Siarnaq saw Ariel’s gift as potentially useful, but could not imagine living with Baldur’s ability. Maybe it could help you avoid having something fall on your head, but what a nuisance to walk around obsessed with the next few seconds in life. No wonder the man seemed more than a little peculiar.
What mattered was that this obsession with the immediate had led Baldur to some odd investment strategy that had become his whole life. How sad. Siarnaq had considered confiding in the man about his relationship with Ariel, but in the end he had held the information back, remaining vague about how he had learned of the competition between Baldur and Mikkel. Better to wait and learn more first.
The good news was that cousin Carl Mikkel had become a thorn in Baldur’s side, and Baldur was every bit as anxious to put a stop to the man as Siarnaq was. Clearly Mikkel had become obsessed with making money just so that he could fund his modernization schemes. Siarnaq did not care in the least how rich Mikkel got, but if Baldur could stop the man from reshaping Greenland by stopping his flow of money, then a good end would be achieved for all.
He had promised Baldur to stay in touch with him, and to pass along any further information that he learned. Baldur, for his part, had virtually assured Siarnaq that he would find a way to bring Mikkel down.
Siarnaq wouldn’t go so far as to say that they parted as friends, but they had at least parted as two men with a common objective. And Siarnaq had to admit that he felt a little sorry for the guy. To be forced into always being so shortsighted, with all joy so fleeting. What a burden to live with. Poor man.
13. Spring Ends
Eoin tried to be direct. “Yes, he told me wanted to take you out on his yacht and get to know you better. Come on Ariel, you’re a big girl. He’s a big client. Go and be friendly.”
“I don’t like boats. Could I just have dinner with the man somewhere in town?” Ariel was furious at Eoin for pushing her into this but didn’t know how to explain why. Eoin’s request for her to spend time with a client was justified.
“He wants you two to enjoy a boat ride together. Look, do you want to bring a friend along? If that’s the problem, I could send the big guy, Jake, with you, although I would think that at your age and with your looks you’ve figured out how to say ‘No thanks’ gracefully by now.”
Ariel considered the idea of bringing Jake. Yes, she generally could take care of herself just fine and she felt stupid requesting a chaperone. None of the guys in the office would bring along someone.
“It’s okay. There will be a whole boat full of people there if by some bizarre reason he gets pushy. I’ll be fine. Sorry to be a problem, I’m just not fond of the man.”
Eoin gave her a sympathetic shrug. “I doubt that his own mother is fond of him.”
Ariel accepted the invitation coldly over the phone. She’d briefly considered donning a burka for the outing just to make a point, but in the end opted for something that was less obvious and almost as effective. She arrived in the middle of a cool, misty Saturday afternoon for a dinner sail with big sunglasses and a big hat, and clothing and accessories that covered every other inch of her skin except for her nose and mouth. Her body language as she strode on to the deck must have said as much as her style of dress, because Baldur greeted her with a raised eyebrow and a muttered “Oh my.”
He avoided touching her around others while he gave her a friendly tour of the boat, keeping doors open and others in sight as he did so. He is trying to put me at ease, Ariel thought. Maybe he isn’t such a bad guy. It could be that he regrets his behavior that last time that we met.
Talk was light until they settled into deck chairs and a waiter brought drinks and fancy snacks.
“Word is that you like a good mojito,” he smiled.
“Yes. I do.” She let herself give him a small smile back.
“Ariel, I’m going to be honest with you. I manipulate numbers quite well, but I’m not so good with people. I stumble sometimes. My English is not bad, but not as good as you may think. I am poor with nuances in Icelandic, and considerably worse in your native tongue.”
She nodded sympathetically. She had gone ahead and bought herself software to study Icelandic and had gotten through about four lessons before she had given up in frustration. She could not imagine learning a second language, much less the several that so many Europeans managed.
“Besides customs and words, you have surprised me and I don’t surprise well. Perhaps you understand that?” he asked.
Ariel did.
“I was inexplicitly drawn to you the first time I touched you. It was a feeling so overwhelming, and so unexpected, that I may have reacted poorly. I’m sure I did so the second time.”
“You told me you wanted to take over the world and use me to do it,” Arial replied.
“That’s where language and nuance may have been a problem,” Baldur suggested. “I wish to make money and lots of it, but so do all of Ullow’s clients. There is nothing evil about that.”
“You have an unfair advantage over others. You do sense the future, don’t you?” she said.
“Yes, you have learned my secret.”
Ariel appreciated hearing the truth.
“All high frequency trading gives your clients an unfair advantage, Ariel, and you know it, so don’t claim high moral ground with me,” he said. “What’s more, I’m not one-hundred percent accurate in what I see. There is obviously some variability involved and I make mistakes. I’ve lost large sums before. I’m not infallible.”
“When you touch me, you can see further than you normally do, can’t you?” Ariel asked.
Baldur nodded. “That is part of what surprised me so much.”
