Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  “The climate in Phoenix doesn’t agree with you?” asked Miriam.

  “You could say that. Uh. You know how old I am. You know about the no-choice states? Arizona’s one of them, it’s a really bad place to be young, single, and female. I mean, if anything went wrong, if I got raped or something.”

  Miriam did a double-take. “I thought that was a fringe thing, isn’t it? Dominionists? Or is it mainstream these days?” She’d been rooted firmly in the Commonwealth for so long that she’d stopped paying much attention to US domestic politics.

  “No-choicers run about half the states,” Rita said defensively. “Places they’re in charge aren’t good places for people like me to live. Single women, gays, Muslims, immigrants. But I stay in touch with my parents: they’re only there for the job and the, the real estate opportunity, as Dad puts it. Gramps is visiting in Philly right now. We stay in touch. We’re close. But I can’t—people like me can’t—live in one of those states. It’s not safe.”

  Erasmus had gone totally still and silent, fork frozen in mid-air. As Rita finished speaking he completed the movement, taking a mouthful of duck a l’orange and chewing slowly. Miriam recognized the signs: another two o’clock conversation was coming, in which she tried to translate her increasingly irrelevant and rusty memory of American culture and politics into Commonwealth terms, predigesting it for the next week’s editorial policy meetings.

  Huw whistled quietly. “Sounds like things have gotten a lot worse since I was last there,” he said, attracting a pointed stare from Rita.

  “Things have gotten better over the past few years—” Rita stopped and seemingly remembered there was a plate in front of her. “This is good,” she mumbled. “Don’t want it to get cold.”

  Olga spoke up. “Let’s not mince words. 7/16 broke lots of things, and not just in Washington, D.C., and the Gruinmarkt: it broke the collective sanity of a huge number of folks in red state America. If 9/11 was bad, 7/16 tipped them over the edge. Yes?”

  “Well, you people would know about it.” Rita put her fork down carefully. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Oh, we were bound to have this conversation, weren’t we? Miriam took a mouthful of wine to cover her immediate expression. “No,” she said, very firmly.

  “No?” Rita looked startled.

  “The people responsible for 7/16 are dead,” Miriam said firmly, trying to keep a wobble of rage out of her voice. “We hunted them down and killed them. Except for a couple of idiots in the US government who we couldn’t touch.”

  “But the US government didn’t—”

  “We warned them,” Huw said grimly. “They didn’t listen. They tried to kill Miriam when she tipped them off. Using an exploding phone.”

  “An exploding phone?” If Rita’s eyes got any wider they’d be the size of dinner plates.

  Miriam took a deep breath. “Yes. We were in the middle of negotiations, handled via a, a cutout. Trying to warn them about the stolen nukes. They sent us a mobile phone, it came from a Colonel in the agency they’d just set up for dealing with world-walkers. It turned out to be a cell phone with a bomb in it. When we called the Colonel’s boss to warn him about the stolen bombs he sent the detonation signal. He obviously didn’t think we had any electronics chops. But he didn’t need our warning: he already knew about the bombs.”

  “But the Clan planted the bombs—”

  “Rita, the Clan consists—consisted—of a couple of thousand people with wildly diverging agendas of their own, to the point where it went through two bloody civil wars in the past century. As I said, we warned Colonel Smith’s boss”—Rita flinched violently at the name—“and we did our best to stop it happening. But 7/16 wasn’t just bad for D.C. The bastards who blew up the president and tried to nuke the Pentagon also murdered a bunch of my friends that day. They tried to kill me. The bombings in D.C. were part of a coup attempt within the Clan. The plotters failed, but in the process they fucked everyone over, not just the White House and the Capitol and the Washington Monument. So I will thank you for not blaming me personally for 7/16, all right?”

  Rita looked as if her head was about to explode. “Colonel who?” she demanded. “What was this agency?”

