The Hidden Family (8 page)

Miriam sobered. “I don’t need a date right now,” she said, looking worried—and wistful.

“You’re—” Paulette raised an eyebrow. “You still hooked on him?”

Miriam nodded. “It hasn’t gone away. We spoke yesterday. I keep wanting to see him.”

Paulette caught her arm. “Take it from me: don’t. I mean, really,
don’t
. If he’s for real, he’ll be waiting for you. If he isn’t, you’d be running such a huge risk—”

Miriam nodded, wordlessly.

“I figured that was what it was,” Paulie said softly. “You want him whether or not he’s messed up with the shits who’re trying to kill you or disinherit you, is that right?”

“I think he’s probably got his reasons,” Miriam said reluctantly. “Whatever he’s doing. And I don’t think he’s working for them. But—”

“Listen,
no one
is worth what those fuckers want to do to you. Understand?”

“But if he
isn’t
—” it came out as more of a whine than Miriam intended. She shook her head.

“Then it will all sort itself out, won’t it?” said Paulette. “Eventually.”

“Maybe.”

They broke off as the noise of the door opening downstairs reached them. Two pairs of eyes went to the camera. It was Brill, coming in from the cold: She’d been out shopping on foot, increasingly sure-footed in the social basics of day-to-day life in the twenty-first century. “I look at her, and I think she’ll be like you when she’s done some growing up,” Paulette commented quietly.

“Maybe.” Miriam stood up. “What’ve you got?” she called down the stairwell.

“Food for the trip.” Brill grinned. Then her smile turned thoughtful: “Do you have a spare gun?” she asked.

“Huh? Why?”

“There are wild animals in the hills near Hasleholm,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Oops.” Miriam frowned. “Do you really think it’s a problem?”

“Yes.” Brill nodded. “But I can shoot. He is very conservative, my father, and insisted I learn the feminine virtues—deportment, dancing, embroidery, and marksmanship. There are wolves, and I’d rather have a long gun for dealing with them.” Paulette rolled her eyes.

“Okay. Then I guess we’ll have to look into getting you a hunting rifle as soon as possible. In the meantime, there’s the pistol I took from the courier. Where did you stash it?”

“Back at Paulette’s home. But I really could use something bigger in case of wolves or bears,” Brill said seriously. She shoved her hair back out of the way and sniffed. “At least a pistol will protect me from human problems.”

“Deep joy. Try not to shoot any Clan couriers, huh?”

“I’m not stupid.” Brill sniffed again.

“I know: I just don’t want you taking any risks,” Miriam added. “Okay, kids, it’s time to move. And I’m
not
taking you through just yet, Brill.” She reached for her heavy hiking jacket, pulled it on, and patted the right pocket to check her own gun was in place. “Wish me luck,” she said, as she walked toward the back door and the yard beyond.

Cleaning the air

Miriam snapped into awareness teetering on the edge of an abyss. She flung herself sideways instinctively, grabbing for a tree branch—caught it, took two desperate strides as the ground under her feet crumbled, then felt her boots grip solid ground that didn’t crumble under her feet.

“Shit.” She glanced to her left. A large patch of muddy soil lay exposed in the middle of the snowscape, exposed on the crest of a steep drop to a half-frozen streambed ten feet below and twenty feet beyond what would be the side of the yard. “Oh shit.” She gasped for breath, icy terror forcing her to inhale the bitterly cold air. Horrified, she looked down into the stream.
If we’d rented the next unit over, or if I’d carried Brill over
—a ducking in this sort of weather could prove fatal.
Or could I have come through at all?
She glanced up. She’d been lucky with the tree, a young elm that grew straight and tall for the first six feet. The forest hereabouts was thin. I
need to ask Brill what else she hasn’t thought to tell me about world-walking,
she realized. Perhaps her mother was right about her being over-confident. A vague memory floated up from somewhere, something about much of Boston being built on landfill reclaimed from the bay.
What if I’d tried this somewhere out at sea?
she thought, and leaned against the tree for a minute or two to catch her breath. Suddenly, visions of coming through with her feet embedded in a wall or hovering ten feet above a lake didn’t seem comical at all.

She closed her locket and carefully pocketed it, then looked around. “It’ll do,” she muttered to herself. “As long as I avoid that drop.” She stared at it carefully. “Hmm.” She’d gone through about a foot away from the left-hand wall of their yard: The drop-off was steepest under the wall. The yard was about twelve feet wide, which meant—

“Right here.” She took out her knife and carved a blaze on the tree around head height. Then she dropped her backpack and turned around, slowly, trying to take in the landscape.

The stream ran downhill toward the river a quarter of a mile away, but it was next to invisible through the woods, even with the barren winter branches blocking less of the view than the summer’s profusion of green. In the other direction trees stretched away as far as she could see. “I could walk for miles in this, going in circles,” Miriam told herself. “Hmm.”

