Then she heard them. A bang from the front door, low-pitched male voices, hunters casting around for the scent. Burgeson’s distraction had worked its purpose, but if she didn’t hurry, it would be all for nothing. Grimly determined, Miriam stepped into the abandoned workshop and gripped her suitcase. Standing beneath the skylight, she pulled the locket out of her pocket and narrowed her eyes, focusing on it and clearing her mind of everything else as the police agents stumbled towards her through the darkness.
This is it, she told herself. No more nice-guy Miriam. Next time someone tries to do this to me, I’m not going to let them live long enough to regret it.
And then the world changed.
Huw slept badly after he finished drafting the e-mail report to the duke. It wasn’t simply the noises Yul and Elena were making, although that was bad enough—young love, he reflected, was at its worst when there wasn’t enough to go round—but the prospects of what he was going to have to face on the morrow kept him awake long after the other had fallen asleep.
A new world. There couldn’t be any other explanation for the meteorological readings. Temperatures that low, that kind of subarctic coniferous forest, hadn’t been found in this part of the world since the last of the ice ages. The implications were enormous. For starters, this was the second new world that the Wu family’s knotwork could take a world-walker to. What happens if I use the original knot, from somewhere in this fourth world? Probably it takes me to yet another… even without discovering new topologies, ownership of both knotwork designs implied access to a lot more than three, or even four, worlds. The knots define a positional transformation in a higher order space. Like the moves of different pieces on a chessboard—able to go forward or backward, but if you used your bishop to make a move in one direction, then swapped your bishop for a rook, you could go somewhere else. It meant everything was up for grabs.
For over a century the Clan’s grandees had doppelgangered their houses—building defenses in the other world they knew of, to protect their residences from stealthy attack—without realizing that the Wu family could attack them from a third world. Now there was a fourth, and probably a fifth, a sixth…where would it end? Our core defensive strategy has just been made obsolete, overnight. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The Wu family knot was a simple mistake, the lower central whorl superimposed over the front of the ascending spiral, rather than hidden behind it. There would be other topologies, encoding different positional transformations. That much seemed clear to Huw, although he’d had to limit his forays into Mathematica to half an hour per day—trying to work out the knot structure was a guaranteed fast-track route to a migraine. There will be other worlds.
He lay awake long after Yul and Elena had dozed off, staring at the ceiling, daydreaming about exploration and all the disasters that could befall an unwary world-walker. We’ll need oxygen masks. (What if some of the worlds had never evolved photosynthesis, so that life was a thin scum of sulfur-reducing bacteria clustered around volcanic vents, at the bottom of a thick blanket of nitrogen and ammonia?) Trickster-wife, we may need space suits. (What if the planet itself had never formed?) Need to map the coastlines and relief, see if plate tectonics evolves deterministically in all worlds…
He blinked at the sunlight streaming in through the front window. How had it gotten to be morning? His mouth tasted of cobwebs and dust, but his head was clear. “Gaah.” There was no point pretending to sleep.
Someone was singing as he wandered through into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. It was Elena: she’d found the stash of kitchenware and was filling the coffee maker, warbling one of the more salacious passages of a famous saga to herself with—to Huw—a deeply annoying air of smug satisfaction.
“Humph.” He rummaged in the cupboard for a glass but came up with a chipped coffee mug instead. Rinsing it under the cold water tap, he asked, “Ready to face the day?”
“Oh yes!” She trilled, closing up the machine. She turned and grinned at him impishly. “It’s a wonderful day to explore a new world, don’t you think?”
“Just as long as we don’t leave our bones there.” Huw took a gulp of the slightly brackish tap water. “Yuck.” Ease up, she’s just being exuberant, he told himself. “Where’s Yul?”
“He’s still getting dressed—” She remembered herself and flushed. “He’ll be down in a minute.”
“Good.” Huw pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. Memo to self: do not taunt little brother’s girlfriend, little brother will be tetchy. “Coffee would be good, too, thanks,” he added.
“What are we going to do today?” she asked, eyes widening slightly.
“Hmm. Depends.”
“I was thinking about doing breakfast,” rumbled Hulius, from the doorway.
“That—” Huw brightened “—sounds like a great idea. Got to wait for the duke’s say-so before we continue, anyway,” he added. “Breakfast first, then we can get ready for a camping trip.”
Huw drove into town carefully, hunting for the diner he’d spotted the day before. He steered the youngsters to a booth at the back before ordering a huge breakfast—fried eggs, bacon, half a ton of hash browns, fried tomatoes, and a large mug of coffee. “Go on, pig out,” he told Elena and Hulius, “you’re going to be sorry you didn’t later.”
“Why should I?” asked Elena, as the waitress ambled off towards the kitchen. “I’ll be sorry if I’m fat and ugly before my wedding night!”
Huw glanced at his brother: Yul was studiously silent, but Huw could just about read his mind. Not the sharpest knife in the box… “We’re going back to the forest,” Huw explained laboriously, “and we’re staying there for at least one night, maybe two, in a tent. It’s going to be very cold. Your body burns more calories when you’re cold.”
“Oh!” She glared at him. “Men!” Yul winked at him, then froze as the waitress reappeared with a jug of coffee. “No sense of humor,” she humphed.
“Okay, so we’re humor-impaired” Huw started on his hash browns. “Listen, we—” he paused until the waitress was out of earshot “—it depends what orders we receive, alright? It’s possible his grace will tell me to sit tight until he can send a support team…but I don’t think it’s likely. From what I can gather, we’re shorthanded everywhere and anyone who isn’t essential is being pulled in for the corvee, supporting security operations, or running interference. So my best bet is, he’ll read my report and say ‘carry on.’ But until I get confirmation of that, we’re not going across.”
Elena stabbed viciously at her solitary fried egg. “To what end are we going?”
“To see if that stuff Yul found really is the remains of a roadbed. To look around and get some idea of the vegetation, so I can brief a real tree doctor when we’ve got time to talk to one. To plant a weather station and seismograph. To very quietly see if there’s any sign of inhabitation. To boldly go where no Clan explorer has gone before. Is that enough to start with?”
“Eh.” Yul paused with his coffee mug raised. “That’s a lot to bite off.”
“That’s why all three of us are going, this time.” Huw took another mouthful. “And we’re all taking full packs instead of piggybacking. That ties us down for an hour, minimum, if we run into trouble, but going by your first trip, there didn’t seem to be anybody home. We might have wildlife trouble, bears or wolves, but that shouldn’t be enough to require an immediate withdrawal. So unless the duke says ‘no,’ we’re going camping.”