Brill shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said, “I never saw how they operate the post service. But surely—if we get a very heavy pack ready, and lift it so you can walk into it backwards, then just lock your knees, wouldn’t that work?”
“It might.” Miriam pulled a face. “I might also twist an ankle. Which would be bad, in the middle of nowhere.”
“What happens if you try to go through with something on the ground?” Brill asked.
“I don’t.” Miriam refilled her glass. “It was one of the first things I tried. If you jump on my back I can just about carry you for thirty seconds or so before I fall over—that’s long enough. But I tried with a sofa a while ago. All that happened was, I got a splitting headache and threw up in the toilet. I don’t know how I managed it the first time, sitting in a swivel chair, except maybe it was something to do with its wheels—there wasn’t much contact with the floor.”
“Oh, right.”
“Which says interesting things about the family trade,” Miriam added. “They’re limited by weight and volume in what they can ship. Two and a half tons a week. If we open up ‘world three’ that’ll go down, precipitously, although the three-way trade may be worth more. We’ve got to work out how to run an import/export business that doesn’t run into the mercantilist zero-sum trap.”
“The what?” Brill looked blank.
Miriam sighed. “Old, old theory. It’s the idea that there are only a finite quantity of goods of fixed value, so if you ship them from one place to another, the source has to do without. People used to think all trade worked that way. What happens is, if you ship some commodity to a place where it’s scarce, sooner or later the price drops—deflates—while you’re buying up so much of the supply that the price rises at the source.”
“Isn’t that the way things always work?” Brill asked.
“Nope.” Miriam took a sip of wine. “I’m drinking too much of this stuff, too regularly. Hmm, where was I? This guy called Adam Smith worked it out about two centuries ago, in this world. Turns out you can create value by working with people to refine goods or provide services. Another guy called Marx worked on Smith’s ideas a bit further a century later, and though lots of people dislike the prescription he came up with, his analysis of how capitalism works is quite good. Labor—what people do—enhances the value of raw materials. This table is worth more than the raw timber it’s made out of, for example. We can create value, wealth, what-have-you, if we can just move materials to where the labor input on them enhances their value the most.” She drifted off, staring at the TV set, which was showing a talk show with the volume muted. (Brill said it made more sense that way.) “The obvious thing to move is patents,” she murmured. “Commercially valuable ideas.”
“You think you can use the talent to create wealth, instead of moving it around?” Brill looked puzzled.
“Yes, that’s it exactly.” Miriam put her glass down. “A large gold nugget is no use to a man who’s dying of thirst in a desert. By the same token, a gold nugget may be worth a lot more to a jeweler, who can turn it into something valuable and salable, than it is to someone who just wants to melt it down and use it as coin. Jewelry usually sells for more than its own weight in raw materials, doesn’t it? That’s because of the labor invested in it. Or the scarcity of the end product, a unique work of art. The Clan seems to have gotten hung up on shipping raw materials around as a way of making money. I want to ship ideas around, instead, ideas that people can use to create value locally—in each world—actually create wealth rather than just cream off a commission for transporting it.”
“And you want to eventually turn my world into this one, Brilliana said calmly.
“Yes.” Miriam looked back at her. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing, do you think?”
Brill gestured at the TV set. “Put one of those, showing that, in every peasant’s house? Are you kidding? I think it’s the most amazingly wonderful thing I’ve ever heard of!” She frowned. “My momer would say that’s typical of me, and my father would get angry and perhaps beat me for it. But I’m right, and they’re wrong.”
“Ah, the self-confidence of youth.” Miriam picked up her glass again. “Doesn’t the idea of, like, completely wiping out the culture of your own people worry you? I mean, so much of what we’ve got here is such complete shit—” She stopped. Brill’s eyes were sparkling—with anger, not amusement.
“You really think so? Go live in a one-room hut for a couple of years, bearing illiterate brats half of whom will die before they’re five! Without a fancy toilet, or even a thunder-mug to piss in each morning. Go do that, where the only entertainment is once a week going to the temple where some fat stupid priest invokes the blessings of Sky Father and his court on your heads and prays that the harvest doesn’t fail again like it did five years ago, when two of your children starved to death in front of your eyes. Then tell me that your culture’s shit!”
