Dealing in Futures Part 8

"Deadheading," I said.

One of the Council abruptly rose. "Pardon me," he said in a weird parody of English. "We have to be dead to take this vacation? That seems of little value."

I was somewhat startled at that, in view of the other inducement I was going to offer. I told him it was an English term that had nothing to do with heads or death. - Most of the Hartford vessels that leave this planet are nearly empty. It is no great material loss to Hartford to take along nonpaying guests, so long as they do not displace regular pa.s.sengers. And Hartford will ultimately benefit from an increase in tourism to !ka'al, so they were quite willing to make this agreement with my tribe.

-The market value of this could be quite high, Uncle said.

As much as five or six hundred shares, I said, -depending on how distant each trip is.

-Very well. And what is your other inducement?

-I won't say. (I had to grin.) -It is a gift.

The Council chittered and tweeted in approval. Some even exposed their arms momentarily in a semi-obscene gesture of fellows.h.i.+p. "What kind of game are you playing?" Peter Rabbit said.

"They like surprises and riddles." I made a polite sound requesting attention and said, -There is one thing I will tell you about this gift: It Belongs to all three mercantile cla.s.ses. It is of no value, of finite value, and infinite value, all at once, and to all people.

-When considered as being of finite value, Uncle said, -how much is it worth in terms of Hartford stock?

-Exactly one hundred shares.

He rustled pleasantly at that and went to confer with the others.

"You're pretty clever, d.i.c.k," Rabbit said. "What, they don't get to find out what the last thing is unless they accept?"

"That's right. It's done all the time; I was rather surprised that you didn't do it."

He shook his head. "I've only negotiated with !tang off-planet. They've always been pretty conventional."

I didn't ask him about all the fis.h.i.+ng he had supposedly done here. Uncle came back and stood in front of us.

-There is unanimity. The land will go to the Navarro's tribe. Now what is the secret inducement, please? How can it be every cla.s.s at once, to all people?

I paused to pa.r.s.e out the description in !tangish. -Uncle, do you know of the Earth corporation, or tribe, Immortality Unlimited?

-No.

Lafitte made a strange noise. I went on. -This Immortality Unlimited provides a useful service to humans who are apprehensive about death. They offer the possibility of revival. A person who avails himself of this service is frozen solid as soon as possible after death. The tribe promises to keep the body frozen until such time as science discovers a way to revive it.

-The service is expensive. You pay the tribe one full share of Hartford stock.

They invest it, and take for themselves one tenth of the income, which is their profit.

A small amount is used to keep the body frozen. If and when revival is possible, the person is thawed, and cured of whatever was killing him, and he will be comparatively wealthy.

-This has never been done with nonhumans before, but there is nothing forbidding it. Therefore I purchased a hundred "s.p.a.ces" for !tang; I leave it to you to decide which hundred will benefit.

-You see, this is of no material value to any living person, because you must die to take advantage of it. However, it is also of finite worth, since each s.p.a.ce costs one share of Hartford. It is also of infinite worth, because it offers life beyond death.

The entire Council applauded, a sound like a horde of locusts descending. Peter Rabbit made the noise for attention, and then he made it again, impolitely loud.

-This is all very interesting, and I do congratulate the Navarro for his cleverness.

However, the bidding is not over.

There was a low, nervous whirring. "Better apologize first, Rabbit," I whispered.

He bulled ahead. -Let me introduce a new mercantile cla.s.s: negative value.

"Rabbit, don't-"

This is an object or service that one does not want to have. I will offer not to give it to you if you accept my terms rather than the Navarro's.

-Many kilometers up the river there is a drum full of a very powerful poison. If I touch the b.u.t.ton that opens it, all of the fish in the river, and for a great distance out into the sea, will die. You will have to move or. . . . He trailed off.

One by one, single arms snaked out, each holding a long sharp knife.

"Poison again, Rabbit? You're getting predictable in your old age."

"d.i.c.k," he said hoa.r.s.ely, "they're completely nonviolent. Aren't they?"

