"Yes, milady. Makes things easier." Irma shook her head. "Four crossings in four hours—that's harsh."
"Yes. That's why for the first crossing we'll all be going piggyback on whichever members of your lance draw the short straws. And for the second crossing, Gerd will carry his grace and Martyn will carry you. On the third crossing, you can take the duke. The fourth will be the hardest, but that way, only one of us risks breaking our head."
"Do you think we should ditch our field gear?"
Olga thought for a moment. "If it's not too much to carry, I think we should hang onto it until we're ready to make the final transit. But once we hit Concord"—she paused—"we can't be wearing armor or carrying long arms. What clothing did you find for us?"
"Nothing for sure, milady, we must see if it fits—but the baron's family maintained a wardrobe with some American clothing, and it has not been looted yet. I hope," she added under her breath.
"Let's go see, shall we," Olga suggested, stretching as she stood up. Her own state she passed over: She and Angbard had never expected to wind up here, and her neat trouser suit would be fine. "We need clothing that will pass at a distance for Gerd, Martyn, and you."
"This way, then." Irma led her from the master bedroom into an adjacent room, its rich paneling splintered and holed by small arms fire. Chests of drawers and a huge wooden chest dominated half a wall. "I think this is what you're looking for."
Late afternoon.
Miriam segued into wakefulness to the rattle and jabber of daytime television fuzzed into incoherence through a thin stud wall. Gathering her wits, she rolled over. The bed isn't moving, she realized. She'd found it difficult to rest, her worries chasing their tails through her mind, but she'd spent the last few nights on a transcontinental express train and the novelty of a bed that didn't sway side-to-side and periodically bump across railroad points had eventually drawn her down into a deep abyss of dreamless sleep. Yawning, she sat up and rolled off the comforter. What time is it? . . . She glanced at the dressing table. Her notebook PC sat there, its LEDs winking as it charged. Whether it would start up was a moot point—it had spent six months in a hidden compartment in a disused office—but it had a clock; maybe it would still be working. She reached over and pressed the power button, then started gathering her clothes.
The regular startup chord and busy clicking of a hard disk provided welcome background noise as she dressed; but as the computer seemed to want to twiddle its thumbs instead of talking to her, she locked the screen and headed for the bathroom, and then the stairs, rather than waiting. To think that only four days ago she'd risked arrest and imprisonment to retake the thing, seeing it as central to her hopes for survival and prosperity! . . . Her understanding of her circumstances was changing almost from hour to hour, leaving her adrift and unable to rely on plans she'd made only the day before. It gave her an anxious sense of insecurity, rising to the level of nervous dread whenever her thoughts circled back to the pregnancy question.
The television noise was coming from the living room, along with other sounds. As Miriam pushed the door open she caught a burst of conversation: "She's right, then what are we going to do? We won't be able to go back! Had you thought of"—A blond head turned—"Oh, hi!"
Miriam paused. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything. . . ."
"Not really." Huw was slouched in a recliner, propping up a laptop, while the two younger ones, Yul and Elena, had been either watching TV or arguing about something while sharing a large pizza of uncertain parentage. "Feel free to join us."
"Yah," agreed Yul, chewing rhythmically.
Elena thumped him. "Don't talk with your mouth full!"
"Yuh." He took her punch on one shoulder, looking amused rather than hurt.
Miriam turned to address Huw. "Where's Brill?"
"Oh, she went out." He sounded disinterested. "Hmm, that's interesting."
Miriam glanced at the window. It was clearly getting late, and the shadows of the trees out front were lengthening. "Is there anything to eat around here?" Her gaze was drawn to Elena and Yul's pizza, almost against her will.
"Uh?" Huw looked up at her, and visibly did a double take. "Food? Um . . . yeah, food! Just a minute." A rattle of hastily struck keys later, he closed the laptop's lid and stood up. "Let's see what's in the kitchen?"
The kitchen was as sparsely equipped as it had been earlier in the afternoon. Huw headed straight for the freezer and the microwave, but Miriam stopped him. "Let me." While she rooted around in the cupboards, she asked, "Any idea where Brill went? Did she ask you to get me a pregnancy test kit?"
