Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  “General, what happens to your airship if the time line you send it to has no atmosphere? Or an unbreathable one?” The fellow with the oddball question looked to be one of the magistrates’ aides: colorless eyes, unobtrusive, diffident manners.

  Huw smiled stiffly, not baring his teeth. “We don’t send airships through to new time lines without some idea what they’re getting into. The first probe mission is always a pair of world-walkers in pressure suits: one to cross over, and a partner to bring them back immediately.”

  “But if they don’t come back—”

  “—Then they have had the supreme misfortune to have discovered a time line so hostile that it can kill a pair of armed explorers in space suits in less than a minute.” Huw frowned at his audience. “Citizens, this is not a risk-free enterprise. I’d like to remind you that the limitless natural resources we can obtain from these other worlds come at the price of asking a corps of very brave volunteers to play roulette with a revolver. Over the past decade we’ve lost twelve world-walkers in this manner. In return, they and their colleagues have mapped routes to no less than two hundred and eighty-four time lines, and no less than two hundred and fifty-one where it is safe for human beings to live and work. And we are currently actively working in fourteen.”

  “If you don’t count the United States of America,” said the sour-faced woman.

  “Yes, that is correct, ma’am.”

  “What happens if one of your exploration craft finds itself in a time line with another technological civilization?” asked a different rep: a sixty-something man whose olive skin and aristocratic pose bespoke southern aristocratic ancestry. “Like the, ah, United States…” He pronounced its name with a moue of skepticism, as if he wasn’t entirely convinced the fabled high-tech time line existed.

  “It hasn’t happened yet. We try to avoid such a situation arising; on the first pressure-suited visit our world-walkers deposit a multi-channel data logger and a wireless receiver. Their next mission, a few hours later, is to retrieve the logger—nothing more, it’s a quick in-and-out. We only send an aerostat once we’re sure there are no radio emissions. Obviously if we run into a civilization so advanced that they have abandoned wireless for crystal balls, we might have a problem—but we would hope to see other warning signs first.”

  He lost their attention as the Fraternity finally came in to dock. The ground crew had wheeled out the mobile mooring mast and ballast tankers, and the Fraternity’s propulsion fans were swiveling and twitching as its guidance computer held it steady. The weather was good but not completely still. Huw watched with them as the airship nosed up to the mooring mast, then waited for the clang of the docking connector and the rumble of tons of ballast water flooding into the ship’s tanks, dragging it gently down onto the wheeled trolley that would carry it into the hangar.

  “All right. If you’ll follow me this way, into the headquarters building, I can talk you through our operational program. After which the officers’ mess has laid on a buffet lunch—and then I can take you to see JUGGERNAUT.”

  THE MENSHIKOV PALACE, ST. PETERSBURG, TIME LINE THREE, MAY 2020

  “Daddy, buy me a palace for my birthday?”

  The King-in-Exile winced. “Certainly not, Liz. Birthday presents should be ostentatious, but there are limits.” He spared her a brief, withering stare, then directed his gaze toward Professor Thompson, her tutor. “Where does she get these ideas?”

  A grandiose and excessive claim is best supported by a bombastic backdrop. Knowing this, and being mindful of the proprieties of offering a Brother Emperor sanctuary during the tiresome business of suppressing the protracted rebellion afflicting his realm, His Imperial Majesty Louis XXV had granted His Royal Highness John Frederick the Fourth, Emperor-in-Exile of the New British Empire, a suitable sinecure. In due course he had also extended the same courtesy to his son John Frederick the Fifth, known by his rebellious subjects as the Young Pretender. The Emperor’s thinking was that a grand duchy encompassing territories in the Bulgar, Romanian, Ruritanian, and Serbian lands would permit the Pretender to comport himself in a manner befitting an emperor-in-exile, but without sufficient influence to rival the true Imperial house. The British monarch was to be indebted to the House of Bourbon, and provided with a seat from which to campaign for the return of his rightful throne—but not encouraged to pursue any futile and tiresome ambitions he might harbor toward his ancestral lands, these being the islands of Greater Brittany and the duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

  So the British Crown-in-Exile occupied the Menshikov Palace on the banks of the Bolshaya Neva, living in straightened circumstances on a purse providing a mere seven million écus per month in taxes.

