The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

At the Money - RICHARD WADHOLM

New writer Richard Wadholm lives in Seattle, and is at work on a novel set in the universe of the story that follows. He’s made several sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and his story “Green Tea,” set in the same milieu, appeared in our Seventeenth Annual Collection.

Here’s a tense and compelling visit inside a high-tech “Stock Exchange” in an evocative and electrifyingly strange far-future universe, one filled with players expert in double-dealing and intrigue-and one where life itself rides on every bet.

Personally, I see nothing wrong in doing deals in a bar. Esteban always loved working out of Chuy’s. He wore the place like an old coat. Every barmaid was his foil and confidante.

We did a deal with a couple of Anglos just before Esteban went out on his last run. Twelve hundred pennyweight of morghium, bound for some ideology franchise in the Scatterhead. Whenever the negotiations got tense, Esteban would vow he didn’t need their money anyway. He could get enough to live on from Doctor Friendly, “the Spaceman’s Friend.” Then he would grab some nether part of himself and give a leer to the old tumor broker at the end of the bar-” What’ll you give me for this, huh?

The Anglos would look appalled. Martisela would look from Esteban to me in amazement, like Sleeping Beauty awakening in the wrong castle. “ This is what I sneak out of the convent for? High risk and low comedy?” And Esteban would grin at me, even as he pleaded with Martisela not to tell his wife.

Times like that don’t seem special until later, when you look up and suddenly realize they are over.

Tonight, I was back at Chuy’s. I was meeting the same Anglos, tying up loose ends with the same morghium deal. Only Martisela was back at the convent. She was through missing bed checks for a while. And Esteban?

My last conversation with Esteban, he was on this Bright Matter ship, the Hierophant. They were up in the dusky end of the Scatterhead Nebula, passing through a plume of tungsten ions left behind by some medium-sized supernova. Esteban had loaded the Anglos’ target isotopes onto the Hierophant’s starboard vane. He was calling me to double check their nuclear chemistry: Would perbladium transmutate into morghium under tungsten ion bombardment?

Really, they print this information on splash screens. I would have yelled at him for the price of the call. Except I knew the real reason he was calling. These pinche Anglos and their morghium job had him in sweats. He needed a little reassurance. I told him everything was all right. I promised him he wasn’t going to die, I’d see him when he got back.

Tonight, as I sat at our old table next to the tumor broker, I thought about that promise. All I had left of Esteban was a salvage ticket awarding me 900 pennyweight in unspecified isotopes. Not even a guess what these unspecified isotopes might be, or how long till they decayed to something else. Only that Esteban Contreras had entrusted them to me for the sake of his wife. And they were worth the price of a fleet of Bright Matter ships.

Chuy’s Last Load Lounge was hosting a wake for the crew of Esteban’s ship, the Hierophant. Chuy himself-Jesus Navarete to Anglos or ships’ officers-had worked on the Hierophant as a young man. Dorsal vane mechanic, he reminded his patrons proudly- “Where the money gets made.” A target shelf of hot phoellium had fused the fingers of his left hand into a flipper. A man of lurid humor, he had planed that load of glassified slag into a countertop, mounted it on dark azurewood and made it the centerpiece of his life as an innkeep. To this day, the counter glows from the isotopes embedded within.

Chuy was perfecting the head on a pitcher of French lager as I stepped up to the bar. Grief is thirsty work; three other pitchers extended to his left. Alpha particles from the bar passed through them, trailing arcs of delicate bubbles.

“Ah. Lazarus,” his voice slow with care for the beer. “Back from the dead to tell all.”

“Chuy.”

“I hear share prices for the Hierophant’s salvage rights have gone up 27 percent since the accident. I don’t suppose you’d like to take a little credit for that.” He never looked up from his task. In the best of times, there is antipathy between vane dogs like Chuy and mercaderos like myself. This was not one of those times.

I smiled. “You’re just saying that so I’ll buy the next round.”

He leaned forward to give me a malign squint. For one moment, an arc of quiet speculation seemed to spread out around the two of us. My life was, as they say on the Exchange, in play.

