“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?”

Brill gestured at the TV set. “Put one of those, showing that, in every peasant’s house? Are you kidding? I think it’s the most amazingly wonderful thing I’ve ever heard of!” She frowned. “My momer would say that’s typical of me, and my father would get angry and perhaps beat me for it. But I’m right, and they’re wrong.”

“Ah, the self-confidence of youth.” Miriam picked up her glass again. “Doesn’t the idea of, like, completely wiping out the culture of your own people worry you? I mean, so much of what we’ve got here is such complete shit—” She stopped. Brill’s eyes were sparkling—with anger, not amusement.

“You really think so? Go live in a one-room hut for a couple of years, bearing illiterate brats half of whom will die before they’re five! Without a fancy toilet, or even a thunder-mug to piss in each morning. Go do that, where the only entertainment is once a week going to the temple where some fat stupid priest invokes the blessings of Sky Father and his court on your heads and prays that the harvest doesn’t fail again like it did five years ago, when two of your children starved to death in front of your eyes. Then tell me that your culture’s shit!”

Miriam tried to interrupt: “Hey, what about—”

Brill steamed right on. “Shut up. Even the children of the well-off—like me—grow up living four to a room and wearing hand-me-downs. We are married off to whoever our parents think will pay best bride-price. Because we’re members of the outer families we don’t die of childbed fever—not since the Clan so graciously gave us penicillin tablets and morphine for the pain—but we get to bear child after child because it’s our duty to the Clan! Are you insane, my lady? Or merely blind? And it’s better for us in the families than for ordinary women, better by far. Did you notice that within the Clan you had rights? Or that outside the Clan, in the ordinary aristocracy, you didn’t? We have at least one ability that is as important, more important, than what’s between our legs: another source of status. But those ordinary peasants you feel such guilt for don’t have any such thing. There’s a better life awaiting me as a humble illegal immigrant in this world than there is as a lady-in-waiting to nobility in my own. Do you think I’d ever go back there for any reason except to help you change the world?”

Taken aback, Miriam recoiled slightly. “Ouch,” she said. “I didn’t realize all that stuff. No.” She picked up her wine glass again. “It’s post-colonial guilt, I guess,” she added by way of explanation. “We’ve got a lot of history here, and it’s really ugly in parts. We’ve got a long tradition of conquering other people and messing them up. The idea of taking over and running people for their own good got a very bad name about sixty years ago—did anyone tell you about the Second World War? So a lot of us have this cringe reflex about the whole idea.”

“Don’t. If you do what you’re planning, you couldn’t invade and conquer, anyway. How many people could you bring through? All you can do is persuade people to live their lives a better way—the one thing the families and the Clan have never bothered trying to do, because they’re swimming desperately against the stream, trying to hold their own lives together. It takes an outside view to realize that if they started building fabulous buildings and machines like these at home they wouldn’t be dependent on imported luxuries from the world next door. And they never—” her chest heaved—”let us get far enough away to see that clearly. Because if we did, we might not come back.”

She looked depressed.

“You don’t want to go back?” asked Miriam. “Not even to visit, to see your family and friends?”

“Not really.” It was a statement of fact. “This is better. I can find new friends here. If I go there, and you fail—” she caught Miriam’s gaze. “I might never be able to come back here.”

For a moment, looking at this young woman—young enough to be at college but with eyes prematurely aged by cynicism and the Clan’s greedy poverty of riches—Miriam had second thoughts. The families’ grip on their young was eggshell-thin, always in danger of bursting. If they ever got the idea that they could just take their lockets or tattoos or scraps of paper and leave, the Clan would be gone within a generation. Am I going to end up making this family tyranny stronger? she wondered. Because if so, shouldn’t I just give up now …? “I won’t fail you,” she heard herself saying. “We’ll fix them.”

Brill nodded. “I know you will,” she said. And Miriam nodded right back at her, her mind awash with all the other family children, her distant relatives—the siblings and cousins she’d never known, might never have known of, who would live and die in gilded poverty if she failed.

A woman dressed in black stepped out of the winter twilight.

She looked around curiously, one hand raised to cover her mouth. “I’m in somebody’s garden by the look of things. Hedge to my left, dilapidated shed in front of me—and a house behind. Can’t be sure, but it looks a mess. The hedge is wildly overgrown and the windows are boarded up.”

She glanced around, but couldn’t see into the neighboring gardens. “Seems like an expensive place.” She furtively scratched an arrowhead on the side of the shed, pointing to the spot she’d arrived on, then winced. “This light is hurting my head. Ow …” She hitched her coat out of the grayish snow then stumbled toward the house, crouching below the level of the windows.