Germany was already restless. The Reichstag was restless. The newspapers were restless.
And across the Empire, from industrial halls to village taverns, people were asking much the same question that had troubled the men inside the palace at Potsdam:
What came next?
Oskar did not hesitate to answer them, or rather, he did not explain himself quite as everyone expected.
When the Crown Prince finally stood before the assembled Reichstag, there was no enormous lecture on naval logistics, Pacific geography or the mathematics of colonial defense. No maps were rolled across the floor. No charts were raised. No hours-long explanation followed.
Oskar simply stood before them.
He acknowledged that Germany had reached a difficult moment. The Ottoman relationship had deteriorated. The old road east was closing. Hard decisions waited ahead, and some of those decisions would offend pride before their wisdom could ever become apparent.
Then he asked them for something considerably more dangerous than agreement.
He asked them for trust.
"I have given what I could to this country," Oskar told them. "I have worked for it. I have sacrificed for it. I have bled for it. And everything I have done—rightly or wrongly—has been done because I believed it would secure the prosperity and survival of Germany, so that those who live beneath its flag might continue to live, work and raise their children in peace."
The chamber had gone remarkably quiet.
"You have trusted me before. You have permitted ideas that once seemed strange, laws that seemed dangerous, industries that appeared impossible. You placed faith in me when there was little reason to do so except my word."
His eyes passed slowly across the chamber.
"And now I ask for that faith once more."
There was no need for Oskar to recite his achievements. Every man there knew them.
Half the Reichstag probably wore something manufactured by one of his companies. Their constituents drove his automobiles, took his medicines, worked beneath electric lights powered by his enterprises and sent their children into schools influenced by ideas he had championed.
Oskar had no need to remind them. Instead he placed one hand over his heart.
"I have already placed everything I possess behind the future of Germany. My fortune, my labour, my blood, my heart."
A pause.
"Now I ask you only this."
His voice lowered.
"Will you place yours beside mine?"
Coming from almost any other prince in Europe, the words might have sounded intolerably arrogant.
Men might have demanded details. They might have laughed. They might have shouted that a nation did not surrender its judgment simply because a royal asked nicely. But Oskar was not almost any other prince.
One deputy rose, then another, then another. Across the chamber men stood, some enthusiastic, others uncertain, others perhaps merely unwilling to remain seated while everyone around them rose. Fists and open hands came against chests in a gesture that spread unevenly through the hall until much of the Reichstag stood before the Crown Prince.
They would hear his proposal, they would examine it.
And, for now, they would trust the Iron Prince who had already carried Germany farther than most of them had once believed possible.
Of course, Oskar had never truly intended to rely upon faith alone. Karl and Tanya had made certain of that.
By the time the Crown Prince entered the Reichstag, weeks of quieter work had already softened the ground beneath him. Certain politicians received invitations, assurances, favors and, where Karl considered philosophical persuasion insufficient, rather handsome gifts of money delivered with enough discretion that nobody felt the need to ask unnecessary questions. They also received books—beautifully printed copies of a peculiar new work entitled The Quest to the Stars.
Officially, it was merely speculative fiction. Unofficially, it was propaganda of almost shameless proportions. Its story began generations in the future, after mankind had spent decades exhausting itself through wars, territorial disputes, hunger, greed and the endless struggle to possess one another's land. Then the Sun began to die. At first the scientists refused to believe it, but the temperatures continued falling, harvests shortened, winters stretched longer and ice crept steadily southward until the calculations became impossible to ignore. Whatever was happening to the Sun was accelerating, and humanity had perhaps a century before Earth itself became incapable of sustaining civilization.
Suddenly every border, colony and ancient quarrel seemed rather small.
The nations of Earth were left with two possibilities. The first was almost impossibly ambitious: reach the Sun itself and somehow reignite the dying star. The second was greater still. Humanity would have to leave—to build vessels capable of carrying men, women, animals, seeds, knowledge and everything else worth saving beyond the dying Solar System and toward another world beneath another sun.
And amid that approaching extinction rose one prince from one conveniently unnamed, though extraordinarily German-looking, nation. He possessed the factories, scientists, machines and, most importantly, the maddening certainty that humanity did not have to perish simply because the universe had presented it with an impossible problem. The story made little attempt at subtlety. The prince became a new Noah, only his ark was not made from timber but steel, engines and rockets. Instead of preserving mankind from a flood, he intended to carry mankind beyond a dying world, and instead of waiting for the waters to recede upon some distant mountain, his survivors would awaken beneath another star.
The central message was difficult to miss. Why should mankind murder itself over islands, borders and scraps of soil when Earth itself was merely one small island floating inside an ocean vastly larger than the Pacific? Why should Germany obsess over possessing a few scattered specks in Oceania when entire worlds might someday lie beyond the sky? The old imperial horizon ended at the edge of a map. Oskar wanted Germany to look up.
Karl considered the book magnificent propaganda. Tanya considered several chapters so melodramatic that she accused Oskar of trying to make politicians cry themselves into supporting the colonial sale. Oskar secretly loved almost every page.
