The Merchants’ War

Travelers

It was a warm day in New London, beneath the overcast. A slow onshore breeze was blowing, but the air remained humid and close beneath a stifling inversion layer that trapped the sooty, smelly effusions of a hundred thousand oil-burning engines too close to the ground for the comfort of tired lungs.

Two figures walked up the street that led away from Hogarth Villas, arm in arm: a tall, stooped man, his hair prematurely graying, and a woman, her shoulder-length black hair bundled up beneath a wide-brimmed sun hat. The man carried a valise in his free hand. They were dressed respectably but boringly, his suit clean but slightly shiny at elbows and seat, her outfit clearly well worn.

“Where now?” Miriam asked as they reached the end of the row of brick villas and paused at the curb, waiting for a streetcar to jangle and buzz past with a whine of hot electric motors. “Are we going straight back to Boston, or do you have business to attend to first?”

“Come on.” He stepped out into the street and crossed hastily.

She followed: “Well?”

“We need to take the Northside ’car, three miles or so downtown.” He was staring at a wooden post with a streetcar timetable pasted to a board hanging from it. “Then a New Line car to St. Peter’s Cross. I think there’s a salon there.” He glanced sidelong at her hair. “By the time we’ve got that out of the way—well, unless we find a mail express, I don’t think we’ll get back to Boston tonight, so I suggest we take a room in one of the station hotels and entrain at first light tomorrow.”

“Right.” She shrugged, slightly uncomfortably. “Erasmus, when I crossed over, I, um, I didn’t bring any money…”

He glanced up and down the street, then reached into an inner pocket and withdrew a battered wallet. “One, two—all right. Five pounds.” He curled the large banknotes between bony fingertips and slipped them into her hand. “Try not to spend it all at once.”

Miriam swallowed. One pound—the larger unit of currency here—had what felt like the purchasing power of a couple of hundred dollars back home. “You’re very generous.”

He smiled at her. “I owe you.”

“No, you—” She paused, trying to get a grip on the sense of embarrassed gratitude. “Are you still taking the tablets?”

“Yes. It’s amazing.” He shook his head. “But that’s not what I meant. I still owe you for the last consignment you sold me.” A shadow crossed his face. “You needn’t worry about money for the time being. There are lockouts and beggars defying the poor laws on every other street corner. Nobody has money to spend. If I was truly dependent on my business for a living I would be as thin as a sheet of paper by now.”

“There’s no money?” She took his arm again. “What’s the economy doing?”

“Nothing good. We’re effectively at war, which means there’s a blockade of our Atlantic trade and shipping raiders in the Pacific, so it’s hit overseas trade badly. His majesty dismissed parliament and congress last month, you know. He’s trying to run things directly, and the treasury’s near empty: we’ll likely as not be stopped at the Excise bench as we arrive in Boston, you know, just to see if there’s a silver teapot hiding in this valise that could be better used to buy armor plate for the fleet.”

“That’s not good.” Miriam blinked, feeling stupid. How not good? she wondered uneasily. “Is the currency deflating?”

“I’d have said yes, but prices are going up too. And unemployment.” Burgeson smiled humorlessly. “This war crisis is simply too damned soon after the last one, and the harvest last year was a disaster, and the army is over-stretched dealing with civil disorder—they mean local rebellions against the tax inspectorate—on the great plains and down south.” It took Miriam a moment to remember that down south didn’t mean the southern United States—it meant the former Portuguese and Spanish colonies that the New British crown had taken by force in the early nineteenth century, annexing to the empire around the time they’d been rebelling against their colonial masters across the ocean in the world she’d grown up in. “And the price of oil is going up. It’s doubled since this time last year.”

Miriam blinked again. The dust and the smelly urban air were getting to her eyes. That, and something about Burgeson’s complaint sounded familiar…“How’s the government coping?” she asked.