  “We got the details afterwards from”—Miriam caught Olga’s warning glance but plowed on all the same—“intelligence sources. Our contact was working for a Colonel Eric Smith, who was part of an agency that was then called the Family Trade Organization. FTO. It’s part of DHS these days, they renamed it a few times … what is it?”

  Rita wasn’t calming down: if anything her distress was growing. “My boss is called Colonel Smith,” she said shakily. “He’s not a Colonel anymore, he retired from the Air Force—but he’s DHS. And he was there from the start. Oh my God. Oh my God.” She jammed her fist against her mouth. Miriam stared at her. So did everyone else.

  Miriam cleared her throat. “Hey, we’re not going to hold it against you,” she said softly. “Rita. Please listen?”

  Rita looked at her with horror in her eyes, then nodded rapidly.

  “It was your Colonel’s boss who did it, and he’s long since moved on. A neocon political hack from the, the last administration but two. I’m pretty sure that nobody wants another nuclear war, least of all your boss. But these are the stakes we’re playing for. And I think we’ve all got a duty to do whatever we can to avoid it happening again, haven’t we?” Rita nodded. Good: I’m getting through to her, Miriam thought. “You’re among friends here, at least at this table. Let’s finish dinner and maybe talk some more. Then we can figure out how to stop anything bad from happening.”

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  Later, Miriam found Erasmus in his dressing room, nursing a glass of port in his dressing gown.

  “Mind if I join you?” she asked.

  “Go ahead.” His grin was lopsided. “I see you came prepared.”

  She sat down beside him on the chaise, holding her whisky tumbler away from her robe. It was empty. “I needed it. That’s usually a bad sign, isn’t it.”

  His smile slipped away. “You just met your daughter for the first time, love.” He raised his glass. “Panic-induced histrionics don’t count. Office ultimata don’t count. If you were insisting it was business as usual I’d be worried for your sanity. As it is”—he sipped his port—“I think it went quite well.”

  “What do you think of her?”

  “Prickly. Bright and sharp as a nail. Still a bit naive, but she’ll grow out of that. She has inherited your brains, I think. I confess I didn’t realize you dallied with aristocracy in your youth, my dear—”

  “Aristocracy?” Miriam spluttered. “Oh, you think—” She snorted. “It doesn’t work that way in the United States, I assure you. I hear her father’s a consultant physician these days. His family weren’t poor, but nobility? Hardly. They came from Pakistan—sorry, from the country where the French Punjab Dominions are in this world. Not exactly the elevated descendants of imperial conquerors—at least not in the past couple of hundred years.”

  “Hmm.” Erasmus nodded to himself. “Well, then. Then the resemblance is probably coincidental.”

  “Resemblance? What resemblance?”

  “You haven’t been following the news from St. Petersburg about the Dauphin’s new fiancée, have you? It’s really quite funny: if Rita wants to pursue a career on the stage she could make a fortune impersonating the Princess.”

  “Oh, come on.” Miriam sipped her drink, covering her confusion. If it had been anyone else, or on any other occasion, she would have found it amusing. But everything relating to Rita was still raw, like a new scar from which a protective dressing had been removed for the first time. And Erasmus zeroing in on the matter she’d been trying to discuss with Brill earlier in the evening was just uncanny.

  “Humor an old man’s whimsy?”

  “Never.” She punched Erasmus lightly on the upper arm. “But still, she held up quite well, I think.”

  “Did s
he now? I’m astonished she didn’t flee screaming into the night, the way you laid into her.”

  “You don’t say. Brill went a couple of rounds with her first, I gather. Laying out the facts of life. I thought”—Miriam focused on some inward vista—“honesty was the best policy.”

  “She’s just discovered she has a second family and they’re a nest of scheming vipers?”

