by Tony Daniel
“Oh I’m sorry, little one,” he says. “All this talking, and you’re standing there hurt.”
He reaches over. I put out my arm. In the moment of touching, he realizes what I am doing, but it is too late. I have studied him for too long and know the taste of his pellicle. I know how to get inside him. I am his daughter, after all. Flesh of his flesh.
And I am fast. So very fast. That’s why he wanted me around in the first place. I am a scrap of code that has been running from security for two hundred years. I am a projection of his innermost longings now come to life. I am a woman, and he is the man that made me. I know what makes TB tick.
“I’ll look for her,” I say to him. “I won’t give up until I find her.”
“No, Jill—” But it is too late for TB. I have caught him by surprise, and he hasn’t had time to see what I am up to.
“TB, don’t you see what I am?”
“Jill, you can’t—”
“I’myou , TB. I’m your love for her. Sometime in the future you have reached back into the past and made me. Now. So that the future can be different.”
He will understand one day, but now there is no time. I code his grist into a repeating loop and set the counter to a high number. I get into his head and work his dendrites down to sleep. Then, with my other hand, I whack him on the head. Only hard enough to knock him the rest of the way out.
TB crumples to the floor, but I catch him before he can bang into anything. Andre Sud helps me lay him gently down.
“He’ll be out for two days,” I say. “That should give you enough time to get him off the Carbuncle.”
I stand looking down at TB, at his softly breathing form. What have I done? I have betrayed the one who means the most to me in all creation.
“He’s going to be really hungry when he wakes up,” I say.
Andre Sud’s hand on my shoulder. “You saved his life, Jill,” he says. “Or he saved his own. He saved it the moment he savedyours .”
“I won’t give her up,” I say. “I have to stay so he can go with you and still have hope.”
Andre Sud stands with his hand on me a little longer. His voice sounds as if it comes from a long way off even though he is right next to me. “Destiny’s a brutal old hag,” he says. “I’d rather believe in nothing.”
“It isn’t destiny,” I reply. “It’s love.”
“There are moments when freedom and determinism are the same thing. There are people who are both at the same time . . .” Andre Sud looks at me, shakes his head, then rubs his eyes. It is as if he’s seeing a new me standing where I am standing. “It is probably essential that you find Alethea, Jill. She must be somewhere in the Met. I think Ben knows that. He would know if she were truly dead. She needs to forgive him, or not forgive him. Healing Ben and ending the war are the same thing . . . but we can’t think about it that way.”
“I care about TB. The war can go to hell.”
“Yes,” Andre Sud says, “The war can go to hell.”
After a while, I go up on deck to keep a watch out for more pursuit. Molly Index comes with me. We sit together for many hours. She doesn’t tell me anything about TB or Alethea, but instead she talks to me about what it was like growing up a human being. Then she tells me how glorious it was when she spread out into the grist and could see so far.
“I could see all the way around the sun,” Molly Index says. “I don’t know if I want to live now that I’ve lost that. I don’t knowhow I can live as just aperson again.”
“Even when you are less than a person,” I tell her, “you still want to live.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Besides, Andre Sud wants to have sex with you. I can smell it on him.”
“Yes,” Molly Index says. “So can I.”
“Will you let him?”
“When the time comes.”
“What is it like?” I say.
“You mean with Andre?”
“What is it like?”
Molly Index touches me. I feel the grist of her pellicle against mine, and for a moment I draw back, but then I let it in, let it speak.
Her grist shows me what it is like to make love.
It is like being able to see all the way around the sun.
The next day, Molly Index is the last to say good-bye to me as Makepeace Century’s ship gets ready to go. Makepeace Century looks like Gladys if Gladys didn’t live in a ditch. She’s been trying for years to get Bob to come aboard as ship musician, and that is the price for taking them to Triton—a year of his service. I get the feeling she’s sort of sweet on Bob. For a moment, I wonder just whohe is that a ship’s captain should be so concerned with him. But Bob agrees to go. He does it for TB.
