“She said.” Miriam leaned on the back of his chair. “You’ve been exploring. Whatever that means.” She sounded bored, but there was a glint in her eye.
“Uh, yeah.” Huw leaned forward and shut the laptop’s lid. “Why don’t we go fix something to drink?” He glanced sidelong at Yul and Elena, who were sitting on the sofa, bickering amiably over the gun, their heads leaning together. “Somewhere quieter.” The TV howled mournfully, recycling the sound track of a guitar in torment.
The kitchen was bland, basic, and undersupplied—they’d traveled light and hadn’t had time to buy much more than a bunch of frozen pizzas—but there was coffee, and a carton of half-and-half, and a coffee maker. Huw busied himself filling it while Miriam searched the cupboards for mugs. “How did you go about it?” she asked, finally.
Huw took a deep breath. “Systematically. We haven’t started de-convoluting the knotwork”—the two worlds to which the Clan’s members could walk were distinguished by the use of a different knot that the world-walker had to concentrate on—“but I’m pretty sure we’ll start finding others once we do. The fourth world we found—it’s accessed from this one, if you use the Lee’s knot. We couldn’t get through to it in New England, but it worked down south; I think it may be in the middle of an ice age.”
“Did you find anyone? People, I mean?”
“Yes.” Huw paused as the coffee maker coughed and grumbled to itself. “Their bones. A big dome, made out of something like, like a very odd kind of concrete. Residual radioactivity. A skull with perfect dentistry, bits of damaged metalwork, fire escapes or gantries or something, that I’ll swear are made out of titanium. It’s clearly been there decades or centuries. And then there’s the door.”
“Door?”
“Yul hit it with an axe. Nearly killed us—there was hard vacuum on the other side.”
“Whoops.” Miriam pulled out a stool and sat down at the breakfast bar. “Too fast. Vacuum? You think you found a door onto another world?”
“We didn’t stick around to make sure,” Huw said drily. “But it didn’t stop sucking after a couple of minutes. Last time we saw the dome, it was surrounded by fog.”
“Oh my.” Her shoulders were shaking. “God.”
Huw watched her, not unsympathetically. He’d had more than a day to get used to the idea: If Lady Brilliana was right—and his own judgement was right—and Miriam was fit to lead them . . .
“That changes a lot of things,” she said, looking straight at him. “If it is a door to another world . . . how do you think it works?”
Huw shrugged again. “We are cursed by our total ignorance of our family talent’s origins,” he pointed out. “But what we seem to have is a trait that can be externally controlled—that’s what the knot’s for—and I figure if it turns out that other knots take us to other worlds, then it’s no huge leap to conclude that it was engineered for a purpose. I don’t think anyone’s looked inside us—I figure the mechanism, if there is one, has got to be something intracellular—but the fact that it’s controllable, that we don’t world-walk at random when we look at a maze or a fractal generator on a PC, screams design. This door? There’s more stuff in that dome, lots more, and it looks like wreckage left behind by a civilization more advanced than this one.” He pointed at the coffee maker. “Think what a peasant back home would make of that? You know, and I know, what it is and how it works, because we went to school and college in this country.” He pulled the jug out and poured two mugs of coffee. “Electricity. But to a peasant . . .”
“Magic.” The word hung in the air as Miriam poured milk into both mugs.
“So.” He chose his words carefully. “What do you think it means?”
“Oh boy.” Miriam stared at her coffee mug, then blew on it and took a first sip. “Where do you want me to start? If nothing else, it makes all the Clan’s defensive structures obsolete overnight. One extra universe is useful, two is embarrassing, three extra universes implies . . . more. Which means, assuming there are more, that doppelgangered houses stop being effectively defended.” Doppelgangering—the practice of building defenses in the other worlds, physically colocated with the space occupied by the defended structure, in order to stop hostile world-walkers gaining access—was a key element in all the Clan families’ buildings. But you could build an earth berm or a safe house in one parallel universe—how could you hope to do it if there were millions? “And then . . . well. I tried telling the Council their business model was broken, but I didn’t realize how broken it was.”
“Really?” Huw leaned forward.
“Really.” She put her mug down. “The—hell, I’m doing it again. Distancing. We got rich in the Gruinmarkt by exploiting superior technology—being able to move messages around fast, make markets, that kind of thing. And we got rich in this world”—she glanced at the window, which opened out onto an unkempt yard—“by smuggling. But what they were really doing was exploiting a development imbalance. Making money through a monopoly on superior technology—okay, call it a family talent, and it may be something you can selectively breed for, but if you’re right and it’s a technology, then it’s not a monopoly anymore.”
“Uh.” Huw took a mouthful of coffee. “What’s your reasoning?”
“Well. You’re the one who just told me you thought our ability was artificial? And we’ve established that someone else—let’s take your door into a vacuum realm as a given—has a way of moving stuff between time lines—yes, I’m going to take the idea that we’re in a bunch of parallel universes that branch off each other as a given. New Britain really rubs your nose in it—and I think if they can just open a door then we have to admit that what the Clan can do? The postal corvée? Is a joke.”
Miriam closed her eyes for a moment. “The Council are so not going to want to hear this. And it’s not the worst of it.”
“There’s more?” Huw stared at her, fascinated. Have you figured out the other thing? . . .
“Okay, let’s speculate wildly. There are other people out there who can travel between parallel worlds. They’re better at it than us, and they know what they’re doing. That’s really bad, right there, but not necessarily fatal. However . . . we’ve been pointedly ignoring, all along, the fact that what we do isn’t magical. It’s not unique. It’s like, after 1945, the government pretended for a few years that making nuclear weapons was some kind of big secret. Then the Russians got the bomb, and the Brits, and the Chinese, and before you can blink we’re worrying about the North Koreans, or the Iranians. What the Clan Council needs to worry about is the US government—who they’ve spent the past few decades systematically getting mad at them—and who now know we exist. What do you think?”
“But we don’t know how the world-walking mechanism works. It’s got to take them time—”
Miriam took another mouthful of coffee. “They’ve had seven or eight months, Huw. That’s how long it’s been since Matthias went over the wall. And there’s”—she paused, as if considering her words—“stuff that’s happened, stuff that will turn hunting us down into a screaming crash priority, higher than al Qaida, higher than the Iraq occupation. They’ve got to be throwing money at . . .” She trailed off.
“I don’t think they’ll have got anywhere yet.” Huw reached for the coffee pot again, emptying the dregs into their mugs. “It takes time to organize a research project and they’ll be doing it under conditions of complete secrecy.”