The Hidden Family

by Charles Stross

  “Hello yourself.” The nurse at the desk glanced up. “Visiting hours run until eight,” she commented, “you’ve got an hour. Who are you looking for?”

  “Olga Hjorth. We’re expected.”

  “Hmm.” The nurse frowned and glanced down, then her frown cleared. “Oh, yeah, you’re on the list. I’m sorry,” she looked apologetic. “She’s only taking a few visitors; we’ve got orders to keep strangers out. And she’s on nil by mouth right now, so if you’ve brought any food or drink you’ll have to leave it right here at the desk.”

  “No, that’s okay,” said Miriam. “Uh, can you ask if she’s willing to see my friend here? Brill?”

  “That’s me,” said Brill, miscueing off Miriam’s request.

  “Oh, well—you’re on the clear list.” The nurse shrugged. “It’s just that somebody shot her.” She frowned. “She’s under guard. Spooks, if you follow my drift.”

  Miriam gave her a sympathetic smile. “I follow. They know us both.”

  “That way.” The nurse pointed. “Second door on the right. Knock before you open it.”

  Miriam knocked. The door opened immediately. A very big guy in dark clothes and dark glasses filled it. “Yes?” he demanded, in a vaguely central-European accent.

  “Miriam Beckstein and Brill van Ost to see Olga. We’re expected.”

  “One moment.” The door closed, then opened again, this time unobstructed. “She says to come in.”

  It was a small anteroom and there were not one but three heavies in suspiciously bulky jackets and serious expressions hanging around. One of them was sitting down reading a copy of Guns and Ammo, but the other two were on their feet and they studied Miriam carefully before they opened the inner door. “Olga!” cried Brill, rushing in. “What have they done to you?”

  “Careful,” warned Miriam, following her.

  “Hello,” said Olga. She smiled slightly and shifted in the bed.

  “Excuse me,” the young nurse said waspishly. “I’ll just be finishing here before you disturb her, if you don’t mind?”

  “Oh,” said Brill.

  “I don’t mind,” said Miriam, staring at Olga. “How are you?” she asked anxiously.

  “Bad.” Olga’s smile warmed slightly. “Tired’n’bruised. But alive.” Her eyes tracked toward the nurse, who was fiddling with the drip mounted on the side of the bed, and Miriam nodded minutely. The back of her bed was raised and there was a huge dressing over her right shoulder. Alarming-looking drain tubes emerged from it, and a bunch of wires from under the neck of her hospital gown fed into some kind of mobile monitor on a trolley. It chirped occasionally. “Damn.” Half of her hair was missing, and there was another big dressing covering one side of her head, but no drain tubes—which, Miriam supposed, was a good sign. “This feels most strange.”

  “I’ll bet it does,” Miriam said with some feeling. Wow, she thought, thinking about Brill’s first reaction to New York, she’s handling it well. “Did they find whoever did it?”

  “I’m told not.” Olga glanced at the nurse again, who glanced back sternly and straightened up.

  “I’ll just leave you to it,” she announced brightly. “Remember, no food or drink! And don’t tire her out. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes; if you need me before then, use the buzzer.”

  Miriam, Brill, and Olga watched her departure with relief. “Strange fashions here,” Olga murmured. “Strange buildings. Strange everything.”

  “Yeah, well.” Miriam glanced at the drip, the monitoring gear, everything else. Cable TV, a private bathroom, and a vase with flowers in it. Compared to the care Olga would receive in the drafty palace on the other side, this was the very lap of luxury. “What happened?”

  “Ack.” Olga coughed. “I was in your, your room. Asleep. He appeared out of nowhere and shot ... well.” She shifted slightly. “Why doesn’t it hurt more?” she asked, sounding puzzled. “He shot at me, but I am a light sleeper. I was already sitting up. And I sleep with my pistol under my pillow.” Her smile widened.

  Miriam shook her head. “Did he get away?” she asked. “If not, did you get his locket?”

  “I wondered when you would ask.” Olga closed her eyes. “Managed to grab it before they found me. It’s in the drawer there.”

