Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  A chair implied a string of disturbing consequential concepts, starting with a person who is seated, who might be an interrogator, or possibly a prosecutor, here to offer her a plea bargain. (A visiting friend or relative seemed hopelessly optimistic.) A cold sweat broke out in the small of her back, then she began to shiver, flushing hot and sweaty all over. She felt weak, as if gut-punched. Here it comes, she thought. The light at the end of the tunnel could only be an onrushing freight train. And she was shackled to the floor in front of it, unable to escape.

  The door behind her opened with a click. Then a man in a dark gray suit walked around the table, drew back the chair, and sat down opposite her.

  “Good morning, Ms. Milan,” he said, politely enough. He studied her over his gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles. He was balding, the remains of his hair a peppery gray; crow’s-feet wrinkles framed his eyes. He was about her age, give or take a few years—somewhere in the uneasy gap between early middle age and declining sixties—and he wore a badge on a lanyard over his plain blue necktie.

  Paulette focused on the badge. Something about it, she knew, made it very important. Possibly all-important. She tried to read the words on it, but they blurred. Her eyes were watering. He was the first human face she’d actually seen aside from her own reflection in the one-way mirror in weeks. The guards she had glimpsed only sidelong in the moments when she’d been unhooded, their backs turned to the interrogators’ window. It was remarkably upsetting.

  “Who—” She cleared her throat. “Who are you?”

  “You can call me Eric, Ms. Milan. And I’ll call you—hmm. Do you prefer Paulette, or Paul, or Paulie? You don’t strike me as being a Paul, but one can never be sure.”

  “Paulie will do.” Her voice nearly cracked at the tiny kindness. “Why?”

  “Well.” He shrugged, flexing the padded shoulders of his jacket. “I’ve got some good news for you. I’ve read the transcripts of your questioning, and everything checks out—you’re not lying to us about anything I can put my finger on. And your story is consistent with Mike Fleming’s.”

  She stared at him in shock. “You knew Mike?”

  “I was his manager until he disappeared.”

  “He disappeared—” Paulie’s voice froze up. In the wake of 7/16, Mike had wanted to leak the existence of the disastrous chain of mistakes that had led to stolen atomic demolition munitions falling into the hands of the Clan. He’d tried to rope Paulette in with his scheme. She’d demurred. That was the last time she’d seen him: the truth never made it into the news media, so presumably he’d failed. “Did you people get to him?”

  Eric shook his head very slightly. “You don’t ask the questions in here, Paulie. You should know it doesn’t work like that.”

  “Oh. Well.”

  She thought about saying something more, but decided against it. They sat in silence for a minute or so, until Eric finally spoke. “You were told that you could face treason charges, or that you could be rendered to another jurisdiction for destructive debriefing and recycling. But there’s another alternative open to you, depending on how cooperative you’re feeling.”

  What’s my price? Paulette shivered. “Eighteen million children’s lives,” she said haltingly.

  “Eighteen what?” Eric looked perplexed.

  “Antibiotics.” She cleared her throat again. “That was the latest figure. Children’s lives saved, because of what I did.” By the valuable intellectual property I obtained for the Commonwealth. Medicines from the 1960s and 1970s, cephalosporins and beta-lactamase inhibitors, long out of patent control, rendered useless in this time line due to the antibiotic resistance that had emerged following their reckless misuse by the cattle feed industry. “What do you do for a living, Eric? Does it have anything to do with saving children’s lives?”

  “Not directly.” His eyes narrowed. “But I don’t have to lie awake at night thinking up justifications for why I’m betraying my nation, either.”

  He’s breaking his own rules. She smiled, her cheeks hurting. “I haven’t deserted my nation: the nation has deserted its own citizens. This isn’t the country it was before 7/16; what are you doing to make things better?”

  She wasn’t sure what to expect. A back-handed blow across her face; a cold dismissal back to her empty cell; a curt rejoinder. But Eric merely stared at her with barely-concealed contempt. “I’m working as hard as I can to prevent a nuclear war, Ms. Milan. Is that good enough for you?”

  Well now. “That’s a start,” she conceded.

