The Merchants' War (19 page)

"I'm glad you agree."

He wasn't making this easy. "So. Tomorrow... train back home? Then what?"

"It'll be a flying visit. Overnight, perhaps." He shoveled a potato onto his fork, holding it in place with a fatty piece of mutton: "I need to pick up my post, make arrangements for the shop, and notify the Polis." His cheek twitched. "I've reserved a suite on the night mail express, leaving tomorrow evening. It joins up with the Northern Continental at Dunedin, we won't have to change carriages."

"A suite?" She raised an eyebrow. "Isn't that expensive?"

Erasmus paused, another forkful of food halfway to his mouth: "Of course it is! But the extra expense, on top of a transcontinental ticket, is minor." He grimaced. "You expect travel to be cheaper than it is. It can be-if you don't mind sleeping on a blanket roll with the steerage for a week."

"Yes, but..." Miriam paused for long enough to eat some more food: "I'm sorry. So we're going straight through Dunedin and stopping in Fort Petrograd? How many days away?"

"We'll stop halfway for a few hours. The Northern Continental runs from Florida up to New London, cuts northwest to Dunedin, stops to take on extra carriages, nonstop to New Glasgow where it stops to split up, then down the coast to Fort Petrograd. We should arrive in just under four days. If we were really going the long way, we could change onto the Southern Continental at Western Station, keep going south to Mexico City, then cross the Isthmus of Panama and keep going all the way to Land's End on the Cape. But that's a horrendous journey, seven thousand miles or more, and the lines aren't fast-it takes nearly three weeks."

"Hang on. The Cape-you mean, you have trains that run all the way to the bottom of South America?"

"Of course. Don't your people, where you come from?" They ate in silence for a few minutes. "I'd better write that letter to Roger right now and mail it this evening."

"That would be prudent." Burgeson lowered his knife and fork, having swept his plate clean. "You'll probably want to go through my bookcases before we embark, too-it's going to be a long ride."

After the final cup of coffee, Burgeson sighed. "Let us go upstairs," he suggested.

"Okay- yes." Miriam managed to stand up. She was, she realized, exhausted, even though the night was still young. "I'm tired."

"Really?" Erasmus led the way to the elevator. "Maybe you should avail yourself of the bathroom, then catch an early night. I have some business to attend to in town. I promise to let myself in quietly."

He slid the elevator gate open and as she stepped inside she noticed the heavily built doorman just inside the entrance. "If it's safe, that works for me."

"Why would it be unsafe? To a hotel like this, any whiff of insecurity for the guests is pure poison." "Good."

Back in the room, Miriam jotted down a quick note to her sometime chief research assistant, using hotel stationery.

"Can you get this posted tonight?" she asked Erasmus. "I'm going to have that bath now..."

The bathroom turned out to be down the corridor from the bedroom, the bath a contraption of cold porcelain fed by gleaming copper pipework. There was, however, hot water in unlimited quantities-something that Miriam had missed for so long that its availability came as an almost incomprehensible luxury.

The
things we take for granted,
she thought, relaxing into the tub: the comforts of a middle-class existence in New Britain seemed exotic and advanced after months of detention in a Clan holding in Niejwein.
I could fit in here.
She tried the thought on for size.
Okay, so domestic radios are the size of a photocopier, and there's no Internet, and they use trains where we'd use airliners. So what? They've got hot and cold running water, and gas and electricity. Indoor plumbing.
The chambers Baron Henryk had confined her to had a closet with a drafty hole in a wooden seat.
I could live here.
The thought was tempting for a moment- until she remembered the thin, pinched faces in the soup queue, the outstretched upturned hats. Erasmus's hacking cough, now banished by medicines that she'd brought over from Boston-her own Boston. No antibiotics: back before they'd been discovered, a quarter to a third of the population had died of bacterial diseases. She sighed, lying back carefully to avoid soaking her brittle-bleached hair.
It's better than the Clan, but still...