  “That’s about it,” Miriam admitted. She reached for the bottle of port: Erasmus got there first and tipped a generous measure into her tumbler. “Ras, I don’t like this. Colonel Smith—most likely, his superiors—are playing head games with us again. If they can activate the ability in outer family members, in carriers, then they’ve got access to potentially thousands of world-walkers. Some of them only a few years younger than Rita. And they could have sent a helicopter instead, couldn’t they? Or a bomb wing with nukes, like they did to Niejwein and the Gruinmarkt, although two can play at that game nowadays … But instead they sent Rita. There’s no way I can read that as anything other than a personal threat aimed directly at me. Using blood as a weapon.”

  “Psychological warfare has always held a peculiar fascination for spies,” Erasmus observed. He took a mouthful of his fortified wine. “Maybe they’re trying to put a thumb on the balance, to tip it against you by convincing the likes of Adrian Holmes that you’re conspiring with the United States against the Commonwealth.”

  “But I’d never…!”

  “Of course not. But will Adrian believe that?”

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  Rita awakened slowly, in an unfamiliar bedroom. The mattress felt wrong, weirdly lumpy and bouncy at the same time. Springs, she realized fuzzily. Didn’t they use metal springs in the old days? She rolled over and opened her eyes on a view skewed at sixty degrees to reality. There was wallpaper, but the patterns were unfamiliar. There was furniture, but the wooden chair and the handles on the chest of drawers looked wrong. They were the products of nearly three centuries of divergent design decisions, embedding subtly different traditions in popular culture. I’m in the Commonwealth, she remembered, and the previous evening came crashing back in a mortifying rush: kill me now!

  Either the Colonel had lied to her, or these people—strangers who happened to be her blood relatives—were lying to her. Maybe both, but she was fairly sure that in the course of her questioning she hadn’t mentioned Colonel Smith by name. Inspector Morgan’s questions had focused on protocol and tradecraft, on the precise methods and techniques of her reconnaissance, rather than on personalities. Then Mrs.Burgeson—Miriam—had dropped her bombshell, and it all fitted together horribly plausibly, the exploding phone and the double-cross story. Either Miriam was trying to psych her out, or everything she thought she knew about the people she was working for was wrong … or was it?

  It wasn’t as if she could go home and start asking questions about what really happened on 7/16. Everyone knew what happened that day in D.C. Asking questions would make you look like a tinfoil hat case at best, or one of the weirdos who still insisted that the twin towers had been mined with demolition charges on 9/11. And that assumed that her birth mother was trying to gaslight her, that her inside job theory was false. If it really was an inside job and the Colonel had been involved, asking questions sounded like a suicidally bad idea.

  Rita rolled over and buried her face in the pillow. Her tradecraft self tried out a different narrative to see if it held water. Suppose Olga had sucked her in and surrounded her with her own allies and friends, establishing an intoxicating party atmosphere with freely flowing wine and everyone primed with the same story to—no, that doesn’t work either. There was no rational reason why they’d need to turn Rita to their way of thinking, was there? I’m just a courier, she thought. A go-between whose birth mother just happens to be … fuck.

  It all revolved around the fact of her existence. The Unit, the DHS, the earlier Family Trade Organization: whatever name it went by, the agency had a history with Mrs. Burgeson. With Miriam. And even when she slipped through their fingers, they’d kept a vigilant eye on her remaining connections. They’d been tracking Rita since she was eight. The Colonel had said as much to her face. The abduction attempt at the car park—fake, she realized dismally. It had been as fake as a three dollar bill. These people had helicopters and armed police and all the panoply of big government, just like the USA. They wouldn’t send a pair of two-bit thugs to carjack their target. If they wanted her they’d have sent a SEAL team. What other experiences that she took for granted had been rigged, a theatrical trailer designed to hook an audience of one? Had they deliberately assigned her to Philadelphia just to trail her past Angie and see if they could make her—no, that’s not possible. Rita shook her head dazedly as she sat up. But she kept circling back to the idea. Facebook was owned by the government agencies, everybody knew that. So were the other social networks. What if they’d drilled down deep enough to work out how she felt, then purposefully recruited Angie the way they’d reeled in Rita—no, Angie’s not part of the Unit, not a ringer like Julie. The only role the Colonel has for her is a hostage for my good behavior. She felt unaccountably grubby even for thinking it, although she’d showered before dinner and slept between clean sheets.