The book was only one part of the campaign. Imperial Image Works carried the same message into illustrations, serialized stories, animated shorts and increasingly elaborate motion pictures. Some showed mankind decades into the future standing beneath enormous rockets while the flags of many nations surrounded a single image of the Earth. Others depicted the Moon, Mars and distant imagined worlds beneath unfamiliar stars. Again and again came variations upon the same theme: one Earth, one humanity, and new horizons waiting above them.
If humanity shared one Earth, then Asians could hardly continue being portrayed merely as faceless hordes threatening Europe from the other side of a map. That part of the campaign was deliberate as well. Imperial Image Works began presenting China and Japan not as strange yellow masses upon political charts, but as ancient civilizations inhabited by ordinary people—families eating together, children attending school, merchants bargaining in markets, students studying medicine and engineering, sailors, farmers, mothers and old men drinking tea. Their clothing, customs, languages and religions differed from those of Germany, certainly, but that was precisely the point. Different did not have to mean monstrous.
The German public was quietly encouraged to see Asians as potential customers, business partners, tourists, friends and, above all, fellow inhabitants of the same very small planet. The Japanese ambassador's wife and daughter became particularly useful to this effort. They began appearing in society magazines wearing elegant European fashions complemented by Oskar's cosmetics, sometimes photographed beside Tanya and the other women of Oskar's household. They attended charitable events, exhibitions, public receptions and even gyms, while photographers especially adored occasions when the Japanese women fussed over Tanya's increasingly prominent pregnancy or entertained Oskar's children as cameras clicked enthusiastically around them.
It became considerably harder to convince an ordinary German family that Japan represented an approaching racial apocalypse when newspapers kept printing photographs of smiling Japanese women holding adorable German children.
Karl contributed in his own peculiar fashion. Somehow, he found himself practicing kendo with members of the Japanese diplomatic circle, and naturally someone brought a camera. Then someone brought a motion-picture camera. The resulting footage of the compact, heavily muscled German businessman being repeatedly struck with a bamboo sword while stubbornly refusing to admit defeat became far more popular than anyone involved had intended.
China received a different treatment. Oskar met repeatedly with representatives of the new Chinese Republic, and those meetings created an entirely different sort of fascination. To everyone's surprise, the Crown Prince understood Chinese customs with an ease that seemed thoroughly unreasonable. He knew when to bow, handled tea correctly, recognized references he should not have recognized and played Weiqi with enough competence that his opponents quickly stopped treating the games as ceremonial opportunities to flatter a European prince.
Then he began speaking Mandarin.
Not perfectly. There were rough edges, strange hesitations and moments when his pronunciation sounded as though it belonged somewhere—or perhaps somewhen—slightly different from the men sitting opposite him. Yet it was undeniably Mandarin, and at one point, after stumbling over a phrase, Oskar apologized and muttered that he simply had not spoken the language properly in a very long time.
One of the Chinese diplomats looked at him curiously. "How long, Your Highness?"
Oskar stared down into his tea for a moment.
"A very long time."
Everyone politely assumed he meant childhood lessons.
Oskar politely allowed them to believe that.
By the time the real political announcements were ready, Germany had already spent weeks being shown something very different from the old image of the East. Japanese families, Chinese businessmen, Asian students studying in German universities, German engineers shaking hands with Chinese merchants, Japanese diplomats beside German aristocrats and children playing together appeared constantly in newspapers, books and film. Above all of them rose the same image again and again: rockets climbing toward a sky that belonged to none of them yet.
The argument was no longer simply that Germany's Pacific colonies were expensive and difficult to defend. It was that they were small—painfully small. A few islands, a few harbours, some timber, fish, coconuts and modest deposits of natural resources. Useful things, certainly, but Oskar was asking Germany to compare them with the Moon, with Mars, with worlds nobody had yet seen and with a future in which mankind might someday have to reach the Sun itself or abandon the Solar System altogether.
Against that horizon, squabbling over possession of distant islands began to look less like imperial grandeur and more like children fighting over stones in a field.
Then the first decision struck the world.
Germany would sell its Pacific possessions.
Berlin was stunned. London was stunned. Washington became deeply interested. Tokyo was perhaps most stunned of all.
When Germany had first approached Japan, the Japanese government had not yet understood the full extent of Berlin's intentions. German diplomats spoke carefully of strategic consolidation, Africa, trade, commercial cooperation and the avoidance of unnecessary rivalry in East Asia. Again and again, they presented Germany's policy not as withdrawal but concentration: the deliberate gathering of national strength rather than its continued dispersal across possessions increasingly difficult to reinforce or defend.
Beneath all of it lay the new language Oskar had spent weeks teaching Germany itself. Asia was not something Germany needed to own in order to profit from it. China did not need to be German. Japan did not need to be German.
Germany merely needed to be welcome there.
What the diplomats never spoke of was surrender.
Japan therefore listened with suspicion.
German New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Carolines, the Marshalls and the scattered Pacific possessions were not worthless scraps simply because Europeans required a magnifying glass to find some of them upon a map. They were stepping stones, anchorages, possible wireless stations and future naval facilities—hundreds of islands scattered across an enormous stretch of ocean that, properly developed, might someday form an imperial network of considerable value.
