She ran the next slide. A photograph of a shattered white dome on a forested hillside. Fast forward again: structures inside the dome, indistinct in the gloom but clearly showing how enormous it was. Next slide: a sealed metal door set in a concrete wall. “On the other side of this door, Sir Huw discovered hard vacuum.” Next slide: a view down into the valley, thick mist swirling around the crack in the dome’s side. “A door into an apparently endless vacuum. The cloud you’re looking at is condensation where the air pressure around the dome drops. It’s too dangerous to approach closer, or we’d have gone back to try and seal it—our people were lucky to get away alive—but it’s not any kind of vacuum pump I’ve heard of. Our best guess is that it’s a gate that maintains a permanent connection between two worlds, rather than the transient connection we make when we world-walk. But we have no idea how it works or why there’s no, uh, world there. Maybe there used to be and the gate needs to be anchored in some way? We don’t know.”
The chatter had subsided into a stunned silence. Miriam glanced round the shocked faces in front of her. “Sir Huw has also conducted some topological analysis on the family knotworks,” she said forcefully. “He generated a series of variants and checked them—not to world-walk, but to see if he could feel them. He generated them using Mathematica. It turns out that the family knots can be derived by following a fairly simple formula, and there are three constants that, if you vary them, give rise to different knots that give him the family headache.” Next slide: a polynomial equation. “Apparently, this is the key to our ability—it’s the Alexander polynomial describing the class of knots to which ours belong. No, I don’t understand it either, but it turns out that by tweaking some of these coefficients we get different knots that include the two we already know of.
“Any given knot, starting in any given world, seems to act as a binary switch: Focus on it and you can walk from your starting world into a single destination determined by the knot you use.”
Someone had thoughtfully placed a wine goblet by her laptop. Miriam paused to take a sip.
“There’s more. The conventional wisdom about how much we can carry, about the impossibility of moving goods using a carriage or a wheelbarrow? It’s somewhat . . . wrong. It’s true that you can’t easily carry a larger payload, but with careful prior arrangement and some attention to insulators and reducing contact area you can move about a quarter of a ton. Possibly more, we haven’t really pushed the limits yet. I suspect that this was known to the postal service but carefully kept quiet prior to the civil war; the number of world-walkers who’d have to cooperate to establish a rival corvée, independent of our Clan authorities, is much smaller than the conventional wisdom would have it. If this was widely known it would have made it harder to control the young and adventurous, and consequently harder to retain a breeding population. So the knowledge was actually suppressed, and experimentation discouraged, and during the chaos of the civil war everyone who knew the truth was murdered. Maybe it was a deliberate strategy—knowledge is power—or just coincidence, or accident. It doesn’t matter; what I want to impress on you is that there are big gaps in our knowledge, and some of them appear to have been placed there deliberately. Only we’ve begun to piece things together, thanks to the recent destabilization. And the picture I’m building isn’t pretty.”
She hit the key for the next slide. “You heard—a year ago you heard—my views on the Clan’s business and its long-term viability. Smuggling drugs only works as long as they stay expensive, and as long as the people you’re smuggling them past don’t know what’s going on. We’ve seen evidence of a technology to build gates between worlds, and if there’s one thing the US government is good at, it’s throwing money at scientific research and making it stick. They know we’re here, and I promise you that right now there is a national laboratory—hell, there are probably ten—trying to work out how world-walking works. Worst case, they’ve already cracked the problem; best case . . . we may have years rather than months. But once they crack it, we, here in the Gruinmarkt, we’re finished. Those people can send two million tons of heavy metal halfway around the world to kick in doors in Baghdad, and we’re right on their doorstep.”
She paused to scan the room again. Forty pairs of eyes were staring at her as if she’d sprouted a second head. Her stomach knotted queasily. “I think we need to get used to the idea that it’s over. We can’t stay here indefinitely; we don’t have the leverage. Even if we can negotiate some kind of peaceful settlement with them—and looking at the current administration I’m not optimistic—it’d be like sleeping with an elephant. If it rolls over in its sleep . . . well. We need some ideas about what we can do. New Britain is a first approximation of an answer: It’s got vastly more resources than the Gruinmarkt, Nordmarkt coastline, and we’ve got contacts there. I propose that we should collectively go into the technology-transfer business. We’ve got access to American libraries and know-how, and if we put our muscle into it we can jump-start a technological revolution in New Britain. Operating under cover in the United States has brought very mixed results—it’s encouraged us to act like criminals, like gangsters. I propose that our new venture should be conducted openly, at least in New Britain. We should contact their authorities and ask for asylum. We could do it quietly, trying to set up cover identities and sneak in—but it would be much harder now that they’re in the middle of a war and a major political upheaval. If we were exposed by accident, the first response would likely be harsh, just as it has been in the United States.
“But anyway. That’s why I invited you here today. Last year I told you that I thought the Clan’s business was unsustainable in the long term. Today, I’m telling you that it has become a lethal liability in the present—and to explore an alternative model. I can’t do this on my own. It’s up to you to help make this work. But if it doesn’t, if we don’t pull ourselves together and rapidly start up a new operation, we’re going to be crushed like bugs. Probably within a matter of months.”
She took another sip from her wineglass. “Any questions?” A hand waved at the back, then another. The first, Huw, was one of her plants, but the other . . . “Earl Wu? You have something to say?”
“Yes,” rumbled the Security heavy. “You are an optimist. You think we can change our ways, yes? We will either have to run from the Americans, or negotiate with them.”
Miriam frowned. “Isn’t that obvious? There’s nothing else—”
“—They will want to strike back,” Carl interrupted. “Our backwoods hotheads. They are used to power and they do not spend enough time in America to understand how large the dragon is that they think they have cornered.” He tapped his forehead. “I got my education in the US Marine Corps. And I know these idiots, the ones who stayed home.”
“But how can they strike back?” Miriam stared at him. Brooding and grim as a warrior out of a Viking saga, Carl exuded absolute certainty and bleakly pessimistic skepticism.