And then someone even funnier than we used our stock’s inflated market value to leverage us out of our own corporation. And what were we going to do? Complain to Los Zapatos?
Martisela went back to the Convent Santa Ynez. Esteban went out on his last run with the Hierophant. And me? I returned to the aesthetic life. Who knows where I might have landed but for this ticket of unspecified salvage. I rather dread to think.
There was always this moment when I saw Martisela again. Things came back from the old days. Challenges we had met. People we had done. I would get awkward and romantic, Martisela would simply get awkward.
Martistela stood back from the Convent’s ornate front door. She blinked up at me with her graphite-colored eyes and thought of two or three things not to say.
I said, “I’m cold, Marti.” I nodded behind her, toward the inviting warmth of the Convent Santa Ynez. “Will you let me in?” I could smell tea brewing somewhere down the hallway.
Martisela Coria closed the door behind her. She gave me a prim little smile; we would suffer together. “Are we here for the Commodities Exchange, Señor Coria? Or is it the room and the hot meal?”
“I need you.”
“This is business, I presume?” Martisela was having a grand time. I could tell.
“I’ve got something going. I need someone who can read the market for me. You’re the best I know.”
We looked at each other, suspicious as gangsters. “What’s the commodity?” she asked.
“Just backroom stuff. Strictly backroom. No shares, no speculation.”
“What’s the commodity?” Repeated, with a little edge to her voice.
“It’s 1.3 teratramos. Marti—1.3 teratramos!”
Her chin started to rise. “You’re nervous, Orlando.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“Don’t lie to me,” she said. “ ‘No shares. No speculation.’ ” In her scornful he-man voice. “You’ve got something unstable and you’re trying to unload it before it decays to lead.”
This is the price one pays for dealing with an ex-spouse. At some point, all the surprises lay behind you. Along with most of the hopes. She looked at me, daring me to lie. I could see her hand edging behind her for the door. The water-taxi pilot who had brought me out was venting his boredom by tapping the boarding bell.
“I have acquired Esteban’s load.”
She turned on me in slow, blinking, perfect amazement. “The Hierophant,” she said. “You’re trading on the Hierophant.” Her hands came loose at her sides. “You’re trading on Esteban’s last load?”
Allow me to spare you the rest of our reunion. Swearing is like riding a bicycle, I suppose. In any case, there’s no percentage in outrage.
“It’s for his wife, Cynthia,” I said. “Esteban named me executor of his estate.”
“Cynthia Contreras. The golfa with the colored eyes.”
Perhaps Esteban’s semi-comely widow was the wrong person to bring up. “It’s for you as well,” I said. “To get you out of this place before the Church sends you off on some doomed bright matter ship.”
“What makes you think I want out of my obligation to sponsorship?”
This would be a rhetorical question. The wreck of the Hierophant had been found in the San Marcos star system just two days earlier. Nobody wants to die the way those people died.
“Have you seen the market fixing on April hostages? April hostages are up something like 20 percent.” The market seemed to be forecasting an imminent shortage.
She gulped that one back a moment. Then: “The sisters are a little touchy about that word, ‘hostages,’ ” she said evenly.
“When exactly were you going out on your sponsorship?”
“Tomorrow morning.” She looked at me. “You laugh and I’ll slug you.”
A phone went off at her belt—Martisela was late for the evening meal. They were wondering, was everything all right? My taxi pilot was calling out something about a cargo he had in the back, decaying to lead. Martisela seemed perfectly content to let us all wait.
“This unspecified salvage,” she said to me. “This is from that morghium deal we did? And the market is putting the price at 1.3 teratramos? That must be some kind of vacuum state.” I mentioned how Cynthia Contreras had sold off the isotope rights. Martisela shook her head in astonishment. “That’s a really stupid thing to do,” she said. Only we both knew Esteban’s widow, and she was not prone to stupid moves. Not at her most grief-stricken.
“You know where this all plays out.”
“At the Botanica.” She said it without thinking, in a rush of breath and memory that broke my heart. The Botanica Linda was where she and I had spent our lives. All our memories were there. All our good fights.