  “A good start, in my opinion, or I wouldn’t be sitting here taking shit from a traitor.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, Paulie. Here’s the proposition. I’m going to ask you to do some things for my organization. If you do them well, if we succeed, there won’t be a war. Instead there will be negotiations, and summit meetings, probably some kind of treaty process, and other trust-building exercises. Somewhere along the way the other side will ask about you. If you cooperate fully, at that point I’ll see you charged under the original terms of the Espionage Act, sentenced to time served, stripped of your citizenship, and expelled into their custody. That’s how the game used to be played with the Soviets, and that’s how we’re going to play it this time round.” He said it as calmly as a weatherman describing tomorrow’s cold front passing overhead with a belt of rain leading the drop in temperature.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked, more out of boredom than curiosity. Whatever it was, she’d do it: it was inevitable, even though she strongly doubted he’d deliver on the deal. It was simply bait to keep her pliant and cooperative. But it was preferable to returning to her solitary cell with a life sentence ringing in her ears. As long as she cooperated she could continue to pretend that her life wasn’t over.

  “You can start by telling me everything you know about this man.” Eric pulled a fatphone from his suit coat pocket and tapped the display. A CCTV Magritte showed Paulette a video of the back of her own head, a half-eaten burrito sitting on the table in front of her. She sat opposite a man who went by the code name Jefferson these days, although she’d known him for nearly two decades, long before he’d been assigned any aliases. “We know he’s a world-walker. We know he’s Clan, or ex-Clan, whatever they call themselves these days.”

  “Oh.” Paulie fell silent for a moment. I don’t suppose it matters, she realized. They’re not idiots. They’ll know I’ve been turned. She’d never caught them at it but she was certain the DPR had protocols in place to ensure that they only made contact when she was confirmed clean. “His name is Hulius Hjorth. Major Hjorth. Cover name Jefferson. He works for the Commonwealth Department of Para-time Research.”

  “Good.” Eric tapped the screen again. It showed a new photograph of the Major, in different clothing.

  “Huh.” Paulette squinted. “Where was this taken?”

  “In Germany. The day before yesterday.” Eric picked up his phone and slid it away again. “And what is your rank in the DPR, Ms. Milan?”

  “My what?” She met his gaze. Smith’s eyes were very blue, as cold as liquid oxygen. “They told me I’m a Colonel.” She shrugged. “Presumably there’s a pension attached. Not that I expect to claim it.”

  “Well, Colonel.” He smiled, as if amused by something: “As I said, this is your lucky day. You can go back to your cell now, but don’t get too settled. I’m going to arrange for you to be released into the custody of my unit. And then we’re going on a little trip. To Berlin…”

  PART THREE

  DEFECTORS

  Rudolf Rassendyll: “I was hoping that our skeleton was safe at home in our family cupboard.”

  Fritz von Tarlenheim: “Some skeletons are prodigious travelers.”

  —Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda

  Dining with the Devil

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  Dinner with Huw and Brilliana was a regular fixture for Miriam. The extra guest was another matter. Like a close encounter with an ext
ra-solar body, distorting the regular orbits of the planets as it barreled through the solar system, the kid’s presence warped the conversation around her presence. The kid, Miriam reminded herself, is older than I was when I gave birth to her.

  Rita remained silent while she drank her soup, as if unaware of the effect of her presence. Brill suddenly playing society hostess again, a role she’d grown rusty at in recent years. Huw unusually reticent, Rita’s presence clearly inhibiting his normal tendency to talk shop at the table. (Admittedly, any outsider would have had the same effect, given the nature of his work.) Of them all, only Erasmus was his usual self—mainly because a dinner party with his wife’s inner circle was one of his few opportunities to switch off and enjoy life. They were all highflyers, and these monthly dinners usually oscillated between serving as an unofficial kitchen cabinet meeting of the DPR’s most senior directors and nostalgic reunions for Miriam’s all-but-abandoned coterie of Clan modernizers.