He chuckled. “It isn’t: the king dismissed it. We’re back into the days of fiat reale, like the way King Frederick the Second ran things during the civil war.” He noticed her expression and did a double take. “Seventeen ninety-seven to eighteen hundred and four,” he murmured. “I can find you a book on it if it interests you. Long and the short is, there was a war across the Atlantic and the states of Carolina, Virginia, and Columbia tried to rebel against the Crown, in collusion with the French. They nearly mustered a parliamentary majority for secession, too: invited in a French pretender to take their crown. So Frederick dissolved the traitor parliament and went through the plantation states with fire and the sword. He wasn’t merciful, like your, ah, Mister Lincoln. Frederick was not stupid, though: he recognized the snares of unencumbered absolute power, and he reconvened the estates and allowed them to elect a new parliament—once he’d gibbeted the traitors every twenty feet along the road from Georgetown to New London.”

“That’s martial law, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s worse: it’s the feudal skull showing through the mummified skin of our constitutional settlement.” Erasmus stared into the near distance, then stuck his arm out in the direction of the street. A moment later a streetcar lumbered into view round the curve of the road, wheels grinding against the rails as it trundled to a halt next to the stop. “After you, ma’am.”

Miriam climbed onto the streetcar’s platform, waited while Erasmus paid, then climbed the stairs to the upper deck, her mind whirling. Things have been going downhill fast, she realized: war, a liquidity crisis, and martial law? Despite the muggy warmth of the day, she shivered. Looking around, she realized the streetcar was almost empty. The conductor’s bell dinged and the ’car moved off slowly as Erasmus came up the stairs, his hair blowing in the breeze that came over the open top of the vehicle. Sparks crackled from the pickup on top of the chimney-like tower behind her. “I didn’t realize things were so bad,” she remarked.

“Oh, they’re bad all right,” he replied a little too loudly: “I’ll be lucky to make my rent this month.”

She gave him an old-fashioned look as he sat down beside her. “Afraid of eavesdroppers?” she muttered.

“Yes,” he whispered, almost too quietly to hear.

Whoops. Miriam shut up and stared out the window as the city unrolled to either side. This city might be called New York, but the layout was bewildering; from the citadel and palaces of Manhattan Island—here called New London—to the suburbs sprawling across the mainland around it, Jersey City to Brookhaven, everything was different. There was no orderly grid, but an insane mish-mash of looping and forking curlicues, as if village paths laid out by drunkards had grown together, merging at the edges: high streets and traffic circles and weird viaducts with houses built on top of them. Tenement blocks made of soot-stained brick, with not a single fire escape in sight. In the distance, blocky skyscrapers on the edge of the administrative district around the palace loomed on the skyline, but they weren’t a patch on her New York, the New York of the Chrysler and the Empire State buildings and, not long ago, the twin towers. High above them a propeller aircraft droned slowly across the underside of the clouds, trailing a thin brown smear of exhaust. For a moment she felt very alone: a tourist in the third world who’d been told her ticket home was invalid. I wanted to escape, didn’t I? To cut loose and go where the Clan can’t find me. She pondered the irony of the change in her circumstances: it all seemed so long ago, now.

“Nearly there,” remarked Burgeson, and she noticed his hand tightening on the back of the chair in front of them.

“Nearly where?”

“New Line crossing. Come on.” He unfolded from the seat and rolled towards the staircase, pulling the bell chain on his way. Miriam scrambled to follow him.

There were more people here, and the buildings were higher, and the air smelled of coal smoke and damp even in the summer heat. Miriam followed Burgeson across the street, dodging a horse-drawn cart piled high with garbage and a chuffing steam taxi. A lot of the people hereabouts were badly dressed, their clothing worn and threadbare and their cheeks gaunt: a wheeled stall at one corner was doing a brisk trade, doling out cupfuls of stew or soup to a long queue of shuffling men and women. She hurried to keep up with Erasmus as he walked past the soup kitchen. Stagflation, that’s it, she remembered vaguely. The treasury’s rolling the presses to print their way out of the fiscal crisis triggered by the war and the crop failure, but the real dynamic is deflationary, so wages and jobs are being squeezed even as prices are going up because the currency is devaluing…she remembered the alleyway three nights before, the beggar threatening her with a knife, and abruptly felt sick at the implications. They were starving, she realized. This is the capital. What’s going on, out in the boonies?

