“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