She carved another blaze on a tree, then began cautiously probing into the woods, marking trees as she went. After an hour she’d established that there was no sudden change in the landscape for a couple of hundred yards in two directions away from her little backyard. Sheer random chance had brought her through in nearly the worst possible place.

“Okay,” she told herself, squeezing her forehead as if she could cram the headache back inside the bones of her skull. “Here goes.” And this time, she pulled down her left sleeve and looked at the chilly skin on the inside of her wrist—pale and almost blue with cold, save for the dark green-and-brown design stippled in dye below the pulse point.

It worked.

* * *

That night, Miriam didn’t sleep well. She had a splitting headache and felt sick to her stomach, an unfamiliar nausea for one who didn’t suffer migraines. But she’d managed a second trip after dark, only four hours after the first, and returned after barely an hour with aching back and arms (from lifting the heavy shooting hide and a basic toolkit) and a bad case of the shivers.

Brilliana fussed over her, feeding her moussaka and grilled octopus from a Greek take-out she’d discovered somewhere—Brill had taken to exploring strange cuisines with the glee of a suddenly liberated gastronome—and readied her next consignment. “I feel like a Goddamn mule,” Miriam complained over a bottle of wine. “If only there were two of us!”

“I’d do it if I could,” Brill commented, stung. “You know I would!”

“Yes, yes… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just—I can carry eighty pounds on my back, just. A hundred and twenty? I can’t even pick it up. I wish I could take more. I should take up weight lifting …”

“That’s what the couriers all do. Why don’t you use a walking frame?” asked Brill.

“A walking—is this something the Clan does that I don’t know about?”

Brill shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said, “I never saw how they operate the post service. But surely—if we get a very heavy pack ready, and lift it so you can walk into it backwards, then just lock your knees, wouldn’t that work?”

“It might.” Miriam pulled a face. “I might also twist an ankle. Which would be bad, in the middle of nowhere.”

“What happens if you try to go through with something on the ground?” Brill asked.

“I don’t.” Miriam refilled her glass. “It was one of the first things I tried. If you jump on my back I can just about carry you for thirty seconds or so before I fall over—that’s long enough. But I tried with a sofa a while ago. All that happened was, I got a splitting headache and threw up in the toilet. I don’t know how I managed it the first time, sitting in a swivel chair, except maybe it was something to do with its wheels—there wasn’t much contact with the floor.”

“Oh, right.”

“Which says interesting things about the family trade,” Miriam added. “They’re limited by weight and volume in what they can ship. Two and a half tons a week. If we open up ‘world three’ that’ll go down, precipitously, although the three-way trade may be worth more. We’ve got to work out how to run an import/export business that doesn’t run into the mercantilist zero-sum trap.”

“The what?” Brill looked blank.

Miriam sighed. “Old, old theory. It’s the idea that there are only a finite quantity of goods of fixed value, so if you ship them from one place to another, the source has to do without. People used to think all trade worked that way. What happens is, if you ship some commodity to a place where it’s scarce, sooner or later the price drops—deflates—while you’re buying up so much of the supply that the price rises at the source.”

“Isn’t that the way things always work?” Brill asked.

“Nope.” Miriam took a sip of wine. “I’m drinking too much of this stuff, too regularly. Hmm, where was I? This guy called Adam Smith worked it out about two centuries ago, in this world. Turns out you can create value by working with people to refine goods or provide services. Another guy called Marx worked on Smith’s ideas a bit further a century later, and though lots of people dislike the prescription he came up with, his analysis of how capitalism works is quite good. Labor—what people do—enhances the value of raw materials. This table is worth more than the raw timber it’s made out of, for example. We can create value, wealth, what-have-you, if we can just move materials to where the labor input on them enhances their value the most.” She drifted off, staring at the TV set, which was showing a talk show with the volume muted. (Brill said it made more sense that way.) “The obvious thing to move is patents,” she murmured. “Commercially valuable ideas.”

“You think you can use the talent to create wealth, instead of moving it around?” Brill looked puzzled.

“Yes, that’s it exactly.” Miriam put her glass down. “A large gold nugget is no use to a man who’s dying of thirst in a desert. By the same token, a gold nugget may be worth a lot more to a jeweler, who can turn it into something valuable and salable, than it is to someone who just wants to melt it down and use it as coin. Jewelry usually sells for more than its own weight in raw materials, doesn’t it? That’s because of the labor invested in it. Or the scarcity of the end product, a unique work of art. The Clan seems to have gotten hung up on shipping raw materials around as a way of making money. I want to ship ideas around, instead, ideas that people can use to create value locally—in each world—actually
create
wealth rather than just cream off a commission for transporting it.”

“And you want to eventually turn my world into this one, Brilliana said calmly.

“Yes.” Miriam looked back at her. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing, do you think?”

Brill gestured at the TV set. “Put one of
those
, showing
that
, in every peasant’s house? Are you kidding? I think it’s the most amazingly wonderful thing I’ve ever heard of!” She frowned. “My momer would say that’s typical of me, and my father would get angry and perhaps beat me for it. But I’m right, and they’re wrong.”

