The Hidden Family

by Charles Stross

  She talked for a long time, and Iris listened, occasionally prompting her for more detail but mostly just staring at her face, intently, with an expression somewhere between longing and disgust.

  Finally Miriam ran down. “That’s all, I guess,” she said. “I left Brill with Paulie, who’s looking after her. Tomorrow I’m going to take the second locket and, well, see if it works. Over here or over there.” She searched Iris’s face. “You believe me?” she asked, almost plaintively.

  “Oh, I believe you, kid.” Iris reached out and covered her hand with her own: older, thinner, infinitely familiar. “I—” She paused. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” she admitted. “I had an idea this was going to get weird before I gave you the box, but not like this. It seemed like a good time to pass it on when you began sniffing around their turf. Large-scale money laundering is exactly the sort of thing the, this Clan, would be mixed up in, and I suspected—well. I expected you to come back and ask me about it sooner, rather than simply jumping in. Maybe I should have warned you.” She looked at Miriam, searchingly.

  “It’s okay, Ma.” Miriam covered Iris’s hand with her other.

  “No, it’s not okay,” Iris insisted. “What I did was wrong! I should have—”

  “Ma, shut up.”

  “If you insist.” Iris watched her with a curious half-smile. “This second knotwork design—I want to see that. Can you show me sometime?”

  “Sure.” Miriam nodded. “Didn’t bring it with me, though.”

  Her mother nodded. “What are you going to do next?”

  “I’m—” Miriam sighed. “I warned Angbard that if anybody touched a hair on your head, he was dead meat. But now there’s a second bunch after me, and I don’t have a hotline to their boss. I don’t even know who their boss is.”

  “Neither did Patricia,” murmured Iris.

  “What did you say?”

  “I’d have thought it was obvious,” Iris pointed out quickly. “If she’d known, they wouldn’t have gotten near her.” She shook her head. “A really bad business, that.” For a moment she looked angry, and determined—the same expression Miriam had glimpsed in a mirror recently. “And it hasn’t gone away.” She snorted. “Give me your secret phone number, girl.”

  “My secret—what?”

  Iris grinned at her. “Okay, your dead-letter drop. So we can keep in touch when you go on your wanderings. You do want to keep your old mom informed of what the enemies of freedom and civilization are up to, don’t you?”

  “Ma!” Miriam smiled right back. “Okay, here it is,” she said, scribbling her new, sanitized mobile number down on a piece of paper and sliding it over to Iris.

  “Good.” Iris tucked it away quickly. “This locket you found—you think it goes somewhere else, don’t you?”

  “Yes. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.”

  “To another world, where everything will of course be completely different.” Iris shook her head. “As if two worlds wasn’t already one too many.”

  “And mystery assassins. Don’t forget the mystery assassins.”

  “I’m not,” said her mother. “From what you’ve been telling me ...” She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t trust any of them. Not the Clan, not even the one you bedded. They’re all—they sound like—a bunch of vipers. They’ll screw you as soon as you think you’re safe.”

  “Ma.” Miriam began to blush. “Oh, I don’t trust them. At least, not to do anything with my best interests at heart.”

  “Then you’re smarter than I was at your age.” Iris pulled on her gloves. “Give an old lady a lift home? Or at least, back to the woods? It’s a cold and scary night. Mind you, I may have forgotten to bring your red cloak, but any wolves who try to lay hands on this old granny will come off worse.”

  Pawn Broker

  “It’s no good,” said Miriam, rubbing her forehead. “All I get is crossed eyes, blurred vision, and a headache. It doesn’t work.” She snapped the assassin’s locket closed in frustration.

  “Maybe it doesn’t work here,” Brill suggested. “If it’s a different design?”

  “Maybe.” Miriam nodded. “Or then again, it’s a different design and it came through on the other side. How do I know where I’d end up if I did get it to work here?” She paused, then looked at the locket. “Maybe it wasn’t real clever of me to try that here,” she said slowly. “I really ought to cross over before I try it again. If there’s really a third world out there, how do we know there isn’t a fourth? Or more? How do we know that using it twice in succession brings you back to the place you departed from—that travel using it is commutative? It raises more questions than it answers, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes—” Brill fell silent.

