The Clan Corporate: Book Three of The Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  “What if I don’t want to become pregnant?”

  Ven Hjalmar paused with his hand on the door handle. “I really don’t think you ought to trouble yourself with such unrealistic fantasies,” he said.

  “But, what if?” Miriam called to him. Her fingernails bit into her palms hard enough to draw blood.

  “Prozac,” said ven Hjalmar, as he opened the door.

  Three days after Dr. ven Hjalmar’s humiliating interrogation, Miriam was beginning to wish she’d taken him up on the offer of antidepressants when the ferret knocked on the door.

  “What is it?” she asked, looking up from her book.

  “You have an invitation,” he said in hochsprache. He’d taken to using it almost all the time, except when she was obviously floundering. As ever, her jailer’s expression was unreadable. “The baron says you may accept it if you wish.” He repeated himself in English, just in case she hadn’t got the message.

  “An invitation.” Where to? Her imagination whirled like a hamster on a wheel: Not the royal court, obviously, or it would be compulsory . . .

  “From the honorable Duchess Patricia voh Hjorth d’Wu ab Thorold. Your mother. She begs your forgiveness for not writing and invites the honorable Countess Helge voh Thorold d’Hjorth to visit with her for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Tell her I’d, I’d—” Miriam licked her lips. “Of course I’ll go.”

  “I shall tell her.” The ferret began to withdraw. “I shall make arrangements. You will be ready to travel by eleven and you will be back here no later than five of the afternoon.”

  “Wait!” Miriam stood up. “Can I see Olga Thorold Arnesen?”

  “No.” He began to close the door.

  “Or Lady Brilliana d’Ost?”

  The ferret stopped and stared at her. “If you continue to pester me I will hurt you.” Then he shut the door.

  Miriam paced back and forth across the reception room in a blind panic, stir-crazy from confinement but apprehensive about whatever Iris would say to her. Of course Henryk will have told her, she thought. But blood was thicker than water, and surely Iris wouldn’t side with him against her—or would she? She’s been so distant and cold since she rejoined the Clan. The change in her mood had been like a safety curtain dropping across the stage at the end of a play, locking in the warmth and the light. Mom’s got her own problems. She said so. Like her own mother, the poisonous dowager Hildegarde. The old women’s plot. She crossed her arms. Henryk must have told her, or she wouldn’t have known where to send the invitation, she thought. If I can persuade her to give me a locket I could make a clean break for it—

  But a cold, cynical thought still nagged at her. What if Mom wants me to marry Prince Stupid? She wouldn’t do that . . . would she?

  The ruthless reproductive realpolitik within the Clan had made an early victim of Patricia voh Hjorth: her own mother had forced her into marriage to a violent sociopath. The scars had taken a long time to scab over, even after Patricia had made her run to the other world and settled down to life as Iris Beckstein for nearly a third of a century. Iris wouldn’t have dreamed of forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage of convenience. But now she was back in the suffocating bosom of the Clan, which way would Patricia jump—especially if her own skin was at stake?

  Back home in Cambridge, Miriam’s mother had never made a big thing about wanting grandchildren. But that was then.

  They took Miriam to visit her mother for lunch in a sealed sedan chair carried by two strapping porters. It was a hot day, but there were no windows, just a wooden grille behind her head. It was impossible to see out of. She protested when she saw it, but the ferret just stared at her. “Do you want to attend the duchess, or not?” he asked. Miriam gave in, willing to accept one more indignity if it gave her a chance to talk to Iris. Maybe she’ll be able to get me out of this, she told herself grimly.

  The box swayed like a ship on choppy water. It seemed to take forever to make its way across town. By the time the porters planted it with a bone-jarring thump, Miriam had gone from being off her appetite to the first green-cheeked anticipation of full-blown nausea: she welcomed the rattle of chains and the opening of the door like a galley slave released from belowdecks, blinking and gasping. “Are we there?”

