The Clan Corporate

Miriam perched tensely on the edge of the sofa. "Yes, please," she said. Remembering the pain of a childhood vaccination, she added, "It's the consumption, isn't it?" Consumption. The white death, tuberculosis. He'd picked it up in the camps, been in remission for a long time. But this is as bad as I've ever seen him-

"Yes." He shuffled toward the kitchen. "I've not so many months left in me."

He's whistling past the graveyard, she realized, appalled. "How old are you, Erasmus?" she called through the doorway.

"Thirty-nine." The closing kitchen door cut the rest off. Miriam stared after him, slightly horrified. She'd taken him for at least a decade older, well into middle age. This was a roomy apartment, top of the line for the working classes in this time and place. It had luxuries like indoor plumbing, piped town gas, batteries for electricity. But it was no place to live alone, with tuberculosis eating away at your lungs. She stood up and followed the sounds through to the kitchen.

"Erasmus-" She paused in the doorway. He had his back turned to her, washing his hands thoroughly under a stream of water piped from the coal-fired stove.

"Yes?" He half-turned, his face in shadow.

"Have you eaten in the past hour or two?" she asked.

Evidently she'd surprised him, for he shut the tap off and turned round, drying his hands on a towel. "What kind of question is that to be asking?" He cocked his head on one side, and something of the old Erasmus flickered into light.

"I'm asking if you've eaten," she said impatiently, tapping her toe.

"Not recently, no." He put the towel down and reached back into his pocket for his handkerchief.

"Okay." She dug around in her bag. "I've got something for you. You're certain what you've got is consumption?"

"Ahem-" He coughed, hacking repeatedly, into the handkerchief. "Yes, Miriam, it's the white death." He looked grim. "I've seen it take enough of my friends to know my number's come up."

"Okay." She tipped two tablets out into the palm of her hand, held them out toward him: "I want you to take these right now. Wash them down with tea, and make sure you don't eat anything for half an hour afterwards."

He looked at her in confusion, not taking the tablets. After a moment he smiled. "More of your utopian nonsense and magic, Miriam? Think this'll cure me and make me whole again?"

Miriam rolled her eyes. "Humor me. Please?"

"Ah, well. I suppose so." He took the two tablets and swallowed them one at a time, looking slightly disgusted. "What are they meant to do? I've got no time for quack nostrums as a rule…" The kettle began to whistle, and he turned back to the stove to pour water into a tarnished metal teapot.

"Remember the DVD player I showed you? The movie?" Miriam asked his turned back.

He froze.

"It's not magical," she added. "You need to take two of these tablets at the same time, on an empty stomach, every day without fail, for six months. That should-I hope-stop the disease from progressing. It won't make your lungs heal from the damage already done, and there's a chance, about one in ten, that it won't work, or that it'll make you feel even more sick, in which case I'll have to find some different medicine for you. But you should lose the coughing in a couple of weeks and begin to feel better in a month. Don't stop taking them, though, until six months are up, or it may come back." She paused. "It's not a utopia I come from, and the drugs don't always work. But they're better than anything I've seen here."

"Not a utopia." He turned to face her, holding the teapot. "You've got some very strange notions, young lady."

"I'm thirty-three, old man. You want to put that teapot down before you spill it? And no, it's not a utopia. Thing is, the bac-germs-that cause consumption, they evolve over time to resist the drugs. If you stop taking the medicine before you're completely cured, there's a chance that you'll develop a resistant strain of infection and these drugs will stop working. Too many homeless people where I come from stopped taking them when they felt better-result is, there are still people dying of tuberculosis in New York City." He was halfway back to the living room as she followed him, lecturing his receding back. "That stuff is the cheap first-line treatment. And you'll by god finish the bloody course, because I need you alive!"

He put the teapot down. When he turned round he was smiling broadly. "Hah! Now that's a surprise, ma'am."

"What?" Miriam, stopped in midstream, was perplexed.

He exhaled through a gap between his teeth. "You've shown no sign of needing anyone ever before, if I may be blunt. A veritable force of nature, that's you."

Miriam sat down heavily. "A force of nature with family problems. And a dilemma."

"Ah. I see. And you want to tell me about it?"

"Well-" She paused. "Later. What brought the tuberculosis back? How long did they hold you for?" How have you been? she wanted to ask, but that might imply an intimacy in their relationship that had never been explicit in the past.

"Oh, questions, questions." He poured tea into two china cups, neither of them chipped. "Always the questions." He chuckled painfully. "The kind of questions that turn worlds upside down. One lump or two?"

"None, thank you." Miriam accepted a cup. "Did they charge you?"

"No." Burgeson looked unaccountably irritated, as if the Political Police's failure to charge him reflected negatively on his revolutionary credentials. "They just banged me up and squatted in my shop." He brightened: "Some party or parties unknown-and not related to my friends-did them an extreme mischief on the premises." He cracked his knuckles. "And I was in custody! Clearly i

"Bastards," Miriam said absently. Burgeson winced slightly at the unladylike language but held his tongue. "I've been seeing a lot of that." She told him about the train journey, about Marissa and her mother who was afraid Miriam was an informer or police agent. "Is something happening?"

"Oh, you should know better than to ask me that." He glanced at her speculatively. When she nodded slightly, he went on: "The economy." He raised a finger. "It's in the midden. Spi

"Um, no." Miriam shook her head. "Different players, but the game's the same." She sipped her tea. Global climate change? What is the world's population here, anyway? Suddenly she had a strange vision, a billion coal-fired cooking stoves staining the sky with as bad a smog as a billion SUVs. Convergence…