The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Martisela stood on tiptoe as she read down the lists of salvaged isotopes. It was one of those unconscious gestures of anxiety, like me, whenever I pull at my mustache bangle. “Ave Maria purisima,” she said into her fingertips.

There were a few heart warmers among the wreckage-a bit of albatine, shielded by chance behind an isotope vault. A hundred kilos of medical-grade cobalt 60 dug from the wreckage of a collapsed targeting shelf. But that was as good as the news got.

Most of the stuff on the port vane had been poisoned by neutron flurries from the accident on the starboard vane. That, and heat and melted titanium and carbon and boron.

“Esteban was out in that,” Martisela said.

“This Hierophant market is going to tank if they don’t find something better than this,” I said.

Across the room, investors pinched their foreheads. They checked their currency markers, and turned on their catastrophists- there must be some mistake. Really, it was a ship accident after all. What were they expecting? I gloated at their naivete for a moment or so. Then I remembered my own little bit of paradise.

Martisela watched me watch the port vane assays drift away. She nodded toward the currency marker in my back pocket. “Go ahead,” she said. “You might as well know now.”

My 1.3 teratramos of unspecified Bright Matter had bucked the market. It had increased in value. It was now one-and-a-half teratramos of unspecified Bright Matter. A remarkable price for something that no one could name. Martisela looked dubious. Even I was uneasy. This business is far from infallible. We might have been chasing a qubit shadow. Maybe something as simple as too many investors, and too many quantum recognizers, not enough hard-eyed realists.

I pressed the market to give me some sort of decay chain. Any real baryonic commodity will break down into a sequence of isotopes. Even without knowing the parent isotope, the market will extrapolate a decay chain, complete with estimate of its market value, half-period, and purity.

My 900 pennyweight of unspecified wealth just sat there, grinning at me.

“It’s some sort of vacuum,” I reasoned. “Vacuum 6, maybe. They don’t figure decay plateaus for Vacuum 6.”

Martisela gave me a look I had seen entirely too often lately. She told me to sell my shares while I had that little bit of mystery at my back. “If nothing else,” she said, “option futures on the decay products. A market like this, people will bet good money you won’t get your unspecified Bright Matter to market before it decays into their unspecified isotope.”

She was probably right, of course. But we had a little while. The assay for the Hierophant’s dorsal vane would not be in for another eight hours or so.

“Let’s go talk to the neighbors,” I said. They would be out on the patio, plying their trade in the metallic plasmas and exotic vacuum states. She put her arm in mine, and we smirked at each other just enough to show we were not fooled by this arm-in-arm business, not for one minute.

The Bodega Linda opened onto a patio in those days, a view past the paraffin works and down to the bay. This is where the jaded gentry drank and sparred. It was more or less invitation only, and I had never, not on my most profitable week, been invited. But one-and-a-half teratramos in my pocket made me cocky. Even if it was for one night.

We were stopped at the door by a security guard. She remembered me. I could tell by her dubious expression. She asked if we had weapons, and studied a handheld field detector while we answered. My perbladium sample provoked discussion with two security people, as did Martisela’s grids. They passed on the perbladium, but Marti’s grids were deemed an insult to the Efficient Market economist who ran the patio. I could leave Marti at the door, but I know where my gifts lie. I was the salesman. Marti was the banker. I could succeed without her-I could travel in this range. But I needed her financial sense to deal with the patio crowd.

I was debating how to broach the delicate subject of a bribe when the gatekeeper stepped aside for a man in an open-weave scarab-skin suit.

He grinned. He made a show of palming his eyes to peer in at us. “You bring a nun to vouch for your character and still they won’t let you on the patio!”

I was tempted to ask Zuniga what he was doing here. His cuffs were open and rolled back to his elbows. As I looked closer, I could make out the vestiges of bifurcation grids, just paling-out against the backs of his hands. They were dense and strange, I couldn’t figure what he was working on.

He nodded toward Martisela. “Are you back with us now? Served out your exile or whatever that was?”

“I’m just helping out a friend.” She refused to catch my eye as she said this. She absolutely refused to smile. “You’re here for the shipwreck market.”