"Except in matters of trade." Uncle was the last one to produce a knife. They moved toward us very slowly. "Unless you do something fast, I think you're about to lose your feet."

"My G.o.d! I thought that was just an expression."

"I think you better start apologizing. Tell them it was a joke."

-I die! he shouted, and they stopped advancing. -I, um .. .

-You play a joke on your friends and it backfires, I said in Greek.

Rapidly: -I play a joke on my good friends and it backfires. I, uh . . . "Christ, d.i.c.k, help me."

"Just tell the truth and embroider it a little. They know about negative value, but it's an obscenity."

-I was employed by ... a tribe that did not understand mercantilism. They asked me, of all things, to introduce terms of negative value into a trivial transaction. My friends know I must be joking and they laugh. They laugh so much they forget to eat.

All die. O the embarra.s.sment.

Uncle made a complicated pa.s.s with his knife and it disappeared into his haybale fur. All the other knives remained in evidence, and the !tang moved into a circle around us.

-This machine in your pocket, Uncle said, -it is part of the joke?

Lafitte pulled out a small gray box. -It is. Do you want it?

-Put it on the floor. The fun would be complete if you stayed here while the Navarro took one of your marvelous floaters up the river. How far would he have to go to find the rest of the joke?

-About twelve kilometers. On an island in midstream. Uncle turned to me and exposed his arms briefly. -Would you help us with our fun?

The air outside was sweet and pure. I decided to wait a few hours, for light.

That was some years ago, but I still remember vividly going into the Council Building the next day. Uncle had divined that Peter Rabbit was getting hungry, and they'd filled him up with !tang bread. When I came in, he was amusing them with impersonations of various Earth vegetables. The effect on his metabolism was not permanent, but when he left Morocho III he was still having mild attacks of cabbageness.

By the time I retired from Hartford, Starlodge had finished its hotel and sports facility on the beach. I was the natural choice to manage it, of course, and though I was wealthy enough not to need employment, I took the job with enthusiasm.

I even tried to hire Lafitte as an a.s.sistant-people who can handle !tangish are rare-but he had dropped out of sight. Instead, I found a young husband-and-wife team who have so much energy that I hardly have to work at all.

I'm not crazy enough to go out in the woods, hunting. But I do spend a bit of time fis.h.i.+ng off the dock, usually with Uncle, who has also retired. Together we're doing a book that I think will help our two cultures understand one another. The human version is called Hard Bargain.

Almost n.o.body, including me, p.r.o.nounces the "!" in "!tang" properly; it's a glottal click, as used in Bantu and other African languages. (If you were a folksong fan in the sixties, you might remember Miriam Makeba using the sound in her delightful performances.) In fact, the only stranger who ever did it properly was a Soviet critic who came up to me at a meeting in Moscow and said, "Ah, Mr. Haldeman-I just read 'A !Tangled Web.' Very interesting," and walked away with a mysterious smile.

This was only a couple of months after the story had appeared in a.n.a.log, a rather capitalistic magazine, the possession of which supposedly is illegal in the Soviet Union.

So the story of that story ends in a foreign country, and the story of the next begins in one. My wife and I were marooned in a hotel room in Tangier, Morocco: poleaxed by dysentery. The morbid thought came to me that if we should die there, the friendly concierge would probably just empty our pockets and sell our luggage and make our bodies disappear-it was a real cla.s.sy hotel-and n.o.body would ever find out what had happened to us. Tangier is that kind of city; the guidebooks had warned us not to stop there, just get on the first train and head south.

