The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  She pinched her nose and blinked, trying to get adjusted to the daylight. “I’m afraid we have an exclusive relationship with the Radascine Combine.”

  Baru fanned her bonds across the breast of her jacket. “Totally exclusive?”

  “Well.” A single one of Baru’s bonds could make this woman the pilotfish of her family. “If you’re interested in an exploratory arrangement…”

  “I am indeed.” Baru extracted her cream-paper pad and licked her pen. “I would like to buy your dates on the eightieth of Summer at six notes a pound. As many as I can get.”

  When she was done laughing, the Jamascine woman said, “Your Excellence, we’ve already hedged our crop at twelve notes a pound. That means we will not sell for less than twelve to anyone else. Do you understand how a futures contract works?”

  Baru did indeed—she’d taught them to Tain Hu. A futures contract was a way to remove uncertainty. The date farmers wanted to be sure they got enough money to profit off the season, even if the price of dates plunged. The date-buying merchants wanted to be sure they wouldn’t need to mortgage their children to afford dates if the price of dates spiked.

  So they got together and said, listen, I’ll give up my chance at selling these dates for a really high price, if you’ll give up your chance at buying them for a really low price. Let’s agree on a price in the middle, so we can plan our finances with confidence. Okay?

  “Yes,” Baru snapped, “I know how a fucking futures contract works. I’m here to buy your dates at six notes a pound. Haven’t you heard the news? All your contracts are shit now. In a month you’ll be begging to get six notes a pound.”

  The woman was about to sneeze. She stopped. “What news?”

  “You haven’t heard?” Baru gasped. “A Masquerade inspector was in the harbor today. She found faked records. Apparently someone’s been watering pirates for a very busy summer. That’s grounds to close trade. I think you’re looking at a run on your money, a visit from a navy flotilla, and, friend, a very bad date season.”

  * * *

  SHE asked her bravos where she could watch powerful people, so she’d know when the panic began.

  “At the execution, I expect.” Both seemed very excited about this. “They’re killing a thief, I think, a thief of metal.” With sudden apology: “I know it might seem harsh to you, but it’s our way.” A phrase that made Baru feel reflexive contempt and skepticism, for what good was an unexamined way? Only much later would she come back to this moment and break the wall before her to find the truth.

  “I understand,” Baru said. “I’ve seen people executed before.”

  “Selfish people?”

  Baru swallowed the hurt. “People who knew they couldn’t put themselves before their home.”

  As they went toward the killing square the crowd thickened. One of Baru’s bravos bumped into a man, black-haired, strong, shielding a clay pot with his broad back. He saved the pot, and she began to apologize, profusely, and with an excess of touch. She was so sorry. Did he need help getting home? He shouldn’t be out here, passions were up and the streets weren’t safe right now. She had friends with her. Why didn’t he come with them?

  The man had the height and build to throw her like a little idol but he held himself so as to be small. He did not need help, he was saying, he only wanted to be left alone.

  Alone? Why? She touched his chest. Others might be so cruel to him. Didn’t he know she wasn’t like that? Didn’t he want to be appreciated by the gallant?

  He said, “I have to bring this water home.”

  Did he know, she asked, that he was very handsome? She hoped he was proud of that. He did not look proud. Was he stuck-up, then? Was he an onanist?

  Baru, uncomfortable with the direction of all this, shouted, “Let him be! Come along, I’m not paying you to flirt!” Though it wasn’t flirting.

  “What a cutter,” her bravo muttered, to the other. “Did you see his fish? He could hardly think for wanting it.”

  It occurred to Baru that she had never, in all her life, been powerless in a city street.

  The execution was a public spectacle, of course. The state had to keep up its credit rating, too—see how we punish the transgressor? See that you can trust us to punish the thief, and therefore, please, do not start murdering thieves yourself.

  Baru admitted a certain admiration for the morality play of the method. The guilty woman pushed a wheel, the wheel pulled a rope, the rope looped through pulleys to lift a coffin-sized stone. A couple of bored constables waited for the thief to hoist the rock high enough that they could drop it and crush her under her own labors. Men watched from the rooftops, their children slung on strong backs and curled up in their arms.

