“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?

Agent Provocateur - ALEXANDER IRVINE

New writer Alexander Irvine made his first sale in 2000, to The Magazine of Fantasy amp; Science Fiction, and has since made several more sales to that magazine, as well as sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. His well-received first novel, A Scattering of Jades, was released in 2002, and was followed by his first collection, Rossetti Song. He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

In the sly and tricky story that follows, he shows us how sometimes everything can turn on the simplest things: the flip of a coin, say, or whether a ball is dropped or caught. And when we say everything-we mean everything.

It’s July in Detroit, a Thursday afternoon in 1940. I am twelve years old. From my seat in the left-field upper deck at Briggs Stadium, I can look over my shoulder and see the General Motors Building towering over Woodward Avenue. Cars stream up and down Michigan Avenue, Fords and Chevrolets and Buicks and the occasional Nash, many driven by the same hands that built them. I look at my hands and imagine that they will become autoworker’s hands, large-knuckled and scarred, grime worked so deep into the wrinkles that even Lava soap will never get it out.

My father’s shadow falls across me. He sits on my right and balances three mustard-slathered hot dogs on his lap. I look at his hands and try to count the dozens of pale round pinhole scars that mark his wrists and forearms. My father works for the Ford Motor Company as a welder. He is thirty-one years old and seems to me to contain all the knowledge in the world.

I take a hot dog and devour it in three bites, then reach for another. “Christ, kid,” my father says around a mouthful. “You and Babe Ruth. Tell you what, why don’t we flip for this one and I’ll go get another at the seventh- inning stretch?”

On the field, Schoolboy Rowe is warming up before the fourth and the Boston Red Sox are milling around the steps of their dugout. Rowe is throwing well and the Bosox are in a bit of a slump; still, three innings could take forty minutes. I am twelve years old. I could starve to death in forty minutes.

“Deal,” I say.

Dad flips a quarter.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that the act of observing an object displaces that object, so that its true position and direction cannot both be determined at once. Or so we were taught in high school.

The Baseball Encyclopedia states that Moe Berg hit six home runs in a major-league career spanning parts of thirteen seasons with four teams. It was said of him that he could speak twelve languages, but couldn’t hit in any of them; Berg was the most scholarly of baseball players, and he made joking notes about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle while he watched the man himself lecture in Switzerland during World War II, all the while deciding whether or not to kill him. I think Moe Berg would understand the subtle shifts my memories of him undergo every time I dredge them up from my seventy years’ worth of neurochemical silt.

I was Moe Berg’s biggest fan in 1940, even though he’d sort of officially retired at the end of the ’39 season. Like him, I loved baseball, and like him, I loved to read-a combination unusual among twelve-year-olds as it is in major-league clubhouses. I even went so far as to adopt some of his eccentricities. When I found out that he wouldn’t read a newspaper that someone else had touched, I demanded that I be the first in our house to get the Free Press off the porch. Nobody else could touch the sports section until I’d gotten a look at the box scores. Only virgin agate type for this devotee of the national pastime.

Berg stayed on with the Red Sox as a warm-up catcher and a kind of team guru, but never played a game after 1939, and by the time the war heated up, he was Agent Berg of the OSS. His photographs of Tokyo, taken on a goodwill tour of American baseball players just before the war, guided Jimmy Doolittle’s bombers, and his good sense saved Werner Heisenberg’s life.

At least, that’s what the history books say. I remember things a little differently.

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