TB is so deep asleep he is not even dreaming. I don’t dare touch him for fear of breaking my spell. I don’t dare tell him good-bye.
There is a thin place in the Carbuncle here, and they will travel down through it to where the ship is moored on the outer skin.
I only watch as they carry him away. I only cry until I can’t see him anymore.
Then they are gone. I wipe the tears off my nose. I never have had time for much of that kind of thing.
So what will I do now? I will take the Bendy River all the way around the Carbuncle. I’ll find a likely place to sink the hoy. I will set the ferrets free. Bob made me promise to look after his dumb ferret, Bomi, and show her how to stay alive without him.
And after that?
I’ll start looking for Alethea. Like Andre Sud said, she must be here somewhere. And if she is not in the Carbuncle, then I will leave this place and search for her in the Met. If anybody can find her there, I can. I will find her.
There is a lot I have to do, and now I’ve been thinking that I need help. Pretty soon Amés is going to be running all the grist, and all the code will answer to him. But there’s some code he can’t get to. Maybe some of those ferrets will want to stick around. Also, I think it’s time I went back to the mulmyard.
It’s time I made peace with those rats.
Then Amés had better watch out if he tries to stop me from finding her.
We will bite him.
PART ONE
FIGHT AND FLIGHT
* * *
One
Business was tanking down. The Positions Room was afire with key economic indicators—and the color was red, red, red. Kelly Graytor’s suit was gray and tan, with black-and-green management palps at the shoulders denoting his rank—junior partner. The palps were a sheer irony in upper management, since the hierarchy shifted with the portfolio strength of each j.p. Nevertheless, the old man insisted that palps be worn just as they had in days of yore when Teleman Milt was as important to Mercury as the planet’s proximity to the sun. Kelly tweaked his palps and called up a glass of cold water from the wall grist. He drank it while he looked at the tickers.
Production sectors were getting killed—bio down, gristplant and chemistry suffering mightily, quantum jumping around crazily like it always did, but continually banging its head against a price ceiling that was falling at a stately, Newtonian rate. Hard-product liquidation had reach a critical mass, and all the money was flowing into energy like a virtual nuclear explosion. On the retail side, the news was even worse.
“Ah hell,” Kelly said. “And where does the goddamn time go?”
The time stocks, a subset of quantum, were his specialty and made up the bulk of the portfolio he managed for the firm. And, since they were also linked inexorably to the grist, they, too, were taking a beating.
Rapid conversion flux throughout the time sector. Options to time equities to grist to energy sinks and potentiality wells,Danis, his portfolio, said.Every bit of it flowing downhill, Kelly. As always, the whisper of his portfolio along his aural neurons was arousing, even when she was talking data and pain. She was also his wife, after all. But timewas running out.
All in all, it was a massive economic downturn and a meltdown of the markets.
“A war panic,�
�� the old man said when he entered. The other portfolio managers trailed into the room behind him. “What are the merci boards saying?”
“Three billion five hundred thousand eight hundred forty-two million seven hundred and fifty thousand inquiries to sell,” the Position Room said, then gave its customary three half-second update follow-throughs. “Up ten thousand. Down a thousand. Up eleven. We are approaching stage-one liquidity limits.”
“Shit,” the old man said. “Lock us in.”
The room’s door became a wall.
“Minimize the count.”
The quotes ceased to migrate through the surroundings, and the walls darkened down to mahogany grain under a pale green light.
The junior partners all stood about the center of the room, some of them leaning on wooden pillars that had, a moment before, been readout consoles. Hed Ash, one of the youngest of the j.p.s, hoisted himself onto one of these and sat with his legs dangling. Kelly contented himself to lean against a big piece of mahogany as tall as he was and set his cup of water down on the top of another one nearby that was about chest high. The old man stood in the middle of a circle of j.p.s poised like a wolf pack among rocks.