  Life, Baru thought, was cheap here. Not cheaper than in Aurdwynn, really, but cheaper than it ought to be. When your civilization was sustained by the regular and necessary murder of infants, when you watched your friends devoured by storm or cast from cliffsides, how couldn’t it be cheap? Make enough death, and like any other currency it loses its value.

  Wasn’t this barbarism? Wasn’t this the disease Incrasticism sought to cure? Hadn’t Farrier asked, “What does the Mbo have to offer us? What medicines? What sciences? What is worthwhile about their society?”

  Baru wanted to be able to answer that question, not just for the Mbo but for the Llosydanes. But for some mad reason the answer would not come: as if she had lost the measuring tools she needed.

  The quieter bravo cackled suddenly and nudged Baru. “Friend of yours?”

  In the narrow way between two houses Baru saw a young Falcresti woman, vitiligo-spotted and thus probably from eastern Grendlake, wearing a student’s waistjacket and a smirk of satisfied hunger. She had her trousers round her knees and a man’s head between her narrowly parted legs. The roar of the execution crowd climbed again and she groaned with that roar. Her eyes slitted in pleasure. One of her fists was in his hair, and the other full of coins, which she let slip, one by one, to slide down his scalp and roll along his naked back into the muck.

  The boy wore the same costume as the old man who’d played ykari Wydd, but cut down to scanty straps. Here was Falcrest, fucking Wydd’s face. Indulging itself in the primal vitality of a cultural preserve.

  Baru wanted to spit at the woman.

  Then she thought, am I not here, ruining their money, rooting through their books? Wouldn’t I hire a prostitute, if I had the courage?

  One of the parties of Family observers suddenly exited the square. A moment later a second Family’s party began to beat their way out of the crowd. Baru perked up. Was the panic beginning?

  The fire bells began to jangle.

  * * *

  THE panic was swift and thorough.

  Baru knew the young Jamascine woman must have returned to her family with Baru’s promise of a bad season. The Jamascines scrambled to purchase all the Masquerade fiat notes they could get, to secure their food supply: there would be no more coming in if the date season failed. And those buys did not go unnoticed by the rest of the Twelve Families.

  Baru went back to the Fiat Bank branch to see how high the exchange rate had climbed.

  There was no exchange rate to be found. Nor any Fiat Bank at all. An Eddyn fire crew, women caked to their ears in soot, pumped seawater up the cliffside to soak the wreckage.

  “What happened?” Baru asked a constable.

  “Lynnedy,” she spat. “Their fucking Allmother panicked and sent muscle to open the Fiat Bank vaults. It went all wrong.”

  “Oh,” Baru said, innocently.

  She would need a bank of her own to make her sales. So she selected a longhouse restaurant called Demimonde (on the theory that it must be very fine, to justify its footprint on the tiny island), walked in the front door, found the owner whispering with her family about the failed trade season, and bought the whole place, from rafter to foundation, for a pittance in fiat notes. A kicker fee got her the hotel for foreign merchants next door, in case
she needed a place to rest.

  “Will you post a sign?” she asked the ex-owner, whom she had installed as executive manager. “The Payo Mu Bank. No Fiat Notes on Premises: Encrypted Bonds Only: Do Not Pillage. Please Queue. And then lay out refreshments for a great many wealthy visitors. Don’t spare the good vintages.”

  She sent her bravos to inform the Sydanemoot families that she would entertain offers of their ring shells for her fiat note. She was like a spring erupting in the desert: an unforeseen well of fiat notes, which could become food. And all she asked was the local money they had so much of to spend.

  They came in small parties at first, dire old women with their dark-eyed bodyguards and their local fortunes to turn into fiat notes. It was desperation, yes, but speculation, too. The fiat note had become so impossibly valuable, was still growing more valuable as the Families raced to capture the supply, that you could make a fortune simply by buying fiat notes, waiting an hour, and changing them back to ring shell.