But the night was too sad for that sort of foolishness. He slapped my arm and gave me a snicker at once ugly and forgiving. The sort of laugh meant to be passed around between pinche cabrones like ourselves.

“Here,” he said, and passed me one on the house. As he did, he leaned in close. “A couple of gabachos looking for you.” He waved his flippered hand toward the room. “They’re around here somewhere. You keep your business quiet. I won’t be responsible, you start offending people’s sensibilities.”

Even as he spoke, I felt a presence at my side. In the mirror just past Chuy’s head, I saw a copper-haired Anglo with pouty lips and strawberried cheeks. I doffed my beer to him. “Mister Chamberlain,” I said.

He smiled. “Orlando Coria. And your friend, Contreras…?” He looked past my shoulder as if Esteban might be waiting in the crowd. No Esteban; Chamberlain lifted his eyebrows, well well well. “Damn shame,” he said. “Smart guy like that. And that nasty little nun?”

“Back at the convent.”

“Well,” he offered, “I’m sure you miss her.” He took my hand as he spoke. More than a handshake-I felt myself gently directed toward a quiet spot at the end of the bar.

Another Anglo waited there. This one sprawled across his chair, hips and shoulders cocked fashion-model style. A little smile played at his lips. This would be Chamberlain’s… “chauffeur?” These Anglos.

Chamberlain gave him a nudge that knocked his leg from the tabletop. “Bell, be convivial.”

Bell said, “Hey, Buddy.” They must have been bashful where Bell came from.

I made room under the table for my barter bag. It was mostly empty but for a couple of perbladium samples from one of Esteban’s little jobs. These gabachos had introduced themselves as perbladium speculators. I was curious to know if they would recognize real perbladium when they saw it. I was curious to know who they really were.

I set Esteban’s salvage ticket on the table and leaned back to take in their reactions.

Chamberlain studied the ticket over tented fingers. He might have been counting his money. He might have been adding up his crimes.

“That’s a lot of money for a bit of morghium,” he said.

“That was my thought as well. Have you seen what’s left of the Hierophant? Whatever you gave Esteban to turn, it didn’t transmutate into morghium.”

He gave his partner an expression of aggravation. “I told Seynoso to pay for this stuff outright.”

“That would have been awkward,” I said.

“When would it have been more awkward than right now?”

“About the time the Hierophant burned with all hands. Someone from the Mechanics’ Guild makes a point of looking up every registered investor.”

I was calling him a ship killer, is what I was doing. There were two possible reactions to this sort of slander. Horror and outrage, and this other one. More rueful, more considered.

Chamberlain pressed his fingertips a little tighter. “There’s a story behind this morghium deal. Things are more complicated than you think.” He waved his hand, the story was too complex to go into now. “I’m willing to buy these salvage rights from you, blind. I’ll pay you 10 percent market price. And before you laugh, consider the realities. You don’t know what you’re holding anymore than we do. You might be holding lead futures for all you know.”

I would have stood up to leave, except that Chamberlain was right. All I had in my hand was a market mirage. It was expensive as such things went, but all salvage looks good from a distance.

This was when I missed Martisela’s market expertise. She had three of the seven basic Thommist Catastrophes ingrained as quantum processors into the unused DNA of her hands. Wasn’t a decay chain she couldn’t follow. I had nothing to go on but my unscientific nose, which wrinkled considerably at these two.

“I’m not in a position to negotiate,” I lied. “This salvage claim belongs to Seсor Contreras’s family. Unless you’ve got some further claim, I am obliged to sell it at the market price.”

“ ‘Further claim?’ ” Chamberlain gave his compaсero a nudge, such language! “We have further claim,” he said. “We bought first position on your decay rights.”

He produced a futures contract for whatever isotopes might decay from Esteban’s unspecified salvage. I looked down till I found the signature of Esteban’s wife, Cynthia. I looked back and the two of them were grinning at me.

There is nothing illegal in optioning 900 pennyweight of pterachnium to one investor and then optioning its decay products to someone else. Martisela always warned me to cover those isotope futures in the contract. What had Cynthia been thinking?

