The Clan Corporate (ARC)

by Charles Stross

  There was a knock at the door.

  Sudden panic gripped her. She shuddered and shoved the incriminating samizdat into the bag, her palms slippery with sweat. Oh shit! The train was moving. If I have to try to get away-

  Another knock, this time quieter. Miriam paused, then let go of her left sleeve cuff with her right hand. The panic faded, but the adrenaline shock was still with her. She forced herself to take a deep breath and stand up, then shot the bolt back on the door. "Yes?" she demanded.

  "Are you a constabule?" asked the girl Marissa, staring up at her with wide eyes. "Coz if so, I wants to know, when's you going to arrest my mam?"

  "I am not-" Miriam stopped. "Come in here." The little girl moved as if to step back, but Miriam caught her wrist and tugged lightly. She didn't resist but came quietly, as if sleepwalking. She didn't seem to weigh anything. "Sit down," Miriam said, pointing at the bench seat opposite her bunk. She slid the door shut. "Why do you think I'm going to arrest your mam?" Her mother? Miriam thought, aghast: she'd taken Mrs. Crosby for sixty, but she couldn't be much older than Miriam herself. She suddenly realized she was looming over the kid. This can't be good. She sat down on the bunk and tried to compose her features. "I'm not going to arrest anyone, Marissa. Why, did you think I was a constable?"

  Marissa nodded at her, looking slightly less frightened. "You's look like the one as nicked my nuncle? You talk all posh-like, an' dress like a rozzer. An' you got that way of looking aroun' at people, like you's sizing them for a cage."

  Jesus, am I frightening the little children now? Miriam laughed nervously. "I'm not a, a rozzer, girl." And what's her mother afraid of? Is that why she was grilling me over dinner? "But listen, it's not safe to go asking people if they're Polis. I mean, if they aren't it's rude, and if they are, you're telling them you're afraid. If you tell them you're frightened they'll ask why you're frightened, understand? So you don't do that, you just ignore them. Besides, if I was with the Polis, why would I tell you the truth?"

  Miriam paused, suddenly realizing she'd sawn off the logical branch her argument was sitting on: Hope she doesn't spot it. She stared at Marissa. Marissa had long, stringy hair lying heavy down her back and wore a smock that hadn't been laundered too recently. When she was older she'd probably have cheekbones to kill for, but right now she just looked starved and frightened. She's about the age Rita would be-stop that. Miriam hadn't seen Rita, her daughter, since she gave her up for adoption at the age of two days: Rita had been a minor personal disaster, an unplanned intrusion while Miriam was in med school, and the less remembered the better. "Listen. I think you should go back to your mother-you didn't tell her you were coming here, did you?" A vigorously shaken head. "Good. You don't tell her you came to see me because she'll worry. And she's got enough to worry about already, hasn't she?" Traveling first-class, but her kid hasn't eaten much recently and her brother's been arrested? Similarly vigorous nodding confirmed Miriam's suspicions. "What did they arrest your uncle for?"

  "Sedition," Marissa said shyly.

  Miriam felt light-headed with anger. "Well." She reached down into the bag and fumbled around, finding the vase and its decoy contents. She fumbled in it with clumsy fingers then brought out a small coin. "Here, do you have somewhere to hide this?"

  The kid looked baffled for a moment, made as if to push it away.

  "What is it?" Miriam asked tensely.

  "Mam said not to-"

  "Ah." Miriam paused for a moment. Take, and double-take: "Marissa, what will your mam do if she finds out you've been to see me?"

  The kid looked frightened. "You wouldn't!"

  "Take. This." She pushed the coin into the girl's hand, folding the fingers around the buttery gleam of the royal groat-withdrawn from circulation a decade since to offset the liquidity crisis following the Persian war, now worth a hundred times its face value. "Give it to your mam. Tell her the truth. You came to see me, to ask. I told you, you were silly and shouldn't ask those questions. Then I gave you this." Marissa looked puzzled. "Go on. Your mam won't thump you, not if you give her this. She'll sleep better, because a constable wouldn't do that." And maybe she'll be able to buy you some more meals, Miriam added silently.

  Marissa jerked, as if she'd suddenly awakened from a bad dream. "Thank'y," she gasped, then turned and scrabbled at the door. A moment later she was gone, darting off down the corridor.

