The Clan Corporate

DIFFERENCES OF OPINION

What the hell do you think you’re doing in my office?” Miriam asked in a dangerous voice.

The man in the swivel chair turned round slowly and stared at her with expressionless eyes. “Running it,” he said slowly.

“Ah. I see.”

The office was cramped, a row of high stools perched in front of the wooden angled desks that formed one wall: they were the only occupants. Miriam had just stepped through the front door, not even bothering to go check on the lab. She’d meant to hang her coat up first, then go find Roger or the rest of the lab team before chasing up the paperwork and calling on her solicitor and then on Sir Alfred Durant, her largest customer. Instead of which—

“Morgan, isn’t it? Just who told you you were running the show?”

Morgan leaned back in his swivel chair. “The thin white duke.” He smiled lazily. She’d met Morgan before: a strong right hand, basically, but not the sharpest tool in the box when it came to general management. “Angbard. He sent me over here after the takedown in Boston. Said I was too hot to stay over there, and he needed someone to keep an eye on things here. Anyway, it’s on autopilot, just ticking over. Every week I get a set of instructions, and execute them.” His smile faded. “I don’t recall being notified that you had permission to be here.”

“I don’t recall having given Angbard permission to manage my company,” Miriam said tensely. “Never mind the fact that he knows as much about running a tech R&D bureau as I know about fly-fishing. Neither do you, is my guess. What have you been up to while I was in Niejwein?” It was a none-too-subtle jab, to tell Morgan that she had the ear of important people. Maybe it worked: he stopped smiling and sat up.

“Expansion plans—the new works—are on hold. I had to let two of your workmen go, they were insubordinate—”

“Workmen?” She leaned across the desk toward him. “Which workmen?”

“I’d have to look their names up. Some dirty-fingered fellow from the furnace room, spent all his time playing with rubber—”

“Jesus. Christ.” Miriam stared at him with thinly concealed contempt. “You fired Roger, you mean.”

“Roger? Hmm, that may have been his name.”

“Well, well, well.” Miriam breathed deeply, flexing her fingertips, trying to retain control. Give me strength! “You know what this company makes, don’t you?”

“Brake pads?” Morgan sniffed dismissively. Like most of the Clan’s sharp young security men, he didn’t have much time for the plebian pursuits of industrial development.

“No.” Miriam took another deep breath. “We’re a design bureau. We design brakes—better brakes than anyone else in New Britain, because we’ve got a forty- to fifty-year lead in materials science thanks to our presence in the United States—and sell licenses to manufacture our designs. So. Did it occur to you that it might just be a bad idea to fire our senior materials scientist?”

Morgan shook his head minutely, but his eyes narrowed. “That was a scientist?”

I’m going to strangle him, Miriam thought faintly, so help me I am. “Yes, Morgan, Roger is a real live scientist. They don’t wear white coats here, you see, nor do they live in drafty castles in Bavaria and carry around racks of smoking test tubes. Nor do they wear placards round their necks that say SCIENTIST. They actually work for a living. Unlike some people I could mention. I spent five months getting Roger up to speed on some of the new materials we were introducing—I was going to get him started on productizing cyanoacrylate adhesives, next!—and you went and, and sacked him—”

She stopped. She was, she realized, breathing too fast. Morgan was leaning backward again, trying to get away from her. “I didn’t know!” he protested. “I was just doing what Angbard told me. Angbard said no, don’t buy the new works, and this artisan told me I was a fool to my face! What was I meant to do?”

Miriam came back down to earth. “You’ve got a point about Angbard,” she admitted. “Leave him to me, I’ll deal with him when I can get through to him.” Morgan nodded rapidly. “Did he tell you to shut down the business? Or just put the expansion on hold?”

“The latter,” Morgan admitted. “I don’t think he’s paying much attention to what goes on here. He’s fighting fires constantly at present.”

“Well, he could have avoided adding to them right here if he’d left me in charge; the one thing you can’t afford to do with a business like this is ignore it. How many points are you on?”

Morgan hesitated for a moment. “Five.” Five thousandths of the gross take, in mob-speak.

Ten, or I’m a monkey’s aunt. “Okay, it’s like this. Angbard wants a quiet life. Angbard doesn’t need to hear bad news. But if you let this company drift it will be an ex-company very fast—it’s a start-up, do you know what that means? It’s got just one major product and one major customer, and if Sir Alfred realizes we’re drifting he’ll cut us loose. He can afford to tie us up in court until we go bust or until Angbard has to bail us out, and he’ll do that if we don’t show signs of delivering new products he can use. I think you can see that going bust would be bad, wouldn’t it? Especially for your points.”

“Yes.” Morgan was watching her with ill-concealed fear now. “So what do you think I should do?”

