The Hidden Family

“I know: I just don’t want you taking any risks,” Miriam added. “Okay, kids, it’s time to move. And I’m not taking you through just yet, Brill.” She reached for her heavy hiking jacket, pulled it on, and patted the right pocket to check her own gun was in place. “Wish me luck,” she said, as she walked toward the back door and the yard beyond.

Cleaning The Air

Miriam snapped into awareness teetering on the edge of an abyss. She flung herself sideways instinctively, grabbing for a tree branch—caught it, took two desperate strides as the ground under her feet crumbled, then felt her boots grip solid ground that didn’t crumble under her feet.

“Shit.” She glanced to her left. A large patch of muddy soil lay exposed in the middle of the snowscape, exposed on the crest of a steep drop to a half-frozen streambed ten feet below and twenty feet beyond what would be the side of the yard. “Oh shit.” She gasped for breath, icy terror forcing her to inhale the bitterly cold air. Horrified, she looked down into the stream. If we’d rented the next unit over, or if I’d carried Brill over—a ducking in this sort of weather could prove fatal. Or could I have come through at all? She glanced up. She’d been lucky with the tree, a young elm that grew straight and tall for the first six feet. The forest hereabouts was thin. I need to ask Brill what else she hasn’t thought to tell me about world-walking, she realized. Perhaps her mother was right about her being over-confident. A vague memory floated up from somewhere, something about much of Boston being built on landfill reclaimed from the bay. What if I’d tried this somewhere out at sea? she thought, and leaned against the tree for a minute or two to catch her breath. Suddenly, visions of coming through with her feet embedded in a wall or hovering ten feet above a lake didn’t seem comical at all.

She closed her locket and carefully pocketed it, then looked around. “It’ll do,” she muttered to herself. “As long as I avoid that drop.” She stared at it carefully. “Hmm.” She’d gone through about a foot away from the left- hand wall of their yard: The drop-off was steepest under the wall. The yard was about twelve feet wide, which meant—

“Right here.” She took out her knife and carved a blaze on the tree around head height. Then she dropped her backpack and turned around, slowly, trying to take in the landscape.

The stream ran downhill toward the river a quarter of a mile away, but it was next to invisible through the woods, even with the barren winter branches blocking less of the view than the summer’s profusion of green. In the other direction trees stretched away as far as she could see. “I could walk for miles in this, going in circles,” Miriam told herself. “Hmm.”

She carved another blaze on a tree, then began cautiously probing into the woods, marking trees as she went. After an hour she’d established that there was no sudden change in the landscape for a couple of hundred yards in two directions away from her little backyard. Sheer random chance had brought her through in nearly the worst possible place.

“Okay,” she told herself, squeezing her forehead as if she could cram the headache back inside the bones of her skull. “Here goes.” And this time, she pulled down her left sleeve and looked at the chilly skin on the inside of her wrist—pale and almost blue with cold, save for the dark green-and-brown design stippled in dye below the pulse point.

It worked.

That night, Miriam didn’t sleep well. She had a splitting headache and felt sick to her stomach, an unfamiliar nausea for one who didn’t suffer migraines. But she’d managed a second trip after dark, only four hours after the first, and returned after barely an hour with aching back and arms (from lifting the heavy shooting hide and a basic toolkit) and a bad case of the shivers.

Brilliana fussed over her, feeding her moussaka and grilled octopus from a Greek take-out she’d discovered somewhere—Brill had taken to exploring strange cuisines with the glee of a suddenly liberated gastronome—and readied her next consignment. “I feel like a Goddamn mule,” Miriam complained over a bottle of wine. “If only there were two of us!”

“I’d do it if I could,” Brill commented, stung. “You know I would!”

“Yes, yes…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just—I can carry eighty pounds on my back, just. A hundred and twenty? I can’t even pick it up. I wish I could take more. I should take up weight lifting…”

“That’s what the couriers all do. Why don’t you use a walking frame?” asked Brill.

“A walking—is this something the Clan does that I don’t know about?”

Brill shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said, “I never saw how they operate the post service. But surely—if we get a very heavy pack ready, and lift it so you can walk into it backwards then just lock your knees, wouldn’t that work?”

“It might.” Miriam pulled a face. “I might also twist an ankle. Which would be bad, in the middle of nowhere.”

“What happens if you try to go through with something on the ground?” Brill asked.

“I don’t.” Miriam refilled her glass. “It was one of the first things I tried. If you jump on my back I can just about carry you for thirty seconds or so before I fall over—that’s long enough. But I tried with a sofa a while ago. All that happened was, I got a splitting headache and threw up in the toilet. I don’t know how I managed it the first time, sitting in a swivel chair, except maybe it was something to do with its wheels—there wasn’t much contact with the floor.”

“Oh, right”

“Which says interesting things about the family trade,” Miriam added.

“They’re limited by weight and volume in what they can ship. Two and a half tons a week. If we open up ‘world three’ that’ll go down, precipitously, although the three-way trade may be worth more. We’ve got to work out how to run an import/export business that doesn’t run into the mercantilist zero-sum trap.”

“The what?” Brill looked blank.

Miriam sighed. “Old, old theory. It’s the idea that there are only a finite quantity of goods of fixed value, so if you ship them from one place to another, the source has to do without. People used to think all trade worked that way. What happens is, if you ship some commodity to a place where it’s scarce, sooner or later the price drops— deflates—while you’re buying up so much of the supply that the price rises at the source.”

“Isn’t that the way things always work?” Brill asked.

“Nope.” Miriam took a sip of wine. “I’m drinking too much of this stuff, too regularly. Hmm, where was I? This guy called Adam Smith worked it out about two centuries ago, in this world. Turns out you can create value by working with people to refine goods or provide services. Another guy called Marx worked on Smith’s ideas a bit further a century later, and though lots of people dislike the prescription he came up with, his analysis of how capitalism works is quite good. Labor—what people do—enhances the value of raw materials. This table is worth more than the raw timber it’s made out of, for example. We can create value, wealth, what-have-you, if we can just move materials to where the labor input on them enhances their value the most.” She drifted off, staring at the TV set, which was showing a talk show with the volume muted. (Brill said it made more sense that way.) “The obvious thing to move is patents,” she murmured. “Commercially valuable ideas.”

“You think you can use the talent to create wealth, instead of moving it around?” Brill looked puzzled.

“Yes, that’s it exactly.” Miriam put her glass down. “A large gold nugget is no use to a man who’s dying of thirst in a desert. By the same token, a gold nugget may be worth a lot more to a jeweler, who can turn it into something valuable and salable, than it is to someone who just wants to melt it down and use it as coin. Jewelry usually sells for more than its own weight in raw materials, doesn’t it? That’s because of the labor invested in it. Or the scarcity of the end product, a unique work of art. The Clan seems to have gotten hung up on shipping raw materials around as a way of making money. I want to ship ideas around, instead, ideas that people can use to create value locally—in each world—actually create wealth rather than just cream off a commission for transporting it.”

“And you want to eventually turn my world into this one,” Brilliana said calmly.

“Yes.” Miriam looked back at her. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing, do you think?”