Erasmus stopped so suddenly that she nearly ran into his back. “Follow me,” he muttered, then lurched into the road and stuck an arm out. “Cab!” he called, then stepped back sharply to avoid being run over by a steamer. “Get in,” he told her, then climbed in behind. “St. Peter’s Cross,” he called forward to the driver: “An extra shilling if you can get us there fast!”

“Aye, well.”

The driver nodded at him and kicked the throttle open. The cab lurched forward with a loud chuffing noise and a trail of steam as it accelerated, throwing Miriam backwards into the padded seat. Erasmus landed at the other side from her, facing. She grinned at him experimentally. “What’s the hurry?”

“Company.” Burgeson jerked his chin sideways. A strip of cobbled street rattled beneath the cab’s wheels. “We’re best off without them.”

“We were followed?” A sudden sense of dread twisted her stomach. “Who by?”

“Can’t tell.” He reached out and slid the window behind the driver’s head closed. “Probably just a double-cross boy or a thugster, but you can’t be too sure. Worst case, a freelance thief taker trying to make his quota. Nobody you’d want to be nabbed by, that’s for sure.”

“In broad daylight?” she demanded.

He shrugged. “Times are hard.”

Shit. She stared at him. His closed expression spoke volumes. “What am I going to do?” she asked. “My business. My house. They’ll be under surveillance.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure they will be.”

“But what can I—”

“You can start by relaxing,” he said. “And letting the salon dye your hair.” His lips twitched in a brief smile. “Then, once we have checked into the hotel, if you’d honor me with your presence at dinner, you can tell me all about your recent travails. How does that sound?”

“That sounds—” This is going to be tougher than I realized, she thought faintly, as the cab lurched around a corner and pulled in opposite an imposing row of store windows near the base of a large stone building. “—acceptable.”

Late afternoon in NYC, mid-morning in San Francisco. Colonel Smith had brought a laptop and a briefcase full of work with him on the Air Force Gulfstream, holing up at the back of the cabin while Dr. James worked the phones continuously up front. Dr. James had brought along a small coterie of administrative gofers from NSC, and two Secret Service bodyguards: the latter had sized Smith up immediately and, after confirming he was on their watch list, politely asked him to stay where they could keep their eyes on him. Which was fine by Eric. Every time he ventured down from one of the FTO aeries he got a sensation between his shoulder blades as if a sniper’s crosshairs were crawling around there. Even Gillian had noticed him getting jumpy, staring at passing cars when they went places together—in the few snatched hours of domesticity that were all this job was leaving him. Bastards, he thought absently as he paged through the daily briefing roundup, looking for any sign that things weren’t going as badly as he feared. I hope this isn’t a waste of time…

Dr. James had been as infuriatingly unreadable as usual, saying nothing beyond the cryptic hints about some project at UC Berkeley. Lawrence Livermore Labs weren’t exactly on campus in Berkeley—it wasn’t even a daily commute—but that seemed to be where they were going. The gray Gulfstream executive jet touched down at San Francisco International and taxied towards a fenced-in compound where a couple of limos and two SUVs full of security contractors were waiting for them. “Take the second car,” James had told Eric: “The driver will take you to Westgate badge office to check you in before bringing you to JAUNT BLUE.” He nodded. “I’ve got prior clearance and an appointment before I join you.”

“Okay.” Eric swung his briefcase into the back of the Lincoln. “See you there,” he added, but James had already turned on his heel and was heading for the other car.