“And when you touch me I see closer in. We interfere with each other’s natural frequencies,” Ariel said.
“That’s a good way to put it.” Baldur seemed delighted to hear it explained so clearly. “From the interference comes new information. What I’m trying to say is that if you would work with me, I think I could become much better at investing and perhaps train you as well. We would both benefit. Surely you don’t want to work for some company all of your life? I could help you get started, even give you a little seed capital, and in return you help me be more effective.”
Ariel was wary. “I thought you said that humans never really helped each other, they just pretended like they did.” She took the glove off of her right hand with a deliberate motion. It was time to gather information from this man. “Have you developed a higher opinion of humanity over the past couple of months?”
“I misspoke.” Her slowly approaching hand was making him nervous. “I think cooperation is possible and you and I could aspire to it.”
“Really?” Ariel was having trouble accepting his changed worldview. As her fingers wiggled towards the open V-neck shirt that exposed his throat, he took a step back from her.
“Don’t touch me!” He said it more sharply than he intended and she looked at him quizzically.
“Why? Is there something in our mutual near future that you don’t want me to see?”
“I am offering you the chance to be far richer than you could ever hope to be,” he said defensively. “I would think that your response would be gratitude and eager acceptance.”
“Assuming I want to be very rich, and I’m not actually sure that I do, exactly how would you envision a partnership between us? I’m prohibited from using my company’s software to make trades and I can’t go beating out my own clients.”
He laughed aloud at her when he heard her first concern. “I rather assumed that you would quit your job. That would allow me unlimited access to you, physically, and in return you would no longer have any ethical constraints.”
“So not a partnership, more of an apprenticeship. Are we talking about a sexual relationship?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Holding your hand might be as effective as anything, in which case I would ask for nothing more. However, I’ve developed some theories of my own about how th
is works. Did you know that atoms are almost all space? I read somewhere that you could fit the entire human race inside of a cube of sugar! So I figure with all that space our boundaries are a little less clear than we think they are on a macroscopic scale.”
Ariel agreed. “Electrons get shared all the time between atoms. In the subatomic world they jump all over the place and have no sense of belonging to me or you or the chair I am sitting in. They go where they go.”
“Exactly! The past is done—where those electrons have been is decided. But the future is only possibilities, and because of that I think the fuzziness of the boundaries between me and you matters. When I see the future, my edges aren’t so well defined. I touch you, or my keyboard, and there is fluidity, and that’s why touch gives me more information.”
“You think more skin contact gives better results?”
“It makes sense. I also notice that changing the contact area helps. It’s like after a while you’ve exploited all the overlap and if you introduce new surfaces, and therefore new electrons, then the information flow stays strong. To answer your question, I would require sufficient and varied skin contact with you, as I experiment with ways to use you to be more effective with longer term trading. There would need to be a certain amount of trial and error and you would have to be open to that as well.”
“So I’d be your girlfriend?” Ariel persisted with the questions. “And your student.”
“Others would likely consider you my girlfriend, yes. What we consider each other is up to us and matters very little to me as long as I have as much access to as much of your body as I need.”
She wiggled her fingers towards his neck again. “And I get as much access as I need, too.”
“Of course. See. It is a mutually beneficial arrangement. It could possibly include pleasure and affection. I understand that those are frequent byproducts of intimacy.
This one was a charmer with ladies, Ariel thought with chuckle.
“And what if one of us tires of the arrangement?”
“I’m afraid we would have to revert to the initial terms of a teacher and an apprentice. When the teacher believes that the arrangement is done, the student leaves with her new skills and, in this case, her money as well. I’d want my seed capital repaid with interest of course, but the profits you made for yourself beyond that would be yours to keep. They would likely be considerable.”
Ariel knew the next question would be the sticking point.
“And if the student decides that she no longer wishes to continue her training?”
Baldur shook his head at her. “Once a teacher has invested a great deal in an apprentice, he is understandably going to be reluctant to have her quit the arrangement prematurely. The teacher is expected to be reasonable in this regard, however, and to take the needs of the student into account.”
“That means that if I agree to your proposal, you can send me on my way at any time, but as long as I’m making you more money, you’re not going to be inclined to let me go anywhere. Do I become your prisoner?”
Baldur considered. He wanted to give her the best answer, because he was starting to get disturbing flashes from the next few minutes every time his hand brushed against anything on the boat. It was so rare for him these days to have premonitions about anything other than money. They had been so faint as to have been almost unnoticeable only a few minutes earlier, and he suspected that they had to be increasing in probability because of the conversation he was having.
“You’ll have no reason to be unhappy with the arrangement,” he assured her.
“And if I choose to decline your very generous offer?” Ariel asked.
He noted the sarcasm. “That would be an irrational choice. Don’t you want to know what we are capable of together?”
A black fuzziness was beginning to form on the periphery of Ariel’s vision, and she felt a little dizzy. Baldur noticed how she steadied herself in her chair.
