The Merchants' War: Book Four of the Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  “It’s your black box, isn’t it?”

  “Hey, quick on the uptake! Yes, that’s it. We went through three samples and twelve microscopy preparations before we figured out it wasn’t an artifact. What do you think?”

  Eric stared at the screen.

  “What is it?”

  A different voice said, “it’s a Nobel Prize—or a nuclear war. Maybe both.”

  Eric glanced round in a hurry, to see Dr. James standing behind him. For a bureaucrat, he moved eerily quietly. “You think?”

  “Cytology.” James sounded bored. “These structures are in every central nervous system tissue sample retrieved so far from targeted individuals. Also in their peripheral tissues, albeit in smaller quantities. At first the pathology screener thought he was looking at some kind of weird mitochondrial malfunction—the inner membrane isn’t reticulated properly—but then further screening isolated some extremely disturbing DNA sequences, and very large fullerene macromolecules doped with traces of heavy elements, iron and vanadium.”

  “I’m not a biologist,” said Eric. “You’ll have to dumb it down.”

  “Continue the presentation, Dr. Hu,” said James, turning away. Show-off, thought Eric.

  Hu leaned back in his chair and swiveled round to face Eric. “Cells, every cell in your body, they aren’t just blobs full of enzymes and DNA, they’ve got structures inside them, like organs, that do different things.” He waved at the screen. “We can’t live without them. Some of them started out as free-living bacteria, went symbiotic a long time ago. A very long time ago.” Hu was staring at Dr. James’s back. “Mitochondria, like this little puppy here—” he pointed at a lozenge-shaped blob on the screen “—they’re the power stations that keep your cells running. This thing, the thing these JAUNT BLUE guys have, they’re repurposed mitochondria. Someone’s edited the mitochondrial DNA, added about two hundred enzymes we’ve never seen before. They look artificial, like it’s a tinker-toy construction kit for goop-phase nanotechnology—well, to cut a long story short, they make buckeyballs. Carbon-sixty molecules, shaped like a soccer ball. And then they use them as a substrate to hold quantum dots—small molecules able to handle quantized charge units. Then they stick them on the inner lipid wall of the, what do you call them, the mechanosomes.”

  Eric shook his head. “You’re telling me they’re artificial. It’s nanotechnology. Right?”

  “No.” Dr. James turned round again. “It’s more complicated than that. Dr. Hu, would you mind demonstrating preparation fourteen to the colonel?”

  Hu stared at Eric. “Prep fourteen is down for some fixes. Can I show him a sample in cell twelve, instead?”

  “Whatever. I’ll be in the office.” James walked away.

  Hu stood up: “If you follow me?”

  He darted off past the row of cubicles, and Eric found himself hurrying to keep up. The underground tunnel looked mostly empty, but the sense of emptiness was an illusion: there was a lot of stuff down here. Hu led him past a bunch of stainless steel pipework connecting something that looked like a chrome-plated microbrewery to a bunch of liquid gas cylinders surrounded by warning barriers, then up a short flight of steps into another of the ubiquitous trailer offices. This one had been kitted out as a laboratory, with worktops stretching along the wall opposite the windows. Extractor hoods and laminar-flow workbenches hunched over assemblages of tubes and pumps that resembled a bonsai chemical plant. Someone had crudely sliced the end off the trailer and built a tunnel to connect it to the next one along, which seemed to be mostly full of industrial-size dish-washing machines to Smith’s uneducated eye. A technician in a white bunny suit and mask was doing something in a cabinet at the far end of the room. The air conditioning was running at full blast, blowing a low-grade tropical storm out through the door: “Viola, the lab.”

  Eric winced: the horrible itch to correct Hu’s behavior was unbearable. “It’s voilà,” he snapped waspishly. “I see no medium-sized stringed instruments here. And you’ll have to tell me what everything is. I know that’s a laminar-flow workbench, but the rest of this stuff isn’t my field.”