It took more than an hour to drive out to the laboratory complex, during which time Eric ran and reran his best scenarios for the coming meeting, absent-mindedly working his gyroball exerciser. James wouldn’t be visiting in person if he didn’t think it was important, which means he’ll be reporting to the vice president. Progress. But what are they doing here? He’d pulled the files on the only professor called Armstrong who was currently on faculty at UCSD: some kind of expert on quantum computing. Then he’d had Agent Delaney do a quick academic literature search. A year ago, Armstrong had coauthored a paper with a neurobiologist, conclusively demolishing the Penrose microtubule hypothesis, coming up with a proof that quantum noise would cause decoherence in any circuit relying on tubulin-bound GTP, whatever the hell that was. Then he’d written another paper, about quantum states in large protein molecules, before falling mysteriously silent—along with his research assistants and postdocs. The previous year they’d put their names on eighteen papers: this year, the total was just three, and those were merely citations as co-authors with other research groups.

Quantum computing. Neurobiology. Quantum states in large protein molecules. Eric shook his head over the densely written papers Delaney had copied for him. Then Armstrong dropped off the map, and now James is taking me to see him. He grinned humorlessly. I wonder if this means what I think it means. The gyroball whirred down as he shifted it to his left hand, twisting his wrist continually, trying to drive out the stiffness and shooting pains by constant exercise.

Security at the sprawling laboratory complex—more like a huge university campus than anything else—was pervasive but not heavy-handed at first. His driver, Agent Simms, smoothed the way as he checked in his mobile phone, laptop, and the hand exerciser with the security guards. “You ready to visit JAUNT BLUE now, sir?”

“Take me there.”

Back in the car, it was another five-minute drive past endless rows of windowless buildings. Eric sat back, watching the chain-link fence and the site road unfold around him. One DoD site looked much like any other, but there were signs here for those who knew what to look for. Inner fences. Curious, long berms humped up beneath a carpet of sunburned grass, like state secrets casually swept out of the view of passing spy satellites by a giant security-obsessed housekeeper. Driving past some clearly disused buildings, Simms turned into a side road then pulled over in front of a gate. “Okay, sir, we walk from here. Building forty-seven.”

“Right.” Eric opened the door and got out, feeling the heat start to suck him dry. Late morning and it was already set to be a burning hot summer day. “Which way?”

“Over here.” Simms walked over to one of the disused warehouse units. The walls were simple metal sidings and the doors and windows were missing, the building itself just a hollow shell.

“Here? But it’s abandoned—”

“It’s meant to look that way. Building forty-seven. If you’d follow me? Sir?”

The secret service agent was clearly sure of himself. Someone’s spent a lot on camouflage, Eric told to himself, clutching his briefcase and following behind. What’s going on? The inside of the warehouse was no more promising than the exterior. Huge ceiling panels were missing, evidently the holes where air conditioning units had been stripped out. The concrete loading bay at the rear of the building was dusty and decrepit, the doors missing. Simms walked over to the near side, where a rusty trailer was propped up on blocks. Eric glanced past him, and for the first time noticed something out of place—a black dome, about the size of his fist, fastened to the wall somewhere above head height. Closed circuit cameras? In an abandoned shed?

Simms climbed a ramshackle flight of steps and opened the door of the trailer. “This way, sir.”

Eric relaxed, everything clicking into place. The camera, the abandoned trailer, the shadows thick and black under the trailer—it was all intended to deal with visitors from the Clan. “Okay, I’m coming.” He climbed the steps and found himself in a small lobby behind Simms, who was waiting in front of an inner door with a peephole set in it. The door was made of steel and opened from the inside.

“Agent Simms, Colonel Smith of FTO, visiting JAUNT BLUE,” Simms announced.

A speaker crackled. “Close the outer door now.”

Eric reached back and pulled the door shut. The inner door buzzed for a moment, then whined open sideways to reveal the bare metal walls of a freight elevator. “Neat,” he said admiringly as they descended towards the tunnels under the laboratory complex. “If you can’t go up without being obvious, go down.”