“Well—” Miriam hesitated for a moment, then pressed on. What the hell can he do? It’s my way or the highway! “I suggest you listen to me and run things my way. No need to tell Angbard, not yet. When he sends you instructions you just say ‘yes sir,’ then forward them to me, and I’ll tell you how to implement them, what else needs doing, and so on. If Angbard doesn’t want me expanding fast, fine: I can work around that. In the short term, though, we’ve got to position the company so that it’s less vulnerable—and so that when we’re ready to expand we can just pump money in and do it. In the long term, I work on Angbard. I haven’t been able to get in to see him for months, but the crisis won’t last forever—you leave him to me. I can’t be around as much as I want—I’ve got this week to myself, but they keep dragging me back to the capital and sooner or later I’m liable to be stuck there for a while—so you’re going to be my general manager here. If you want the job, and if you follow orders until you’ve learned enough about the way things work not to sack our most important employee because you’ve mistaken him for the janitor.”

“Hah.” He looked sour. “What’s in it for me?”

Miriam shrugged. “You’ve got five points. Do you want that to be five points of nothing, or five points on an outfit that’s going to be turning over the equivalent of a hundred million dollars a year?”

“Ah. Okay.” Morgan nodded, slowly this time. Miriam put on her best poker face. She wasn’t happy; Morgan was barely up to the job and was a long way from her first choice for a general manager, but on the other hand he was here. And willing to be bribed, which made everything possible. If there was one thing the Clan had taught Miriam, it was the importance of being able to hammer out a quick compromise when one was needed, to build coalitions on the fly—and to recognize when a palm crossed with gold would trump weeks of negotiations. Normally she was bad at it, as events in Niejwein had demonstrated, but here was an opportunity to do it right. “I’ll take it,” he said, with barely concealed ill-grace. “You didn’t leave me a choice, did you?”

“Oh, you had a choice.” She smiled, humorlessly. “You could have decided to wreck the company I created and screw yourself out of a fortune at the same time. Not much of a choice, is it?”

“Okay, my lady capitalist. So what do you suggest I do? Now that I’m running this business under your advice?” He crossed his arms.

Miriam walked around the desk. “You start by giving me back my chair,” she said. “And then we go look round the shop and come up with an action plan. But I can tell you this much, the first item on it will be to track down Roger and offer him his old job back. Along with all the back pay he lost when you sacked him. Now”—she gestured at the door—“shall we go and assess the damage?”

Five days of hard work, stressful and unpleasant, passed her by like a bad dream. At the end of the first day, Miriam went home to her house on the outskirts of Cambridgetown, to find it shuttered, dark, and cold, the servants nowhere to be found. On the second day, she met with her company lawyer, Bates; on the third day, Morgan reported finding the misplaced Roger; and on the fourth day, she actually began to feel as if she was getting somewhere. The agency Bates recommended had sent her a cook, a gardener, and a maid, and the house was actually inhabitable again. (In the meantime, she’d spent two nights in the Brighton Hotel, rather than repeat the first night’s fitful shivering on a dust-sheeted sofa.) A visit to Roger, cap in hand, had begun to convince him that it was all an unfortunate mistake, but she was getting very tired of telling everybody that she’d been hospitalized with a fever during a business trip to Derry City and had taken a month to convalesce afterward. Whether they believed the story . . . well, why hadn’t she written? Never mind. Her earlier reputation for mystery and eccentricity, formerly a social handicap of the worst kind, suddenly came in handy.

On the fifth day, while Morgan was away performing his corvée duty for the Clan, a parcel arrived.

Miriam was in the office that morning, going over the accounts carefully—Morgan had left that side of things almost completely to Bates’s clerk, and Miriam wanted to double-check him—when the bell outside the window rang. She stood up and slid the window back. “Yes?” she asked.

“Delivery.” An eyebrow rose. “Hah! Fancy seeing you here. Sign, please.” It was Sharp Suit Number Two from the verminous hole of a post office near Chicago, wearing a fetching magenta tailcoat over the oddly flared breeches that seemed to be the coming fashion for gentlemen this year.

“Thanks.” Miriam signed off on his pad. “Want to come in? Or . . . ?”

“No, no, must be going,” he said hastily. “Just didn’t realize this was a Clan operation.”

“It is.” Miriam nodded. Isn’t it? she asked herself. “Good day to you.”

“Adieu.” He tipped his bicorn hat at her, then turned away. She slid the window closed and carried the parcel over to the desk. Inside it were two large plastic bottles of RIFINAH-300 tablets and a handwritten note from Paulette: Here’s your first item, the other will be ready by tomorrow. “Good old Paulie,” Miriam muttered to herself, smiling. She tucked the bottles into her shoulder-bag, went back to the accounts. They’d wait until after lunch. Then she had to go and visit a friend.

Lunch. Standing up stiffly, Miriam put the heavy ledger back in its place on the shelf, then walked through into the laboratory. John Probity was bent over a test apparatus, tightening something with a spanner. “I shall be calling on a business contact after lunch,” Miriam announced to his back, “so I may not be back this afternoon. If you could shut up shop in the evening I would be obliged. Either I, or Mr. Morgan, will be in the office tomorrow if anyone calls.”