She tried to gather her scattered thoughts. New Britain wasn't some kind of nostalgic throwback to a gaslight age: it was dirty, smelly, polluted, and intermittently dangerous. Clothing was expensive and conservative because foreign sweatshops weren't readily available: the cost of transporting their produce was too high even in peacetime-and with a wartime blockade in force, things were even worse. Politics was dangerous, in ways she'd barely begun to understand: there was participatory democracy for a price, for a very limited franchise of rich land-owning men who thought themselves the guardians of the people and the rulers of the populace, shepherding the masses they did not consider to be responsible enough for self-determination.

It wasn't only women's rights that were a problem here-and
that
was bad enough, as she'd discovered: women here had fewer civil rights than they had in Iran, in her own world; at least in Iran women could vote-but here, anyone who wasn't a member of the first thousand families was second-class, unable to move to a new city without a permit from the Polis, a subject rather than a citizen. "Fomenting democratic agitation" was an actual on-the-books felony that could get you sent to a labor camp in the far north. Outright chattel slavery might not be a problem-it seemed to have fizzled away in the late nineteenth century-but the level of casual racism she'd witnessed was jarring and unpleasant.

I just want to go home. If only I knew where home is!

The water was growing cold. Miriam finished her ablutions, then returned to the hotel room. It was close and humid in the summer heat, so she raised the sash window, dropping the gauze insect screen behind it.
Erasmus can let himself in,
she thought, crawling between the sheets.
How late will he
-she dozed off.

She awakened to daylight, and Erasmus's voice, sounding heartlessly cheerful as he opened the shutters: "Rise and shine! And good morning to you, Miriam! I hope you slept well. You'll be pleased to know that your letter made the final collection: it'll have been delivered already. I'll be about my business up the corridor while you make yourself decent. How about some breakfast before we travel?"

"Ow, you cruel, heartless man!" She struggled to sit up, covering her eyes. "What time is it?"

"It's half-past six, and we need to be on the train at ten to eight."

"Ouch. Okay, I'm awake already!" She squinted into the light. Burgeson was fully dressed, if a bit rumpled-looking. "The chaise was a bit cramped?"

"I've slept worse." He picked up a leather toilet bag. "If you'll excuse me? I'll knock before I come in."

He disappeared into the corridor, leaving Miriam feeling unaccountably disappointed.
Damn it, it's unnatural to be that cheerful in the morning!
Still, she was thoroughly awake. Kicking the covers back, she sat up and stretched. Her clothing lay where she'd left it the evening before. By the time Erasmus knocked again she was prodding her hair back into shape in front of the dressing-table mirror. "Come in," she called.

"Oh good." Erasmus nodded approvingly. "I've changed my mind about breakfast: I think we ought to catch the morning express. How does that sound to you? I'm sure we can eat perfectly well in the dining car."

She turned to stare at him. "I'd rather not hurry," she began, then thought better of it. "Is there a problem?" Her pulse accelerated.

"Possibly." He didn't look unduly worried, but Miriam was not reassured. "I'd rather not stay around to find out."

"In that case." Miriam picked up the valise and began stuffing sundries into it. "Let's get moving." The skin in the small of her back itched. "Are we being watched?"

"Possibly. And then again, it might just be routine. Let me help you." Erasmus passed her hat down from the coat rack, then gathered up her two shopping bags. "The sooner we're out of town the better. There's a train at ten to seven, and we can just catch it if we make haste."

Downstairs, the hotel was already moving. "Room ninety-two," Erasmus muttered to the clerk on the desk, sliding a banknote across: "I'm in a hurry."

The clerk peered at the note then nodded. "That will be fine, sir." Without waiting, Erasmus made for the front door, forcing Miriam to take quick steps to keep up with him. "Quickly," he muttered from the side of his mouth. "Keep your eyes open."

The sidewalk in front of the hotel was merely warm, this early in the morning. A newspaper boy loitered opposite, by the Post Office: early-morning commuters were about. Miriam glanced in the hotel windows as she followed Erasmus along the dusty pavement. A flicker of a newspaper caught her eye, and she looked ahead in time to see a man in a peak-brimmed hat crossing the road, looking back towards them.
Shit.
She'd seen this pattern before-a front and back tail, boxing in a surveillance subject. "Are we likely to be robbed in the street?" she asked Erasmus's retreating back.

