Divisions by Ken MacLeod Read Free Book Online Page B

and firmly steering me away. We’d gone only a few steps when the woman called out: ‘Awright, I’ll give you a special, just to try it aht. Frow in paypas, too.’
    Back we went and the bargain, after a few more verbal exchanges, was concluded. To my surprise both the woman and Suze were smiling at each other, both apparently satisfied with an outcome which they had each insisted would, if repeated too often, reduce one or the other to complete wretchedness.
    We sat down at a table a few yards away and ordered coffee and bread rolls stuffed with cooked meat which had almost certainly not been grown from blue-greens. I’m not sentimental about beasts, but I tried not to think about it too much—marine molluscs are one thing, vertebrates are something else. When we’d finished eating Suze built a small joint of tobacco and hemp, lit it and passed it to me after a few appreciative puffs.
    ‘Good stuff,’ she said.
    I tested and confirmed this. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just like the woman said it was. But won’t she … dislike you for the way you made her accept such a small amount of silver for it?’
    Suze guffawed. ‘She got a very good price—an acceptable amount of silver—for it. She’s happy with the silver, and we’re happy with the hemp. Oh, thanks.’
    I looked at her as she drew on it again. ‘So you were both lying?’
    ‘No, of course not,’ Suze chuckled. ‘It’s a convention. Like bluffing in a strategy game.’
    ‘But why did you bother to go through it? Why didn’t you just give her what she asked in the first place? I mean …’ I shrugged, having enough nous to understand that saying out loud how much metal we had on us might not be a good idea.
    ‘Ah,’ said Suze. ‘That’s an interesting point. In theory, OK, all the Union tourists here could bring as much, uh, negotiables as they could carry, and buy anything they wanted. All that would happen is that the amount the locals expected for their goods would go up, and everybody would be worse off all round. That’s one of the things that get explained to first-timers. It
used to be called inflation when there were states.’ She frowned. ‘Sort of, except they used pretend money—’
    I cut her off hastily, not wanting to get my head around yet another complication ( pretend money? Say what ?).
    ‘OK, but if the woman had stuck with her first offer, what—oh! I see. You’d have gone to another stall.’
    Suze grinned, passing back the joint. ‘Make an economist of you yet.’
    ‘Hah! Hard to believe, now, that the whole world was once run like this.’ Suze nodded soberly. ‘This, and various combinations of this and pushing people around. Weird.’
    We got up to leave, and were recalled by an indignant yell from the food-stall minder.
    ‘Sorree!’ Suze said to him, blushing as she passed him a silver coin. ‘Keep the change.’
    It took her even longer to explain to me about that: the custom of a price that wasn’t a price, on top of the price; a sum that was never asked for, but whose omission was always resented. We wandered on towards the stalls of books and machines. The smoke, and the coffee and food, had shifted my brain chemistry in the way I’d hoped. They were helping me to adjust to what was going on around me, but I still let Suze do the talking.
    She browsed the bookstalls and machine shops and nanotech tanks, making the occasional small purchase and apparently idle inquiries after Malley. Sometimes she used his full name, sometimes she just wondered aloud if anyone had heard of ‘the scientist’ or ‘the old doc’. Most of the sellers seemed to know her by sight, and gave her less of a hard bargain than some other Union tourists were getting. At the last stall she picked up and leafed through an obsolete textbook of physics which she’d dug up from one of the plastic boxes at the foot of the stall.
    ‘I wish I knew someone who could explain this to me,’ she said, casually handing the book to the seller.