The Merchants’ War

by Stross, Charles

  “Where’s Dr. James’s group?” he asked Simms’s receding back.

  “Follow me, sir.”

  Smith followed, trying not to gape too obviously. He was used to security procedures on Air Force bases and some other types of sensitive installations, but he’d never seen anything quite like this. The main tunnel was domed overhead, rising to a peak about fifty feet up; it stretched to infinity ahead and behind. There were no windows, but more conduits and the boxy, roaring ducts of a huge air conditioning system overhead. The concrete piles that had once supported a mile-long linear accelerator were still visible on the floor, but the linac itself had long since been removed and replaced by beige office partitions surrounding a forlorn-looking clump of cubicles, and a line of mobile office trailers that stretched along one wall like a subterranean passenger train. The train didn’t go on forever, though, and after they’d walked a couple of hundred feet from the “back door” they reached the end of the column. Beyond it, the concrete tunnel stretched dizzyingly towards a blank wall in the distance, empty but for a grid of colored lines painted on the floor. Lots of room for expansion, he realized.

  Simms gestured at the trailer on the edge of the empty floor space. “Dr. James uses Room 65 as his site office when he’s visiting. I believe he’s in a meeting until fifteen hundred, but he told me to tell you that Dr. Hu will be along to give you the dog and pony tour at eleven thirty. If you make yourself at home, I’ll find Dr. Hu and get things started.”

  Eric paused at the door to the trailer. “Dr. James didn’t exactly tell me what it is you people do out here,” he said slowly. “Can you fill me in on what to expect?”

  Simms frowned. “I think I ought to leave that to Dr. Hu,” he said.

  “Is Dr. Hu one of Professor Armstrong’s team?”

  Simms nodded. “I’ll go get him.”

  “Okay.” Eric climbed the step up to the site office trailer and went inside to wait.

  Begin Transcript

  “You wanted to s-see me, sir?”

  “Yes, yes I did. Have a seat, lad. Your parents: doing well, I hope?”

  “…”

  “Calm down, there’s a good fellow. Try to relax, I’m not going to bite your head off. I’m sure they’ll be perfectly fine, current emergency notwithstanding. No, the pretender isn’t about to go haring off into the Sennheur marches, and if he does, they’ll have plenty of warning to evacuate. Now, where was I…? Ah, yes. I wanted to ask you about your studies.”

  (Mumble.)

  “Yes, I know. In the current situation, it’s difficult. But I think it may be possible for you to go back there in the fall, if things work out well.”

  “But I’ll be behind. I should be working right now, with my roommates—it’s not like a regular school. They’ll want to know where I was while they were working on our project.”

  (Snorts.) “Well, you’ll just have to tell them you were called away by urgent family business. A dying relative, or something. Don’t look at me like that: worse things happen in war time. If you go back to your laboratory at all you will be luckier than many of our less talented children, Huw. But as it happens, I have a little research project for you that I think will smooth your way. One that you and your talking-shop friends will be able to get your teeth into, and that will be much more profitable in the long term.”

  “A research project? But you don’t need someone like me—I mean, the kind of research your staff do, begging your pardons in advance, your grace, aren’t exactly where my aptitude lies—”

  “Correct. Which is why I want you for a different kind of research.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “On the contrary, I think you’ll understand all too well.” (Pause.) “Red or white?”

  “Red, please.” (Sound of glass being filled.) “Thank you very much.”

  “Show me your locket.”

  “My” (coughing) “locket? Uh, sure. Here—”

  “Put it there. Yes, open. Don’t focus on it. Now, this one. You can see the difference if you look at them—not too close, now! What do you think?”

  “I’m—excuse me, it’s easier to study them if you cover part of the design and compare sections. Less distracting.”

  “You sound as if you’ve done that before.”

  (Hurriedly): “No sir! But it’s only logical. We’ve been using the Clan sigil for generations. Surely” (pause) “hey, I think the upper right arc of this one is different!”

  “It is.” (Sound of small items being cleared away.) “It came from our long-lost, lamentably living, cousins. The Lees. Who, it would appear, discovered the hard way that redesigning the knotwork can have catastrophic consequences.”

  (Pause.) “I’d heard they used a different design. But…” (Pause.) “Nobody thought to experiment? Ever?”

  “Some of the Lee family did, generations ago. Either they failed to world-walk, or they didn’t come back. After they lost a couple, their elders banned further experimentation. For our part, with no indication that other realms than the two we know of might exist, who would bother even trying? Especially as most of the simple variations don’t work. Look at yourself, Sir Huw! The finest education we can buy you, a graduate student at MIT, and you, too, took the family talent for granted.”

  “I, I think—hell. I assumed that if it was possible to do something, it would already have been done, surely?”

  “That’s the assumption everyone who has given the subject a moment’s thought comes up with. It tends to deter experimentation, doesn’t it, if you believe an alley of inquiry has already been tried and found wanting? Even if the assumption is wrong.”

  “I—I feel dumb.”