He stopped dead, and she nearly ran into him: "No, of course not." He didn't meet her eyes, looking past her. "I see what you see," he added in a low, conversational tone. "So. Change of plan-again." He offered her his arm. "Let's take this nice and easy."

Miriam took his arm, holding him close to her side. "What are we going to do?" she muttered.

"We're going to deliberately get on the wrong train." He steered her around a pillar box, then into the entrance to the station concourse, and simultaneously passed her a stubby cardboard ticket. "We want to be on the ten to seven for Boston, on platform six. But we're going to get on the eight o'clock to Newport, on platform eight, opposite platform six, and we're going to get on right at the front."

Miriam nodded. "Then what?"

"It's sixteen minutes to seven." He smiled and waved his ticket at the uniformed fellow at the end of the platform: Miriam followed his example. "At twelve minutes to the hour, we cross over to the right train. If we're stopped or if you miss it, remember your cover, we just got on the wrong train by mistake. All right? Let's go..."

Miriam took a deep breath.
This doesn't sound good,
she realized, her pulse pounding in her ears as an irrational fear made her guts clench. She resisted the urge to look over her shoulder, instead keeping hold of Burgcson's arm until he steered her towards a railway carriage that seemed to consist of a row of small compartments, each with its own doors and a running-board to allow access to the platform. As she reached the train, she glanced sideways along the platform. The same two men she'd seen on the street were walking towards her: as she watched, one of them peeled off toward the carriage behind.
It's a box tail all right.
She forced herself to unfreeze and climbed into the empty eight-seat compartment, and Erasmus's arms.

"Hey!"

"This is the hard bit." He steered her behind him, then pulled the door to and swiftly dropped the heavy leather shutters across the windows of the small compartment. Then he walked to the door on the other side of the carriage and opened it. "I'll lower you."

"I can climb down myself, thanks." Miriam looked over the edge. It was a good five feet down to the track bed. "Damn." She lowered herself over the dusty footplate. "Got the bags?"

"Right behind you."

The track bed was covered in cinders and damp, unpleasant patches. She patted her clothes down and reached up to take the luggage Erasmus passed her. A second later he stood beside her, breathing hard. "Are you all right?"

"A touch of-of-you know." He wheezed twice, then coughed, horribly. "All right now.
Move."
He pointed her across the empty tracks, towards a flight of crumbling brick steps leading up the side of the platform. "Go on."

She hurried across the tracks then up the steps. She glanced back at Erasmus: he seemed to be in no hurry, but at least he was moving.
Shit, why now?
This was about the worst possible moment for his chest to start causing trouble. She looked round, taking stock of the situation. The crowd on the platform was thinning, people bustling towards open doors as if in a hurry to avoid a rain storm. A plump man in a tricorn hat was marching up the platform, brandishing a red flag. Nobody was watching her climb the steps from the empty track bed.
Come on, Erasmus!
She took a step towards the train, then another, and picked up her pace. A few seconds later, an open door loomed before her. She pulled herself up and over the threshold. "Is this compartment reserved?" she asked, flustered: "My husband-"

A whistle shrilled. She looked round, and down. Erasmus stood on the platform below her, panting, clearly out of breath. "No reservations," grumbled a fat man in a violently clashing check jacket. He shook his newspaper ostentatiously and made a great show of shifting over a couple of inches.

Miriam reached down and took Erasmus's hand. It felt like twigs bound in leather, light enough that her heave carried him halfway up the steps in one fluid movement. She stepped backwards and sat down, and he smiled at her briefly then tugged the door closed. The whistle shrilled again as the train lurched and began to pull away. "I didn't think we were going to make it," she said.

Burgeson took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds. "Neither did I," he admitted wheezily, glancing back along the platform towards the two running figures that had just lurched into view. "Neither did I..."

Chapter 8

BREAKTHROUGHS

It's all very simple,
Huw tried to reassure himself.
it'll take us somewhere new, or it won't.
True, the Wu family knotwork worked fine, as a key for travel between the worlds of the Gruinmarkt and New Britain. But the limited, haphazard attempts to use it in the United States had all failed so far. Huw had a theory to explain that: Miriam was in the wrong place when she'd tried to world-walk.

