The Family Trade tmp-1

by Charles Stross

  “Not in the short term,” Miriam corrected instinctively. “Ask me again in six months. Anyway. Is there anything I can get you while I’m here?”

  “A good stiff drink.” Iris clucked to herself. “Listen, I’m going to be all right. The disease, it comes and it goes-another few weeks and I’ll be walking again.” She gestured at the aluminium walking frame next to her chair. “I’ve been getting plenty of rest and with Marge around twice a day I can just about cope, apart from the boredom. I’ve even been doing a bit of filing and cleaning, you know, turning out the dusty old corners?”

  “Oh, right. Turned anything up?”

  “Lots of dustballs. Anyway,” she continued after a moment. “There’s some stuff I’ve been meaning to hand over to you.”

  “ ‘Stuff.’” For a moment, Miriam couldn’t focus on the problem at hand. It was too much to deal with. She’d lost her job and then, the very same day, her mother wanted to talk about selling her home. “I’m sorry, I’m not very focused today.”

  “Not very-” Iris snorted. “You’re like a microscope, girl! Most other people would be walking around in a daze. It’s not very considerate of me, I know, it’s just that I’ve been thinking about things and there’s some stuff you really should have right now. Partly because you’re grown up and partly because it belongs to you-you might have some use for it Stuff that might get overlooked.”

  Miriam must have looked baffled because Iris smiled at her encouragingly. “Yes. You know, ‘stuff.’ Photograph albums, useless things like Morris’s folks’ birth certificates, my old passport, my parents’ death certificates, your adoption papers. Some stuff relating to your birth-mother, too.”

  Miriam shook her head. “My adoption papers-why would I want them? That’s old stuff, and you’re the only mother I’ve ever had.” She looked at Iris fiercely. “You’re not allowed to push me away!”

  “Well! And who said I was? I just figured you wouldn’t want to lose the opportunity. If you ever felt like trying to trace your roots. It belongs to you, and I think now is definitely past time for you to have it. I kept the newspaper pages too, you know. It caused quite a stir.” Miriam made a face. “I know you’re not interested,” Iris said placatingly. “Humour me. There’s a box.”

  “A box.”

  “A pink and green shoebox. Sitting on the second shelf of your father’s bureau in the guest bedroom upstairs. Do me a favour and fetch it down, will you?”

  “Just for you.”

  Miriam found the box easily enough. It rattled when she picked it up and carried it, smelling of mothballs, down to the living room. Iris had picked up her crochet again and was pulling knots with an expression of fierce concentration. “Dr. Hare told me to work on it,” she said without looking up. “It helps preserve hand-eye coordination.”

  “I see.” Miriam put the box down on the sofa. “What’s this one?”

  “A Klein-bottle cosy.” Iris looked up defensively at Miriam’s snort. “You should laugh! In this crazy inside-out world, we must take our comforts from crazy inside-out places.”

  “You and Dad.” Miriam waved it off. “Both crazy inside-out sorts of people.”

  “Bleeding hearts, you mean,” Iris echoed ominously. “People who refuse to bottle it all up, who live life on the outside, who-” she glanced around-“end up growing old disgracefully.” She sniffed. “Stop me before I reminisce again. Open the box!”

  Miriam obeyed. It was half-full of yellowing, carefully folded newsprint and elderly photocopies of newspaper stories. Then there was a paper bag and some certificates and pieces of formal paperwork made up the rest of its contents. “The bag contained stuff that was found with your birth-mother by the police,” Iris explained. “Personal effects. They had to keep the clothing as evidence, but nobody ever came forward and after a while they passed the effects on to Morris for safekeeping. There’s a locket of your mother’s in there-I think you ought to keep it in a safe place for now; I think it’s probably quite valuable. The papers-it was a terrible thing. Terrible.”

  Miriam unfolded the uppermost sheet; it crackled slightly with age as she read it. unknown woman found stabbed, baby taken into custody. It gave her a most peculiar feeling. She’d known about it for many years, of course, but this was like seeing it for the first time in a history book, written down in black and white. “They still don’t know who she was?” Miriam asked.