  “Hey, stay cool, man! Um, where do you want me to start? This is where we work on the tissue cultures. Over there, that’s the incubation lab. You see the far end behind the glass wall? We’ve got a full filtered air flow and a Class two environment; we’re trying to get access to a Class four, but so far AMRIID isn’t playing ball, so there’s some stuff we don’t dare try yet. But anyway, what we’ve got next door is a bunch of cell tissue cultures harvested from JAUNT BLUE carriers. We keep them alive and work on them through here. We’re using a 2D field-effect transistor array from Infineon Technologies. They’re developing it primarily as an artificial retina, but we’re using it to send signals into the cell cultures. If we had some stem cells it’d be easier to work with, but, well, we have to work with what we’ve got.”

  “Right.” The president’s opinion on embryonic stem-cell research was well known; it had never struck Eric as being a strategic liability before now. He leaned towards the contraption behind the glass shield of the laminar-flow cabinet. “So inside that box, you’ve got some live nerve cells, and you’ve, you’ve what? You’ve got them to talk to a chip? Is that it?”

  “Yup.” Hu looked smug. “It’d be better if we had a live volunteer to work with—if we could insert microelectrodes into their optic nerve or geniculate nucleus—but as the action’s happening at the intracellular level this at least lets us get a handle on what we’re seeing.”

  Live volunteers? Eric stifled a twitch. The “unlawful combatant” designation James had managed to stick on Matthias and the other captured Clan members was one thing: performing medical experiments involving brain surgery on them was something else. Somehow he didn’t see any of them volunteering of their own free will: was Hu really that stupid? Or just naive? Or had he not figured out how the JAUNT BLUE tissue cultures came to be in his hands in the first place? “What have you been able to do with the materials available to you?”

  “It’s amazing! Look, let me show you preparation twelve in action, okay? I need to get a fresh slide from Janet. Wait here.”

  Hu bustled off to the far end of the lab and waved at the person working behind the glass wall. While he was preoccupied, Eric took inventory. Okay, so James wants me to figure it out for myself. He wants a sanity check? So far, so obvious. But the next bit was a little more challenging. So there’s evidence of extremely advanced biological engineering, inside the Clan members’ heads. Quantum dots, fullerene stuff, nanotechnology, genetic engineering as well. Artificial organelles. He shivered. Are they still human? Or something else? And what can we do with this stuff?

  Hu was on his way back, clutching something about the size of a humane rat trap that gleamed with the dull finish of aluminum. “What’s that?” asked Eric.

  “Let me hook it up first. I’ve got to do this quickly.” Hu flipped up part of the laminar-flow cabinet’s hood and slid the device inside, then began plugging tubes into it. “It dies after about half an hour, and she’s spent the whole morning getting it ready for you.”

  Hu fussed over his gadgets for a while, then plugged a couple of old-fashioned–looking coaxial cables into the aluminum box. “The test cell in here needs to be bathed in oxygenated Ringer’s solution at body temperature. This here’s a peristaltic pump and heater combination—” He launched into an intricate explanation that went right over Eric’s head. “We should be able to see it on video here—”

  He backed away from the cabinet and grabbed hold of the mouse hanging off of the computer next to it. The screen unblanked: a window in the middle of it showed a grainy gray grid, the rough-edged tracks of a silicon chip at high magnification. Odd, messy blobs dotted its surface, as if a microscopic vandal had sneezed on it. “Here’s an NV51 test unit. One thousand twenty-four field effect transistors, individually addressable. The camera’s calibrated so we can bring up any transistor by its coordinates. These cells
are all live JAUNT BLUE cultures—at least they were alive half an hour ago.”

  “So what does it do?”

  Hu shrugged. “This is preparation twelve, the first that actually did anything. Most of the later ones are still—we’re still debugging them, they’re still under development. This one, at least, it’s the demo. We got it to work reliably. Proof of concept: watch.”

  He leaned close to the screen, muttering to himself, then punched some numbers into the computer. The camera slewed sideways and zoomed slightly, centering on one of the snot-like blobs. “Vio—sorry. Here we go.”

  Hu hit a key. A moment later, Eric blinked. “Where did it go? Did you just evaporate it?”

  “No, we only carry about fifty millivolts and a handful of microamps for a fiftieth of a second. Look, let me do it again. Over…yeah, this one.”