  “Momentarily.” The ferret was as imperturbable as ever. “This way.” Another closed courtyard with barred windows. Miriam’s spirit fell. They’re just shuffling me between prisons, she realized. I’m surprised he didn’t handcuff me to the chair.

  Now the nerves took over. “Where is—she isn’t under arrest too, is she?”

  Unexpectedly, the ferret chuckled. “No, not exactly.”

  “Oh.” Miriam followed him, two paces ahead of the guards he’d brought along. She glanced at the walls to either side, half-wishing she could make a break for freedom. A couple of gulls squawked raucous abuse from the roofline. She envied them their insolent disdain for terrestrial boundaries.

  They came to a solid door in one wall, where a liveried servant exchanged words with the ferret, then produced a key. The door opened on a walled garden. There was a gazebo against the far wall, glass windows—expensively imported, a hallmark of a Clan property—propped open to allow the breeze in. “Go right in,” said the ferret. “I believe you are expected. I will collect you later.”

  “What? Aren’t you coming in with me? I thought you were supposed to be watching me at all times?”

  The ferret snorted. “Not here.” Then he stepped back through the gate and closed it with a solid click.

  Wow. Miriam narrowed her eyes as she looked at the gazebo. Mom’s got clout, then? She marched up to the door. “Hello?” she asked.

  “Come right in, dear.”

  Her mother watched her from a nest of cushions piled on top of a broad-winged armchair. She looked more frail than ever, wearing a black velvet gown with more ruffles and bows than a lace factory. “Has someone died?” Miriam asked, stepping into the shadow of the gazebo.

  “Sit down, make yourself comfortable. No one’s died yet, but I’m told it was a close-run thing.”

  Miriam sat in the only other chair, next to the circular cast-iron table. Iris watched her: she returned her mother’s gaze nervously. After a while she cleared her throat. “How much has Henryk told you?”

  “Enough.”

  Another silence.

  “I know I shouldn’t have done it,” Miriam said, when she couldn’t take it anymore. “But I was being deliberately cut out of my own affairs. And they’ve been trying to set me up—”

  “It’s too late for excuses, kid.” Miriam stared. Her mother didn’t look angry. She didn’t look sad, but she didn’t look pleased to see her, either. The silence stretched out until finally Iris sighed and shuffled against her cushions, sitting up. “I wanted to look at you.”

  “What?”

  “I wanted to look at you again,” said Iris. “One last time. You know they’re going to try to break you?”

  “I don’t break easily.” Miriam knew it was false bravado even as the words left her mouth. The great hollow fear congealing inside her gave the lie away. But what else could she say?

  Her mother glanced away evasively. “We don’t bend.” She shook her head. “None of us does—not me, not you, not even your grandmother. But sooner or later we break. Thirty-three years is what it took, kid, but look at me now. One of the old bitches already.”

  “What do you mean?” Miriam tensed.

  “I mean I’m about to sell you down the river.” Iris looked at her sharply. “At least, that’s how it’s going to seem at first. I’m not going to lie to you: I don’t see any alternatives. We’re stuck playing the long game, kid, and I’m still learning the rules.”

  “Suppose you explain what you just said.” There was an acid taste in her mouth. Miriam forced herself to unclench her fingers from the arms of her chair. “About selling me down the river.”

  Iris coughed, wheezing. Miriam waited her out. Presently h
er mother regained control. “I don’t like this any more than you do. It’s just the way things work around here. I don’t have any alternatives, I’m locked up here and you managed to get caught breaking the unwritten rules.” She sighed. “I thought you had more sense than to do that—to get caught, I mean. Anyway, we’re both out of alternatives. If I don’t play the game, neither of us is going to live very long.”

  “I don’t need this!” Miriam finally let go of her tightly controlled frustration. “I have been locked up and policed and poked and pried at and subjected to humiliating medical examinations, and it’s all just some game you’re playing for status points? What did you do, promise the Queen Mother you’d marry me off to her grandson if she beat you at poker?”

