Revolution Business (39 page)

"As long as you're cautious, Angbard. He knows too much already."

"About us? We won't be feeding him tidbits about
us.
But the fellow has enemies, and he knows it, and as long as we make ourselves discreetly indispensable we'll be safe from investigation by any agency he can touch. We've never had a vice president before, my lady; I hope to make it a mutually profitable arrangement."

(Pause.) "As long as he doesn't turn on us, your grace. Mark my words. As long as he doesn't turn on us…"

The tape clicked to an end. Mike stared at the poisonous thing, unwilling to rewind it and listen again. It wasn't as if he hadn't had his suspicions, but…
this is
Art Bell Show
material,
he told himself.
The vice president is in cahoots with the Clan?

Slowly a new and even more unwelcome supposition inserted itself into his mind.
No. The vice president
was in cahoots with the Clan. Now he's-Mike
flashed over on a vision of Dr. James, in a meeting with WARBUCKS himself, giving orders from his shadowy web-now
he's set on
destroying
them. When Matthias defected he didn't realize the reports would end on WARBUCKS desk and WARBUCKS would have to kill him and turn on the Clan to destroy the evidence of his collusion-

The thoughts were coming too fast. Mike stood up tiredly, stretched the kinks out of his shoulders, glanced at the clock. It was four in the afternoon: a little early to go home, normally, but…

Miriam cleared her throat.
Begin with a cliche:
This was the part she was edgy about. "I expect you're all wondering why I asked you here," she said, and smiled. Deathly silence. She studied her audience: forty or so of the most important movers and shakers of the inner families, mostly allies of the progressive faction. They were rapt, waiting for her explanation and uninclined to social chatter. Oh
well, moving swiftly on…
"It's been a year since I turned up with a plan and a business and asked my uncle to call a meeting of the Clan Council."

Heads nodded. Many of them had been at that particular meeting.

"You probably think I asked you here today because a lot has happened in the past year. In particular,
that
plan is dead in the water. I'm not going to assign blame or complain about it. Rather, I'd like to describe the situation we face right now, and propose a new plan. It's drastic, because we're in a bad position, but I think we can make it work. It'll mean major changes to the way we live, but if we go through with it"-she shrugged-"we'll be in a better position, going forward."
Too much padding,
she thought nervously.

She leaned over the laptop-sitting on a lectern borrowed from the shrine to the household deities-and tapped the space bar. PowerPoint was running, but the projector-"Someone check that-"

Huw poked at the projector. "It's on," he confirmed. A moment later the screen beside her (a bleached, lime-washed canvas stretched flat within a monstrously baroque gilt picture frame) flickered to life.

"Okay." Miriam focused on her notes. She'd spent almost twelve hours working on this presentation, far less than the subject deserved but as much as she'd been able to steal between her other duties over the past week. "Here's what we know for sure: Almost ten months ago, Sir Matthias, who had been participating in at least one little conspiracy against his grace the duke, vanished. We've subsequently learned that he handed himself in to the DEA in return for immunity"-shocked muttering from the back of the room told her that not everybody present had known even that much-"and the DEA handed him on to some kind of black intelligence team called the Family Trade Organization. They're the folks behind the series of raids that shut down the east coast network. A number of us have been compromised, including myself and her grace my mother. FTO subsequently captured at least two of our number and coerced them to act as mules, and at least one of their agents was in the grounds of the Summer Palace earlier this year when the pretender made his bid for the succession."

She paused. The muttering hadn't died down. "Can you save it for later?" she called.

"Silence!" This a deep bellow from Sir Alasdair, at the back corner of the room. "Pray continue, milady."

"Thank you… As I was about to say, anything we decide to do now has to take account of the facts that the US government is aware of us; considers us to be a threat; has developed at the very least a minimal capability to send operatives over here; and we can presume that the explosion at the Hjalmar Palace was also their work. And the news doesn't get any better from there. Um."