Miriam tried to interrupt: “Hey, what about—”
Brill steamed right on. “Shut up. Even the children of the well-off—like me—grow up living four to a room and wearing hand-me-downs. We are married off to whoever our parents think will pay best bride-price. Because we’re members of the outer families we don’t die of childbed fever—not since the Clan so graciously gave us penicillin tablets and morphine for the pain—but we get to bear child after child because it’s our duty to the Clan! Are you insane, my lady? Or merely blind? And it’s better for us in the families than for ordinary women, better by far. Did you notice that within the Clan you had rights? Or that outside the Clan, in the ordinary aristocracy, you didn’t? We have at least one ability that is as important, more important, than what’s between our legs: another source of status. But those ordinary peasants you feel such guilt for don’t have any such thing. There’s a better life awaiting me as a humble illegal immigrant in this world than there is as a lady-in-waiting to nobility in my own. Do you think I’d ever go back there for any reason except to help you change the world?”
Taken aback, Miriam recoiled slightly. “Ouch,” she said. “I didn’t realize all that stuff. No.” She picked up her wine glass again. “It’s post-colonial guilt, I guess,” she added by way of explanation. “We’ve got a lot of history here, and it’s really ugly in parts. We’ve got a long tradition of conquering other people and messing them up. The idea of taking over and running people for their own good got a very bad name about sixty years ago—did anyone tell you about the Second World War? So a lot of us have this cringe reflex about the whole idea.”
“Don’t. If you do what you’re planning, you couldn’t invade and conquer, anyway. How many people could you bring through? All you can do is persuade people to live their lives a better way—the one thing the families and the Clan have never bothered trying to do, because they’re swimming desperately against the stream, trying to hold their own lives together. It takes an outside view to realize that if they started building fabulous buildings and machines like these at home they wouldn’t be dependent on imported luxuries from the world next door. And they never—” her chest heaved—”let us get far enough away to see that clearly. Because if we did, we might not come back.”
She looked depressed.
“You don’t want to go back?” asked Miriam. “Not even to visit, to see your family and friends?”
“Not really.” It was a statement of fact. “This is better. I can find new friends here. If I go there, and you fail—” she caught Miriam’s gaze. “I might never be able to come back here.”
For a moment, looking at this young woman—young enough to be at college but with eyes prematurely aged by cynicism and the Clan’s greedy poverty of riches—Miriam had second thoughts. The families’ grip on their young was eggshell-thin, always in danger of bursting. If they ever got the idea that they could just take their lockets or tattoos or scraps of paper and leave, the Clan would be gone within a generation. Am I going to end up making this family tyranny stronger? she
wondered. Because if so, shouldn’t I just give up now ...? “I won’t fail you,” she heard herself saying. “We’ll fix them.”
Brill nodded. “I know you will,” she said. And Miriam nodded right back at her, her mind awash with all the other family children, her distant relatives—the siblings and cousins she’d never known, might never have known of, who would live and die in gilded poverty if she failed.
A woman dressed in black stepped out of the winter twilight.
She looked around curiously, one hand raised to cover her mouth. “I’m in somebody’s garden by the look of things. Hedge to my left, dilapidated shed in front of me—and a house behind. Can’t be sure, but it looks a mess. The hedge is wildly overgrown and the windows are boarded up.”
She glanced around, but couldn’t see into the neighboring gardens. “Seems like an expensive place.” She furtively scratched an arrowhead on the side of the shed, pointing to the spot she’d arrived on, then winced. “This light is hurting my head. Ow ...” She hitched her coat out of the grayish snow then stumbled toward the house, crouching below the level of the windows.
