This, in so many words, was exactly what Zuniga was offering—A classic hedge. A teeter-totter, weighted on each end by commodities that Zuniga believed linked. A failure in one commodity would send investors to the other. Either way, he made out. Not necessarily his partners.
Zuniga looked from Martisela to me, looking for what? A wedge? Whatever he saw in our faces set him back. He had to think what to do next. “How about I make you an offer of just 500 megatramos?” he said at last. “No mining shares, nothing. And if you don’t take it I’ll let my friends know who it was behind that disastrous morghium business on the Hierophant. You know the people I work with. You know how they express their disappointment.”
Ahh yes. Alberto Zuniga’s fashionably dangerous clientele. Anglo militiamen and Bright Matter smugglers. Just the thing for a feckless playboy in need of a little gravitas.
“I’m stepping out for a moment to check on my charities,” he said. “When I get back, you will accept my offer. Or I will set about making you famous.”
Martisela watched him push through the curtain into the foyer. “Can he make things hard on you?”
I shrugged. For a lot of people, he could. People with houses and families and regular places they had to be at regularly appointed times. Now you know why I lived the life of a street urchin. I nudged Martisela. I nodded toward the door.
Martisela was frowning at her hands. “Six hundred and twenty megatramos per pennyweight,” she said. “Why do you suppose he came up with that number?”
“This is a shipwreck market. Everyone in here is offering prices they can’t justify for things they can’t name.”
Martisela shook her head; that wasn’t good enough, but she was too busy to explain. She began flipping from catastrophe to catastrophe, so fast I could barely keep up. She had this frown of vast interest that just got deeper the more she looked.
“Perhaps it is coincidence,” she said, “but 620 megatramos was the estimated price for lyghnium a week-and-a-half ago, when Esteban left on his last run.”
“What are you saying? Esteban left me with a load of lyghnium?” I was not so happy about this. Up in the Scatterhead Nebula, the Philistines burn lyghnium in fission bombs. I saw myself dealing with a dreary assortment of zealots and thugs. You’ve seen what they’re like. Imagine my heart.
“Don’t worry about the lyghnium.” She narrowed her eyes at a cursor as it rolled down the crown of her knuckles to a stasis-point near the crook of her thumb. “Zuniga’s a dealer in decay products. When he looks at the market, all he sees is what he recognizes. But he tends to miss the parent isotope, which, in the case of lyghnium, is most likely to be ...” She turned her hand as the cursor crossed through the cusp of skin between her thumb and index finger. Whatever she saw made her eyes get round. “Pterachnium,” she whispered. “Vacuum3.”
I felt something giddy rise in my throat. Half the fleet communications in Spanish Space depended on tuned singularities. Most of them were collapsed from white dwarf stars by Vacuum3.
“This is what those two gabachos at Chuy’s were after.” I heard a voice just beyond my sight: No more tutorials for rich tourists ...
“This is what killed Esteban,” she said. “Esteban and everyone on his ship. I can’t believe we’re trading this. I can’t believe we’re making money from it.”
“You know what this means? We’re rich enough to kill! You know how long it’s been since you and I were rich enough, somebody would want to kill us?” No more money changing for Chinese smugglers. No more laughing along with jokes at my own expense.
Martisela made this bemused little moue. She looked as if she wanted to say something. Whatever it was, she let it drop. “Zuniga still has his fangs in you,” she said. “He will never allow your profit to eclipse his own. Not so long as you and he are yoked together.” She was quiet for a moment. I realized she was watching him as he made his way back from the patio.
Zuniga stopped at one of Señora Sebastian’s glass cases. He pointed—there, to an apothecary bottle of rose hips. There, to a brass censer. Here, to a set of bifurcation grids, pre-loaded in their own epidural slugs.
I knew what he was doing—giving me time to sweat. It worked. I tried to think of some way of extricating myself from his grasp. Nothing came to mind.
Zuniga pointed to a scarab-skin jacket hanging from a rafter. But no, it had to be open weave, to match his shoes. All the Anglo gangsters were living on the edge, fashion-wise.
