Charles Stross: The Clan Corporate

Miriam's reluctant nod seemed to satisfy the duchess, because she nodded: "Remember, a lady never unintentionally gives offense-especially to people she depends on to keep her alive. If you can hang on to just one rule to help you survive in the Clan, make it that one. But I'm losing the plot. How are you doing? Have there been any aftereffects?"

"Aftereffects?" Miriam caught her hand at her chin and forced herself to stop fidgeting. She flushed, pulse jerking with an adrenaline surge of remembered fear and anger. "I-" She lowered her hand. "Oh, nothing physical," she said bitterly. "Nothing…"

"I've been thinking about him a lot lately, Miriam. He wouldn't have been good for you, you know."

"I know." The younger woman-youth being relative: she wouldn't be seeing thirty again-dropped her gaze. "The political entanglements made it a messy prospect at best," she said, frowning. "Even if you discounted his weaknesses." The duchess didn't reply. Eventually Miriam looked up, her eyes burning with emotions she'd experienced only since learning to be Helge. "I haven't forgiven him, you know."

"Forgiven Roland?" The duchess's tone sharpened.

"No. Your goddamn half-brother. He's meant to be in charge of security! But he-" Her voice began to break.

"Yes, yes, I know. And do you think he has been sleeping well lately? I'm led to believe he's frantically busy right now. Losing Roland was the least of our problems, if you'll permit me to be blunt, and Angbard has a major crisis to deal with. Your affair with him can be ignored, if it comes to it, by the Council. It's not as if you're a teenage virgin to be despoiled, damaging some aristocratic alliance by losing your honor-and you'd better think about that some more in future, because honor is the currency in the circles you move in, a currency that once spent is very hard to regain-but the deeper damage to the Clan that Matthias inflicted-"

"Tell me about it," Miriam said bitterly. "As soon as I was back on my feet they told me I could only run courier assignments to and from a safe house. And I'm not allowed to go home!"

"Matthias knows you," her mother pointed out. "If he mentioned you to his new employers-"

"I understand." Miriam subsided in a sullen silence, arms crossed before her and back set defensively. After a moment she started tapping her toes.

"Stop that!" Moderating her tone, the duchess added, "If you do that in public it sends entirely the wrong message. Appearances are everything, you've got to learn that."

"Yes, Mother."

After a couple of minutes, the duchess spoke. "You're not happy."

"No."

"And it's not just-him."

"Correct." Her hem twitched once more before Helge managed to control the urge to tap.

The duchess sighed. "Do I have to drag it out of you?"

"No, Iris."

"You shouldn't call me that here. Bad habits of thought and behavior, you know."

"Bad? Or just inappropriate? Liable to send the wrong message?"

The duchess chuckled. "I should know better than to argue with you, dear!" She looked serious. "The wrong message in a nutshell. Miriam can't go home, Helge. Not now, maybe not ever. Thanks to that scum-sucking rat-bastard defector the entire Clan network in Massachusetts is blown wide open and if you even think about going-"

"Yeah, yeah, I know, there'll be an FBI SWAT team staking out my backyard and I'll vanish into a supermax prison so fast my feet don't touch the ground. If I'm lucky," she added bitterly. "So everything's locked down like a code-red terrorist alert; the only way I'm allowed to go back to our world is on a closely supervised courier run to an underground railway station buried so deep I don't even see daylight; if I want anything-even a box of tampons-I have to requisition it and someone in the Security Directorate has to fill out a risk assessment to see if it's safe to obtain; and, and…" Her shoulders heaved with indignation.

"This is what it was like the whole time, during the civil war," the duchess pointed out.

"So people keep telling me, as if I'm supposed to be grateful! But it's not as if this is my only option. I've got another identity over in world three and-"

"Do they have tampons there?"

"Ah." Helge paused for a moment. "No, I don't think so," she said slowly. "But they've got cotton wool." She fumbled for a moment, then pulled out a pen-sized voice recorder. "Memo: business plans. Investigate early patent filings covering tampons and applicators. Also sterilization methods-dry heat?" She clicked the recorder off and replaced it. "Thanks." A lightning smile that was purely Miriam flashed across her face and was gone. "I should be over there," she added earnestly. "World three is my project. I set up the company and I ought to be managing it."

"Firstly, our dear long-lost relatives are over there," the duchess pointed out. "Truce or not, if they haven't got the message yet, you could show your nose over there and get it chopped off. And secondly…"

"Ah, yes. Secondly."

"You know what I'm going to say," the duchess said quietly. "So please don't shoot the messenger."

"Okay." Helge turned her head to stare moodily out of the nearest window. "You're going to tell me that the political situation is messy. That if I go over there right now some of the more jumpy first citizens of the Clan will get the idea that I'm abandoning the sinking ship, aided and abetted by my delightful grandmother's whispering campaign-"

"Leave the rudeness to me. She's my cross to bear."

"Yes, but." Helge stopped.

Her mother took a deep breath. "The Clan, for all its failings, is a very democratic organization. Democratic in the original sense of the word. If enough of the elite voters agree, they can depose the leadership, indict a member of the Clan for trial by a jury of their peers-anything. Which is why appearances, manners, and social standing are so important. Hypocrisy is the grease that lubricates the Clan's machinery." Her cheek twitched. "Oh yes. While I remember, love, if you are accused of anything never, ever, insist on your right to a trial by jury. Over here, that word does not mean what you think it means. Like the word secretary. Pah, but I'm woolgathering! Anyway. My mother, your grandmother, has a constituency, Miri-Helge. Tarnation. Swear at me if I slip again, will you, dear? We need to break each other of this habit."

Helge nodded. "Yes, Iris."

The duchess reached over and swatted her lightly on the arm. "Patricia! Say my full name."

"Ah." Helge met her gaze. "All right. Your grace is the honorable Duchess Patricia voh Hjorth d'Wu ab Thorold." With mild rebellion: "Also known as Iris Beckstein, of 34 Coffin Street-"

"That's enough!" Her mother nodded sharply. "Put the rest behind you for the time being. Until-unless-we can ever go back, the memories can do nothing but hurt you. You've got to live in the present. And the present means living among the Clan and deporting yourself as a, a countess. Because if you don't do that, all the alternatives on offer are drastically worse. This isn't a rich world, like America. Most women only have one thing to trade: as a lady of the Clan you're lucky enough to have two, even three if you count the contents of your head. But if you throw away the money and the power that goes with being of the Clan, you'll rapidly find out just what's under the surface-if you survive long enough."

"But there's no limit to the amount of shit!" the younger woman burst out, then clapped a hand to her face as if to recall the unladylike expostulation.

"Don't chew your nails, dear," her mother said automatically.

It had started in mid-morning. Miriam (who still found it an effort of will to think of herself as Helge, outside of social situations where other people expected her to be Helge) was tired and irritable, dosed up on ibuprofen and propranolol to deal with the effects of a series of courier runs the day before when, wearing jeans and a lined waterproof jacket heavy enough to survive a northeast passage, she'd wheezed under the weight of a backpack and a walking frame. They'd had her ferrying fifty-kilogram loads between a gloomy cellar of undressed stone and an equally gloomy subbasement of an underground car park in Manhattan. There were armed guards in New York to protect her while she recovered from the vicious migraine that world-walking brought on, and there were servants and maids in the palace quarters back home to pamper her and feed her sweetmeats from a cold buffet and apply a cool compress for her head. But the whole objective of all this attention was to soften her up until she could be cozened into making another run. Two return trips in eighteen hours. Drugs or no drugs, it was brutal: without guards and flunkies and servants to prod her along she might have refused to do her duty.