“I know that, Zane, and that’s why I tried to revive Baldur before you got here,” Ariel said.
“What? That asshole? Why in the world would you do something so stupid?”
“Hear me out. Cillian tried to get Baldur to see the far future and he might have succeeded—we don’t know. If he did, then Baldur could have turned into our biggest ally and Toby wouldn’t have had to do anything. But my touching him didn’t seem to do anything but set all the machinery off, so Toby better do what he needs to do.”
Zane nodded, and started his goodbyes.
“Would you rather not hug me?” he asked. He certainly understood his sister better these days.
She laughed. “It’s a risk. I will probably see things.”
“I’ll take a chance this time,” he said and gave her a bear hug. She hugged back, but pulled away.
“Is everything okay at home?” she asked.
“Mom told me not to tell you,” he answered. “Yes, she’s having some problems of her own. I know that she wants to talk to you about it over Christmas. Why?”
“Christmas isn’t looking so good for our family,” Ariel said. “I think I’m going to take more time off than I planned. You might think about doing the same. It looks like mom is going to need some help from both of us. Go. Catch your flight now. We’ll talk more about it later.”
Zane shrugged. He wondered what it was like to have normal relatives. Looked like he’d never know.
The next day Ulfur called Ariel, and they met in the hospital lobby. Ulfur explained that he understood that Ariel and Baldur had a “complicated” relationship, both financially and emotionally.
“I think you should know that Baldur took some sort of turn for the worse while you were in the room with him. I don’t blame you—I could see that you didn’t do anything. But the doctors say that his brain woke up while you were in there and it is now fully functioning.”
“So he’s out of a coma?”
“Not really. His brain stem continues to communicate with his body, so he breathes fine and his heart is pumping and so on. But everything above the brain stem appears to have lost every bit of its connection with his body. The doctors don’t think he can hear or see or feel, and he clearly has no muscle control at all. He’s completely cut off from the world, and they think that he is conscious enough to know it.”
Ariel shuddered. What a horrible fate. “Is there anything they can do?”
“Obviously they’re going to try all kinds of things, and no doubt chip away a good bit of his considerable wealth while they do so. There’s no known cure for his situation, though, and it seems to me like they don’t even understand it, so how can they fix it?”
Ariel tried to keep the look of relief off of her face.
“I don’t know if you two had any remaining financial dealings to iron out, but if you have any claims, get in line with all the others. I promise to give yours fair consideration at least.”
Ariel shook her head. “No. Baldur was a client for my company and I have no remaining interest in his estate.”
“He obviously will be closing his account with Ullow. Do you think the Dublin office will stay open?”
Ariel hadn’t even thought that far ahead.
“No, I don’t suppose that it will.”
“So you’ll be going back to London?” Ulfur asked.
“I doubt it.” She realized that it was true as soon as she said it. “I’m probably going to make the move into a slightly different field. Something more about computers and less about money.”
Ulfur looked relieved. “Good luck to you then. This planet needs more competent software engineers. And hardware engineers too.”
“It does, doesn’t it? Come to think of it, every planet does.”
Ulfur just gave her a funny a look as she walked out the door.
29. Autumn Ends 2012
Siarnaq wasn’t sure of much, but one of the facts on the short list of what he knew was that somewhere along the way he had fallen in love with Ariel. A romantic would have placed the onset of deep affection early on, maybe even at their first touch. Siarnaq was a more pragmatic man, and he recognized how his feelings had grown as he watched her try to do the right thing through circumstances that would have challenged the best of the gods themselves.
Mikkel had been kind enough to call Siarnaq the day after Ariel and her brother had been pulled safely from the sea. The severity of the situation hit Siarnaq like a splash of cold water on his own face when he realized that his relief that Ariel was alive was dampened by his own envy that Mikkel had somehow managed to place himself aboard this speedboat and help pull Ariel out of the water.
Siarnaq wanted to slap himself. Mikkel’s part in the rescue was perfect. It was exactly what was needed. From such gestures grew deeper affection, and Ariel needed to love Mikkel. Well, she didn’t need to, but her life would be so much better if she did, and Siarnaq wanted her to have a good life, didn’t he?
Of course he did.
Her missing Siarnaq, even in the least, or her wondering if she and Siarnaq could just maybe have found a way to make a life, these things would not be good, no matter how strongly Siarnaq wanted them. She needed to see Siarnaq as a passing youthful fling, an experience enjoyed and then forgotten. He could be nothing more.
For his sunset-haired lover had important duties ahead, and she was going to need her heart, her mind and her soul in the game if she was going to successfully take on the role that fate would offer her. Siarnaq had seen it, finally, in its full clarity, that last wonderful time that he and Ariel had lay together on the filthy couch in the messy apartment of someone Siarnaq kind of knew. The lingering effects of Cillian’s touch had combined with Ariel’s present one to make it all clearer than Siarnaq had needed or had wished. He’d known then that he must say goodbye to Ariel, and never see her again.