While Señora Sebastian hurried off to retrieve just the right shade of blue, Zuniga slipped out his currency marker for a couple of quick deals. He was feeling good; he was clowning. He looked up at us as if he’d only just remembered we were watching. He grinned his most boyish grin—I’ve got to pay for this somehow—and began punching out sell orders as if in panic.
“Some people should stay away from self-parody.”
“How does he do it?” She marveled as she watched. “How does somebody with even less money than we have manage to push around the market the way he does?”
“He leverages himself to excruciating levels and then drums up some new deal to pay down his debt load.”
“And let’s don’t even talk about those suits.” She made a face.
“Zuniga and his little gangster conceits.”
Something behind her eyes made this nearly audible click. “What would you bet he pays for everything in anti-money?” I got nervous when Martisela talked about anti-money. Gangsters still use it. They like it because it is anonymous. Martisela liked it the same way she liked chocolate, because she wasn’t supposed to have it. Anti-money—more specifically, speculating in the misalignment between anti-money and the debt it was supposed to represent—is what got her installed in the Convent Santa Ynez.
“Don’t do it,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Whatever. Don’t do it.”
Her eyes were black and shiny like I’d seen them in the old days. “How much are you willing to be hated?”
“By Zuniga? You’re joking, right?”
“Not by Zuniga. By everyone.” Martisela had this little look of dread and wicked calculation. It made me nervous enough I would have asked what she had in mind, but Zuniga was one last dawdle from being upon us.
“What do I need to do?”
“Sign everything you own over to me.”
Perhaps I paused a beat too long. I was thinking of my winery in the Four Planet Nation. The tea plantation on the flanks of Olympus Mons. The beach house at Santa Jessica that I’d never seen. Martisela leaned her cheek to her collar. “I’m a nun,” she said. “Vow of poverty, remember?” What I remembered was that we were always better business partners than lovers. Somewhere along the way, those little pranks we played had turned expensive.
“You remember the vow of poverty is yours, not mine.”
Martisela didn’t even smile. She palmed my currency marker and brushed by Zuniga without a shiver. Zuniga never even looked at her, she was that good.
“Sorry to push, Hermano.” He gave me his best little frown of sincerity. “But I’ve got to wrap this business up.”
He tugged at his collar enough to show me this greenish smear along his left shoulder.
“I bought this open weave jacket a month ago. Everything stains it, and now look. I stood too close to one of those lizard trees and one of the little bastards rained down on me.”
Well, that explained the smell. At least on this occasion.
I glanced over Zuniga’s shoulder. Martisela was with a pack of currency traders, buried in some negotiation. She made an impatient nod at Zuniga—keep him talking.
I was thinking to interest him in some bogus hedge swap. Maybe involving this Object-Oriented Socialism I’d heard about in the last market fixing, along with that black hole mine they had riding sidecar. That had just enough of Zuniga’s devious sense of value to keep him interested.
I mentioned it and he gave me a vile little chuckle. “A hedge swap?” I cou
ld see it appealed to his sense of the perverse.
“I’ll give you the same deal you gave us—620 meg per pennyweight.”
“Mined lyghnium 482 is going for 800 meg per pennyweight,” he sniffed.
“Then why were you going to pay me 620?”
He waved my objections aside. “Really, Coria. Let’s be serious with each other. The gravity brokers are all aflutter looking for some fusty little dwarf star they can collapse into a singularity. I ask myself—what alters the Coulomb force inside a dwarf star and shows up unnamed in all my market equations? What do you say, Coria? Vacuum3? Vacuum6?”
Even through the crowd noise, Martisela heard him. I saw her stiffen and close her eyes, just for a moment. Zuniga caught me looking. He laughed. He clapped me on the shoulder. “There are no secrets from Zuniga. Holding back will only make the reckoning more severe.” To make his point, he brought up his Anglo friends in the expatriate community. It seems that someone had given them a floor plan of my distillery outside Bougainville. Perhaps someone would nationalize it. Perhaps they would simply burn it down. Zuniga gave me a look of frank appraisal. From there, it was but a short conceptual leap to the man who owned it.