"A what?" He walked over to the kitchen door and closed it carefully. "No, that's women's stuff. If you asked for such a thing, she wouldn't trust a man to procure it."
"Oh." Miriam froze for a couple of seconds, disappointed. Then she sighed and opened the next cupboard. "So where did she go?"
"If not to attend to your request, I'd guess she has a private call to make. She was getting extremely itchy about being on the wrong coast, and even itchier about how we're going to get back out east without attracting attention."
"Attention"—Miriam paused to pull out a can of tomatoes and a bag of pasta—"what kind of attention?"
"She came out here in the company biz-jet, but . . . someone tipped the feds off about where ClanSec were concentrating? Somewhere near Concord, apparently. We've had hints"—Miriam rattled past him, rifling a drawer in search of utensils—"they're getting serious about tracking us down. So I don't think there's a biz-jet ride home in our immediate future." Miriam slammed the cupboard door. "What?"
"This is useless!" She pointed at her haul. "What did they think we were going to do, eat at Mickey D's every day?"
"Freezer. Microwave." Huw pulled a face. "If you were stocking a house for a bunch of kids who're not used to living away from home without servants, what would you do?"
"Leave a cookbook!"
"We-ell, okay." Huw made for the freezer again. "Memo to Duke Angbard Lofstrom, Office of Clan Security. Re: training program for armed couriers. Classification: Clan Confidential. All couriers must attend mandatory Cooking with Rachael Ray video screening and Culinary Skills 101 course prior to commencing overnight missions. Malnutrition a threat to morale, combat-readiness, and operational security." He straightened up, a pizza box in each hand. "Meat lover's feast or four cheese, my lady?"
"Oh hell, I'll take the cheese." She forced a smile to take the sting out of her words. "Sorry. It just bugs me."
"It'd be good to have a staff, or use a hotel or something," Huw agreed. "But this is less conspicuous, and less conspicuous is good right now." He pulled a face.
"What do you mean?" She pulled out a chair and sat down.
"Well." He slid the first pizza onto a plate and put it in the microwave. "I have a nasty suspicion that in the interests of looking inconspicuous we're going to end up driving back to Massachusetts. Or driving part of the way, to avoid tracking. If we just fly point-to-point and they're paying attention we'd show up. And then there's the communication discipline. All Internet traffic is monitored by the NSA. All of it. So we fall back on 1930's tech—old-fashioned letters written in runic hochsprache, flash memory cards sealed under postage stamps instead of microdots, that kind of thing. It's probably why my lady Brilliana is taking so long."
"Oh." Miriam stared at the second pizza, feeling a stab of acute déja vu. It was just like Erasmus's problems in New Britain, seen through a high tech looking glass. "I think I'm getting a headache."
The oven pinged for attention. Huw opened it, sniffed, then slid the steaming microwave-limp pizza in front of her. "Sorry—"
"Don't be, it's not your fault." She picked up a knife and began to cut as he put the second pizza in. "What do you want, Huw?"
"Huh?"
"What do you want?" She put down her knife. "Here, help yourself to a slice."
"Uh, you mean, what do I want, as in, what is my heart's desire, or what do I want, as in, wha
t am I trying to achieve right now?" He reached over and took a piece, holding it twitchily on his fingertips.
"The former." Miriam picked up a wedge of hot pizza and nibbled at it. "Because I'd say, right now you're trying not to burn your fingers."
"Ouch, yes! Um, life's little ambitions. I want to finish my masters, and I wanted to do a Ph.D., obviously. Only the duke more or less handed me a doctoral subject a couple of few weeks ago! Hell, not a doctorate: a life's work. The implications are enormous. As for the other stuff . . . I'm a younger son. Clan shareholder, but at least I'm not going to get roped in and tied down into running a backwoods estate. There's more to life than the Gruinmarkt and if I must do the getting married and raising a family thing I want to do it somewhere civilized, with electricity and running water, and a partner of my own choosing."
"Got anyone in mind?"
"Oh, I think so." His expression turned inward for a moment. "Although it's too early to ask. . . ." He shook his head. The microwave dinged again. "Is that what you wanted to know?"