“Aye, mam,” Probity grunted. A fellow of grim determination and few words, the only time she’d ever seen him look happy was when she’d announced that Roger would be rejoining the company on Monday next. So rather than waiting for any further response, Miriam turned on her heel and headed out to catch a cab back home. Not only was she hungry, she needed a change of clothes: it would hardly do for her to be seen in the vicinity of Burgeson the pawnbroker while dressed for the office—that is, as a respectable moneyed widow of some independent means. Lips might flap, and flapping lips in his vicinity had an alarming tendency to draw the attention of the Royal Constabulary.

The electric streetcar rattled its way across the trestle bridge over the river, swaying slightly as it went. The air was slightly hazy, a warm, damp summer afternoon that smelled slightly of smoke. Traffic was heavy, horse-drawn carts and steam trucks rumbling and rattling past the streetcar, drivers shouting at one another—Miriam peered out of the window, watching for her stop. She’d traded her dove-gray shalwar suit and cape for the pinafore of a domestic, worn with a slightly threadbare straw hat. With the “Gillian” identity papers tucked in her shabby shoulder-bag, there was nothing to mark her out as anything other than a scullery maid on a scarce day off, except the two jars of pills in her bag—and she’d decanted them into glass bottles rather than leaving them in their original plastic wrappers. Nothing to it, she thought dreamily, staring out at the paddlewheel steamers on the Charles River, letting a beam of sunlight warm her face. I could be anyone I want. Once you took the first step and got used to the idea of living under a false identity, it was easy . . .

It was a seductive fantasy, but it was hardly practical. Not with so many strange relatives wanting to get their claws into her skin, to graft a piece of her onto the old family tree. A year ago she’d been an only child, adopted at that, with no relatives but an elderly mother and a daughter she hadn’t seen in years. Now, she found she craved nothing quite as much as placid anonymity. I want my freedom back, she realized. No amount of money or power can make up for losing it. It was something that the Clan, with their sprawling extended families and their low-tech background, didn’t seem to understand about her. A flash of anger: I’m just going to have to take it back, aren’t I?

She’d grown up in a world where she’d been led to expect that she could create her own identity, her own success story, rather than vicariously acquiring her identity from her role in a hierarchy, the way the Clan seemed to expect her to. And it was at times like this—when independence seemed a streetcar ride away—that their expectations were at their most tiresome and her natural instinct to rebel came to the fore, an instinct bolstered by the self-confidence she’d acquired from starting up her own business in this strange, subtly alien city.

Highgate High Street, tall brick-fronted houses huddling against one another as if for comfort against the winter gales. Holmes Alley, piles of uncleared refuse lining the gutters. She stepped around the worst of the filth carefully. The shop front was shuttered and dark, and her heart gave a small downward lurch. I thought they had let him go. Or have they arrested him again? Miriam glanced over her shoulder, then walked past the shop to the battered door with the bellpull: E Burgeson, Esq. When she tugged, it took almost a second for the rattle of the doorbell upstairs to reach her. She waited for the chimes to die away, waited and waited, pulled the doorbell again, waited some more. Damn, he’s not home, she thought. She began to turn away, just as there was a click from the latch.

“Please, no deliveries—” A hideous fit of coughing doubled the man in the doorway over, racking him painfully.

Miriam stared. Burgeson the pawnbroker, her first contact in New Britain, possibly the nearest thing to a friend she had here, was coughing his lungs bloody.

“Erasmus?” she asked. “You’re ill, aren’t you?” Shit, he looks awful, she realized, abruptly worried. In the dusty sunlight filtering down between the houses he looked half dead already.

“Euh, euw—” He tried to straighten up, succeeded after another bout of rattling coughing. “Miriam? How—hah—good to see you.” Cough. “But not in. This state.”

“Let’s go inside,” she suggested firmly. “I want to take a look at you.”

Miriam followed Burgeson’s halting progress up the steeply pitched spiral staircase, up to the front door of his apartment. She’d been here before, seen the cavernous twelve-foot ceiling walled on both sides by dusty, tottering shelves of books, the perfectly circular living room with its overstuffed sofa and scratched grand piano. The genteel bachelor-pad disarray of a cultured life going slowly downhill in the grip of chronic illness. Much of his life was a mystery to her, but she’d picked up some tantalizing hints. He’d once had a family, before he’d spent seven years in one of his majesty’s logging camps out in the northwestern wilderness. And he wasn’t as old as he looked. But his usual gauntness had now given way to the stooped, cadaverous, sunken-cheeked look of the terminally ill. “Make yourself at home. Can I”—he paused for the coughing fit—“make you a pot of tea?” He finished on a croak.