“I’m sorry Ariel, but I couldn’t take the chance that you might decline to participate in my experiment today. For my own planning purposes, I must know if this thing between us is actually effective for investing, and if so I need to know just how well it works.”
“You put something in my drink.” Ariel was outraged.
Baldur smiled. This one had a sharp mind. “It’s only a mild sedative. You’ll be fine. Lucky for you, I suspect that I need you to be conscious for you to be of any use to me. All that is going to happen is that I am going help you up out of your chair, and help you take off that terribly ugly jacket you found to wear today. We are going to enjoy the sunset together while I put my arm around your bare waist and you let me take the time to gather some information for both of us. You may not be nearly as useful to me as I think, in which case we part agreeably and I’ll keep your secrets and you keep mine.”
That seemed liked her best hope, Ariel thought.
“If it looks like I am right, however, then you are going to come below deck with me and please don’t be silly about it. Everyone on this boat works for me. Luckily for us the New York Stock Exchange is open for two more hours. We’ll try a few test decisions together and see how it goes. If it goes very well, then we can face those thorny questions about what comes next.”
It almost seemed reasonable. Ariel stood up, took off her own jacket, and grabbed Baldur’s arm herself and placed it around her waist, thinking that she’d as soon get this little experiment over with and move on.
However, as soon as the skin contact was made, the flash of premory hit her hard. It was an almost certain tilting of the ship’s deck as it inexplicitly made a very hard turn to the right. She saw the boat approach a forty-five degree list as chairs and people slid across it and several deck hands yelled. The image gave Ariel just enough warning for her to turn around and grab onto a rail behind her and be holding on tight when the incident began a second later.
Baldur had seen the same possibility of an unexplained dangerous turn of the boat, but when Ariel stood up and he placed his arm on her, his mind went straight to the wonders of the weeks ahead and lost all connection with the immediate future. The sudden twist of his yacht took him by surprise. He slid between the slates of the outer guardrail and found himself hanging out over the water yelling for help and trying to keep his feet out of the icy bay. It was a less than dignified experience.
By the time the boat was righted and an angry Baldur was hauled to safety, two patrol vessels had approached the yacht to make sure that all was well. A disturbed Ariel quickly accepted an offer for safe transportation back to shore.
The agitated crew thought that one of the two local hired hands had been serving as helmsman on the calm seas while the captain tended to other business, but only one of the locals could be found after the rescue ships left, and he could prove that he had been below deck. The other local hire was never seen again, and the crew guessed that he might have tried to swim to shore rather than face the consequences of his actions. A watch was put out for his body, but no body was ever found.
******
Ariel called Zane the next night and she was in a foul mood.
“Tell your friend that he is absolutely correct in his worst assumptions of our mutual acquaintance and I need to find a way to tell him more. Zane, you know how you can morph your appearance but you don’t really want anyone to know about it?”
“Right. I don’t want it to be public knowledge, at any rate. But my close friends all know. Why? Did you tell somebody else?”
“Oh no, nothing like that.” Ariel hesitated. “Zane, I have a secret like that too. Only in my case, nobody knows.”
“That isn’t healthy,” Zane said, worry in his voice.
“Well, two people know now, but they aren’t my family and it turns out that they aren’t my friends either. In fact, these people are both part of my problem. Zane, I might be in over my head here.”
Ariel could feel her brother searching for the right response. “Can I pass along any so
rt of request for help for you?” Zane said.
“Maybe. Tell your friend—tell him that the thing he thinks our mutual acquaintance can do—he’s right. The guy can do it. But I need you to tell him that I can do it too. Only differently. I’m sorry, I know this is confusing and no way to let your brother in on your troubles. Tell him that maybe I should have told him right away but for god’s sake I’d never told anybody before and I just didn’t see at the time how it was going to turn out to be so important.”
There was more silence on the other end of the line. “Ariel, what sort of thing does this mutual acquaintance do exactly?”
Ariel shrugged. She was tired of being paranoid. If Baldur had her phone tapped, he did, and he wasn’t going to learn anything new from this conversation.
“He sees the future, Zane. He’s a client of mine and he’s wreaking havoc in the world of investing, and your friends are worried about the ramifications.”
“Oh,” Zane said. “That does explain several things that Toby said. And what about you?”
“I sort of have a way of remembering what might happen, too, but it’s not like usually about things that would help me make money. It’s like things about my life, or the lives of people I touch. I don’t know Zane—it’s mostly a nuisance, but now this head case thinks he can harness what I can do to make even more money for himself.”
“Should I try to get somebody over to Dublin to get you back to Texas safely?” The worry in Zane’s voice was growing.
“I don’t want to overreact. I think I’m okay for now. Really. I just want your friend to have all the facts. Please tell him that I’m going to find a way to get him Jake’s research too and more specifics about my own peculiarity. I’ll find a way to put the information somewhere out there on the internet where only you can access it and pass it along. All this background in IT, I ought to at least be able to do that much. So tell him that a lot more facts are coming.”
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