The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Zuniga put up his hands- What can one say? “I find myself chasing down a bit of vacuum.” He chuckled as he said this. We might have been discussing some embarrassing family secret. “I’ve bought out four vacuum traders already. They all know they’ve got hold of something, not one of them is smart enough to tell me what it is.” He cocked an eye at me. He looked sly. “You always like the hot stuff, don’t you? The exotic vacuum states? The strange matter? I’ve always admired your taste in risky investment.” He sighed. “Would you had a bit more liquidity…?”

“The heart of a vacuum trader.” I endeavored a smile. “The purse of a gallery slave.” I found myself holding my breath. This is the moment one discovers that religious bent that Auntie Gracia had always hoped for. Sure, I had come to the Botanica ready to meet my silent partners. But not Zuniga. Anyone but Zuniga.

Zuniga normally worked in decay futures, which is not necessarily the last refuge of a scoundrel, but it is no place to see people at their best. Everything was a fire sale to Zuniga. And if not, why not?

He studied me. “I’m giving everyone 620 megatramos per pennyweight,” he said at last. “I’ll give you 620 megatramos for whatever you’re holding. Just because I like you.”

I nodded to the grids on the back of his hands. “Go back and run your catastrophes again,” I said. “You’re not even close.”

Zuniga leaned in close and confidential; he would bend a little, so long as no one could hear. “I can give you a gig if you’re willing to accept part of it in stock.”

Martisela looked at me. I looked at her.

“What sort of stock?” she said.

“There’s this mining platform skimming the ergosphere at Los Batihojas.” He glanced around nervously; black hole mining is rather disdained among our own, no matter how much the Anglos favor it. “Run by a bunch of crazy gabachos for the most part. They send a magnetic flume down into all those ions crashing into each other. They come up with the most amazing stuff. If this Hierophant market starts to play out, they are going to be positioned to pick up the hedge investors. Honestly, my friends, the stock’s not bad. I’m giving you the keys to the kingdom is what I’m doing. I’m letting you walk in Saint Hidalgo’s Scented Slippers.”

Scented slippers or no, Martisela was appalled. She squinted at him in disbelief. “You want to buy us off with shares in this ergosphere mine, while you bet the bank you can make them worthless?” She gave me a look- am I missing something?

This, in so many words, was exactly what Zuniga was offering-A classic hedge. A teeter-totter, weighted on each end by commodities that Zuniga believed linked. A failure in one commodity would send investors to the other. Either way, he made out. Not necessarily his partners.

Zuniga looked from Martisela to me, looking for what? A wedge? Whatever he saw in our faces set him back. He had to think what to do next. “How about I make you an offer of just 500 megatramos?” he said at last. “No mining shares, nothing. And if you don’t take it I’ll let my friends know who it was behind that disastrous morghium business on the Hierophant. You know the people I work with. You know how they express their disappointment.”

Ahh yes. Alberto Zuniga’s fashionably dangerous clientele. Anglo militiamen and Bright Matter smugglers. Just the thing for a feckless playboy in need of a little gravitas.

“I’m stepping out for a moment to check on my charities,” he said. “When I get back, you will accept my offer. Or I will set about making you famous.”

Martisela watched him push through the curtain into the foyer. “Can he make things hard on you?”

I shrugged. For a lot of people, he could. People with houses and families and regular places they had to be at regularly appointed times. Now you know why I lived the life of a street urchin. I nudged Martisela. I nodded toward the door.

Martisela was frowning at her hands. “Six hundred and twenty megatramos per pennyweight,” she said. “Why do you suppose he came up with that number?”

“This is a shipwreck market. Everyone in here is offering prices they can’t justify for things they can’t name.”

Martisela shook her head; that wasn’t good enough, but she was too busy to explain. She began flipping from catastrophe to catastrophe, so fast I could barely keep up. She had this frown of vast interest that just got deeper the more she looked.

“Perhaps it is coincidence,” she said, “but 620 megatramos was the estimated price for lyghnium a week-and-a-half ago, when Esteban left on his last run.”

“What are you saying? Esteban left me with a load of lyghnium?” I was not so happy about this. Up in the Scatterhead Nebula, the Philistines burn lyghnium in fission bombs. I saw myself dealing with a dreary assortment of zealots and thugs. You’ve seen what they’re like. Imagine my heart.