  She didn’t point at the small chest of drawers, but Miriam figured it out. Before she could blink, Brill had the top drawer open and lifted out a chain with a disk hanging from it. “Give me,” said Miriam.

  “Yeah?” Brill raised an eyebrow, but passed it to her all the same.

  “Hmm.” Miriam glanced at it, felt a familiar warning dizziness, and glanced away. Then she pulled back a cuff and looked at the inside of her right wrist. The same. “Same as the bastard who killed Margit. Exactly the same. While the other bunch of heavies who tried to roll us over at the same time didn’t have any lockets. At all.”

  “Thought so,” murmured Olga.

  “Listen, they’re after us both,” said Miriam. “Olga?”

  “I’m listening,” she said sleepily. “Don’t worry.”

  “They’re after us both,” Miriam insisted. “Olga, this is very important. You’re probably going to be stuck here for two or three days, minimum, and it’ll take weeks before you’re well—but as soon as you’re well enough to move, Angbard will want to take you back to his fortress on the other side. It is really important that you don’t go there. I mean, it’s vital. The killers can reach you on the other side, in Fort Lofstrom, even in a doppelgangered room. But they can’t reach you here. Listen, I’ve got a friend here working for me. And Brill’s here, too. You can stay with us, if you like. Or talk to Roland, get Roland to help. I’m pretty sure he’s reliable—for you, at least. If you stay in Angbard’s doppelgangered rooms on this side, the ones he uses to stop family members getting at him in the fort, you’ll be safe from the lost family in world three, and from the other conspirators, but not from the mole. And if you go back to Niejwein, the conspirators will try to kill you.”

  “Wait!” Olga struggled visibly to absorb everything. “Lost family? World three? What’s—”

  “The assassin who killed Margit.” Miriam tensed. “It’s a long story. I think they’re after you, now, because of me.”

  Olga shook her head. “But why? I mean, what purpose could that serve?”

  “Because it’ll discredit me, or it’ll restart the civil war, and I’m fairly certain that’s what the bunch from world three, the long-lost relatives, want to achieve. If I die and it can be blamed on one half of the Clan, that starts it up again. If you die and it looks like I’ve schemed with Roland to get you out of the way so I can marry him, it starts up for a different reason. Do you see?”

  “Vaguely.” Olga opened her eyes and looked at Miriam. “You’ll have to explain it again later. Do you think they’ll let me stay here?”

  “Hmm.” Miriam thought for a moment. “You can stay here to recover. I don’t think even Angbard is stupid enough to move you while you’re ill. You can lean on him to let you stay a bit longer to see what it’s like, too. That might work. If he’s got any sense he’ll work it out from what I told him. But he isn’t safe, Olga.”

  Brill turned around. “They abducted—or killed—Miriam’s foster-mother, milady. Yesterday, at the same time they shot you.”

  “Oh!” Olga looked pensive. “So. What would you suggest?”

  “I think you should stay here for now. When you’re better, I want to—” Miriam caught Brill’s eye—”introduce you to a friend of mine called Paulette. And then we’ll see.” She licked her lips. “I’ve got a business proposition in mind. One that will flush out the bastards who want us both dead, and make everybody involved wealthy beyond belief.” She grinned at Olga. “Interested?”

  Agreements

  Almost exactly two weeks later, Miriam sat in front of a mirror in the Brighton Hotel, brushing her hair and pulling a face. It’s definitely getting longer, she thought. Damn that hairdresser! She’d drawn the line at
a wig, but even shoulder-length hair was considered eccentrically short by Boston polite society, and a reputation for eccentricity was something Miriam didn’t want to cultivate—it would happen anyway, and could only get in her way. But she hadn’t had hair even this long since she was a teenager. Bloody nuisance, she thought affectedly, then snorted with amusement. This place is getting to me. Even the way they talk! The house purchase was going ahead, the conveyancing papers and legal to-ing and fro-ing well in hand. Erasmus had taken delivery of no less than ten pounds of twenty-three carat gold, an immense amount by any standard—back in Cambridge it would have paid Miriam’s salary at The Weatherman for almost a year—and had warned his shadowy compatriots to expect much larger amounts to start flowing soon, “from a sympathetic source.” His stock had risen. Meanwhile, Miriam had taken pains to quietly slip into at least two meetings of the Friendly Party to keep an eye on where the money was going. When she’d left money on the collecting tray, it had been with a sense that she was doing the right thing.