A writer to the grisly end, though, I proceeded to make up a story out of that particular misery. I scribbled down a rough outline of it in my travel diary and that was the end of it for several years. (The story wouldn't take place in Morocco-I saved that setting for a more specifically Moroccan story, "Lindsay and the Red City Blues"-but rather in Mexico, for reasons that will become clear.) Story notions like that sit on the back burner until some specific stimulus tells you it's time for them to be written. In this case the stimulus was a fascinating book I came across while browsing in the biography section of the local library: the diary of the wife of the American amba.s.sador to Mexico in the years just preceding the Mexican War. It hit the period and the location of the story precisely and was a gold mine of detailed day-to-day mundania. The woman was a good writer possessed of, or by, a voracious curiosity about this exotic foreign land, and she wrote not only about the upper-crust activities that her position required her to attend but also about the middle cla.s.s and peones. I consumed the large book in two days of delighted reading, taking a few notes as to prices of things, menus, and so forth, but mainly just getting a feel for the period.

I wanted the main character to be an uneducated but intelligent American roughneck, which generated a problem in diction. I know how such a person would talk nowadays, but what would his speech have been like more than a hundred years ago? Dictionaries of slang don't always give date references, and to my knowledge there doesn't exist a slang dictionary that is specifically organized chronologically.

(What a fascinating project that would be!) So I made my own, in a limited way, leafing through several dictionaries that did give date references for some of their slang, cant, and jargon; collecting a couple of hundred words and phrases that this character would be likely to use. (I came across dozens of expressions I couldn't use because, although they were contemporary with the story, they sounded too modern.

He could call a policeman a pig, for example, or use the expression "take a back seat to.") Then I just sat down and started writing. As happens too rarely, the story took on a life of its own, and proceeded to write itself. I hope you enjoy reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it.

MANIFEST DESTINY.

This is the story of John Leroy Harris, but I doubt that name means much to you unless you're pretty old, especially an old lawman. He's dead anyhow, thirty years now, and n.o.body left around that could get hurt with this story. The fact is, I would've told it a long time ago, but when I was younger it would have bothered me, worrying about what people would think. Now I just don't care. The h.e.l.l with it.

I've been on the move ever since I was a lad. At thirteen I put a knife in another boy and didn't wait around to see if he lived, just went down to the river and worked my way to St. Louis, got in some trouble there and wound up in New Orleans a few years later. That's where I came to meet John Harris.

Now you wouldn't tell from his name (he'd changed it a few times) but John was pure Spanish blood, as his folks had come from Spain before the Purchase. John was born in Natchitoches in 1815, the year of the Battle of New Orleans. That put him thirteen years older than me, so I guess he was about thirty when we met.

I was working as a greeter, what we called a "bouncer," in Mrs. Carranza's wh.o.r.ehouse down by the docks. Mostly I just sat around and looked big, which I was then and no fat, but sometimes I did have to calm down a customer or maybe throw him out, and I kept under my weskit a Starr pepperbox derringer in case of real trouble. It was by using this weapon that I made the acquaintance of John Harris.

Harris had been in the bar a few times, often enough for me to notice him, but to my knowledge he never put the boots to any of the women. Didn't have to pay for it, I guess; he was a handsome cuss, more than six feet tall, slender, with this kind of tragic look that women seem to like. Anyhow it was a raw rainy night in November, cold the way noplace else quite gets cold, and this customer comes downstairs complaining that the girl didn't do what he had asked her to, and he wasn't going to pay the extra. The kate came down right behind him and told me what it was, and that she had too done it, and he hadn't said nothing about it when they started, and you can take my word for it that it was something nasty.

Well, we had some words about that and he tried to walk out without paying, so I sort of brought him back in and emptied out his pockets. He didn't even have the price of a drink on him (he'd given Mrs. Carranza the two dollars but that didn't get you anything fancy). He did have a nice overcoat, though, so I took that from him and escorted him out into the rain head first.

What happened was about ten or fifteen minutes later he barges back in, looking like a drowned dog but with a Navy Colt in each hand. He got off two shots before I blew his brains out (pepperbox isn't much of a pistol but he wasn't four yards away) and a split second later another bullet takes him in the lungs. I turned around and everybody was on the floor or behind the bar but John Harris, who was still perched on a stool looking sort of interested and putting some kind of foreign revolver back into his pocket.

