As for Rudi’s assignment, here’s how I explained my findings to him when I made my report:
“To a first-order approximation, there is no signal in the noise.”
“Bah.” Hanging upside down in the middle of his nest of retinas, Rudi looked as disgusted as I felt. I’d spent more than a hundred days plowing through records, drilling for hidden dependencies between investment trusts and holdings, and looking at published company reports filed in a variety of aquatic micronations at varying depths in the upper oceans of Shin-Tethys. “That’s ridiculous. There are scandals and frauds everywhere! You’re not going to convince me that those people are an exception. What’s out there?”
“What’s out there is a disturbing lack of naughtiness. Almost as if all signs of it are being deliberately suppressed.”
I waved at the retina coating the far wall of his nest. “Observe.”
I’d been working toward this presentation for months. Declining good-natured invitations to orgies from the crew because I had pivot tables to analyze. Mumbling my way through it over my food at mealtimes until I found myself eating alone. Dreaming of dark currents flowing beneath the ice caps of frozen slow money reserves. There were 497 mutually recognized governments in Shin-Tethys; while all of them recognized the Taj Slow Dollar as the rock-bottomed foundation of fiscal probity, more than half of them—316—maintained their own medium-investment vehicles with floating exchange rates (in the shape of bonds with various maturity terms), and almost all had their own cash standards (except for three alliances comprised of smaller but mostly prosperous nations who formed customs unions). Around 70 percent of these governments had their own national banks, and another 26 percent allowed private but highly regulated banking industries to exist. These naturally ran on top of other currencies and media of reputational account, for not all of these nations were marketized—indeed, at least eighty of them were communist, and a hundred had nonexchangeable primitive currencies used solely for reproductive courtship purposes and marking changes of social status. There were even three oddball kingdoms that ran gift economies mediated by the frequent exchange of small, polished spheres of metallic plutonium. (People in those polities learned very rapidly to give money away as fast as it came in. Depressions were rare, and tended to end explosively.)
In any event, I’d been able to follow the declared medium holdings of most of the governments and banks and major off-world investors via various government property registers and gazetteers.
“Look.” I pointed. “Shin-Tethys as a whole maintains a positive trade surplus with the rest of the system. A third of the local nations don’t export directly, but there’s a lot of internal, intramural trade between the tribes—the main six exporters account for eighty-two percent of the uranium and fifty-seven percent of the rare earths. What comes in is, well, lots of skilled labor, finished high-tech assemblies, anything that needs microgravity or vacuum or very high temperatures or an anaerobic environment. In other words, it’s your typical pattern for an energy-exporting planet, with the added twist that because it’s very damp, a lot of planetary surface activities—smelting metals, manufacturing ceramics—are expensive to perform locally. The only interesting thing is how little slow money is going into their economic system. As for banking corruption, there’s the usual, but no more than the usual. Around one government per decade—out of nearly five hundred, mind—gets into bad trouble one way or another. But the system is self-stabilizing: What usually happens is that a consortium of their trading partners and main creditors get together and mount a hostile takeover—I believe they call it a “war”—and place the defaulter under administration until it digs itself out of the hole. But there’s not much of that going on. You have to go back nearly a thousand years to find anything really bad; for example, the Trask affair—”
“What was that?” Rudi interrupted.
“Nothing relevant. Ivar Trask-1 was one of the system founders—set up the systembank at Taj Beacon, established the Dojima slow dollar on the interstellar exchanges. There was some sort of scandal over money laundering, and he went missing, believed murdered, but as I was saying, that was nearly a thousand years ago. Dojima System’s bankers are very staid, even by slow money banking standards.”
Rudi snorted, and one ear tip twitched, as if he was keeping his opinions to himself: But presently he nodded. “Continue, please.”
“Shorter version: What you’re looking for doesn’t seem to exist. Either that, or there’s a conspiracy of silence so vast as to defy human nature—you’d need to have more than two thousand institutions in different jurisdictions agreeing to stash their dirt behind the reaction-mass tankage, and nobody leaking.”
“That big?” Rudi looked at me sharply. “Are any of them showing signs of changing internal power structures? New ownership?”
I shrugged. “That’s a political question. You didn’t ask me to report on their politics.”
“Well, you’d better look into that,” he grumbled. “Immigrants may come entangled with slow dollars. Start with the Kingdom of Argos and specifically any events in Nova Ploetsk, and spiral out from there to anywhere your sister might have taken an interest in. After all, she didn’t disappear by accident. She must have blundered into something.”
“There’s a limit to what I can achieve from up here—”
“Yes!” Rudi snapped his jaws in a manner I was coming to recognize as emphatic agreement. “So when you’ve done it, we will have to go down-well to continue our investigation in person. But that is then, and this is now! So get to work.”
I believe I mentioned that the surface gravity of Shin-Tethys is about three-quarters that of Earth. However, Shin-Tethys is a big world—over seventy thousand kilometers in circumference. It has no land surface; rather, its surface is all water, with small, floating ice caps around the north and south poles, and sargasso rafts of vegetation the size of continents afloat in the tropics. The water forms a thin layer around an outer mantle of mixed rock and ice, for ice under extreme pressure changes into strange crystalline phases that are denser than liquid water: The boundary is only two to three hundred kilometers down.
At the surface of the outer mantle, there is a layer consisting almost entirely of heavy ice contaminated by intrusive threads of fractured rock, the remains of lava tubes and hot spots that thrust their way to the surface and burst in a catastrophic verneshot. There are volcanoes, some of them cold but glowing pale blue from Cerenkov radiation generated by the fission reactions that power them. The critical mass of uranium is significantly reduced in aqueous solution because hydrogen atoms slow thermal neutrons, making them easier for large nuclei to capture: Consequently, deposits of uranium salts leached from the rocky intrusions from the lower mantle frequently achieve criticality and fire up a fission chain reaction.
Somewhere thousands of kilometers below the outer mantle, there lies a mesomantle of rock, the outer mantle of the Earth-like world drowned within Shin-Tethys’s watery caul—but that does not concern me. We can’t get to it directly, so it is of no economic interest.
The main significance of the hydrosphere is that it is both a promise and a threat: the promise of huge wealth from mineral-resource extraction and the threat of hydrostatic pressure.
Pressure kills. It kills Fragile cells and human mechanocytes alike because the molecular machinery of which such cells are composed relies on phase boundaries between oily and aqueous compartments to organize and orient these large molecules, and increasing pressure warps and distorts them because lipid bubbles don’t expand or contract at precisely the same rate as watery ones when you crank up the pressure. You can adapt gradually, of course, tweaking a hydrogen bond here and a covalent structure there, but persons who go swimming in the oceans of Shin-Tethys without extreme modifications are vulnerable to pressure-induced necrosis if they travel even a couple of hundred meters up or down. And the hydrosphere is hundreds of kilometers deep.