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For Iain M. Banks, who painted a picture of a better way
MAIN TIME LINES
TIME LINE ONE:
History diverged from our own around 200–250 BCE in time line one. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all absent and the collapse of the Roman Empire into dark ages was complete rather than just partial. Since then, civilization in Europe re-emerged and quasi-medieval colony kingdoms sprang up on the eastern seaboard of North America. (The western seaboard was settled by Chinese traders.)
The Gruinmarkt, one such kingdom, was home to the Clan—rich merchant-traders with the ability to cross between time lines. As world-walkers, they made a good living as the only people who could send a message coast-to-coast in a day in time line one. They could also guarantee a heroin shipment would arrive without fear of interception in time line two. But all good things come to an end, and the vicious civil war that broke out in 2003 (by time line two reckoning) led to the Clan’s discovery by the US Government. Their escalating cycle of retaliation ended in a nuclear inferno.
TIME LINE TWO:
This is a world almost identical to your time line, as the reader of this book—right up to a key date in 2003. Here world-walkers from the Clan’s conservative faction detonated a stolen nuclear weapon in the White House. They assassinated the President and forced the government to reveal the existence of parallel universes and the technology for reaching them. Our story starts in time line two.
TIME LINE THREE:
This time line was discovered by Miriam Beckstein. In this alternate world, England was invaded by France in 1760 and the British Crown in Exile was established in the New England colonies. There was no American War of Independence and no French or Russian Revolutions. Therefore the Ancien Regime—despotism by absolute monarchy—shaped the world order until the Revolution of 2003. Here, the New British Empire’s Radical Party overthrew the government and declared a democratic Commonwealth. The country is now known as the New American Commonwealth.
The French invasion of England stifled the Industrial Revolution in its crib, so industrialization began a century later than in time line two. But economics and science have their own imperatives. And even before Miriam led the survivors of the Clan into exile in the Commonwealth, the pace of technological innovation was beginning to pick up.
TIME LINE FOUR:
Currently uninhabited, this time line is in the grip of an ice age—with an ice sheet covering much of Europe, Canada, and the northern states of the US. But it hasn’t been uninhabited forever. The enigmatic Forerunner ruins pose both a threat and a promise …
MAIN CHARACTER PROFILES
ERIC SMITH
Born in 1964 in time line two, Colonel Smith, USAF (retired) has been a government man all his life. He worked for the United States’ National Security Agency, then inside a top secret unit within Homeland Security. It was tasked with defending the States against threats from other time lines; these included world-walkers, those who could cross between these alternative worlds and his own time line. Many might consider this easy—after all, most known time lines are uninhabited, or populated by stone age tribes at best. However, the exceptions are the problem. The notorious Clan and their world-walkers came from time line one. And contact with this secretive organization resulted in a national trauma—dwarfing both 9/11 and the war on terror.
Smith knows that there are other inhabited time lines out there. At least one civilization is far ahead of the United States’ technology levels, fighting—and losing—a para-time war against parties unknown. And then there’s the BLACK RAIN time line, where reconnaissance drones and human spies go missing.
Defending the nation is easier said than done, when you can’t even be sure what you’re defending it from. But you can make a good guess …
KURT DOUGLAS
Born in 1941 in time line two, Kurt Douglas grew up in the German Democratic Republic—East Germany—during the Cold War. Drafted at 18, he ended up in the Border Guards. Then in late 1968 he escaped over the Berlin Wall to the West, and emigrated to the United States. Marrying Greta, another East German defector, he made a new life for himself. Kurt raised a family, and lived quietly with his son, daughter-in-law, and their adopted children—Rita and River.
However, the East German foreign intelligence service didn’t send Kurt to the West to spy on the United States—they had longer-term objectives in mind. However, that was before the end of the Cold War and the collapse of East Germany. Old skills don’t fade easily, and Kurt has given Rita the best training he could for living in a police state. And she knows, if she ever gets in over her head, that she can count on grandpa Kurt—and his friends—for help.
MIRIAM BURGESON
Born in 1968 in time line two, Miriam grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. She worked as a tech sector journalist before discovering, in her early thirties, that her mother had been lying to her for most of her life. Mother and daughter were fugitives from the Gruinmarkt—a small kingdom in time line one, which had reached medieval levels of technology. They were women of noble birth, whose designated role was to produce more world-walkers and to serve the Clan. Miriam world-walks “home” by accident and is expected to conform. But that had never been Miriam’s style. So in short order, she discovered a route to a new inhabited time line and built a business start-up—using it to import high-tech innovations into this new territory. This triggered a crisis within the Clan, reviving a dormant blood feud and causing civil war.
Now seventeen years have passed since the Clan and the Gruinmarkt were both destroyed. Clan reactionaries made a disastrous miscalculation that led to a very brief war with the United States—ending when the US nuked the Gruinmarkt. Miriam saw the writing on the wall and led anti-Clan survivors into exile in the new world she’d discovered. But here she found a revolution in progress—and a new vocation.