“This all used to be part of the high-energy physics group, back in the sixties,” Simms said laconically. “They repurposed it this year. There are several entrances. Dr. James told me to show you in through the back door.” A back door disguised as a derelict building, complete with spy cameras and probably some kind of remotely controlled defense system: whatever James had going on down here, he didn’t welcome unexpected visitors.

The freight elevator ground to a halt and Eric did a double-take. Jesus, I’ve just fallen into The Man from U.N.C.L.E! He glanced around at the rough-finished concrete walls, fluorescent lights, innumerable pipes and conduits bolted overhead—and at the end of the passage, a vast, brightly lit space.

“Badges, please.” The Marine guards waiting in an alcove off one side of the corridor were armed, and not for show. Smith extended the badge he’d been issued and waited while one of the guards checked him off a list. “You may proceed, sir.”

“Where’s Dr. James’s group?” he asked Simms’s receding back.

“Follow me, sir.”

Smith followed, trying not to gape too obviously. He was used to security procedures on Air Force bases and some other types of sensitive installations, but he’d never seen anything quite like this. The main tunnel was domed overhead, rising to a peak about fifty feet up; it stretched to infinity ahead and behind. There were no windows, but more conduits and the boxy, roaring ducts of a huge air conditioning system overhead. The concrete piles that had once supported a mile-long linear accelerator were still visible on the floor, but the linac itself had long since been removed and replaced by beige office partitions surrounding a forlorn-looking clump of cubicles, and a line of mobile office trailers that stretched along one wall like a subterranean passenger train. The train didn’t go on forever, though, and after they’d walked a couple of hundred feet from the “back door” they reached the end of the column. Beyond it, the concrete tunnel stretched dizzyingly towards a blank wall in the distance, empty but for a grid of colored lines painted on the floor. Lots of room for expansion, he realized.

Simms gestured at the trailer on the edge of the empty floor space. “Dr. James uses Room 65 as his site office when he’s visiting. I believe he’s in a meeting until fifteen hundred, but he told me to tell you that Dr. Hu will be along to give you the dog and pony tour at eleven thirty. If you make yourself at home, I’ll find Dr. Hu and get things started.”

Eric paused at the door to the trailer. “Dr. James didn’t exactly tell me what it is you people do out here,” he said slowly. “Can you fill me in on what to expect?”

Simms frowned. “I think I ought to leave that to Dr. Hu,” he said.

“Is Dr. Hu one of Professor Armstrong’s team?”

Simms nodded. “I’ll go get him.”

“Okay.” Eric climbed the step up to the site office trailer and went inside to wait.

Begin Transcript

“You wanted to s-see me, sir?”

“Yes, yes I did. Have a seat, lad. Your parents: doing well, I hope?”

“…”

“Calm down, there’s a good fellow. Try to relax, I’m not going to bite your head off. I’m sure they’ll be perfectly fine, current emergency notwithstanding. No, the pretender isn’t about to go haring off into the Sennheur marches, and if he does, they’ll have plenty of warning to evacuate. Now, where was I…? Ah, yes. I wanted to ask you about your studies.”

(Mumble.)

“Yes, I know. In the current situation, it’s difficult. But I think it may be possible for you to go back there in the fall, if things work out well.”

“But I’ll be behind. I should be working right now, with my roommates—it’s not like a regular school. They’ll want to know where I was while they were working on our project.”

(Snorts.) “Well, you’ll just have to tell them you were called away by urgent family business. A dying relative, or something. Don’t look at me like that: worse things happen in war time. If you go back to your laboratory at all you will be luckier than many of our less talented children, Huw. But as it happens, I have a little research project for you that I think will smooth your way. One that you and your talking-shop friends will be able to get your teeth into, and that will be much more profitable in the long term.”

“A research project? But you don’t need someone like me—I mean, the kind of research your staff do, begging your pardons in advance, your grace, aren’t exactly where my aptitude lies—”

“Correct. Which is why I want you for a different kind of research.”