Tokyo's first assumption was therefore simple.
There had to be a trap.
Germany did not appear weak. Quite the opposite. German industry was expanding with extraordinary speed, its Army was becoming more dangerous, its Navy was improving and its Crown Prince seemed to produce a new technological disturbance every few months. Europe's recent experience in the Balkans had done little to make German military influence appear harmless either.
Weak empires did not sell territory with this much confidence.
So Japan negotiated carefully. The price was challenged, shipping privileges discussed, staggered payments suggested and additional guarantees placed across the table. Berlin was willing to move upon details, but not enough to make the transaction resemble desperation.
The message became increasingly obvious. Germany did not need to sell. Germany had decided to sell. That distinction mattered.
Japan understood perfectly well that its own position in the Pacific was not secure forever. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance existed, certainly, but alliances were instruments of interest rather than eternal friendships. Britain wanted Japan useful, but that did not necessarily mean Britain wished to see Japan become powerful enough to dominate the Pacific. Australia had concerns of its own, as did New Zealand, and across the ocean stood the United States watching every shift in the regional balance.
Even if some future war allowed Japan to seize the German islands by force, there was no guarantee that the other powers would simply allow Tokyo to keep everything afterward.
This offer was different.
It was clean, purchased, recognized and legal. There would be no war, no dead sailors and no international conference waiting afterward to divide the spoils according to who had contributed most blood.
It was a once-in-a-generation opportunity. And Oskar knew precisely what might make it irresistible.
German negotiators therefore did more than present maps. They spoke first of what was already known—timber, fisheries, copra, palm products and agricultural potential—and then, more quietly, of what might yet be discovered beneath the land and seabed.
Copper, Gold, Oil, possibly even Natural gas.
Some possibilities remained speculative. Others rested upon little more than incomplete surveys and geological expectation. It hardly mattered. Japan was an industrial island empire painfully conscious of how dependent it remained upon imported food, fuel and raw materials. Resources meant security, and security meant power.
The implication practically sold itself.
Buy the islands now, and perhaps Japan was not merely purchasing territory. Perhaps it was purchasing part of its future.
Eventually suspicion became arithmetic, and arithmetic became agreement.
Japan accepted.
The final price was one hundred and twenty-five million marks.
Reaction spread almost immediately. Australia grew nervous, and New Zealand did likewise. British newspapers began arguing among themselves over whether Germany had retreated from the Pacific or had simply tricked Japan into paying handsomely for territory Berlin considered increasingly difficult to defend. American observers wondered what an expanded Japanese position meant for their own interests, while French diplomats searched obsessively for hidden clauses and secret understandings.
Oskar answered with smiles and speeches.
Germany sought friendship, trade and mutual respect, he declared. The age in which nations measured greatness solely by how much foreign soil they possessed did not need to continue forever. Germany wished to sell goods rather than fire shells, build commercial relationships rather than fortresses and profit from Asia without attempting to dominate it.
He even managed several carefully rehearsed phrases in Japanese for the occasion, which were received with polite enthusiasm despite his pronunciation.
The performance was elegant.
Tokyo remained cautious.
And almost immediately after securing the islands, another possibility began looming over Japanese calculations.
Qingdao.
If Germany truly intended to withdraw from East Asian colonial competition, then why should Japan not purchase the port as well? Qingdao was worth considerably more than any scattered Pacific island. Its harbour, railway connections, commercial infrastructure and strategic position upon the Chinese coast made it one of the most valuable foreign footholds in northern China.
Japan therefore began quietly testing Berlin's willingness to discuss it.
Then came the second shock.
Germany announced that Kiautschou would indeed cease being German.
But Japan would receive nothing.
Germany intended to return Qingdao to China.
Not because Germany had been defeated. Not because an army stood outside the walls. Not because Berlin had been forced by ultimatum or humiliation.
Germany would relinquish the territory voluntarily as part of a new commercial arrangement with the Chinese Republic.
German companies would retain access. Investment protections would be negotiated. Merchants could remain and trade could continue. But the colonial administration would end, the fortress would disappear, the garrison would depart and the German war flag would come down.
Chinese sovereignty would return.
Tokyo's satisfaction cooled considerably.
The Pacific islands had been an extraordinary prize.
Qingdao would have been something greater.
Instead Germany had removed it from the board entirely and, in doing so, handed Beijing something no Chinese government could easily forget.
Oskar made certain that the transfer became a spectacle.
Before cameras and journalists, he publicly shook hands with representatives of both nations, congratulating Japan upon the conclusion of the Pacific agreement while welcoming what he described as a new relationship with the Chinese Republic. Germany formally treated the republican government as China's legitimate authority, and Oskar even added—with his characteristic inability to leave delicate diplomacy entirely alone—that should the young former Emperor of China ever desire an education abroad, Germany would be honoured to receive him.
To the Japanese representatives he offered similar warmth, expressing his hope that one day he might meet their Emperor personally.