  Miriam shut and bolted the door again, then rubbed her forehead. "Bastards," she muttered. There was an unhappy picture here: she could put any number of interpretations to it, a countless multitude of sad little just-so stories to explain the desperate women in the frame. A mother and her kid selling the house, selling the furniture, using their savings to get away by the first train available. The uncle on his way to a work camp-whether he was a real uncle or a live-in companion made no odds, such things were winked at but not admitted publicly-by way of a beating and interrogation in the cells. Sedition. It was a movable feast. It could mean reading the wrong books (like the one in my bag, Miriam realized uncomfortably), attending the wrong meetings, even being seen in the same bars as campaigners for a universal franchise. (They campaigned for the universal male franchise, mostly-votes for women or nonwhites were the province of wild-eyed dreamers.) This is a police state, after all, Miriam reminded herself. Back home in the United States, most people had an overly romantic view of what a monarchy-not the toothless, modern constitutional monarchies of Europe, but the original l'état c'est moi variety-was like. In reality, a monarchy was just a fancy name for a hereditary dictatorship, Miriam decided. And that wasn't anything you wanted to get caught up in.

  It was only later, lying awake in the stuffy darkness of her compartment, that Miriam's worries caught up with her. And by then it was too late to take back the coin (what if the Clan counts the decoy cash?) or to un-open the bag (what if they're testing me again?) or unread the peculiar memoranda (what's a W* heterozygote?) or even the samizdat tract by the executed French dissident Jean-Paul Mavrides. All because her PDA had crashed, and she hadn't bought any alternative reading matter.

  The remainder of her outbound trip went uneventfully. Miriam turned out of bed at seven in the morning, forced down as much of a light breakfast as she could manage in the already oppressive heat, then alighted with her bag at Dunedin station. From there it was a brief cab ride to the safe house, an anonymous classical villa in the middle of a leafy suburb on the edge of the city center. She knocked on the door, and her contact ushered her into a basement room. Then he waited outside while she opened one of the two lockets she wore on a fine gold chain around her neck and focused on it.

  The usual headache clamped around her head, making her feel breathless and sick. But she was back in the Gruinmarkt again-or rather, in an outpost in the middle of the Debatable Lands, the great interior void unclaimed by the eastern marcher states or the empire on the West Coast. Three bored-looking men sat around a log table in the middle of the room, one dressed to play Davy Crockett and the other two in sharp suits and shades. It might have been a frontier cabin, except frontier cabins didn't come with kerosene heaters, shortwave radio sets, and a rack of Steyr assault rifles by the door.

  "Courier route blue four, parcel sixteen," Miriam said in her halting hochsprache as she stepped off the taped transit area on the floor and planted her carpetbag on the table. Davy Crockett passed her a clipboard wordlessly, boredom clear on his face. Miriam signed off.

  Sharp Suit Number One picked up her bag. "Well, I'll be going," he said, signing the board. Walking over to the far side of the room he pulled a gleaming metal suitcase off the top of a chest, then stuffed the entire carpetbag inside it. Back on the transit area he picked up the case, nodded at Davy Crockett, then at Miriam, and clicked his heels together. "There's no place like home," he intoned, staring into a niche in the wall that Miriam hadn't noticed before. Then he wasn't there anymore. He didn't make a sound, she realized, massaging her forehead: not that she'd ever paid much attention to other
world-walkers in their comings and goings, but-doesn't teleportation imply air displacement?

  "Would you like coffee? Or wine?" asked Sharp Suit Number Two.

  "Uh, coffee is be good-" Miriam's hochsprache broke down completely as she made it to the table. "And ibuprofen." She fanned herself with her hat. "Is it always this hot here?"

  "Stupid question." At last Davy Crockett spoke. "I've had a requisition for a portable air conditioner and solar power pack in for, oh, two years."

  Two years? Miriam quailed at the idea of being assigned to babysit a frontier safe house like this for any length of time.

  "Still not enough hands for a game of poker," Sharp Suit Number Two said regretfully. He blinked, slightly owlishly.

  "The clock is ticking," intoned Davy Crockett. "Two hours." He nodded at Miriam. "When's your train?"

