The Clan Corporate

The kid looked baffled for a moment, made as if to push it away.

"What is it?" Miriam asked tensely.

"Mam said not to-"

"Ah." Miriam paused for a moment. Take, and double-take: "Marissa, what will your mam do if she finds out you've been to see me?"

The kid looked frightened. "You wouldn't!"

"Take. This." She pushed the coin into the girl's hand, folding the fingers around the buttery gleam of the royal groat-withdrawn from circulation a decade since to offset the liquidity crisis following the Persian war, now worth a hundred times its face value. "Give it to your mam. Tell her the truth. You came to see me, to ask. I told you, you were silly and shouldn't ask those questions. Then I gave you this." Marissa looked puzzled. "Go on. Your mam won't thump you, not if you give her this. She'll sleep better, because a constable wouldn't do that." And maybe she'll be able to buy you some more meals, Miriam added silently.

Marissa jerked, as if she'd suddenly awakened from a bad dream. "Thank'y," she gasped, then turned and scrabbled at the door. A moment later she was gone, darting off down the corridor.

Miriam shut and bolted the door again, then rubbed her forehead. "Bastards," she muttered. There was an unhappy picture here: she could put any number of interpretations to it, a countless multitude of sad little just-so stories to explain the desperate women in the frame. A mother and her kid selling the house, selling the furniture, using their savings to get away by the first train available. The uncle on his way to a work camp-whether he was a real uncle or a live-in companion made no odds, such things were winked at but not admitted publicly-by way of a beating and interrogation in the cells. Sedition. It was a movable feast. It could mean reading the wrong books (like the one in my bag, Miriam realized uncomfortably), attending the wrong meetings, even being seen in the same bars as campaigners for a universal franchise. (They campaigned for the universal male franchise, mostly-votes for women or nonwhites were the province of wild-eyed dreamers.) This is a police state, after all, Miriam reminded herself. Back home in the United States, most people had an overly romantic view of what a monarchy-not the toothless, modern constitutional monarchies of Europe, but the original l'état c'est moi variety-was like. In reality, a monarchy was just a fancy name for a hereditary dictatorship, Miriam decided. And that wasn't anything you wanted to get caught up in.

It was only later, lying awake in the stuffy darkness of her compartment, that Miriam's worries caught up with her. And by then it was too late to take back the coin (what if the Clan counts the decoy cash?) or to un-open the bag (what if they're testing me again?) or unread the peculiar memoranda (what's a W* heterozygote?) or even the samizdat tract by the executed French dissident Jean-Paul Mavrides. All because her PDA had crashed, and she hadn't bought any alternative reading matter.

The remainder of her outbound trip went uneventfully. Miriam turned out of bed at seven in the morning, forced down as much of a light breakfast as she could manage in the already oppressive heat, then alighted with her bag at Dunedin station. From there it was a brief cab ride to the safe house, an anonymous classical villa in the middle of a leafy suburb on the edge of the city center. She knocked on the door, and her contact ushered her into a basement room. Then he waited outside while she opened one of the two lockets she wore on a fine gold chain around her neck and focused on it.

The usual headache clamped around her head, making her feel breathless and sick. But she was back in the Gruinmarkt again-or rather, in an outpost in the middle of the Debatable Lands, the great interior void unclaimed by the eastern marcher states or the empire on the West Coast. Three bored-looking men sat around a log table in the middle of the room, one dressed to play Davy Crockett and the other two in sharp suits and shades. It might have been a frontier cabin, except frontier cabins didn't come with kerosene heaters, shortwave radio sets, and a rack of Steyr assault rifles by the door.

"Courier route blue four, parcel sixteen," Miriam said in her halting hochsprache as she stepped off the taped transit area on the floor and planted her carpetbag on the table. Davy Crockett passed her a clipboard wordlessly, boredom clear on his face. Miriam signed off.

Sharp Suit Number One picked up her bag. "Well, I'll be going," he said, signing the board. Walking over to the far side of the room he pulled a gleaming metal suitcase off the top of a chest, then stuffed the entire carpetbag inside it. Back on the transit area he picked up the case, nodded at Davy Crockett, then at Miriam, and clicked his heels together. "There's no place like home," he intoned, staring into a niche in the wall that Miriam hadn't noticed before. Then he wasn't there anymore. He didn't make a sound, she realized, massaging her forehead: not that she'd ever paid much attention to other world-walkers in their comings and goings, but-doesn't teleportation imply air displacement?

"Would you like coffee? Or wine?" asked Sharp Suit Number Two.

"Uh, coffee is be good-" Miriam's hochsprache broke down completely as she made it to the table. "And ibuprofen." She fa

"Stupid question." At last Davy Crockett spoke. "I've had a requisition for a portable air conditioner and solar power pack in for, oh, two years."

Two years? Miriam quailed at the idea of being assigned to babysit a frontier safe house like this for any length of time.

"Still not enough hands for a game of poker," Sharp Suit Number Two said regretfully. He blinked, slightly owlishly.

"The clock is ticking," intoned Davy Crockett. "Two hours." He nodded at Miriam. "When's your train?"

"Um. The return leaves just after four, so allow an hour to get to the station-"

"No problem." He picked up his pack of cards, shuffled the deck, and began dealing some kind of a solitaire hand. "We'll get you there," he muttered.

"Is there anything to do here?" Miriam asked.

"Play cards." Davy Crockett's cheek twitched. "Seriously, you don't go out that door unless the roof is on fire. Wouldn't like the company hereabouts, anyways, and you've got a train to catch in five hours."

"Oh." Miriam shifted uneasily on her chair.

"I'll tell them you've arrived," said the stationmaster. He stood up heavily and shambled over to the shortwave set.

Sharp Suit Number Two fussed over the kerosene stove: presently he turned it down and returned to the table bearing a metal espresso pot. "So," he said, hunching his shoulders conspiratorially, "what's it like, then?"

Miriam looked at him blankly. "What's what like?"

"Over there. You know." He waved at her, a gesture that took in everything she was wearing. "Different, isn't it, to America? In Chicago you'd stand out like, oh, obvious."

"Oh, there." Miriam stifled a sigh: it was going to be a long wait. "Well, for starters, they don't have air-conditioning…"

The return journey went smoothly, with no troublesome signs of recognition. There were no unwelcome traveling companions, no desperate Marissa to spark Miriam's paranoia, and no delays. Miriam managed to keep her nimble fingers away from the courier bag, having remembered to pause in the railway station kiosk before departure and pick up a selection of newspapers and a cheap novel or two. The headlines, as always, perplexed and mystified her as she tried to make sense of them. Comptroller-General A