The Hidden Family tmp-2

by Charles Stross

  “A what?” Olga shook her head. “This is intelligence of a rare and fantastic nature. Not me, Helge, not me.” She grinned. “Who’s been spinning you these tales?”

  “Angbard,” said Miriam. She shook her head. “Are you certain you don’t work for him?”

  “Certain?” Olga frowned. “About as certain as I am that the sun rises in the east. Unless—” She looked annoyed. “—you are telling me that he has been using me?”

  “I couldn’t possibly comment,” Miriam said, then changed the subject as fast as possible. Let’s just say Angbard’s definition of someone who works for him doesn’t necessarily match up to the definition of an employee in federal employment law. “I suppose you know about the extraordinary meeting?”

  “I know he’s called one.” Olga looked at Miriam suspiciously. “That’s most unusual. Is it your fault?”

  “Yup. Did you bring the dictaphone?”

  “The what? Oh, your recording angel? Yes, it is in my bag. Paulie gave it to me, along with these battery things that it eats. Such a sweet child he is,” she added. “A shame we’ll have to hang him.”

  “We—” Miriam caught herself. “Who, the Clan? Lin, or Lee, or whatever he’s called? I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “He knows too much about us,” Olga pointed out calmly. “Like the fact that we’re operating here. Even if he’s from the lost family, that’s not enough to save his life. They’ve been trying to kill you, Miriam, they’ve picking away at us for decades. They did kill Margit, and I have not forgiven them for that.”

  “Lin isn’t guilty of that. He’s a kid who was drafted into his family’s politics at too early an age, and did what they told him to. The one who killed Margit is dead, and if anyone else deserves to get it in the neck it’s the old men who sent a boy to do a man’s job. If you think the Clan should execute him, then by the same yardstick his family had a perfect right to try to murder you. True?”

  “Hunh.” Miriam watched a momentary expression of uncertainty cross Olga’s face. “This merciful mood ill becomes you. Where does it come from?”

  “I told you the other day, there’s been too much killing,” Miriam repeated. “Family A kills a member of Family B, so Family B kills a Family A member straight back. The last killing is a justification for the next, and so it goes on, round and about. It’s got to stop somewhere, and I’d rather it didn’t stop with the extinction of all the families. Hasn’t it occurred to anyone that the utility of world-walking, if you want to gain wealth and power, is proportional to the square of the number of people who can do it? Network externalities—”

  Olga looked at her blankly. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  Miriam sighed. “The mobile phones everyone carries in Cambridge. You’ve seen me using one, haven’t you?”

  “Oh yes!” Olga’s eyes sparkled. “Anything that can get Angbard out of bed in the middle of the night—”

  “Imagine I have a mobile phone with me right now, here on the table.” She pointed to the salt shaker. “How useful is it?”

  “Why, you could call—oh.” She looked crestfallen. “It doesn’t work?”

  “You can only call someone else who has a phone,” Miriam told her.

  “If you have the only phone in the world, it might as well be a salt shaker. If I have a phone and you have a phone we can talk to each other, but nobody else. Now, if everyone has a phone, all sorts of things are possible. You can’t do business without one, you can’t even live without one. Lock yourself out of your home? You call a locksmith round to let you in. Want to go to a restaurant? Call your friends and tell them where to meet you. And so on. The usefulness of a phone relates not to how many people have got them, but to how many lines you can draw between those people. And the Clan’s one real talent is—” she shrugged—“forget cargo, we can’t shift as much in a day as a single ox-drawn wagon. The real edge the Clan has got is its ability to transmit messages.”

  “Like phones.”

  Miriam could almost see the light bulb switch on over her head. “Yes. If we can just break out of this loop of killing, even if it costs us, if we can just start trading…think about it. No more messing around with the two of us running errands. No more worries about the amount we can carry. And nobody trying to kill us, which I’d call a not-insignificant benefit—wouldn’t you?”

  “Nice idea,” said Olga. “It’s surely a shame the other side will kill you rather than listen.”

  “Isn’t that a rather defeatist attitude?”

  “They’ve been trying to keep the civil war going,” Olga pointed out.

  “Are you sure they did not intrigue it in the first place? A lie here and a cut throat there, and their fearsome rivals—we families—will kill each other happily. Isn’t that how it started?”

  “It probably did.” Miriam agreed. “So? What’s your point? The people who did that are long since dead. How long are you going to keep slaughtering their descendants?”

  “But—” Olga stopped. “You really do want him alive,” she said slowly.

  “Not exactly. What I don’t want is him dead, adding to the bad blood between the families. As a corpse he’s no use to anyone. Alive, he could be a go-between, or an information source, or a hostage, or something.”

