After a moment I popped Trask’s soul from my socket and reinserted my journal. It was strange: I didn’t feel any different. You’d think that becoming a slow dollar multimillionaire would come with lights and noise and a parade of bankers or something. Achievement unlocked. I handed the chip back to Ana. “You want to load that immediately: I split the take.”
“Wait, but—”
I took pity on her. “Ana. In addition to the ghost of a dead corrupt banker, that soul chip contains one million nine hundred and forty-two thousand and sixteen unlocked slow dollars.” (Somewhere north of ten trillion in cash at the current prevailing exchange rates: Alas, being cut off from the surface meant that I could not consult the bourses.) “There’s almost exactly double that amount in my head. But you need that money, you and your commune, and besides, without their efforts, we wouldn’t have recovered any of it. Because Sondra has recently become aware that we—well, me and Andrea, and I have set aside a similar share for her—have pilfered the uncommitted transaction from her vault, and she probably guesses that we intend to do what she’s carefully taught us to do with uncommitted slow money transactions. This money is not only a rather large fortune: It’s the proof that Sondra was into the Atlantis scandal up to her eyelids. It’s even proof that Atlantis was a scam in the first place if anyone still doubts it!”
“Which makes it extremely dangerous.” Ana took the chip, then, without waiting, slid it behind her neck. Her smile was fey. “Thank you.” Small appreciation for someone who had just gifted her with nearly two million slow, I thought for a moment: Then she showed me her hand again. “You’ll be wanting this back.”
“This is—”
“The individuals who handled the body-shop work also took a snapshot of your backup,” she said coolly. “Just in case.”
“Gaah.” I grabbed the chip from her hand. “If you can’t trust your sisters, whom can you trust?”
“Ask mother dearest.” A reflective pause: “I’m glad I didn’t have to use it.”
The trouble was, she was right. Our lineage is not invariably trustworthy, as Sondra’s actions demonstrated. On the other hand, assimilating even a close sib’s memories by side-loading their soul chip—well, Father Gould’s unfortunate disposition was among the less florid examples of what could go wrong. Soul chips are best integrated with an unimprinted new body. Ana might have been able to dig the Atlantis Carnet out of my soul (or rather, to dig the pass-codes to my encrypted memory palace, in which I had archived the copy of the carnet that Andrea and I had stolen from Sondra’s vault), but only at risk of her own sanity.
After a few seconds, I nodded. “I’m glad, too.”
“You will see that Andrea gets her share.”
“I will”—I paused—“try. You saw her message. If I receive confirmation that she’s dead, I will split her share with you.”
Ana met my gaze. “Thank you.”
“What . . . what happened to Trask, by the way?” I asked. “Where did you get the chip?”
She pulled a face. “They found a harpoon not far from the bones. Someone murdered him, clearly enough. Possibly someone who knew about the transaction and wanted to take it but who botched the mugging. Or perhaps he had other enemies; if he was willing to launder dirty money for Sondra and her friends, maybe he had other bad habits that caught up with him.” She shook her head. “It’s of no matter anymore: Over nine hundred years have passed.”
“Ancient history seems to have developed a taste for our skin,” I reminded her. “Keep your eyes open, sis.”
She changed the subject. “What will you do now?”
“I’m not sure I should tell you in any detail. I’m—” I glanced around, then looked down. Taking in my own deformed shape. On Ana, the mer form looked graceful and somehow right: But every time I stopped to think about myself, I felt as if I teetered on the edge of a storm of body dysmorphia of epic proportions. “I need to get to the surface as fast as possible. I need to hire bodyguards, then book a rapid physical passage to Taj Beacon. Then I’m going to run a very long way.” Just like Andrea. “If Mother tries to catch me . . . I need to record a transcript, I think. As an insurance policy, I intend to arrange a dead man’s handle that will release it if I am murdered, and make sure Sondra knows about it. That will take some thought. Then . . . I’m not sure. What are you planning on doing?”
“I think what you’re planning is too complicated; you just need to find a home and a tribe you are comfortable with. For my part, I shall stay with my adopted people,” Ana added. “Perhaps even request the operation, to change myself all the way. To swim with the shoal and see the blue smokers for myself. I hope you can make our problem go away before Sondra finds out what they’ve done: Otherwise, there’ll be a blood bath. She’ll hold them responsible.”
I bit back my first instinctive response, But they’re communists! If little sister valued the idea of belonging to a greater collective higher than owning nearly two million in the hardest currency in the known universe, well, perhaps she was right: some things are worth more than money. And having a shoal of hundreds of thousands, or millions, of squid-folk to hold your back . . . that might be worth quite a lot to one of us, under the circumstances. “I’ll do my best to—” A sonorous chime rippled through the office, making my flanks shiver. “What was that?”
“It’s an acoustic duplex terminal for private speech. Excuse me.” Ana reached over and pulled an odd device from a niche in the wall above her sleeping oyster pets. She held it to her head and listened. Voices buzzed, high-pitched but inaudible due to some sort of privacy screen of white noise. “Really?” she said, then, “I’ll certainly see him. I’m sure she will, too. Thank you for the warning. Bye.” She put the device back on its hook on the wall. “Alef says we have visitors. They’re asking for you by name, and they know I’m here. They say they want to talk to us.”
I startled, and nearly swam headfirst into the ceiling: “Who say they want to talk?”
“Alef wasn’t very clear. Apparently some surface dwellers are visiting in a bathyscaphe. Something about an insurance company you’ve been doing some work for? Wait, you haven’t been dealing with—”
“Rudi?” I stopped. In the twilight of her office, Ana’s eyes went wide.
“You know him?”
“Yes, did you really buy a life insurance policy from the bats?”
“It was a just-in-case move; they’re honest enough.” She looked at me oddly. “A good tribe. I couldn’t stay with them, but . . .”
She was holding something back: But I doubted it could be important. “Then let’s go and have a chat with them. I’m sure Rudi will be relieved to know he doesn’t need to make good for your backup, and as for the rest, I think I shall put a little business proposal before him and see if he bites . . .”
Unimaginably Rich
The visiting bathyscaphe hovered above the People’s Palace like a giant pearl clamped to the bottom of an archaic cylindrical rocket ship, all fins and nozzles and guidance vanes. I stared at it through the gaps in the manifold skin of the People’s Palace. Spotlights illuminated its iridescent surface, a third of which was covered by a large retina screen: The pearl itself was a solid hollow shell of opaque diamond at least twenty centimeters thick.