The Family Trade by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online

gushed into the tub. “Big girls don’t get bent out of shape by little things,” she told herself. Like losing her job. “Big girls deal with divorces. Big girls deal with getting pregnant while they’re at school, putting the baby up for adoption, finishing med school, and retraining for another career when they don’t like the shitty options they get dealt. Big girls cope with marrying their boyfriends, then finding he’s been sleeping with their best friends. Big girls make CEOs shit themselves when they come calling with a list of questions. They don’t go crazy and think they’re wandering around a rainy forest being shot at by armoured knights with assault rifles.” She sniffed, on the edge of tears.
    A first rational thought intruded: I’m getting depressed and that’s no good. Followed rapidly by a second one: Where’s the bubble bath? Bubble bath was fun. Bubble bath was a good thought. Miriam didn’t like wallowing in self-pity, although right now it was almost as tempting as a nice warm shower. She went and searched for the bubble bath, finally found the bottle in the trashcan—almost, but not entirely, empty. She held it under the tap and let the water rinse the last of the gel out, foaming and swirling around her feet.
    Depression would be a perfectly reasonable response to losing my job, she told herself, if it was actually my fault. Which it wasn’t. Lying back in the scented water and inhaling steam. But going nuts? I don’t think so. She’d been through bad times. First the unplanned pregnancy by Ben, in her third year at college, too young and too early. She still couldn’t fully articulate her reasons for not having an abortion; maybe if that bitch from the student counselling service hadn’t simply assumed… but she’d never been one for doing what everyone expected her to do, and she’d been confident—maybe too confident—in her relationship with Ben. Hence the adoption. And then, a couple of years later when they got married, that hadn’t been the smartest thing she’d ever done either. With twenty-twenty hindsight it had been a response to a relationship already on the rocks, the kind that could only end in tears. But she’d weathered it all without going crazy or even having a small breakdown. Iron control, that’s me. But this new thing, the stumbling around the woods being shot at, seeing a knight, a guy in armour, with an M-16 or something—that was scary. Time to face the music. “Am I sane?” she asked the toilet duck.
    Well, whatever this is, it ain’t in DSM-IV. Miriam racked her memory for decade-old clinical lectures. No way was this schizophrenia. The symptoms were all wrong, and she wasn’t hearing voices or feeling weird about people. It was just a single sharp incident, very vivid, realistic as—
    She stared at her stained pants and turtleneck. “The chair,” she muttered. “If the chair’s missing, it was real. Or at least something happened.”
    Paradoxically, the thought of the missing chair gave her something concrete to hang on to. Dripping wet, she stumbled downstairs. Her den was as she’d left it, except that the chair was missing and there were muddy footprints by the french doors. She knelt to examine the floor behind her desk. She found a couple of books, dislodged from the shelf behind her chair when she fell, but otherwise no sign of anything unexpected. “So it was real!”
    A sudden thought struck her and she whirled then ran upstairs to the bathroom, wincing. The locket!—
    It was in the pocket of her pants. Pulling a face, she carefully placed it on the shelf above the sink where she could see it, then got into the bathtub. I’m not going nuts, she thought, relaxing in the hot water. It’s real.
    An hour later she emerged, feeling much improved. Hair washed and conditioned, nails carefully trimmed and stripped of the residue of yesterday’s polish, legs itching with mild razor-burn, and skin rosy from an exfoliating scrub, she