Next slide.
"Now, I'm going to assume that we are all familiar with the long-lost cousins and the rediscovery of their, ah, home world. Before his illness, his grace the duke observed that one extra world might be an accident, but two were unlikely to be a coincidence; accordingly, he tasked Sir Huw here with conducting some preliminary research into the matter. What Sir Huw established, very rapidly, was that our early attempts to use the cousins' variant knotwork design on the east coast in the United States had failed because of a doppelgangering effect of some kind. The cousins' knotwork does, in fact, work, if you go far enough south and west. The world Sir Huw and his fellows discovered was-well, we don't know that it's uninhabited, but the presence of ruined buildings suggests that it used to be inhabited. Now it's cold; Maryland is sub-arctic, with pine forests, and there's residual radioactivity around the ruins-" She paused again, as the chatter peaked briefly. "Yes, this is,
was,
a high-tech world.
Very
high-tech."

She ran the next slide. A photograph of a shattered white dome on a forested hillside. Fast forward again: structures inside the dome, indistinct in the gloom but clearly showing how enormous it was. Next slide: a sealed metal door set in a concrete wall. "On the other side of this door, Sir Huw discovered hard vacuum." Next slide: a view down into the valley, thick mist swirling around the crack in the dome's side. "A door into an apparently endless vacuum. The cloud you're looking at is condensation where the air pressure around the dome drops. It's too dangerous to approach closer, or we'd have gone back to try and seal it-our people were lucky to get away alive-but it's not any kind of vacuum pump
I've
heard of. Our best guess is that it's a gate that maintains a permanent connection between two worlds,

rather than the transient connection we make when we world-walk. But we have no idea how it works or why there's no, uh, world there. Maybe there used to be and the gate needs to be anchored in some way? We don't know."

The chatter had subsided into a stunned silence. Miriam glanced round the shocked faces in front of her. "Sir Huw has also conducted some topological analysis on the family knotworks," she said forcefully. "He generated a series of variants and checked them-not to world-walk, but to see if he could feel them. He generated them using Mathematica. It turns out that the family knots can be derived by following a fairly simple formula, and there are three constants that, if you vary them, give rise to different knots that give him the family headache." Next slide: a polynomial equation. "Apparently, this is the key to our ability-it's the Alexander polynomial describing the class of knots to which ours belong. No, I don't understand it either, but it turns out that by tweaking some of these coefficients we get different knots that include the two we already know of.

"Any given knot, starting in any given world, seems to act as a binary switch: Focus on it and you can walk from your starting world into a single destination determined by the knot you use."

Someone had thoughtfully placed a wine goblet by her laptop. Miriam paused to take a sip.

"There's more. The conventional wisdom about how much we can carry, about the impossibility of moving goods using a carriage or a wheelbarrow? It's somewhat… wrong. It's true that you can't
easily
carry a larger payload, but with careful prior arrangement and some attention to insulators and reducing contact area you can move about a quarter of a ton. Possibly more, we haven't really pushed the limits yet. I suspect that this was known to the postal service but carefully kept quiet prior to the civil war; the number of world-walkers who'd have to cooperate to establish a rival corvée, independent of our Clan authorities, is much smaller than the conventional wisdom would have it. If this was widely known it would have made it harder to control the young and adventurous, and consequently harder to retain a breeding population. So the knowledge was actually suppressed, and experimentation discouraged, and during the chaos of the civil war everyone who actually knew the truth was murdered. Maybe it was a deliberate strategy-knowledge is power-or just coincidence, or accident. It doesn't matter; what I want to impress on you is that there are big gaps in our knowledge, and some of them appear to have been placed there deliberately. Only we've begun to piece things together, thanks to the recent destabilization. And the picture I'm building isn't pretty."

