The Merchants’ War tmp-4

by Charles Stross

  Hu was on his way back, clutching something about the size of a humane rat trap that gleamed with the dull finish of aluminum. “What’s that?” asked Eric.

  “Let me hook it up first. I’ve got to do this quickly.” Hu flipped up part of the laminar-flow cabinet’s hood and slid the device inside, then began plugging tubes into it. “It dies after about half an hour, and she’s spent the whole morning getting it ready for you.”

  Hu fussed over his gadgets for a while, then plugged a couple of old-fashioned–looking coaxial cables into the aluminum box. “The test cell in here needs to be bathed in oxygenated Ringer’s solution at body temperature. This here’s a peristaltic pump and heater combination—” He launched into an intricate explanation that went right over Eric’s head. “We should be able to see it on video here—”

  He backed away from the cabinet and grabbed hold of the mouse hanging off of the computer next to it. The screen unblanked: a window in the middle of it showed a grainy gray grid, the rough-edged tracks of a silicon chip at high magnification. Odd, messy blobs dotted its surface, as if a microscopic vandal had sneezed on it. “Here’s an NV51 test unit. One thousand twenty-four field effect transistors, individually addressable. The camera’s calibrated so we can bring up any transistor by its coordinates. These cells are all live JAUNT BLUE cultures—at least they were alive half an hour ago.”

  “So what does it do?”

  Hu shrugged. “This is preparation twelve, the first that actually did anything. Most of the later ones are still—we’re still debugging them, they’re still under development. This one, at least, it’s the demo. We got it to work reliably. Proof of concept: watch.”

  He leaned close to the screen, muttering to himself, then punched some numbers into the computer. The camera slewed sideways and zoomed slightly, centering on one of the snot-like blobs. “Vio—sorry. Here we go.”

  Hu hit a key. A moment later, Eric blinked. “Where did it go? Did you just evaporate it?”

  “No, we only carry about fifty millivolts and a handful of microamps for a fiftieth of a second. Look, let me do it again. Over…yeah, this one.”

  Hu punched more figures into the keyboard. Hit the return key again. Another blob of snot vanished from the gray surface.

  “What’s this meant to show me?” Eric asked impatiently.

  “Huh?” Hu gaped at him. “Uh, JAUNT BLUE? Hello, remember that code phrase? The, the folks who do that world-walking thing? This is how it works.”

  “Hang on. Wait.” Eric scratched his head. “You didn’t just vaporize that, that—” Neuron, he realized, understanding dawning. “Wow.”

  “We figured out that the mechanosomes respond to the intracellular cyclic-AMP signaling pathway,” Hu offered timidly. “That’s what preparation fourteen is about. They’re also sensitive to dopamine. We’re looking for modulators, now, but it’s on track. If we could get the nerve cells to grow dendrites and connect, we hope eventually to be able to build a system that works—that can move stuff about. If we can get a neural stem-cell line going, we may even be able to mass-produce them—but that’s years away. It’s early days right now: all we can do is make an infected cell go bye-bye and sneak away into some other universe—explaining how that part of it works is what the quant group are working on. What do you think?”

  Eric shook his head, suddenly struck by a weird sense of historical significance: it was like standing in that baseball court at the University of Chicago in 1942, when they finished adding graphite blocks to the heap in the middle of the court and Professor Fermi told his assistant to start twisting the control rod. A Nobel Prize or a nuclear war? James isn’t wrong about that. “I’d give my left nut to know where this is all going to end,” he said slowly. “You’re doing good work. I just hope we don’t all live to regret the consequences.”

  Maneuvers

  As forms of transport went, horse-drawn carriages tended to lack modern amenities—from cup holders and seat-back TV screens on down to shock absorbers and ventilation nozzles. On the other hand, they came with some fittings that took Mike by surprise. He gestured feebly at the raised seat cushion as he glanced at the geriatric gruppenfuhrer in the mound of rugs on the other side of the compartment: “If you think I’m going to use that—”

  “You’ll use it when you need to, boy.” She cackled for a moment. The younger woman, Olga, rolled her eyes and sent him a look that seemed to say, humor her. “We’ll not be stopping for bed and bath for at least a day.”

  “Damn,” he said faintly. “What are you going to do?”

  Iris said nothing for a moment, while one wheel crunched across a rut in the path with a bone-shaking crash that sent a wave of heat through his leg. She seemed to be considering the question. “We’ll be pausing to change teams in another hour or so. Don’t want to flog the horses; you never know when you’ll need a fresh team. Anyway, you can’t stick your nose outside: you wouldn’t fool anyone. So the story is, you’re unconscious and injured and we need to get you across to a hospital in upstate New York as soon as possible. If they’re still using the old emergency routes—” she looked at Olga, who nodded “—there should be a postal station we can divert to tomorrow evening. If it’s running, we’ll ship you across and you can be home in forty-eight hours. If it’s not running…well, we’ll play it by ear; you’ve been hit on the head and you’re having trouble with language, or something. Until we can get you out of here.”

  Mike tried to gather his thoughts. “I don’t understand. What do you expect me to do…?”