You couldn't world-walk if there was a solid object in your position in the destination world. That was why doppelgangering worked, why if you wanted protection against assassins for your castle in the Gruinmarkt you needed to secure the equivalent territory in the United States-or in any other world where the same geographical location was up for grabs. That explained why the Wu family had been able to successfully murder a handful of Clan heads over the years, triggering and fueling the vicious civil war that had decimated the Clan between the nineteen-forties and the late nineteen-seventies. And their lack of the pattern required to world-walk to the United States explained why, in the long run, the Wu family had fallen so far behind their Clan cousins.

"There are a bunch of ways the knotwork might work," he'd tried to explain to the duke. "The fact that two different knots let us travel between two different worlds is interesting. And they're similar, which implies they're variations on a common theme. But does the knotwork specify two endpoints, in which case all a given knot can do is let you shuttle between two worlds, A and B-or does it define a vector relationship in a higher space? One that's quantized, and commutative, so if you start in universe A you always shuttle from A to B and back again, but if you transport it to C you can then use it to go between C and a new world, call it D?"

The duke had just blinked at him thoughtfully. "I'm not sure I understand. How will I explain this to the committee?"

Huw had to give it some thought. "Imagine an infinite chessboard. Each square on the board is a world. Now pick a piece-a knight, for example. You can move to another square, or reverse your move and go back to where you started from. That's what I mean by a quantized commutative transformation-you can only move in multiples of a single knight's move, your knight can't simply slide one square to the left or right, it's constrained. Now imagine our clan knotwork is a knight-and the Wu family's design is, urn, a special kind of rook that can move exactly three squares in a straight line. You use the knight, then the rook: to get back to where you started you have to reverse your rook's move, then reverse the knight's move. But because they're different types of move, they don't go to the same places-and if you combine them, you can discover new places to go. An infinite number of new places."

"That is a very interesting theory. Test it. Find out if it's true. Then report to me." He raised a warning finger: "Try not to get yourself killed in the process."

The pizza crusts were cold and half the soda was drunk. It was mid-afternoon, and the house was cooling down now that the air-conditioning had been on for a while. Huw sat in the front room, staring at the laptop screen. According to the geographical database, the ground underfoot was about as stable as it came. There were no nearby rivers, no obvious escarpments with debris to slide down and block the approaches. He closed his eyes, trying to visualize what the area around the house might look like in a land bare of human habitation. "You guys ready yet?" he called.

"Nearly there." There was a clicking, rattling noise from the kitchen. Elena was tweaking her vicious little toy again. ("You're exploring: your job is to take measurements, look around, avoid being seen, and come right back. But if the worst happens, you aren't going to let anyone stop you coming back. Or leave any witnesses.")

"Ready." Hulius came in the door, combat boots thudding.

Huw glanced up. In his field camouflage, body armor, and helmet Hulius loomed like a rich survivalist who'd been turned loose in an army surplus store, "where's your telemetry pack?"

"In the kitchen. Where's your medical kit?"

Huw gestured at the side of the room. "Back porch." He slid the laptop aside carefully and stood up. "How's your blood pressure?"

"No problems with it, I'm not dizzy or anything."

"Good. Okay, so let's go..."

Huw found Elena in the kitchen at the back of the rental house. She had her telemetry belt on, and the headset, and had rigged the P90 in a tactical sling across her chest. "Ready?" he asked.

"I can't wait!" She bounced excitedly on her toes.

"Let me check your equipment first." She surrendered with ill grace to Huw's examination. "Okay, I'm switching it on now." He poked at the ruggedized PDA, then waited until the screen showed an off-kilter view of the back of his head. "Good, camera's working." He turned to Hulius. Gruffly: "Your turn now."

"Sure, dude." Hulius stood patiently while Huw hung the telemetry pack off his belt, under the big fanny pack of ration packs, drink cans, and survival tools. Hulius's was heavier, and included a Toughbook PC and a shortwave radio-unlike Elena he might be sticking around for a while.