  Hu punched more figures into the keyboard. Hit the return key again. Another blob of snot vanished from the gray surface.

  “What’s this meant to show me?” Eric asked impatiently.

  “Huh?” Hu gaped at him. “Uh, JAUNT BLUE? Hello, remember that code phrase? The, the folks who do that world-walking thing? This is how it works.”

  “Hang on. Wait.” Eric scratched his head. “You didn’t just vaporize that, that—” Neuron, he realized, understanding dawning. “Wow.”

  “We figured out that the mechanosomes respond to the intracellular cyclic-AMP signaling pathway,” Hu offered timidly. “That’s what preparation fourteen is about. They’re also sensitive to dopamine. We’re looking for modulators, now, but it’s on track. If we could get the nerve cells to grow dendrites and connect, we hope eventually to be able to build a system that works—that can move stuff about. If we can get a neural stem-cell line going, we may even be able to mass-produce them—but that’s years away. It’s early days right now: all we can do is make an infected cell go bye-bye and sneak away into some other universe—explaining how that part of it works is what the quant group are working on. What do you think?”

  Eric shook his head, suddenly struck by a weird sense of historical significance: it was like standing in that baseball court at the University of Chicago in 1942, when they finished adding graphite blocks to the heap in the middle of the court and Professor Fermi told his assistant to start twisting the control rod. A Nobel Prize or a nuclear war? James isn’t wrong about that. “I’d give my left nut to know where this is all going to end,” he said slowly. “You’re doing good work. I just hope we don’t all live to regret the consequences.”

  6

  Maneuvers

  As forms of transport went, horse-drawn carriages tended to lack modern amenities—from cup holders and seat-back TV screens on down to shock absorbers and ventilation nozzles. On the other hand, they came with some fittings that took Mike by surprise. He gestured feebly at the raised seat cushion as he glanced at the geriatric gruppenfuhrer in the mound of rugs on the other side of the compartment: “If you think I’m going to use that—”

  “You’ll use it when you need to, boy.” She cackled for a moment. The younger woman, Olga, rolled her eyes and sent him a look that seemed to say, humor her. “We’ll not be stopping for bed and bath for at least a day.”

  “Damn,” he said faintly. “What are you going to do?”

  Iris said nothing for a moment, while one wheel crunched across a rut in the path with a bone-shaking crash that sent a wave of heat through his leg. She seemed to be considering the question. “We’ll be pausing to change teams in another hour or so. Don’t want to flog the horses; you never know when you’ll need a fresh team. Anyway, you can’t stick your nose outside: you wouldn’t fool anyone. So the story is, you’re unconscious and injured and we need to get you across to a hospital in upstate New York as soon as possible. If they’re still using the old emergency routes—” she looked at Olga, who nodded “—there should be a postal station we can divert to tomorrow evening. If it’s running, we’ll ship you across and you can be home in forty-eight hours. If it’s not running…well, we’ll play it by ear; you’ve been hit on the head and you’re having trouble with language, or something. Until we can get you out of here.”

  Mike tried to gather his thoughts. “I don’t understand. What do you expect me to do…?”

  Miriam’s mother leaned forward, her expression intent. “I expect you to tell me your home address and zip code.” A small note pad and pencil appeared from somewhere under her blankets. “Yes?”

  “But—”

  She snorted. “You’re working with spies, boy. Modern spies with lots of gizmos for bugging phone conversations and tapping e-mail. First rule when going up against the NSA: use no communications technology invented in the last half-century. I want to be able to send you mail. If you want to contact me, write a letter, stick it in an envelope, and put it in your trash can on top of the refuse sacks.”

  “Aren’t you scared I’ll just pass everything to my superiors? Or they’ll mount a watch on the trash?”

  “No.” Eyes twinkled in the darkness. “Because first, you didn’t make a move on my daughter when you had the chance. And second, have you any idea how many warm bodies it takes to mount a twenty-four/seven watch on a trash can? One that’s capable of grabbing a dumpster-diving world-walker without killing them?”