Miriam perched tensely on the edge of the sofa. “Yes, please,” she said. Remembering the pain of a childhood vaccination, she added, “It’s the consumption, isn’t it?” Consumption. The white death, tuberculosis. He’d picked it up in the camps, been in remission for a long time. But this is as bad as I’ve ever seen him—

“Yes.” He shuffled toward the kitchen. “I’ve not so many months left in me.”

He’s whistling past the graveyard, she realized, appalled. “How old are you, Erasmus?” she called through the doorway.

“Thirty-nine.” The closing kitchen door cut the rest off. Miriam stared after him, slightly horrified. She’d taken him for at least a decade older, well into middle age. This was a roomy apartment, top of the line for the working classes in this time and place. It had luxuries like indoor plumbing, piped town gas, batteries for electricity. But it was no place to live alone, with tuberculosis eating away at your lungs. She stood up and followed the sounds through to the kitchen.

“Erasmus—” She paused in the doorway. He had his back turned to her, washing his hands thoroughly under a stream of water piped from the coal-fired stove.

“Yes?” He half-turned, his face in shadow.

“Have you eaten in the past hour or two?” she asked.

Evidently she’d surprised him, for he shut the tap off and turned round, drying his hands on a towel. “What kind of question is that to be asking?” He cocked his head on one side, and something of the old Erasmus flickered into light.

“I’m asking if you’ve eaten,” she said impatiently, tapping her toe.

“Not recently, no.” He put the towel down and reached back into his pocket for his handkerchief.

“Okay.” She dug around in her bag. “I’ve got something for you. You’re certain what you’ve got is consumption?”

“Ahem—” He coughed, hacking repeatedly, into the handkerchief. “Yes, Miriam, it’s the white death.” He looked grim. “I’ve seen it take enough of my friends to know my number’s come up.”

“Okay.” She tipped two tablets out into the palm of her hand, held them out toward him: “I want you to take these right now. Wash them down with tea, and make sure you don’t eat anything for half an hour afterwards.”

He looked at her in confusion, not taking the tablets. After a moment he smiled. “More of your utopian nonsense and magic, Miriam? Think this’ll cure me and make me whole again?”

Miriam rolled her eyes. “Humor me. Please?”

“Ah, well. I suppose so.” He took the two tablets and swallowed them one at a time, looking slightly disgusted. “What are they meant to do? I’ve got no time for quack nostrums as a rule . . .” The kettle began to whistle, and he turned back to the stove to pour water into a tarnished metal teapot.

“Remember the DVD player I showed you? The movie?” Miriam asked his turned back.

He froze.

“It’s not magical,” she added. “You need to take two of these tablets at the same time, on an empty stomach, every day without fail, for six months. That should—I hope—stop the disease from progressing. It won’t make your lungs heal from the damage already done, and there’s a chance, about one in ten, that it won’t work, or that it’ll make you feel even more sick, in which case I’ll have to find some different medicine for you. But you should lose the coughing in a couple of weeks and begin to feel better in a month. Don’t stop taking them, though, until six months are up, or it may come back.” She paused. “It’s not a utopia I come from, and the drugs don’t always work. But they’re better than anything I’ve seen here.”

“Not a utopia.” He turned to face her, holding the teapot. “You’ve got some very strange notions, young lady.”

“I’m thirty-three, old man. You want to put that teapot down before you spill it? And no, it’s not a utopia. Thing is, the bac—germs—that cause consumption, they evolve over time to resist the drugs. If you stop taking the medicine before you’re completely cured, there’s a chance that you’ll develop a resistant strain of infection and these drugs will stop working. Too many homeless people where I come from stopped taking them when they felt better—result is, there are still people dying of tuberculosis in New York City.” He was halfway back to the living room as she followed him, lecturing his receding back. “That stuff is the cheap first-line treatment. And you’ll by god finish the bloody course, because I need you alive!”

He put the teapot down. When he turned round he was smiling broadly. “Hah! Now that’s a surprise, ma’am.”

“What?” Miriam, stopped in midstream, was perplexed.

He exhaled through a gap between his teeth. “You’ve shown no sign of needing anyone ever before, if I may be blunt. A veritable force of nature, that’s you.”

Miriam sat down heavily. “A force of nature with family problems. And a dilemma.”

“Ah. I see. And you want to tell me about it?”

“Well—” She paused. “Later. What brought the tuberculosis back? How long did they hold you for?” How have you been? she wanted to ask, but that might imply an intimacy in their relationship that had never been explicit in the past.

“Oh, questions, questions.” He poured tea into two china cups, neither of them chipped. “Always the questions.” He chuckled painfully. “The kind of questions that turn worlds upside down. One lump or two?”

“None, thank you.” Miriam accepted a cup. “Did they charge you?”