  Miriam’s mother leaned forward, her expression intent. “I expect you to tell me your home address and zip code.” A small note pad and pencil appeared from somewhere under her blankets. “Yes?”

  “But—”

  She snorted. “You’re working with spies, boy. Modern spies with lots of gizmos for bugging phone conversations and tapping e-mail. First rule when going up against the NSA: use no communications technology invented in the last half-century. I want to be able to send you mail. If you want to contact me, write a letter, stick it in an envelope, and put it in your trash can on top of the refuse sacks.”

  “Aren’t you scared I’ll just pass everything to my superiors? Or they’ll mount a watch on the trash?”

  “No.” Eyes twinkled in the darkness. “Because first, you didn’t make a move on my daughter when you had the chance. And second, have you any idea how many warm bodies it takes to mount a twenty-four/seven watch on a trash can? One that’s capable of grabbing a dumpster-diving world-walker without killing them?”

  “I’ve got to admit, I hadn’t thought about it.”

  Olga cleared her throat. “It takes two watchers per team, minimum. Five teams, each working just under thirty hours a week, in rotation. They’ll need a blind, plus perimeter alarms, plus coordination with the refuse companies so they know when to expect a legitimate collection, and that’s just the watchers. You need at least three spare bodies, too, in case of sickness or accidents. To be able to make a snatch, you need at least four per team. Do you have thirty agents ready to watch your back stoop, mister? Just in case her grace wishes to receive a letter from you, rather than sending a messenger to pay a local wino to pick it up?”

  “Jeez, you sound like you’ve done this a lot.”

  Mrs. Beckstein rapped a knuckle on the wooden window frame of the carriage: “Fifty years ago there were three times as many world-walkers as there are now, and they didn’t all die out because they forgot how to make babies.”

  “Huh?”

  Olga glanced down. “Civil war,” she said very quietly. “And now, your government.”

  “Civil—” Mike paused. Didn’t Matthias say something about internal feuds? “Hold on. It killed two thirds of you?”

  “You wouldn’t believe how lethal a war between world-walkers can be, boy.” Mrs. Beckstein frowned. “You should hope the Clan Council never decides they’re at war with the United States.”

  “We’d wipe y
ou out. Eventually.” He realized he was gritting his teeth, from anger as much as from the pain in his leg: he tried to force himself to relax.

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, probably. But right now? You think you have a problem with terrorism? You have seen nothing, boy. And we are not religious fanatics, no. We just want to live our lives. But the logic of power—” she stopped.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want my daughter out of this mess and home safe, Mr. Fleming. She had a sheltered upbringing: she’s in danger and her own ignorance of it is her worst enemy. Second…when she came over she raised a shit storm among our relatives. In particular, she aired some very dirty family linens in public half a year ago. Called for a complete rethink of the Clan’s business model, in fact: she pointed out that the emperor has no clothes, and that basing one’s income on an enemy’s weakness—in this case, the continuing illegality of certain substances, combined with the continuing difficulty your own organization and others face in stopping the trade—is foolish. This made her a lot of enemies at the time, but it set minds a-thinking. The current upheavals are largely a consequence of her upsetting that apple cart. The Clan will change in due course, and switch to a line of work more profitable than smuggling, but as long as she remains among them, her presence will act as a reminder of the source of the change to the conservative faction, and will provoke them, and that will make her a target. So I want her out of the game.”

  “Uh, I think I see where you’re leading.” Mike shook his head. “But she’s missing…?”

  Iris snorted. “She won’t stay missing for long—unless she’s gotten herself killed.”

  “Oh.” He thought for a moment. “That’s not all, is it?”

  She stared at him. “No, Mr. Fleming, that is not all, not by a long way. I mentioned a conservative faction. You won’t be surprised to know that there exists a progressive faction, too, and current circumstances—the fighting you may have noticed—is about to tip the scales decisively in their favor. Your interests would be served by promoting the progressives to the detriment of the conservatives, believe me.”

  “And you’re a progressive. Right?”

  “I prefer to think of myself as a radical.” She leaned against the seat back as the coach hit another rough patch on the dirt track. “Must be all the sixties influences. A real flower child, me.”

  “Ah.” Verbal punctuation was easier than trying to hold his own against this intimidating old woman. “Okay, what do the progressives want?”

  “You’d best start by trying to understand the conservatives if you want to get a handle on our affairs, boy. The Clan started out as the descendants of an itinerant tinker. They learned to world-walk, learned how to intermarry to preserve the family ability, and got rich. Insanely rich. Think of the de Medicis, or the Saudi royal family. That’s what the Clan represents here, except that ‘here’ is dirt-poor, mired in the sixteenth or seventeenth century—near enough. It’s not the same, never is, but there are enough points of similarity to make the model work. But the most important point is, they got rich by trade in light merchandise, by running a postal service. The postal service ships high-value goods, whatever they are, either reliably—for destinations in your world, without fear of interception—or fast—for destinations in this world, by FedEx across a continent ruled by horseback.”

  She pushed herself upright with her walking stick. “Put yourself in their shoes. They want nothing to change, because they feel threatened by change—their status is tenuous. A postal network is a packet-switched network, literally so. If world-walkers drift away from it, the bandwidth drops, and thus, its profitability. New ventures divert vital human capital. They’re against exploration, because they’re scrambling to stay on top of the dung heap.”

