The Trade of Queens tmp-6

by Charles Stross

  “Tell him to leave them—” Julius paused. That’s funny, I wonder what it is? The post office in question was the Clan’s courier service, manned by members of the six families and their close relatives who held in common the talent of walking between worlds. Normally he could expect at most one courier delivery a day, and today’s had arrived some hours ago. “Show him in.”

  “At once, my lord.”

  The manservant withdrew. After a moment’s muted conversation, the door opened again.

  “My lord Arnesen.” Julius didn’t recognize the courier. He was a young fellow, wearing a dark business suit, conservatively cut, standard uniform for the couriers who had to travel in public in American cities. The briefcase he held was expensive and flashy: brushed aluminum with a combination lock and other less obvious security measures. “May we speak in private?”

  “Of course.” Julius waved at his servant: “Be off, and keep everyone away from the door.”

  “Thank you, my lord.” The courier didn’t smile.

  “Well? What is it?” Julius strained to sit up, pushing back against the weight of his years.

  “Special message, for your eyes only, from her grace the dowager Thorold Hjorth.” He put the briefcase down on the side table.

  This should be good, Julius thought. The duchess Hildegarde, Helge’s grandam, one of the mainstays of the conservative faction, hadn’t had the time of day for him since the disaster at the Summer Palace three months ago. If she’s decided to kiss and make up now it must mean—

  He was still trying to articulate the thought when the messenger shot him in the face, twice. The gun was fitted with a suppressor, and Baron Arnesen was seated; there was barely any noise, and the second bullet was in any case unnecessary.

  “She sent her best wishes,” said the courier, sliding his pistol back into the padded sleeve and picking up his briefcase in his left hand. “Her very best wishes.”

  Then he rolled his left sleeve up, focused his eyes on the temporary tattoo on the back of his wrist, and vanished into the locked and derelict warehouse that Julius Arnesen had been so reassured to hear of from his chief of security.

  * * *

  Meanwhile in another world, a doctor of medicine prepared himself for his next house call—one that would destroy families, rewrite wills, and quite possibly generate blood feuds. They deserve it, he thought, with a bitter sense of anticipation. Traitors and bastards, the lot of ’em.

  For Dr. Griben ven Hjalmar, the past six months had brought about a disastrous and unplanned fall from grace and privilege. A younger child of the same generation as the duchess Patricia, or Angbard ven Lofstrom, born without any great title or fortune to his outer-family-derived name, Griben had been quick-witted and ambitious enough to seize for himself the opportunity to study needful skills in the land of the Anglischprache, a decade before it became the common pattern of the youth of the six families. In those days, the intelligent and scholarly were viewed with circumspection, if not outright suspicion: Few paths were open, other than the military—a career with direct and useful benefits to the Clan’s scions.

  Griben aimed higher, choosing medicine. In the drafty palaces of the Gruinmarkt, the allure of Western medicine held a mesmeric attraction to the elders and the high ladies. With open sewers in the streets, and middens behind many houses, infection and disease were everyday killers: Childbed morbidity and infant mortality robbed the Clan of much of its vigor. Griben had worked hard to convince Angbard’s dour predecessor of his loyalty, and in return had been given some slight experience of life in America—even a chance to practice medicine and train after graduation, so long as he packed his bag and scurried home at the beck and call of his betters.

  Antibiotics and vaccines raised many a soul from death’s bed, but the real returns were quite obviously to be found in obstetric medicine. He realized this even in premed; the Clan’s strength lay in its numbers, and enhancing that would find favor with its lords. As for the gratitude of its noblewomen at being spared a difficult or even fatal labor … the favors so endowed were subtler and took longer to redound, but no less significant for all that. One day, Griben reasoned, it was likely that the head destined to wear the crown would be there solely by his intervention—and the parents of that prince would know it. So for two decades he’d worked at his practice, patiently healing the sick, attending to confinements, delivering the babies (and on occasion discreetly seeing to the family-planning needs of their mothers), while keeping abreast of the latest developments in his field.