“I don’t understand.”

“On the contrary, I think you’ll understand all too well.” (Pause.) “Red or white?”

“Red, please.” (Sound of glass being filled.) “Thank you very much.”

“Show me your locket.”

“My” (coughing) “locket? Uh, sure. Here—”

“Put it there. Yes, open. Don’t focus on it. Now, this one. You can see the difference if you look at them—not too close, now! What do you think?”

“I’m—excuse me, it’s easier to study them if you cover part of the design and compare sections. Less distracting.”

“You sound as if you’ve done that before.”

(Hurriedly): “No sir! But it’s only logical. We’ve been using the Clan sigil for generations. Surely” (pause) “hey, I think the upper right arc of this one is different!”

“It is.” (Sound of small items being cleared away.) “It came from our long-lost, lamentably living, cousins. The Lees. Who, it would appear, discovered the hard way that redesigning the knotwork can have catastrophic consequences.”

(Pause.) “I’d heard they used a different design. But…” (Pause.) “Nobody thought to experiment? Ever?”

“Some of the Lee family did, generations ago. Either they failed to world-walk, or they didn’t come back. After they lost a couple, their elders banned further experimentation. For our part, with no indication that other realms than the two we know of might exist, who would bother even trying? Especially as most of the simple variations don’t work. Look at yourself, Sir Huw! The finest education we can buy you, a graduate student at MIT, and you, too, took the family talent for granted.”

“I, I think—hell. I assumed that if it was possible to do something, it would already have been done, surely?”

“That’s the assumption everyone who has given the subject a moment’s thought comes up with. It tends to deter experimentation, doesn’t it, if you believe an alley of inquiry has already been tried and found wanting? Even if the assumption is wrong.”

“I—I feel dumb.”

(Pause.) “You’re not the only one of us who’s kicking himself. There have been a number of unexplained disappearances over the centuries, and simple murder surely doesn’t explain all of them—but the point is, nobody who succeeded came back to tell the tale. Which brings me to the matter at hand. When Helge reappeared with the family Lee in unwilling thrall, I had reason to send for the archivists. And to have my staff conduct certain preliminary tests. It appears that the Lee family design has never been tested in the United States of America. And our clan symbol doesn’t work in New Britain. That is, it doesn’t in the areas that correspond to the Gruinmarkt. The east coast. But that’s all we know, Huw, and it worries me. In the United States, the authorities have made their most effective attack on our postal service for a hundred years. This would be a crisis in its own right, but on top of that we have the pretender to the throne raising the old aristocracy against us in Niejwein. He can be contained eventually—we have means of communication and transport that will permit us to meet his army with crushing force whenever he moves—but that, too, would be crisis enough on its own. And I cannot afford to deal with any new surprises. So I want you—I have discussed this with members of the

council—to set your very expensively acquired skills to work and do what our none-too-inquisitive ancestors failed to do.”

“You want me to, to find out how the sigil works? Or…what?”

(Clink of glassware.) “When there was just one knot, life was simple. But we’ve got two, now, and three worlds. I want to know if there are more worlds out there. And more knots. I want to know why sometimes trying a design gives the world-walker a headache, and why sometimes the experimenter vanishes. I want to know, Sir Huw, so that I can map out the terrain of the battlefield we find ourselves on.”

“Is it really that bad?”

(Pause.) “I don’t know, boy. None of us know. That’s the whole point. Can you do it? More importantly, what would you do?”