  John Frederick held the palace on a rolling yearly lease, and spent every August praying that the revolution would vanish like a bad dream, freeing him from the need for it. With the passing of the fifteenth anniversary of the lease, his bolder courtiers had begun to whisper behind his back that perhaps it would have been prudent to purchase it instead. But none were brave enough to bring this suggestion to the royal ear, until his daughter.

  “You’re wasting money on this pile,” Elizabeth insisted, with the withering scorn of a late teenager. “I saw the figures. We bleed as much in rent in four years as it would cost to buy the freehold outright! If you were to buy it and deed it to me as my birthright then it would certainly light a bonfire signaling the wealth and power of the House of Hanover—and it would save you money in the long term. Even in the short term! I did the sums when Professor Thompson taught me the laws of usury and compound interest: it’s true, I swear! In just four years you would break even. Even if the rebels open their arms and welcome you with flowers, will we abandon court in St. Petersburg so soon? And anyway,” she added, “if we move back to New London we can lease it out ourselves, or sell it. Even if we lost a tenth of its value and had to divest after a year, we would be better off than under the terms of the lease Prince Krunichev extracted from Grandpapa.”

  The skin around John Frederick’s eyes tightened: Professor Thompson wilted under his gaze. There will be an accounting for this accounting, the Pretender’s expression promised. Then he turned back to his daughter. She was eighteen, skinny, and blessed with her mother’s brown eyes, black hair, and sharp wits. But she was also barely biddable, prone to back talk, and dangerously close to rebellious: in his opinion she’d spent too much time running wild in the country estates when she should have been learning the social and diplomatic graces required at court.

  “We are minded to say no,” he said, mildly enough. “You are correct on the accounts. We would break even after a year. But buying the palace would send another signal, Liz, one you’ve overlooked: it would declare us reconciled to our exile in a land that we cannot call our own. If my father had purchased it when we first arrived, it might have passed unremarked. But to buy it now would send a renewed sign of commitment to our continental cousins. Just at the worst possible time.”

  “Worst?” Elizabeth’s brow wrinkled. “Why is this birthday different…?”

  “Walk with me, daughter.” John Frederick rose and, offering her an arm, gestured with his free hand toward the tall French windows that opened onto the garden at the rear of the drawing room. Liveried footmen, as unremarkable as any other furnishings, leapt to open the doors. “One should like to smell the rosebushes.”

  Elizabeth rose and took her father’s arm. The fashion in St. Petersburg in the twenty-first century was dominated by a baroque revival, with court dress as elaborate as anything from the time of the Sun King. The King-in-Exile led his daughter down the marble steps and along a gravel path between elaborate displays of topiary. A cometary trail of servants followed behind them: footmen bearing wireless telephones and discreet cypher machines, ladies-in-waiting of good breeding in the Princess’s service, runners to fetch and carry anything that the royal couple might call for, and a squad of soldiers in dress uniform as overt bodyguards. An autogyro of the Royal Gend
armerie buzzed in lazy circles overhead, watching the approaches to the royal cantonment of Vasileostrovskiy. Doubtless there were other guards concealed in the shrubbery, their uniforms camouflaged and their guns loaded, but they were at pains to be discreet so as not to offend the eyes of their rulers.

  “You are nearly eighteen,” John Frederick told his daughter. He knew perfectly well that she was ill at ease here, preferring the opportunities for solitary study and outdoor exercise that their dacha in the countryside provided. “And you are feeling the constraints of palace life. The constant scrutiny and public speculation, the lack of friends of your own age…”

  Elizabeth ducked her head. Some things didn’t need saying. “I’m not that short of friends, Papa. I have my ladies-in-waiting and my tutors … has Donald been reporting to you?”

