Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  “Daddy would say I should stop the car, wave and smile for them: but I don’t care.” Elizabeth crossed her arms stubbornly. “I’m tired, I need a bath, and I know what the headlines will say. And what the cartoons will look like.”

  Susannah touched her knee delicately. “Anyone who catches the public imagination is fair game for petty cruelty…”

  The finishing school was located in the former Schloss Britz, near Bezirk Neukölln, some distance from Berlin proper, but the school term had not yet started. Elizabeth had been offered rooms in the Old Wing of the Charlottenburg Palace, but had politely declined. Instead, she’d asked for a suite in one of the grand hotels on Unter den Linden, right in the middle of the excitement and electric lights of the city. It gave her another excuse for declining her fiancé’s offer of a cortège fitting a princess. It also gave her the opportunity to slip in and out with only a single chaperone for company, dressed in a mode suitable for an upper-middle-class young lady. She wanted to discreetly sample the public life of the city without attracting a sparkling trail of face-stealing photo-journalists and vitriolic editorial writers keen to expose every public misstep of the “Quarter-Blood Princess” (as the gutter press had labeled her). Not that there were many young ladies in Berlin whose Brazilian mother’s blood showed so clearly in their skin, but short of taking a tour of the Ottoman rump or the foot of Sicily, it seemed unlikely she could ever find herself in a part of the empire where she would not stand out.

  It had been Princess Elizabeth’s misfortune to be born with three burdens: exile, intelligence, and her mother’s bloodline. Exile was self-explanatory: she’d been too young to remember the palaces of New York before the revolution that had forced her grandfather and parents to seek uncertain shelter with their long-term rivals, the Bourbon Empire. Her mother’s blood was a problem of a different kind. Her father had mildly scandalized New British society twenty years ago by courting her mother, Helena, Princess of Brazil. She was a famous beauty, but like most of the nobility of her province she was descended from the freed African troops who had conquered the southern continent for the Crown in the eighteenth century. Helena had succumbed to neurasthenic depression in exile and had become a recluse, thereby leaving Elizabeth to grow up in isolation in an exiled court, surrounded by an empire where dark skin was a signifier of serfdom rather than southern aristocracy.

  But by far the heaviest burden was to be intelligent and active while also being a girl. If I’d been a boy none of this would be necessary, she told herself grimly. Princes were expected to set their own goals and trim their sails accordingly, to be players in the dynastic games of monarchy. Princes had agency. But in the ossified political etiquette of the Old World, a princess was merely an incubator for the next crop of rulers. Princes did things; princesses were done to.

  If that had been the worst of her fated problems, Elizabeth might have forced a glassy-eyed smile and gone through the motions of cooperating. Even the dynastic betrothal her father had arranged for her to the French emperor’s son and heir—though he was nearly twice her age and possessed both a mistress and (it was rumored) the clap—even that, she might have suffered in silence.

  But Elizabeth was a quietly voracious, not to say eclectic, reader. It had been a cause for despair and even a nervous breakdown or two among her tutors. Expecting a spoiled and overprivileged brat, they’d been confronted by a whirlpool of ravening intellectual hunger. And, having studied, she could draw her own conclusions. It was apparent to her, if not to her father—or to the other bickering grand dukes and princes of Europe—that the tide of history was turning. While her father had glanced dismissively at the headlines describing the rebel Commonwealth’s new artificial moonlet, then snorted, or chosen to make a joke out of the scientific gewgaws coming out of the workshops of the West, Elizabeth had shivered apprehensively. She had begun to make discreet inquiries, paying attention to the more bizarre conspiracy theories coming out of New London, rumors of visitors from other worlds bearing alien technology. She had asked for subscriptions to some additional periodicals (which her tutors approved without demur, for dry academic journals hardly required censorship for the delicate sensibilities of a princess). And she was unsurprised when one day she found an unasked-for and most peculiar history book in her papers. A couple of weeks later, she found a letter hidden among the pages of one of her technical journals. It had been addressed to her, asking if she had read the book, and would like some more. (And it was unsigned, of course.)

