Charles Stross - The Hidden Family

Olga cleared her throat. “Last December I was summoned to spend time with Duke Lofstrom at his castle. I had for a year before then been petitioning him for an active role, in the hope that he could find a use for me in the trade. He asked me to escort Helge Thorold-Hjorth, newly arrived and ignorant of our ways, both to educate her and to ensure that no harm came to her. I do not believe he anticipated subsequent events when we arrived at this house—” She continued to enumerate intrusion after intrusion, outrage by outrage, pausing only when interrupted from the floor by a burst of voices demanding further explanation.

Miriam watched in near-astonishment. “Is everyone here something to do with Clan Security?” she asked Kara quietiy.

“Not me, milady!” Kara’s eyes were wide.

Olga finished by recounting how Miriam had brought her to a new world, and how they had been assaulted there, too, by strangers. A voice from the floor called out. “Wait! How do you know it was another world? Can’t it possibly have been another region of ’Merica?”

“No, it can’t,” Olga said dismissively. “I’ve seen America, and I’ve seen this other place, and the differences are glaringly obvious. They both sprang from the same roots, but clearly they have diverged—in America, the monarchy is not hereditary, is it?” She frowned for a moment. “Did I say something wrong?”

Uproar. “What’s all this nonsense about?” demanded Earl Hjorth, red-faced. “It’s clear as day that this can’t be true! If it was, there might be a whole new world out there!”

“I believe there is,” Olga replied calmly.

The gavel rose and fell on the resulting babble. “Silence! I now call Helge Thorold-Hjorth, alias Miriam Beckstein. Please approach the table.”

Miriam swallowed as she stood up and walked over.

“Please describe for the Clan how you come to be here. From the day you first learned of your heritage.”

“We’ll be here all day—”

“Nevertheless, if you please.”

“Certainly.” Miriam took a deep breath. “It started the day I lost my job with a business magazine in Cambridge. I went to visit my mother—” a nod to Iris “—who asked me to fetch down a box from her attic. The box was full of old papers …”

She kept going until she reached her patent filing in New Britain, the enterprise she was setting up, and Olga’s shooting. Her throat was dry and the room was silent. She shook her head. “Can I have a glass of water, please?” she asked. A tumbler appeared next to her.

“Thank you. By this time I had some ideas. The people who kept trying to murder Iris—sorry, Patricia—and who kept going after me, or getting at Olga by mistake—they had to be relatives. But apart from one attempt, there was never any sign of them on the other side, in America that is. I remembered being told about a long-lost brother who headed west in the earliest days of the Clan. You know—we learned—that they, too, use a pattern to let them world-walk, however they can travel only from here to New Britain, to the place I’ve just been telling you about.

“What I’ve pieced together is something like this. A very long time ago one of the brothers headed west. He fell on hard times and lost his amulet. In fact, he ended up as an indentured slave and took nearly ten years to save the cash to buy his freedom. Once free, he had to reconstruct the knot design from memory. Either that, or his was deliberately sabotaged by a sibling. Whichever, the knot he painted was different . I can’t emphasize that strongly enough; where you go when you world-walk depends on the design you use as a key. We now know of two keys, but there’s another fact—the other one, this lost brother’s knot, doesn’t work in America. Our America. The one we go to.

“Anyway, he crossed over repeatedly, because it had been arranged that at regular intervals he should check for his brothers. They evidently intended to send a trade caravan to meet him, somewhere in Northern California perhaps. But he never found his business partners waiting for him, because they were elsewhere, traveling to another world where, presumably, they interpreted his absence as a sign that he’d died. He was cut off completely, and put it down to betrayal.”

“Preposterous!” Someone in the front row snorted, prompting Angbard to bring down the gavel again. Miriam took the opportunity to help herself to a glass of water.

“This brother, Lee, had a family. His family was less numerous, less able to provide for themselves, than the Clan. Just as the ability was lost to your ancestors for a generation or two, so it was with his descendants—and it took longer before some first cousins or cousins married and had an infant with renewed ability. They prospered much as you have, but more slowly. The New British don’t have a lot of time for Chinese merchants, and as a smaller family they had far fewer active world-walkers to rely on.

“Now, the Lees only found the Clan again when the family Wu moved west, less than a century ago. The Lees reacted—well, I think it was out of fear, but they basically conducted the campaign of assassinations that kicked off the feud. Everyone in the Clan knew that the murders could only have been carried out by world-walkers, so the attacks on the western families were blamed—understandably—on their cousins back east.”

She paused. The level of conversation breaking out in the benches made continuing futile. Angbard raised his gavel but she held up a hand. “Any questions?” she asked.

“Yes! What’s this business—”

“—How did you travel—”

“—We going to put up with these lies?”

Bang. Miriam jumped as Angbard brought down the gavel. “One at a time,” he snapped. “Helge, if you please. You have the floor.”

“The new world, where the other family—the Lees—go, is like the one I grew up in, but less well developed. There are a number of reasons for this, but essentially it boils down to the apparent fact that it diverged historically from my own about two hundred and fifty years ago. If you want evidence of its existence I have witnesses, Lady Olga and Brilliana d’Ost, and video recordings. I can even take you over there, if you are willing to accept my directions—remember, it is a very different country from the United States, and if you don’t bear that in mind you can get into trouble very easily. But let me emphasize this. I believe anyone who is sitting in this room now can go there quite easily, by simply using a Lee family talisman instead of a Clan one. You can verify this for yourselves. I repeat: It appears that if you have the ability to world-walk, you can go to different worlds simply by using a different kind of talisman.

“New Britain only had an industrial revolution a century ago. I’ve established a toehold over there, by setting up an identity and filing some basic engineering patents on the automobile. They’ll be big in about five to ten years. My business plan was to leverage inventions from the U.S.A. that haven’t been developed over there, rather than trading in physical commodities or providing transportation. But by doing this, I attracted the Lee family’s attention. They worked out soon enough that I’d acquired one of their lockets and was setting up on their territory. As Olga told you, they attempted to black-bag my house, and we were waiting for them.” She glanced at Angbard for approval. He nodded to her, so she went on. “We took a prisoner, alive. He was in possession of an amulet and he’s indisputably a world-walker, but he’s not of the Clan. I asked for some medical tests. Ah, my lord?”

The duke cleared his throat. “Blood tests confirm that the prisoner is a very distant relative. And a world-walker. It appears that there are six families, after all.”