"It'll do for a start." Miriam watched as he stood up and pulled the second pizza out of the oven. "How many—of your generation—do you think see eye-to-eye with you on the last bit? Electricity and running water and marrying for love rather than because your parents say so?"
Huw reached for the knife. "It's funny . . . there are a bunch of foreign students at MIT? You can't go there and not know a couple of them. We had a lot in common. It's like, we all got used to the amenities and advantages of living over here, but it's not home. The Chinese and Middle-Eastern and developing-nation students all wanted to spend time over here, earning a stake, maybe settle down. It's a deprivation thing. I didn't see that with the European students—there weren't as many of them, either—but then, you wouldn't. The difference in standards of living isn't so pronounced. But you want to know about my generation? There are those who've never spent much time over here—a minority, these days—and they don't know any better, but there's an outright majority who'd be over the wall in an instant if they could keep visitation rights. And if you promised to install electricity and running water and start Niejwein developing, they'd elect you pope-emperor. Shame that's not going to happen, of course. I'd have liked to see you on the throne in the Summer Palace, taking names and kicking butt. I think you'd have been good at it."
"You think." Miriam gnawed at a fresh chunk of pizza. "Well, we've got a bigger problem now."
"Yes, I was just thinking that. . . ." Huw slid another portion onto her plate. "Here, have a chunk of mine. Urn. So what's your life's ambition?"
"Uh?" Miriam stared at him, a chunk of pizza crust held in one hand. "Excuse me?"
"Go on." Huw grinned. "There must be something, right? Or someone?"
"I—uh." She lowered the piece of crust very carefully, as if it had suddenly been replaced by high explosive. "You know," she continued, in a thoughtful tone of voice, "I really have absolutely no idea." She cleared her throat. "Is there anything to drink?"
"Wine, or Diet Coke?"
"Ugh. Wine, I think, just not too much of it. . . ."
"Okay." Huw fetched a pair of glasses and a bottle.
"I used to think I had the normal kinds of ambition," she said thoughtfully. "Married, kids, the family thing. Finish college, get a job. Except it didn't quite work out right, whatever I did. I did everything the wrong way round, the kid came too soon and I gave her up for adoption because things were . . . fucked up right then? Yes, that's about the size of it. Mom suggested it, I think." Her face froze for a moment. "I wonder why," she said softly.
Huw slid a glass in front of her. "I didn't know you had a child?"
"Most people don't." She sipped briefly, then took a mouthful of wine. "I married him. The father. Afterwards, I mean. And it didn't work out and we got divorced." She stifled an unhappy laugh. That's what I mean about doing things in the wrong order. And before you ask, no, I'm not in contact with the adoptive parents. Mom might know how to trace them, but I bet"—she looked thoughtful—"she won't have made it easy. For blackmail, you see. So anyway, after my marriage fell apart I had a career for a decade until some slime in a vice president's office flushed it down the toilet. And I'd still have a career, a freelance one, except I discovered I had a family, and they wanted me to get married and have a baby, preferably in the right order, thanks, electricity and running water strictly optional. Oh, and my mother is an alien in both senses of the word; the first man I met in ten years who I thought I'd be willing to risk the marriage thing with was shot dead in front of me; the boyfriend before that, who I dropped because of the thousand-yard stare, turns out to be a government spy who's got my number; I'm probably pregnant with a different dead man's baby; and the whole world's turned to shit." She was gripping the glass much too tightly, she realized. "I just want it to stop."
Huw was staring at her as if she'd just grown a second head. Poor kid, she thought. Still at the mooning after girlfriends stage, not sure what he wants—why did I dump all that on him? Now she knew what to look for—now she knew the pressure that had broken Roland—she could see what was looming in his future, the inevitable collision between youthful optimism and brutal realpolitik. Did I really just say all that?
While she was trying to work it out, Huw reached across the breakfast bar and laid a finger on the back of her hand. "You've been bottling that up for a long time, haven't you?"
"How old are you?" she asked.
"I'm twenty-seven," he said calmly, taking her by surprise: He had five years on her estimate. "And I hear what you're not saying. You're what, thirty? Thirty-one? And—"
"Thirty-four," she heard herself saying.