“Seсora Contreras is distraught,” I said. “Whatever she hoped to gain with this will be satisfied some other way. I think I will leave you now.”

“What about our decay rights?”

“The problem with decay futures? They are useless unless something actually decays. That is why they are cheap to buy. Ay te wacho.”

Chamberlain needed a moment to realize what I was saying. “You really are going to make this hard, aren’t you?” To himself: “He’s really going to make this hard.” He looked at Bell to do something. Bell seemed utterly impassive.

I was pushing myself back from the table when I noticed a fluorescence in the gloom of Bell’s shirt cuff. I recognized the source from my own improvident youth-a 48 yuen piece on a leather loop. With a bit of steghnium to light old Mau’s eyes. Or a 128 yuen piece, bearing Emperor Yuan, lit by phoellium. Or a 256 yuen piece, glowing with albatine. Depending on what sort of smugglers they were and what sort of detectors they had to confuse.

Bell had been toying with the coin all this time, but I hadn’t noticed till he let it slip from his fingers and into the gloom of his sleeve. He twisted his cuff as if embarrassed, but not so quickly I would miss the bleeding ulcer beneath the coin. Yes, he had been wearing it a very long time.

He noticed my eyes on his smugglers’ charm. He gave me a smile as desolate as every darkened doorway along Galle de Campana. Chamberlain nudged my barter bag with his foot.

“Enjoy the evening,” he said. “We’ll catch up with you.”

I glanced to the rest of the room. An engineer off of the Page of Wands sang a corrido to the vane mechanics of the Hierophant. How much they loved their pepper seed mash. How bad it made them smell. A compaсero chimed in, something about their dubious sexual practices. Make no mistake, they’d all be weeping in a moment. Had I miscalculated?

The entire roomful of people seemed caught in their grieving. Save one little Anglo. I spotted him sitting by Doctor Friendly, the tumor broker. I remember hooded eyes, and this goatee that seemed to point the way for his nose. He watched me intently. I thought he might come to my aid. The little Anglo merely nodded at me and smiled- now what?

They do have their sense of fun.

I turned back to Chamberlain: “What if I made you a counter proposal?” I said.

Chamberlain lifted an eyebrow at Bell- are you listening to this?

“One moment of patience, I will show you real wealth.” I had come here to deal for Esteban’s legacy after all. And why not offer them a sample?

I gave Chamberlain my confidential smile. Careful, careful, so as not to alarm, I pulled the pouch of woven lead from my barter bag. It was a small pouch. It barely filled my hand. But heavy enough I had to stiffen my arm beneath it.

There is an art to this sort of presentation. I peeled back the double-sealed flap. I made it an unveiling. Inside gleamed a ball coated in mirror-smooth nickel. I could see Chamberlain was fascinated. He wanted to touch it. Still, I held onto it. I waited till he asked before I slipped it from its leaden sheath and into his palm.

He laughed at the surprising weight of it. “It’s heavy.”

“Yes, it is.”

“It’s warm.”

“Like holding a hamster in your hand. It’s a subcritical amount of perbladium, distilled from liquid suspension and purified. Up in the Scatterhead Nebula, the militias use it as a crude proximity trigger. That warmth in your palm? That’s alpha particle radiation, knocked off the sealant.”

Chamberlain shrank back. He had the cerrazadito’s abhorrence of contamination. Now it was my turn for amusement.

“Forget the alpha particles,” I soothed.

He looked at me to see if I was having him on. His shoulders eased. “Perbladium,” he said. He laughed a rueful little laugh. “I stay away from the real touchy stuff.” This was a big admission for Seсor Chamberlain.

I nodded. Sure, sure. “You need something to worry about, consider the neutrons reflecting back from your body. They are quickly pushing that little ball to criticality.”

He was still smiling as he looked up at me. I’ll never forget the moment he stopped.

“You’re lying.”

I had a particle detector on the table. It roared to life at my touch.

Chamberlain made a strangled yip. He dropped the ball of perbladium. He dove backward into a drunken throng of vane mechanics, which might have been the wrong thing to do.