  As his reputation burgeoned, so did his personal wealth and influence. He bought an estate in Oest Hjalmar and a private practice in Plymouth, growing plump and comfortable. Duke Lofstrom sought his advice on certain technical matters of state, which he dealt with discreetly and efficiently. There was talk of an earldom in his future, even a petty barony; he began considering the social advantages of taking to wife one of the ladies-in-waiting who graced the court of Her Majesty the queen-widow.

  Then everything inexplicably and rapidly turned to shit.

  Dr. ven Hjalmar shrugged, working his left shoulder in circles to adjust the hang of the oddly styled jacket he wore, then glanced at the fly-specked mirror on the dresser. His lip curled. To fall this far … He glanced sidelong at the battered carpetbag that sat on the hotel room bed. Well, what goes down can come right up again, he reminded himself.

  It was all the Beckstein women’s fault, mother and daughter both. He’d first heard it from the mouth of the haughty dowager duchess herself: “The woman’s an impostor of course,” Hildegarde voh Thorold-Hjorth had snapped at him. “Do you really think it likely that an heiress has been living secretly in exile, in the, the barbarian world, for all these years? Just to surface now, when everything is finally settling down again? This is a plot, you mark my words!”

  Well, the Beckstein woman wasn’t an impostor—the dowager might not know a DNA paternity test from a rain of frogs, but he was under no such illusions—but the emergence after so long of her black-sheep mother certainly suggested that the dowager was right about it being some sort of conspiracy. And the bewildering ease with which Miriam had destroyed all the obstacles set in her path and then taken on the Clan Council like some kind of radical reformist firebrand was certainly suggestive. Someone was clearly behind the woman. And her exposure of the lost cousins, and this strange world which they had made their own, was a thunderbolt out of the blue. “She’s a loose cannon,” Baron Henryk ven Nordstrom had muttered angrily over a glass of port. “We shall have to take her out of play, Robard, or she’s going to throw the board on the floor and jump on the pieces.”

  “Do you want me to neutralize her permanently?” ven Hjalmar had asked, cocking his head slightly to one side. “It seems unsubtle.…”

  Henryk snorted in reply. “She’s a woman, we can tie her down. If necessary, you can damage her a little.” He didn’t mention the other business, with the boy in the palace all those years ago; it would be gauche. “Marry her off and give her some children to keep her busy. Or, if she won’t back off, a childbed accident. Hmm, come to think of it, I know a possible husband.”

  Well, that hadn’t worked out for the best, either. Griben snorted again, angry and disquieted. He’d seen what the Pervert’s army had left of the pretty little country house he’d bought, kicked the blood and ashes of Oest Hjalmar from his heels for a final time after he’d made the surviving peasants build a cairn from the ruins. He’d done his bit for Henryk, insuring the rebellious cow got knocked up on schedule for the handfasting after she stuck her nose in one too many corners where it didn’t belong; how was he to know the Pervert would respond by committing regicide, fratricide, patricide, homicide, and generally going apeshit?

  But after that, things went even more askew. Somehow Angbard’s minions had conspired to put her on the fucking throne, the throne!—of all places—with a Praetorian guard of hardline progressivist thugs. And she knew. She’d dug and dug until she’d turn
ed up the breeding program, figured out what it was for—almost as if she’d been pointed at it by someone. Figured out that Angbard had asked him to set up the liaison with the clinic, no doubt. Figured out that what was going on was a power struggle between the old bitches who arranged the marriage braids and the macho phalangist order of the Clan Security organization. Figured out that he was the fixer, the enabler, the Clan’s own medic and expert in reproductive technology who had given Angbard the idea, back when he was a young and foolish intern who didn’t know any better.…

  His idea. The power of it still filled his age-tempered heart with bitter awe: The power to raise an army of world-walkers, to breed them and train them to obedience could have made him the most powerful man in the six—now unhappily seven—families. If he’d waited longer, realized that he stood on the threshold of his own success, he’d never have sought Angbard’s patronage, much less learned to his dismay how thoroughly that put him under the thin white duke’s thumb.