"—Thirty-four is a hard age to be finding out about the Clan for the first time, and even harder if you're a woman. It's a shame you're not ten or fifteen years older," he continued, tilting his head to one side as he stared at her, "because they understand old maids; they wouldn't bother trying to marry you off." He shook his head abruptly. "I'm sorry, I'm treating your life like a puzzle, but it's . . ."
"No, that's okay."
"Ah, thank you." He paused for a few seconds. "I shall forget whatever you wish me to, of course."
"Um?" Miriam blinked.
"I assume you don't want your confidences written up and mailed to every gossip and scandalmonger in the Gruinmarkt?" He raised a wicked eyebrow.
"Of course not!" Catching the gleam in his eye: "You wouldn't. Right?"
"I'm not suicidal." He calmly reached out and took the final wedge of her pizza. "I bribe easily."
"Here's to wine and pizza!" She raised her glass, trying to cover her rattled nerves with a veneer of flippancy. Damn, he's not that unsophisticated at all. Why do I keep getting these people wrong?
"Wine and pizza." Huw let her off the hook gracefully. "You wanted to know what my life's ambitions were," she said slowly. "May I ask why?"
Huw stopped chewing, then swallowed. "I'd like to know what motivates the leader I'm betting my life on." He looked at her quizzically. "That heavy enough for you?"
"Whoa!" She put her glass down slightly too hard. "I'm not leading anyone!" But Brill's words, earlier, returned to her memory. Your mother intends to put you on the throne; and we intend to make sure you're not just there for show. "I'm—" She stopped, at a loss for words.
"You're going to end up leading us whether you like it or not," Huw said mildly. "I'm not going to shove you into it, or anything like that. You're just in the right position at the right time, and if you don't, we'll all hang. Or worse."
"What do you mean?" She leaned forward.
Huw turned his head and looked at the window, his expression shuttered. "The duke has been holding the Clan together, through ClanSec, for a generation. He's, he's a modernizer, in his own way. But there aren't enough of us, and he's aging. He's also a fascist." Huw held up a finger: "I say that in the strict technical sense of the word—he's what you get when you take the principle of aristocratic exceptionalism
and push it down a level onto the bourgeoisie, and throw in a big dose of the subordination of the will of the individual to the needs of the collective. Ahem."
He took a sip of wine. "Sorry, Political Econ 301, back before I ended up in MIT. The Clan—we're only five generations removed from folks who remember being itinerant tinkers. We are the nearest thing that the Gruinmarkt has thrown up to a middle class, and it's the lack of any effective alternative that had our great-grandparents buying titles of nobility and living it up. Anyway, the duke has taken a bunch of warring, feuding extended families and given them a security organization that guards them all. He's kicked butt and taken names, and secured a truce, and virtually everyone now agrees it's a good thing. But he's a single point of failure. When he goes, who's going to be the next generalissimo? Your trouble is that you're his niece, by his red-headed wildcat stepsister. More importantly, you're the only surviving one in the direct line of succession—the attrition rate forty years ago was fearsome. So if you decide not to play your cards you'd better be ready to run like hell. Whichever of the conservative hard-liners comes out on top will figure you're a mortal threat."
"Hang on, whichever? Conservatives? Aren't you jumping the gun—"
"No, because we're not ready. Give us another few years and maybe Earl Riordan could do it. Or Olga, Baroness Thorold, although she's even younger. There are others: Kennard Heilbrunner yen Arnesen, Albericht Hjalmar-Hjorth. But they're not in position. You're in an unusual spot: You're young but not too young, you've got different experience, you demonstrated a remarkable ability to innovate under pressure, and—the icing on the cake—assuming you're pregnant, you're carrying a legitimate heir to the throne. Or at least one who everyone who survived the betrothal will swear is legitimate, and that's what counts. And they'll swear to it because, while the old nobility wouldn't know a DNA paternity test from a hole in the ground, the Clan nobility have heard of it, and even the old folks have a near-superstitious respect for the products of science."
The Revolution Business: Book Five of the Merchant Princes Page 10