After that I pushed every day. Doing no-till agriculture is all very well, but first you need soil to not till. That takes first doing some serious turning over and plowing under, I’ll tell you; years of backbreaking work, in our case, and always pinched for cash, as we used everything I could afford to set aside to pay for various neighbors’ manure and crop waste.
But shit to gold, as they say; we did all that. I drove him and he drove his workers, and we got some trees and perennials planted and left them alone, and during the harvests we harvested their usufruct with gratitude. We suffered a drought and a flood, but saw our land do a little better through those catastrophes than some of our neighbors’ properties did, because of what we were doing. And it was all without any tractors or fertilizers or pesticides, just the good old poisons that had always been there. All the right kinds of old ways, and all documented by me, as these were going to be factors in the eventual carbon reckoning. We grew most of what we ate, we grew some things to sell, and we put all we earned back into the land. My ox grumbled; who ever heard of growing a crop of dirt?
Finally came a time when the team from the district office was coming through again to check carbon levels. The moment I heard I went down to the district office to sign up for it. Soon after that, the day came when the team, a different one of course, visited to make its evaluation of our little farm’s soil. They wandered the property taking samples, sometimes digging with a tool like a posthole digger, other times with a pole like a long corkscrew. Samples, then evaluations over at their truck, which held in its back some big metal machines.
When they were done with their evaluation they came over to us. You’ve done well, they told us. We’re authorized to pay you right now, but first you have to know, we subtract an eleven percent fee out of your pay-out, to pay for our expenses, and also your taxes. So if you’ll sign here to agree to that, we’ll get it done.
My big ox bristled. I’ve never heard of any such cut, he said. What’s ours is ours, just pay us what we’re owed, we’ll deal with the rest of it ourselves.
The one talking sighed and looked at his colleagues. I can’t do that, the procedure is set. You have to sign to get your part.
I won’t do it, my husband declared. Let’s go have it out at the district.
No! I said. I dragged him off to confer in private; I didn’t want to embarrass him too much in front of these strangers. Around the corner of the house I wagged my finger under his nose. You take the deal or I’ll divorce you, I told him. We’ve worked too hard. People like this always take a cut. We’re lucky it’s only eleven percent, they could have said fifty percent and we’d still have to take it! Don’t be an idiot or I’ll divorce you and then I’ll kill you, and then I’ll tell everyone why.
The ox thought it over and went back to the visitors. All right, he said, my wife insists. And she can be very insistent.
The men nodded. We signed their form, then looked at what they had given us.
Twenty-three? my man asked. That’s nothing!
Twenty-three carbon coins, they said. Actually, twenty-three point two eight. One coin per ton of carbon captured. Which means, in your currency, if that’s how you want to take it, about … He tapped on his wristpad. At the current exchange rate, it comes to about seventy thousand. Seventy-one thousand, six hundred and eighty.
My ox and I looked at each other. That was more than we spent per year on everything, by a long shot. Almost two years of expenses, in fact.
Is that before or after the eleven percent is taken out? my ox inquired.
I had to laugh. My husband is funny.
81
Transcript Mary S/Tatiana V, phone conversation, secure line. M in office, T in safe house, location undisclosed.
M: How are you doing?
T: Bored. How about you? Shouldn’t you be in hiding too?
M: I don’t think anyone wants to kill me. It wouldn’t change anything.
T: Maybe.
M: So what are you doing?
T: Working. Telecommuting, like this. Advising our legal efforts.
M: Anything interesting?
T: Well, I think some parts are working.
M: What do you mean?
T: I think the bet that the super-rich will take a buy-out is turning out to be correct. For most of them, anyway.
M: How can you tell?
T: We’ve been trying it. Offer them fifty million they can count on, or endless prosecution and harassment, even a situation like mine, to stay safe. Many of them are taking the deal.
M: This is legal? It sounds like extortion.
T: There are legal forms for it. I’m just speaking plainly for your sake.
M: Thanks. So they don’t just shift their money into tax havens?
T: We’ve killed those. That’s maybe the best thing about blockchain for fiat money— we know where it is. There aren’t any hiding places left. If you do manage to hide it, it isn’t really money anymore. Only money on the books has any real value now. The older stuff is like, I don’t know, doubloons. Real money, we know where it is and where it came from.
M: Wasn’t that always true?
T: No. Remember cash?
M: I still use it! But it was numbered, right?
T: Sure. But once it got moved around a couple of times, it was just cash. There were lots of ways to launder it, and it
