“I can climb down myself, thanks.” Miriam looked over the edge. It was a good five feet down to the track bed. “Damn.” She lowered herself over the dusty footplate. “Got the bags?”
“Right behind you.”
The track bed was covered in cinders and damp, unpleasant patches. She patted her clothes down and reached up to take the luggage Erasmus passed her. A second later he stood beside her, breathing hard. “Are you all right?”
“A touch of—of—you know.” He wheezed twice, then coughed, horribly. “All right now. Move.” He pointed her across the empty tracks, towards a flight of crumbling brick steps leading up the side of the platform. “Go on.”
She hurried across the tracks then up the steps. She glanced back at Erasmus: he seemed to be in no hurry, but at least he was moving. Shit, why now? This was about the worst possible moment for his chest to start causing trouble. She looked round, taking stock of the situation. The crowd on the platform was thinning, people bustling towards open doors as if in a hurry to avoid a rain storm. A plump man in a tricorn hat was marching up the platform, brandishing a red flag. Nobody was watching her climb the steps from the empty track bed. Come on, Erasmus! She took a step towards the train, then another, and picked up her pace. A few seconds later, an open door loomed before her. She pulled herself up and over the threshold. “Is this compartment reserved?” she asked, flustered: “My husband—”
A whistle shrilled. She looked round, and down. Erasmus stood on the platform below her, panting, clearly out of breath. “No reservations,” grumbled a fat man in a violently clashing check jacket. He shook his newspaper ostentatiously and made a great show of shifting over a couple of inches.
Miriam reached down and took Erasmus’s hand. It felt like twigs bound in leather, light enough that her heave carried him halfway up the steps in one fluid movement. She stepped backwards and sat down, and he smiled at her briefly then tugged the door closed. The whistle shrilled again as the train lurched and began to pull away. “I didn’t think we were going to make it,” she said.
Burgeson took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds. “Neither did I,” he admitted wheezily, glancing back along the platform towards the two running figures that had just lurched into view. “Neither did I…”
Breakthroughs
It’s all very simple, Huw tried to reassure himself. It’ll take us somewhere new, or it won’t. True, the Wu family knotwork worked fine, as a key for travel between the worlds of the Gruinmarkt and New Britain. But the limited, haphazard attempts to use it in the United States had all failed so far. Huw had a theory to explain that: Miriam was in the wrong place when she’d tried to world-walk.
You couldn’t world-walk if there was a solid object in your position in the destination world. That was why doppelgangering worked, why if you wanted protection against assassins for your castle in the Gruinmarkt you needed to secure the equivalent territory in the United States—or in any other world where the same geographical location was up for grabs. That explained why the Wu family had been able to successfully murder a handful of Clan heads over the years, triggering and fueling the vicious civil war that had decimated the Clan between the nineteen-forties and the late nineteen-seventies. And their lack of the pattern required to world-walk to the United States explained why, in the long run, the Wu family had fallen so far behind their Clan cousins.
“There are a bunch of ways the knotwork might work,” he’d tried to explain to the duke. “The fact that two different knots let us travel between two different worlds is interesting. And they’re similar, which implies they’re variations on a common theme. But does the knotwork specify two endpoints, in which case all a given knot can do is let you shuttle between two worlds, A and B—or does it define a vector relationship in a higher space? One that’s quantized, and commutative, so if you start in universe A you always shuttle from A to B and back again, but if you transport it to C you can then use it to go between C and a new world, call it D?”
The duke had just blinked at him thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I understand. How will I explain this to the committee?”
Huw had to give it some thought. “Imagine an infinite chessboard. Each square on the board is a world. Now pick a piece—a knight, for example. You can move to another square, or reverse your move and go back to where you started from. That’s what I mean by a quantized commutative transformation—you can only move in multiples of a single knight’s move, your knight can’t simply slide one square to the left or right, it’s constrained. Now imagine our clan knotwork is a knight—and the Wu family’s design is, um, a special kind of rook that can move exactly three squares in a straight line. You use the knight, then the rook: to get back to where you started you have to reverse your rook’s move, then reverse the knight’s move. But because they’re different types of move, they don’t go to the same places—and if you combine them, you can discover new places to go. An infinite number of new places.”
“That is a very interesting theory. Test it. Find out if it’s true. Then report to me.” He raised a warning finger: “Try not to get yourself killed in the process.”
The pizza crusts were cold and half the soda was drunk. It was mid-afternoon, and the house was cooling down now that the air-conditioning had been on for a while. Huw sat in the front room, staring at the laptop screen. According to the geo graph i cal database, the ground underfoot was about as stable as it came. There were no nearby rivers, no obvious escarpments with debris to slide down and block the approaches. He closed his eyes, trying to visualize what the area around the house might look like in a land bare of human habitation. “You guys ready yet?” he called.
“Nearly there.” There was a clicking, rattling noise from the kitchen. Elena was tweaking her vicious little toy again. (“You’re exploring: your job is to take measurements, look around, avoid being seen, and come right back. But if the worst happens, you aren’t going to let anyone stop you coming back. Or leave any witnesses.”)
“Ready.” Hulius came in the door, combat boots thudding.
Huw glanced up. In his field camouflage, body armor, and helmet Hulius loomed like a rich survivalist who’d been turned loose in an army surplus store. “where’s your telemetry pack?”
“In the kitchen. Where’s your medical kit?”
Huw gestured at the side of the room. “Back porch.” He slid the laptop aside carefully and stood up. “How’s your blood pressure?”
“No problems with it, I’m not dizzy or anything.”
“Good. Okay, so let’s go…”
Huw found Elena in the kitchen at the back of the rental house. She had her telemetry belt on, and the headset, and had rigged the P90 in a tactical sling across her chest. “Ready?” he asked.
“I can’t wait!” She bounced excitedly on her toes.
“Let me check your equipment first.” She surrendered with ill grace to Huw’s examination. “Okay, I’m switching it on now.” He poked at the ruggedized PDA, then waited until the screen showed an off-kilter view of the back of his head. “Good, camera’s working.” He turned to Hulius. Gruffly: “Your turn now.”
“Sure, dude.” Hulius stood patiently while Huw hung the telemetry pack off his belt, under the big fanny pack of ration packs, drink cans, and survival tools. Hulius’s was heavier, and included a Toughbook PC and a short-wave radio—unlike Elena he might be sticking around for a while.