The cops came soon enough but there was no trouble, not with forty witnesses, except for what to do with the dead meat. He didn't have any papers and Mrs.

Carranza didn't want to pay the city for the burial. I was for just taking it out back and dropping it in the water, but they said that was against the law and unsanitary. John Harris said he had a wagon and come morning he'd take care of the matter. He signed a paper and that satisfied them.

First light, Harris showed up in a fancy landau. Me and the driver, an old black, we wrestled the wrapped-up corpse into the back of the carriage. Harris asked me to come along and I did.

We just went east a little ways and rolled the d.a.m.ned thing into a bayou, let the gators take it. Then the driver smoked a pipe while Harris and me talked for a while.

Now he did have the d.a.m.nedest way of talking. His English was like nothing you ever heard-Spanish his mother tongue and then he learned most of his English in Australia-but that's not what I really mean. I mean that if he wanted you to do something and you didn't want to do it, you had best put your fingers in your ears and start walking away. That son of a gun could sell water to a drowning man.

He started out asking me questions about myself, and eventually we got to talking about politics. Turns out we both felt about the same way towards the U.S.

government, which is to say the h.e.l.l with it. Harris wasn't even really a citizen, and I myself didn't exist. For good reasons there was a death certificate on me in St. Louis, and I had a couple of different sets of papers a fellow on Bourbon Street printed up for me.

Harris had noticed that I spoke some Spanish-Mrs. Carranza was Mexican and so were most of her kates-and he got around to asking whether I'd like to take a little trip to Mexico. I told him that sounded like a really bad idea.

This was late 1844, and that d.a.m.ned Polk had just been elected promising to annex Texas. The Mexicans had been skirmis.h.i.+ng with Texas for years, and they said it would be war if they got statehood. The man in charge was that one-legged crazy greaser Santa Anna, who'd been such a gentleman at the Alamo some years before. I didn't fancy being a gringo stuck in that country when the shooting started.

Well, Harris said I hadn't thought it through. It was true there was going to be a war, he said, but the trick was to get in there early enough to profit from it. He asked whether I'd be interested in getting ten percent of ten thousand dollars. I told him I could feel my courage returning.

Turns out Harris had joined the army a couple of years before and got himself into the quartermaster business, the ones who shuffle supplies back and forth. He had managed to slide five hundred rifles and a big batch of ammunition into a warehouse in New Orleans. The army thought they were stored in Kentucky and the man who rented out the warehouse thought they were farming tools. Harris got himself discharged from the army and eventually got in touch with one General Parrodi, in Tampico. Parrodi agreed to buy the weapons and pay for them in gold.

The catch was that Parrodi also wanted the services of three Americans, not to fight but to serve as "interpreters"-that is to say, spies-for as long as the war lasted. We would be given Mexican citizens.h.i.+p if we wanted it, and a land grant, but for our own protection we'd be treated as prisoners while the war was going on. (Part of the deal was that we would eavesdrop on other prisoners.) Harris showed me a contract that spelled all of this out, but I couldn't read Spanish back then. Anyhow I was no more inclined to trust Mexicans in such matters than I was Americans, but as I say Harris could sell booze to a Baptist.

The third American was none other than the old buck who was driving, a runaway slave from Florida name of Was.h.i.+ngton. He had grown up with Spanish masters, and not as a field hand but as some kind of a butler. He had more learning than I did and could speak Spanish like a grandee. In Mexico, of course, there wasn't any slavery, and he reckoned a n.i.g.g.e.r with gold and land was just as good as anybody else with gold and land.

Looking back I can see why Was.h.i.+ngton was willing to take the risk, but I was a d.a.m.ned fool to do it. I was no rough neck but I'd seen some violence in my seventeen years; that citizen we'd dumped in the bayou wasn't the first man I had to kill. You'd think I'd know better than to put myself in the middle of a war. Guess I was too young to take dying seriously-and a thousand dollars was real money back then.

