by M M Buckner
“What is it?” he asked.
Juanita answered, “It’s the marketplace.”
Dominic shot her a quick glance. The marketplace? He bent over the screen and studied the ceaseless movement, the shifting spectrum of colors, the massing and dissolution of bright spots. It mesmerized him. The flow seemed to pulse in a rhythmic reiteration, yet he couldn’t quite pin it down. No movement ever exactly repeated.
“If this is an econometric model, it’s the most sophisticated I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Where did you get this, Juanita?”
“From my superiors.” Juanita smiled. “Your Major Qi wasn’t the only Org operative here.”
Dominic stepped back and stared at her. She held herself erect and calmly returned his gaze.
“That’s right. I’m a WTO agent. Gig asked me to show you this.” She tapped the screen, where wine-colored masses were transitioning into darker, deeper violets. “The Orgs created this model to observe the tides of entropy in the marketplace. The program factors every market swing from order to disorder and back again. This is how the Orgs predict outcomes.”
Dominic turned back to the entrancing screen. Pockets of light and darkness formed. “So what are you telling me, Juanita? The Orgs see the future?”
“No, not mat.” Juanita sat on the pilot’s stool and made herself comfortable, then patted another stool beside her. “Join me, coin giver. We need to talk.”
Dominic was too curious to refuse. He sat beside her, and as the bathysphere drifted between two soaring peaks of wreckage, Juanita told him what the Orgs had forecast. Richter Jedes, she said, was a true visionary. ZahlenBank’s iron-fisted monetary control had kept the markets teetering in steady state for almost two centuries, ensuring full employment—and delaying the onset of radical change.
“But change is inevitable, Dominic. You’ve seen the reports. Temperatures are still rising, resources are failing, and technology’s not keeping up.” Juanita picked at the folds of her dress. “I don’t have to tell you about the queues down in the tunnels.”
“The tail end of things,” Dominic muttered.
“Not at all,” she said. “More like a pressure cooker without a vent.”
Dominic watched the screen as she talked. Greens, yellows and fuchsias coiled together and blossomed. Sometimes linear shapes emerged, chains and spirals of faceted crystals. Sometimes the colors branched like veins. He said, “The miners made a vent.”
“Precisely.” Juanita took his hand between hers and patted it. “A condition of intolerable pressure was building. The colony became necessary, so the marketplace created it.”
“Incredible,” Dominic said. “The Orgs predicted that?”
“We foresaw that the marketplace would self-correct.”
“You knew I would help the miners, even before I knew it myself?”
Juanita demurred. “We had reason to trust your instincts.”
“And you knew about Qi.” Dominic jerked his hand free and pulled away from her. “You deliberately threw us together.”
“Dominic, the Orgs can’t measure the position of every particle in the system. We deal in probabilities. Certain incidents act as fulcrums around which the streams of causality bend and change direction. That’s what we look for. Sometimes we assist—carefully. Remember, the WTO is inside the system, too.”
Juanita-got up and squinted through the tiny portal. “Banker, this is not the tail end of anything. The markets are swinging back to order again. Production is up. Prices are holding. Every condition is temporary.”
“And the colony? What about that?”
Juanita shook her head. “It’s stabilizing, for a while. When the miners first sent their broadcast, an initial flood of runaways burst out of their overcrowded Coms and came here. But now the pressure has eased, and the flow is trickling off.”
Dominic rose and joined her at the portal. They watched a team of divers unearthing an old surface vehicle, half crushed and rotted with rust. Inside its sealed trunk were boxes of plastic toys. “People will always come here,” Dominic murmured.
“Yes, they will.” Juanita smiled at his reflection in the glass. “But only a few. The journey’s hazardous. Most workers would rather stay in protected jobs. The colony is already becoming a myth. A necessary myth. You see that?”
“I think so.”
“That’s why Gig shielded the miners and disguised their broadcast.”
“Gig inserted that office maintenance account into the Ark, too. Didn’t he?” Dominic set his jaw. “Gig’s fingerprints were all over it.”
“Um-hm. And that’s why we dropped the court case.” Juanita winked. “Let your genie believe we’re blowing circuits and eating court costs. The Orgs lost nothing.”
Dominic gazed out the portal and chewed over this information. One of the divers had found some kind of paddle-shaped device in the box of toys. The paddle had a ball attached with an elastic string, and the diver was attempting to bat the ball around underwater. After a moment, Dominic laughed.
“So what’s next, Juanita? What does the mighty Gig predict for my future?”
Juanita laughed, too. “When we return to the surface, your genie will be furious with both of us. It’ll want to know why this old bathysphere is clad in stealth shielding. You can tell it anything you like. I’ll go back to the colony and raise my grandchildren. I trust you won’t betray me.”
“The NP reads my mind, Juanita. I can’t hide anything.”
“Then I’d better do something to make you forget for a while.” She pinched his cheeks affectionately. Already, she was slumping, sagging, visibly changing back into the arthritic old woman he’d first met in the raft. She operated the levers, and the craft began to rise.
“But—you can’t see what’s ahead for me?” he asked.
Juanita chuckled gaily. “You’ll lead an interesting life, coin giver.”
“I wanted to stay here and help start up the new bank and—other things.”