  Stolen. Well he had, by god—by the Anglischprache’s dead god on a stick, or by Lightning Child, or whichever thrice-damned god really mattered (and who could tell)—he had stolen it back again. The bitch-queen Helge might have it in for him, and her thugs wouldn’t hesitate with the hot knives if they ever discovered his role in Hildegarde’s little gambit—but that was irrelevant now. He had the list. And he had a copy of the lost, hidden family’s knotwork emblem, a passport for travel to New Britain. And lastly, he had a piece of paper with a name and address on it.

  James Lee had done his job well, during his exile among the Clan.

  Finally satisfied with his appearance, Dr. ven Hjalmar walked to the door and opened it an inch. “I’m ready to go,” he said quietly.

  Of the two stout, silent types standing guard, one remained impassive. The other ducked his head, obsequious—or perhaps merely polite in this society; Griben was no judge of strange mores—and shuffled hastily towards the end of the corridor.

  The doctor retreated back to his room to wait. These were dangerous times, to be sure, and he had nearly fallen foul of muggers on his way here as it was; the distinction between prison guard and bodyguard might be drawn arbitrarily fine. In any case, the Lees had done him the courtesy of placing him in a ground-floor room with a window overlooking a walled garden; unless Clan Security was asleep at the switch and the Lees had been allowed to set up doppelganger installations, he was free to leave should he so choose. Of course, that might simply be yet another of their tests.…

  There was a knock; then the door opened. “Good afternoon, Doctor.”

  Ven Hjalmar nodded affably. “And the same to you, sir.” The elders were clearly taking him seriously, to have sent James Lee to conduct him to this meeting. James was one of the principal heirs. One-quarter ethnic Han by descent, he wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows in the other Anglische world: but the politics of race and ethnicity were very different here, and the Lee family’s long sojourn on the west coast of the Clan’s world among the peasants of the Middle Empire had rendered them conspicuous in the whitebread northeast of New Britain. “Chinese gangsters” was perhaps the nicest term the natives had for them, and despite their considerable wealth they perforce kept a low profile—much like Griben himself. “I trust it is a good afternoon?”

  “I’ve had worse.” Lee held the door open. “The elders are waiting to hear your proposal in person, and there’s always the potential for—misunderstandings, in such circumstances. But we are all men of goodwill, yes?”

  “Yes.” Ven Hjalmar smiled tightly. “And we all hold valid insurance policies. After you, no, I must insist.…”

  * * *

  The Lee family had fallen out of contact with the rest of the Clan most of two centuries ago—through betrayal, they had thought, although the case for cock-up over conspiracy was persuasive—and in that time they had come to do things very differently. However, some aspects of the operation were boringly familiar: an obsession with the rituals of hierarchy, pecking order, and tiresome minutiae of rank. As with the Clan, they relied on arranged marriages to keep the recessive genetic component of the world-walking trait strong. Like the Clan, they had fractured into a loose formation of families, first and second cousins intermarrying, with a halo of carriers clinging to their coattails. (Again, like the Clan, they practiced a carefully controlled level of exogamy, lest inbreeding for the world-walking trait reinforce other, less desirable ones.) Unlike the Clan, Mendelian genetics had made a late arrival—and actual modern reproductive genetics as practiced in the clinics of America was an unknown black art. Or so ven Hjalmar believed; in fact, he was betting his life on it.

  * * *

  “Speak to me of this breeding program,” said the old man on the mattress.

  Ven Hjalmar stared at his beard. It straggled from the point of his chin, wispy but not too wispy, leaving his cheeks bare. Is that spirit gum? he wondered. The cheeks: There was something unnatural about their smoothness, as if powdered, perhaps to conceal the pattern of stubble. It would make sense perhaps, in an emergency, to be able to shed the formal robes, queue, and beard, to dissolve in the crowd.… “It was established by the Clan’s security division a generation ago,” he said slowly. “Normally the, the braid of marriages is managed by the elder womenfolk, matchmakers. But with a civil war only just dying down, the Clan’s numbers were diminished drastically.” It was surprisingly easy to slip into the habit of speaking of them as a third party, as them not us. Another creeping sign of exile.