  On the other hand it gave Miriam an opportunity to observe her daughter, for which she was cautiously grateful. Their traumatic first meeting had dredged up unwelcome memories of Miriam’s breakup with Ben, nearly two and a half decades ago. Maybe that was why she’d taken it so hard, she speculated. Getting pregnant in pre-med had been bad enough, and Iris’s push to organize adoption had seemed like a welcome intervention at the time. But afterward, after graduation, she’d married Ben—perhaps trying to salvage a dying relationship, or maybe propelled in part by unadmitted regrets. It hadn’t worked out and they’d separated acrimoniously. The adoption had been one of the wedges that opened the gap between them until it was unbridgeable. She’d thought that period of her life was a closed book—or even a bad joke. But now the punch line was sitting across the table from her, avoiding eye contact in a borrowed evening dress that didn’t quite work for her.

  She couldn’t escape feeling that Rita’s silence was prickly and sensitive, a thin layer of ice concealing a hot spring of anger beneath. But it hadn’t seemed like that in the parlor when Rita had offered up something that might have been an olive branch: my grandfather told me about your mother. Yes, but what did he say? And how much did he know?

  Iris Beckstein—alternatively, the Duchess Patricia Thorold-Hjorth—had died more than a decade ago. The medication for her multiple sclerosis wasn’t easy to obtain by stealth in the aftermath of 7/16, and she’d become increasingly debilitated. In the end the flu epidemic of 2005 did for her. Olga appeared to have inherited the MS via a different route. The Clan’s careful sequestration of the recessive trait they depended on for their family trade—the world-walking ability—had come at a heavy price. I’m as old as Iris was when she organized the adoption, Miriam realized. How well did I know her?

  Iris/Patricia had held her cards close to her chest as she played a vicious game with her own mother. The dowager Duchess Hildegarde had led the Clan’s conservative faction—the reactionary fools who had thought you negotiated with a democracy the same way you dealt with a hostile monarchy. That had been the last generation to keep to the old ways. Before Iris, the Clan had kept their youngsters close, training them in the ways of Gruinmarkt nobility. By Miriam’s generation, they had mostly been shipped to the United States for education to college level and even postgraduate degree courses. (Not to mention the odd enlistment in the US military, which was a useful finishing school for aspirants to a warrior nobility.) Iris had been the freak exception, born on the cusp of massive change. Ostensibly a runaway and a deserter, she’d fled an abusive marriage arranged by Hildegarde, escaping with the connivance of Iris’s brother, the Duke Angbard.

  The genetic determinism imposed by the desperate need to conserve a valued recessive trait, combined with the frankly dismal status of women in a roughly medieval society, had turned the Clan’s politics into a double-layered game. Male aristocrats danced to the puppet strings of the grandmothers who arranged the braided marriages that kept the breeding program running. Angbard had provoked—or revived—a civil war within the clan by secretly approving a plan to use a fertility clinic in the United States to generate a host of carriers (and then, in the second generation, world-walkers) who would be loyal to the organization rather than the dowagers. His goal had been to put an end to the blood feuds that had almost destroyed the world-walkers during the twentieth century. But the backlash had been disastrous.

  And now, as the maids cleared the soup bowls and prepared the table for the entrées, Miriam found herself sitting across the table from a young woman with skin the color of latte and an unexpected claim on her heart—and as the emotional squall of meeting Rita began to subside, Miriam found herself pondering disturbing questions.

  “Do you know why Olga is late?” Brill asked Miriam. “I know she was working this evening, but…”

  Miriam looked up from her place setting. “It’s something to do with Hulius, I think.” She glanced around the table. Huw nodded slightly. (Of course, he knew.) Erasmus was asking Rita something about stagecraft and the girl was talking to him, quietly but intensely. “Does everyone here know what she’s engaged in?” Miriam asked pointedly, glancing askance at their visitor.

  Brilliana shrugged. “We can talk around it. Or not, if you think it prudent.”

  Miriam blinked, then reached for her glass. “We need to discuss it later.” She’d barely touched her wine. “For now, naming no names—I’m very worried that this scheme could backfire. The potential for embarrassment is enormous. High risk, high payoff. I gather Olga said Yul got the go-ahead, so she’s lining up all the billiard balls ready for him to break. And that takes time. But—”

  The doorbell rang. Brilliana rose gracefully: “Guess who?” she asked with a smile. “I’ll handle it.”

