The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (57 page)

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 micro-amps 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.’

As forms of transport went, horse-drawn carriages lacked modern amenities – from cup holders and seat-back TV screens 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 Gruppenführer 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 chuckled 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.’

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

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 pain 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 notepad and pencil appeared from somewhere under her
blankets. ‘Yes?’

‘But – ’

‘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, because they need to stay alert: two world-walkers
can be in and out in under ten seconds. 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. ‘And now, your government.’

‘Civil –’ Mike paused.
Didn’t Matthias say something about internal feuds?
‘Hold on. It killed
two-thirds
of you?’

‘You can’t imagine 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, very probably. But right now you think you have a problem with terrorism, and I’m saying you have seen
nothing,
boy. We are not religious
fanatics, no. We just want to live our lives. But the logic of power –’ She paused.

‘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 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 them, 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 . . . ?’

‘She won’t stay missing for long – not unless she’s gotten herself killed.’

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

‘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 – are 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. 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 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. 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.’

She pushed herself upright with her walking stick. ‘Put yourself in their shoes. They want nothing to change, because they feel threatened by change – their status is tenuous. A
postal network is a packet-switched network, like your internet. World-walkers carry packets. If world-walkers drift away from it, the bandwidth drops, and thus, its profitability. New ventures
divert vital human capital. So they’re in favor of producing more world-walkers, and locking them into the family trade. And they’re against exploration, because they’re
scrambling to stay on top of the dung heap.’

‘Sounds like –’ Mike could think of a number of people it sounded like, uncomfortably close to home –
Change the subject.
‘What about the
progressives?’

‘We want change, simple as that. Miriam observed that we are mired in a business that scales in direct proportion to the number of world-walkers, like a service business. She suggested
– and her uncovering another world provided the opportunity – that we switch to what she called a technology-transfer model, trading information between universes.’

‘How many are there?’ he asked.

‘At least three. We thought two, until a year ago. Now we know there are three, and we suspect there are many more. Yours is the most advanced we know of, but what might be lurking out
there? We can trade, Mr. Fleming. We could be
very useful
to the United States of America. But first we need a . . . change of management? Yes, a change of management. We originated in a
feudal realm, and our ability is hereditary: don’t underestimate the effects of reproductive politics on the Clan’s governance. Before we can change the way we do things, before we can
end our unfortunate reliance on illegal trafficking, we need to break the grip of the conservative factions on the council, and to do that we need to entirely overturn our family and tribal
foundations.’

‘Your family structures?’

‘Yes.’ Olga pulled a face: Iris either ignored it, or pretended to do so. ‘You must be aware of the implications of artificial insemination. There’s been a quiet argument
going on within the Clan’s council for a generation now, over whether it is our destiny to continue existing as braided matrilineal families in a patriarchal society, or to become . . . well,
not a family organization any more, but one open to anyone born with the ability, whatever their parentage.’

Mike shut his eyes.
I think my brain just melted,
he thought. ‘Who are the progressives?’

‘Myself for one, to your very great good fortune. My half-brother for another, although he is as circumspect in public as befits the head of the Clan’s external security organization
– a seat of significant power on the council. There are others. You do not need to know who they are. If you’re captured or tortured, what you don’t know you can’t give
away.’

‘And the conservatives?’

‘Miriam’s Great-Uncle Henryk, if he’s still alive. He was the late king’s spymaster in chief. My mother, Hildegarde, who is also Miriam’s grandmother. Baron Oliver
Hjorth, about two-thirds of the council . . . too many to enumerate.’

‘Okay. So you want me to set up a covert channel between you – your faction – and my agency? Or just me?’

‘Just you, at first. You’re injured. When you are back on your feet I will contact you. You will excuse me, but I am afraid I will require certain actions from you in order to
demonstrate that you are trustworthy. Tokens of trust, if you like.’