  Miriam finished with her soup. “Listen, I have to go to the office, but tomorrow evening I need to be in Niejwein. At the Castle Hjorth. Lin, whoever he is, was from out of town. Chances are we can get there from here without being noticed by anyone in this world, at least anyone but Inspector Smith. This afternoon I’m going to the office. I suggest that tomorrow morning we catch the train to New London. That’s New York in my world. When we get there—how well do you know Niejwein? Outside of the palaces and houses?”

  “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 anym
ore. Your gain is their loss. Right?”

  “Yes.” Olga nodded thoughtfully.

  “Well, that’s just plain wrong,” said Miriam. “That idea used to be called mercantilism. Discarding it was one of the key steps that distinguishes my world from yours. The essential insight is that human beings create value. A lump of iron ore isn’t as valuable as a handful of nails, because it takes human labor to turn it into nails and nails are more useful. Now, if you have iron ore but no labor, and I have labor but no iron ore, both of us can profit by trade, can’t we? I can take your iron ore, make nails, give you some of them in payment, and we’re both better off, because before we had no nails at all. Isn’t that right?”

  “I think I see.” Olga wrinkled her brow. “You’re telling me that we don’t trade? That the Clan has the wrong idea about how to make money—”

  “Yes, but that’s only part of it. The Clan doesn’t add value, it simply moves it around. But another important factor is that a peasant farmer is less good at creating value than, say, a farmer who knows about crop rotation and soil maintenance and how to fertilize his fields effectively. And a man who can sit down all day and make nails is less productive than an engineer who can make a machine that takes in wire feedstock at one end and spits out nails at the other. It’s more productive to make a machine to make nails, and then run it, than to make the nails yourself. Educated people can think of ways to make such machines or provide valuable services—but to get to the wealth, you’ve got to have an educated population. Do you see that?”

  “What you’re doing, you’re taking ideas where they’re needed, and teaching people with iron ore to make nails and, and do other things, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. And while I can’t easily take the fruits of that trade home with me, I can make myself rich over here. Which in turn should serve to give me some leverage with the Clan, shouldn’t it? And there’s another thing.” She looked pensive. “If the goal is to modernize the Gruinmarkt, the land where the Clan holds so much power, it’s going to be necessary to import technologies and ideas from a world that isn’t as far ahead as the United States. There’s less of a gap to jump between New Britain and the eastern kingdoms. What I want to do is to develop riches in this realm, and use them to finance seed investments in the kingdoms. If the Clan won’t let me live away from them, at least I can try to make my life more comfortable. No more drafty medieval castles!”

  “Castles.” Olga looked wistful for a moment. “You’d build a house like your own near Niejwein? Bandits, the southern kingdoms—”

  “No bandits,” said Miriam, firmly. “First, we need to improve the efficiency of farming. What I saw looked—no offense—like the way things were done five or six hundred years ago in Europe. Strip cultivation, communal grazing, no reaping or sowing machines. By making farming more efficient, we can free up hands for industry. By providing jobs, we can begin to produce more goods—fabric, fuel, housing, ships—and see to the policing of the roads and waterways along which trade flows. By making trade safer we make it cheaper, and increase the profits, and by increasing the profits we can free up money to invest in education and production.”

  Olga shook her head. “I’m dizzy! I’m dizzy!”

  “That’s how it happened in England around the industrial revolution,” Miriam emphasized. “That’s how it happened here, from 1890 onwards, a century later than in my world. The interesting thing is that it didn’t happen in the Gruinmarkt, or in Europe, over there. I’ve got this nagging feeling that knowing why it failed is important…still. Given half a chance we’ll make it happen.” She leaned toward Olga. “Roland tried to run away and they dragged him back.” She took a deep breath. “If they’re going to try to drag me away from civilization, I’m going to try to bring civilization with me, middle class morality and all. And then they’ll be sorry.”

  The train began to slow its headlong charge between rows of red-brick houses.

  “If you go down this path, you’ll make enemies,” Olga predicted.

  “Some of them close to home, but others…Do you really think the outer families will accept an erosion of their relative status? Or the king? Or the court? Or the council of lords? Someone will think they can only lose by it, and they’ll fight you for it.”

  “They’ll accept it if it makes them rich,” Miriam said. She glanced at the window, sniffed, and buttoned her jacket up. “Damn, it’s cold out there.” A thought struck her. “Will we be alright on the other side?”

  “We’re always at risk,” Olga remarked. She paused for a moment.

  “But, on second thoughts, I think we are at no more risk than usual.” She nudged the bag at her feet. “As long as we don’t linger.”

  The train sneaked along a suburban platform and stopped with a hissing of steam; doors slammed and people shouted, distant whistles shrilling counterpoint. “Next stop?” Miriam suggested tensely. She pulled out a strip of tablets, took one, and offered another to Olga.