Miriam is now older and wiser, and a minister in government. She works for the New American Commonwealth, the ascendant democratic superpower of time line three. She’d taken part in the revolution that overthrew the absolute monarchy of the New British Empire, now defunct. And ever since, she’s been warning the new government, “the USA is coming”. For seventeen years, she’s been working feverishly to ensure that when the US drones arrive overhead, the Commonwealth will be ready to meet them on equal terms. But she wasn’t expecting them to be expecting *her*—and to have made plans accordingly.
RITA DOUGLAS
Born in 1995 in time line two, and adopted at birth by Franz and Emily Douglas, Rita was eight when Clan renegades from time line one nuked the White House. Growing up in President Rumsfeld’s Am
erica, she has learned to keep her head down and her nose clean. But there’s only so much she can do to avoid attention. The paranoid high-surveillance state has her under constant surveillance in case the woman who gave her up for adoption (and enemy of the state) takes a renewed interest in her.
Rita has a history and drama studies degree, a pile of student loans, and no great employment prospects. At twenty-five years of age she doesn’t really know where she’s going. But that’s okay. Because the government has big plans for Rita.
See the end of the novel for a principal cast list and a glossary of key terms and vocabulary.
PART ONE
DOG AND PONY SHOW
The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.
—William Gibson
Prologue
BOSTON, 2004
A grandfather and his granddaughter walked under the leaf-bare trees of late autumn:
“Tell me again about Grandma Greta, Grandpa?”
Her gloved hand was fragile and small in his. The clouds were gray overhead, and the chilly Boston air, not quite ready for snow, nevertheless bore the crisp smell of incoming rain. The grass to either side of the metaled path had been mown for the last time this year. Kurt swallowed, rewinding the tapes of memory to a more innocent time. He tried to decide how much more he could tell his adoptive granddaughter about the extraordinary woman who’d died when she was three.
She was ten now, in these chilly dog days of 2004, old enough for another eyedropper-full of truth. Kurt glanced round, checking for eavesdroppers: but Kurt and Rita had come to pay their respects to Grandma late on a weekday, right before Thanksgiving. The only other residents of this park lay silent and unhearing, marked for eternity beneath gravestones and sculpted memorials.
They came to a fork in the path. Here, a narrower trail led off between a grove of trees toward a cluster of grave markers now falling into evening’s shadow. Kurt gently steered his granddaughter onto this path, proceeding on instinct. The cold air numbed his cheeks, matching his mood. Soon he saw the plot, and finally spoke: not looking at the girl, trying to order his thoughts.
“Look at the headstone and tell me what it reads.”
Rita trotted across the grass with the unstudied spontaneity of a child who’d never lost anyone close. She bent to read: “Greta Douglas, wife and mother, born February sixteenth, 1942, Dresden, died August nineteenth, 1998, Boston.” A puzzled frown shadowed her eyebrows at the next phrase: “‘Finally among friends’?”
Kurt nodded. For a moment he choked on his memories. “Everything except the places and the date of her death was a lie.”
“Lies on a gravestone?” The indignation of an outraged youngster had bite.
“Oh yes.” A ghost of a smile tugged at his cheeks: or perhaps it was the proximity of tears. “She was very insistent toward the end. I was to maintain appearances at all costs. Her illness … She was very tired, Rita, but she didn’t want her death to affect the rest of us.”
“But. If it’s all lies … is ‘finally among friends’ untrue too?”
“No.” Kurt took in the rest of the graveyard with a jerk of his chin. “She was buried under a false name, in a country foreign to her, among people who would have been her enemies if they’d known what she was.” Now he too stepped off the path onto the grass, shifting his grip on the bunch of flowers. “So lonely.”
“But…” Monosyllabic awkwardness struck. “Wife and mother?”
“Um.” Kurt squatted, going down on knees that creaked more with every year. He began to unwrap the paper from around the bouquet. “I suppose that bit was true, if you like.” His hands worked busily, without his conscious intervention. Dead flower stems, cold under his fingertips. He remembered Greta’s hands, the warmth of her shared laughter. Her voice a little throaty from the cigarettes, a warning of the emphysema to come. “As true as you want it to be. She was a wife and mother. And as misdirection, it’s perfect: nobody looks twice at a hausfrau, no? Exactly what she wanted on her headstone.”
“She wanted her headstone to misdirect people? Why?”
Kurt arranged the flowers in the empty niche before the headstone, his neck bent. He did this every season, and would continue to do so as long as he was able to. Greta, his one true love, had died while he was still in his fifties. He didn’t expect to ever remarry: for a man in his position it was too risky. But he still had their son, Franz, and Franz’s wife, Emily, and their adopted offspring. He thought of his adoptive grandson, River, and this curious gawky girl with the perpetually stunned-looking dark eyes and restless mind, her talent for deadpan impersonation. “She was a”—he stumbled—“a sort of actress.” Fingers fumbled with a flower stem. “It was all an act for Greta. A role she played. Wife and mother, for example. Just as, before she came to the United States, she was a sergeant in the, the special police, assigned to the Dresden administration. That’s where we met: Dresden, Germany, in ’66.”
