The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  This was a sore point. I wasn’t sure what she had cooking with Chamberlain and Bell. Once upon a time, we had actually owned the decay rights to this pterachnium, extending down to lyghnium 485, at least. Though we were asking a lot more for it then the 620 meg that Zuniga had offered us. No point going into all that mess.

  “We’ve had some trouble pinning down the isotope rights,” Martisela answered quickly. “That hardly matters so long as the pterachnium is sold off.”

  “And you have buyers for this stuff.”

  “Lining up buyers is the easy part,” I said. “Bright Matter fleets from Buenaventura to the Four Planet Nation are salivating for a tuned singularity.”

  Martisela, as always, was out front of the market. She set her investment portfolio on the table with a little flourish. She was ready to hedge Cynthia Contreras’ profits across the breadth of the communications market—A little to the designers of the event-horizon skimming satellites that put all those quantum-entangled photons in orbit. A portion to the enclave of Jesuit electrical engineers who fashioned the polarizing screens that spun those photons into code. A portion to the shipwrights who installed the answering micro-singularities onto the ships. Any one of these markets could tank and a flood of investors would buoy up the other two.

  Cynthia Contreras flipped through the printout. She nodded. She smiled. She was impressed. Then she said, “I’m thinking of investing in Buenaventura municipal bonds.”

  “Municipal bonds.” Martisela looked up at me. “Municipal bonds?”

  Cynthia Contreras did not look up. “What do you think, Orlando?”

  She was turning her back on a 2400 percent return and a perpetual reinvestment for municipal bonds.

  “I think you’re crazy.”

  That only made her laugh. She leaned toward me as if we were plotting an assassination. “Have you seen the debt market in the last couple of hours?”

  “Debt market?” I felt Martisela’s fingers dig through my pant leg.

  “About two hours ago, someone inflated the debt market—I know, I know. Why would anyone do that? But they did, till it’s as over-valued as it’s ever been.” I felt this electric tension at my side. “Say I put part of my money into Buenaventura bonds,” Cynthia said, “which, by law, have guaranteed lines of credit. Say I put the rest into shorting the debt market. When the debt market crashes, I’ll be sitting on a couple teratramos in saleable debt potential.”

  Martisela looked to me to say something. I would have, if she hadn’t cut me off before I could draw a breath. “I think you misunderstand the nature of strategic investing,” she said carefully.

  Cynthia frowned. “You think it won’t work?”

  “There are people sitting at this table who will be ruined by what you’re proposing.”

  “Esteban’s true friends will understand and forgive.”

  “It’s a sin,” Martisela said. “To ruin people when you’re not even hungry.”

  Cynthia had this laugh she’d been saving up for six years, knowing and angry and disappointed. It made the hairs bristle against my sleeves. “Perfect,” she clapped her palms like a little girl. “Perfect.” She looked past us toward a man leaning in the doorway. “They’re worried for me,” she said to him in Cargo English. “For my future, or my soul. They can’t decide.”

  “Look upon it as a challenge,” he said. I recognized the lazy smile even before I recognized the face. Here was the little Anglo I had seen at Chuy’s.

  “Hola, Cholito.” A finger came up, pointing my way. He cocked his thumb, ray-gun style, Prssshk prssshk. He laughed his lazy laugh.

  “Everyone?” Cynthia Contreras waved a hand: “Noah Dryden.” She made no further explanation, but that was explanation enough. We all lived with expatriate Anglos. We could pretty much guess what this one was doing here.

  Dryden nodded at me. “How’s the commodities trade?” he said.

  “Never better. How’s the smuggling trade?”

  “I’m afraid you have me confused with someone.” He smiled. “I’m in franchised socialism.”—Even as his left hand rose by dead reckoning to the forty-eight yuen strung from his right wrist. “You mean this?” He laughed. “I’ve had this since childhood. But these bracelets are hardly uncommon where I’m from.”

  In the dusky light of the kitchen, the eyes glowed bright enough to light the unmarked underside of Dryden’s wrist. Cynthia knew where I was looking; I thought she would look away, but her course was set. She didn’t much care what I figured out now.