“This is just for Esteban,” she said as we boarded the water-taxi back to town. A couple of Martisela’s hermanas poked their heads out the door. “I’ll be right back,” Martisela called out to them.
I realized I was participating in a jailbreak—a Buenaventura sort of jailbreak. Martisela had made good her escape. But she was leaving for her sponsorship in the morning, she had to be back before then or give up any thought of ever retrieving her trader’s license.
This would be a jailbreak as staged by Cinderella.
Martisela must have realized this the same moment I did. All the way to the Bodega, I heard my Spanish Cinderella looking forward to midnight:
“Ya me chinge,” she muttered.
* * *
I remember when the Anglos started bringing their war business to us. There was not much discussion on the morality of marketing perbladium to sociopaths. Mostly, the Shoes worried that the old city, with its paraffin works and its churches all tinged green by lizard droppings, would present an unsophisticated face.
A new Exchange was built in one of the towns along the Buenaventura Crater rim, as far away from the wet docks and the paraffin works as possible. It’s very nice. Perhaps you’ve seen pictures? I especially like the true clock in the Court of Commerce. (Though honestly, how many people need to know the true ship time of some carrier up in the Blanco Grande? All the Bright Matter traders have their own true clocks anyway.)
The real money, of course, remains where it always has. In the back room of the Botanica Linda.
Señor a Sebastian still sells herbs and roosters’ feet to bless a new enterprise, and flaming hearts of Mary to the more esoterically religious. She keeps dishes on the glass case full of those hard, unsweet candies the Bright Matter smugglers call “piedras de molleja”—gizzard stones.
She recognized Martisela from the old days. “Are you back, Señor ita Davalos?” Señor ita Davalos. And with her husband standing beside her.
Marti smiled. “I’m helping him out of a jam,” she said.
Señor a Sebastian looked at me. “You’ve got one of those ‘unnamed salvage’ tickets?” With an expression that said, You’re probably expecting it to pay off like a lottery ticket, aren’t you. “Have a stone.” She held out the dish for me.
Martisela gave me a piquant little smile, barely more than a dimple. She scooped a few into my hand. “Oh, be nice,” she hissed at me, and we plunged through the curtain into darkness and noise.
The trading room is kept dim against the sudden blossoming of holographic charts or a ghost wall or a ballet of hands traced out in bioluminescent catastrophe grids. It is an old warehouse turned into a grotto, and the darkness between the lights is frantic.
The calls and cries and angry laughter reflect off the hardwood ceiling all the way back to the little clutch of desks where the shipping underwriters are laying odds on every transport that leaves orbit. Put your hand to any desktop, the tremors grind at your fingertips like low electric current. And that’s an average night.
In a shipwreck market, every fortune is at stake. Your bit of salvage may still exist. Or it may be melted to slag. Or it may be seeded with some exotic vacuum state and is already being coveted by a market that knows more about what y
ou have in your pocket than you do. The only way to find out is to wander through the assembled multitude, plucking at the feedback loops that tie us all together.
An agent offers time at her Bright Matter refinery up in the Four Planet Nation. A transport jobber hints at a ship he has available—not the fastest in the fleet, but the captain can hold it to within a baby’s breath of light speed, right where relativistic time dilation effects are most acute. Who can say why these people come to you? The market sent them, that’s all.
One blurs the eyes and allows a market’s worth of greed and fear and quantum computing power to shape the gaps into recognizable outlines. This strategy works best when the market is calm and winners and losers can be neatly defined. Tonight, the market rode this Hierophant bubble. All bets were off.
Here are a few of the commodities rising with the shipwreck market:
Bright Matter was up, of course. The price of Vacuum4 doubled in the time it took my eyes to adjust to the dark. Moving in tandem to the Vacuum4 would be the market in large-scale power generation. Power generators loved Vacuum4 for its steady flurry of magnetic monopoles. And gnodium, the baryonic cinder that separates Vacuum4 from the rather fragile vacuum of our own universe. And, if you care to press a point, the market in high-priced legal insurance; vacuum traders are notorious for whiling away the hours in recreational litigation.
