—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 class: 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 button that opens it, all of the fish in the river, and for a great distance out to 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.”
“Dick,” he said hoarsely, “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 God! 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 friend and it backfires. I, uh…
“Christ, Dick, 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 the 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 embarrassment.
Uncle made a complicated pass 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 assistant — people who can handle !tang 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 fishing 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.
NOVELLA
NEBULA AWARD WINNER »»
THE WOMEN OF NELL GWYNNE’S
Kage Baker
ONE:
In Which It Is Established That
In the city of Westminster, in the vicinity of Birdcage Walk, in the year of our Lord 1844… There was once a private residence with a view of St. James’s Park. It was generally known, among the London tradesmen, that a respectable widow resided there, upon whom it was never necessary to call for overdue payment. Beggars knew she could be relied upon for charity, if they weren’t too importunate, and they were careful never to be so; for she was one of their own, in a manner of speaking, being as she was blind.
Now and again Mrs. Corvey could be observed, with her smoked goggles and walking stick, on the arm of her adolescent son Herbert, taking the pleasant air in the park. It was known that she had several daughters also, though the precise number was unclear, and that her younger sister was in residence there as well. There may even have been a pair of younger sisters, or perhaps there was an unmarried sister-in-law, and though the daughters had certainly left the schoolroom their governess seemed to have been retained.
In any other neighborhood, perhaps, there would have been some uncouth speculation about the inordinate number of females under one roof. The lady of the house by Birdcage Walk, however, retained her reputation for spotless respectability, largely because no gentlemen visitors were ever seen arriving or departing the premises, at any hour of the day or night whatsoever.
Gentlemen were unseen because they never went to the house near Birdcage Walk. They went instead to a certain private establishment known as Nell Gwynne’s, two streets away, which connected to Mrs. Corvey’s cellar by an underground passage and which was in the basement of a fairly exclusive dining establishment. The tradesmen never came near that place, needless to say. Had any one of them ever done so, he’d have been astonished to meet there Mrs. Corvey and her entire house hold, including Herbert, who under this separate roof was transformed, Harlequin-like, into Herbertina. The other ladies resident were likewise transformed from Ladies into Women, brandishing riding crops, birch rods, and other instruments of their profession.
Nell Gwynne’s clientele were often statesmen, who found the place convenient to Whitehall. They were not infrequently members of other exclusive clubs. Some were journalists. Some were notable persons in the sciences or the arts. All were desperately grateful to have been accorded membership at Nell Gwynne’s, for it was known — among the sort of gentlemen who know such things — that there was no use whining for a sponsor. Membership was by invitation only, and entirely at the discretion of the lady whose establishment it was.
Now and again, in the hushed and circumspect atmosphere of the Athenaeum (or the Carlton Club, or the Traveller’s Club) someone might imbibe enough port to wonder aloud just what it took to get an invitation from Mrs. Corvey.
The answer, though quite simple, was never guessed.
One had to know secrets.
Secrets were, in fact, the principal item retailed at Nell Gwynne’s, with entertainments of the flesh coming in a distant second. Secrets were teased out of sodden members of Parliament, coaxed from lustful cabinet ministers, extracted from talkative industrialists, and finessed from members of the Royal Society as well as the British Association for the Advancement of Science.