  As they came to her to buy her bonds, she took them behind a little silk screen and, as price of doing business, asked them who had sold the water to the pirates.

  Everyone, they told her. Every family had sold water futures to an Oriati merchant named Abdumasi Abd. He had spread his buys around in case of a well failure. No one had ever seen his fleet come and take the water, but quite a few water-laden ships had been “taken by pirates,” and if that was not code for a rendezvous then Baru would call Taranoke Sousward.

  Again and again that name sounded in her ears. Abdumasi Abd.

  As the families bartered with her and with each other the Demimonde became a spontaneous open currency market, a crackling point of discharge like a ship’s lightning spike. The kitchens brought in the bored staff of nearby restaurants to meet the hunger of so many rich women. By second dogwatch the Families were making, and losing, entire fortunes: they were drinking, smoking, singing, going mad. The crew of an Oriati “privateer” stumbled in drunkenly round the beginning of candle watch, and threw up a cheer for the richest woman on the Llosydanes. “Payo Mu!” they called. “May she never wake alone!”

  The ordinary people looked on in bemusement. The street value of the ring shell was unaffected, for no one had had time to adjust their prices. This was a madness of the rich.

  Someone hired the prostitutes who served sailors as second spouses to come and amuse. When those ran out, someone else hired the low-end seasonal whores who worked off debt indenture during trade season. These were, to Baru’s pleased surprise, as much women as men, or at least as much female as male. Some were even trawling for Falcresti trade—women in severe buttoned-down formalwear and waistcoats, subtly made up to look stern and severe, their hot eyes prepared to deprecate and dismiss those who would buy their attention. The game worked on Baru, too, who had suffered her fair share of adolescent torment in Miss Pristina Struct’s class.

  She made a tipsy advance toward one of the women, in the only language she really knew. “Could I buy out your indentures? You’re in debt, right, your madams hold the debt? Could I buy those out and—I don’t know, what could I do with them?”

  “Oh, certainly!” she said, in charmingly thick Aphalone. “We talk about it always. We’d bundle our debts together, and sell them to a proper bank.” Meaning they would promise to pay off their debts to the bank, rather than to their creditors (who would get a fee from the bank). “We’d pool our incomes to pay them all off together, you see? If one woman came up short another could take up her slack. And since the bank would trust a lot of us to pay our debts more than one or two alone, we could get some credit, use it to hire doctors, a barrister, some nicer rooms…”

  “Good idea,” Baru said, and she sent for the madams.

  By midnight Baru was dealing bundles of prostitutes’ indentures to local banks in batches of fifty. Two of the Oriati had beaten each other silly with baking pins for the right to woo her. She had written so many sell orders and contracts that she could not remember them: she was nursing a nervous suspicion that she had not even been aware of some of the things her right hand recorded.

  A woman in a sealskin jacket approached her table.

  Baru looked up from the sprawl she’d been reduced to (the prostitutes gave wonderful back massages). “Oh,” she said. “You’re finally here.”

  The spy said, expressionlessly, “I have been asked to beg you to stop. I have been asked to tell you that you have no idea what you risk provoking.”

  “Tell your case officer,” Baru said, enunciating in clear Aphalone, “that I want to meet with them. Understand? I want to talk to your Oriati case officer on neutral ground. Find a way.”

  The spy departed. Baru looked at the party she had invented. The Family elders were dancing with the privateers, and the privateers with the prostitutes; the ruined were weeping and the fortunate glowed with euphoria. An old woman comforted her sister. Two laughing daughters (each of a different family) reclined with linked arms and watched the dance. The severely dressed prostitute who’d suggested the indentures trade looked at Baru over the shoulder of her dance partner, bright-eyed and curious, and Baru was suddenly terrified and sick with grief.

  She slipped out the back of the restaurant. The moon was high and bright; the air had grown wet and charged, and the southern horizon boiled with ramparts of stormcloud.

  North a ways, plain as the teeth of a striking shark, the red sails of the Imperial Navy’s frigate Sulane swayed on high waves.

  * * *

  SHE dreamt that night of Itinerant’s utopia.