So he had swallowed his envy and his grief and thanked Mikkel for the news that their mutual friend was safe. He wished Mikkel well with his projects and offered to collaborate if it ever was needed.
Siarnaq would go back to his life, and to the purpose that had driven him for years. He only wished it didn’t feel so empty now.
He reminded himself that Ariel had shown him more than her own future. She had also helped him to see some of his. There would be another love, eventually. This one could go considerably better, at least if he wasn’t stupid about it. He might end his days surrounded by affection, if he was lucky and if he learned to move on.
So many ifs. At one time, the idea of a future that malleable would have disturbed him, but today it brought him hope. Perhaps the best gift Ariel had left with him was the knowledge of how many ifs there were in determining what tomorrow would bring.
******
Ariel’s grandfather had been a fireman, and he had attended more funerals in his hometown in East Texas than he would have liked. In too many cases his relationship with the deceased and with the cause of death was complicated.
Ariel thought of him now as she approached Mrs. Finn to pay her respects.
“All you say in a case like that is, ‘I am so sorry for your loss,’ he had once told her. ‘I had to learn to fight the temptation to say anything more, especially then and there.’”
“Thanks papa,” she muttered now as Eoin’s wife turned to her.
“I’m so sorry for your loss.” She said it and she meant it. The woman nodded mutely.
Later there were toasts and stories and tears and more toasts. Ariel noticed that Eoin’s wife and children only stayed for a few of them, but Eoin’s many pals and business associates were determined to spend the rest of the day drinking his soul into the afterlife.
The Ullow group sat together at a table, trying to find the right balance between merriment and sorrow. Rumor had it that Ullow would close the Dublin office by the end of the year, so this was likely the last time that they all would be together. Brendan didn’t much care about the office closing, he had already dec
ided to take time off from his career for a while to help Cillian settle elsewhere. Ariel thought it likely that Brendan would take on the fulltime role of becoming Cillian’s eyes, and his face to the world, as the blind clairvoyant used his increased knowledge and larger funds to continue to try to lessen the odds of human extinction.
Ronan and Fergus were both going to work directly for Mikkel once the office closed. When there was a break in the toasts, Ariel turned to the one next to her, the one with the slightly pointier chin.
“I wish you and Fergus the best of luck in Copenhagen.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that, but I am Fergus,” he answered amiably.
“Okay then, Fergus. I hope that learning Danish goes well for you guys.”
“Thanks, but I’m Ronan,” he replied with out cracking a smile. Then Ariel got it.
“You guys have been doing this to me since I got here, haven’t you?”
“We do it to everyone, don’t we Ronan,” one of the two young men said laughing.
“We’ve even confused our own mums, now haven’t we, Ronan,” the other laughed back.
“No wonder I could never remember which of you was which.” Ariel looked around the table at the others. “What do the rest of you do?”
“We call them whichever name we fooking please,” Brendan said, his serious face breaking into one of its rare smiles. Everyone laughed except Jake.
“Maybe keep it down just a little,” Jake said in a loud whisper. “We are at Eoin’s funeral, you know.”
Jake seemed to be the most lost member of the group, and Ariel wondered if Jake had spoken with Toby about a job. Jake’s analysis of Baldur’s investing results had been impressive. Perhaps somewhere in y1 there was someone who could make good use of Jake’s skills. Ariel made a mental note to check into it more.
Ariel planned to finish out the workweek, and then turn in her resignation effective the end of the year. She had three weeks of vacation saved. Mikkel had invited her to visit for a few days and then she’d head back to Texas.
She went to the ladies room and was surprised to find Eoin’s wife standing at the sink, a lost look on her face.
“I thought you’d gone home,” Ariel said, thinking it was a dumb thing to say even as she said it.
“I did. My mum said she’d watch the children, that I should come back here and let friends console me, but she was wrong. These people are celebrating his life. Me, I’m mourning his death, and I will be for a long while. It’s different.”
She gave Ariel a hard stare. “I need to know something. What happened to him? The police in Iceland, they were useless. My man didn’t get struck by lightning, did he?”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Ariel said.
“Explain my loss,” the woman replied. “He was doing something that he wasn’t supposed to be doing, wasn’t he?”
“Oh no.” So that was what his wife thought. “You can’t put him to rest thinking that! I don’t know exactly what happened. I don’t think anyone does. But I do know that your husband was doing nothing wrong. He went to that park to right wrongs. To save lives. He died trying to be a hero, ma’am, not a villain, and you’ve got to believe that, because it’s true, and nothing, nothing would have mattered more to him than your knowing that.”
She studied Ariel’s flushed face for a few seconds.
“You tell the truth,” she finally said. “It’s good to know.”
As Ariel walked back into the room filled with drunken mourners, she thought that even the wisest of grandparents occasionally got it wrong.
******
Toby thought that he had never handled negotiations that were so complicated or so delicate. Working with a basically unwilling Ariel, Baldur had expertly placed thousands of trades on over a dozen different stock exchanges under hundreds of different names. Ulfur was complicit, but the dozens of underlings he had managed likely had no idea what they were part of and hardly deserved to be hung out to dry.