  “Thanking you—yes.”

  The train pulled away into a deep cutting, its whistle hooting. Buildings on either side cast deep shadows across the windows, then Miriam found herself watching the darkness of a tunnel. “I’m worried about the congress,” Miriam admitted.

  “Hah. Leave that to the duke. Do you think he would have called for it if he didn’t trust you?”

  “If anything goes wrong, if we don’t get there, if Brill was lying about my mother being safe—”

  The train began to slow again. “Our stop!” Olga stood up and reached for her coat.

  They waited at one end of the platform while the huge black and green behemoth rumbled away from the station. A handful of tired travelers swirled around them, making for the footbridge that led over the tracks to the main concourse. Miriam nodded at a door. “Into the waiting room.” Olga followed her. The room was empty and cold. “Are you ready?” Miriam asked. “I’ll go across first. If I run into trouble, I’ll come right back. If I’m not back inside five minutes, you come over too.”

  Olga discreetly checked her gun. “I’ve got a better idea. You’re too important to risk first.” She pulled out her locket and picked up her bag: “See you shortly!”

  “Wait—” It was too late. Miriam squinted at the fading outline. Funny, she thought, irritated, I’ve never seen someone else do that. “Damn,” she said quietly, pulling out her own compact and opening it up so that she could join Olga. “You’d better not have run into anything you can’t handle—”

  Ouch. Miriam took a step back and a branch whacked her on the back of the head.

  “Are you alright?” Olga asked anxiously.

  “Ouch. And again, ouch. How about you?”

  “I’m fine, except for my head.” Olga looked none the worse for wear.

  “Where are we?”

  “I should say we’re still some way outside the city limits.” Miriam put her bag down and concentrated on breathing, trying to get the throbbing in her head under control. “Are you ready for a nice bracing morning constitutional?”

  “Ugh. Mornings should be abolished!”

  “You will hear no arguments from this quarter.” Miriam bent down, opened her bag, and removed a cloak from it to cover her alien clothes. “That looks like clear ground over there. How about we try to pick up a road?”

  “Lead on,” sighed Olga.

  They’d come out in deciduous woodland, snow lying thick on the ground between the stark, skeletal trees; it took them the best part of an hour to find their way to a road, and even that was mostly dumb luck. But, once they’d found it, Niejwein was already in sight. And what a sight it was.

  Miriam hadn’t appreciated before just how crude, small, and just plain smelly the city was. It stood on a low bluff overlooking what might, in a few hundred years, mutate into the Port Authority. Stone walls twenty feet high followed the contours of the ground for miles, bascules sprouting ominously every hundred yards. Long before they reached the walls, she found herself walking beside Olga
in a cloud of smelly dust, passing rows of windowless tumbledown shacks. Scores of poor-looking countryfolk—many in clothes little better than layered rags—drove heavily laden donkeys or small herds of sheep toward the city gates. Miriam noticed that they were picking up a few odd looks, especially from the ragged mothers of the barefoot urchins who cast stones across the icy cobbles, but she avoided eye contact and nobody seemed interested in approaching two women who knew where they were going. Especially after Olga pointedly allowed the barrel of her gun to slip from under her cloak, in response to an importuning rascal who attempted to get too close. “Hmm, I see why you always travel by—” Miriam stopped and squinted at the gatehouse. “Tell me that’s not what I think it is, on the wall,” she said.

  “Not what—oh, that.” Olga looked at her oddly. “What else would you have them do with bandits?”

  “Um.” Miriam swallowed. “Not that.” The city gates were wide open and nobody seemed to be guarding them. “Is there meant to be anyone on watch?”

  “Invasion comes from the sea, most often.”

  “Um.” I’ve got to stop saying that, Miriam told herself. Her feet were beginning to hurt with all the walking, she was picking up dust and dirt, and she was profoundly regretting not making use of the dining carriage for breakfast. Or crossing all the way over, phoning for Paulie to pick them up, and driving all the way in the back of an air-conditioned car. “Which way to the castle?”

  “Oh, that’s a way yet.” Olga beamed as a wagon laden with bales of hay clattered past. “Isn’t it grand? The largest city in the Gruinmarkt!”

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” Miriam said hollowly. She’d seen something like this before, she realized. Some of the museum reconstructions of medieval life back home were quite accurate, but nothing quite captured the reek—no, the overwhelming stench—of open sewers, of people who bathed twice a year and wore a single set of clothes all the time, of houses where the owners bedded down with their livestock to share warmth. Did I really say I was going to modernize this? she asked herself, aghast at her own hubris. Why yes, I think I did. Talk about jumping in with both feet…