  “Do you know anything about this?” Miriam asked.

  “No.” She shook her head slowly. “I don’t—they never spoke about the possibility. Why should they? It was as much as anyone could do to travel between this world and the other, without invoking phantoms. Would testing a new sigil not be dangerous? If it by some chance carried you to another world where wild animals or storms waited ...”

  “Someone must have tried it.” Miriam frowned. “Mustn’t they?”

  “You would have to ask the elders,” Brill offered. “All I can tell is what I was told.”

  “Well, anyway,” Miriam rubbed her forehead again, “if it works, it’ll be one hell of a lever to use with Angbard. I’ll just have to take this one and cross over to the other side before I try to go wherever its original owner came from. Then try from there.”

  “Can you do that?” Brill asked.

  “Yes. But just one crossing gives me a cracking headache if I don’t take my pills. I figure I can make two an hour apart. But if I run into something nasty on the far side-—wherever this one takes me—I’ll be in deep trouble if I need to get away from it in a hurry.”

  Malignant hypertension wasn’t a term she could use with Brill, but she’d seen what it could do to people. In particular she’d seen a middle-aged man who’d not bothered to follow the dietary guidelines after his HMO doctor prescribed him an ancient and dubious monoamine oxidase inhibitor. He’d flatlined over the cheese board at a birthday party, the glass of sparkling white wine still at hand. She’d been in the emergency room when the ambulance brought him in, bleeding from nose and eyes. She’d been there when they turned the ventilator off and filled out the death certificate. She shook her head. “It’ll take careful planning.”

  Miriam glanced at the window. Snow drifted down from a sky the color of shattered dreams. It was bitterly cold outside. “What I should do is go across, hole up somewhere and catch some sleep, then try to cross over the next day so I can run away if anything goes wrong. Trouble is, it’s going to be just as cold on the other side as it is here. And if I have to run away, I get to spend two nights camping in the woods, in winter, with a splitting headache. I don’t think that’s a really great idea. And I’m limited to what I can carry.”

  Wheris Paulie due back? she wondered. She’ll be able to help.

  “What about a coaching-house?” Brill asked, practical-minded as ever.

  “A coaching—” Miriam stopped dead. “But I can’t—”

  “There’s one about two miles down the road from Fort Lofstrom.” Brill looked thoughtful. “We dress you as a, an oracle’s wife, summoned to a village down the coast to join your husband in his new parish. Your trap broke a wheel and—” She ran down. “Oh. You don’t speak hoh’sprashe.”

  “Yup.” Miriam nodded. “Doesn’t work well, does it?”

  “No.” Brill wrinkled her nose. “What a nuisance! We could go together,” she added tentatively.

  “I think we’ll have to do that,” said Miriam. “Probably I play the mute mother and you play the daughter—I try to look older, you to look younger. Think it would work?”

  From Brilliana’s slow nod she realized that Brill did—and wasn’t enthusiastic about it. “It might.”

>   “It would also leave you stranded in the back of beyond up near, where was it, Hasleholm, if I don’t come back, wouldn’t it?” Miriam pointed out. “On the other hand, you’d be in the right place. You could make your way to Fort Lofstrom and tell Angbard what happened. He’d take care of you,” she added. “Just tell him I ordered you to come along with me. He’ll swallow that.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” Brilliana said evenly. “Not until I’ve seen more of this wonderful world.”

  Miriam nodded soberly at her. “Me too, kid. So we’re not going to plan on me not coming back, are we? Instead, we’re going to plan on us both going over, spending the night at a coach-house, and then walking down the road to the next one. They’re only about twenty miles apart—it’s a fair hike, but not impossible. Along the way, I disappear, and catch up with you later. We spend the night there, then we turn back—and cross back here. How does that sound?”

  “Three days?” Brill looked thoughtful. “And you’ll bring me back here?”

