoon down. “The council will meet on the morrow, won’t it? I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad.”

“It’ll have to be good,” Miriam assured her. “It can’t be anything else.”

Extraordinary Meeting

Two women sat alone in a first-class compartment as the morning train steamed through the wintry New England countryside. Puffs of smoke coughed past from the engine, stained dirty orange by the sun that hung low over icy woods and snow-capped farmland. The older woman kept her nose buried in the business pages of The London Intelligencer, immune to the rattle of track joints passing underneath the carriage. The younger woman in contrast started at every strange noise and stared out at the landscape with eyes eager to squeeze every detail from each passing town and village. Church steeples in particular seemed to fascinate her. “There are so many people!” Olga exclaimed quietly. “The countryside, it’s so packed!”

“Like home.” Miriam stifled a yawn as she read about the outrageous attempts of a consortium of robber barons from Carolingia to extract a royal monopoly on bituminous path-making, and the trial of a whaler’s captain accused of barratry. “Like home, ninety years ago.” She unbuttoned her jacket; the heating in the carriage was efficient but difficult to control.

“But this place is so rich!”

Miriam folded her paper. “Gruinmarkt will be this rich too, and within our lifetimes, if I have my way.”

“But how does it happen? How do you make wealth? Nobody here knows how the other world got so rich. Where does it come from?”

Miriam muttered to herself, “teach a mercantilist dog new tricks…” She put the paper aside and sat up to face Olga. “Look. It’s a truism that in any land there is so much gold, and so much iron, and so much timber, and so many farmers, isn’t it? So that if you trade with a country, anything you take away isn’t there anymore. Your gain is their loss. Right?”

“Yes.” Olga nodded thoughtfully.