“Okay,” the old man said. “Let’s get out of free fall and make this into a controlled dive.”
“Sell off Pop Chart, first,” Ash said from his perch. The old man gave him a withering glance. The personality popularity futures and options would be the first hit by a downturn. Those speculative highfliers should be somewhere in the millileafs per share by now, with calls everywhere going unhonored. It was far too late for a little trimming.
Ash had never actually seen a really bad bear market, Kelly reflected. E-Street had been on a ten-year growth spurt, fueled by rapid Met expansion and the first returns on some of the huge potential of the outer system. Kelly, on the other hand, remembered the languid years before Amés had consolidated his commission-based government. And he had been a neophyte trader at the turn of the century when the old Republic had fallen apart in the polls and been replaced by the Interim Committee for twenty years.
Hazen Huntly, the j.p. the others considered most likely to make partner next, spoke up. “My team has just run two thousand scenarios parallel through the Abacus. The results indicate that we need to withdraw geographically, rather than by manufacturing process or commercial sector,” she said. Hazen had a strong voice, but not a harsh one, and she always spoke with complete conviction. Kelly felt his spirits buoyed up for a moment just from the tone of it. But it was a false cheer, and he knew it. “We have to concentrate on the inner system and let Europa handle their own markets,” Hazen continued. “And I suggest liquidating Mars.”
This brought a gasp from those gathered. But even Mars isn’t going to be enough, Kelly thought. You don’t need two thousand possible economic worlds to tell you what’s as plain as day on the sun. This is a panic over war with the outer system. The uncertainty element is precisely the real estate, especially at first. Geographic trade strategy was the obvious method to apply. But what was obvious to Hazen and her bunch of interlinked technicals was also obvious to anyone with common sense. Hazen’s team was never going to beat the market when it was in ruthlessly efficient mode. They could only reflect it.
“Do you have your actions queued up?” the old man asked Hazen.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then feed them to the Teller and get us off Mars. And get me a sequence ready for withdrawing our interests all the way down the Diaphany. We may end up owning nothing but a piece of Mercury before this is over.”
We’re going to end up owning less than that, Kelly thought. There is no way Amés won’t move in on the big financials, now that he has them in this weakened state.
“Does anybody have anything else?” said the old man. “Anything?”
“I do,” said Kelly.
The old man looked at him impatiently, then saw the smile on his face and shook his head. “All right, Kelly, out with it.”
“I shorted all but the cash position in my portfolio five e-days ago.”
“You didwhat ?”
“I sold everything I owned and bought nearly the exact same holdings short.”
“What do you mean, the exact same holdings?”
“They are falling nearly as fast as everything else, but they are well-managed concerns and are the only ones who will exist as an issue long enough for us to be able to sell them.”
“My boy,” said the old man. “That’s . . . pretty damn good news at the moment.”
“Yes, it is,” said Kelly.
“And have you run the numbers through the Abacus?”
“You know I don’t trust those projections, sir.”
“But have you run them?”
“I have.”
“And what were the results?”
“Provided seventy percent of the concerns survive as commercial entities, my port should turn us a profit of—”
“Did you say profit?”
“Yes, sir. It’s entirely sold short, remember?”
“Yes,” said the old man. “Yes, of course.” Then the old man did something Kelly had never seen him do before in the twenty years Kelly had been with Teleman Milt. The old man wiped his bald pate with the sleeve of his suit. Evidently, he had been sweating.
“A profit of thirty percent per e-day if the market drops at near the current rates.” Kelly shook his head, and rubbed a finger along the bone of his chin. “But those fall-rate predictions are completely arbitrary, if you ask me.”
“Things could get much worse than the Abacus thinks?”
“Oh, sure,” said Kelly, “They already are.”
The old man sat down on a chunk of mahogany. He blinked once, twice. Kelly knew that he was conferring with the convert portion of his personality. Most of the old manwas a virtual human, with his body serving mainly as an avatar for closing deals, boosting morale, and such. Everyone waited silently for the old man to speak.
