Rip woke up thoroughly refreshed. He pulled off the bandage Nancy gave him and inspected his arm. Just as Blair said, he could find no trace of the bullet wound.

“That’s certainly handy,” he thought, feeling his old scar from that knife fight back in junior high. “Too bad it’s not retroactive. There are limits, I suppose.”

He freshened up and picked out what he hoped were appropriate clothes, making a mental note to reimburse Blair for the tailor now that he had some money. This time he donned some of the venture clothing the tailor had made.

It was already close to 8:00 so he wandered over to the main house and tapped on the window set in the back door. Nancy looked up and waved him in.

“Have a seat! Breakfast is almost ready. It’s ham and eggs this morning, with rye toast and marmalade.”

“Sounds great.”

As soon as he sat down at the table, Blair walked in, wearing Venture Society khakis.

“We’ll get you suited up proper when we visit Doctors’ Commons later today. How did you sleep?”

“Like a baby. You’d never know I got shot yesterday.”

“Being enhanced gives you a remarkable constitution and recuperative powers.”

Nancy bustled in with a tray of food and some tea, plus a coffee pitcher.

“I tried this recipe from Matilda at the marketplace. The coffee beans are already roasted, but I had to buy a grinder. See what you think, Mr. Coulter.”

She poured him a cup and laid out cream and sugar, which he declined. He blew on the hot coffee and took a tiny sip. His eyebrows went up.

“Not bad. Not bad at all. Please make it like this every time.”

Nancy beamed in pure happiness and set out various other items. Then she adjusted everything on the table again, quite needlessly.

The front doorbell rang.

“Oh! That’ll be the post.”

She bustled out to answer the door.

“Hm. Morning mail,” Rip said. “That must be nice.”

“Oh, we get mail at all hours.”

“You do?”

“Yes, six times a day in the city. Less out in more rural areas, of course.”

“You get the mail delivered to your house six times a day?”

“Indeed. Although, we don’t always get letters that often. Do you not have mail service on your world?”

“Well . . . in my country I guess we still get snail mail once a day, in most places. Except Sunday. Although, even that’s changed with . . . uh . . . a big company that likes to mail things to people. They buy it off the internet and, uh . . .”

He abandoned trying to explain Sunday delivery exceptions with the United States Postal Service.

“Mostly we get official mail once a day, six days a week. And there’s a couple big private delivery services for other packages.”

“Snail mail, you say?”

“Yeah, that’s what we call traditional mail. Everybody else uses email, or better yet, text.”

“Ah. So, how does ‘text’ work?”

“Well, you see everybody has a smartphone. And they all have a text app, using the SMS service. And so, you tap in the message on the screen of your phone and the other person gets it pretty much instantly.”

She stared at him silently.

“I’m not making any sense, am I?”

“No. No matter. Did we get anything important, Nancy?”

“You have a letter from the Colonel, dear.”

Nancy walked back into the room and handed over a cream-colored envelope. Blair took it and broke the seal, pulling out a single sheet of stationary.

“He says the hearing is after lunch, at two. So, we’ll relax this morning. Nancy can prepare us an early meal and we’ll head over to Doctors’ Corners with plenty of time to spare. How does that sound?”

“Fine with me.”

They talked a while longer, then Rip excused himself to go back to the cottage. He wanted to finish reading the books Blair had picked out for him.

Thumbing through the titles, he decided he had absorbed as much as he could from ‘Rossum’s Rules of Etiquette at Court.’ He also had read through ‘Decorum for the Genteel Classes.’ This one he decided to keep for reference. The rules, such as they were, seemed odd in places. He would not stick out too much if he knew the rules.

That left ‘A Brief History of Umbria,’ which he quickly finished. Several questions remained stirring within him, and he decided to explore Blair’s library for answers.

Taking the books on court etiquette and the brief history in hand, he made his way back inside the kitchen door. Neither Nancy nor Blair were to be seen, so he walked down the hall and over to the wing of the house where Blair kept her library.

He found an open set of double doors leading to several massive bookshelves. The library took up two floors, with a balcony level on the second floor. The center on the first floor had long shelves, all filled.

Rip decided the entire place had to be loaded with thousands of titles.

He walked around in some confusion, trying to figure out how things were organized. Each shelf had a subject matter sign posted on it. He realized at last that the books were arranged by author, alphabetically from the top left on each shelf.