Preferably, Oskar added, after he had learned enough Japanese not to insult His Majesty accidentally.
The photographs travelled everywhere.
A gigantic blond German prince stood between Chinese and Japanese representatives, smiling as though he had not just rearranged a substantial piece of Pacific politics.
In London and Paris, the mood was considerably less cheerful.
Germany's imperial frontier had shrunk. Under normal circumstances, that should have been reassuring.
Instead it made people nervous.
There had been no military defeat, no financial collapse, no colonial rebellion forcing Berlin's hand and no obvious crisis compelling Germany to surrender anything. If anything, the Empire was wealthier, more technologically advanced and more militarily confident than it had been when many of those possessions were first acquired.
So why was it voluntarily removing them?
Some believed Oskar genuinely wanted peace.
Others suspected preparation.
An empire shedding burdens did not necessarily become weaker. Sometimes it simply became easier to defend. Money previously spent maintaining possessions across the Pacific could now be spent in Europe. Ships tied to distant stations could be concentrated closer to home. Administrators, troops and investment could be redirected toward Africa or the continent itself.
Germany's lines were shortening.
Its strength was concentrating.
And everyone in Europe understood what concentration could mean.
The British Admiralty quietly recalculated. French officers reconsidered old assumptions. Intelligence services increased their attention upon Berlin and began looking for movements that might explain what Oskar was really preparing.
Germany claimed that it was opening its fist.
Others wondered whether it was merely drawing that fist closer to its body.
Because a fist drawn inward did not always mean surrender.
Sometimes it meant the blow had yet to come.
Oskar knew that interpretation would spread, and there was little he could do to prevent it. For the moment, however, the Eastern Question was settled as far as he was concerned.
There were no celebrations afterward. No grand victory tour. No enormous parade beneath the Brandenburg Gate. There was simply more work. Factories still demanded attention, Africa waited, Bulgaria remained unfinished and the future remained irritatingly enormous.
And considerably closer to home, Tanya and several other women were becoming more pregnant by the day.
Oskar had rearranged Germany's position in Asia. For several glorious days afterward, he and Karl genuinely believed they might be allowed to return to work. They were mistaken.
The first assault came in late November.
Cecilie went into labour shortly after sunrise. Tanya followed before breakfast. Anna began complaining of contractions before noon. By early afternoon Gundelinde had joined them.
Oskar received each announcement with progressively greater disbelief until, sometime after the fourth physician entered his study, he simply stared at the ceiling and accepted that this was apparently how Allah had chosen to punish him.
The timing was not entirely mysterious.
All four women had become pregnant within essentially the same period, for reasons everyone inside Oskar's household understood perfectly well and politely declined to discuss in front of the servants.
Thus Oskar's private apartments at Potsdam ceased functioning as princely apartments and became something closer to an imperial maternity ward.
Physicians hurried between rooms. Nurses carried water, linens and sterilized instruments. Maids moved with the grim efficiency of soldiers under artillery fire. Oskar's enormous bedchamber and several adjoining rooms were surrendered to the effort, and by evening enough sheets had been ruined that one maid quietly suggested they might simply burn the entire collection and begin again.
The women survived, the sheets did not. And before the day was finished, five new children had entered the world.
Cecilie delivered first.
Adriel was a boy, small and quiet, with fine platinum-blond hair, pale skin and violet eyes that opened early and regarded the room with such solemn suspicion that Cecilie immediately declared he had inherited Oskar's habit of judging everyone silently.
Tanya came next and produced something considerably larger.
Samael entered the world broad-chested, thick-limbed and heavy enough that even the experienced midwives remarked upon him. He possessed the same pale-blond hair and deep violet eyes as his brothers, but there was already something almost comically severe about his little face.
Tanya looked at him, then at Oskar.
"That one is definitely yours."
Oskar examined the miniature siege engine wrapped in blankets.
There seemed little point arguing.
Anna's Rosiel followed soon afterward and represented almost the complete opposite. She was tiny, delicate and pink-cheeked, with soft platinum hair and violet eyes that barely opened before she curled against her mother and returned to sleep. Anna cried when she saw her.
Oskar did too.
He denied this afterward.
Nobody believed him.
Gundelinde finished the day's campaign by producing twins.
Cassiel arrived first, a pale little boy with sharp features and an expression so grave that Karl later claimed he already looked disappointed with the government.
Miriel followed several minutes later. She was softer and smaller, with fine platinum hair, large violet eyes and an almost unnaturally peaceful expression once she had been cleaned and placed beside her mother.
By midnight the palace contained five additional babies.
Oskar stood among the beds looking from one exhausted woman to another and tried to understand how a single day had somehow produced an entire fireteam of his children.
Tanya, barely awake, corrected him when he said so.
"Not enough for a fireteam."
Oskar stared at her.
She smiled faintly.
He decided not to encourage the conversation.
The following days became considerably noisier. Once the mothers were strong enough to rest together, the largest of Oskar's private family rooms was transformed into something between a nursery, recovery room and gathering place. Cradles stood beside couches and beds while nurses moved constantly between them, but the older children proved considerably harder to control.