  The Levelers, despite official persecution (and the imprisonment of many of their leading lights for sedition), had a political agenda she thought she understood, one not too alien from her own. High upon it was a bill of rights; the universal franchise (granting women the vote here for the first time); equal rights regardless of age, race, and sex; and separation of Church from state. That the imperial government didn’t take such things for granted gave Miriam one source of comfort; if she was going to get her start here by smuggling contraband gold to fund radicals, at least they were radical democrats. The ironies in the similarity between her activities and the Clan’s own business model didn’t leave her untouched. She consoled herself with two thoughts: Smuggling gold to undermine a despotic monarchy wasn’t in the same moral league as being the main heroin connection for the East Coast, and she intended to switch to a different business model just as soon as she could.

  Miriam checked her appearance in the mirror. With earrings and a pearl choker and the right haircut and dress she could just about pass, but she still felt she was walking a knife-edge in maintaining appearances. New Britain seemed to take class consciousness almost as seriously as the feudal nobility of the Gruinmarkt. It was depressing, and the need to dive into the detail work of setting up a business here left her no time to pursue casual friendships. When she had time to think about it, she realized she was lonely. But at least she had the option of going home in a few more days. That was more than Brill had. Or Iris, wherever she was.

  As she locked the jewel box, there was a knock at the door. A bellhop bobbed to her outside. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but you have a visitor.” He offered Miriam a card on a silver tray. Miriam nodded. “Please show Sir Alfred Durant to my table in the dining room. I have been expecting him, and I will join him shortly. I’m also expecting a Mr. Humphrey Bates. If you’d care to see they are offered an aperitif first.”

  Miriam left her room and headed downstairs, outwardly calm but inwardly tense. Paradoxically, some things were easier to do over here. The primitive state of the corporate scene made it relatively easy to mount an all-out assault on the captains of industry, for which she was deeply grateful. (An SEC-approved due diligence background check such as she’d have faced at home would have smashed through her public identity as if it was made of wet cardboard.) But other things were harder to fake. People judged your trustworthiness by a whole slew of social indicators, your class background, and the way you spoke and dressed. The equivalent of a dark suit and a PowerPoint presentation would get you precisely nowhere unless you were a member of the right clubs or had been to the correct finishing school. If you were an outsider, you needed a special edge—and you needed to be at least twice as good.

  She’d spent most of the day running scenarios for how this meeting could play, ranging from the irredeemably bad to the unexpectedly good. She’d gotten her story prepared, her answers ready, her lawyer in attendance, and just about everything—except her hair—straight. Now all that remained was to see if Sir Durant would bite ... or whether he’d turn out to be an inveterate snob, or an overbred twit whose business was run for him by self-effacing middle-class technicians.

  She’d reserved the Hanover Room off the back of the carvery downstairs. Most restaurants in this city were associated with hotels, and the Brighton’s was a very expensive, very exclusive one. As she came through the door, two men rose. One of them was the lawyer, Bates, and the other—she smiled at him and dipped her head briefly. “You must be Sir Alfred Durant?” she asked. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “A pleasure, ma’am,” he said, in a hoarse, slightly gravelly voice. Durant was thin and tall, imposing but with a hauteur that spoke more of a weary self-confidence than of arrogance. His eyes were soft, brown, and deceptively tired-looking. “Please, you must call me Alfred. Mr. Bates has been pinning my ears back with stories about you.”

  “Indeed.” Miriam’s expression acquired a slightly fixed, glassy overtone as she nodded to her lawyer. “Well, and have you arrived in good health? Has anyone offered you a drink? I say, waiter—”

  The waiter hurried over. “Yes, milady?”

  Durant raised an eyebrow. “Gin and tonic for me,” he said slowly—or was it melancholia? He likes people to think he drives from the back seat, Miriam noted. Watch this one.

  “A sweet Martini for me,” Bates added. Next to Sir Durant he was short, plump, and somewhat overeager.

