Tony Daniel (10 page)

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 time
was
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 did
what
?”

“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 man
was
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 version 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 for
you
and
me
?” 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’s
going
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 an
aspect
thing.]

[Oh, come on. Don’t
you
, 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.

[If that is the case, then maybe you need to give this trip a little more thought.]

[There isn’t time. You saw the time stocks and futures. It’s an objective and measurable shift. So you measure it. All I know is that I’ve got to get my family the hell away from the Met.]

[All right, then,] Danis replied. [All right. I’ll book us passage on a ship departing from the Leroy Port on the Diaphany. When do we leave?]

[Today.]

[Today? Kelly, are you sure?]

[Things will get bad. Count on it, Danis.]

Kelly reached a transport door and sent a message through the grist for a personal coach. Although Kelly prided himself on normally using public transportation, he thought he would need the isolation of the coach to settle his thoughts.

[Well, we’re all packed,] Danis said. [Your coach is here.]

The transport door irised open like a big heart valve, and Kelly stepped through into the round softness of his coach. His grist informed the coach of his personal biology, and the coach adjusted its air and temperature accordingly.

Danis Graytor sat back in her favorite worn leather armchair and shook herself a smoke. She breathed in deeply and the Dunhill crackled lowly as the tobacco caught and smoldered. She slid a fine ceramic ashtray across the lacquered top of her side table and listened to the pleasant grate of porcelain on mahogany. After another long drag, she ashed the cigarette and considered the pleasing gray of the tobacco remains against the pure white of the ashtray’s bowl. All of this would soon be only a memory. There was no way she could download her office study into Kelly’s pocketbook and still have room for the essential things her family must take with them on their upcoming journey. Without Danis to maintain it, the office study would soon be written over in the virtuality, erased.

She made a quick check on Kelly and found that he was still in the coach on his way home. The children would arrive soon.

Danis ran back over her checklist, more for comfort’s sake than in the expectation that she’d forgotten anything. She never forgot anything. But bugs could creep into even the best algorithm’s program, and Danis never took data for granted. That was the very reason that Kelly had hired her on as an assistant in the first place. The love had come later.

My home is dissolving, Danis thought. Right before my eyes, it is flowing away into the general grist.

There was, of course, no real
here
, here, but a particular location in the reality that sustained the virtuality had a certain something. To Danis, it manifested as a smell, a feeling of safety and familiarity somewhere deep inside. She was entirely software, of course, and an algorithm could operate in any medium capable of sustaining its complexity.

But this is home, Danis thought. This chair, this golden glow from the roof lighting, this odor of cigarettes and account books. And
Pluto
, of all places! Did they even have grist on Pluto? Well, of course they must. But was there enough? Perhaps she’d find herself inhabiting the solid-state desert of an old mainframe, thinking one thought at a time.

Her
own
investments were now, very likely, down the drain. She had liked to think that she had not spent ten years at Teleman Milt for nothing, and that she’d learned a bit about high finance. But the current financial craziness was unprecedented. She’d planned on surprising Kelly with a nice addition to their nest egg using money she’d saved and invested herself.