Imperiel attempted to behave like an experienced elder brother. Juniel and Lailael competed over who could hold Rosiel longer. Liorael and Azarael wanted to know when Samael would be old enough to wrestle. Aureliel repeatedly asked why newborn babies were so boring. The younger children mostly crowded around the cradles, poking tiny cheeks, counting fingers and whispering names until nurses began defending the infants from excessive affection.
Anna's older daughters were more useful. Greta, now approaching womanhood herself, could pick up a crying toddler and remove them from the room before disaster occurred, while Lise and Klara increasingly behaved less like children and more like older sisters helping supervise the swarm.
Oskar enjoyed it more than he admitted.
There was something profoundly calming about sitting among them after months of war, diplomacy and maps covered in arrows. He could spend an hour with a sleeping infant against his chest and, for that hour at least, not think about Japan, Britain, Serbia or anything else waiting beyond the palace walls.
Unfortunately, the women discovered another form of entertainment.
Changing diapers.
Oskar's hands were excellent for many things. They could control horses, fire weapons, manipulate machinery and lift weights most ordinary men considered furniture.
They were considerably less suited to fastening tiny pieces of cloth around a squirming infant.
His fingers looked absurd beside the babies.
The first time Tanya forced him to change Samael, Oskar spent several minutes attempting to fold the cloth properly while four women watched with growing amusement.
Then Samael kicked. Oskar lost one corner. Rosiel began crying. Adriel joined her. Miriel apparently decided solidarity required participation. Within seconds the entire room erupted.
The women laughed until some of them complained that laughing still hurt. The older children laughed because their mothers were laughing.
Even the nurses were smiling.
Oskar eventually stood there holding one naked, furious baby in hands large enough to encompass most of him and wondered how the man who had reorganized German heavy industry had been defeated by a diaper.
It became a recurring family amusement.
Then, only several days after Oskar's household had begun settling into its new rhythm, Karl received his own punishment.
Heddy went into labour.
Oskar arrived expecting another child, perhaps twins.
Three appeared, which Oskar had already named in his head, Fíli, Kíli and Arwen.
Two boys and a girl.
Karl stared at the triplets with the expression of a businessman who had discovered an enormous unrecorded liability on the company books.
Heddy looked exhausted and delighted. Oskar made the mistake of smiling. Karl immediately pointed at him.
"No."
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to."
"I came to congratulate you."
"No names."
Heddy raised her head.
"Oskar gives wonderful names."
Karl closed his eyes, they already had Durin, Balin and Éowyn. And quite quickly Karl understood exactly where this was going.
Several minutes later he possessed Fíli, Kíli and Arwen as well.
Heddy adored the names. Karl accepted the outcome with the quiet dignity of a defeated nation signing a peace treaty.
Oskar, however, was genuinely delighted. There was something deeply satisfying about watching Karl hold three tiny children of his own, particularly when the usually unflappable businessman seemed terrified that one wrong movement might break them.
Fíli was the largest and loudest of the three, a sturdy little boy with dark-blond fuzz and lungs apparently designed for battlefield signaling. Kíli was thinner and far more restless, forever escaping blankets through sheer determination, while Arwen was the quietest, a pretty wide-eyed little girl who resembled Heddy more strongly and seemed perfectly content to sleep while her brothers exhausted everyone around them.
For a few days Oskar and Karl once again convinced themselves that the baby crisis had ended.
Then a message arrived from Essen. Bertha had given birth. Oskar stared at the telegram. Karl stared at Oskar. Neither spoke.
Oskar eventually sighed and went west. At the Krupp estate he discovered twins.
Konrad was a sturdy blond boy with blue eyes, broad little shoulders and a face which possessed several features Oskar found irritatingly familiar.
Margarete was smaller and calmer, with soft blond hair, clear blue eyes and more of Bertha visible in her finer features.
Oskar stood beside the bed looking down at them. Bertha watched him with obvious amusement. Gustav stood nearby with the controlled expression of a man who had spent several years mastering the art of not asking certain questions.
"Well," Oskar finally said, "they are rather good-looking children."
Bertha smiled.
"Just like you."
Oskar's face changed.
"You mean handsome."
"Mhm."
"That is what you meant."
"Of course."
Gustav looked toward the nearest window. Seeing it, Oskar politely decided he had remained in Essen long enough.
Whatever suspicions Gustav carried, he bore them with remarkable discipline. Konrad and Margarete would carry his household's name, grow beneath his roof and eventually occupy places within one of Germany's greatest industrial dynasties.
Bertha appeared entirely satisfied with that arrangement.
Oskar left Essen thinking, not for the first time, that his private life had become far more complicated than European diplomacy.
By Christmas, all of the year's babies had arrived.
Five within Oskar's household. Three more for Karl and Heddy. Two in Essen. Ten newborns in little more than a month.
Germany celebrated the royal births enthusiastically. Church bells rang in several towns. Newspapers printed photographs whenever the family permitted them. Cakes bearing miniature imperial eagles appeared in bakeries, and the Church of the New Dawn predictably found theological significance in the continued fruitfulness of its increasingly legendary prince.