We went back into town and Harris took me to the warehouse. What he had was fifty long blue boxes stenciled with the name of a hardware outfit, and each one had ten Hall rifles, brand new in a mixture of grease and sawdust.

(This is why the Mexicans were right enthusiastic. The Hall was a flintlock, at least these were, but it was also a breech-loader. The old muzzle-loaders that most soldiers used, Mexican and American, took thirteen separate steps to reload. Miss one step and it can take your face off. Also, the Hall used interchangeable parts, which meant you didn't have to find a smith when it needed repairing.) Back at the house I told Mrs. Carranza I had to quit and would get a new boy for her. Then Harris and me had a steak and put ourselves outside of a bottle of sherry, while he filled me in on the details of the operation. He'd put considerable money into buying discretion from a dockmaster and a Brit packet captain. This packet was about the only boat that put into Tampico from New Orleans on anything like a regular basis, and Harris had the idea that smuggling guns wasn't too much of a novelty to the captain. The next Friday night we were going to load the stuff onto the packet, bound south the next, morning.

The loading went smooth as cream, and the next day we boarded the boat as paying pa.s.sengers, Was.h.i.+ngton supposedly belonging to Harris and coming along as his manservant. At first it was right pleasant, slipping through a hundred or so miles of bayou country. But the Gulf of Mexico ain't the Mississippi, and after a couple of hours of that I was sick from my teeth to my toenails, and stayed that way for days.

Captain gave me a mixture of brandy and seawater, which like to killed me. Harris thought that was funny, but the humor wore off some when we put into Tampico and him and Was.h.i.+ngton had to off-load the cargo without much help from me.

We went on up to Parrodi's villa and found we might be out of a job. While we were on that boat there had been a revolution. Santa Anna got kicked out, having pretty much emptied the treasury, and now the moderado Herrera was in charge.

Parrodi and Harris argued for a long time. The Mexican was willing to pay for the rifles, but he figured that half the money was for our service as spies.

They finally settled on eight thousand, but only if we would stay in Tampico for the next eighteen months, in case a war did start. Was.h.i.+ngton and I would get fifty dollars a month for walking-around money.

The next year was the most boring year of my life. After New Orleans, there's just not much you could say about Tampico. It's an old city but also brand new. Pirates burnt it to the ground a couple of hundred years ago. Santa Anna had it rebuilt in the twenties, and it was still not much more than a garrison town when we were there.

Most of the houses were wood, imported in pieces from the States and nailed together. Couple of wh.o.r.ehouses and cantinas downtown, and you can bet I spent a lot of time and fifty bucks a month down there.

Elsewhere, things started to happen in the spring. The U.S. Congress went along with Polk and voted to annex Texas, and Mexico broke off diplomatic relations and declared war, but Was.h.i.+ngton didn't seem to take notice. Herrera must have had his hands full with the Carmelite Revolution, though things were quiet in Tampico for the rest of the year.

I got to know Harris pretty well. He spent a lot of time teaching me to read and write Spanish-though I never could talk it without sounding like a gringo-and I can tell you he was h.e.l.lfire as a teacher. The schoolmaster used to whip me when I was a kid, but that was easier to take than Harris's tongue. He could make you feel about six inches tall. Then a few minutes later you get a verb right and you're a hero.

We'd also go into the woods outside of town and practice with the pistol and rifle.

He could do some awesome things with a Colt. He taught me how to throw a knife and I taught him how to use a la.s.so.

We got into a kind of routine. I had a room with the Galvez family downtown. I'd get up pretty late mornings and peg away at my Spanish books. About midday Harris would come down (he was staying up at the General's place) and give me my daily dose of sarcasm. Then we'd go down to a cantina and have lunch, usually with Was.h.i.+ngton. Afternoons, when most of the town napped, we might go riding or shooting in the woods south of town. We kept the Galvez family in meat that way, getting a boar or a deer every now and then. Since I was once a farm boy I knew how to dress out animals and how to smoke or salt meat to keep it. Sra. Galvez always deducted the value of the meat from my rent.