Juanita worked the levers and watched the dials. “You have a lot of hard choices ahead. Like everyone.”
“I’ll come back in a year,” he said. “I will.”
“Tooky thinks you will.”
“He does?”
“Right now, you have an appointment to keep elsewhere. Go, Dominic. Go where you belong.” Juanita stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, and he felt a tiny spark of static electricity.
At that moment, the bathysphere broke through the surface and tilted violently on a rolling wave. Bright sunlight streamed through the portal. And like a power surge, the NP’s presence charged into his artificial eye.
“Where’ve you been? You belong in Nome, boy. We’re about to seal the deal of the century. You gotta sign the documents. I need you, boy.”
“I’m coming.”
Dominic offered Juanita a handshake, but the old woman hugged him to her fleshy bosom. Blushing, he made a quick transfer from the bathysphere to the ZahlenBank aircar.
“You’re soaking wet,” the NP ranted. “Get cleaned up. I packed you a suit. What did that old hag want anyway?”
“Nothing important. I can’t even remember.”
“Huh. That’s freakin’ strange,” the NP said. “I’ll figure it out”
Dominic didn’t really care. He buckled himself into the seat and watched the pilot ready the craft for flight. Through the window, he could see the old bathysphere tilting in the waves. Juanita was leaning out of the hatch and struggling to haul up the ladder. Inside his comfortable cabin, a musical chime signaled imminent liftoff, and he heard the engines powering up.
“Wait,” he said.
“Wait for what?” said the NP.
“Something I have to do without you.” Dominic was already unbuckling. “I need you to log out.”
“We don’t have time!” the NP railed. “The meeting!”
“Give me five minutes. The sooner you log out the sooner I’ll be back.”
“More sentimental crap. I kn
ow I’m gonna regret this. Okay, five minutes.”
Dominic felt the drain as the NP withdrew. Then he rushed through the airlock and wrenched open the car’s exterior door. “Juanita!” He dove into the ocean and swam for the bathysphere. “Juanita!” he called, spitting gray foam. “Juanita, let the ladder down.”
The descent to the hospital deck on the Pressure of Light took only a few minutes, but it seemed to go on forever. Once inside the ship, he sprinted through the corridors, checking every ward, asking everyone he met if they’d seen Qi Raoshu. He found her feeding tea to an old woman propped up on a cot. The instant she saw him, she sprang to her feet and reared back as if she meant to hurl the cup at him. The old woman gaped.
“Qi,” he said. Then he couldn’t go on.
“Don’t talk to me.” She knelt again and began pouring tea down the old woman’s chin and neck till the woman coughed and pushed her away.
“Qi,” he said again.
“You’ve got that thing in your eye.” She dabbed roughly at the woman’s chin with a washcloth. “I won’t have it spying on me.”
“It’s gone, I swear.” Dominic knelt beside her. “Wait for me. I’ll come back in one year.”
She smoothed the woman’s blanket with both hands as if she meant to iron out every wrinkle. “You’re gonna play Siamese brains with your dear old Da. Who knows what you’ll be like after a year.”
“My father is dead. It’s just me now. No one else is here. Look at me.” He tried to touch her, but she jerked away. “Please, Major. I need you.”
She swung around and started beating him with her fists. “I’m not your preter-vicious major! I never have been!”
“Yes, you are.” He caught her in his arms and held her. “You are my preter-vicious major. Say it, Qi. Say you’ll wait.”
She sobbed into his shoulder and bit him. “You’re a scheming liar and a thief, and you’ll promise anything.” Then she kissed him. “Conceited, selfish, underhanded.” She kissed him again, hard on the mouth, and. she hugged him as if she meant to crack him open. “Plus you’re lazy,” she said.
“Don’t forget greedy.” He nuzzled her neck. “And lustful.”
“And way too pale.”
Glancing over Qi’s shoulder, Dominic saw the old woman give him a thumbs-up.
Much, much later, back in the ZahlenBank car, he borrowed the pilot’s headband and adjusted the wire in front of his right eye.
With a jolt, the NP surged back into his head. “We missed the meeting! I can’t believe I let you do that!”
“So we make the Orgs cool their heels.” Dominic calmly rebuckled his seat belt. “The deal isn’t going to evaporate because we got hung up in traffic.”
“Traffic! Krishna Christ, boy!”
As the car lifted off, Dominic watched the fleet of medical vans disappear in the smog. Then he switched to metavision and continued to watch till they dwindled away behind him to infinitesimal particles and finally vanished in the dazzling purple waves.
One year, he promised.
Aloud he said, “That name you picked out, tell me again?”
“Änderungen,” the NP said proudly.
“So how about a trade? I’ll call you Änderungen if you’ll call me Dominic. No more ‘son’ or ‘boy’ or anything like that. We’re partners, not relatives.”
“Sure, sure. You wanna be called Dominic. I can do that.”
“Splendid.” Dominic put the headband away and opened his notebook. “Let’s go over that Org settlement again, point by point, to make sure they don’t trick us.”
The NP chuckled. “Hell, I like the way you think. We’re two sides of a coin, you and me.”
“A coin with two heads.” Dominic stroked his beard and smiled at his interesting life. Such a deal.