Congratulations arrived from across Europe and beyond.
French diplomats sent polite messages. Italian friends sent gifts. The Bulgarians sent far too many flowers.
From America came telegrams, letters, bottles of alcohol, expensive toys and invitations to visit from financiers and businessmen who seemed genuinely fascinated by the apparently inexhaustible reproductive enthusiasm of the Iron Prince.
Oskar accepted the gifts. Although he continued declining the invitations.
Meanwhile, while his household dealt with infants, Wilhelm handled the less adorable consequences of the Asian settlement.
The Kaiser's ministers worked through the enormous quantity of paperwork created by the transfer. Colonial administrators prepared to leave territories they had expected to govern for decades. German civilians were offered passage home or opportunities elsewhere in the Empire. Commercial rights in China had to be formalized, Japanese payments arranged and property transferred without allowing the process to appear disorderly.
The Navy required its own reorganization.
Ships and crews previously tied to Germany's eastern possessions were reassigned. Some smaller vessels and useful patrol craft moved toward African stations, where German territory still required maritime protection, but most of the serious naval strength gradually returned toward European waters.
Oskar had sold concentration as the purpose of the policy. Wilhelm had made concentration real.
The Kaiser also worked quietly to prevent Germany's wounded relationship with Constantinople from collapsing completely. The old intimacy would not return quickly, if ever, but trade could survive resentment. Consular relations remained. Commercial channels remained open where possible, and Berlin made clear that withdrawing military intimacy did not mean Germany sought the destruction of the Ottoman state.
Father and son had naturally divided the work. Oskar had sold the vision. Wilhelm handled the paperwork required to make it exist.
Outside Germany, meanwhile, the consequences of Oskar's Asian gamble began creating problems for everyone else.
Japan had obtained an enormous spread of Pacific territory, and almost immediately other governments began asking what Tokyo intended to do with it.
British officials quietly explored whether Japan might be persuaded to relinquish or resell portions of its new holdings, particularly where Australian and New Zealand concerns were strongest.
Tokyo showed little enthusiasm. Japan after all had paid for the islands, and now as agreed, Japan intended to keep them.
Australia watched nervously. New Zealand did the same. Across the Pacific, Washington studied maps that suddenly contained far more Japanese-controlled dots than before, some lying uncomfortably close to American routes and possessions.
China had its own problems administering the returned territory at Qingdao while enjoying the enormous prestige of having recovered it without firing a shot.
Everyone thus watched Japan, while Japan watched everyone watching Japan. And for once, none of it was Oskar's problem. That was precisely what he had wanted.
Germany possessed no isolated eastern fortress requiring reinforcement, no Pacific island chain demanding garrisons and no reason to throw German soldiers between competing Asian ambitions. Thus now Berlin could trade, invest, smile, and stay out of the argument.
Within Germany itself, life remained remarkably calm.
There were debates, certainly. Nationalists still complained about abandoned prestige. Colonial enthusiasts remained bitter. Newspapers occasionally demanded to know whether Japan had received too generous a bargain.
But Germany was prosperous, the payment had arrived, Qingdao had been relinquished from strength rather than defeat and Oskar's enormous propaganda campaign had successfully reframed the entire affair as concentration rather than retreat.
The public's attention gradually moved elsewhere, and so did Oskar's.
By the closing days of December, the flood of babies had finally ended, the mothers were recovering and Karl could once again enter Oskar's office without some nurse, telegram or panicked servant announcing that another woman had gone into labour.
At last, the two men returned to work.
Oskar had promised himself at the beginning of 1913 that he would try, for once in his life, not to spend every waking hour creating another industry, reorganizing another institution or attempting to drag humanity several decades into the future. In a strange way, he had almost succeeded. Bulgaria had demanded enormous attention after the war, certainly, and the Eastern Question had unexpectedly grown into one of the greatest strategic rearrangements of his life, but much of everything else had been allowed to grow quietly in the background.
Now, as the year crept toward its end, Oskar and Karl finally returned to the quieter projects that had continued growing while their attention had been elsewhere.
One of them, however, immediately caught Oskar's eye.
America.
The People's Welfare Lottery had entered the United States years earlier, and by 1912 its partnerships there had already begun mutating into enterprises that possessed considerably less to do with welfare and considerably more to do with the extraordinary number of ways Americans could be persuaded to surrender money willingly.
Oskar and Karl had encouraged that development.
Little by little came new lotteries, games, entertainment houses, private clubs, hotels, gambling establishments and businesses catering to pleasures respectable people publicly condemned and privately purchased in enormous quantities. By the end of 1913, Oskar could sit beside Karl with the American ledgers spread across his desk and watch the money flowing back toward Germany in numbers large enough to make his conscience mildly uncomfortable.
Las Vegas represented the most ridiculous example.
The place was nowhere near the enormous metropolis Oskar remembered from another lifetime. It was still a young desert town built around railways, dust and ambition, but Oskar's American partners had spent several years deliberately pushing it toward something much stranger.