  “Of course.” Miriam brooded for a moment. “I think I want some more tea,” she decided. “Want some?”

  “Oh yes!” Brilliana sat up eagerly. “Is there any of Earl Grey’s own blend?”

  “I’ll just check.” Miriam wandered into Paulette’s kitchen, her mind spinning gears like a car in neutral. She filled the kettle, set it on the hob to boil, began searching for tea bags. There’s got to be a way to make this work better, she thought. The real problem was mobility. If she could just arrange how to meet up with Brill fifteen miles down the road without having to walk the distance herself—“Oh,” she said, as the kettle began to boil.

  “What is it?” asked Brill, behind her.

  “It’s so obvious!” Miriam said as she picked the kettle up. “I should have figured it out before.”

  “Figured? What ails you?”

  She poured boiling water into the teapot. “A form of speech. I meant, I’ve worked out what I need to do.” She put the lid on the pot, moved it onto a tray, and picked it up to carry back into the living room. “Go on.”

  “You’ve hatched a plan?”

  “Yes.” Miriam kicked the kitchen door shut behind her. “It’s quite simple. I’ve been worrying about having to camp in the woods in winter, or make myself understood, or keep up appearances with you. That’s wrong. What I should have been thinking about is how I can move myself about, over there, to somewhere where there’s shelter, without involving anyone else. Right?”

  “That makes sense.” Brilliana looked dubious. “But how are you going to do that, unless you walk? You couldn’t take a horse through. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any horses here—”

  Miriam took a deep breath. “Brill, when Paulie gets back I think we’re going to go shopping. For an all-terrain bicycle, a pair of night-vision goggles, a sewing machine, and some fabric...”

  * * *

  The devil was in the details. In the end it took Miriam two days to buy her bicycle. She spent the first day holed up with cycle magazines, spokehead Web sites, and the TV blaring extreme sports at her. The second day consisted of being patronized in successive shops by men in skintight neon Lycra bodysuits, to Brill’s quietly scandalized amusement. In the end, the vehicle of Miriam’s desire turned out to be a Dahon folding mountain bike, built out of chromed aluminium tubes. It wasn’t very light, but at thirty pounds—including carrying case and toolset—she could carry it across easily enough, and it wasn’t a toy. It was a real mountain bike that folded down into something she could haul in a backpack and, more importantly, something that could carry herself and a full load over dirt trails as fast as a horse.

  “What is that thing?” Brill asked, when she finished unfolding it on a spread of newspapers on Paulette’s living room carpet. “It looks like something you torture people with.”

  “That’s a fair assessment.” Miriam grimaced as she worked the alien keys on the saddle-post, trying to get it locked at a comfortable height. “I haven’t ridden a bike in years. Hope I haven’t forgotten how.”

  “When you sit on that thing, you can’t possibly be modest.”

  “Well, no,” Miriam admitted. “I plan to only use it out of sight of other people.” She finished on the saddle and began hunting for an attachment place for the toolkit. “The Swiss army used to have a regiment of soldiers who rode these things, as mounted infantry—not cavalry. They could cover two hundred miles a day on roads, seventy a day in the mountains. I’m no soldier, but I figure this will get me around faster than my feet.”

  “You’ll still need clothing,” Brill pointed out. “And so will I. What I came across in isn’t suitable for stamping around in the forest in winter! And we couldn’t possibly be seen wearing your camping gear if we expect to stay in a coaching inn.”

  “Yup. Which is where this machine comes in.” Miriam pointed to the other big box, occupying a large chunk of the floor. “I take it there’s no chance that you already know how to use an overlocker?”

  The overlocker took them most of the rest of the day to figure out, and it nearly drove Paulette to distraction when she came home from the errand she’d been running to find Miriam oiling a bicycle in the hall and Brill puzzling out the manual for an industrial sewing machine and a bunch of costume patterns Miriam had bought. “You’re turning my house into an asylum!” she accused Miriam, after kicking her shoes off.

  “Yeah, I am. How’s the office hunt going?”