“No.” Burgeson looked unaccountably irritated, as if the Political Police’s failure to charge him reflected negatively on his revolutionary credentials. “They just banged me up and squatted in my shop.” He brightened: “Some party or parties unknown—and not related to my friends—did them an extreme mischief on the premises.” He cracked his knuckles. “And I was in custody! Clearly innocent! The best alibi!” He managed not to laugh. “They still charged me with possession—went through the bookshelves, seems I’d missed a tract or two—but the beak only gave me a month in the cells. Unfortunately that’s when the cough came back, so they kicked me out to die on the street.”

“Bastards,” Miriam said absently. Burgeson winced slightly at the unladylike language but held his tongue. “I’ve been seeing a lot of that.” She told him about the train journey, about Marissa and her mother who was afraid Miriam was an informer or police agent. “Is something happening?”

“Oh, you should know better than to ask me that.” He glanced at her speculatively. When she nodded slightly, he went on: “The economy.” He raised a finger. “It’s in the midden. Spinning its wheels fit to blow a boiler. We have plenty out of work, queues for broth around the street corners—bodies sleeping in the streets, dying in the gutter of starvation in some cases. Go walk around Whitechapel or Ontario if you don’t believe it. There’s a shortage of money, debtors are unable to pay their rack, and I am having to be very careful who I choose to give the ticket to. Nobody likes a pawnbroker, you know. And that’s just the top of it: I’ve heard rumors that in the camps they’re going through convicts’ teeth in search of gold, can you believe it? Claiming it as Crown property. Secundus.” He raised another finger. “The harvest is piss-poor. It’s been getting worse for a few years, this unseasonable strange weather and peculiar storms, but this year it hit the corn. And with a potato blight rotting the spuds in the field—” He shrugged. A third finger: “Finally, there is the game of thrones. Which heats up apace, as the dauphin casts a greedy eye at our beloved royal father’s dominions in the Persian Gulf. He’s an ambitious little swine, the dauphin, looking to shore up his claim to the iron throne of Caesar in St. Petersburg, and a short victorious war that would leave French boots a-cooling in the Indian ocean would line his broadcloth handsomely.” Erasmus smiled thinly. “Would you like me to elaborate?”

“Um, no.” Miriam shook her head. “Different players, but the game’s the same.” She sipped her tea. Global climate change? What is the world’s population here, anyway? Suddenly she had a strange vision, a billion coal-fired cooking stoves staining the sky with as bad a smog as a billion SUVs. Convergence . . .

“So times are bad and the Constabulary are getting heavyhanded. The Evil Empire is rattling its sabers and threatening to invade, just to add to the fun. And the economy is stuck in a liquidity trap that’s been getting worse for months, with deflation setting in . . . ?” She shook her head again. “And I thought things were bad back home.”

“So where have you been?” Erasmus asked, cocking his head to one side. There was something birdlike about his movements, but now Miriam could see that it was a side effect of the disease eating him from the inside out, leaving him gaunt and huge-eyed. “I thought you’d abandoned me.” He said it in such a self-consciously histrionic tone that she almost laughed.

“Nothing so spectacular! After you were arrested, the shit hit the fan”—she ignored the wince and continued—“and—well. The people who were trying to kill me have been neutralized. But one of them defected to the police in my own . . . in the world I grew up in. He, his man, killed—” She stopped for a moment, unable to continue. “Roland’s dead. And, and.” Nothing else matters in comparison. It was true; she couldn’t care less about everything. Roland’s absence still felt like a gaping hole in her life, every time she woke up, every time she noticed it.

After a few seconds she forced herself to continue. “The Clan’s entire fortune there, in my world, is based on smuggling. They’ve been driven underground. Some of them seem to have blamed me for it; as a result, they’ve been keeping me on a very short leash. I’m not the family black sheep anymore, but I’m not exactly trusted, and it took me a lot of work just to be allowed out here on my own. Some of them have got a scheme to marry me off. They’re big on arranged marriages,” she added bitterly. “It’s a good way of silencing inconveniently loud women.”

“You’re not so easy to silence,” Erasmus noted after she’d stopped talking. He smiled. “Which is a good thing: it is our willingness to allow ourselves to be silenced easily that allows scoundrels to get away with so much, as a friend of mine put it—you might like to drop in on her next time you’re in New London, incidentally. She’s another loud woman who doesn’t believe in being silenced. She’s called Margaret, Lady Bishop, and you can find her at Hogarth Villas: I think you’ve got a lot in common.” He cracked his knuckles again. “But you haven’t told me why you wanted to see me. Much less, why you wanted to save my life.”

“I didn’t?” She shook herself. “Damn, I’m stupid. It’s—well. Look, I managed to steal a week over here, and it’s nearly over, and I’ve wasted most of it repairing the damage Morgan inflicted on my company through neglect—”

“I thought you said he was stupid and lazy?”

“He is. But—”

“Well then, imagine how much damage he could have done if he was stupid and energetic.”