  She had replied in the affirmative, pulse pounding and palms moist, before replacing the magazine in the drawer of her desk. The following week, there was another letter, which set out a most interesting proposal. At which point she demanded some external evidence, for the suggestion was breathtaking in its audacity—and almost insultingly extreme, as if Herr Polk, her seventy-year-old violin teacher, had calmly asked her to elope with him.

  The next letter was terse, and contained six angular parameters and a time, five days hence. She waited expectantly: and when the newssheets announced that the anarchists beyond the ocean had thrown another piece of scrap metal into the heavens, her disinterest was entirely feigned.

  That was when she began to make serious plans. For Elizabeth of Hanover had no intention of being consigned to the scrap heap of history, like the Dauphin of France described in the book: a bizarre history of eighteenth-century France that ended in a terrifying revolution in 1789—a revolution that was absent from her own world’s records.

  BERLIN, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  There was no engram that could take Hulius directly from the Berlin of time line two to time line three without passing through the chilly, forested wastelands of time line one. Hulius jaunted, sheltered quietly under a tall pine tree until his headache subsided, then jaunted again, careful to stay within the perimeter marked out by stakes in the forest floor.

  The warehouse in time line three—Hulius’s home time line, that of the Commonwealth and the globe-spanning French Empire—was dark, extremely dusty, and smelled overpoweringly of damp leather. Hulius lowered his bags to the floor then stood in silence for half a minute, trying to ignore the pounding in his skull as his eyes adapted to the gloom. Finally, hearing nothing and feeling marginally nauseous, he relaxed slightly.

  The arrival point in the doppelgänger facility was situated in the middle of a sample room. Wooden cubbyholes vanished into the gloom beneath a high ceiling, each stuffed with a fur or a bundle of leather or a brown paper parcel. The lamplighter had drawn a chalk circle on the worn linoleum floor to outline the safe transfer area, within which Hulius could world-walk back to time line one without risking a painful intersection with a tree. So far, so good. He moved toward the entrance to the room, then listened for a moment before he pushed the door open.

  Wan afternoon sunlight streamed through windows almost completely coated with grime, the soot of a million coal fires that turned sunsets into an apocalyptic symphony of color and choked the lungs. The back of the furrier’s warehouse was filled from floor to creaking rafters with bales and bulging sacks. Up front, the cramped business office lay empty, inkwells dry and telephone stilled. Hulius satisfied himself that the premises were empty. Then he went back to collect the carpetbag, let himself out, and locked the office’s front door behind him.

  The most perilous action for any intelligence agent is a covert insertion into hostile foreign territory. Once in place and oriented, with somewhere to go to ground and local contacts and knowledge, it’s possible to hide incriminating equipment and develop a cover story with local alibis. But the moment of arrival is the moment of maximum risk. Most spies are detected within twenty-four hours of insertion, and of those, the majority are caught within the first six hours.

  Walking along a gray sidewalk in the afternoon light, Hulius reminded himself to keep his pace slow and his head down, to avoid rubbernecking like a visitor. Maintaining a scan was pointless; if he was already under surveillance his mission wa
s over before it began. Prussia was by no means the most heavily policed province of the Empire. But in the increasingly fearful political climate of a superpower that was falling technologically behind a revolutionary upstart enemy with super-science on its side, it wasn’t a good idea to stand out.

  Trucks rumbled past, belching diesel fumes. Overhead cables sparked and sizzled against the pick-ups of the trolley buses. Private cars were relatively rare compared to the flock of buzzing sky-blue taxis. An occasional police sedan drove past, big-block engine gurgling, but for the most part the cops hereabouts walked the streets in pairs, or watched from small elevated guard towers at intersections. There were enough pedestrians that he didn’t stand out among the foot traffic. Hausfrauen pushed perambulators or trudged under their loaded grocery baskets. Street hawkers and shoe-shine men called their services as self-important clerks hurried around them.

  Hulius had memorized the directions left by the lamplighter. He followed them to an intersection of three boulevards a mile from the furrier’s warehouse, where a gleam of steel embedded in the cobblestones betrayed a loop of tram tracks curving back toward the center of the city. He didn’t have long to wait for a ride. Within minutes a multi-carriage streetcar whined into view around the curve of a residential street and squealed to a halt by the stop. He climbed aboard, and nodded to the guard in his wooden cubby hole. “A single to the Brandenberger exchange, please,” he said haltingly.