  The Colonel was a manipulative shit, but he wasn’t omniscient. He couldn’t have predicted that Rita would fall straight into Angie’s arms after eight years separation, could he? She frowned again. On the other hand, when you had enough data about someone’s behavioral profile you could use deep learning techniques to infer things about them that they weren’t even aware of. Like supermarkets showing young women ads for maternity products before they even realized they were pregnant. Or political campaigns that could micro-target propaganda to pander to your prejudices and nudge you to vote their way, based on which FB posts you’d liked. Maybe there was a social graph heat map somewhere inside DHS, labeled RITA CONTACTS. And maybe they’d picked the site of this test operation in accordance with the gnomic advice of some incomprehensible deep learning neural network, some software oracle that looked at the phase of the Moon and the state of her Facebook feed and gave a higher probability of her proving loyal if they ran her in Philly instead of Boston …

  Her office garb was folded neatly on top of the dressing table. She dressed quickly in the pale light filtering through the thin muslin curtains. The top floor bathroom was next door to the guest bedroom, and it was unoccupied. Morning ablutions and brushing out her hair bought her more minutes for uneasy introspection before she had to go downstairs and face Huw and Brilliana.

  I’ll have to go back, she realized. They’ve got their hooks in me. “They” being Colonel Smith and Dr. Scranton. They knew how she felt about her parents and her grandfather. They for sure knew all about her and Angie and their illegal-in-Arizona relationship. They knew about everything except—she hoped—the Wolf Orchestra. They’d sent her on this mission (call it Operation Headfuck, she thought bitterly: although whether the head in question was hers or Miriam’s was unclear) only after they had made sure she had something to go home for. Whether or not they’d aimed Angie at her was irrelevant at this point.

  That was something the Stasi’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung—the Main Reconnaissance Administration—had known. Unless you’re absolutely certain of an asset’s loyalty, never send them abroad without sufficient ties to bring them home again. Hold hostages. If necessary, manufacture hostages, lest they defect. The home leave and the weekends off had to be seen in this context. Colonel Smith had sent her into the Commonwealth knowing there was a risk she’d begin to empathize with her newfound cousins. Or to bond with the woman who’d had her arm twisted into giving her up for adoption all those years ago. He wouldn’t have done that without a hook firmly embedded in her lip, so he could reel her back in when the time was ripe. Or hooks. Hooks called Kurt and Angie and Mom and Pop …

  James Bond didn’t have any hooks, she mused as she tied her hair back. But then, Bond wa
s a sociopath, wasn’t he? With a heavy heart, she went downstairs.

  The Explorer-General and his wife occupied a government-owned row house within the walls of the fortified palace-city of New London, granted by grace and favor (formerly imperial grace, now the favor of the ruling party, whatever that meant) when they came to town. It didn’t have much of a yard and it looked small from outside, but looks were deceptive. Rita had to descend three flights of stairs to get to the first floor, where the dining room, parlor, and kitchen facilities were located. She’d slept late. The clock on the landing said it was well past eight when she paused in the dining room doorway.

  “C’mon in,” called Huw. He was sitting at the table, munching on a bread roll while reading an odd-sized newspaper page. He seemed to be alone. “Cook’ll sort you out anything you want for breakfast. Coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” Rita said gratefully. Huw reached for an ornately detailed silver coffee pot and poured a stream of thin brown liquid into a cup. “Is Brill still here?” She’d indicated she had plans for Rita’s day the evening before, but Rita’s memory for trivia had blurred under the impact of one significant revelation too many.

  “She’s around,” Huw said noncommittally. “I think she wants to talk to you before she heads to the office.”

  Ten minutes later Rita was working on a bowl of something not unlike muesli when Brilliana paused in the doorway. “Oh, there you are,” she said. She wore a coat over her tunic-suit. “Did you sleep well, Rita?”