  “In America, to which they have access, medical science is very much more advanced than in the Gruinmarkt—or in New Britain. Childless couples can make discreet use of medical services to arrange for a child to be born, with one or other parent’s genes”—he used the alien word deliberately, throwing it into conversation without explanation—“to the wife, or to a host mother for adoption. The duke came to an arrangement with such a clinic, to discreetly insure that a number of such babies were born with the ability to pass on the world-walking gene to their own offspring. Records were kept. The plan was to approach the female offspring, as adults, and offer to pay them to be host mothers—paid handsomely, to bear a child for adoption. A child who would, thanks to the clinic, be a true world-walker, and be fostered by the Clan.”

  The old lady to the right of the bearded elder tugged her robe fastidiously. Despite the cultivated air of impassivity, the stench of her disapproval nearly made the doctor cough. “They are unmarried, these host mothers?” she asked querulously.

  Ven Hjalmar nodded. “They do things very differently in the United States,” he added.

  “Ah.” She nodded; oddly, her disapproval seemed to have subsided. Must be some local custom.… He took note of it, nervously.

  “As you can imagine, the Clan’s, ah, matchmakers”—he’d nearly said old women but caught himself at the last moment—“did not know of this scheme. It undermined their authority, threatening their rank and privilege. Furthermore, if it went to completion it would hugely undermine the noble families, for these new world-walkers would be brought into the Clan by the duke’s security apparatus, with no hereditary ties to bind them to the braids. The scheme found favor with the radical reformers who wished to integrate the Clan more tightly into America, but to those of us who had some loyalty to the old ways”—or who preferred to be bigger fish in a smaller pond—“it was most suspicious.”

  The old man—Elder Huan, James Lee had whispered in his ear as they approached the chamber—nodded. “Indeed.” He fixed ven Hjalmar with a direct and unwavering gaze that was entirely at odds with the image he had maintained throughout the audience up to this point, and asked, “What do you want of us, Doctor?”

  Ven Hjalmar did a double take. “Uh, well, as a doctor, the duke commanded my attendance. I obeyed, with reservations; however, I consider myself to be released from his service by the occasion of his death. The family loyalists and the radicals are currently tearing each other apart. I come to you in the hope that
you might better exercise the wisdom needed to guide and integrate a generation of new world-walkers.” He smiled tightly. “I do not have the list of host mothers on my person, and indeed it would be no use to you without a physician licensed to practice in the United States—which I happen to be. There will be expenses, and it will take some time to set up, but I believe my identity over there is still secure. And I have in any case taken steps—”

  Elder Huan glanced sideways at the sour-faced old woman. “Aunt Mei?”

  Aunt Mei sniffed. “Get to the point, boy. We don’t have all day!” Elder Huan produced a pocket watch from one sleeve of his robe and glanced at it. “You are trying to sell us something. Name your price.”

  Sweat broke out on Griben’s hands. Not so Chinese, he realized. Either that, or the directness was a snub, unconscionable rudeness to someone of professional rank. “I can give you world-walking babies,” he finally admitted. “I will have to spend some time and considerable money in the United States, and it will take at least eighteen months to start—this can’t be hurried, not just the pregnancies but the appearance of legitimate medical practice—but once the operation is up and running, I can deliver up to fifty new world-walkers in the first two years, more later.” Lots more with harvested eggs and sperm and an IVF clinic; times had moved on since the first proposal to use AID and host mothers. “The money … I believe on the order of two million US dollars should cover start-up costs, and another hundred thousand per baby. That would be eight thousand pounds and eight hundred pounds. You’ll need to build a small shipping operation along similar lines to the Clan’s to raise the money—but you have the advantage of being utterly unknown to and unsuspected by the federal agencies. If you stay out of their exact line of business you should thrive.”

  Aunt Mei’s eyes narrowed. “And your price?” she asked.