  (Pause.) “You’re not the only one of us who’s kicking himself. There have been a number of unexplained disappearances over the centuries, and simple murder surely doesn’t explain all of them—but the point is, nobody who succeeded came back to tell the tale. Which brings me to the matter at hand. When Helge reappeared with the family Lee in unwilling thrall, I had reason to send for the archivists. And to have my staff conduct certain preliminary tests. It appears that the Lee family design has never been tested in the United States of America. And our clan symbol doesn’t work in New Britain. That is, it doesn’t in the areas that correspond to the Gruinmarkt. The east coast. But that’s all we know, Huw, and it worries me. In the United States, the authorities have made their most effective attack on our postal service for a hundred years. This would be a crisis in its own right, but on top of that we have the pretender to the throne raising the old aristocracy against us in Niejwein. He can be contained eventually—we have means of communication and transport that will permit us to meet his army with crushing force whenever he moves—but that, too, would be crisis enough on its own. And I cannot afford to deal with any new surprises. So I want you—I have discussed this with members of the

  council—to set your very expensively acquired skills to work and do what our none-too-inquisitive ancestors failed to do.”

  “You want me to, to find out how the sigil works? Or…what?”

  (Clink of glassware.) “When there was just one knot, life was simple. But we’ve got two, now, and three worlds. I want to know if there are more worlds out there. And more knots. I want to know why sometimes trying a design gives the world-walker a headache, and why sometimes the experimenter vanishes. I want to know, Sir Huw, so that I can map out the terrain of the battlefield we find ourselves on.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  (Pause.) “I don’t know, boy. None of us know. That’s the whole point. Can you do it? More importantly, what would you do?”

  “Hmm.” (Pause.) “Well, I’d start by documenting what we already know. Maps and times. Then there are a couple of avenues I would pursue. On the one hand, we have two knots. I can see if the clan knot is failing to work in New Britain because of a terrain anomaly. If, say, it leads to a world where the world-walker would emerge in the middle of a tree, or underwat
er, that would explain why nobody’s been able to use it. And I’d do the same for the Lee family knotwork in the United States, of course. That’s going to take a couple of world-walkers, some maps and surveying tools, and someone to report back if everything goes wrong. Next, well…once we’ve exhausted the possibilities, we’ve got two knots. I need to talk to a mathematician, see if we can work out the parameters of the knots and come up with a way of generating a family of relatives. Then we need to invent a protocol for testing new designs: not so much what to do if they don’t work, but how to survive if they take us somewhere new. If this works, if there are more than two viable knots, we’re going to lose world-walkers sooner or later. Aren’t we?”

  “I expect so.”

  “That’s awfully cold-blooded, isn’t it, sir?”

  “Yes, boy, it is. In case it has slipped your attention, it is my job to be cold-blooded about such things. I would not authorize—I suspect my predecessors did not authorize—such research, if the situation was not so dangerous. The risk of losing world-walkers is too high and our numbers too few for gambling. Already there have been losses, couriers taken in transit by American government agents. You met the Countess Helge. Your opinion…?”

  “Helge? She’s, she’s—what happened to her? Shouldn’t she be here, given her experience?”

  “I am asking the questions, Sir Huw. What was your opinion of her?”

  “Bright…inquisitive…fun, I think, in a scary way. Where is she?”

  “‘Fun, in a scary way’…yes, that’s true enough. But she scared too many cousins, Huw, cousins who lack your sense of fun. I did what I could to protect her. If she surfaces again, well, circumstances have changed, and it may be possible to distract her pursuers, as long as she is not involved in the regrettable business unfolding in New York. But for the time being, she is not available, and so I am turning to you.”

  “I’m, um, I’m at your disposal, sir. How would you like to proceed?”

  “Write me a report. No more than three pages. Tell me what you’re going to do, what resources you need, what people you need, and what you expect to learn from it. I want your report no later than the day after tomorrow, and I want you to be ready to begin work the day after that.”

  “Sir! That’s rather—”

  “What, you’re going to tell me you’ve never written a grant proposal in a hurry? Please don’t insult my intelligence.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, sir! But it’s going to cost, people and money—”

  “Let me worry about that. You just tell me what you need, and I’ll make sure you get it.”

  “Wow! Thank you—”

  “Don’t thank me, boy. Not until it’s over, and we’re still alive.”

  END TRANSCRIPT

  Dr. Hu was alarmingly young and bouncy, a Vietnamese-American postdoc with a ponytail, cargo pants, sandals, and a flippant attitude that would have annoyed the hell out of Eric if Hu had been working for him. Luckily Hu was someone else’s problem, and despite everything, he’d been cleared by security to work on JAUNT BLUE. Which probably means the Republic is doomed, Eric thought mordantly. Ah well, we work with what we’re given.

  “Hey man, the professor told me to give you the special tour. Where you wanna start? You been briefed or they dropping you in it cold?”

  Eric stared at him. “I’ll take it cold.”

  “Suits me! Let’s start with…hell. What do you know about parallel universes?”