That left Mr. Bell. His eyes skittered from the sample on the table to me. One of us would kill him. He seemed uncertain which. I was about to clear up his confusion when Chuy Navarete rounded the bar with a couple of beefy crane operators off of the Ace of Pentacles.

“What did I tell you?” I think Chuy was more furious with me than anyone else. “Come in here. Ruin the somber mood…” He glared down at my perbladium, which had dented the table where it landed and never even bounced. “That stuff better not be real.”

“Sorry, Choo. I was just putting it away.”

Chuy reached into the brawl and withdrew a very bruised and confused guero, who swung at him in wild frustration, and snarled, “Let go of me, you fish-handed freak!”

I winced. Everyone in the bar winced. Chamberlain might have said a lot of wrong things and not said that.

Chuy gave Chamberlain the sort of benign smile a chef bestows on a favored lobster. “їComo?”

We will avert our eyes at this point. Take my word, the fate of these two gabachos only gets more wretched. In any case, I had a fortune disintegrating in my pocket. And only one person in Buenaventura could tell me what it was.

I want to tell you about Martisela. Martisela and Esteban and myself. A trio of swindlers were we. I was sleeping behind the kiosks that line Borregos Bridge. I imagined myself a romantic figure, a Prince of the Barrio. Though, a little older and a bit less turned-out, I might simply have been “homeless.”

Martisela had already been exiled to the Convent Santa Ynez for selling short on the anti-money market just as it pitched into its long-overdue collapse. One of the few truly blameless things she had done in her entire sordid career. Ahh, but she had made money where others had lost, and that was not to be forgiven.

Esteban Contreras actually held down a steady job-Starboard Vane Chief on the Bright Matter Ship Hierophant.

He used his position to solicit these little side jobs-a couple hundred pennyweight of phoellium to melt a polar ice cap into atmospheric gasses. Or vanodium to be turned to echnesium to confine a bit of industrial grade Vacuum 2.

He always backed up his commodity by optioning futures on its every decay state. Then he sold these options to his partner-me-and I used them as collateral to pump the stock of the Orlando Coria Mining and Bright Matter Company, Incorporated. Amazing, the sort of people who will throw money at a little brokerage with the right sort of pedigree. It might have been criminal if we had made any real money. But Martisela was the brains behind this mob, and she never really cared about the money. The fun for her was in rigging the game.

Only one time did we get serious. This was prior to Esteban’s last trip out with the Hierophant. Esteban had agreed to turn this load of morghium for Chamberlain and Bell, and their iffy Spanish friend, Seynoso. Esteban thought the job over some more and decided that it liked him not. We decided to put this Spaniard’s morghium to our own ends.

Morghium is pretty humble stuff. It has a bit of Vacuum 1 at its heart, which alters the speed of light through certain crystal lattices-big news if you’re a designer of quantum optic switches. It is more spectacular as a target material. Flown through a cloud of tungsten ions at just under the speed of light, morghium transmutates under bombardment into some of the most exotic stuff on the Bright Matter Exchange. Lyghnium, and Vacuum 4, which whispers of a universe full of magnetic monopoles. Pterachnium and Vacuum 5, used to convert underloved white dwarf stars into highly desirable singularities.

With our client’s morghium in hand, Esteban offered futures on pterachnium, even though he would have been crazy to actually turn anything so dangerous. Martisela optioned Esteban’s potential pterachnium using money borrowed against its potential isotopes. I was the one in charge of cashing it all in.

For about two hours there, our stock was leading a small bubble market in lyghnium 485 futures. I was as wealthy as I had ever been in my life.

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, Seсor 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.

Seсor 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, Seсor ita Davalos?” Seсor ita Davalos. And with her husband standing beside her.

Marti smiled. “I’m helping him out of a jam,” she said.

Seсor 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 you 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 Vacuum 4 doubled in the time it took my eyes to adjust to the dark. Moving in tandem to the Vacuum 4 would be the market in large-scale power generation. Power generators loved Vacuum 4 for its steady flurry of magnetic monopoles. And gnodium, the baryonic cinder that separates Vacuum 4 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 Vacuum 8 and lyghnium, a favorite combination to Anglo ship killers. Vacuum 8 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 Vacuum 6. 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. “Vacuum 6, maybe. They don’t figure decay plateaus for Vacuum 6.”