  Iris reached out and grabbed her wrist. Startled, Miriam froze. Her mother’s hand felt hot, bony, as weak as a sparrow: “No, never that! But if you knew what it was like to grow up here, fifty years ago . . .”

  Miriam surprised herself: “Suppose you tell me?” Go on, justify yourself, she willed. There were butterflies in her stomach. Whatever was coming, it was bound to be bad.

  Her mother nodded thoughtfully. Then her lips quirked in the first sign of a smile Miriam had seen since she’d arrived.

  “You know how the Clan braids its families, one arranged marriage after another to keep the bloodline strong.” Miriam nodded. “And you know what this means: the meddling old grannies.”

  “But Mom, Henryk and Angbard—”

  “Hush. I know about the breeding program.” Miriam’s jaw dropped. “Angbard told me about it. He’s not stupid enough to think he can push it through without . . . without allies. In another ten years the first of the babies will be coming up for adoption. He needs to convince the meddling old grannies to accept them, or we’ll be finished as a trading network within another couple of generations. So he asked me for advice. I’m his consultant, I guess. I don’t think most of the families realize just how close to the edge we are, how badly the civil war damaged us. Small gene pool, insufficient numbers—it’s not good. I’ve seen the numbers. If we don’t do something about it, the Clan could be extinct within two centuries.” Her voice hardened. “But then you barged right in, doing what you do—snooping. Yes, I know it’s what you did for a living for all those years, but you’ve got to understand, you can’t do that right now. Not here, it’s much too dangerous. People here who really want to keep secrets tend to react violently to intrusion. And there’s a flip side to the coin. I know you and the-bitch-my-mother don’t get on well”—a twinkle in her eye as she said this: Miriam bit her tongue—“but Hildegarde is just doing what she’s always done, playing the long game, defending her status. Which is tenuous here because we are, let’s face it, women. Here in the Gruinmarkt—hell, everywhere in the whole wide world—power comes from a big swinging dick. We, you and me, we’re the badly adjusted misfits here: you’ve got the illusion that you’re anybody’s social equal and I, I’ve been outside . . .”

  She fell silent. Miriam shook her head. “This isn’t like you, Mom.”

  “This place isn’t like me, kid. No, listen: what happens to the Clan if Angbard, or his successor, starts introducing farmed baby world-walkers in, oh, ten years time? Without tying them in to the existing great families, without getting the old bitches to take them in and adopt them as their own? And what happens a generation down the line when they become adults?”

  Miriam frowned. “Um. We have lots more world-walkers?”

  “Nuts. You’re not thinking like a politician: it shifts the balance of power, kid, that’s what happens. And it shifts it away from the braids, away from the meddling old grannies—away from us. It’s ugly out there, Miriam, I don’t think you’ve seen enough of the Gruinmarkt to realize just how nasty this world is if you’re a woman. We’re insulated by wealth and privilege, we have a role in the society of the Clan. But if you take that all away we are, well . . . it’s not as bad as Afghanistan under those Taliban maniacs, but it’s not far off. This is what I’m getting at when I talk about the long game. It’s the game the old women of the Clan have been playing for a century and a half now, and the name of the game is preserving the status of their granddaughters. Do you want a measure of control over your own life? Because if so, you’ve got to match the old bitches at their own game. And that’s”—Iris’s voice wavered—“difficult. I’ve been trying to help you, but then you kicked the foundations out from underneath my position . . .”

  “I—” Miriam paused. “What is your position? Is it the medicines?”

  “I take it you’ve met Dr. ven Hjalmar?”

  “Yes.” Miriam tensed.

  “Who do you think he works for? And who do you think I get my meds from? Copaxone and prednisone, by the grace of Hildegarde. If there’s an accident in the supply chain, a courier gets caught out and I go short—well, that’s all she wrote.” Iris made a sharp cutting gesture.

  “Mom!” Miriam stared, aghast.

  “Blackmail is just business as usual,” Iris said with heavy irony. “I’ve been trying to tell you it’s not pretty, but would you get the message?”