A city of pleasure.
Hotels rose beside gambling halls illuminated with electric signs bright enough to turn portions of the desert night into artificial day. Saloons had evolved into elaborate gaming houses where cards, dice, wheels and increasingly sophisticated games separated visitors from their money with mathematical efficiency. Beautifully designed swimming halls borrowed ideas from Waterworld, giving wealthy travelers pools, baths, fountains and indoor gardens in which to escape the desert heat.
Other establishments were less respectable.
Music halls offered dancers wearing considerably less clothing than polite society considered appropriate. Private clubs experimented with performances that increasingly resembled what another century would simply call strip shows. Prostitutes worked beside expensive courtesans, while Angel Works cheerfully supplied fashionable dresses, stockings, cosmetics and increasingly daring garments for women whose professions benefited greatly from attracting attention.
Oskar had apparently discovered that lingerie possessed excellent margins.
Then came food.
If the city intended to sell indulgence, Oskar saw no reason to limit indulgence to anything recognizably American. Immigrant cooks and recruited specialists were encouraged to bring cuisines from across the world. Indian kitchens served curries beside German restaurants heavy with beer and meat. Chinese establishments offered regional dishes, tea and traditional treatments such as massage and acupuncture. Mediterranean, Arab, Japanese, French and Italian food appeared within walking distance of one another, often adapted shamelessly toward whatever wealthy tourists proved willing to buy.
The architecture became equally ridiculous.
Miniature versions of famous monuments began appearing as attractions: fragments of imaginary ancient temples, towers inspired by Europe, elaborate fountains, artificial gardens and buildings designed less around architectural dignity than around making visitors stop, stare and spend money.
There were boxing halls.
Wrestling halls.
Private fighting clubs where different martial traditions could be tested against one another beneath rules Oskar and Karl were already beginning to standardize into something approaching modern mixed combat.
There was alcohol, Gambling, Sex, Food, Luxury, Violence packaged as entertainment. Vanity sold through clothing, beauty treatments and expensive hotels. Greed converted into tables covered in chips.
Karl eventually looked across the American reports and came to the uncomfortable conclusion that, between gambling, alcohol, luxury, fighting clubs and increasingly theatrical nightlife, they were apparently assembling most of the seven deadly sins into a single business model.
Oskar saw the same thing and, after studying the figures, could only shrug. Whatever he thought of the morality involved, vice was proving extraordinarily profitable in America. The People's Welfare Lottery and the businesses growing around it had spread into gambling, entertainment, medicine, fashion and other corners of American life, drawing a steady stream of money back across the Atlantic.
Of course, none of that access came entirely for free.
Powerful American partners provided the connections, protection and political room that allowed Oskar's ventures to spread so widely, and in return they expected their own share of the future. Some of that price was perfectly ordinary.
Technology was one of the prices.
Oskar allowed selected older patents, engine designs and manufacturing methods to cross the Atlantic—never anything truly cutting-edge, but enough to give his American partners a profitable head start without threatening Germany's technological advantage.
One of the strangest results came when the Goldman family approached him for help establishing an automobile manufacturer of their own.
Thus emerged the Gold Line Company.
Built around proven German designs that Oskar considered safely outdated, Gold Line expanded with astonishing speed and, much to his surprise, soon overtook Ford in the American market. Its success owed as much to aggressive marketing as engineering. Newspapers were filled with slogans such as:
Buy Gold. There Is No Other Choice.
Own the Standard.
The Gold Standard of Motion.
When It's Gold, It Wins.
Oskar found most of them painfully embarrassing. Karl thought they were magnificent. American customers apparently agreed with Karl.
Oskar hardly complained. He retained a sizeable stake in the company, so every Gold Line automobile sold simply sent another portion of American money back across the Atlantic.
That was the respectable side of the bargain.
The other side of the partnership was simpler, and considerably darker.
It came in the form of letters.
Invitations had accumulated upon Oskar's desk for years, always written politely, always expensive, and always carrying language that seemed innocent enough until one had read enough of them.
One such letter read:
"Your Highness, next week we gather again. You should honor my private estate with your presence. We have excellent pizza here—proper New York style—fresh, hot, and endless. A man of many women will surely appreciate a table like ours. And if pizza is too simple for a prince, we can offer finer things: aged whiskey that burns sweet, champagne that makes the mind light, sushi so fresh it practically melts. Our chefs insist you'll never taste anything like it in Germany.
Come hungry. Leave satisfied."
On its own, it looked harmless.
After years of receiving similar invitations, Oskar was less certain.
Certain words appeared too often. Fresh. Tender. Private. Special guests. Things unavailable to ordinary visitors. Assurances of discretion, no press and sometimes no records at all.
Perhaps it meant nothing.
Oskar preferred to believe that.
Yet he suspected his American partners had interpreted his reputation—his women, his scandals and his rather flexible private morals—as evidence that he might appreciate whatever darker entertainments their private circles offered.
They were mistaken.
Oskar possessed no proof of what those invitations truly meant, and he wanted none. There were doors a man could open and simply close again afterward.
