"As you wish, my princess." Yul, hulking and fair-haired as any Viking warrior, carefully squeezed the remote. Advertisements and sitcoms strobed across the eviscerated guts of the machine pistol on the coffee table until he arrived at MTV. "Ah, that is better." Marilyn Manson strutted and howled through the last tour on earth; Elena pulled a face. "Manly music for martial-" an oily rag landed on his head.
"Children."
Elena glanced round, pulled a face. "He started it!"
"Sure." Huw stood in the doorway, trying not to smile. "Did you get the Internet working?"
"Something's wrong with it," Yul said apologetically.
"Ah, well." Huw shrugged and walked over to the armchair, where a laptop trailed bits of many-colored spaghetti towards the wall. "I'll sort it out. Got to report in." Expecting Yul or Elena to do anything technical had been a forlorn hope. Am I the only competent person around here? he wondered. Dumb question: While he'd been studying in schools and colleges in the United States under a false identity, Yul had been bringing joy to their backwoods father's heart, riding and hunting and being a traditional son on their country estate in the western marches of the Gruinmarkt; and Elena had been under the stifling constraints of a noble daughter, although she'd kicked up enough of a fuss that her parents had allowed her to escape into Clan Security, leaving them with one less dowry to worry about. Which left Huw as the guy who knew one end of an Internet router and a secure voice-over IP connection from another, and Yul and Elena as the armed muscle to watch over him when they weren't engaging in risky post-adolescent high-jinks-risky because the older generation weren't many years past fighting blood feuds over that sort of thing.
It took him a few minutes, some scrabbling with cables, and a reboot to get everything working properly, but Huw was setting up the encrypted link to the ClanSec e-mail hub and looking forward to checking in when he heard footsteps.
"Yes?" He glanced round. It was Miriam. She looked-not tired, exactly, but careworn. And something else.
"Brill tells me we need to talk," she said, then glanced across the room at the sofa.
"She said-"Huw's larynx froze for a few seconds as he stared at her. The first time he'd met her, gowned and bejeweled at a royal reception, she'd been turned out in the very mode of Gruinmarkt nobility; then earlier, when Lady Brilliana had so rudely yanked him (and Yul, and Elena) away from his survey, she'd been wearing an outlandish getup. Now she looked-at ease, he decided. This is her. She isn't acting a part. How interesting. "Ah. Well, she did, did she?"
"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."