  “Certainly.” Miriam relaxed slightly. “A sherry, please,” she added. “If you’d like to come in, I believe our table is waiting ... ?”

  The scandalous overtones of a single woman entertaining two gentlemen to dinner in a closed room were mildly defused by her black dress and rumored widowhood. Bates had confirmed that there were no unsalubrious rumors about Sir Durant’s personal life—or at least none she need worry about. Miriam concentrated on being a perfect hostess while pumping Durant for information about himself, and keeping Bates from either drying up or running off at the mouth. Durant was not the most forthcoming of interview subjects, but after the soup she found a worthwhile button to press, and triggered a ten-minute monologue on the topic of car-racing. “It is without doubt the wooden track that makes it so exciting,” Durant droned over the salmon steak—expensively imported by airship from the north—“for with the embankment of the course, and the addition of pneumonic wheels, they get up to the most exhausting speeds. There was the time old Timmy Watson’s brakes failed on the inside straight toward the finish line at Yeovilton—”

  After the best part of two hours, both Bates and Sir Durant were reclining in their chairs. Miriam felt bloated and silently cursed the etiquette that prevented her from leaving the table for a minute, but the last-minute addition of an excellent glass of vintage port seemed to have helped loosen Alfred up. Especially after Miriam had asked a couple of leading questions about brake shoe manufacture, which veered dangerously close to discussing business.

  “You seem to me to be unusually interested in brakes,” Sir Durant said, cupping his glass in one hand and staring at her across the table with the expression of a well-fed and somewhat cynical vulture. “If you’ll pardon me for saying this, it’s a somewhat singular interest in one of the fairer sex.”

  “I like to think I have lots of singular interests.” Miriam smiled. Patronizing old bastard. “I have spent much of my time traveling to far places and I’m afraid my education in the more feminine arts may be a little lacking. Business, however, is another matter.”

  “Ah, business.” Bates nodded knowingly, and Miriam had to actively resist the temptation to kick him under the table.

  “Business.” Durant, too, nodded. “I noticed your purchase of a company—was it by any chance Dalkeith, Sidney and Fleming?—with interest. A fine engineering venture, once upon a time.”

  Miriam nodded. “I like to get my hands dirty. By proxy,” she added, glancing at Bates. “It’s something of a hobby. My father taught me
never to take anything for granted, and I extended the lesson to the tools in his workshop.”

  “I see.” Durant nodded. “I found the, ah, samples you sent me most interesting.”

  “Good.” When she smiled this widely, Miriam’s cheeks dimpled: She hated to be reminded of it, but there was no escaping the huge gilt-framed mirror hanging above the sideboard opposite. Is that rouged harpy in the evening dress really me? “That was the idea.”

  “My men applied one of the samples to a test brake engine. The results were precisely as your letter promised.”

  “Indeed.” Miriam put her glass down. “I wouldn’t waste your time, Alfred. I don’t like to mince words. I’m a woman in a hurry, and I wanted to get your attention.”

  “Can you provide more samples?” His stare was penetrating.

  “Yes. It will take about a month to provide them in significant quantities, though. And the special assembly for applying them.” It had taken a week to get the chrysotile samples in the first place, and longer to set up the workshop, have them ground to powder, and set into the appropriate resin matrix. Epoxide resins were available here, but not widely used outside the furniture trade. Likewise, asbestos and rock wool—chrysotile—could be imported from Canada, but were only really used in insulating furnaces. The young industrial chemist Miriam had hired through Bates’s offices, and the other three workers in her makeshift research laboratory, were initially startled by her proposal, but went along with it. The resulting grayish lumps didn’t look very impressive, and could certainly do with much refinement, but the principle was sound. And she wouldn’t be stopping with asbestos brakes—she intended to obsolesce it as rapidly as she’d introduced it, within a very few years, once she got her research and development department used to a steady drip feed of advanced materials from the other world. “The patents are also progressing nicely, both on the brake material and on the refinements we intend to apply to its use.” She smiled, and this time let her teeth show. “The band brake and the wheel brake will be ancient history within two years.”