She pulled a face. “I did: that’s why I made him general manager. I think I’ve got him sufficiently house-trained to minimize the damage in future. Only time will tell.”

“Ah, nepotism,” Erasmus said, nodding sagaciously. “But your week is up and you have nothing to show for it?”

“Well.” She looked at him speculatively. “I’ve been doing some thinking. And it seems to me that I’ve been letting them take me for granted. They have their own set of assumptions about how I should behave, and if I let them apply those assumptions to me they’ll back me into a corner. So I need to do something, acquire leverage. Make them let me alone.”

“That could be dangerous,” Erasmus said neutrally.

“You bet it’s dangerous!” Miriam rolled her teacup between her hands, fidgeting. “They’ve got my mother.” Tight-lipped: “She’s dependent on certain medicines. They think that’s enough to get a handle on me. But if I can establish my autonomy, I can provide her meds. I just have to get them to leave me alone.”

“Hmm. As I understood it, when you first told me about your turbulent family, they wouldn’t leave you alone because you signify an inheritance of enormous wealth, is that not the case?” He raised an eyebrow at her.

“Yes,” she said grudgingly. “Not that it makes a lot of difference to me.”

“Hah. Perhaps not, but they might be reluctant to leave you alone not because they insist on controlling you for control’s own sake but because they fear the disposition of such wealth in directions inimical to their own interests. In which case you will need a tool with which to express your urgency somewhat persuasively . . .”

“I was leaning toward blackmail, myself.” She frowned. “Their pressure is relatively subtle, social expectations and so forth. There are lots of secrets in this kind of culture, embarrassing facts best not aired in public and so on. Given a handful of truths it’s possible to suggest to people that they butt out”—her expression brightened—“and if there’s one thing I’m told I’m good at, it’s digging up embarrassing truths.”

Erasmus tried again. “But, that is to say—you are applying your not-inconsiderable reasoning skills to this as a social paradox. Your real problem is a temporal, political one. If you try to blackmail them—”

“They’re aristocrats. The personal is political,” she said dismissively. “Once you get a pig by the nose, its body will follow, right?”

“Right,” he said reluctantly.

“I’d better hope so,” she added, “because if I’m wrong about them, well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. So I’m not going to worry about it. But everything I’ve seen so far tells me that it’s going to work. Matthias blackmailed Roland . . .” She stared bleakly at the thin patina of dust on top of the lid of Erasmus’s piano. “Blackmail seems to be a way of life inside the Clan. So I’d better get with the program.”

“Hi, Paulie!”

Miriam waved from across the station concourse, smiling when Paulette spotted her and headed straight to where she was standing.

“Hey, Miriam, that’s a great coat! You’re looking good. Listen, there’s this new brasserie just outside the center, you up to eating or do you just want to hang out? We could go back to the office—”

“Eating would be good.” Miriam rubbed her forehead. “Made two crossings this morning; I need something in my stomach so I can take the ibuprofen.” She winced theatrically. “I’d rather not go near the office,” she added quietly as Paulie led her toward one of the side doors of the station. “Too much chance someone’s bugged it.”

“Uh-huh.” Paulette didn’t break stride: not that Miriam had expected her to. Back when Miriam had been a senior reporter for The Industry Weatherman Paulette had been her research assistant—right up until one of Miriam’s investigations had gotten them both escorted off the premises with extreme prejudice. Then when Miriam had gotten mixed up with the Clan she’d hired Paulie to look after her interests back home in Boston, United States timeline. Paulette knew about the Clan, had grown up in a tough neighborhood where some of the residents had mob connections. Angbard knew about Paulette, which meant there was a very real risk the office was indeed bugged, and thus Miriam had arranged to meet up with her at Penn Station.

The brasserie was crowded but not totally logjammed yet, and Paulette managed to get them a table near the back. “I need breakfast,” Miriam said, frowning. “What’s good?”

“The bruschetta’s passable, and I was going to go for the spaghetti al polpette.” Paulette shrugged. “To drink, the usual hangover juice, right?”

“Yeah, a double OJ it is.” At which point the waitress caught up with them and Miriam held back until Paulette had ordered. “Now. Did you get me the stuff I asked for?”

“Sure.” Miriam felt something against her leg—the plastic shopping bag Paulie had been carrying. It was surprisingly heavy—lots of paper, a box file perhaps. “It’s in there.”

“Okay. All of that is for me?” Miriam stared, perplexed.

Paulette grinned. “Give me credit.”

“Yeah, I know you’re good—but that much?”

“I have my ways,” Paulie said smugly. Quieter: “Don’t worry, I kept it low-key. First up are the public filings, SEC stuff, all hard copy. The downloads I did in a cybercafe, using an anonymous Hotmail account I never access from home. To pay for the searches, I got an account with a special online bank: they issue one-time credit card numbers you can use to pay for something over the Net. The idea is, you use the number once, the transaction is charged to your account at the bank, then the number goes away. Anyone wants to trace me, they’re going to have to break the bank’s security first, okay?”