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 enough 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?

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. “Vacuum 3.”

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 Vacuum 3.

“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 Seсora 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 Seсora 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 could 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? Vacuum 3? Vacuum 6?”

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, Seсor? With Seсor ’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 Seсor 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. “ Seсor Dryden.” He was laughing. їQue 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 decontamination chamber that fronted the street. Esteban himself peered over the mezcбl 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 mнo. 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?”

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 delicious. 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 mezcбl and drink myself to stupefaction. Decisions, decisions.

I absolutely was not going to worry for Martisela. Seсor a Pushcart. Seсor 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 infuriated 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 Malecуn 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.”

“Shut up about my wife.” I smiled; I had decided this conversation would remain friendly. In any case, I had come to talk about something else. “It was your idea to leverage Esteban and myself out of our own corporation.”

“We may have collateralized a few of your assets. I would hardly call what we did ‘leveraging.’”

“I’ve always been curious why somebody like you would take an interest in a tiny corporation like Coria Bright Matter. Alberto Zuniga told you about our lyghnium shares. Didn’t he.”

I had found something amusing for him. “It was your friend Contreras that he told us about. A good morghium designer is hard to come by. The lyghnium has turned out to be a bonus.”

For a moment, he seemed uncertain how much he wanted to go on. Oh, but here was a man in love with his cause. He had no enemies. Only prospects.

“We have this wayward franchisee,” he said after a while. “This man, del Cayo. He purchased a lot of very expensive ideology. Refused every decent overture of repayment. When we pressed the matter, he generated the money to pay us by pumping up lyghnium production at all his ergosphere mines throughout the French Violet-so much lyghnium, he caused a collapse in the market.”

“So, you turn our Bright Matter ships into missiles. And you shut down his lyghnium operations. Permanently.”

“He’s put a quarter-billion people out of work. He’s used our ideology to sanction a civil war against his brother. Killing…” He waved his hand at some unconscionable number. He had that faith shared among Anglos that anything can be forgiven. God’s own attorneys, those people; anything can be mitigated in the light of something worse.

“You must be nervous right now.”

“It’s a big night for us,” he admitted, breathless as an ingйnue.

“I mean, you must be nervous putting all that lyghnium back on the market.” That is how you paid or your pterachnium isn’t it?”

He peeked up at me through his eyebrows, impish in his guilt. “We fudged a little. What we sold were options on lyghnium futures-the same contracts we acquired from Coria Bright Matter when we bought you out. Lyghnium 485.” He shook his head in amazement. “I’d still like to know where you got that stuff. It must be decayed half to lead by now, which is a singular shame.”

“You’re going to substitute 482 from one of your mines.”

He put up his hands, what can I do? The problem would come when Dryden’s creditors called in those 485 options; there would be trouble even if they accepted Dryden’s isotope for our own. Putting 900 pennyweight of lyghnium on the market would devalue the price another couple of kilotramos at least. I could see that chewed at his conscience in ways that killing another Bright Matter ship did not.

But I had good news for Dryden’s conscience.

“You are in a unique position to fulfill your lyghnium 485 contracts,” I said. “You own the parent isotope.”

He started to explain to me about binding energies versus repulsive electrical charge, and the limitations of naturally formed nuclei. He stopped. He gave me a cautious, sideways look. A little smile. “What did you say?”

“Lyghnium 485 decays down from pterachnium. You borrowed the money to buy your pterachnium using its own isotope futures as collateral.”

He thought about that. His eyes grew narrow, and then very wide.

“It’s called a market loop,” I said. “The way Martisela set up ours was very deliberate, with an exit strategy close to hand. And we were careful about who we brought in downstream. You bought into her market loop without ever realizing. You used it to borrow from some of the biggest brokers on the Exchange.”

He turned on his heel to look back up the path. He might have been looking for a way out. He might have been looking to see if anyone else found me as amusing as he did.

“So what then? We compounded your larceny with a few innocent mistakes. What are you going to do?” He laughed. “Call Los Zapatos?”