  "Um. The return leaves just after four, so allow an hour to get to the station-"

  "No problem." He picked up his pack of cards, shuffled the deck, and began dealing some kind of a solitaire hand. "We'll get you there," he muttered.

  "Is there anything to do here?" Miriam asked.

  "Play cards." Davy Crockett's cheek twitched. "Seriously, you don't go out that door unless the roof is on fire. Wouldn't like the company hereabouts, anyways, and you've got a train to catch in five hours."

  "Oh." Miriam shifted uneasily on her chair.

  "I'll tell them you've arrived," said the stationmaster. He stood up heavily and shambled over to the shortwave set.

  Sharp Suit Number Two fussed over the kerosene stove: presently he turned it down and returned to the table bearing a metal espresso pot. "So," he said, hunching his shoulders conspiratorially, "what's it like, then?"

  Miriam looked at him blankly. "What's what like?"

  "Over there. You know." He waved at her, a gesture that took in everything she was wearing. "Different, isn't it, to America? In Chicago you'd stand out like, oh, obvious."

  "Oh, there." Miriam stifled a sigh: it was going to be a long wait. "Well, for starters, they don't have air-conditioning . . ."

  The return journey went smoothly, with no troublesome signs of recognition. There were no unwelcome traveling companions, no desperate Marissa to spark Miriam's paranoia, and no delays. Miriam managed to keep her nimble fingers away from the courier bag, having remembered to pause in the railway station kiosk before departure and pick up a selection of newspapers and a cheap novel or two. The headlines, as always, perplexed and mystified her as she tried to make sense of them. Comptroller-General Announces Four-Fifths per Gross Increase in Salt License Fee-what on earth did that mean? Licensing salt? And there was more inside. Sky Navy to Impress Packets just about made sense, but when she got to the sports pages (Chicxulub Aztecs versus Eton Barbarians: Goal Scored!) it turned baffling. Not only did they not play football or baseball, they didn't even play soccer or cricket: instead they had other esoteric team games-like the Aztecs versus Barbarians wall ball match, in which the Aztecs had apparently just scored the first goal in a major league match for fourteen years.

  A day on a train gave Miriam a lot of time for thought. I need bargaining power, she told herself. Otherwise they're going to keep me on a short leash forever. And sooner or later they'll get serious about marrying me off. Serried ranks of W* heterozygote babies line-danced in her imagination when she closed her eyes and tried to sleep. How did I get into this bind?

  Asking herself that question was pointless: if she pursued the answer far enough, she came to the uncomfortable conclusion that it was her own fault, her own dogged tendency to dig for the truth that had gotten her into the Clan's business. (And behind that story lay Iris's shady history, her mother's attempt to escape from an unhappy Clan-decreed dynastic marriage-but some subjects were best treated with kid gloves.) If I want some personal space I'm going to have to manufacture it for myself, she decided. But persuading her distant relatives to back off was not easy: privacy seemed to be in scant supply outside the United States. Especially if you harbored valuable genes or looked like your mere presence might upset the established order. And as to just why privacy was in short supply . . .

  By the time she reached the safe house in the New London suburbs she was feeling tired, irritable, and increasingly itchy and dirty. She'd been in transit for three days, and the trains didn't have so much as a shower on board. Next time I'll take an extra change of clothes, she resolved-this kind of issue obviously didn't affect the Clan courier operations in the United States.

  When she signed off the courier bag, Miriam got her first surprise: a coach was waiting for her in the courtyard of Lord Brunvig's town house, and Brill beside it, in an agony of impatience. "Milady! It's almost two o'clock! Quick, we must get you back to your rooms immediately, there's barely time."

  "Time? For what?" Miriam asked, pausing on the bottom step of the boarding platform with a sense of exquisite dread. Oh no-

  "The royal entertainment! It's tonight! Oh, Miriam, if I had realized it would take you three days I would have yelled at his lordship-"

  "Well, none of us thought of it, did we?" Miriam said as she climbed into the carriage. "Everything happens more slowly over there." She gritted her teeth and settled down into a corner, her nose wrinkling. It's unavoidable, she thought to herself. I really am going to have to answer him. Nearly six months ago the king himself had asked her a question. Brill, sitting opposite her, looked anxious. "Do I have time to clean up first?" Miriam asked. "And a bite to eat?"