Someone was offering Tuesday afternoon illyrium, which would be thralium 442 by Wednesday morning (and sold as a separate commodity).
Someone else was dealing Vacuum8 and lyghnium, a favorite combination to Anglo ship killers. Vacuum8 for its cognizance of bright matter. Lyghnium for its dense neutron cross-section and spectacular binding energies.
Doing even better than the bright matter market were futures in single-bean Saint Elise cocoa, which is prized in the French Violet for that little kick that arsenic lends the aftertaste. Corn and soy futures were doing well, especially in the Four Planet Nation, where the variable star M. Exelrod had been turning up the heat lately, which was good for their growing season.
And then there were the franchised ideologies. Even cocoa couldn’t compare to the market in April Communism. Object-Oriented Socialism had suffered a huge debt write-off, but they continued to do well on the strength of their subsidiary interests in ergosphere mining. Of course, National Socialism is always looking to break out of the pack.
The only unease in all this giddiness lay with the Hierophant itself. After fifty hours, the silence from the salvage crews was growing worrisome. Traders try to be realists about shipwreck bubbles. Nobody expects to smash a violin and hear Schubert. But there should have been something. The ghost walls whispered rumors of tellolite nodules dug from the face of the starboard vane. A few had tested positive for Vacuum6. Where was the mother lode to make this all worthwhile?
A new set of ghost walls opened—salvage reports from the port vane of the Hierophant. The port vane carried medical isotopes, which I do not invest in. Good thing for me.
Martisela stood on tiptoe as she read down the lists of salvaged isotopes. It was one of those unconscious gestures of anxiety, like me, whenever I pull at my mustache bangle. “Ave Maria purisima,” she said into her fingertips.
There were a few heart warmers among the wreckage—a bit of albatine, shielded by chance behind an isotope vault. A hundred kilos of medical-grade cobalt 60 dug from the wreckage of a collapsed targeting shelf. But that was as good as the news got.
Most of the stuff on the port vane had been poisoned by neutron flurries from the accident on the starboard vane. That, and heat and melted titanium and carbon and boron.
“Esteban was out in that,” Martisela said.
“This Hierophant market is going to tank if they don’t find something better than this,” I said.
Across the room, investors pinched their foreheads. They checked their currency markers, and turned on their catastrophists—there must be some mistake. Really, it was a ship accident after all. What were they expecting? I gloated at their naivete for a moment or so. Then I remembered my own little bit of paradise.
Martisela watched me watch the port vane assays drift away. She nodded toward the currency marker in my back pocket. “Go ahead,” she said. “You might as well know now.”
My 1.3 teratramos of unspecified Bright Matter had bucked the market. It had increased in value. It was now one-and-a-half teratramos of unspecified Bright Matter. A remarkable price for something that no one could name. Martisela looked dubious. Even I was uneasy. This business is far from infallible. We might have been chasing a qubit shadow. Maybe something as simple as too many investors, and too many quantum recognizers, not enough hard-eyed realists.
I pressed the market to give me some sort of decay chain. Any real baryonic commodity will break down into a sequence of isotopes. Even without knowing the parent isotope, the market will extrapolate a decay chain, complete with estimate of its market value, half-period, and purity.
My 900 pennyweight of unspecified wealth just sat there, grinning at me.
“It’s some sort of vacuum,” I reasoned. “Vacuum6, maybe. They don’t figure decay plateaus for Vacuum6.”
Martisela gave me a look I had seen entirely too often lately. She told me to sell my shares while I had that little bit of mystery at my back. “If nothing else,” she said, “option futures on the decay products. A market like this, people will bet good money you won’t get your unspecified Bright Matter to market before it decays into their unspecified isotope.”
She was probably right, of course. But we had a little while. The assay for the Hierophant’s dorsal vane would not be in for another eight hours or so.
