The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (39 page)

‘Crone Mother’s tears! This should
not
have been allowed.’

‘May I remind you again that nobody saw it coming? That if we had, it wouldn’t have happened?’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘What we always do, when they’re too big to take down: I’m afraid we’re going to have to pay him tribute.’

‘It’s going to be expensive, Angbard. He’s their king-in-waiting – indeed, he may actually be their king-emperor in all but name. The dynastic child they’ve placed
on the throne does not impress with his acumen. Someone must be issuing the orders in his stead.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure, my lady; he’s strong-willed and I’m told he’s brighter than he looks when the glare of the public gaze is shuttered. And I am not
certain you’re right about the cost of tribute, either. But Mr. Cheney is as rich as one of our first circle, and from his office in the Old Executive Office Building he has more power than
many of our relatives can even conceive of. So we cannot buy him with money or cow him with threats. However, there is a currency a man of his type craves, and he knows we can pay in it.’

‘What – oh, I see.’

‘He is, it seems, setting up his own private intelligence group – by proxy, through Defense – this Office of Special Plans. He is one of those seekers for power who have a
compulsive need for secrecy and hidden knowledge. We know exactly how to handle such men, do we not?’

‘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. That’s how it worked with Hoover. 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 the VPOTUS 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 Mr. Cheney’s desk and the VP 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 .
. .

The Clan take politics personally – when they figure out what’s happened they’ll treat it as a
personal
betrayal. But if I even hint that I know this shit, Dr. James
will have me rubbed out. What the hell am I going to do?

Buy time. Sign myself out as sick. And hope something turns up
. . .

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 of the United States had failed because of a doppelgängering
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 hightech 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. 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 continued. ‘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 actively suppressed, and experimentation
discouraged, and during the chaos of the civil war everyone who 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, 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 Sudtmarkt to Nordmarkt coastline, and we’ve got contacts there.

‘So. 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 while 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?’