“Sky father, no!” He looked shocked. “The Clan council would never have stood for it! Even if it was just over here. But I could buy us both a house over here, make believe that—” He stopped, took a sip of coffee, then put his cup down again. All through the process, he avoided Miriam’s gaze.

“You didn’t want to go back,” she stated.

“You can cross over twice in a day, in an hour, if you take beta-blockers,” he said quietly. “Speaking of which.” He extracted a blisterpack of pills from his inner pocket and passed it across to her. “They do something about the headaches. You can discharge your duty to Clan and family that way, keep the post moving, and live nine-tenths of your life free of… of… of…”

Miriam waited for him to sort his tongue out.

“Jan and I had two years together,” he finally said quietly. “Then they broke us up.”

“The Clan.” Her mouth was dry. She turned the pack of pills over and over, reading the label. “Did they—”

“Indirectly.” He interrupted her deliberately, then finished his coffee cup. “Look, she kept asking questions. Questions that I couldn’t answer. Wasn’t allowed to answer. I’d have been required to go home and marry someone of high rank within the Clan sooner or later, just to continue the bloodline, but I’m a man. I’m allowed to spend some time settling down. But eventually … if we marry out we go extinct in two, maybe three generations. And the money goes down faster, because our power base is built on positive market externalities—have you—”

“Yes,” she said, mouth dry despite the coffee she’d just swallowed without tasting. “The more of you there are, the more nodes you’ve got to trade between and the more effectively you can run your import/export system, right?”

“Right. We’re in a population trap, and it takes special dispensation to marry out. Our position is especially tenuous because of the traditional nobility; a lot of them see us as vile upstarts, illegitimate and crude, because we can’t trace our ancestry back to one of the hetmen of the Norge fleet that conquered the Gruinmarkt away from the Auslaand tribes about four, five hundred years ago. We find favour with the crown, because we’re rich—but even there we are in a cleft stick: It does not do well to become so powerful that the crown itself is threatened. If you get the chance to marry into the royal family—of Gruinmarkt or of one of our neighbours—but that’s the only way you could marry out without the council coming down on you.”

“Huh. Other kingdoms? Where did they come from, anyway? It’s, I’d have said medieval—”

“Nearly.” Roland nodded. “I did some digging into it. You are aware that in your world the feudal order of western Europe emerged from the wreckage of the Roman Empire, imposed largely by Norse—Viking—settlers who had assimilated many of the local ways? I am not sure, but I believe much the same origin explains our situation here. On this coast, there are several kingdoms up and down the seaboard. Successive waves of emigration from the old countries of the Holy Empire conquered earlier kingdoms up and down the coast, forced into a militarized hierarchy to defend themselves against the indigenous tribes. Vikings, but Vikings who had assimilated the Roman church—the worship of the divine company of gods—and such learning as the broken wreckage of Europe had to offer. We sent agents across the Atlantic to explore the Rome of this world thirty years or so ago: It lies unquiet beneath the spurs of the Great Khan, but the churches still make burned offerings before the gods. Maybe when there are more of us we will open up trade routes in Europe … but not yet.”

“Um. Okay.” Miriam nodded, reduced to silence by a sudden sense of cultural indigestion. This is so alien! “So what about you? The Clan, I mean. Where do you—we—fit into the picture?”

“The Clan families are mostly based in Gruinmarkt, which is roughly where Massachusetts and New York and Maine are over here. But we, the Clan families, were ennobled only in the past six generations or so—the old landholders won’t ever let you forget it. The Clan council voted to make children of any royal union full members—that way, the third generation will be royalty, or at least nobility, and have the talent. But nobody’s married into one of the royal families yet—either in the Gruinmarkt, or north or south for that matter.

“In the Outer Kingdom, to the west, things are different again—-there are civil service exams. Again, we’ve got an edge there. We have schools over here and ways to cheat. But I was talking about the population trap, wasn’t I? The council has a long arm. They won’t let you go. And it’ll take more than just one person on the inside, pushing, to make them change. I’ve tried. I got a whole huge reform program mapped out that’d break their dependency, begin developing the Gruinmarkt—but the council tore it up and threw it out without even reading it. Only Duke Angbard kept them from going further and declaring me a traitor.”

“Let me get this straight,” Miriam said, leaning forward. “You lived with Janice until she couldn’t put up with you not telling her what you were doing for two hours a day, couldn’t put up with not knowing about your background, and until your elders began leaning on you to get married. Right?”

“Wrong,” he said. “I told Uncle Angbard where he could shove his ultimatum.” He hunched over, a picture of misery. “But she moved out, anyway. She’d managed to convince herself that I was some kind of gangster, drug smuggler, whatever, up to my ears in no good. I was trying, trying, to get permission to go over for good, to try to make it up to her, to make everything all right. But she was killed by a car. A hit-and-run accident, the police said.”

He fell silent, story run down.

Well, she thought. Words failed her for a minute. “Were the two things connected? Causally, that is?”

“You mean, did the council have her killed?” he asked harshly. “I don’t know. I’ve refused to investigate the possibility. Thousands of pedestrians are killed by hit-and-run drivers every year. She’d walked out on me, and we might never have got back together. And if I did discover that one of my relatives was responsible, I’d have to kill them, wouldn’t I? You didn’t live through the war. Trust me, you don’t want to go there, to having assassins stepping out of thin air behind people and garrotting them. Far better to let it lie.”

“That doesn’t sound like the same man speaking,” she speculated.

“Oh, but it does.” He smiled lopsidedly. “The half of me that is a cold-blooded import/export consultant, not the half of me that’s a misguided romantic reformer who thinks the Gruinmarkt could industrialize and develop in less than half a century if the Clan threw its weight behind the project. I’m hoping the duke is listening …”

“Well, he has you where he can keep an eye on you.” Miriam paused. “For your own good, to his way of thinking.”

“Politics.” Roland made it sound like a curse. “I don’t care about who gets the credit as long as the job gets done!” He shook his head distractedly. “That’s the problem. Too many vested interests, too many frightened little people who think any progress that breaks the pattern of Clan business activities is a personal attack on them. And that’s before we even get started talking about the old aristocracy, the ones who aren’t part of us.”

“He’s keeping you under his thumb until he can figure out a way to get a hold on you,” Miriam suggested. “Some way of tying you down, maybe?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” He looked around, trying to catch the waiter’s eye. “I figured you’d understand,” he said.

“Yes, I guess I do,” she said regretfully. “And if that’s what he’s got in mind for you, what about me?”

They drove back to the house in the suburbs in companionable silence. From the outside, the doppelgängered mansion looked like a sedate business unit, possibly a software company or an accounting firm. As they rolled onto the down ramp, Roland cued the door remote, and the barrier rolled up into the ceiling. For the first time Miriam realized how thick it was. “That’s bombproof, isn’t it?”