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.”