She paused. “It looks empty,” she muttered to the dictaphone. “Forward ho.” She walked around to the front of the house, where the snow was banked in deep drifts before the doors and blank-eyed wooden window shutters. Nobody had been in or out for days, that much was clear. There was a short uphill driveway leading to a road, imposing iron gates chained in front. “Damn. How do I get out?” She glanced round, saw a plaque on the front of the house—BLACKSTONES, 1923. A narrow wooden gate next to the pillar supporting one of the cast-iron gates was bolted on the inside. Miriam waded toward it, shivering from the snow, shot the bolt back, and glanced round one final time to look at the house.
It was big. Not as big as the palace in Niejwein, or Angbard’s fortress, but bigger than anything she’d ever lived in. And it was clearly mewed up, shutters nailed across those windows that weren’t boarded, gates chained tight. She grinned, gritting her teeth against the cold. “Right, you’re mine.” Then she slipped through the wooden door and onto the sidewalk. The street here was partially swept. On the other side of it lay an open field in the middle of what was dense forest in world one and downtown Cambridge in world two. She could see other big town houses on the other side of the field, but that didn’t matter. She turned left and began walking toward the crossroads she could see at the far corner of the quadrangle.
Her teeth were chattering by the time she reached the clock tower on the strange traffic circle at the crossroads. There was almost no traffic on this bitterly cold morning. A lone pony-trap clattered past her, but the only vehicles she saw out and about were strange two-deck streetcars, pantographs sparking occasionally as they whirred down the far side of the field and paused at a stand in the middle of the traffic circle. Miriam blinked back the instinctive urge to check her watch. What day is it? she wondered. A sign in heavy classical lettering at the empty tram stop answered her question: Sunday service only. Oh. Below it was a timetable as bemusingly exact as anything she’d seen at an airport back home—evidently trams from this stop ran into the waterfront and over something called Deny Bridge once every half hour on Sundays, for a fare of 3d, whatever that meant. She shivered some more and stepped inside the wooden shelter, then fidgeted with the handful of copper change that she had left. Second thoughts began to occur to her. Was it normal for a single woman to catch a tram, unaccompanied, on a Sunday? What if Burgeson’s shop was closed? What if—
A streetcar pulled up beside the shelter with a screech of abused steel wheels. Miriam plucked up her courage and climbed aboard. The driver nodded at her, then without warning moved off. Miriam stumbled, almost losing her footing before she made it into the passenger cabin. She sat down without looking around. The wooden bench was cold but there seemed to be a heater running somewhere. She surreptitiously examined her fellow passengers, using their reflections in the windows when she couldn’t look at them directly without being obvious. They were an odd collection—a fat woman in a ridiculous bonnet who looked like a Salvation Army collector, a couple of thin men in oddly cut, baggy suits with hats pulled down over their ears, a twenty-something mother, bags under her eyes and two quietly bickering children by her side, and a man in what looked like a Civil War uniform coming toward her, a ticket machine hung in front of his chest. Miriam took a deep breath. I’m going to manage this, she realized.
“I’m going to Highgate, for Holmes Alley. How much is it, please, and what’s the closest stand? And what’s this stop called?”
“That’ll be fourpence, miss, and I’ll call you when it’s your stop. This is Roundgate interchange.” He looked at her slightly oddly as she handed him a sixpence, but wound off a strip of four penny tickets and some change, then turned away. “Tickets, please.”
Ouch. Miriam examined the tickets in her hand. Is nothing simple? she wondered. Even buying streetcar tickets was a minor ordeal of anticipation and surprise. Brill did very well, she began to realize. Maybe too well. Emm. That would explain why Angbard is letting me run...
The tram trundled downhill at not much better than walking pace, the driver occasionally ringing an electric bell, then stopping next to a raised platform. The houses were much closer together here, in terraces that shared side walls for warmth, built out of cheap red brick stained black from smoke. There was an evil smell of half-burned coal in the air, and chimneys belched from every roofline. She hadn’t noticed it in the nob hill neighborhood of Blackstones, but the whole town smelled of combustion, as if there’d been a house fire a block away. The air was almost acrid, a nasty sour taste undercutting the cold and coating her throat when she tried to breathe. Even the cloud above was yellowish. The tram turned into a main road, rattled around a broad circle with a snow-covered statue of a man on a horse in the middle, then turned along an alarmingly skeletal box-section bridge that jutted out over the river. Miriam, watching the waterfront through the gray-painted girders, felt a most unsettling wave of claustrophobia—as if she was being taken into police custody for a crime she hadn’t committed. She forced herself to shrug it off. Everything will be alright, she told herself.
