Charles Stross: The Hidden Family

Miriam whistled tunelessly between her teeth and plugged her cellular modem card back into the notebook, ready to send in her feature article. Maybe Iris could teach her some useful techniques. The way things were going, she needed every edge.

A landscape of concrete and steel, damp and gray beneath a sky stained dirty orange. The glare of streetlamps reflected from clouds heavy with the promise of sleet or rain tomorrow. Miriam swung the rental car around into the parking lot, lowered her window to accept a ticket, then drove on in search of a space. It was damply cold outside, the temperature dropping with nightfall, but eventually she found a free place and parked. The car, she noted, was the precise same shade of silver-gray as Iris’s hair.

Miriam walked around the corner and down a couple of flights of stairs, then through the entrance to the museum.

Warm light flooded out onto the sidewalk, lifting her gloom. Paulette had brought Brill home earlier that afternoon, shaking slightly. The color- and pattern-enhanced marketing strategies of modern retail had finally driven Brill into the attack of culture shock Miriam had been expecting. They’d left Brill hunched up in front of the Cartoon Network on cable, so Paulette could give Miriam a lift to the nearest Avis rental lot. And now—

Miriam pushed through the doors and looked around. Front desk, security gates, a huge human-powered sailplane hanging from the ceiling over the turnstiles, staff busy at their desks—and a little old lady in a powered wheelchair, whirring toward her. Not so little, or so old. “You’re late! That’s not like you,” Iris chided her. “Where have you been?”

“That’s new,” Miriam said, pointing to the chair.

“Yes, it is.” Iris grinned up at her, impishly. “Did you know it can outrun a two-year-old Dodge Charger? If you know the footpaths through the park and don’t give the bastards time to get out and follow you on foot.” She stopped grinning. “Miriam, you’re in trouble . What did I teach you about trouble?”

Miriam sighed. “Don’t get into it to begin with, especially don’t bring it home with you,” she recited, “never start a war on two fronts, and especially don’t start a land war in Asia. Yes, I know . The problem is, trouble came looking for me. Say, isn’t there a coffee shop in the food court, around the corner from the gift shop?”

“I think I could be persuaded— if you tell me what’s going on.”

Miriam followed her mother’s wheelchair along the echoing corridor, dodging the odd family group. It took them a few minutes, but finally Miriam got them both sorted out with drinks and a seat at a table well away from anyone else. “It was the shoe box,” Miriam confessed. Iris had given her a shoe box full of items relating to her enigmatic birth-mother, found stabbed in a park nearly a third of a century ago. After all those years gathering dust in the attic the locket still worked, dumping Miriam into a world drastically unlike her own. “If you hadn’t given it to me, they wouldn’t be staking out your house.”

“Who do you think they are?”

Miriam swallowed. “They call themselves the Clan. There are six families in the Clan, and they’re like this.” She knotted her fingers together, tugged experimentally. “Turns out I’m, uh, well, how to put this? I’m not a Jewish princess. I’m a—”

“She was important,” Iris interrupted. “Some kind of blue blood, right? Miriam, what does the Clan do that’s so secret you can’t talk but so important they need you alive?”

“They’re—” Miriam stopped. “If I told you, they might kill you.”

Iris raised an eyebrow. “I think you know better than that,” she said quietly.

“But—”

“Stop trying to overprotect me!” Iris waved her attempted justification away. “You always hated it when I patronized you. So what is this, return-the-favor week? You’re still alive, so you have something on them, if I know you. So it follows that you can look after your old mother, right? Doesn’t it?”

“It’s not that simple.” Miriam looked at her mother and sighed. “If I knew you’d be safe …”

“Shut up and listen, girl.” Miriam shut up abruptly and stared at her. Iris was watching her with a peculiar intensity. “You are by damn going to tell me everything . Especially who’s after you, so that I know who to watch for. Because anyone who tries to get at you through me is going to get a very nasty surprise indeed, love.” For a moment, Iris’s eyes were icy-cold, as harsh as the assassin in the orangery at midnight, two days before. Then they softened. “You’re all I’ve got left,” she said quietly. “Humor your old ma, please? It’s been a long time since anything interesting happened to me—interesting in the sense of the Chinese proverb, anyway.”

“You always told me not to gossip,” Miriam accused.

“Gossip is as gossip does.” Iris cracked a smile. “Keep your powder dry and your allies briefed.”

“I’ll—” Miriam took a sip of her coffee. “Okay,” she said, licking her dry lips. “This is going to take a long time to tell, but basically what happened was, I took the shoe box home and didn’t do anything with it until that evening. Which probably wasn’t a good thing, because …”

She talked for a long time, and Iris listened, occasionally prompting her for more detail but mostly just staring at her face, intently, with an expression somewhere between longing and disgust.

Finally Miriam ran down. “That’s all, I guess,” she said. “I left Brill with Paulie, who’s looking after her. Tomorrow I’m going to take the second locket and, well, see if it works. Over here or over there.” She searched Iris’s face. “You believe me?” she asked, almost plaintively.

“Oh, I believe you, kid.” Iris reached out and covered her hand with her own: older, thinner, infinitely familiar. “I—” She paused. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” she admitted. “I had an idea this was going to get weird before I gave you the box, but not like this. It seemed like a good time to pass it on when you began sniffing around their turf. Large-scale money laundering is exactly the sort of thing the, this Clan, would be mixed up in, and I suspected—well. I expected you to come back and ask me about it sooner, rather than simply jumping in. Maybe I should have warned you.” She looked at Miriam, searchingly.

“It’s okay, Ma.” Miriam covered Iris’s hand with her other.

“No, it’s not okay,” Iris insisted. “What I did was wrong! I should have—”

“Ma, shut up.”

“If you insist.” Iris watched her with a curious half-smile. “This second knotwork design—I want to see that. Can you show me sometime?”

“Sure.” Miriam nodded. “Didn’t bring it with me, though.”

Her mother nodded. “What are you going to do next?”

“I’m—” Miriam sighed. “I warned Angbard that if anybody touched a hair on your head, he was dead meat. But now there’s a second bunch after me, and I don’t have a hotline to their boss. I don’t even know who their boss is .”

“Neither did Patricia,” murmured Iris.

“What did you say?”

“I’d have thought it was obvious,” Iris pointed out quickly. “If she’d known, they wouldn’t have gotten near her.” She shook her head. “A really bad business, that.” For a moment she looked angry, and determined—the same expression Miriam had glimpsed in a mirror recently. “And it hasn’t gone away.” She snorted. “Give me your secret phone number, girl.”

“My secret—what?”

Iris grinned at her. “Okay, your dead-letter drop. So we can keep in touch when you go on your wanderings. You do want to keep your old mom informed of what the enemies of freedom and civilization are up to, don’t you?”