The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Seсor a Sebastian still sells herbs and roosters’ feet to bless a new enterprise, and flaming hearts of Mary to the more esoterically religious. She keeps dishes on the glass case full of those hard, unsweet candies the Bright Matter smugglers call “piedras de molleja”-gizzard stones.

She recognized Martisela from the old days. “Are you back, Seсor ita Davalos?” Seсor ita Davalos. And with her husband standing beside her.

Marti smiled. “I’m helping him out of a jam,” she said.

Seсor a Sebastian looked at me. “You’ve got one of those ‘unnamed salvage’ tickets?” With an expression that said, You’re probably expecting it to pay off like a lottery ticket, aren’t you. “Have a stone.” She held out the dish for me.

Martisela gave me a piquant little smile, barely more than a dimple. She scooped a few into my hand. “Oh, be nice,” she hissed at me, and we plunged through the curtain into darkness and noise.

The trading room is kept dim against the sudden blossoming of holographic charts or a ghost wall or a ballet of hands traced out in bioluminescent catastrophe grids. It is an old warehouse turned into a grotto, and the darkness between the lights is frantic.

The calls and cries and angry laughter reflect off the hardwood ceiling all the way back to the little clutch of desks where the shipping underwriters are laying odds on every transport that leaves orbit. Put your hand to any desktop, the tremors grind at your fingertips like low electric current. And that’s an average night.

In a shipwreck market, every fortune is at stake. Your bit of salvage may still exist. Or it may be melted to slag. Or it may be seeded with some exotic vacuum state and is already being coveted by a market that knows more about what you have in your pocket than you do. The only way to find out is to wander through the assembled multitude, plucking at the feedback loops that tie us all together.

An agent offers time at her Bright Matter refinery up in the Four Planet Nation. A transport jobber hints at a ship he has available-not the fastest in the fleet, but the captain can hold it to within a baby’s breath of light speed, right where relativistic time dilation effects are most acute. Who can say why these people come to you? The market sent them, that’s all.

One blurs the eyes and allows a market’s worth of greed and fear and quantum computing power to shape the gaps into recognizable outlines. This strategy works best when the market is calm and winners and losers can be neatly defined. Tonight, the market rode this Hierophant bubble. All bets were off.

Here are a few of the commodities rising with the shipwreck market:

Bright Matter was up, of course. The price of Vacuum 4 doubled in the time it took my eyes to adjust to the dark. Moving in tandem to the Vacuum 4 would be the market in large-scale power generation. Power generators loved Vacuum 4 for its steady flurry of magnetic monopoles. And gnodium, the baryonic cinder that separates Vacuum 4 from the rather fragile vacuum of our own universe. And, if you care to press a point, the market in high-priced legal insurance; vacuum traders are notorious for whiling away the hours in recreational litigation.

Someone was offering Tuesday afternoon illyrium, which would be thralium 442 by Wednesday morning (and sold as a separate commodity).

Someone else was dealing Vacuum 8 and lyghnium, a favorite combination to Anglo ship killers. Vacuum 8 for its cognizance of bright matter. Lyghnium for its dense neutron cross-section and spectacular binding energies.

Doing even better than the bright matter market were futures in single-bean Saint Elise cocoa, which is prized in the French Violet for that little kick that arsenic lends the aftertaste. Corn and soy futures were doing well, especially in the Four Planet Nation, where the variable star M. Exelrod had been turning up the heat lately, which was good for their growing season.

And then there were the franchised ideologies. Even cocoa couldn’t compare to the market in April Communism. Object-Oriented Socialism had suffered a huge debt write-off, but they continued to do well on the strength of their subsidiary interests in ergosphere mining. Of course, National Socialism is always looking to break out of the pack.

The only unease in all this giddiness lay with the Hierophant itself. After fifty hours, the silence from the salvage crews was growing worrisome. Traders try to be realists about shipwreck bubbles. Nobody expects to smash a violin and hear Schubert. But there should have been something. The ghost walls whispered rumors of tellolite nodules dug from the face of the starboard vane. A few had tested positive for Vacuum 6. Where was the mother lode to make this all worthwhile?

A new set of ghost walls opened-salvage reports from the port vane of the Hierophant. The port vane carried medical isotopes, which I do not invest in. Good thing for me.