The town center was almost empty compared to its state the last time she’d visited. It smelled strongly of smoke—chimneys on every side bespoke residents in the upstairs flats—but the shop windows were dark, their doors locked. A distant church bell clattered numbly. Scrawny pigeons hopped around near the gutter, exploring a pile of horse dung. The conductor tapped Miriam on the shoulder, and she started. “You’ll be wanting the next stop,” he explained.
“Thank you,” she replied with a wan smile. She stood up, waiting on the open platform as the stop swung into view, then pulled the string threaded through brass eyeholes that she’d seen the other passengers use. A bell dinged behind in the driver’s partition and he threw on the brakes. Miriam hopped off the platform, shook her coat out, hiked her bag up onto her shoulder, and stepped back from the tram as it moved off with a loud whirr and a gurgle of slush. Then she took stock of her surroundings.
Everything looked different in the chilly gloom of a Sunday morning. The shop fronts, comparatively busy last time she’d been here, looked like vacant eyes, and the peddlars hawking roast chestnuts and hand-warmers had disappeared. Do they have Sunday trading laws here? she wondered vaguely. That could be a nuisance—
Burgeson’s shop was closed, too, a wooden shutter padlocked into place across the front window. But Miriam spotted something she hadn’t noticed before, a solid wooden door next to the shop with a row of bell-pull handles set in a tarnished plaque beside it. She peered at them. E. Burgeson, esq. “Aha,” she muttered, and pulled the handle.
Nothing happened. Miriam waited on the doorstep, her toes freezing and feeling increasingly damp, and cursed her stupidity. She put her hand on the knob and yanked again, and this time heard a distant tinkling reward. Then the door scraped inward on a bare-walled corridor. “Yes?”
“M
r. Burgeson?” she smiled hopefully at him. “I’m back.”
“Oh.” He was dressed as he had been in the shop, except for a pair of outrageous purple slippers worn over bare feet. “You again.” A faint quirk tugged at the side of his upper lip. “I suppose you’ll be wanting me to open the shop.”
“If it’s convenient.”
He sniffed. “It isn’t. And this is rather irregular—although something tells me you don’t put much stock by regularity. Still, if you’d care to grace my humble abode with your presence and wait while I find my galoshes—”
“Certainly.”
She followed him up a tightly spiraling stone-flagged staircase that opened out onto a landing with four stout-looking doors. One of them stood open, and he went inside without waiting for her. Miriam began to follow, then paused on the threshold.
“Come on, come on,” he said irritably. “Don’t leave the door open, you’ll let the cold in. Then I’ll have to fetch more coal from the cellar. What’s keeping you?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said, stepping forward and shutting the door behind her. The hall had probably once been wide enough for two people to stand abreast in, and it was at least ten feet high, but now it felt like a canyon. It was walled from floor to ceiling with bookcases, all crammed to bursting. Burgeson had disappeared into a kitchen—at least Miriam supposed it was a kitchen—in which a kettle was boiling atop a cast-iron stove that looked like something that belonged in a museum. The lights flickered as the door closed, and Miriam abruptly realized that they weren’t electric. “I see you’ve got more books up here than you have down in the shop.”
“That’s work, this is pleasure,” he said. “What did you come to disturb my Sunday worship for, this time?”
“Sunday worship? I don’t see much sign of that around here,” Miriam let slip. She backed up hastily. “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t cause you any trouble?”
“Trouble, no, no trouble, not unless you count having the King Street thief-taker himself asking pointed questions about my visitor of the other morning.” His back was turned to her, so Miriam couldn’t see his expression, but she tightened her grip on her bag, as she suddenly found herself wishing that the pockets of her coat were deep enough to conceal her pistol.
The Hidden Family Page 8