Wandering around, he found the shelves devoted to history in the center of the room, and he began browsing. Eventually, he pulled out five that looked interesting.

These he brought to an overstuffed leather couch set off in one corner with some other furniture. He made himself comfortable in the reading nook and began making his way through the books.

A couple hours later, someone walked in. He looked up and found Blair approaching with a book of her own.

“Oh, hello. How long have you been here?”

“I dunno. A while. Do you read here often?”

“Yes, either here or in my room, mostly. You’d be surprised how much information an effective spy is expected to process.”

“Make sense. And, have you read every one of these books? That’s a lot.”

“Yes. I have a skill, actually. Speed Reading. It’s over level 5 at the moment.”

“That’s impressive.”

“So, what have you gleaned from your history lessons this morning?”

She nodded at the small pile of books on the coffee table, taking a seat in the wingback chair across from him.

“I’ve learned that your world and mine have departed in several key ways, but remain identical in others. I think, but I’m not sure yet, that you have many of the same people we do. But, since the American and French Revolutions were squashed, those people did not rise to the same heights, or at least not in the same way.”

She raised an eyebrow and said, “Do go on.”

“George Washington, for instance, was a hero of the French and Indian War on both worlds. But here, he never served as the United States’ first president.”

“The United States. And that’s your country? Or is it Texas?”

“Texas used to be a country, but joined the United States later.”

“I see.”

“Now, during the French Revolution, they murdered all the nobles and changed society in every way imaginable. Very few of their changes lasted. They were far too radical, like forcing an odd ten-day week calendar on everybody in France. But one thing that did stick, and gained wide acceptance, was the metric system for measurements.”

“The metric system?”

“Yes. Everything was measured in decimals. So, one meter had a hundred centimeters. A kilometer had a thousand meters. Same with weights and volumes. It made measuring things a lot easier.”

Blair made a dismissive gesture.

“Our system is easy, too. Have you heard of Gallon Man? It’s a way to teach school children how many ounces and pints and quarts are in a gallon.”

“Yes, I know Gallon Man. The United States never adopted the metric system. But we did start out with a decimalized currency. So, 100 cents make a dollar. That was helpful. And the dollar became something of a global favorite, partly based on that. The United Kingdom, my world’s version of Greater Umbria, decimalized their currency sometimes in the 1970s, I think.”

Blair waved the comment away again.

“Our monetary system is simple. You just have to memorize it. Twelve pennies to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound.”

“Right. But you’ve got all kinds of odd coins.”

“Not at all. A farthing is a quarter penny. A half penny is self-explanatory. So’s a threepence and a sixpence. A florin is worth two shillings, a crown is worth five shillings. There’s also the half-crown. Larger amounts you can get banknotes for. And there you have it, easy as can be.”

“Hm. I guess if you grew up with it . . . Anyway, the point is your world never adopted these standard, decimalized ways of handling things.”

“And your world adopted the French way for measuring, and the colonies’ monetary system?”

“To an extent. Britain decimalized the pound, like I said. The European Union adopted a decimalized currency too, eventually.”

“I like the pound sterling just the way it is, thank you very much. It’s good for children to learn to count in twelves. And to memorize Gallon Man. There’s nothing wrong with memory exercises.”

She seemed rather irritated at this point in the discussion, and Rip recalled the arguments she and Chance often had.

He smiled to defuse the tension.

“Don’t worry. I’m sure nothing’s going to change anytime soon. I am curious about the fact that all the foreign guns I’ve seen seem to shoot the same caliber of bullets, though.”

“Ah, that. Well, you see, some decades ago most of the empires met and signed a treaty, establishing Umbrian imperial measurements as the world standard.”

“That’s . . . how convenient for Umbria. How did you talk the French and the Prussians and everybody else into adopting your system over theirs?”

“Well, it helped that our empire is bigger than everyone else’s. And to trade with us, we demand using our system of measurements. So it was already something of a de facto standard in international relations. Also, we had recently established military supremacy over the French. And finally, when we battled the tsar in the Crimean Incident, four empires allied with us to defeat the Russians. At that point, standards in ammunition and other things became an increasingly obvious necessity. So, the Weights and Measurements Convention led to a treaty making our system the world’s standard.”

“I see. So, what do French children learn? Le Homme Gallon?”

She smiled.

“Maybe? Je ne sais pas.”