“You’ve been getting very good at the anonymous stuff,” Miriam said admiringly.

“Listen, knowing whose toes you might be treading on kind of incentivized me! I’m not planning on taking any risks. Look, at first sight it all looks kosher—I mean, the clinic is just a straightforward reproductive medicine outfit, specializing in fertility problems, and the company you fingered, Applied Genomics, is a respectable pharmaceutical outfit. They manufacture diagnostic instruments, specializing in lab tests for inborn errors of metabolism: simple test-tube stuff that’s easy to use in the field. They’ve got a neat line in HIV testing kits for the developing world, that kind of thing. You were right about a connection, though. Next in the stack after the filings, well, I found this S.503(c) charity called the Humana Reproductive Assistance Foundation. Applied Genomics pays a big chunk of money to HRAF every year and none of the shareholders have ever queried it, even though it’s in six or sometimes seven figures. HRAF in turn looks pretty kosher, but what I was able to tell is that for the past twenty years they’ve been feeding money to a whole bundle of fertility clinics. The money is earmarked for programs to help infertile couples have children—what is this, Miriam? If it’s another of your money-laundering leads, it looks like a dead end.”

“It’s not a money-laundering lead. I think it really is a fertility clinic.” The drinks arrived and Miriam paused to take a tablet and wash it down with freshly squeezed orange juice. “It’s something else I ran across, okay?”

Paulette glanced away.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. Been having a shitty time lately.”

“You have?” Paulette shook her head, then looked back at Miriam. “Things haven’t been so rosy here, either.”

“Oh no. You go first, okay?”

“Nah, it’s nothing. Man trouble, no real direction. You’ve heard it all before.” Paulie backed off and Miriam eyed her suspiciously.

“You’re tap-dancing around on account of Roland, aren’t you? Well, there’s no need to do that. I’ve—I’ve gotten used to it.” Miriam glanced down as the waitress slid a platter of bruschetta onto the table in front of her. “It doesn’t get any better, but it gets easier to deal with the, with the . . .” She gave up and picked up a piece of the bread, nibbling on it to conceal her sudden spasm of depression.

Paulette stared at her. “So call me an insensitive cow, but what else is eating you?” she asked.

“It’s”—Miriam waved a hand, her mouth full—“reproductive politics. You’d think they’d figure I’m too old for it but no, you’re never too old for the Clan to start looking for something to do with your ovaries. Fallout from the civil war they had a few decades ago: they don’t have enough world-walkers, so the pressure is on those they do have to breed like a bunny. But I didn’t have the story completely straight before. You know all the stuff about arranged marriages I told you? I should have asked who did the arranging. It turns out to be the old ladies, everyone’s grandmother. There’s a lot of status tied up in it, and it seems I got a whole bunch of folks ticked off at me just because I exist. To make matters worse, Ma’s turned strange on me—she’s gone native, even seems to be playing along with the whole business. I think she’s being blackmailed, crudely, over her medication. The king, his mother’s part of the Clan, he’s trying to set up the younger son, who is a basket case into the bargain—brain damage at an early age—and he’s got me in his sights. And the elder son seems to have decided to hate me for some reason. Don’t know if it’s connected, but there’s more.” Miriam took another mouthful of orange juice before she could continue.

“I ran across this secret memo, from the director of the Gerstein Center to Angbard, of all people, talking about the results of some project that Applied Genomics is funding. And I smell a rat. A great, big, dead-and-decomposing-under-the-front-stoop, reproductive politics rodent. Angbard is paying for in-vitro fertilization treatments. Meanwhile everybody keeps yammering about how few world-walkers there are and how it’s every woman’s duty to spawn like a rabbit, and then there’s this stuff about looking for W-star heterozygotes. Carriers for some kind of gene, in other words. And I just learned of a genetic test that’s become available in the past year, god knows from where, that can tell if someone’s a carrier or an active world-walker. You fill in the dotted lines, Paulie—you tell me I’m not imagining things, okay?” Miriam realized her voice had risen, and she looked around hastily, but the restaurant was busy and the background racket was loud enough to cover her.

Paulette stared at her, clutching her bread knife in one fist as if it were the emergency inflation toggle on a life jacket. “I’ve never heard such a . . . !” She put the knife down, very carefully. “You’re serious.”

“Oh yes.” Miriam took another bite of bruschetta. It tasted of cardboard, despite the olive oil and chopped tomato. “What would be the point of being flippant?”

Paulette picked up her bruschetta and nibbled at it. “That is so monumentally paranoid that I don’t know where to begin. You think Angbard is paying for IVF for these families and using donors from the Clan.” She thought for a minute. “It wouldn’t work, would it? They wouldn’t be world-walkers?”