She hit the key for the next slide. "You heard-a year ago you heard-my views on the Clan's business and its long-term viability. Smuggling drugs only works as long as they stay expensive, and as long as the people you're smuggling them past don't know what's going on. We've seen evidence of a technology to build gates between worlds, and if there's one thing the US government is good at, it's throwing money at scientific research and making it stick. They know we're here, and I promise you that right now there is a national laboratory-hell, there are probably ten-trying to work out how world-walking works. Worst case, they've already cracked the problem; best case… we may have years rather than months. But once they crack it, we, here in the Gruinmarkt, we're
finished.
Those people can send two million tons of heavy metal halfway around the world to kick in doors in Baghdad, and we're right on their doorstep."

She paused to scan the room again. Forty pairs of eyes were staring at her as if she'd sprouted a second head. Her stomach knotted queasily. "I think we need to get used to the idea that it's
over.
We can't stay here indefinitely; we don't have the leverage. Even if we can negotiate some kind of peaceful settlement with them-and looking at the current administration I'm not optimistic-it'd be like sleeping with an elephant. If it rolls over in its sleep… well. We need some ideas about what we
can
do. New Britain is a first approximation of an answer: It's got vastly more resources than the Gruinmarkt, Nordmarkt coastline, and we've got contacts there. I propose that we should collectively go into the technology-transfer business. We've got access to American libraries and know-how, and if we put our muscle into it we can jump-start a technological revolution in New Britain. Operating under cover in the United States has brought very mixed results-it's encouraged us to act like criminals, like gangsters. I propose that our new venture should be conducted openly, at least in New Britain. We should contact their authorities and ask for asylum. We
could
do it quietly, trying to set up cover identities and sneak in-but it would be much harder now that they're in the middle of a war and a major political upheaval. If we were exposed by accident, the first response would likely be harsh, just as it has been in the United States.

"But anyway. That's why I invited you here today. Last year I told you that I thought the Clan's business was unsustainable in the long term. Today, I'm telling you that it has become a lethal liability in the present-and to explore an alternative model. I can't do this on my own. It's up to you to help make this work. But if it doesn't, if we don't pull ourselves together and rapidly start up a new operation, we're going to be crushed like bugs. Probably within a matter of months."

She took another sip from her wineglass. "Any questions?" A hand waved at the back, then another. The first, Huw, was one of her plants, but the other… "Earl Wu? You have something to say?"

"Yes," rumbled the Security heavy. "You are an optimist. You think we can change our ways, yes? We will either have to run from the Americans, or negotiate with them."

Miriam frowned. "Isn't that obvious? There's nothing else-"

"-They will want to strike back," Carl interrupted. "Our backwoods hotheads. They are used to power and they do not spend enough time in America to understand how large the dragon is that they think they have cornered." He tapped his forehead. "I got my education in the US Marine Corps. And I know these idiots, the ones who stayed home."

"But how
can
they strike back?" Miriam stared at him. Brooding and grim as a warrior out of a Viking saga, Carl exuded absolute certainty and bleakly pessimistic skepticism

"They can aim a sniper's rifle as well as anyone. And there are always the Clan's special weapons." A ripple of muttering spiraled the room, rapidly ascending in volume. "Whose principle military value lies in
not
using them, but the conservatives have never been good at subtle thinking."

"The Clan's-" Miriam bit her tongue. "You've got to be joking. They wouldn't dare use them. Would they?"

"You need to talk to Baron Riordan," said Carl. "I can say no more than that. But I'd speak to him soon, your majesty. For all I know, the orders might already have been signed."

It was early evening; the store had closed to the public two hours ago, and most of the employees had long since checked out and gone to do battle with the rush hour traffic or the crowds on the subway. The contract cleaners and stock fillers had moved in for the duration, wheeling their handcarts through the aisles and racks of clothing, polishing the display cases, vacuuming the back offices and storerooms. They had a long, patient night's work ahead of them, as did the two-man security team who walked the shop floor as infrequently as they could. "It creeps me out, man," Ricardo had explained once when Frank asked him. "You know about the broad who killed herself in the third floor john ten years ago? This is one
creepy
store."