  She was in the school at Iriad, and the halls were not of ash-concrete or coral but deep warm brown panels of koa, Taranoke’s warrior wood. Koa had a black grain that swirled like ink in water and made strange symmetrical shapes like narrow moth wings. Here some artist had used brushed ink to emphasize parts of the grain, teasing out Aphalone characters, as if the Taranoki trees had grown Falcrest’s language. In this school the mingling of cultures was encouraged, as fuel is encouraged to go into a fire. The passage was crowded with bookshelves. Farrier’s school served a banquet of texts for its gifted students, and everywhere Baru went she was tempted by the titles. This was a school that let you choose your own studies as you pleased … for what it taught was the correct way to choose.

  She was going to an assignation. She could feel it in her heart and in her thighs. But when it came it was over almost before she recognized it: by impulse (that was how the decision would plead, like a guilty trafficker, before the judges of memory—It was only an impulse!) she took a roundabout way to her class, so that she would pass second cousin Lao coming back from her graces, the special lessons where Lao learned how to avert her eyes and attention from those she wanted to smite with her beauty and her charm. Indirection, the teachers taught her, indirection and passivity; you create the opportunity for them to choose to admire you, and they will never know they are in your power.

  Lao came this way to think without eyes on her. In this dream she had been taught early and well to mind her eyes. There had been no accusation of incipient tribadism, and no prescription of “manual stimulus”—even in the dream Baru knew it was rape—to rejoin Lao’s pleasure with the image and scent of a man. (A useless task, as well as abhorrent, for Lao was never only a tribadist). But she did not seem surprised to find Baru in her side corridor.

  Baru looked at the floor. There came that moment, that wordless tension, when it was right to raise her eyes and say hello—

  But Lao was not looking at her. She turned a little as she passed, to peer up at the shelves, where a beam of sunlight through clear hive glass illuminated a Manual of Expedition. She reached up to brush the spine with her fingers, walking for a moment on her bare toes, so the sheer full-body modesty veil drew up over her calves. For a moment she was in the sunlight, poised beneath the translucent veil. And Baru knew she was using her grace in invitation.

  Baru wrenched her eyes away. The thrill felt better than a long meal with her famil
y, a day’s joy in an instant, but it passed as quickly. She—she knew what she was and wanted what she wanted. But there were bigger things to consider, her career and her contributions to the sciences, her chances of teaching bright young girls. She would use her discipline to focus on those goals. And anyway, what could she do with Lao? Whatever they began would only end in hurt and hardship for both of them. If she cared for Lao, she would protect Lao by avoiding her.

  So resolved, Baru went on to class.

  But when she looked back down that corridor of koa and books, she saw Lao’s chin in Tain Hu’s hands, those dark gold eyes daring Lao, daring her, to look away, to pretend she didn’t want: and Lao laughed and laughed and yelped as Hu lifted her against the bookshelf and kissed her and the books came tumbling down like dead birds over Lao’s slim shoulders and long arms, over Hu’s bare muscle and lazy self-satisfied smile as she bent to kiss again.

  A STORY ABOUT ASH 2

  FEDERATION YEAR 910:

  25 YEARS EARLIER

  JEALOUSY grew out of the wound Tau had opened, the wound between themself and their friends. Jealousy skimmed over Lake Jaro like green scum.

  On the north shore, in the city, they looked south and muttered resentment at the rich estates under cypress shade. Sometimes people wished, spitefully, that the rich would drink Jaro’s shit out of the lake and get sick.

  Tau-indi did get sick.

  They’d made an awful mistake when they let the mourning ash turn to mud. For this insincerity their trim fell open like a badly tied khanga. And the principles of the lake, listening to the wishes of the people, gave Tau the snail sickness.

  It began with an itch. “It’s just a swimmer’s rash,” Abdumasi said, inspecting Tau’s naked belly. But the itch made Tau irritable, which made them impatient with Abdumasi, which made Tau-indi find excuses to go to Kindalana’s compound. And her father, Padrigan, recognized the rash on their belly.