  She was referring to Professor Thompson by his first name: That will never do, thought her father. He shook his head. “No, but it’s obvious. We all go through it, the isolation of rank. No, Liz. On the one hand, you feel stifled by the intricacies of court. On the other, you are growing into the age of responsibility just as the world stage is changing and the play moves toward its third act. Buying the palace would be a, a bad idea at present. It would send the wrong message not only to my loyal subjects, but to the enemy. And it would send the wrong message to a potential ally, as well. A princess does not need her own palace when she can use any of her husband’s.”

  She let go of his arm and stopped dead in the middle of the path. “What. Husband,” she said tonelessly.

  John Frederick composed his face. “One is merely speculating about your future,” he pointed out. “You are a princess. Not merely any princess, either: you are Princess Elizabeth, heir to a certain throne. You’ll marry sooner or later, as you wish. We’ll not force your hand, nor arrange anything against your wishes. But your rank means you will have suitors by and by, and you lack the polish and political acumen to understand how to make the most important decision of your life. The professor may be able to teach you the arts and natural sciences, but he lacks the necessary insight into politics. So one believes we should broach the topics of new advisors—and of finishing schools.”

  Elizabeth’s shoulders heaved. “Oh Daddy, you had me worried for a minute!” She tentatively reached for his arm and he offered it. “I thought you were getting ready for that talk.”

  John Frederick smiled wryly. “Which one?” They began to walk again, pacing toward the fountain at the center of the garden.

  “The one in which you tell me we’re to announce my public engagement to that pig Louis,” she said blandly. “Wedding to follow on my twentieth birthday, baby by the twenty-first, pox by the twenty-second.” John Frederick doubled over, coughing. Footsteps, running: “It’s nothing! Nothing, I say! A glass of water for my father, and the physic, that’s all!” She pounded on his back, taking a daring liberty. “Stop choking, Daddy, it’s undignified.”

  Attention, water, and breathing space brought John Frederick back to himself within a minute. Waving off the servants, he turned to his daughter. “You are a wicked, wicked young lady.” His finger stopped wagging momentarily. “Where did you hear those slanders?”

  “I’m not an idiot, Daddy.” She glanced sidelong, checking for overly open ears. “It’s the obvious way to rent yourself an army, and it would explain your lack of desire to make any permanent accommodation here…”

  “Don’t be evasive, child, we were talking about the pox.”

  “I read, Daddy. A lot more widely than Louis would approve of, I’m sure. There are pamphlets, you know.” Her father’s face was a worrying shade of puce. “Don’t worry, they don’t say anything bad about you. But Louis is a pig and a rakehell and has a string of mistresses and a worrying habit of retreating to a certain clinic on a regular basis, and no children by any of his fancies. I understand the urgency of retaking the family seat in New London, but don’t you think you could do better for me?”

  Her father tried to collect his dignity. “A two-year engagement would actually be very convenient right now, Liz, if you could bear to announce it with a straight face—no, hear me out! I’m not proposing that you should actually marry the fellow. But the chief rebel, Burroughs, is dying. He’s going to last less than six months, and when he’s gone the wolves will tear into each other. We could be back in the Brunswick Palace within the year, and any marriage could then be postponed indefinitely by the exigencies of reasserting Crown rule over the dominions. Or the engagement ended, after a decent interval. This is purely about short-term expediency, and the need to give him a reason to lend us the troops we’ll need—”

  “But he’s a pig! And if we’re engaged and I’m here in St. Petersburg it will be impossible to avoid him. Worse, if I retire to the dacha he’ll come and visit.”

  “Yes. Which is another reason I mentioned finishing schools. Madame Houelebecq in Berlin is highly spoken of—”

  “—Berlin? It’s full of knuckle-dragging racist Prussians and their Huguenot and Jew minions! Why not Vienna or Paris?”

  “Louis would insist on offering you the hospitality of his winter court in Versailles, were you to go to Paris. We thought you wanted nothing to do with him?”