  “What did this one promise you?” I asked her. “Revenge on the men who killed Esteban?” Cynthia said nothing. “And now that he’s brought proof of their deaths, you turn over Esteban’s pterachnium to him as payment.”

  “He seems to know a lot about my business,” Dryden drawled as casually as possible.

  I would have asked Cynthia about the isotope futures she had sold Chamberlain and Bell. What was it like to lure two men to their deaths? Cynthia turned to me with these huge and meaningful eyes; all my pointed questions dried up in my throat.

  “They’re friends of my husband,” she said to Dryden. “They won’t go to the Shoes. They have their own problems with the law right now.”

  As for Martisela, she nodded at Cynthia the way old girlfriends do—where did you find this guy?

  Cynthia, for all her veneer, could not look Martisela in the eye. “He helped me,” she said to Martisela. “He helped me even the score for Esteban.”

  “For a price,” I said.

  “Everything has a price,” Cynthia said. “One way or another, everyone pays.”

  Dryden nodded his amen to this. “Bell and Chamberlain were a couple of over-reaching franchisees,” he said. “Their accounts have been settled.”

  “ ‘Settled.’ ” Martisela gave me an owlish look. “Doesn’t that sound final.”

  “Let him be,” Cynthia said. “It’s been hard enough getting things sorted out to my liking. I don’t want anybody having second thoughts now.” She gave me two eyes like steel bearings. “Esteban was hopeless.” She tilted her head at me defiantly. “He left it to me to avenge his death. A trader shouldn’t leave his family to do that. Not if he has command of his skills. Not in this market.”

  An odd sentiment coming from a widow. Even Jorge frowned. But Cynthia Contreras was in that state of grace that Buenaventura bestows on all its widows Everyone around the table nodded along, the way they did to a pretty song sung in Cargo English.

  Only Martisela lowered her eyes in disappointment. “Esteban Contreras filled your house with friends,” she said.

  “Esteban always trusted people to do the right thing. He made allowances. Look at where he left me.” The emotion she had been holding off welled up. She blinked hard at sudden tears. Her chin wrinkled and her face reddened. Jorge saw his chance to move in with sympathy, but Cynthia was angry and pushed him off. She took Martisela’s arm. “I’m going to be like you.”

  Martisela looked down at her habit. But it wasn’t the cloistered life that Cynthia envied. Martisela looked back up at her and she realized what Cynthia was talking about; her eyes widened and she gawped for something to say.

  “I’m going to be ruthless and clever,” Cynthia said. “I’m going to play the market like an ocarina. I will always finish at the money. And if I go down I’ll take a billion people with me. So that even if the Shoes put me in the Convent Santa Ynez, and make me ride Bright Matter ships for my penance, nobody will trade another share without looking across the bay to see if I’m still safely away.”

  I remember someone cooking carne borracha on the river watch that ran behind the house; the splash and sizzle of tequila was the only sound in the room, I remember Martisela trying to say something, only it wouldn’t come out. She sat next to me, and she was beyond my reach.

  It was Jorge who stood up first. “My, doesn’t that smell good?” He grinned and nodded around the table and everyone gratefully agreed. Why, yes. The carne smells del
icious. Let’s all go have a look.

  This wave moved toward the door. Only Cynthia Contreras paused, and then only for a moment. “People pushed me around all my life,” she said to me. “A person like you, you can’t know what that’s like.” She looked to me to tell her she was making sense.

  “Dryden murdered two faithful and trusting employees,” I said. “Just to do business with you. Don’t you wonder when your time will come?”

  She gave me a bashful smile. “Honestly? No.” Behind her, Jorge had Dryden’s arm in this squeeze that gangsters in the Paraffin District give each other. He was detailing what he would do to Dryden’s enemies, extending his hand here and there as if setting out tools. Dryden glanced up at me as he passed. His face was fixed in horror.

  “Jorge likes me,” Cynthia said simply. “He’s always liked me.” The screen slapped behind her.

  Martisela sat back beside me. She folded her hands between her knees. She looked dazed.