“Let’s go talk to the neighbors,” I said. They would be out on the patio, plying their trade in the metallic plasmas and exotic vacuum states. She put her arm in mine, and we smirked at each other just enough to show we were not fooled by this arm-in-arm business, not for one minute.
The Bodega Linda opened onto a patio in those days, a view past the paraffin works and down to the bay. This is where the jaded gentry drank and sparred. It was more or less invitation only, and I had never, not on my most profitable week, been invited. But one-and-a-half teratramos in my pocket made me cocky. Even if it was for one night.
We were stopped at the door by a security guard. She remembered me. I could tell by her dubious expression. She asked if we had weapons, and studied a handheld field detector while we answered. My perbladium sample provoked discussion with two security people, as did Martisela’s grids. They passed on the perbladium, but Marti’s grids were deemed an insult to the Efficient Market economist who ran the patio. I could leave Marti at the door, but I know where my gifts lie. I was the salesman. Marti was the banker. I could succeed without her—I could travel in this range. But I needed her financial sense to deal with the patio crowd.
I was debating how to broach the delicate subject of a bribe when the gatekeeper stepped aside for a man in an open-weave scarab-skin suit.
He grinned. He made a show of palming his eyes to peer in at us. “You bring a nun to vouch for your character and still they won’t let you on the patio!”
I was tempted to ask Zuniga what he was doing here. His cuffs were open and rolled back to his elbows. As I looked closer, I could make out the vestiges of bifurcation grids, just paling-out against the backs of his hands. They were dense and strange, I couldn’t figure what he was working on.
He nodded toward Martisela. “Are you back with us now? Served out your exile or whatever that was?”
“I’m just helping out a friend.” She refused to catch my eye as she said this. She absolutely refused to smile. “You’re here for the shipwreck market.”
Zuniga put up his hands—What can one say? “I find myself chasing down a bit of vacuum.” He chuckled as he said this. We might have been discussing some embarrassing family secret. “I’ve bought out four vacuum traders already. They all know they’ve got hold of something, not one of them is smart e
nough to tell me what it is.” He cocked an eye at me. He looked sly. “You always like the hot stuff, don’t you? The exotic vacuum states? The strange matter? I’ve always admired your taste in risky investment.” He sighed. “Would you had a bit more liquidity ... ?”
“The heart of a vacuum trader.” I endeavored a smile. “The purse of a gallery slave.” I found myself holding my breath. This is the moment one discovers that religious bent that Auntie Gracia had always hoped for. Sure, I had come to the Botanica ready to meet my silent partners. But not Zuniga. Anyone but Zuniga.
Zuniga normally worked in decay futures, which is not necessarily the last refuge of a scoundrel, but it is no place to see people at their best. Everything was a fire sale to Zuniga. And if not, why not?
He studied me. “I’m giving everyone 620 megatramos per pennyweight,” he said at last. “I’ll give you 620 megatramos for whatever you’re holding. Just because I like you.”
I nodded to the grids on the back of his hands. “Go back and run your catastrophes again,” I said. “You’re not even close.”
Zuniga leaned in close and confidential; he would bend a little, so long as no one could hear. “I can give you a gig if you’re willing to accept part of it in stock.”
Martisela looked at me. I looked at her.
“What sort of stock?” she said.
“There’s this mining platform skimming the ergosphere at Los Batihojas.” He glanced around nervously; black hole mining is rather disdained among our own, no matter how much the Anglos favor it. “Run by a bunch of crazy gabachos for the most part. They send a magnetic flume down into all those ions crashing into each other. They come up with the most amazing stuff. If this Hierophant market starts to play out, they are going to be positioned to pick up the hedge investors. Honestly, my friends, the stock’s not bad. I’m giving you the keys to the kingdom is what I’m doing. I’m letting you walk in Saint Hidalgo’s Scented Slippers.”
Scented slippers or no, Martisela was appalled. She squinted at him in disbelief. “You want to buy us off with shares in this ergosphere mine, while you bet the bank you can make them worthless?” She gave me a look—am I missing something?
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 70