  “But—” Miriam was half out of her chair with anger. “Can’t you get Angbard to help you out? Surely they can’t stop you crossing over and visiting a doctor—”

  “Shush, Miriam. Sit down, you’re making me itch.” Miriam forced herself to untense: she sat down again on the edge of her chair, leaning forward. “If I bring Angbard into this, I lose. Because then I owe him, and I’ve dragged him into the game, do you see? Look, the rules are really very simple. You grow up hating and fearing your grandmother. Then she marries you off to some near-stranger. A generation later, you have your own grandchildren and you realize you’ve got to hurt them just the way your own great-aunts and grandmother hurt you, or you’ll be doing them an even worse disservice; if you don’t, then instead of a legacy of some degree of power all they’ll inherit is the status of elderly has-been chattel. That is what the braid system means, Miriam. You’re—you’re old enough and mature enough to understand this. I wasn’t, I was about sixteen when my great-aunt—my grandmother was dead by then—leaned on the-bitch-my-mother and twisted her arm and made her give me reason to hate her.”

  “Um. It sounds like—” Miriam winced and rubbed her forehead. “There’s something about this in game theory, isn’t there?”

  “Yes.” Iris looked distant. “I told Morris about it, years ago. He called it an iterated cross-generational prisoner’s dilemma. That haunted me, you know. Your father was a very smart man. And kind.”

  Miriam nodded; she missed him. Not that he was her real father. Her real father had been killed in an ambush by assassins shortly after Miriam’s birth, the incident that had prompted Iris to run away and go to ground in Boston, where she’d met and lived with Morris and brought Miriam up in ignorance of her background. But Morris had died years ago, and now . . .

  “When I gave you the locket I didn’t expect you to jump straight in and get caught up in the Clan so rapidly. I was going to warn you off. But once you got picked up, there wasn’t much else I could do. So I called up Angbard and came back in. I figure I’m not good for many more years, even with the drugs, but while I’m around I can watch your back. Do you see?”

  “That was a mistake, it would seem.”

  “Oh yes.” Iris was silent for almost a minute. “Because there are no grandchildren, and in the terms of the game that means I’m not a full player. I thought for a while your business plans on the other side would serve instead, but there’s the glass ceiling again: you’re a woman. You’ve set yourself up to do something that just isn’t in the rules, so lots of people want to take you down. They want to make you play the game, to conform to expectations, because that reinforces their own role. If you don’t conform, you threaten them, so they’ll use that as an excuse to destroy you. And now they’ve got me as a hostage to use against you.”

  “Oh. Oh shit.”

  “You can say t
hat again.” Iris reached out and tugged a bellpull. There was a distant chime. “Do you want some lunch? I wouldn’t blame you if all this has put you off your appetite . . .”

  Miriam succumbed to depression on the way back to her prison. The sedan chair felt like a microcosm for her life right now, boxed in and darkly claustrophobic, the walls pressing tighter on every side, forcing her into a coerced and unwilling conformity. When she was very young she’d sometimes fantasized about having a long-lost family, played the I’m really a princess but I was swapped at birth for a commoner make-believe game. Somehow it had never involved being locked inside a swaying leather-lined box that smelled of old sweat and potpourri, her freedom restricted and her independence denied. The idea that once people decided you were going to be a princess, or a countess, your life stopped being your own, your body stopped being private, had never occurred to her back when she was a kid. I need to talk to someone, Miriam realized. Someone other than Iris, who right now was in as much of a mess as she was. Otherwise I am going to go crazy.

  It had not escaped her attention that there were no sharp-edged implements in any of the rooms she had access to.

  When they let her out in the walled courtyard, Miriam looked up at the sky above the gatehouse. The air was close and humid, and the clouds had a distinct yellowish tinge: the threat of thunder hung like a blanket across the city. “You’d better go in,” said the ferret, in a rare sign of solicitude. Or maybe he just wanted to get her under cover and call a guard so that he could catch some rest.

  “Right.” Miriam climbed the staircase back to her rooms tiredly, drained of both energy and optimism.