“Hmm.” (Pause.) “Well, I’d start by documenting what we already know. Maps and times. Then there are a couple of avenues I would pursue. On the one hand, we have two knots. I can see if the clan knot is failing to work in New Britain because of a terrain anomaly. If, say, it leads to a world where the world-walker would emerge in the middle of a tree, or underwater, that would explain why nobody’s been able to use it. And I’d do the same for the Lee family knotwork in the United States, of course. That’s going to take a couple of world-walkers, some maps and surveying tools, and someone to report back if everything goes wrong. Next, well…once we’ve exhausted the possibilities, we’ve got two knots. I need to talk to a mathematician, see if we can work out the parameters of the knots and come up with a way of generating a family of relatives. Then we need to invent a protocol for testing new designs: not so much what to do if they don’t work, but how to survive if they take us somewhere new. If this works, if there are more than two viable knots, we’re going to lose world-walkers sooner or later. Aren’t we?”

“I expect so.”

“That’s awfully cold-blooded, isn’t it, sir?”

“Yes, boy, it is. In case it has slipped your attention, it is my job to be cold-blooded about such things. I would not authorize—I suspect my predecessors did not authorize—such research, if the situation was not so dangerous. The risk of losing world-walkers is too high and our numbers too few for gambling. Already there have been losses, couriers taken in transit by American government agents. You met the Countess Helge. Your opinion…?”

“Helge? She’s, she’s—what happened to her? Shouldn’t she be here, given her experience?”

“I am asking the questions, Sir Huw. What was your opinion of her?”

“Bright…inquisitive…fun, I think, in a scary way. Where is she?”

“‘Fun, in a scary way’…yes, that’s true enough. But she scared too many cousins, Huw, cousins who lack your sense of fun. I did what I could to protect her. If she surfaces again, well, circumstances have changed, and it may be possible to distract her pursuers, as long as she is not involved in the regrettable business unfolding in New York. But for the time being, she is not available, and so I am turning to you.”

“I’m, um, I’m at your disposal, sir. How would you like to proceed?”

“Write me a report. No more than three pages. Tell me what you’re going to do, what resources you need, what people you need, and what you expect to learn from it. I want your report no later than the day after tomorrow, and I want you to be ready to begin work the day after that.”

“Sir! That’s rather—”

“What, you’re going to tell me you’ve never written a grant proposal in a hurry? Please don’t insult my intelligence.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, sir! But it’s going to cost, people and money—”

“Let me worry about that. You just tell me what you need, and I’ll make sure you get it.”

“Wow! Thank you—”

“Don’t thank me, boy. Not until it’s over, and we’re still alive.”

END TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Hu was alarmingly young and bouncy, a Vietnamese-American postdoc with a ponytail, cargo pants, sandals, and a flippant attitude that would have annoyed the hell out of Eric if Hu had been working for him. Luckily Hu was someone else’s problem, and despite everything, he’d been cleared by security to work on JAUNT BLUE. Which probably means the Republic is doomed, Eric thought mordantly. Ah well, we work with what we’re given.

“Hey man, the professor told me to give you the special tour. Where you wanna start? You been briefed or they dropping you in it cold?”

Eric stared at him. “I’ll take it cold.”

“Suits me! Let’s start with…hell. What do you know about parallel universes?”

Eric shrugged. “Not a lot. Seen some episodes of Sliders. Been catching up on some sci-fi books in my copious free time.” The writers they’d sounded out hadn’t been good for much more than random guesses, and without priming them with classified information that was all they could be expected to deliver. It had been a waste of time, in his opinion, but—“and then there’s the day job.”

“Heh. You bet, boss!” Hu laughed, a curious chittering noise. “Okay, we got parallel universes. There’s some theoretical basis for it in string theory, I can give you some references if you like, but I can only tell you one thing for sure right now: we’re not dealing with a Tegmark Level I multiverse—that’s an infinite ergodic universe, one where the initial inflationary period gave rise to disjoint Hubble volumes realizing all possible initial conditions.”

Eric crossed his arms and frowned. “So you’ve ruled that out.” Asshole? Or show-off?

