The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

I glanced over Zuniga’s shoulder. Martisela was with a pack of currency traders, buried in some negotiation. She made an impatient nod at Zuniga- keep him talking.

I was thinking to interest him in some bogus hedge swap. Maybe involving this Object-Oriented Socialism I’d heard about in the last market fixing, along with that black hole mine they had riding sidecar. That had just enough of Zuniga’s devious sense of value to keep him interested.

I mentioned it and he gave me a vile little chuckle. “A hedge swap?” I could see it appealed to his sense of the perverse.

“I’ll give you the same deal you gave us-620 meg per pennyweight.”

“Mined lyghnium 482 is going for 800 meg per pennyweight,” he sniffed.

“Then why were you going to pay me 620?”

He waved my objections aside. “Really, Coria. Let’s be serious with each other. The gravity brokers are all aflutter looking for some fusty little dwarf star they can collapse into a singularity. I ask myself-what alters the Coulomb force inside a dwarf star and shows up unnamed in all my market equations? What do you say, Coria? Vacuum 3? Vacuum 6?”

Even through the crowd noise, Martisela heard him. I saw her stiffen and close her eyes, just for a moment. Zuniga caught me looking. He laughed. He clapped me on the shoulder. “There are no secrets from Zuniga. Holding back will only make the reckoning more severe.” To make his point, he brought up his Anglo friends in the expatriate community. It seems that someone had given them a floor plan of my distillery outside Bougainville. Perhaps someone would nationalize it. Perhaps they would simply burn it down. Zuniga gave me a look of frank appraisal. From there, it was but a short conceptual leap to the man who owned it.

I may have disdained Zuniga, but I did not underestimate him. The expatriate community lived just across the bay, in Jimmy-Jim Town. No one’s more vulnerable than a broke commodities trader. I was starting to think how I could explain a 400 megatramo deal to myself when Martisela caught my eye. She lofted her eyebrows in a breezy, insouciant manner, like a tourist enjoying a particularly bad part of town.

Zuniga was going on about my tea plantation in the French Violet. He wanted that especially.

Even as he spoke, currency windows were popping open in a line just beyond his vision. While Zuniga had been threatening my wealth and my life, the anti-money market had gathered itself into a precipitous wave. Some of this would be my assets, sold off and converted to anti-money. Most of it would be collateral investment from market technicians smelling blood in the water. Zuniga didn’t know it yet, but he had become the biggest holder of anti-money on the entire Exchange-a position not unlike being the biggest landlord on a southbound iceberg.

He was just rounding the corner on my beach house when Martisela pulled the plug. All that anti-money was swapped for simple debt futures. From where I stood, it look like half the anti-money market drained down a black hole. Even by the Exchange standards, this was a lightning strike. Within moments, the exchange rate between anti-money and undifferentiated debt had slipped to 3-to-1. The only major players left in the anti-money market were the ones too preoccupied to see what was happening.

Zuniga was going on in his mellifluous announcer’s voice. His Anglo militia friends had shown him things that no one should see. Zuniga was just beginning to detail these things for me as one of the Botanica’s well-dressed floor daemons appeared at his side.

He carried no expensive scarab skin coat, nothing but the obsequious expression that seems to attend embarrassing news- There is a problem, Seсor? With Seсor ’s account?

Zuniga smiled, all incredulous. He glanced over the man’s head at the money market windows and the smile just grew. He could appreciate a joke at his expense, give him credit for that.

The smile was hardening as he turned to me. By the time it came around to Martisela, it had gone necrotic as a rotten baby tooth.

“You did something”-jovial and teasing as ever. “What have you done with my money?” His eyes fell to the grids on her arms. A cursor was still pulsing between her knuckles, perhaps he recognized himself? “Give me back my money.” He advanced on her. Already, he was a little desperate. I grabbed him around the shoulders. “Give it back. Before Zuniga shows his nasty side.”

“Let him go,” Martisela said to me.

“You know who my friends are,” Zuniga bucked my arms. “Don’t make me set them on you.”