The ten other members of d4 had been excluded from the real money in the end—they just didn’t know it yet. Baldur’s plans to dissolve d4 were in place and even, in some cases, in progress, and as ten very wealthy savants realized they had been cheated out of the real prize, they were none too happy. Several of them suspected that Ariel was involved, and they were more than willing to drag her into this.
Cillian and Mikkel had done well to cover their tracks and their associations with Baldur, and Toby was going out of his way to maintain that disassociation. However they all were connected through Ullow, and through one Eoin Finn who had not helped the situation at all by dying a newsworthy death while literally linking Baldur to Cillian.
Plenty of people would have opted for a very public airing of the facts and an equally public punishing of those guilty in any way. In the end this could have included Cillian, Mikkel, every employee of Ullow, and probably Toby and Zane for good measure.
Toby was most definitely not a fan of claiming that too much money was involved for justice to be served. He’d been scoffing at that assertion for the past four years. He was all for punishing the guilty. However people who had legitimate reason to claim that they were trying to save the world with their actions and just couldn’t tell anyone, well, they did deserve special treatment as far as Toby was concerned.
So he worked harder at this than he ever had at anything in his life. Once he quietly laid out the facts of Baldur’s uncanny investment strategy and its upcoming success to the tune of more than a hundred billion euros to a few key sensible people in power, they listened.
It was decided that Baldur’s considerable current wealth, already well into the billions, would be distributed among his probably undeserving family, his personal and professional staff, which included Hulda, a large fund set aside for his medical bills, and a plethora of charities and individual trust funds to be named later. Eoin’s wife and all five of his children would be among those latter beneficiaries. Once Ulfur realized that he was being offered a sizable inheritance and a healthy fee to handle Baldur’s affairs as instructed, as opposed to facing legal prosecution and possible jail time, he became far more cooperative.
Loopholes that provided an unfair advantage for all high frequency traders would be quietly closed, lest anyone else in d4 decided to go back into business and take even greater advantage of the situation. In return for making generous voluntary donations to local charities and then quietly disappearing without complaint, no charges of cheating or fraud would ever be brought against d4 for their irregular investments. Toby didn’t like the arrangement, but he could live with it. He just hoped that nobody else in the group would ever grasp the way that Baldur had been able to use Ariel’s talents to circumvent even more of the system.
The final challenge was what to do about Baldur’s many yet-to-mature options and futures investments that were set to deliver over seventy billion or so euros if they all developed as expected. There was no easy or fair way to pull most of that money back out of the system. Ronan advocated for distributing it evenly to every man, woman and child on Earth.
“Are you nuts? So everybody gets ten euros, make that five after shipping and handling. I mean, it sounds like a real lot of money but we’re a real lot of people,” Fergus countered. “Not many lives anywhere get changed by five extra euros. You basically take a fortune and make it insignificant.”
“I never thought of it that way,” Ronan marveled. “You know, backwards. This means that if I could get every person on Earth to give me just ten euros, I’d be the richest man alive. There has got to be a way to do that.”
Toby was shaking his head. “Trust me, you two. You don’t want to waste your life trying to do that.”
Because discretion and lack of disruption to the world’s economy were the biggest drivers, it was decided that the profits of each of the little shell companies Baldur had created should be handled separately. There were just more than seven hundred of them, and Toby would divide the world into seven hun
dred groups of about ten million people each. Each shell company would take its proceeds of a hundred million dollars or so and quietly invest them locally in the assigned area. The goal would be to fund schools, parks, hospitals, projects for clean water and electricity, and a start for family businesses of all kinds. Each of these hundreds of little companies would need to determine the best way to put money back into the lives of its individual communities. It was going to be a little bit like putting toothpaste back into a tube.
Toby was delighted when Ariel mentioned that Jake could use a good job. It seemed fitting that Jake, the first person to figure out how d4 was sucking up the world’s money in the first place, should be the one to handle finding a way to put the money back where it had come from. Jake and the group of people working for him, that is. That was going to be one hell of a lot of work.
******
Brendan determined that Cillian needed to move out of Dublin, and Nell set about finding a suitable house for Brendan and Cillian in County Donegal. That was two houses she now needed to find. Hulda had agreed to move to Ireland and to try living with the person that her former girlfriend Murna really was, and Nell’s little apartment there would no longer serve her needs.
Cillian’s mood improved every day as he realized that he had at least two dear friends willing to care for him, and that his contact with Baldur, Ariel and Siarnaq had left him with clearer and more varied visions than he had ever had before. Perhaps the blindness helped with the visions as well.
Though he remained sad that he would never see his beloved Ireland again with his own eyes, he was determined not to lapse into the depression that had claimed his own father for so many years. He knew that a tendency towards despondency was hereditary, and Cillian had important work to do. There were certain types of research on communicable diseases that could be encouraged, and libraries and other non-electrical repositories of information had to be designed and maintained. Better long-life batteries must be developed. Every day brought more helpful ideas.
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