“What do you mean?” Miriam tensed.
“I mean I’m about to sell you down the river.” Iris looked at her sharply. “At least, that’s how it’s going to seem at first. I’m not going to lie to you: I don’t see any alternatives. We’re stuck playing the long game, kid, and I’m still learning the rules.”
“Suppose you explain what you just said.” There was an acid taste in her mouth. Miriam forced herself to unclench her fingers from the arms of her chair. “About selling me down the river.”
Iris coughed, wheezing. Miriam waited her out. Presently her mother regained control. “I don’t like this any more than you do. It’s just the way things work around here. I don’t have any alternatives, I’m locked up here and you managed to get caught breaking the unwritten rules.” She sighed. “I thought you had more sense than to do that—to get caught, I mean. Anyway, we’re both out of alternatives. If I don’t play the game, neither of us is going to live very long.”
“I don’t need this!” Miriam finally let go of her tightly controlled frustration. “I have been locked up and policed and poked and pried at and subjected to humiliating medical examinations, and it’s all just some game you’re playing for status points? What did you do, promise the Queen Mother you’d marry me off to her grandson if she beat you at poker?”
Iris reached out and grabbed her wrist. Startled, Miriam froze. Her mother’s hand felt hot, bony, as weak as a sparrow: “No, never that! But if you knew what it was like to grow up here, fifty years ago . . .”
Miriam surprised herself: “Suppose you tell me?” Go on, justify yourself, she willed. There were butterflies in her stomach. Whatever was coming, it was bound to be bad.
Her mother nodded thoughtfully. Then her lips quirked in the first sign of a smile Miriam had seen since she’d arrived.
“You know how the Clan braids its families, one arranged marriage after another to keep the bloodline strong.” Miriam nodded. “And you know what this means: the meddling old grannies.”
“But Mom, Henryk and Angbard—”
“Hush. I know about the breeding program.” Miriam’s jaw dropped. “Angbard told me about it. He’s not stupid enough to think he can push it through without . . . without allies. In another ten years the first of the babies will be coming up for adoption. He needs to convince the meddling old grannies to accept them, or we’ll be finished as a trading network within another couple of generations. So he asked me for advice. I’m his consultant, I guess. I don’t think most of the families realize just how close to the edge we are, how badly the civil war damaged us. Small gene pool, insufficient numbers—it’s not good. I’ve seen the numbers. If we don’t do something about it, the Clan could be extinct within two centuries.” Her voice hardened. “But then you barged right in, doing what you do—snooping. Yes, I know it’s what you did for a living for all those years, but you’ve got to understand, you can’t do that right now. Not here, it’s much too dangerous. People here who really want to keep secrets tend to react violently to intrusion. And there’s a flip side to the coin. I know you and the-bitch-my-mother don’t get on well”—a twinkle in her eye as she said this: Miriam bit her tongue—“but Hildegarde is just doing what she’s always done, playing the long game, defending her status. Which is tenuous here because we are, let’s face it, women. Here in the Gruinmarkt—hell, everywhere in the whole wide world—power comes from a big swinging dick. We, you and me, we’re the badly adjusted misfits here: you’ve got the illusion that you’re anybody’s social equal and I, I’ve been outside . . .”
She fell silent. Miriam shook her head. “This isn’t like you, Mom.”
“This place isn’t like me, kid. No, listen: what happens to the Clan if Angbard, or his successor, starts introducing farmed baby world-walkers in, oh, ten years time? Without tying them in to the existing great families, without getting the old bitches to take them in and adopt them as their own? And what happens a generation down the line when they become adults?”
Miriam frowned. “Um. We have lots more world-walkers?”
“Nuts. You’re not thinking like a politician: it shifts the balance of power, kid, that’s what happens. And it shifts it away from the braids, away from the meddling old grannies—away from us. It’s ugly out there, Miriam, I don’t think you’ve seen enough of the Gruinmarkt to realize just how nasty this world is if you’re a woman. We’re insulated by wealth and privilege, we have a role in the society of the Clan. But if you take that all away we are, well . . . it’s not as bad as Afghanistan under those Taliban maniacs, but it’s not far off. This is what I’m getting at when I talk about the long game. It’s the game the old women of the Clan have been playing for a century and a half now, and the name of the game is preserving the status of their granddaughters. Do you want a measure of control over your own life? Because if so, you’ve got to match the old bitches at their own game. And that’s”—Iris’s voice wavered—“difficult. I’ve been trying to help you, but then you kicked the foundations out from underneath my position . . .”
“I—” Miriam paused. “What is your position? Is it the medicines?”
“I take it you’ve met Dr. ven Hjalmar?”
“Yes.” Miriam tensed.
“Who do you think he works for? And who do you think I get my meds from? Copaxone and prednisone, by the grace of Hildegarde. If there’s an accident in the supply chain, a courier gets caught out and I go short—well, that’s all she wrote.” Iris made a sharp cutting gesture.
“Mom!” Miriam stared, aghast.
“Blackmail is just business as usual,” Iris said with heavy irony. “I’ve been trying to tell you it’s not pretty, but would you get the message?”
“But—” Miriam was half out of her chair with anger. “Can’t you get Angbard to help you out? Surely they can’t stop you crossing over and visiting a doctor—”
“Shush, Miriam. Sit down, you’re making me itch.” Miriam forced herself to untense: she sat down again on the edge of her chair, leaning forward. “If I bring Angbard into this, I lose. Because then I owe him, and I’ve dragged him into the game, do you see? Look, the rules are really very simple. You grow up hating and fearing your grandmother. Then she marries you off to some near-stranger. A generation later, you have your own grandchildren and you realize you’ve got to hurt them just the way your own great-aunts and grandmother hurt you, or you’ll be doing them an even worse disservice; if you don’t, then instead of a legacy of some degree of power all they’ll inherit is the status of elderly has-been chattel. That is what the braid system means, Miriam. You’re—you’re old enough and mature enough to understand this. I wasn’t, I was about sixteen when my great-aunt—my grandmother was dead by then—leaned on the-bitch-my-mother and twisted her arm and made her give me reason to hate her.”
“Um. It sounds like—” Miriam winced and rubbed her forehead. “There’s something about this in game theory, isn’t there?”
“Yes.” Iris looked distant. “I told Morris about it, years ago. He called it an iterated cross-generational prisoner’s dilemma. That haunted me, you know. Your father was a very smart man. And kind.”
Miriam nodded; she missed him. Not that he was her real father. Her real father had been killed in an ambush by assassins shortly after Miriam’s birth, the incident that had prompted Iris to run away and go to ground in Boston, where she’d met and lived with Morris and brought Miriam up in ignorance of her background. But Morris had died years ago, and now . . .