  “Why should they?” Iris looked at her oddly. “Sometimes they can reopen the case when new evidence comes to light, or do DNA testing, but after thirty-two years most of the witnesses will have moved away or died. The police officers who first looked into it will have retired. Probably nothing happens unless a new lead comes up. Say, they find another body or someone confesses years later. It’s just one of those terrible things that sometimes happen to people. The only unusual thing about it was you.” She looked at Miriam fondly.

  “Why they let two radicals, one of them a resident alien and both of them into antiwar protests and stuff like that, adopt a baby-” Miriam shook her head. Then she grinned. “Did they think I would slow you down or something?”

  “Possibly, possibly. But I don’t remember being asked any questions about our politics when we went to the adoption agency-it was much easier to adopt in those days. They didn’t ask much about our background except whether we were married. We didn’t save the newspapers at the time, by the way. Morris bought them as morgue copies later.”

  “Well.” Miriam replaced the news clipping, put the lid back on the box, and contemplated it. “Ancient history.”

  “You know, if you wanted to investigate it-” Iris was using that look on her, the penetrating diamond-tipped stare of inquisition, the one Miriam tried to think herself into when interviewing difficult customers-“I bet a journalist of your experience would do better than some doughnut stuffed policeman on a routine job. Don’t you think?”

  “I think I really ought to help my real mother figure out what she’s going to do about not going stir-crazy while she gets better,” Miriam replied lightly. “There are more immediate things to investigate, like whether your tea is cold and if there are any cookies in the kitchen. Why don’t we leave digging up the dead past for some other time?”

  Slippers

  Miriam drove away slowly, distractedly, nodding in time to the beat of the wind-shield wipers. Traffic was as bad as usual, but nothing untoward penetrated her thoughts.

  She parked, then hunched her shoulders against the weather and scurried to her front door. As usual, her keys got muddled up. Why does this always happen when I’m in a hurry? She wondered. Inside, she shook her way out of her raincoat and jacket like a newborn moth emerging from its sodden cocoon, hung them on the coat rail, then dumped her shoulder bag and the now-damp cardboard box on the old telephone table and bent to unzip her boots. Free of the constraints of leather, her feet flexed luxuriously as she slid them into a pair of battered pink slippers. Then she spotted the answering machine’s blinking light. “You have new messages,” she sang to herself, slightly manic with relief at being home. “Fuck ’em.” She headed for the kitchen to switch on the coffeepot, then poured a mug and carried it into her den.

  The den had once been the dining room of this suburban home, a rectangular space linked to the living room by an archway and to the kitchen by a serving hatch. Now it was a cramped office, two walls jammed with bookcases and a third occupied by a huge battered desk. The remaining wall was occupied by a set of french windows opening onto the rear deck. Rain left twisting slug trails down the windows, kicking up splashes from the half-submerged ceramic pots outside. Miriam planted the coffee mug in the middle of the pile of stuff that accumulated on her desk and frowned at the effect. “It’s a mess,” she said aloud, bemused. “How the hell did it get this untidy?”

  ‘This is bad” she said, standing in front of her desk. “You hear me?” The stubborn paperwork and scattering of gadgets stubbornly refused to obey, so she attacked them, sorting me le
tters into piles, opening unopened mail and discarding the junk, hunting receipts and filing bills. The desk turned out to be almost nine months’ deep in trivia, and cleaning it up was a welcome distraction from having to think about her experience at work. When the desk actually showed a clear surface-and she’d applied the kitchen cleaner to the coffee rings-she started on the e-mail. That took longer, and by the time she’d checked off everything in her in-box, the rain battering on the windows was falling out of a darkening sky as night fell.

  When everything was looking shipshape, another thought struck her. “Paperwork. Hmm.” She went through into the hall and fetched the pink and green shoebox. Making a face, she upended it onto the desk. Papers mushroomed out, and something clattered and skittered onto the floor. “Huh?”