  “Twenty pfennigs.” The guard spun his handwheel as Hulius slid the coins across and the tram whined back into life, swaying from side to side. He took the ticket and found a spot on one of the slatted wooden bench seats, studiously ignoring the other passengers. It wasn’t hard: as with big city dwellers everywhere, nobody wanted to risk giving the crazy in the next seat a conversational opening.

  It was mid-afternoon and the tram was far from full, so Hulius took the opportunity to gaze out the window at the passing scenery.

  This Berlin felt curiously backward and dated to a visitor from the Commonwealth, let alone one who had experienced a few days in the Berlin of time line two. In time line two, Berlin was populated by cars that resembled half-melted blobs and often drove themselves, the pedestrians thronging the sidewalks all staring into glowing slab-like fatphones. The Commonwealth wasn’t there yet, but signs of hypermodernity were springing up like the first shoots of spring rising from winter ground. The Commonwealth was installing public computer terminals in former telephone booths; synthetic fabrics had pushed the fast-forward button on fashion trends, and satellites and jet airliners were the hot new things on postage stamps.

  In contrast, the Berlin of the Bourbon Empire in time line three seemed to have heard of the modern and decided it wanted none of it. It wasn’t that the suburban streets the tram rolled through looked poor or badly maintained. On the contrary: the road surface was sound, the trees and ornamental plants were well-tended, and the painted building frontages clean and free of cracks. But the clouds overhead were tainted with yellow, and streamers of coal-smoke rose from chimneys on every roofline. The few automobiles were oddly archaic, boxes on wheels that bespoke ignorance of aerodynamics and a lack of advancement in chemical processes. His fellow-passengers’ clothes were well-made, and far more elaborately decorated than the cars, but their fashions wore the unseen fetters of manufacturing costs. Cleaning and mending was in evidence: working women wore aprons to protect their gowns, while some of the poorer-looking male passengers’ outfits showed signs of repair, repeatedly patched at elbow and knee. Fishmongers and butchers displayed their wares on shade-covered unrefrigerated slabs in front of their shops. The streetlights, he noticed with a start, featured rungs for the lamplighters to climb. And drays still clopped along the streets, delivering wooden casks to the bars and reeking horse droppings to the gutters.

  Turning another corner, the tram hummed along a street lined with larger shops. A department store window tried to entice Hulius with the prospect of renting the latest radio-gramophone. In the next window along, a preposterously primitive-looking television—black-and-white, its screen a pale green ovoid set in a tall wooden cabinet—occupied pride of place, where in the Commonwealth an equivalent store might offer an early home computer. You are now entering the Empire: please set your watches back thirty years, he reflected. But it was, he realized, dangerous to be complacent. Like all unreconstructed monarchies, the Empire was a totalitarian regime, equipped with all the police state tools of repression. It had successfully fought off the virus of revolutionary modernism when the New British Empire had succumbed two decades ago. But it was now confronted by a rival, the revenant Commonwealth which had risen from the ashes of empire, which was clearly pulling ahead. And the Commonwealth seemed bound to leave the French Empire in the dust over the next few years. With no peaceful mechanism for transfer of power when a government was failing, sooner or later there would be a crisis of confidence that would plunge the continent into a desperate cycle of perestroika at best, and civil war at worst.

  Another stop, and now the buildings were growing larger and more grandiose. Unter den Linden was only a couple of miles down the track. Hulius stood up and pulled the bell rope, then moved toward the doorway. Hotel reservation in the name of Gormer, he reminded himself. He would check in, unpack, eat a late lunch … and then it would be time to see about saving this world from an accidental descent into nuclear war.

  FORT BASTION, TIME LINE TWELVE, AUGUST 2020

  The officers’ mess at Fort Bastion had laid on a buffet lunch for the inquisitive legislators. Huw forced himself to mingle with the magistrates and their staffers and make friendly small talk, answering questions that ranged from so technical they verged on an operational security risk to so ill-informed they made him want to groan. Canapés, amuse-bouches, and sushi rolls formed heaps on bone china plates, neglected by their owners in favor of a deafening buzz of conversation. Huw tipped a wink to the headwaiter: his glass received only white grape juice and soda water.

