"What-oh. I see."

"He is, it seems, setting up his own private intelligence group-by proxy, through Defense-this Office of Special Plans. He is one of those seekers for power who have a compulsive need for secrecy and hidden knowledge. We know exactly how to handle such men, do we not?"

"As long as you're cautious, Angbard. He knows too much already."

"About us? We won't be feeding him tidbits about us. But the fellow has enemies, and he knows it, and as long as we make ourselves discreetly indispensable we'll be safe from investigation by any agency he can touch. We've never had a vice president before, my lady; I hope to make it a mutually profitable arrangement."

(Pause.) "As long as he doesn't turn on us, your grace. Mark my words. As long as he doesn't turn on us…"

The tape clicked to an end. Mike stared at the poisonous thing, unwilling to rewind it and listen again. It wasn't as if he hadn't had his suspicions, but… this is Art Bell Show material, he told himself. The vice president is in cahoots with the Clan?

Slowly a new and even more unwelcome supposition inserted itself into his mind. No. The vice president was in cahoots with the Clan. Now he's-Mike flashed over on a vision of Dr. James, in a meeting with WARBUCKS himself, giving orders from his shadowy web-now he's set on destroying them. When Matthias defected he didn't realize the reports would end on WARBUCKS desk and WARBUCKS would have to kill him and turn on the Clan to destroy the evidence of his collusion-

The thoughts were coming too fast. Mike stood up tiredly, stretched the kinks out of his shoulders, glanced at the clock. It was four in the afternoon: a little early to go home, normally, but…

Shit. The Clan take politics personally-when they figure out what's happened they'll treat it as treachery. And if I even hint that I know this shit, the vice president will try and have me rubbed out. What the hell am I going to do?

Buy time. Sign myself out as sick. And hope something turns up…

12

Miriam cleared her throat. Begin with a cliche: This was the part she was edgy about. "I expect you're all wondering why I asked you here," she said, and smiled. Deathly silence. She studied her audience: forty or so of the most important movers and shakers of the inner families, mostly allies of the progressive faction. They were rapt, waiting for her explanation and uninclined to social chatter. Oh well, moving swiftly on… "It's been a year since I turned up with a plan and a business and asked my uncle to call a meeting of the Clan Council."

Heads nodded. Many of them had been at that particular meeting.

"You probably think I asked you here today because a lot has happened in the past year. In particular, that plan is dead in the water. I'm not going to assign blame or complain about it. Rather, I'd like to describe the situation we face right now, and propose a new plan. It's drastic, because we're in a bad position, but I think we can make it work. It'll mean major changes to the way we live, but if we go through with it"-she shrugged-"we'll be in a better position, going forward." Too much padding, she thought nervously.

She leaned over the laptop-sitting on a lectern borrowed from the shrine to the household deities-and tapped the space bar. PowerPoint was running, but the projector-"Someone check that-"

Huw poked at the projector. "It's on," he confirmed. A moment later the screen beside her (a bleached, lime-washed canvas stretched flat within a monstrously baroque gilt picture frame) flickered to life.

"Okay." Miriam focused on her notes. She'd spent almost twelve hours working on this presentation, far less than the subject deserved but as much as she'd been able to steal between her other duties over the past week. "Here's what we know for sure: Almost ten months ago, Sir Matthias, who had been participating in at least one little conspiracy against his grace the duke, vanished. We've subsequently learned that he handed himself in to the DEA in return for immunity"-shocked muttering from the back of the room told her that not everybody present had known even that much-"and the DEA handed him on to some kind of black intelligence team called the Family Trade Organization. They're the folks behind the series of raids that shut down the east coast network. A number of us have been compromised, including myself and her grace my mother. FTO subsequently captured at least two of our number and coerced them to act as mules, and at least one of their agents was in the grounds of the Summer Palace earlier this year when the pretender made his bid for the succession."

She paused. The muttering hadn't died down. "Can you save it for later?" she called.

"Silence!" This a deep bellow from Sir Alasdair, at the back corner of the room. "Pray continue, milady."

"Thank you… As I was about to say, anything we decide to do now has to take account of the facts that the US government is aware of us; considers us to be a threat; has developed at the very least a minimal capability to send operatives over here; and we can presume that the explosion at the Hjalmar Palace was also their work. And the news doesn't get any better from there. Um."

Next slide. "Now, I'm going to assume that we are all familiar with the long-lost cousins and the rediscovery of their, ah, home world. Before his illness, his grace the duke observed that one extra world might be an accident, but two were unlikely to be a coincidence; accordingly, he tasked Sir Huw here with conducting some preliminary research into the matter. What Sir Huw established, very rapidly, was that our early attempts to use the cousins' variant knotwork design on the east coast in the United States had failed because of a doppelgangering effect of some kind. The cousins' knotwork does, in fact, work, if you go far enough south and west. The world Sir Huw and his fellows discovered was-well, we don't know that it's uninhabited, but the presence of ruined buildings suggests that it used to be inhabited. Now it's cold; Maryland is sub-arctic, with pine forests, and there's residual radioactivity around the ruins-" She paused again, as the chatter peaked briefly. "Yes, this is, was, a high-tech world. Very high-tech."

She ran the next slide. A photograph of a shattered white dome on a forested hillside. Fast forward again: structures inside the dome, indistinct in the gloom but clearly showing how enormous it was. Next slide: a sealed metal door set in a concrete wall. "On the other side of this door, Sir Huw discovered hard vacuum." Next slide: a view down into the valley, thick mist swirling around the crack in the dome's side. "A door into an apparently endless vacuum. The cloud you're looking at is condensation where the air pressure around the dome drops. It's too dangerous to approach closer, or we'd have gone back to try and seal it-our people were lucky to get away alive-but it's not any kind of vacuum pump I've heard of. Our best guess is that it's a gate that maintains a permanent connection between two worlds,

rather than the transient connection we make when we world-walk. But we have no idea how it works or why there's no, uh, world there. Maybe there used to be and the gate needs to be anchored in some way? We don't know."

The chatter had subsided into a stunned silence. Miriam glanced round the shocked faces in front of her. "Sir Huw has also conducted some topological analysis on the family knotworks," she said forcefully. "He generated a series of variants and checked them-not to world-walk, but to see if he could feel them. He generated them using Mathematica. It turns out that the family knots can be derived by following a fairly simple formula, and there are three constants that, if you vary them, give rise to different knots that give him the family headache." Next slide: a polynomial equation. "Apparently, this is the key to our ability-it's the Alexander polynomial describing the class of knots to which ours belong. No, I don't understand it either, but it turns out that by tweaking some of these coefficients we get different knots that include the two we already know of.