  It was a paper bag. Something in it, a hard, cold nucleus, had spilled over the edge of the desk. She hunted around for a few seconds, then stooped and triumphantly deposited bag and contents next to the pile of yellowing clippings, rancid photocopies, and creamy documents. One of which, now that she examined it, looked like a birth certificate-no, one of those forms that gets filled in in place of a birth certificate when the full details are unknown. Baby Jane Doe, age approximately six weeks, weight blah, eye colour green, sex female, parents unknown… for a moment Miriam felt as if she was staring at it down a dark tunnel from a long way away.

  Ignoring the thing-that-rattled, Miriam went through the papers and sorted these, too, into two stacks. Press clippings and bureaucracy. The clippings were mostly photocopies: They told a simple-if mysterious-tale that had been familiar to her since the age of four. A stabbing in the park. A young woman-apparently a hippie or maybe a Gypsy, judging by her strange clothes-found dead on the edge of a wooded area. The cause of death was recorded as massive blood loss caused by a deep wound across her back and left shoulder, inflicted by some kind of edged weapon, maybe a machete. That was unusual enough. What made it even more unusual was the presence of the six-week-old baby shrieking her little heart out nearby. An elderly man walking his dog had called the police. It was a seven-day wonder.

  Miriam knew the end to that story lay somewhere in Morris and Iris Beckstein’s comforting arms. She’d done her best to edit this other dangling bloody end to the story out of her life. She didn’t want to be someone else’s child: She had two perfectly good parents of her own, and the common assumption that blood ties must be thicker than upbringing rankled. Iris’s history taught better-the only child of Holocaust refugees settled in an unfriendly English town after the war, she’d emigrated at twenty and never looked back after meeting and marrying Morris.

  Miriam shook out the contents of the paper bag over the not-quite birth certificate. It was a lens-shaped silver locket on a fine chain. Tarnished and dull with age, its surface was engraved with some sort of crest of arms: a shield and animals. It looked distinctly cheap. “Hmm.” She picked it up and peered at it closely. This must be what Ma told me about, she thought. Valuable? There was some sort of catch under the chain’s loop. “I wonder…”

  She opened it.

  Instead of the lover’s photographs she’d half-expected, the interior of the shell contained a knotwork design, enamel painted in rich colours. Curves of rich ochre looped and inter-penetrated, weaving above and beneath a branch of turquoise. The design was picked out in silver-it was far brighter than the exposed outer case had suggested.

  Miriam sighed and leaned back in her sprung office chair. “Well, there goes that possibility,” she told the press clippings gloomily. No photographs of her mother or long-lost father. Just some kind of tacky cloisonné knotwork design.

  She looked at it closer. Knotwork. Vaguely Celtic knot-work. The left-hand cell appeared to be a duplicate of the right-hand one. If she traced that arc from the top left and followed it under the blue arc-

  Why had her birth-mother carried this thing? What did it mean to her? (The blue arc connected through two interlinked green whorls.) What had she seen when she stared into it? Was it some kind of meditation aid? Or just a pretty picture? It certainly wasn’t any kind of coat of arms.

  Miriam leaned back further. Lifting the locket, she dangled it in front of her eyes, letting the light from the bookcase behind her catch the silver highlights. Beads of dazzling blue-white heat seemed to trace their way around the knot’s heart. She squinted, feeling her scalp crawl. The sound of her heart beating in her ears became unbearably loud: There was a smell of burning toast, the sight of an impossible knot twisting in front of her eyes like some kind of stereoisogram forming in midair, trying to turn her head inside out-

  Three things happened simultaneously. An abrupt sense of nausea washed over her, the light bulb went out, and her chair fell over backward.

  “Ouch! Dammit!” Something thumped into Miriam’s side, doubling her over as she hit the ground and rolled over, pulling her arms in to protect her face. A racking spasm caught her by the gut, leaving her feeling desperately sick, and the arm of the chair came around and whacked her in the small of her back. Her knees were wet, and the lights were out. “Shit!” Her head was splitting, the heartbeat throb pounding like a jackhammer inside her skull, and her stomach was twisting. A sudden flash of fear: This can’t be a migraine. The onset is way too fast. Malignant hypertension?