“Better. I called all the people holding paper on your lyghnium.” In the dusk beneath the bridge, Dryden’s face took on the pallid glow of a drowned isotope. I could have read my watch by the reflection. “Not to worry,” I said. “I have assumed your debt. No need to thank me.”

His first move was for something in his waistband.

“In the event of my passing, my assets go to Seсora Contreras.”

Dryden had spent the evening with the delightfully ruthless widow. His eyes widened at the mention of her name. His hand fell back to his side.

“There is a bright side,” I said. “I’ve got a buyer. A mining engineer five light years down the Hercules Vent, looking to illuminate veins of tungsten ions through the Nautilus Nebula. We’ll need precision-speed transportation to get the lyghnium to him before it decays. But I’ve got a pilot who does her best work just below light speed. She will milk those time dilation effects for all they’re worth.”

“You’re giving us five years to get out of the lyghnium business.”

“Under the circumstances, I’d say I was being generous.”

Dryden had this caustic laugh of amazement. “You’re talking about some of the poorest economies in the Scatterhead Nebula. Speculators will short them into currency devaluations. Governments will collapse.”

“What you get for bothering my wife.”

He put up his hands in this placating gesture I’ve never seen anyone make but other Anglos. “We made a decision.” He put up his hands again. “A painful decision-to put the lives of the many before the lives of the few. I know this is hard for you to understand-”

I checked my watch. “You have four years, four hundred and ninety-nine days, forty-nine hours, forty-nine minutes.”

“I’ve seen your portfolio. You’re heavily invested in these currencies. You will go down with them.”

“Forty-eight minutes.”

“Seсora Contreras may lose interest in market speculation. Then where will you be? You’re just half-an-hour across the bay from Jimmy-Jim Town.”

I could see the conversation turning petulant. Besides, Martisela’s ship would be leaving soon. But I wanted to leave him with a memento of his time among the Spaniards.

Dryden hefted Esteban’s perbladium sample, smiling his rigid smile. “So what is this stuff exactly?” Proud to the last.

“Spanish version of a crystal ball. Gaze into it awhile. You might just see your future.”

A deep-water ferry was passing along the canal toward the bay. I had to sprint to catch it. I’d like to say I never looked back, but really, it was a freighted moment.

I have this lasting image of Dryden. He is leaning over the rail, chucking Esteban’s perbladium in its leaded sleeve and staring toward the gathering dawn as if surprised by the light.

I have seen him since. He seems to have taken the blame for the collapse of the Scatterhead Nebula economies. Maybe he should have killed me when he had the chance. He’s a front man for the National Socialists these days. Or some tiered-market business operated by the Communists. Whatever, I lose track.

I have acquired this cachet. Paradoxical, I know-I am the cause of eight billion tragedies. But infamy is a commodity like any other. It requires less promotion than heroism, though it helps that I went broke along with the eight billion residents of the Scatterhead-and for love no less. Heartbreak is only slightly less compelling than villainy.

As for the money? I could tell you I don’t miss the money. You might laugh. I will tell you that there are compensations.

I savor the memory of Martisela on the dock at Malecуn de Viejas. The boarding bell is ringing, and we’re arguing. Heatedly. And this old grandfather slides in close to hear tales of drunkenness and cruelty. I remember the look on his face as he realized we were fighting over the destruction of worlds.

I remember Martisela’s face against my palm.

I remember her kiss.

She has arrived in Bougainville. She speaks of this faded rose of a city. Talc-white streets and arsenic-tinged chocolate and the reptile opera. Her note is a bit tentative. She’s reaching across five years. That last good-bye on the docks at Malecуn de Viejas, she did tell me not to wait for her.

I suppose I’m nervous as well. She remembers a clever young man untroubled by conscience, who lived behind the kiosks on Borregos Bridge and toyed with worlds.

What will she think of the man he became? The canal-boat pilot with friends and bills in about equal proportion?

I may leave for Bougainville and be gone forever. I may be back in a week. But right now, I am breathless with anticipation. Do you know how long it’s been since I was breathless?