Others, he suspected, changed the man who walked through them.
So Oskar politely declined every invitation and kept the Atlantic comfortably between himself and that side of the partnership, just as Wilhelm and Karl had advised when the first such letters began arriving years earlier.
The money, however, remained excellent, and for Oskar that mattered. He stayed safely in Germany, maintained the relationship at a distance and allowed business to continue. They used him. He used them. For the moment, the arrangement suited everyone—or at least he hoped it did.
And so 1913 carried on.
Oskar worked because work was the only thing that made the future feel like something he could still grip. Papers, meetings, budgets, cables—every lever he could pull to bend the world away from the cliff he remembered.
Yet as the year gave way to 1914, a cold pressure settled behind his ribs.
He could feel it coming.
The year when history would either break from the path he remembered—or find its way back onto it.
Oskar told himself he had done enough. The Balkans were different. The Ottoman Empire had been shattered and pushed onto another course. Germany had repositioned itself. Alliances had shifted. Austria-Hungary was stronger. He had widened the odds, twisted the road, built buffers where once there had been none.
But odds were not certainty.
And for several months, maddeningly, nothing happened.
Winter passed. Spring followed. Governments argued, soldiers drilled, businessmen made money, and Europe remained stubbornly alive. Oskar watched the calendar and began, slowly and cautiously, to wonder whether perhaps all those changes had finally been enough.
Then, late in the evening on June 26, just as most of his family was preparing for their planned yacht trip, the letter arrived.
It was Franz Ferdinand's own hand—an envelope with familiar weight and familiar ink. Oskar opened it expecting ordinary correspondence.
Instead, he found something dangerously close to an apology.
Ferdinand wrote plainly, almost gently, as though admitting to some social inconvenience rather than stepping onto one of the most infamous knife-edges in history. He would be travelling to Bosnia-Herzegovina to observe military exercises involving elements of the XV and XVI Corps. As Inspector General, it was the sort of visit he was expected to make, especially with tensions rising and Serbia watching.
He knew Oskar would object. That was why he had written personally.
At the bottom came the familiar closing, warm in that stubborn way Ferdinand reserved for the few people he genuinely trusted.
Sincerely, your friend, Ferdinand.
Oskar read it once, then again.
His fingers loosened. The paper slipped from his hand and fell to the floor without him noticing. For a moment the room seemed to move away from him. The walls, the light, the air itself—all of it became distant.
He had warned him.
Not in riddles. Not with vague superstition. He had warned Ferdinand as directly as he could without revealing the impossible truth of why Sarajevo frightened him so deeply.
And there had already been enough evidence to justify caution. General Marijan Varešanin had nearly been murdered by a Serbian student. Weapons had been intercepted crossing borders. Serbian and Bosnian revolutionary circles were not inventions of nervous officials. The Black Hand and the shadows around it were not rumors.
They were networks, contacts, weapons. Young men willing to die if dying meant killing someone important first. And Ferdinand was going anyway.
Oskar slowly lowered himself into his chair.
He had strengthened Austria-Hungary in every way he reasonably could without simply seizing control of the monarchy himself. Its economy was steadier. Internal tensions had been eased where possible. The Army was better supplied and better equipped, with improved helmets, logistics, medicine and discipline. Ferdinand himself now travelled in a Muscle Motors A-class automobile and possessed guards trained according to methods influenced by the Eternal Guard.
The odds were better, they had to be.
An assassin would find it harder to approach him. Security would be tighter. A wounded Archduke would have access to medicine far beyond anything available in the history Oskar remembered.
He should have felt reassured. Instead the dread only grew heavier. Because protection did not end threats, it reshaped them.
When defenses rose, determined enemies did not always retreat. Sometimes they brought more men. Better weapons. A larger bomb. A greater willingness to kill everyone nearby if that was what reaching the target required.
Oskar stared at Ferdinand's letter lying upon the floor.
This was it, this single decision by a single stubborn man might still become the hinge upon which the century turned.
If Ferdinand died, Oskar knew what could follow.
Austria would rage. Serbia would deny. Russia would move. Germany would be forced to choose. France would stand behind Russia. Britain would hesitate until hesitation became impossible.
Ultimatums would become timetables. Timetables would become mobilization. Mobilization would become war.
Oskar had spent eleven years pulling at that chain.
He had changed Germany and much of the world, until the world scarcely resembled the one he remembered.
But had he changed enough?
If Ferdinand lived, peace was not guaranteed. Another crisis might come next year, or ten years later.
But the old chain could finally break. The original trigger might fail.
Millions of men who had died in Oskar's memories might grow old without ever knowing how close history had once come to burying them.
If Ferdinand died—Oskar shut his eyes.
Hope was not a strategy. There was only one way he could be certain that every possible precaution had been taken.
He would have to make certain himself.
Oskar had never considered himself a hero. He preferred numbers, leverage, machinery and money. He preferred changing history from behind a desk, where bullets were generally less common. But there came a point when preparation ended and action began.
If you saw danger, you did not debate it. If you smelled smoke, you did not wait politely for the flames.
You moved.