  “But Vienna—”

  “Is stuffy and full of Czechs and Magyars and other undesirables, Liz. One has been there. You would tire of the opera after a couple of months, feel unwelcome and gawped-at at the balls, and as for the rest of it, it’s as full of stuck-up Balkan princes as anywhere else. We have discussed this with your mother. You would never be allowed to go to Londres or Dublin or Hanover, or any of our other traditional demesnes. Louis and his father aren’t that stupid. In Paris or Rome or the other peripheral capitals you would be unable to avoid Louis’s hospitality. You could go and hide somewhere like Strelsau, but it’s a backwater. Our best option is to dangle you under Louis’s nose, encouraging him to dream of a stake in our American properties—then whisk you away to gain allies and learn the necessary graces at a finishing school somewhere inconvenient but unthreatening to a self-deceiving ally.”

  “You really have thought this through, haven’t you?” Elizabeth looked up into his eyes—not far, for she was a tall lass, scant inches shorter than her father—and smiled admiringly. Her cheek dimpled pleasingly when she did so, taking two or three years off her apparent age. “If I wasn’t your daughter I’d call you a snake!”

  “One writhes in the grass and bites ankles so that you shall have a throne, my dear.” His cheek twitched. “We can only wish that our father had applied himself to his garden with equal diligence when the sprouts of treason were growing under his nose. Then we wouldn’t have to deny you a palace for your coming-of-age present.”

  He paused for a moment. “Will a crown suffice, instead?”

  * * *

  Later, in the privacy of the Princess’s apartment:

  “I can’t believe it. The slimy squirming worm…”

  “What has he done now, my lady?”

  Snort. “He as good as said he’d sold me to the highest bidder! And then he had the gall to say he was doing it for my own good.”

  “And the highest bidder, would be, oh no—”

  “Oh yes, him.”

  “He’s not that ugly. Or ancient. Is he?”

  “If it was merely that he was thirty-two I could close my eyes. But the mistresses and the brothels and the unspeakable habits—he’s indiscreet! He would be a laughing-stock, if not for his royal blood. He’s thirty-two and nobody has married him and there is a reason, Susannah, even if my father refuses to acknowledge it. He’s a catch, but there’s a catch.”

  “You can always say no, can’t you?”

  “That’s the worst part: I don’t think I can. Father spins a web so fine I can barely see the strands. He wants to send me to a finishing school, Sue. That is, right after announcing the engagement. Two years! In Berlin of all places. Why Berlin?”

  “Huh, Berlin? It could be worse. Distance is
the best chaperone and all that … but maybe he wants you out of St. Petersburg for some other reason?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m afraid of. He said it was to let me stay away from the unspeakable fiancé, but what if that’s just a convenient excuse? What if he suspects me?”

  “Hsst! Say it’s not so?”

  “I wish I could, my dear.” A pause. “I’m sorry, I’ve upset you.”

  “Oh, this is terrible!”

  “I’ll find a way to take you with me. I won’t let them part us.”

  “But if your father suspects anything he, he, he—”

  “He won’t. Hear, hug me. Calm down. I’ll think of something.”

  * * *

  Later, by scrambled telephone: “I broke the subject to her.”

  “And how did she take it?”

  “She understands the diplomatic necessity in principle, and she will even tolerate a public engagement. But you face an uphill battle thereafter: it’ll be up to you to woo her. I’m going to send her to finishing school. You’ll have two years to work on your public appearance. Take the cure, banish the trollops—or at least make them use the back door—and practice your charm. Liz thinks she’s going to school to receive some final polish, make friends, and have her horizons broadened. What’s really going to happen is that she’ll be a long way from home and desperately lonely. She’s going to be surrounded by jealous debutantes who resent her for being betrothed to a prince and who will spite her for the color of her mother’s Brazilian skin. Play your cards close to your chest and practice your charm and she’ll be ripe to fall into your arms when we bring her home.”

  “What an excellent plan! I believe I entirely approve. So where are you sending her?”