"Got signal."

"Cool. I'm ready whenever you are."

"Okay, I'll meet you out back."

Huw headed for the front room to collect the big aid kit and the artist's portfolio, his head spinning.
Demo time. Right?
Nobody had done this before; not this well-organized, anyway. He felt a momentary stab of anxiety.
If we'd done this right, we'd have two evenly matched world-walkers, able to lift each other, not a line hacker and a princess.
The failure modes scared him shitless if he stopped to think about them. Still, Yul and 'Lena were eager volunteers. That counted for something, didn't it?

The back door, opening off the kitchen, stood open, let-; ting in a wave of humidity. Hulius and Elena stood in the overgrown yard, Elena facing Yul's back as he crouched down. "Ready?" called Huw.

"Yo!"

Huw placed the first aid kit carefully on the deck besidffl him, then unzipped the art portfolio. "Elena, you ready?"

"Whenever big boy here gets down on his knees."

"I didn't know you cared, babe-"

Huw stifled a tense grin. "You heard her. Piggyback up, I'm going to uncover in ten. Good luck, guys."

Hulius crouched down and Elena wrapped her arms around his chest from behind. He held his hands out and she carefully placed her feet in them. With a grunt of strain, he rose to his feet as Huw dropped the front cover of the folio, revealing the print within-carefully keeping it facing away from himself. "Go!"

He tripped the stopwatch, then put the folio down, closing it. Heart hammering, he watched the yard, stopwatch in hand. Five seconds. Elena would be down and looking around, a long, slow, scan, her headset capturing the view. Ten seconds. The weather station on her belt should be stabilizing, reading out the ambient temperature, pressure, and humidity. Fifteen seconds. Her first scan ought to be complete, and the smart radio scanner ought to be logging megabits of data per second, searching for signs of technology. If there were no immediate threats she should be taking stock of Yul, making sure his blood pressure was stable from the 'walk. Thirty seconds. Huw began to feel a chilly sweat in the small of his back. By now, Hulius should have planted a marker and be on his way to the nearest cover, or would be digging in to wait out the one-hour minimum period before he could return. He'd have a bad headache right now-if he used the one-hour waypoint he'd be in bed for twenty hour hours afterwards, if not puking his guts up. Otherwise he'd stay a while longer...

Fifty- five. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty.
Oh shit.
Sixty-one Sixty-two.

The scenery changed. Huw's heart was in his mouth for a moment: then he managed to focus on Elena. She was holding her hands out, thumbs-up in jubilation.

"Case green! Case green!"

Huw sat down heavily.
I think I'm going to he sick.
It had been the longest minute of his life. "What happened?" he asked, his voice thick with tension: "Which schedule is Yul running to?"

She climbed the steps to the rear stoop. Her submachine gun was missing. "Let's go inside, I need to take some of this stuff off before I melt."

Huw held the door open for her with barely controlled impatience. "What happened?" He demanded. Relax, it's all right, really." She began to unfasten her helmet and Huw moved in hastily to unplug the camera. It was beaded with moisture and he swore quietly when he saw that the lens was fogged over.

"You need to remove the telemetry pack first, I need to get this downloaded."

"Oh all right then! Here's your blasted toy." For a moment she worked on her equipment belt fastenings, then held it up at arm's length with an expression of distaste. Huw grabbed it before she let it drop. "It's perfectly safe over there. A lot cooler than it is here, and there are trees everywhere-"

"What kind of trees?"

She shrugged vaguely. "Trees. Like in the Alps. Dark green, spiny things. Christmas tree trees. You want to know about trees? Send a tree professor."

"Okay. So it's cold and there are coniferous trees. Anything else?"

Elena laid her helmet on the kitchen worktop and began to unfasten her body armor. "It was raining and the rain was cold. We couldn't see very far, but it was quiet- not like over here."

Huw shook his head:
City girl.

"Anyway, I checked over Yul and he said he felt fine and there was no sign of anybody, so I gave him the P90 and tripped back over. Whee!"