  Somebody walked past with a bag of wine. She snagged it without looking. She leaned back and drained it. All around us, the conversation sort of died out; people do seem to tip-toe around a half-potted nun. The man with the wine bladder shook it for signs of life. He looked appalled. Martisela seemed oblivious, but I got uncomfortable. I nudged her and motioned toward the front door. Maybe we need some air? She agreed, maybe we did.

  I didn’t expect we’d be out long. The wind was turning. The fog was coming up from the wet docks, glowing faintly in every hollow along the canal. But Martisela was one of those people who wondered why red wine had to be sour. I thought to stick with her a bit, she’d get sentimental and ill and I’d take her home.

  Cynthia Contreras called out something as we stepped outside. I thought she was asking us to stay, but I realized she was talking to Dryden.

  “Look at this contract. Nine hundred pennyweight and you’re getting it for nothing—1.5 teratramos, and two lives.”

  I looked at Martisela. Maybe she sighed.

  “Amateurs.” I tried to laugh.

  “She didn’t make this city.” Her eyes came around to me from someplace very far away. “Have you ever counted up the people you and I have betrayed?” She waited, but I had no answer. After awhile, I realized she had no answer either.

  “The debt market is not your fault. Let it go.” I nuzzled her ear, just like old times. “Come home with me,” I said. I knew an old high-boy tugboat drydocked on Canal Sanchez. It was warm and private and I pictured us making love in the pilot house, under a parchment-colored sky.

  Martisela was tracing the grids on her left hand with her fingers. “What if we got jobs?”

  I thought she was joking. Martisela had this clownish streak to her, but she was drunk right now, and she was never funny when she was drunk. “We’ve got jobs,” I said. “We’re the best team of traders this city’s ever seen. Tonight, we reminded this whole city why they’ve had spending money the last couple of years.”

  “What if we got a cart and sold shaved ice on Galle de Campana? You could talk to the customers. You’re good at talking to people. And I could put away the money?”

  Shaved ice. I liked that. Shaved ice. This, from the girl who had rigged an entire monetary system in the space of a conversation.

  “You know when you’re making too much money? When poverty starts looking picaresque.”

  She bent away from me. Her hands twined into a figure I recognized: Swallowtail Catastrophe. She was plotting a discontinuous change in her own future.

  “You’re going back to your sponsorship,” I realized.

  “I’m so washed up in this town.” She made a broken little laugh. “I can’t even sell an investment to a poor widow woman.” She rolled her lip under her teeth. She looked away. “You should have seen me. I was doing so well when you showed up. You know how long it had been since I’d told a lie?” She took my currency marker out of my pocket to order up a water-taxi back to Santa Ynez.

  She didn’t even see what was staring at her from the splash screen—something was wrong with the market. It should have been going wild, it was utterly flat. I tried to show her, but Martisela was drunk and heartsick and not listening to what the market was saying. I had to take her hands to make her look at me. “The reason Cynthia Contteras passed on your ancillary market is because there is no ancillary market. Whatever this Dryden person is doing with our pterachnium, it’s not bankable.”

  Not bankable. There was an antiseptic phrase. I remembered the market report of the Hierophant’s port vane. Acres of cesium and cobalt showered by neutrons and swept off in rivers of molten metal. You want to say such visions are “unimaginable.” But they’re not. Sometimes they’re impossible to look away from. “Wait a week,” I said. “Let this pterachnium decay before you go out.”

  “And in that week, what happens? Maybe Dryden hotloads some other ship? With some other sister in my place?”

  “Maybe—” I could hardly get the words out of my throat. “Maybe I make you stay with me.”

  She looped her arms around my neck. Her lips and nose were soft. Her breath, luscious and stale with wine. “Maybe you rescue me.”

  “I’m in no position to rescue anyone. Already, everybody at the Botanica asks what happened to me. They soothe me with cheap flattery like a cerrazadito.”

  “Maybe we rescue each other.” I could see it in her eyes: Me and her and this pushcart.

  “Is that what we’re talking about here? Are we saving my soul?” She gave me a sleepy grin. “If your life depends on my redemption, you are one dead Hermana, Camala.”

  We always talked so tough with each other.

  “Don’t go,” I whispered. “Please.” Perhaps you don’t know Orlando Coria, and this pleading sounds genuine, yes? And that wetness to the eyes, a nice touch.

