The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“What did I tell you?” I think Chuy was more furious with me than anyone else. “Come in here. Ruin the somber mood…” He glared down at my perbladium, which had dented the table where it landed and never even bounced. “That stuff better not be real.”

“Sorry, Choo. I was just putting it away.”

Chuy reached into the brawl and withdrew a very bruised and confused guero, who swung at him in wild frustration, and snarled, “Let go of me, you fish-handed freak!”

I winced. Everyone in the bar winced. Chamberlain might have said a lot of wrong things and not said that.

Chuy gave Chamberlain the sort of benign smile a chef bestows on a favored lobster. “їComo?”

We will avert our eyes at this point. Take my word, the fate of these two gabachos only gets more wretched. In any case, I had a fortune disintegrating in my pocket. And only one person in Buenaventura could tell me what it was.

I want to tell you about Martisela. Martisela and Esteban and myself. A trio of swindlers were we. I was sleeping behind the kiosks that line Borregos Bridge. I imagined myself a romantic figure, a Prince of the Barrio. Though, a little older and a bit less turned-out, I might simply have been “homeless.”

Martisela had already been exiled to the Convent Santa Ynez for selling short on the anti-money market just as it pitched into its long-overdue collapse. One of the few truly blameless things she had done in her entire sordid career. Ahh, but she had made money where others had lost, and that was not to be forgiven.

Esteban Contreras actually held down a steady job-Starboard Vane Chief on the Bright Matter Ship Hierophant.

He used his position to solicit these little side jobs-a couple hundred pennyweight of phoellium to melt a polar ice cap into atmospheric gasses. Or vanodium to be turned to echnesium to confine a bit of industrial grade Vacuum 2.

He always backed up his commodity by optioning futures on its every decay state. Then he sold these options to his partner-me-and I used them as collateral to pump the stock of the Orlando Coria Mining and Bright Matter Company, Incorporated. Amazing, the sort of people who will throw money at a little brokerage with the right sort of pedigree. It might have been criminal if we had made any real money. But Martisela was the brains behind this mob, and she never really cared about the money. The fun for her was in rigging the game.

Only one time did we get serious. This was prior to Esteban’s last trip out with the Hierophant. Esteban had agreed to turn this load of morghium for Chamberlain and Bell, and their iffy Spanish friend, Seynoso. Esteban thought the job over some more and decided that it liked him not. We decided to put this Spaniard’s morghium to our own ends.

Morghium is pretty humble stuff. It has a bit of Vacuum 1 at its heart, which alters the speed of light through certain crystal lattices-big news if you’re a designer of quantum optic switches. It is more spectacular as a target material. Flown through a cloud of tungsten ions at just under the speed of light, morghium transmutates under bombardment into some of the most exotic stuff on the Bright Matter Exchange. Lyghnium, and Vacuum 4, which whispers of a universe full of magnetic monopoles. Pterachnium and Vacuum 5, used to convert underloved white dwarf stars into highly desirable singularities.

With our client’s morghium in hand, Esteban offered futures on pterachnium, even though he would have been crazy to actually turn anything so dangerous. Martisela optioned Esteban’s potential pterachnium using money borrowed against its potential isotopes. I was the one in charge of cashing it all in.

For about two hours there, our stock was leading a small bubble market in lyghnium 485 futures. I was as wealthy as I had ever been in my life.

And then someone even funnier than we used our stock’s inflated market value to leverage us out of our own corporation. And what were we going to do? Complain to Los Zapatos?

Martisela went back to the Convent Santa Ynez. Esteban went out on his last run with the Hierophant. And me? I returned to the aesthetic life. Who knows where I might have landed but for this ticket of unspecified salvage. I rather dread to think.

There was always this moment when I saw Martisela again. Things came back from the old days. Challenges we had met. People we had done. I would get awkward and romantic, Martisela would simply get awkward.

Martistela stood back from the Convent’s ornate front door. She blinked up at me with her graphite-colored eyes and thought of two or three things not to say.

I said, “I’m cold, Marti.” I nodded behind her, toward the inviting warmth of the Convent Santa Ynez. “Will you let me in?” I could smell tea brewing somewhere down the hallway.

Martisela Coria closed the door behind her. She gave me a prim little smile; we would suffer together. “Are we here for the Commodities Exchange, Seсor Coria? Or is it the room and the hot meal?”

“I need you.”