But sometimes, something goes wrong.
Suppose I die after I send you the coin but before I can send it to the authorizing bank for verification. Or that I send it but you die before you send your received copy to the bank. Or that you receive it and get it signed, but your copy (who has traveled to my beacon station) dies before they can sign the coin and verify it with the bank. Or suppose civilization in the bank’s star system collapses halfway through the transaction. Suppose, suppose. These are the simple failure modes. Slow money transactions can take a good chunk of a person’s life. Of the lives of the people at either end. And while local banks are happy to act as proxies or to take care of negotiation and settlement, sometimes people cut corners.
When this happens, a transaction is said to have stalled. And if you can pick up all the necessary signatures and encrypted tokens, it is possible to reassert ownership of the stalled payment. But to do so, you need to buy up the scattered shards of half-signed coins from the soul chips of whomever they are vested in, or the banks who hold them in escrow—or in extremis, pay for the raw download transcript of a soul chip in transit between star systems and resurrect the bearer in order to pick their pocket—a messy, slow job that requires collusion across interstellar distances with half-trusted allies, pen pals, correspondents, and exiled copies of copies of one’s first sibling twice removed.
Slow money, by its nature, is not amenable to investment vehicles. It is an investment vehicle in its own right. It’s so stable that interest rates are microscopically low—0.001 percent compound interest really racks up over a few centuries. All new colonies start off by going heavily into debt, in order to attract the new skilled specialists they need to address whatever critical problems they failed to foresee and plan for before departure; once they’re stable, it can take them millennia to earn their way up to a positive balance of payments, and so they tend to avoid borrowing further. But sometimes people in mature planetary civilizations do borrow slow money, for certain long-term projects.
It’s risky. Not advisable. Only done when the project will take thousands of years, and the payoff is gigantic. Terraforming worlds, for example. Or the Atlantis project.
And sometimes such projects go wrong . . .
An indeterminate time later—it felt like days, but it might have been as little as a couple of hours—the hatch of my cell slammed open. “Prisoner! You come! Count Rudi wants ’ter see ye. Come nice now, or we cut neck!”
We were still in microgravity. Rather than letting me flail around and jump from handhold to surface, they grabbed me by their hind paws and sculled along rapidly through the corridor, using their leathery finger-to-waist wing surfaces. (One of them had my go bag in tow: more consideration than a prisoner warranted and, perhaps in retrospect, a sign of respect I should have paid attention to.) I thought at first the two pirates were going to drag me back to the kitchen or perhaps the control crypt, but instead we ended up in the main air-lock vestibule. A gust of warm, too-recently-breathed air slapped me in the face: it smelled of stale, half-digested tubespam and methanogenic bacterial endosymbionts. The docking tunnel of a pirate vehicle—a fast cutter, I gathered later—had thrust itself through the air lock like a parasite’s ovipositor; its walls, inflatable sheets of brute-repurposed mechanocytic connective tissue, pulsed slightly as it sucked nutrients from deep in the chapel’s belowdeck supply tankage.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Ee’s going aboard the Permanent Crimson,” grunted one of my abductors. “Come along smartly!”
And with that, they dragged me aboard their cutter for a six-hour flight back to the mother ship.
I retain only confused impressions of the journey and of my arrival on the hijacker’s mother ship. It was hot, and dimly lit, and it stank, and it echoed with the shrill whistles and whines of its crew. There was no local vertical, no “up,” but a myriad of cables and webbing straps linking every available surface so that it was impossible to fall far without finding a support to grapple with. A low-gee vehicle, then, that part of my mind that was forever engaged in a running commentary noted: efficient and good for long-haul transits but not ideal for boarding actions, unless the target was a church or a sluggish bulk carrier.
They gave me little time for sightseeing: dragging me willy-nilly to a new cell and drawing a thin, flexible film lid across it to hold me inside. Banging and shuddering ensued. And then, after perhaps an hour, I felt the unmistakable distant rumble of some sort of motor and felt myself drifting toward the overhead membrane. We were under way.
Permanent Crimson
Two subjective years of my mendicant scholar’s pilgrimage had not prepared me for this crisis, or indeed for anything remotely similar.
To undertake a pilgrimage is a drastic and alienating experience, albeit an exciting one; you will visit strange nations and meet people with backgrounds and outlooks quite unlike your own. You expect to study and work hard, to approach life with an open mind and to learn things that will challenge your view of your place in the universe. But you expect to be in control of your own schedule, manager of your own destiny, accountable only to your self and your sponsors, until your successful return to your origin (and probable subsequent promotion).
I began to experience a loss of control from the moment I boarded the chapel and discovered that what I had expected to be a staid, hidebound, institutional vehicle was in fact a flying madhouse. And the loss of control had spiraled outward, to engulf my entire life, from the first intimation of our hijacking through Dennett’s ad hoc gambit to convince them that I was an ordained priestess—while in fact his priestess lay comatose and undead within a sarcophagus—gathering momentum with my discovery that not only did I have a murderous stalker but that Dennett knew of her presence and had been manipulating us!
Then there was the burden of fear and uncertainty unleashed by Andrea’s bombshell of a message. One of our number had snitched: or, quite possibly, Sondra herself had kept a closer eye on her vaults than we had anticipated. Either way, I could not expect my successful return from my pilgrimage to be followed by congratulation and a promotion. Most likely, Sondra wouldn’t hesitate for an instant before having me interrogated via slave chip. And when she uncovered the parcel of secrets nestling in my second slot, the mere fact of my having attained independent citizenship would not shield me from her revenge. I had just lost my long-term future and had no idea what to do next.
Indeed, the pirates were the least of my worries. I confess, if it hadn’t been for the harsh lessons of my upbringing in Sondra’s child garden, I believe I would have completely lost my shit.
The hijackers’ vehicle had been under way for two days when Count Rudi finally got around to sending for me.
Being a prisoner aboard a pirate ship turned out to be, happily, far less unpleasantly eventful than I would have expected. In fact, it was one of the most restful experiences I’d had in a very long time. When I was young and irresponsible and fancy-free, I occasionally acted out, as did various of my sibs: in response to which, the Proctors would use confinement as a punishment. Unlike some of my more rebellious sisters, I learned the virtue of patience and ways of quietly entertaining myself while giving no outward sign of activity. With the not-insubstantial freight of diaries and private files piling up in my spare socket, I had more than enough reading material, not to mention recorded and interactive one-person entertainments, to keep me occupied for a while. I could outstare a blank wall for years on end, given an otherwise stress-free environment.