“Grandma was a secret policewoman?”
“Ssh! Not so loud.” He’d popped the batteries from their cell phones as they entered the graveyard, and there were no visible cameras here, nothing but the thin whine of an Air Force drone circling high overhead. But you could never be sure you were unobserved. “That’s what she was when I met her, before we crossed the wall to the west. Now”—he placed the last flower in the grave holder, covering his hand as he palmed the coin-sized geocache hidden there—“it’s best if we don’t remember this. At least, not in public.” He straightened up, head still bowed, a hollowness behind his breastbone as he stared at his wife’s gravestone. “I think you are old enough to know the truth. But it’s a family thing. Not for outsiders. You can talk to me or your father about it, but nobody else: it’s not safe.”
“I got that.” Rita nodded vigorously, then fell quiet, caught up in his silence. He took a deep breath, trying to clear his mind. Here was where he ended, emotionally. To the left of Greta’s plot there was another strip of ground, turf undisturbed. He’d join her there eventually, he was sure. He’d sleep the final sleep on an alien shore, unable to go home to a nation that no longer existed.
But there was a cold breeze tugging at his coat, and after a minute the girl began to stamp her feet, clutching her hands under her armpits, and he realized it was unfair of him to expect a coltish tween to indulge his chilly grief. So Kurt straightened and walked back toward the path. He checked his watch with a start. “We’d better go straight home,” he told his granddaughter: “it’s past five.”
“Mom will want help with dinner. Will she be mad with us for being out so late?”
“Not this time, I think.” Kurt checked himself. “But we should still go, before the curfew.” Police and Department of Homeland Security operatives would be on high alert tonight, as on all seasonal holidays. A revenge strike for the previous year’s nuclear attack seemed long overdue, so tensions would be high. And for Kurt, a curfew violation and subsequent investigation would invite risky attention. “Just remember the truth about Grandma. And remember to keep it to yourself, or there could be bad consequences.”
“Grandma was an illegal,” Rita whispered under her breath, so quietly that Kurt failed to hear her as they headed back toward the graveyard gate. And again, with her lips barely moving as she tested the fit of the idea: “Grandma was a spy…”
Hurrying to keep up with Kurt’s lengthening stride, Rita smiled in delight.
Trade Show
SEATTLE, MARCH 2020
Rita awakened to the eerie warble of her phone’s alarm, followed by NPR cutting in with the morning newscast. (Oil hitting a thirty-year low, $25 a barrel: a Republican senator calling for a tax on imports from other time lines, to prevent global warming.) She rolled over on the sofa bed and grabbed for it, suppressing a moan. It was five o’clock in the morning, pitch black but for the faint glow of parking lot floodlights leaking into the motel room. Today was Friday: last day of the trade show. Tomorrow they were due to pack
everything up and head home. But today—
Today was their last day on stage demoing HaptoTech’s hardware while their boss, Clive, worked the audience for contacts and (eventually) sales. Last day of mandatory stage makeup and smiles, last day of booth-bunny manners, last day performing their canned routines under the spotlights. Last fucking day. Hoo-rah. The end couldn’t come soon enough for her. HaptoTech sold motion capture gear for the animation industry: kits for digitizing body movements so they could be replayed in cartoons and computer games. Unlike most MoCap rigs, which were suits you wore or pods you strapped on, HaptoTech’s consisted of tiny implants, injected under the performer’s skin. Supposedly this gave more precision and better inputs on musculature. What the brochure didn’t say was that the implants itched.
Rita sat up and stretched, trying not to scratch. Her muscles ached from yesterday’s workout. She’d taken the folding bed in the motel suite’s day room, happy not to arm-wrestle with Deborah and Julie over the twin beds next door. Deborah snored when she slept (and complained when she was awake), and Julie talked too much, oversharing her religion enthusiastically. Rita had agreed to double up with them only because it was that or no contract for the trade show gig, which paid just well enough to make it worthwhile. Clive was a cheapskate, but even a cheapskate paying her by the hour was better than no contract (and no money). But by day 4 of a week of twelve-hour shifts, she was well past second thoughts and into thirds, if not fourths.
She wove her way past the wreckage of last night’s rushed takeout and padded into the bathroom. She’d been too tired to scrub off every last bit of greasepaint the night before: now she made good. By the time she finished fixing the oversight, someone else was banging on the bathroom door with steadily increasing desperation.
Rita opened the door and found herself nose to nose with Julie. “Hey,” Julie squeaked angrily: “gangway!”
Empire Games Series, Book 1 Page 1
