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.