  Finally, the trays on the sideboard began to empty and the delegates surrendered their plates one by one. “General.” It was Madame Sour-Face—Magistrate Rebeccah Smith, representative for the Riding of North Kansaw. “I’d like to thank you for your hospitality, but I can’t help noticing we’re running late.”

  Huw nodded. “Yes, my staff asked for a little extra time to prepare, but they should be ready by now. I take it you’d still like to see JUGGERNAUT itself, so—” He signaled the headwaiter, then he cleared his throat. “Excuse me, honorables, if I may have your attention please! We have a lot of ground to cover, so if you’d like to join me at the entrance it’s time to start the next leg of our tour of the facility.”

  Transferring to a passenger bus, they slowly circumnavigated the airship hangars. Huw reeled off facts and figures about the Fraternity and its sister-ships. They were impressive but obsolescent, retired from service as long-duration antisubmarine patrol vessels a decade and a half ago, to eke out an afterlife as para-time scouting platforms. They had been extremely cheap to buy, but were becoming expensive to maintain. “They’re not fast, but they can cruise for up to ten days without refueling, dropping sample retrieval cages and away teams as they go. On a ten-day mission one of these airships can survey two-thirds of a million square miles, establish four fenced-off landing outposts, drop twelve tons of supplies and twenty ground crew, and traverse up to six double-indirect time lines or twenty-four direct-access ones. Consequently we’re opening up an average of one new time line per month.”

  Huw paused as the bus drew up next to the transit hovercraft. While they’d been touring the hangar, a gigantic freight carrier had come in: the logistics crew were readying it for departure to time line twelve. The driver eased the bus up one of the giant freight ramps and onto the deck of the hovercraft, before a row of stacked forty-foot shipping containers. “To save headaches, I’ve got us a ride on this freighter for the next sector. Lift-off is due in”—he checked his watch—“six minutes. You
might want to fasten your seat belts: it can be a bit dizzying if you’re not expecting it.”

  The gray-eyed representative (a Mr. Cortez, from the state of Patagonia) shook his head. “This is merely another hovercraft, is it not?”

  “Yes, but it’s a lot bigger. And size has a quality all of its own…” Huw gestured at the raised bridge of the craft, where he could see the pilots and the world-walker going through their preflight checklists. The cargo ramps were already rising, and a distant rumble bespoke the hovercraft’s starter motor firing up, ready to turn over the huge bank of diesels that drove the lift fans. “We’re sitting in this bus along with thirty-six containers, holding roughly one and a half thousand tons of cargo. It takes a lot of power to float that much on an insulating air cushion while the world-walker takes us across—”

  The gathering engine roar forced Huw to stop talking. Moments later he reached for his ear defenders as the lift fans howled into life, blasting air into the skirts around the craft. The howl rose to a crescendo and the ground beyond the edge of the freight deck dropped away, as the cushion inflated and the hovercraft lifted them almost twenty feet straight up. Then, from one moment to the next, the sky and the ground outside changed. Huw’s ears popped as clouds crowded in overhead, staining the land with the pinkish gray shadow of an incoming storm. In front of the giant freight hovercraft, an overhead crane squatted above a string of flatbed railcars. And to the left—

  Huw gestured at the view as the lift fans whined down into silence and the hovercraft’s skirts began to deflate. He removed his ear defenders as the magistrates and their assistants turned to gape at an open-sided building that dwarfed the airship hangars they had just toured. “That’s the vertical assembly building where we’re building JUGGERNAUT. You can’t see the launchpad, because it’s in time line twelve-B, another transit away—but it’s co-located with the VAB.” He pointed at a squat building adjacent to the VAB, surrounded by a high fence and watch towers: “That’s the fuel package final assembly building. And that”—he pointed at a five-hundred-foot-high pistol cartridge, just visible through the open side of the assembly building—“that’s the second JUGGERNAUT prototype itself, sitting on its launchpad, ready for orbit.” In front of the bus, the cargo ramp was descending. “Now let’s drive over to the VAB, and take a look at the future of para-time exploration—and space travel.”