  The urge to vomit was strong, but after a moment it began to ebb. Miriam lay still for a minute, waiting for her stomach to come under control and the lights to come back on. Shit, am I having an aneurism? She gripped the locket so tightly that it threatened to dig a hole in her right fist. Carefully she tried to move her arms and legs: Everything seemed to be working and she managed a shallow sigh of relief. Finally, when she was sure her guts were going to be alright, she pushed herself up onto her knees and saw-

  Trees.

  Trees everywhere.

  Trees inside her den.

  Where did the walls go?

  Afterward, she could never remember that next terrible minute. It was dark, of course, but not totally dark: She was in twilight on a forested slope, with beech and elm and other familiar trees looming ominously out of the twilight. The ground was dry, and her chair lay incongruously in a thicket of shrubbery not far from the base of a big maple tree. When she looked around, she could see no sign of her house, or the neighbouring apartments, or of the lights along the highway. Is there a total blackout? she wondered, confused. Did I sleepwalk or something?

  She stumbled to her feet, her slippers treacherous on leaf mulch and dry grass stems. She shivered. It was cold-not quite winter-cold but too damned chilly to be wandering around in pants, a turtleneck, and bedroom slippers. And-

  “Where the hell am I?” she asked the empty sky. “What the hell?”

  Then the irony of her situation kicked in and she began to giggle, frightened and edgy and afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop. She did a twirl, in place, trying to see whatever there was to see. Sylvan idyll at nightfall, still-life with deranged dot-com refugee and brown office furniture. A gust of wind rattled the branches overhead, dislodging a chilly shower of fat drops: A couple landed on Miriam’s arms and face, making her shudder.

  The air was fresh-too fresh. And there was none of the subliminal background hum of a big city, the noise that never completely died. It didn’t get this quiet even out in the country-and indeed, when she paused to listen, it wasn’t quiet; she could hear distant birdsong in the deepening twilight.

  She took a deep breath, then another. Forced herself to thrust the hand with the locket into her hip pocket and let go of the thing. She patted it obsessively for a minute, whimpering slightly at the pain in her head. No holes, she thought vaguely. She’d once worn pants like this where her spare change had worn a hole in the pocket lining and eventually spilled on the ground, causing no end of a mess.

  For some reason, the idea of losing possession of the locket filled her with a black terror.

  She looked up. The first stars of evening were coming out, and the sky was almost clear of cl
oud. It was going to be a cold night.

  “Item,” she muttered. “You are not at home. Ouch. You have a splitting headache and you don’t think you fell asleep in the chair, even though you were in it when you arrived here.” She looked around in wild surmise. She’d never been one for the novels Ben occasionally read, but she’d seen enough trashy TV serials to pick up the idea. 1vilight Zone, Time Squad, programs like that. “Item: I don’t know where or when I am, but this ain’t home. Do I stay put and hope I automagically snap back into my own kitchen or… what? It was the locket, no two ways about it. Do I look at it again to go back?”

  She fumbled into her pocket nervously. Her fingers wrapped around warm metal. She breathed more easily. “Right. Right.”

  Just nerves, she thought. Alone in a forest at night-what lived here? Bears? Cougars? There could be anything here, anything at all. Be a fine joke if she went exploring and stepped on a rattler, wouldn’t it? Although in this weather… “I’d better go home,” she murmured to herself and was about to pull the locket out when she saw a flicker of light in the distance.

  She was disoriented, tired, had just had a really bad day, and some cosmic trickster-god had dumped a magic amulet on her to see what she’d do with it. That was the only explanation, she reasoned afterward. A sane Miriam would have sat down and analysed her options, then assembled a plan of action. But it wasn’t a sane Miriam who saw those flickers of orange light and went crashing through the trees downhill toward them.

  Lights. A jingle, as of chains. Thudding and hollow clonking noises-and low voices. She stumbled out into the sudden expanse of a trail-not a wide one, more of a hiking trail, the surface torn up and muddy. Lights! She stared at them, at the men on horseback coming down the trail toward her, the lantern held on a pole by the one in the lead. Dim light glinted off reflecting metal, helmet, and breastplate like something out of a museum. Someone called out something that sounded like: “Curl!” Look. He’s riding toward me, she thought dazedly. What’s that he’s-