Free The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) by Stross Charles

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?’
    ‘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.’
    ‘Uh.’ Huw took a mouthful of coffee. ‘What’s your reasoning?’
    ‘Well, you’re the one who just told me you thought our ability was artificial? And we’ve established that someone else – let’s take your door into a vacuum realm as
a given – has a way of moving stuff between time lines – yes, I’m going to take the idea that we’re in a bunch of parallel universes that branch off each other as a given.
New Britain really rubs your nose in it – and I think if they can just
open a door
then we have to admit that – what the Clan can do? The postal corvée? Is a
joke.’
    Miriam closed her eyes for a moment. ‘The Council are
so
not going to want to hear this. And it’s not the worst of it.’
    ‘What else do you figure we’re looking at?’ Huw stared at her, fascinated.
Have you figured out the other thing . . . ?
    ‘Okay, let’s speculate wildly. There are other people out there who can travel between parallel worlds. They’re better at it than us, and they know what they’re doing.
That’s really bad, right there, but not necessarily fatal. However . . . we’ve been pointedly ignoring, all along, the fact that what we do isn’t magical. It’s not unique.
It’s like, after 1945, the government pretended for a few years that making nuclear weapons was some kind of big secret. Then the Russians got the bomb, and the Brits, and the Chinese, and
before you can blink we’re worrying about the North Koreans, or the Iranians. What the Clan Council needs to worry about is the US government – who they’ve spent the past few
decades systematically provoking – and who now know we exist. What do
you
think they’ll do?’
    ‘But we don’t know how the world-walking mechanism works. It’s got to take them time – ’
    Miriam took another mouthful of coffee. ‘They’ve had
seven or eight months
, Huw. That’s how long it’s been since Matthias went over the wall. And
there’s’ – she paused, as if considering her words – ‘stuff that’s happened, stuff that will turn hunting us down into a screaming crash priority, higher than
al-Qaeda, higher than the Iraq occupation. They’ve got to be throwing money at it like the Manhattan project . . .’ She trailed off.
    ‘I don’t think they’ll have got anywhere yet.’ Huw reached for the coffee pot again, emptying the dregs into their mugs. ‘It takes time to organize a research
project and they’ll be doing it under conditions of complete secrecy.’
    ‘Yes, but they’ve already got the big national laboratories. And if they’ve got captive Clan members, they’re
starting
from where the Clan stood, as of forty-eight
hours ago. And they could have started months ago! It all depends on whether the problem they’re trying to crack is a hard one or an easy one. If we’ve got some kind of mechanism that
lets us do this, then it’s designed to replicate, and there’s got to be some sort of control system wired into our brains – are you telling me nobody has put bits of a Clan member
under an electron microscope before to look for