  Miriam realized Rita was watching her. “You’re avoiding talking business around me, aren’t you?” Rita said.

  “Guilty.” Miriam put her wineglass down. “We try to dine together at least once a month, but we’re all workaholics and the business conversation can get a bit technical.” She smiled to defuse her next words: “Also, we haven’t forgotten who you work for.”

  “But I—” Rita stopped. “I don’t have any choice in my employers,” she said defensively.

  “I didn’t have much choice either, when the Clan discovered I existed.” Miriam put her glass down. Rita’s was empty. “Refill?”

  “Yes please…” Miriam got to the bottle before Erasmus or Soames, the butler, could intervene, and managed to top up Rita’s glass at arm’s length without spilling it on the tablecloth. It felt important that she should be the one to do it. “Thank you,” Rita said as Miriam filled her own flute. “They tried to pretend I had a choice, but I didn’t, really.” She stared moodily. “I’m a conscript. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d said no to the job offer, but I got the impression it wouldn’t have been good. I suppose it’s a job, and someone has to do it, and I guess as long as I’m not harming anybody … Anyway, they know I’ve got to go home.”

  “Go home because they’ve got something on you, or go home because you want to go home?”

  “A bit of both.” Her pensive expression deepened. “It’s just, um, what was the quote? No man is an island.”

  “Family?” Miriam raised an eyebrow. “Boyfriend?”

  “Partner,” she corrected automatically. Miriam blinked. What does that mean, exactly? She made a guess then filed it away for future discreet inquiry. Yet another sign of how things were changing back in her former home time line. Rita continued. “I have family, too. When you came here, did you leave anyone behind?”

  “Not intentionally—”

  They were spared further intimacy by Brilliana’s return, pushing Olga’s chair. Olga was arguing. “You don’t need to do this, I’m fine—” She held a pair of crutches over the arm of her wheelchair, narrowly missing the door frame on the way in.

  “I don’t want you tiring yourself out,” Brill told her.

  “Let me be the judge of that. Stop right he
re.” Olga pulled the brake handle and Brilliana surrendered to the inevitable as the other woman planted her crutches and laboriously stood. “I’m better than I was yesterday, and I need to know I can walk … that’s better.”

  Huw hastily rose and moved a chair into position as Olga approached the table. She’d come straight from the office and was still dressed for work. “Thank you,” she said gratefully as she lowered herself onto the dining chair beside Rita, who, after a momentary startled look, took the crutches and leaned them against the wall. “What a day!”

  “Any problems?” Huw asked as he returned to his own seat.

  “Your brother…” Olga pulled a face. Then she cleared her throat and nodded at Rita. “With all due respect, we should have this conversation some other time.”

  “Problems?” Erasmus looked up.

  “Nothing yet. Just the meteorology reports.” Olga’s frown deepened. “The forecast has to be just right, twice over—” She glanced sidelong at Rita. “I’ll have whatever she’s drinking, please. It’s been a long day.”

  Miriam looked round the table. Soames was bringing the next course. Olga’s arrival had brought the level of classified projects in the conversation to some sort of critical mass. I need to put a stop to it, she thought. Taking a risk: “Rita, you mentioned a grandfather. Would you like to tell us about your family?”

  “My family?” Rita looked startled: “But I thought you knew…”

  “Please. Pretend I don’t?” Miriam managed to smile. “My mother handled the ad—everything. I don’t think I ever met your parents.” She managed not to stumble over the word. “Let alone your grandfather. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “Oh, sure.” Rita composed herself. Her eyes unfocused slightly as she realized she was being diverted away from a patch of conversational black ice, where she might lose her balance and fall painfully. “Okay, my parents are Franz and Emily Douglas. I’ve got a younger brother, River—also adopted—and one grandfather, Kurt, Franz’s father. Emily couldn’t have children of her own. I grew up in Boston and went to college there but while I was in college Dad’s company opened a plant in Phoenix. Mom telecommutes, so they moved—Phoenix was depressed enough that they could afford to buy two houses, one for us and one next door for Gramps, and property’s rising there again. So.” She shrugged. “I prefer the coastal cities, so I stayed in Boston for college.”