  “Sounds like—” Mike could think of a number of people it sounded like, uncomfortably close to home—change the subject. “What about the progressives?”

  “We want change, simple as that. Miriam observed that we are mired in a business that scales in direct proportion to the number of world-walkers, like a service business. She suggested—and her uncovering another world provided the opportunity—that we switch to what she called a technology-transfer model, trading information between universes.”

  “How many are there?” he asked, side-tracked by fascination.

  “At least three. We thought two, until a year ago. Now we know there are three, and we suspect there are many more. Yours is the most advanced we know of, but what might be lurking out there? We can trade, Mr. Fleming. We could be very useful to the United States of America. But first we need a…change of management? Yes, a change of management. We originated in a feudal realm, and our ability is hereditary: don’t underestimate the effects of reproductive politics on the Clan’s governance. Before we can change the way we do things, before we can end our unfortunate reliance on illegal trafficking, we need to break the grip of the conservative factions on the council, and to do that we need to entirely overturn our family and tribal foundations.”

  “Your family structures?”

  “Yes.” Olga pulled a face: Iris either ignored it, or pretended to do so. “You must be aware of the implications of artificial insemination. There’s been a quiet argument going on within the Clan’s council for a generation now, over whether it is our destiny to continue existing as braided matrilineal families in a patriarchal society, or to become…well, not a family organization any more, but one open to anyone born with the ability, whatever their parentage.”

  Mike shut his eyes. I think my brain just exploded, he thought. “Who are the progressives?”

  “Myself for one, to your very great good fortune. My half-brother for another, although he is as circumspect in public as befits the head of the Clan’s external security organization—a seat of significant power on the council. There are others. You do not need to know who they are. If you’re captured or tortured, what you don’t know you can’t give away.”

  “And the conservatives?”

  “Miriam’s great-uncle Henryk, if he’s still alive. He was the late king’s spymaster in chief. My mother, Hildegarde, who is also Miriam’s grandmother. Baron Oliver Hjorth, about two thirds of the council…too many to enumerate.”

  “Okay. So you want me to set up a covert channel between you—your faction—and, my agency? Or just me?”

  “Just you, at first.” Iris’s cheek twitched. “You’re injured. When you are back on your feet I will contact you. You will excuse me, but I am afraid I will require certain actions from you in order to demonstrate that you are trustworthy. Tokens of trust, if you like.”

  I don’t like the sound of this. “Such as…?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” She relented slightly: “I can’t do business with you if I can’t trust you. But I won’t ask you to do anything illegal—unlike your superiors.”

  Mike shivered. She’s got my number. “What makes you think they’d issue illegal orders?”

  “Come now, Mr. Fleming, how stupid do I look? How did you get here? If your superiors could move more than one or two people at a time they’d have sent a division. They sent you because their transport capacity is tiny, probably because they’re using captured—or renegade—world-walkers. Probably the former, knowing this administration; they don’t trust anyone they haven’t bought for cold cash.” Her expression shifted into one of outright distaste. “Honor is a luxury when you reach the top of the dung heap. Everybody wants it, but it’s in short supply. That’s even more true in Washington, D.C. than over on this side, because aristocrats have at least to keep up the appearance of it. Let me give you a tip to pass on to your bosses: if you mistreat your Clan prisoners, their relatives will revenge them. The political is taken very personally, here.”

  “That’s—” he swallowed “—it may be true, but that’s not how things work right now. Not since 9/11.”

  “Then they’re going to regret it.” Her gaze was level.
“You must warn your superiors of this—the political is personal. If the conservatives think your government is mistreating their prisoners, they’ll take revenge, horrible revenge. Timothy McVeigh and Mohamed Atta were rank amateurs compared to these people, and Clan security probably can’t prevent an atrocity from happening if you provoke them. You need to warn your bosses, Mr. Fleming. They’re playing with fire: or would you like to see a suicide bomber invite himself to the next White House reception?”

  Whoops. Mike cringed at the images that sprang to mind. “They’re that crazy?”

  “They’re not crazy!” Her vehemence startled him. “They just don’t think about things the same way as you people. Your organization is trying to wage war on the Clan: all right, we understand that. But it is a point of honor to avenge blood debts, and that suicide bomber—that’s the least of your worries.” She paused for breath. When she continued, she was much less strident: “That’s one of the things Miriam thought she could change, with her reform program. I tend to agree with her. That’s one of the things we need to change—it’s one of the reasons I reintroduced her to her relatives in the first place. I knew she’d react that way.”

  “But she’s your daughter!” It was out before he could stop himself.

  “Hah. I told you, but you didn’t listen, did you? We don’t work the way you think we do—and it’s not just all about blood debts and honor. There’s also a perpetual inter-generational conflict going on, mother against daughter, grandmother for grandchild. My mother is a pillar of the conservative faction: by raising Miriam where Hildegarde couldn’t get her claws into her, I temporarily gained the upper hand. And—” she leaned forward again “—I would do anything to keep my granddaughter out of this mess.”