Huw managed to confine his response to a nod. "When is he coming back?"

"Uh, we agreed on case green. That means four hours, right?"

"Four hours." Elena laid her armor out on the kitchen table then began to unlace her combat boots. "Then we can break out the wine, yay!"

"I'll be in the front room," Huw muttered, cradling the telemetry belt. "Would you mind staying here and watching the back window for a few minutes? If you see anything at all, call me."

In the front room, Huw poked at the ruggedized PDA, switching off the logging program. He plugged it into the laptop to recharge and hotsync, then sighed. The video take would be a while downloading, but the portable weather station had its own display. He unplugged it from the PDA, flicked it on, and looked at the last reading. Temperature: 16 Celsius. Pressure: 1026 millibars. Relative humidity: 65%. "What the fuck?" He muttered to himself. Sixteen Celsius-sixty Fahrenheit-in Maryland, in August? With high pressure? That was the bit that didn't make sense. It was over ninety outside, with 1020 millibars. "It's twenty Celsius degrees colder over there? And the trees are conifers?"

The penny dropped. "No wonder nobody could use the Wu family knotwork up in Massachusetts-it's probably under half a mile of ice!"

"Hey, you talking to me?" Elena called from the kitchen.

Huw glanced at the laptop. "Be right back, buddy," he told it, then carefully put it down on the battered cargo case, picked up the brown paper bag with the wine, and walked back towards Elena to wait for Hulius's return.

* * *

It was afternoon, according to the baleful red lights on the small TV opposite Mike's bed. He blinked at it sleepily, feeling no particular inclination to reach out for the remote control that sat on the trolley beside his bed. The curtains were drawn across what he took for a window niche, and he was alone in the small hospital room with nothing for company but the TV, the usual clutter of spotlights and strange valves and switches on the wall behind his bed, and the plastic cocoon they'd wrapped his leg in. The cocoon-
it's like something out of
Alien, he thought dreamily. Drainage tubes ran from it to the side of the bed, and there was a trolley with some kind of gadget next to him, and a hose leading to his left wrist. A drip. That was it.
I'm on a drip. Therefore, I must be home. I drip, therefore I am.
The thought was preposterously funny in a distant, swirly kind of way. Come to think of it, all his thoughts seemed to be leaving vapor trails, bouncing off the inside of his skull in slow motion. His leg ached, distantly, but it was nothing important.
I'm home. Phone home. Maybe I should phone Mom and Pop? Let them know I'm all right.
No, that wouldn't work-Mom and Pop died years ago, in the car crash with Sue.
Forget it.
He managed to roll his eyes towards the table the TV stood on. There was no telephone.
Some hospital bedroom this is...

He was too hot. Much too hot. He was wearing pajamas: that was it. Fumbling for the buttons with his right hand, he realized he was fatigued. It felt as if his arm was weak, a long way away. He managed to get a couple of buttons undone, just as the door opened.

"As you can see he's, oh my-"

"Mike? Can he hear me?"

"I'm too hot." It came out funny.

"I'm real sorry, Mr. Smith, but he's running a fever. We've got him on IV penicillin for the infection, and morphine-"

"Penicillin? Isn't that old-fashioned; I mean, aren't most bacteria resistant to it these days?"

"That's not what the path lab report says about this one, thank Jesus; you're right, most infections are resistant, but he's had the good fortune to pick up an old-fashioned one. So, like I was saying, he's on morphine, his leg's an almighty mess, and they used a whole lot of Valium on him last night so he wouldn't pull out his tubes."

"Mike?"

The voice was familiar, conjuring up images of a whirring hand exerciser, a tense expression. "Boss?"

"Mike? Did you try to say something?"

Lips are dry.
He tried to nod.

"Ah, h- heck. Is it the Valium? Or the morphine?"

"He ought to be better in a couple of hours, Mr. Smith."

"Okay. You hang in there, Mike. I'll be right back."

The door closed on discussion, and the sound of footsteps walking away. Mike closed his eyes and tried to gather his thoughts.
In the hospital. Doped up. Leg hurts a little. Morphine? Colonel Smith. Got to talk to the colonel...