I may have disdained Zuniga, but I did not underestimate him. The expatriate community lived just across the bay, in Jimmy-Jim Town. No one’s more vulnerable than a broke commodities trader. I was starting to think how I could explain a 400 megatramo deal to myself when Martisela caught my eye. She lofted her eyebrows in a breezy, insouciant manner, like a tourist enjoying a particularly bad part of town.
Zuniga was going on about my tea plantation in the French Violet. He wanted that especially.
Even as he spoke, currency windows were popping open in a line just beyond his vision. While Zuniga had been threatening my wealth and my life, the anti-money market had gathered itself into a precipitous wave. Some of this would be my assets, sold off and converted to anti-money. Most of it would be collateral investment from market technicians smelling blood in the water. Zuniga didn’t know it yet, but he had become the biggest holder of anti-money on the entire Exchange—a position not unlike being the biggest landlord on a southbound iceberg.
He was just rounding the corner on my beach house when Martisela pulled the plug. All that anti-money was swapped for simple debt futures. From where I stood, it look like half the anti-money market drained down a black hole. Even by the Exchange standards, this was a lightning strike. Within moments, the exchange rate between anti-money and undifferentiated debt had slipped to 3-to-1. The only major players left in the anti-money market were the ones too preoccupied to see what was happening.
Zuniga was going on in his mellifluous announcer’s voice. His Anglo militia friends had shown him things that no one should see. Zuniga was just beginning to detail these things for me as one of the Botanica’s well-dressed floor daemons appeared at his side.
He carried no expensive scarab skin coat, nothing but the obsequious expression that seems to attend embarrassing news—There is a problem, Señor ? With Señor ’s account?
Zuniga smiled, all incredulous. He glanced over the man’s head at the money market windows and the smile just grew. He could appreciate a joke at his expense, give him credit for that.
The smile was hardening as he turned to me. By the time it came around to Martisela, it had gone necrotic as a rotten baby tooth.
“You did something”—jovial and teasing as ever. “What have you done with my money?” His eyes fell to the grids on her arms. A cursor was still pulsing between her knuckles, perhaps he recognized himself? “Give me back my money.” He advanced on her. Already, he was a little desperate. I grabbed him around the shoulders. “Give it back. Before Zuniga shows his nasty side.”
“Let him go,” Martisela said to me.
“You know who my friends are,” Zuniga bucked my arms. “Don’t make me set them on you.”
I thought Martisela would at least step back. Even as Zuniga strained at my grasp, she pushed up right under his nose. “You and your nasty friends,” she whispered. “I shall have to bear them in mind, won’t I?” Suddenly it was Martisela I had by the shoulders. Zuniga was rearing back. “My friends don’t fare so well lately. One of them is burned to death. The other is living under a bridge. Maybe your nasty friends will let you live long enough to find a bridge of your own. If you haven’t invested too much of their money. That would work well for you, yes? A nice little bankruptcy and you will escape their friendship with your life.”
“Don’t speak of my friends,” Zuniga said. “I’ll set them after you. I’ll have them use you.”
“With no money or access to deflect their more predatory instincts? I think you’re about to discover just how useful you can be.” Have I mentioned Martisela’s height? In shoes, she could barely see over my shoulder. The entire time I had hold of her, Martisela’s voice never rose above a whisper. The room should have rolled over her voice like a wave over a sand castle.
I glanced back to see a hundred faces turned up from their market projections and catastrophe grids, all staring from Zuniga to me to Martisela and back to Zuniga.
Zuniga noticed as well. He turned on them. “Que me ves?”—What are you looking at?
This seemed as good a moment as I would get. I handed him my currency marker.
“What is this?”
“It’s 500 megatramos. For your salvage.”
“You’re not serious. I consolidated these salvage holdings, not you. Why should I play this game?”