“Ah, the self-confidence of youth.” Miriam picked up her glass again. “Doesn’t the idea of, like, completely wiping out the culture of your own people worry you? I mean, so much of what we’ve got here is such complete shit—” She stopped. Brill’s eyes were sparkling—with anger, not amusement.

“You really think so? Go live in a one-room hut for a couple of years, bearing illiterate brats half of whom will die before they’re five! Without a fancy toilet, or even a thunder-mug to piss in each morning. Go do that, where the only entertainment is once a week going to the temple where some fat stupid priest invokes the blessings of Sky Father and his court on your heads and prays that the harvest doesn’t fail again like it did five years ago, when two of your children starved to death in front of your eyes.
Then
tell me that your culture’s shit!”

Miriam tried to interrupt: “Hey, what about—”

Brill steamed right on. “Shut
up
. Even the children of the well-off—like me—grow up living four to a room and wearing hand-me-downs. We are married off to whoever our parents think will pay best bride-price. Because we’re members of the outer families we don’t die of childbed fever—not since the Clan so graciously gave us penicillin tablets and morphine for the pain—but we get to bear child after child because it’s our duty to the Clan! Are you insane, my lady? Or merely blind? And it’s better for us in the families than for ordinary women, better by far. Did you notice that within the Clan you had rights? Or that outside the Clan, in the ordinary aristocracy, you didn’t? We have at least one ability that is as important, more important, than what’s between our legs: another source of status. But those ordinary peasants you feel such guilt for don’t have any such thing. There’s a better life awaiting me as a humble illegal immigrant in this world than there is as a lady-in-waiting to nobility in my own. Do you think I’d ever go back there for
any
reason except to help you change the world?”

Taken aback, Miriam recoiled slightly. “Ouch,” she said. “I didn’t realize all that stuff. No.” She picked up her wine glass again. “It’s post-colonial guilt, I guess,” she added by way of explanation. “We’ve got a lot of history here, and it’s really ugly in parts. We’ve got a long tradition of conquering other people and messing them up. The idea of taking over and running people for their own good got a very bad name about sixty years ago—did anyone tell you about the Second World War? So a lot of us have this cringe reflex about the whole idea.”

“Don’t. If you do what you’re planning, you couldn’t invade and conquer, anyway. How many people could you bring through? All you can do is persuade people to live their lives a better way—the one thing the families and the Clan have never bothered trying to do, because they’re swimming desperately against the stream, trying to hold their own lives together. It takes an outside view to realize that if they started building fabulous buildings and machines like these at home they wouldn’t be dependent on imported luxuries from the world next door. And they never—” her chest heaved—”let us get far enough away to see that clearly. Because if we did, we might not come back.”

She looked depressed.

“You don’t want to go back?” asked Miriam. “Not even to visit, to see your family and friends?”

“Not really.” It was a statement of fact. “This is
better
. I can find new friends here. If I go there, and you fail—” she caught Miriam’s gaze. “I might never be able to come back here.”

For a moment, looking at this young woman—young enough to be at college but with eyes prematurely aged by cynicism and the Clan’s greedy poverty of riches—Miriam had second thoughts. The families’ grip on their young was eggshell-thin, always in danger of bursting. If they ever got the idea that they could just take their lockets or tattoos or scraps of paper and leave, the Clan would be gone within a generation.
Am I going to end up making this family tyranny stronger?
she wondered.
Because if so, shouldn’t I just give up now …?
“I won’t fail you,” she heard herself saying. “We’ll fix them.”

Brill nodded. “I know you will,” she said. And Miriam nodded right back at her, her mind awash with all the other family children, her distant relatives—the siblings and cousins she’d never known, might never have known of, who would live and die in gilded poverty if she failed.

* * *

A woman dressed in black stepped out of the winter twilight.

She looked around curiously, one hand raised to cover her mouth. “I’m in somebody’s garden by the look of things. Hedge to my left, dilapidated shed in front of me—and a house behind. Can’t be sure, but it looks a mess. The hedge is wildly overgrown and the windows are boarded up.”

She glanced around, but couldn’t see into the neighboring gardens. “Seems like an expensive place.” She furtively scratched an arrowhead on the side of the shed, pointing to the spot she’d arrived on, then winced. “This light is hurting my head.
Ow …
” She hitched her coat out of the grayish snow then stumbled toward the house, crouching below the level of the windows.

She paused. “It looks empty,” she muttered to the dictaphone. “Forward ho.” She walked around to the front of the house, where the snow was banked in deep drifts before the doors and blank-eyed wooden window shutters. Nobody had been in or out for days, that much was clear. There was a short uphill driveway leading to a road, imposing iron gates chained in front. “Damn. How do I get out?” She glanced round, saw a plaque on the front of the house—BLACKSTONES, 1923. A narrow wooden gate next to the pillar supporting one of the cast-iron gates was bolted on the inside. Miriam waded toward it, shivering from the snow, shot the bolt back, and glanced round one final time to look at the house.