“It appears that thanks to Kelly Graytor’s timely move,” he said, “Teleman Milt can meet sell and liquidity obligations for the present. We’re saved.”
There was a rapid release of breath among the j.p.s and even a smattering of applause. Quite something to hear from a bunch of cutthroat competitors. Hazen, whom Kelly personally liked the most of the group, gave him a quick, sincere smile.
“Most of the other financials aren’t nearly so lucky,” the old man continued. “It looks like there’s a tiered collapse going on. HLB has got itself in bad trouble with outer-system debt. Something’s going to have to be done to shore them up.”
The old man touched his nose. Since he never smiled on principle, this was the sign that generally meant he was pleased.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, using the old locution. “It appears that we have become the closest thing to the bank. If we keep our head about us, we may stand to make quite a bit of money on this downturn.” He took his hand from his nose. “Hazen’s team will work with me on a deal for HLB. The rest of you . . . concentrate on triage. Let’s get this mess under control.” The old man rapped his knuckles against a wooden pillar. “Back to business.”
The Positions Room, taking his meaning, obliged. Kelly found himself surrounded once more by data. He glanced around at a couple of key indicators. The situation had worsened. But, for the moment, there was nothing to be done about it. He walked quickly from the room before anybody noticed him.
[Have you got us packed?] Kelly thought to Danis. He was using a secure side channel in the virtuality that Danis had set up. This was not the kind of statement that you could openly verbalize these days—either in reality or in the virtuality.
[The children are back from school, and I’ve got their converts and myself backed-up in your pocketbook. There was so much information I had to cold-capsule it,] spoke Danis.
[Meaning what?] said Kelly.
[That you couldn’t reconstruct us from that information only. You’d need our original ver
sion to activate the pocketbook information. We’ve got four legal backups remaining for each of the kids. I’ve got one left for the rest of my life, Kelly.]
[They’re even talking about taking backup rights away from free converts,] Kelly replied. [We’ve got to get away from here before that happens.]
[Yes—though God help all the free converts that stayed behind if they do that,] said Danis. [It took some squeezing and link cheating to get all three of us into the pocketbook, even in a static state. Are we still off to Mars?]
[That’s all out now. We’ve got to get farther away.]
[Ganymede?]
[Danis, I want you to look into booking us a passage on a ship.]
[A cloudship? You’re really spooked, Kel. Where exactly did you have in mind taking us?]
[Pluto, at first.]
“Pluto!” Danis’s whisper became fully audible in his mind. “Are you crazy? What kind of a life will that be for Aubry and Sint? What kind of life will that be foryou andme ?” Danis was in full verbalization mode. Kelly wondered if the membranes of his ears were shaking enough from the strength of her voice to bleed a little bit of sound. There were devices for spying on just such activity, and he wouldn’t put it past the Department of Immunity to use those devices even on ordinary Met citizens.
[Calm down,] he thought back in a side channel whisper. [We’ve discussed this. How bad it might get, especially for free converts. It’sgoing to get that bad, Danis.]
[Kelly, how do you know that?]
[The same way I knew to short all the stocks.]
[That doesn’t explain anything.]
[I know. It’s hard to explain. Maybe it’s anaspect thing.]
[Oh, come on. Don’tyou , of all people, give me that bigoted bullshit. If I’m taking our children to Pluto . . . or wherever you’ve got in mind, you’d better start explaining.]
“And if I can’t?” Kelly said aloud.
[If you can’t, then I’ll trust you,] Danis finally replied. [The same way you trust me for an accurate analysis. But trust is not the same thing as understanding.]
Kelly sighed. [How can I explain something that I don’t completely get myself?] He had intended the thought to be personal, but its intensity leapt the boundary of his personal consciousness, and Danis heard him. Or maybe she just figured out what I was going to say, Kelly thought.