“You’ve got lizard shit on your coat. You want a coat, smells like lizard shit?” And the unspoken question—when will you get another one?
He looked at the platten in my hand like it had been scraped off his coat, but he knew better than to refuse my offer. His lips tightened into a sarcastic smile. The joke, whatever it was, must have been on me. He might have explained except for the floor daemon who appeared at his elbow with a phone call for Señor Zuniga.
“Now we’ll see!” Zuniga whipped the phone from the kid’s hand. I would have walked away, but Zuniga would have none of that. He nodded at me as his gangster came on the line. He glared in vindication. “ Señor Dryden.” He was laughing. ¿Que ondas, Carnal? The smile hung on his face a moment, suspended like a cliff diver at the top of his arc.
This would be one of those conversations of silences, stuttering objections, pale eyes, sentences that trail off into nothing. At some point, Martisela nodded toward Zuniga’s hands. What I had taken for knots of anxiety were actually mathematical catastrophes.
“He shouldn’t do that.” She made this little snick-sound with her tongue. Somewhere between pity and reproach. “He’s calculating the moment of his own death,” she said. “If he’s not careful, he’ll get an answer.”
I don’t know how she knew that, only that I had watched him re-run this calculation a half-dozen times. He ran it again even as Martisela pushed me ahead of her through the curtain.
Sooner or later, it had to come out right.
It was evening on the Galle de Campana. One of those evenings the city is most generous with its charms. A chill settles in with the fog. The pumice tiles that line the street swell and chafe and the air fills with the most delicate harmonics. A gang down at the paraffin depot was boiling moderator for some space-bound transport.
Esteban’s family lived in one of those heritage neighborhoods that creep down the sides of every bridge in the Paraffin District. Their house had been built by a ship owner when the Puente de Hierro was new. The vestiges of wealth remained even though the wealthy ship owner was gone: Here’s a formal VR portal, throw rugs rucked up around it. A genuine captain’s command chair from the wreck of the Four of Pentacles, its cushions shiny with wear. And everywhere, the reek of old cooking, the racket of kids slamming up the narrow stairs two and three flights without stopping. The shiver and groan of the bridge itself, as river traffic passed between the spans.
Someone had put out a card table in the old deconta
mination chamber that fronted the street. Esteban himself peered over the mezcál flasks and ornaments of pressed tin. I remembered the picture from a bridge party we had been to across the canal in El Ciudad de Cenizas. Esteban had that look he always had, that sort of half-smile, as if he were listening to a punch line just beyond his understanding.
“Orlando, who’s with you?” Cynthia Contreras called to us from the kitchen. “Martisela Coria? Ay Dios mío. I can’t believe they let you out.” She was wedged in between relatives at the back of this giant mahogany heirloom table. She waved us over for hugs. Her eyes were pink, but, for the moment, dry.
My impression of Cynthia Contreras through six years of marriage was this kohl-eyed wraith at Esteban’s elbow. In a better life, she might have raised a couple of picked-on kids and gone on to spend all her pent-up rage closing lucha de la lagartijos, something socially uplifting like that.
But this widow business would not be part of her plan. I was not entirely sure I wanted to see what she made of the opportunity.
Esteban’s brother, Jorge, sat with her, maybe a little closer than a brother-in-law should. Jorge Contreras always greeted me with this frown of vast and belabored interest. A dimwit’s caricature of a philosopher. “Orlando Coria,” he said. “The Lucky Man himself.” He glared all protective as I put the contract on the table beside Cynthia. I did what I was always do with Jorge; I ignored him. He continued to frown inscrutably. Maybe he was ignoring me as well. “This was Esteban’s,” I said to Cynthia. “It represents a great deal of wealth, and has to be handled quickly.”
She knew what it was, which surprised me. Jorge pestered her to explain and she ignored him while she read to the bottom.
“Do I own all the rights?”
“It’s all tied up,” Martisela said. “The baryonic matter rights. The vacuum state.”
“What about the isotope rights?” Without looking up. “Do I own them? And through how many decay plateaus?”
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 71