  “I’ve got to admit, I hadn’t thought about it.”

  Olga cleared her throat. “It takes two watchers per team, minimum. Five teams, each working just under thirty hours a week, in rotation. They’ll need a blind, plus perimeter alarms, plus coordination with the refuse companies so they know when to expect a legitimate collection, and that’s just the watchers. You need at least three spare bodies, too, in case of sickness or accidents. To be able to make a snatch, you need at least four per team. Do you have thirty agents ready to watch your back stoop, mister? Just in case her grace wishes to receive a letter from you, rather than sending a messenger to pay a local wino to pick it up?”

  “Jeez, you sound like you’ve done this a lot.”

  Mrs. Beckstein rapped a knuckle on the wooden window frame of the carriage: “Fifty years ago there were three times as many world-walkers as there are now, and they didn’t all die out because they forgot how to make babies.”

  “Huh?”

  Olga glanced down. “Civil war,” she said very quietly. “And now, your government.”

  “Civil—” Mike paused. Didn’t Matthias say something about internal feuds? “Hold on. It killed two thirds of you?”

  “You wouldn’t believe how lethal a war between world-walkers can be, boy.” Mrs. Beckstein frowned. “You should hope the Clan Council never decides they’re at war with the United States.”

  “We’d wipe you out. Eventually.” He realized he was gritting his teeth, from anger as much as from the pain in his leg: he tried to force himself to relax.

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, probably. But right now? You think you have a problem with terrorism? You have seen nothing, boy. And we are not religious fanatics, no. We just want to live our lives. But the logic of power—” she stopped.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want my daughter out of this mess and home safe, Mr. Fleming. She had a sheltered upbringing: she’s in danger and her own ignorance of it is her worst enemy. Second…when she came over she raised a shit storm among our relatives. In particular, she aired some very dirty family linens in public half a year ago. Called for a complete rethink of the Clan’s business model, in fact: she pointed out that the emperor has no clothes, and that basing one’s income on an enemy’s weakness—in this case, the continuing illegality of certain substances, combined with the continuing difficulty your own organization and others face in stopping the trade—is foolish. This made her a lot of enemies at the time, but it set minds a-thinking. The current upheavals are largely a consequence of her upsetting that apple cart. The Clan will change in due course, and switch to a line of work more profitable than smuggling, but as long as she remains among th
em, her presence will act as a reminder of the source of the change to the conservative faction, and will provoke them, and that will make her a target. So I want her out of the game.”

  “Uh, I think I see where you’re leading.” Mike shook his head. “But she’s missing…?”

  Iris snorted. “She won’t stay missing for long—unless she’s gotten herself killed.”

  “Oh.” He thought for a moment. “That’s not all, is it?”

  She stared at him. “No, Mr. Fleming, that is not all, not by a long way. I mentioned a conservative faction. You won’t be surprised to know that there exists a progressive faction, too, and current circumstances—the fighting you may have noticed—is about to tip the scales decisively in their favor. Your interests would be served by promoting the progressives to the detriment of the conservatives, believe me.”

  “And you’re a progressive. Right?”

  “I prefer to think of myself as a radical.” She leaned against the seat back as the coach hit another rough patch on the dirt track. “Must be all the sixties influences. A real flower child, me.”

  “Ah.” Verbal punctuation was easier than trying to hold his own against this intimidating old woman. “Okay, what do the progressives want?”

  “You’d best start by trying to understand the conservatives if you want to get a handle on our affairs, boy. The Clan started out as the descendants of an itinerant tinker. They learned to world-walk, learned how to intermarry to preserve the family ability, and got rich. Insanely rich. Think of the de Medicis, or the Saudi royal family. That’s what the Clan represents here, except that ‘here’ is dirt-poor, mired in the sixteenth or seventeenth century—near enough. It’s not the same, never is, but there are enough points of similarity to make the model work. But the most important point is, they got rich by trade in light merchandise, by running a postal service. The postal service ships high-value goods, whatever they are, either reliably—for destinations in your world, without fear of interception—or fast—for destinations in this world, by FedEx across a continent ruled by horseback.”