“Not as I understand it, no.” Miriam finished her starter. The din and clatter of the restaurant was making her headache worse. “But they’d have a huge pool of, in effect, outer family members. Half of them female. Thousands, adding many hundreds more every year. Suppose—how long has this been going on for? How long has HRAF been going?”

“I don’t know.” Paulette looked uncomfortable. “Sixteen years?”

“Okay. Suppose. Imagine HRAF is about creating a pool of outer family people living in the United States who don’t know what they are. In, say, another five years they start hitting age twenty-one. Six hundred . . . call it three hundred women a year. HRAF have their details. They send them all letters asking if they’re willing to accept money to be surrogate mothers. What does a surrogate cost—ten, twenty thousand bucks? Maybe nine out of ten will say no, but that leaves thirty women, each of whom can provide a new world-walker every year—or walkers, you’re not going to tell me that the Gerstein Center isn’t going to dose them with clomiphene, to try for twins or triplets. Call it fifty new world-walkers per year. Say half of the surrogate mothers agree to continue for four years, and you’ve got, let’s see, a hundred and twenty five new world-walkers per annual cohort from Angbard’s breeding program. Paulie, there are only about a thousand world-walkers in the Clan! In just eight years, half the world-walkers will come from this scheme—in twenty years, they’ll outnumber the Clan’s native-born world-walkers, even if the average Clan female produces four world-walking children.” She drank the rest of her orange juice.

“It’s like that movie, The Boys from Brazil,” Paulie murmured. “Cloning up an army of bad guys and making sure they’re raised loyal to the cause.” She looked uncomfortable. “Miriam, I met Angbard. He isn’t the type to do that.”

“Um. No.” Miriam stared at her plate. All of a sudden she didn’t feel hungry. “Charming, ruthless, and manipulative, I’ll grant you. Liable to back a conspiracy to create a test-tube master race? I’m—I don’t see it either. Except, I saw that memo! With my own eyes! If it’s real, it looks like there’s something really smelly going on at that clinic. And I need to get a handle on it.”

“Why?” Paulette asked pointedly. She stabbed at her bruschetta with a knife. “What is getting into you, Miriam? What have they got on you?”

“They—” She stared. “Blackmail is business as usual,” she said bitterly. “I figure I need to get an edge of my own, before they marry me off to the Idiot. Simple as that.”

“Huh.” Paulette put her knife down with exaggerated care. “Miriam. I told you about what things were like when I was growing up.”

“Yes.” Miriam nodded. “Goodfellas. Well, I was born into the mob, I guess, so using their own tactics—blackmail seems to be the family sport—”

“Miriam!” Paulette reached across the table and took her hand. “Listen. As your agent, and as your legal adviser, I would really be a lot happier if you would drop this. You’re right, the clinic shit sounds dirty. But if your uncle is involved, it means money. The tough guys, they used to cut their wives and children a lot of slack—as long as they didn’t try to nose in on the business. You see what I’m saying? This is family business and they’re going to take it a whole lot differently if you go digging—”

“Nuh-uh, no way.” Miriam shook her head vehemently. “I know them, Paulie. They’re more medieval than that. Everything is on the outside, you know? Their politics is entirely personal. So’s their business. If I get the goods on this scheme, then I’ve got a handle on whoever’s running it—” Miriam stopped dead as the waitress sashayed in and scooped up her plate with a smile.

“I still don’t like it.” Paulette frowned. “I mean that. I think you’re misreading them. Just because you’re little miss heiress, it doesn’t make you exempt. They’ve got their code: item number two on it, after ‘don’t talk to the cops,’ is ‘don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.’ And this sounds like exactly the sort of business people wake up dead for sticking their nose into.”

Miriam shrugged. “Paulie, I’ve got status among them. I couldn’t just vanish. Too many people would ask questions.”

“Like they did when you appeared out of nowhere?” Paulette stared at her cynically. “Miriam. Seriously, one last time, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Please, just for me, will you drop it?”

Miriam crossed her arms, irritated. “Who’s paying your wages?”

The main course appeared, savory meatballs in a hot, sweet tomato sauce. Paulie nodded, her face frozen. “Okay, if that’s how you want to do it,” she said quietly. “You’re the boss, you know best. Okay?”

“Oh . . . okay.” I went too far, Miriam realized. Shit. How do I apologize for that? She glanced down at her plate. “Yeah, that’s how I want to play it,” she said. Play it all the way, then apologize. Paulie was a mensch, she’d come round.

“First I have to figure out if it really is what it seems to be. Although given that stuff about W-star heterozygotes, I can’t see what else it might be. Then if I’m right, I have to figure out how to use it. At best”—she bit into a meatball—“it could give me all the leverage I need. They couldn’t touch me, not even my psycho grandmother could. Hmm, great meatballs. So yeah, I think I need to go pay the clinic an anonymous visit.” She flashed Paulette a tentative smile. “Know where I can buy a stethoscope around here?”