  "I hope so-"

  "Well, then it'll all work out." Miriam managed a tired smile. "So how about telling me what's been going on while I've been away?"

  Three hours later she was still hungry, even more tired, and back in the carriage with Brill. This time they were on their way to the summer palace with an escort of mounted guards, clutching scented kerchiefs to their faces to keep the worst of the smell of the open sewers at bay. A fortune in jewelry, the most expensive luxurious clothes they can afford to impress one another with, but the drains are medieval: typical Clan priorities. Miriam shrugged, trying to get comfortable against the hard seat back. Her maids had trussed her into the most excessive gown she'd ever set eyes on, almost as soon as she'd walked in the door. It seemed to weigh half a ton even before they'd added a tiara and a few pounds of gold and pearls. The corset was uncomfortably tight, and the layered skirts had a train that dragged along the ground behind her in a foam of lace and got in the way when she walked. Romantic and feminine be damned, I'm going to be lucky to make it as far as the front door without tripping. Brill had been saying something. "What was that?" she asked, distracted.

  "I was saying, did you want the high points again?" Brill sniffed pointedly. "I know you're tired, but it's important."

  "I know it's important," Miriam said waspishly. Then she sighed. "Forgive me. Not your fault." These formal events always seem to bring out the worst in me, don't they? "This gown needs adjusting. I'm uncomfortable-and a bit tired."

  "I'll arrange another session with Mistress Tanzig when we get back, milady. For tomorrow. I hope you won't hold it against her-it's hard to get the cut right when your ladyship's absent." Brill leaned forward to peer at her. "Hmm. You're being Miriam, Miriam. A word of commendation?"

  "Uh, yes?"

  "Let yourself be Helge. For tonight, just for tonight."

  "But I-" She bit her tongue as she saw Brilliana's expression.

  "You don't like being Helge," Brill said evenly. "It's not as if you go out of your way to conceal it. But just this once-" Her eyes narrowed, calculatingly, as she fanned herself. "Milady, Miriam is too American. Prickly about the wrong things. But this isn't a crowded garden party, this is an intimate informal household entertainment, just us and fifty or sixty family members and courtiers and ministers. If Miriam offers offense . . ."

  "I . . . I'll try." Helge fanned herself weakly in the warm, clammy air and tried to relax. "I'll try to be me. For the evening."

  "That's perfect!" Brilliana sm
iled warmly. "Now, the high points. You've met his royal highness, the princes Egon and Creon, and the Queen Mother. But this evening you're also likely to encounter his grace the Prince of Eijnmyrk and his wife, Princess Ikarie-his majesty's youngest sister-and the Duke du Tostvijk. Main thing to remember is that his grace the prince's marriage is what you would term morganatic. Then there are the high ministers and his holiness the Autonomé du Roma, high priest of Lightning Child . . ."

  An intimate informal household entertainment-by the standards of the social world of the Niejwein aristocracy it was, indeed, uncomfortably small. Helge was introduced to one smiling face after another, assessed like a prize brood mare, forced to make small talk in her halting hochsprache, and stared at in mild disbelief, like a talking horse or a counting pig. At the end of it all her head was spinning with the effort of trying to remember who everybody was and how she was meant to address them. And then the moment she'd been secretly dreading arrived: "Ah, how charmed we are to see you again," said the short, portly fellow with the rosy bloom of broken blood vessels around his nose and the dauntingly heavy gold chain draped around his shoulders. He swayed slightly as if tired or slightly drunk. Helge managed to curtsey before him without saying anything. "Been what, half a year?"

  Helge nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Last time they'd met he'd made her an offer which, in all probability, had been kindly meant.

  "Walk with us," said his royal highness, Alexis Nicholau III, in a tone of voice that brooked no objection.

  There was a state dining room beyond the doors at the end of the gallery, but Alexis drifted slowly toward a side door instead. Two lords or captains or bodyguards of rank followed discreetly, while a third slipped ahead to open the door. "Haven't seen much of you at court, these past six months," remarked the king. "Pressure of work, we understand." He rubbed the side of his nose morosely, then glanced at the nearest guard. "Glass of sack for the lady, Hildt." The guard vanished. "We hear a bit about you from our man Henryk. Nothing too extreme." He looked amused about something-amused, and determined.