Charles Stross: The Family Trade

I NEED WORK

Call Andy and Steve. Pass “Go.” Collect freelance commissions. Collect two hundred dollars. Keep up the mortgage payments.

I AM GOING CRAZY

Well, no. This isn’t schizophrenia. I’m not hearing voices, the walls aren’t going soft, and nobody is beaming orbital mind control lasers at me. Everything’s fine except I had a weird fugue moment, and the office chair is missing.

DID SOMEONE SLIP ME SOMETHING? Don’t be silly: Who? Iris? Maybe she and Morris tripped when they were younger, but she just wouldn’t do that to me. Joe Dixon is a sleazebag with criminal connections, but he didn’t offer me a drink. And who else have I seen in the past day? Anyway, that’s not how hallucinogens work.

MAGIC

That’s silly, too, but at least it’s testable.

Miriam’s eyes narrowed and she chewed the cap of her pen. This was going to take planning, but at least it was beginning to sound like she had her ducks lined up in a row. She began jotting down tasks:

1. Call Andy at The Globe . Try to sell him a feature or three.

2. Make appointment to see Steve at The Herald . See what he wants.

3. See Paulie. Check how she’s doing. See if we can reconstruct the investigation without drawing attention. See if we can pitch it at Andy or Steve. Cover the angles. If we do this, they will turn nasty. Call FBI?

4. See if whatever I did last night is repeatable. Get evidence, then a witness. If it’s me, seek help. If it’s not me…

5. Get the story.

That afternoon Miriam went shopping. It was, she figured, retail therapy. Never mind the job-hunting, there’d be time for that when she knew for sure whether or not she was going insane in some obscurely non-standard manner. It was October, a pretty time of year to go hiking, but fall had set in and things could turn nasty at the drop of a North Atlantic depression. Extensive preparations were therefore in order. She eventually staggered home under the weight of a load of camping equipment: tent, jacket, new boots, portable stove. Getting it all home on the T was a pain, but at least it told her that she could walk under the weight.

A couple of hours later she was ready. She checked her watch for the fourth time. She’d taken two ibuprofen tablets an hour ago and the propionic acid inhibitor should be doing its job by now.

She tightened the waist strap of her pack and stretched nervously. The garden shed was cramped and dark and there didn’t seem to be room to turn around with her hiking gear and backpack on. Did I put the spare key back? she asked herself. A quick check proved that she had. Irrelevant thoughts were better than Am I nuts?-as long as they weren’t an excuse for prevarication.

Okay, here goes nothing.

The locket. She held it in her left hand. With her right she patted her right hip pocket. The pistol was technically illegal-but as Ben had pointed out, he’d rather deal with an unlicensed firearms charge than his own funeral. The rattling memory of a voice snarling at her answering machine, the echo of rifle fire in the darkness, made her pause for a moment. “Do I really want to do this?” she asked herself. Life was complicated enough as it was.

Hell yes! Because either I’m mad, and it doesn’t matter, or my birth-mother was involved in something huge. Something much bigger than a billion-dollar money-laundering scam through Proteome and Biphase. And if they killed her because of it-A sense of lingering injustice prodded her conscience. “Okay,” she told herself. “Let’s do it. I’m right behind myself.” She chuckled grimly and flicked the locket open, half-expecting to see a photograph of a woman, or a painting, or something else to tell her she needed help-

The knot tried to turn her eyes inside out, and then the hut wasn’t there any more.

Miriam gasped. The air was cold, and her head throbbed-but not as badly as last time.

“Wow.” She carefully pushed the locket into her left pocket, then pulled out her pocket dictaphone. “Memo begins: Wednesday, October 16, 8 p.m. It’s dark and the temperature’s about ten degrees colder… here. Wherever the hell ‘here’ is.” She turned around slowly. Trees, skeletal, stretched off in all directions. She was standing on a slope, not steep but steep enough to explain why she’d skidded. “No sign of people. I can either go look for the chair or not. Hmm. I think not”

She looked up. Wind-blown clouds scudded overhead, beneath a crescent moon. She didn’t turn her flashlight on. No call for attracting attention, she reminded herself. Just look around, then go home…

“I’m an astronaut,” she murmured into the dictaphone. She took a step forward, feeling her pack sway on her back, toward a big elm tree. Turning around, she paused, then knelt and carefully placed an old potsherd from the shed on the leafy humus where she’d been standing. “Neil and Buzz only spent eight hours on the moon on that first trip. Only about four hours on the surface, in two excursions. This is going to be my moonwalk.” As long as I don’t get my damn fool self shot, she reminded herself. Or stuck. She’d brought her sleeping bag and tent, and a first-aid kit, and Ben’s pistol (just in case, and she felt wicked because of it). But this didn’t feel like home. This felt like the wild woods-and Miriam wasn’t at home in the woods. Especially when there were guys with guns who shot at her like it was hunting season and Jewish divorcees weren’t on the protected list.

Miriam took ten paces up the hill, then stopped and held her breath, listening. The air was chilly and damp, as if a fog was coming in off the river. There was nothing to hear-no traffic noise, no distant rumble of trains or jets. A distant avian hooting might signify an owl hunting, but that was it. “It’s really quiet,” Miriam whispered into her mike. “I’ve never heard it so silent before.”

She shivered and looked around. Then she took her small flashlight out and slashed a puddle of light across the trees, casting long sharp shadows. “There!” she exclaimed. Another five paces and she found her brown swivel chair lying on a pile of leaf mould. It was wet and thoroughly the worse for wear, and she hugged it like a long-lost lover as she lifted it upright and carefully put it down. “Yes!”

Her temples throbbed, but she was overjoyed. “I found it,” she confided in her dictaphone. “I found the chair. So this is the same place.” But the chair was pretty messed up. Almost ruined, in fact-it had been a second hand retread to begin with, and a night out in the rainy woods hadn’t helped any.

“It’s real,” she said quietly, with profound satisfaction. “I’m not going mad. Or if I’m confabulating, I’m doing it so damn consistently-” She shook her head. “My birth-mother came here. Or from here. Or something. And she was stabbed, and nobody knows why, or who did it.” That brought her back to reality. It raised echoes of her own situation, hints of anonymous threatening phone calls, and other unfinished business. She sighed, then retraced her steps to the potsherd. Massaging her scalp, she sat down on the spot, with her back to the nearby elm tree.

She stopped talking abruptly, thrust the dictaphone into her hip pocket, pulled out the locket, and held her breath.

The crunch of a breaking branch carried a long way in the night. Spooked, she flicked the locket open, focused on its depths, and steeled herself to face the coming hangover: She really didn’t want to be out in the woods at night-at least, not without a lot more preparation.

The next morning-after phoning Andy at The Globe and securing a commission for a business supplement feature on VC houses, good for half a month’s income, with the promise of a regular weekly slot if her features were good enough-Miriam bit the bullet and phoned Paulette. She was nerving herself for an answering machine on the fifth ring when Paulette answered.