  Martisela’s taxi slipped out from the shadow of Puente de Hierro.

  “I’ll call you when I’m away,” she said. I couldn’t believe she would really leave. We’d brought this city to its knees, helped a helpless widow, and faced down the big guero. How she could do this?

  “Leave a message if I’m out.” If she hoped to gain some advantage on me, well, she hoped in vain, didn’t she? If she put her palm to her mouth or offered a little wave, I barely noticed. I had lots to think about. I had my commission, 10 percent of 1.5 teratramos. I was a man of substance now.

  I remember checking my currency marker to show her what she walked away from. I don’t remember the amount, but it was an awful lot of money. Enough so that my life would never be the same. It was enough to make me feel vindicated. Funny the way some moments stay with you.

  As for the jingle of the buckles on her sandal straps as Martisela turned away? Five years later, I barely remember the sound. I have my pride.

  The night tends to blur after that. I remember walking the apron along Canal el Centra, talking to myself, feeling righteous.

  The fog was in, lit from the heart by radioactinides from the ships in the wet docks. People move indoors to avoid Buenaventura’s wet dock fog, but I held off. Right around sun up, the ferry would leave the launch site at de Viejas for the low orbitals. I was thinking to maybe go see Martisela off. I was thinking to maybe invest in a bottle of mezcál and drink myself to stupefaction. Decisions, decisions.

  I absolutely was not going to worry for Martisela. Señor a Pushcart. Señor a Let’s-Sell-Shaved-Ice-and-Look-Like-Fools-to-Everybody-We-Know. I would start to weep and then I would make myself remember her plot to save my soul.

  When that didn’t work, I told myself her fate was out of my hands. I was a trader, not a gangster, what could I do? Fill my hand and confront Dryden in some alley? Please. Buy back my pterachnium shares from him? There were Bright Matter consortiums who couldn’t put together the money to buy 900 pennyweight of pterachnium.

  I found myself arguing the point with Martisela, a frustrating business even when she was around to answer me back. Tonight, she was regal and indifferent to her own fate, which infur
iated me more.

  Just to press my point, I added up all our assets—the fee from the pterachnium deal, the illyrium futures, the tea plantation, the winery and distillery, the beach house, the money, the anti-money. All of it. I came up with enough to buy back maybe a third of Esteban’s legacy.

  But why stop there? I still had some stock options left over from the takeover of Coria Bright Matter. I pulled out my currency marker to check their price, though I knew they were worthless. I think I barely looked at the 10:32 market fixing and shoved the marker back in my pocket.

  It took me that long to realize what I had seen.

  Coria Bright Matter was in play. Noah Dryden was shopping our remaining assets through one of his black hole mining companies, doing better than I had imagined possible. Indeed, he had financed a good chunk of his pterachnium money on our tailings. I tried to remember just what we had owned that could be worth 620 meg per pennyweight. Dryden had a man waiting to answer any questions.

  His name glowed against the shadow on my palm. I studied it, because I had to keep my eyes focused on something stable; the landscape was resettling all around me.

  It was my friend, Alberto Zuniga—the man who so admired my taste in exotic vacuum states.

  I don’t want to tell you what I did then. We have friends, they won’t speak to me even now. I have people looking to kill me, did I mention? With all the moral baggage that goes with being me, you’d think I would reap a few of the more temporal rewards, wouldn’t you?

  Dryden was up at Puente de Hierro, waiting for the lift-off from Malecón de Viejas. As I knew he would be. He had to weep a little before he sent people to their deaths. Made him feel more like a human being.

  He never looked back at me, though he knew I was behind him. Without preamble, he said, “I must confess I’m leaving for Bougainville in a few hours and I’m panicked at the thought of going without those little candies. Those little—what are they called?”

  “Piedras de molleja.”

  “ ‘Piedras de molleja.’ ” He smiled at the name. “They remind me of your wife, you know. That hint of sweetness forever out of reach?” Of course, he would know what I was here for. He took my shoulder under his hand and we started down the bridge toward the ferry landing on the far side. “I’m sorry about your wife,” he said. “You have to be strong. If she dies, it is to alleviate the suffering of millions of others.”