  Eric shrugged. “Not a lot. Seen some episodes of Sliders. Been catching up on some sci-fi books in my copious free time.” The writers they’d sounded out hadn’t been good for much more than random guesses, and without priming them with classified information that was all they could be expected to deliver. It had been a waste of time, in his opinion, but—“and then there’s the day job.”

  “Heh. You bet, boss!” Hu laughed, a curious chittering noise. “Okay, we got parallel universes. There’s some theoretical basis for it in string theory, I can give you some references if you like, but I can only tell you one thing for sure right now: we’re not dealing with a Tegmark Level I multiverse—that’s an infinite ergodic universe, one where the initial inflationary period gave rise to disjoint Hubble volumes realizing all possible initial conditions.”

  Eric crossed his arms and frowned. “So you’ve ruled that out.” Asshole? Or show-off?

  “Yup!” Hu seemed unaccountably pleased with himself. “We can get there from here, which rules out Level I, because in a Level I multiverse the parallel universes exist in the same space time, just a mind-bogglingly huge distance apart. Which means we’re dealing with either a Level II, Level III, or Level IV multiverse. I’m in the cosmology pool—we’ve got an informal bet running—that it’ll turn out to be a Level IV theory. Level II depends on a Linde chaotic inflationary cosmology, in which you get multiple branching universes connected by wormholes, but travel between universes in that kind of scheme involves singularities, and the phenomenon we’re studying doesn’t come with black holes attached.”

  Bumptious enthusiast, no social skills. Eric decided. He forced himself to nod, draw the guy out. “So you’re saying this isn’t a large scale cosmological phenomenon—then what is it?” Some of this stuff sounded half-familiar from his physics minor, but the rest was just weird.

  “We’re trying to work out what it is by a process of elimination.” Hu thrust his hands in his pockets, looking distant. “The thing is, we have no theoretical framework. We’ve got a lot of beautiful theories but they don’t account for what we’re seeing: we’re looking at an amazingly complex artifact and we don’t understand how it works. It’s like handing a nuclear reactor to a steam engineer in the nineteenth century. If you don’t understand the physics behind it you might as well say it works by magic pixie dust as slow neutron-induced fission. Absent a theoretical understanding all we can do is poke it and see if it twitches. And coming up with the theory is, uh, proving difficult.” He slowed down as he spoke, finishing on a thoughtful note.

  Now’s as good a time as any… “What’s the black box you think you’re trying to reverse-engineer?” Eric asked, hoping to draw Hu back on track.

  “Ah!” Hu jerked as if a dozing puppeteer had just realized he’d slackened off on the strings: “That would be the cytology samples Dr. James provided two months ago. That’s how we got started,” he added. “Want to see them? Come down to the lab and see what’s on the slab?”

  Eric nodded, and followed Hu out through the door. If this is the Rocky Horror Picture Show, all we’re missing is the mad scientist. Hu made a beeline towards the maze of brown cubicle-farm partitions at the edge of the floor, and dived into a niche. When Eric caught up, he found him sitting at a desk with a gigantic tube monitor on it, messing with something that looked like the bastard offspring of a computer mouse and a joystick. “Here!” he called excitedly.

  Eric glanced round. The neighboring cubicles were empty: “Where is everybody?”

  “Team meeting,” Hu said dismissively. “Look. Let me show you the slides first, then we’ll go see the real thing.”

  “Okay.” Eric stood behind him. “Take it from the top.”

  Hu pulled up a picture and Eric blinked, taken aback for a moment. It was in shades of gray, somehow messy and biological looking. After a moment he nodded. “It’s a cellular structure, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah! This slide was taken at 2,500 magnification on our scanning electron microscope. It’s a slice from the lateral geniculate nucleus of our first test sample. See the layering here? Top two layers, the magnocellular levels? They do fast positional sensing in the visual system. Now let’s zoom in a bit.”

  The image vanished, to be replaced by a much larger, slightly grainier picture in which individual cells were visible, blobs with tangled fibers converging on them like the branches of a dead umbrella, stripped of fabric.

  “Here’s an M-type gangliocyte. It’s kind of big, isn’t it? There are lots of dendrites going in
, too. It takes signals from a whole bunch of rod and cone cells in the retina and processes them, subtracting noise. You with me so far?”

  “Just about,” Eric said dryly. Image convolution had been another component of his second degree, the classified one he’d sweated for back when he’d been attached to NRO. “So far this is normal, is it?”

  “Normal for any dead dried human brain on a microscope slide.” Hu giggled. It was beginning to grate on Eric’s nerves.

  “Next.”

  “Okay. This is where it gets interesting, when we look inside the gangliocyte.”

  “What—” it took Eric longer, this time, to orient himself: the picture was very grainy, a mess of weird loops and whorls, and something else—“the heck is that? Some kind of contamination—”

  “Nope.” Hu giggled again. This time he sounded slightly scared. “Ain’t nothing like this in the textbooks.”

  “It’s your black box, isn’t it?”

  “Hey, quick on the uptake! Yes, that’s it. We went through three samples and twelve microscopy preparations before we figured out it wasn’t an artifact. What do you think?”

  Eric stared at the screen.

  “What is it?”