“Yup!” Hu seemed unaccountably pleased with himself. “We can get there from here, which rules out Level I, because in a Level I multiverse the parallel universes exist in the same space time, just a mind-bogglingly huge distance apart. Which means we’re dealing with either a Level II, Level III, or Level IV multiverse. I’m in the cosmology pool—we’ve got an informal bet running—that it’ll turn out to be a Level IV theory. Level II depends on a Linde chaotic inflationary cosmology, in which you get multiple branching universes connected by wormholes, but travel between universes in that kind of scheme involves singularities, and the phenomenon we’re studying doesn’t come with black holes attached.”

Bumptious enthusiast, no social skills. Eric decided. He forced himself to nod, draw the guy out. “So you’re saying this isn’t a large scale cosmological phenomenon—then what is it?” Some of this stuff sounded half-familiar from his physics minor, but the rest was just weird.

“We’re trying to work out what it is by a process of elimination.” Hu thrust his hands in his pockets, looking distant. “The thing is, we have no theoretical framework. We’ve got a lot of beautiful theories but they don’t account for what we’re seeing: we’re looking at an amazingly complex artifact and we don’t understand how it works. It’s like handing a nuclear reactor to a steam engineer in the nineteenth century. If you don’t understand the physics behind it you might as well say it works by magic pixie dust as slow neutron-induced fission. Absent a theoretical understanding all we can do is poke it and see if it twitches. And coming up with the theory is, uh, proving difficult.” He slowed down as he spoke, finishing on a thoughtful note.

Now’s as good a time as any… “What’s the black box you think you’re trying to reverse-engineer?” Eric asked, hoping to draw Hu back on track.

“Ah!” Hu jerked as if a dozing puppeteer had just realized he’d slackened off on the strings: “That would be the cytology samples Dr. James provided two months ago. That’s how we got started,” he added. “Want to see them? Come down to the lab and see what’s on the slab?”

Eric nodded, and followed Hu out through the door. If this is the Rocky Horror Picture Show, all we’re missing is the mad scientist. Hu made a beeline towards the maze of brown cubicle-farm partitions at the edge of the floor, and dived into a niche. When Eric caught up, he found him sitting at a desk with a gigantic tube monitor on it, messing with something that looked like the bastard offspring of a computer mouse and a joystick. “Here!” he called excitedly.

Eric glanced round. The neighboring cubicles were empty: “Where is everybody?”

“Team meeting,” Hu said dismissively. “Look. Let me show you the slides first, then we’ll go see the real thing.”

“Okay.” Eric stood behind him. “Take it from the top.”

Hu pulled up a picture and Eric blinked, taken aback for a moment. It was in shades of gray, somehow messy and biological looking. After a moment he nodded. “It’s a cellular structure, isn’t it?”

“Yeah! This slide was taken at 2,500 magnification on our scanning electron microscope. It’s a slice from the lateral geniculate nucleus of our first test sample. See the layering here? Top two layers, the magnocellular levels? They do fast positional sensing in the visual system. Now let’s zoom in a bit.”

The image vanished, to be replaced by a much larger, slightly grainier picture in which individual cells were visible, blobs with tangled fibers converging on them like the branches of a dead umbrella, stripped of fabric.

“Here’s an M-type gangliocyte. It’s kind of big, isn’t it? There are lots of dendrites going in, too. It takes signals from a whole bunch of rod and cone cells in the retina and processes them, subtracting noise. You with me so far?”

“Just about,” Eric said dryly. Image convolution had been another component of his second degree, the classified one he’d sweated for back when he’d been attached to NRO. “So far this is normal, is it?”

“Normal for any dead dried human brain on a microscope slide.” Hu giggled. It was beginning to grate on Eric’s nerves.

“Next.”

“Okay. This is where it gets interesting, when we look inside the gangliocyte.”

“What—” it took Eric longer, this time, to orient himself: the picture was very grainy, a mess of weird loops and whorls, and something else—“the heck is that? Some kind of contamination—”

“Nope.” Hu giggled again. This time he sounded slightly scared. “Ain’t nothing like this in the textbooks.”

“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.”