  “Badly,” snapped Paulette. Her voice changed: “Offices, oy, have we got offices! You should see our offices, such wonderful offices you have never imagined! By the way, how long have you been in business? There’ll be a deposit if it’s less than two years.”

  “Uh-huh.” Miriam nodded. “How big a deposit?”

  “Six months rent,” Paulie swallowed. “For two thousand square feet with a loading bay and a thousand feet of office above it, that comes to about thirty thousand bucks. Plus municipal tax, sewer, electric and gas. And the broadband you want.”

  “Hmm.” Miriam nodded to herself, then hit the quick-release bolts. The bike folded in on itself like an intricate origami sculpture and she locked it down in its most compact position, then eased the carrying case over it.

  “Hey, that’s real neat,” Paulette said admiringly. “You turning into a fitness freak in your old age?”

  “Don’t change the subject.” Miriam grunted, then upended the case and zipped it shut. Folded, the bike was a beast. She could get the thing comfortably on her back but would be hard put to carry anything else. Hmm. “Back in a minute.” She shouldered the bike pack and marched to the back door that opened on Paulette’s yard. “Here goes nothing,” she muttered, and pulled out her locket.

  Half an hour later she was back without the bike, staggering slightly, shivering with cold, and rubbing her sore forehead. “Oh, I really don’t need to do that so fast,” she groaned.

  “If you will do that with no preparation—” Paulette began to say waspishly.

  “No, no.” Miriam waved her away. “I took my pills, boss, honest. It’s just really cold over there.”

  “Where did you stash it?” Paulie asked practically.

  “Where your back wall is, over on the other side, where there’s nothing but forest. Brrr. Up against a tree, I cut a gash in the bark.” She brandished her knife. “Won’t be hard to find if we go over from here: Main thing will be walking to the road, the nearest one is about half a mile away. Better go in the morning.”

  “Right,” Paulette said skeptically. “About the rent.”

  “Yeah.” Miriam nodded. “Look, give me fifteen minutes to recover and I’ll get my coat. Then we can go look over that building, and if it’s right we’ll go straight on to the bank and move another whack of cash so you can wave a deposit under their nose.” She straightened up. “We’ll take Brill. There’s a theatrical costume shop we need to check out; it might speed things up a bit.” Her expression hardened. “I’m tired of waiting, and the longe
r this drags on the harder it’ll be to explain it to Angbard. If I don’t get in touch soon, I figure he’ll cut off my credit until I surface. It’s time to hit the road.”

  Two days later, a frigid morning found Miriam dozing fitfully on a lumpy, misshapen mattress with a quiedy snoring lump to her left. She opened her eyes. Where am I? she wondered for a moment, then memory rescued the day. Oh. A pile of canvas bags before her nose formed a hump up against the rough, unpainted planks of the wall. The snoring lump twitched, pushing her closer to the edge. The light streamed in through a small window, its triangular tiles of glass uneven and bubbled. She’d slept fully dressed except for her boots and cloak, and she felt filthy. To make matters worse, something had bitten her in the night, found her to its taste, and invited its family and friends along for Thanksgiving.

  “Aargh.” She sat up and swung her feet out, onto the floor. Even through her wool stockings the boards felt cold as ice. The jug under the bed was freezing cold too, she discovered as she squatted over it to piss. In fact, the air was so chilly it leached all the heat out of any part of her anatomy she exposed to it. She finished her business fast and shoved the pot back under the bed to freeze.

  “Wake up,” she called softly to Brilliana. “Rise and shine! We’ve got a good day ahead!”

  “Oh, my head.” Brill surfaced bleary-eyed and disheveled from under the quilt. “Your hostelries aren’t like this.”

  “Well, this one won’t stay like this for long if I get my way,” Miriam commented. “My mouth tastes like something died in it. Let me get my boots on and warm my toes up a bit.”

  “Hah.” Brilliana’s expression was pessimistic. “They let the fire run low, I’d say.” She found the chamber pot. Miriam nodded and looked away. So much for en suite bathrooms, she thought mordantly. “You stand up, now,” Brill ordered after a minute.