The Family Trade by Charles Stross Page B

their families—and the same for every member of the merchant or professional classes.”
    “Sounds grimly real to me, babe. Forget Hollywood. Your map was accurate, wasn’t it?”
    “What are you getting at? You’re thinking about… What was that show called: Sliders? Right?”
    “Alternate earths. Like on TV.” Paulette nodded. “I only watched a couple of episodes, but… well. Suppose you are going sideways, to some other earth where there’s nobody but some medieval peasants. What if you, like, crossed over next door to a bank, walked into exactly where the vault would be in our world, waited for the headache to go away, then crossed back again?”
    “I’d be inside the bank vault, wouldn’t I? Oh. ”
    “That, as they say, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Paulette commented dryly. “Listen, this is going to be a long session. I figure you haven’t thought all the angles through. What were you planning on doing with it?”
    “I—I’m.” Miriam stopped. “I told you about the phone call.”
    Paulette looked at her bleakly. “Yeah. Did I tell you—”
    “You too?”
    She nodded. ‘The evening after I told them to go fuck themselves. Don’t know who it was: I hung up on him and called the phone company, told them it was a nuisance call, but they couldn’t tell me anything.”
    “Bastards.”
    “Yes. Listen. When I was growing up in Providence, there were these guys … it wasn’t a rich neighbourhood, but they always had sharp suits. Momma told me never to cross them—or, even talk to them. Trouble is, when they talk to you —I think I need a drink. What do you say?”
    “I say there’re a couple of bottles in the cabinet,” said Miriam, massaging her forehead. “Don’t mind if I join you.”
    Coffee gave way to a couple of modest glasses of Southern Comfort. “It’s a mess,” said Paulette. “You, uh—we didn’t talk about Monday. Did we?”
    “No,” Miriam admitted. “If you want to just drop it and forget the whole business, I’m not going to twist your arm.” She swallowed. She felt acutely uneasy, as if the whole comfortable middle-class professional existence she’d carved out for herself was under retreat. Like the months when she’d subliminally sensed her marriage decaying, never quite able to figure out exactly what was wrong until…
    “ ‘Drop it?’” Paulette’s eyes flashed, a momentary spark of anger. “Are you crazy? These hard men, they’re really easy to understand. If you back down, they own you. It’s simple as that. That’s something I learned when I was a kid.”
    “What happened—” Miriam stopped.
    Paulie tensed, then breathed out, a long sigh. “My parents weren’t rich,” she said quietly. “Correction: They were poor as pigshit. Gramps was a Sicilian immigrant, and he hit the bottle. Dad stayed on the wagon but never figured out how to get out of debt. He held it together for Mom and us kids, but it wasn’t easy. Took me seven years to get through college, and I wanted a law degree so bad I could taste it. Because lawyers make lots of money, that’s numero uno. And for seconds, I’d be able to tell the guys Dad owed where to get off.”
    Miriam leaned forward to top off her glass.
    “My brother Joe didn’t listen to what Momma told us,” Paulette said slowly. “He got into gambling, maybe a bit of smack. It wasn’t the drugs, but one time he tried to argue with the bankers. They held him down and used a cordless drill on both his kneecaps.”
    “Uh.” Miriam felt a little sick. “What happened?”
    “I got as far as being a paralegal before I figured out there’s no point getting into a job where you hate the guts of everybody you have to work with, so I switched track and got a research gig. No journalism degree, see, so I figured I’d work my way up. Oh, you meant to Joe? He OD’d on heroin. It wasn’t an accident—it was the day after they told him he’d never walk again.” She said it with the