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CHAPTER 12
MERCANTILE

DOMINIC pulled himself up through the ceiling hatch and smacked his head hard against a rock roof. Before he could say a word, Tooksook slid the hatch shut, leaving them in darkness. Dominic couldn't stand. The ceiling was too low. He had to creep along the corridor and feel with his knuckles. He rubbed the bruised place on his head, another colorful lump for his collection. Straight up, the old man said. Splendid.

He switched on the laser torch. The place smelled of fungus and fresh cement, and the torch beam glistened along sweating, chiseled walls. The tunnel slanted upward at a slight incline. Steps were notched into the rock, and a short way ahead, the stairway curved out of sight. When Benito disappeared around the corner, Dominic puffed a sigh. "Right, Benito. You lead." He hunched over like a skulking primate and followed.

Around the first bend, the tunnel widened and veered downward. Someone had strung a row of electric bulbs, and in the weak light, Dominic made out shrouded forms suspended along the walls. Hammocks. Six people were sleeping here. He heard snoring. Then he saw a young woman sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth and fanning herself with a broken plate. As she watched him pass, her intense blue eyes reflected the lights.

Farther along, he found Benito squatting with four or five naked children, discussing something on the floor. Dominic bent over and directed his torch beam to see what they found so interesting. In the bright light, the nest of gutterbugs erupted like a living volcano, and shiny black insects skittered in all directions. Dominic jerked back in disgust.

"Benito, let's keep moving." He had to drag the boy away. The children were squealing and racing to catch the bugs.

"Blow me if this tunnel leads up!" the NP groused. "That old geezer doesn't know up from upside down."

Dominic couldn't argue. As the tunnel slanted farther down, he felt the beginnings of panic. He was as lost as ever, and time was running short. Should he go back or forward? He had no idea how to find his way out!

"This is what the Orgs wanted," he muttered under his breath.

"Your heart's racing, son. I'm gonna synthesize a little something to calm you."

"Damn you to hell! You leave my body chemistry alone."

"I'm concerned for your health. Why don't you trust me?"

Dominic plodded on without speaking. His father must have had good intentions when he created the NP, but the result was obnoxious. His father couldn't possibly have meant things to turn out this way. Dominic stubbed his toe and cursed. This passage had more twists than a—a gutterbug trail, he thought with black humor. The stone steps led ever downward, and in every feasible space, people had set up living quarters. He saw cargo webbing strung up as hammocks and shipping crates transformed into a dozen different styles of table, shelf and chair. If nothing else, these protes were clever at building things.

Soon the tunnel widened and branched in three directions, and Dominic found himself in the middle of a factory. People of all ages were picking through damp piles of rubbish and making things by hand. He paused to watch one man transform an archaic cell phone into a musical instrument. In another area, he saw women sewing clothes.

"You're dawdling," the NP said.

"What's the point of rushing?" Dominic said. "I don't know which way to go."

"Keep to the left," the NP said.

"You're guessing."

Dominic sniffed the ripe air of a nearby latrine, and his bowels sent him a message he'd been trying to ignore. Naomi's pudding weighed in his belly like concrete. Benito didn't hesitate to get in line for a stall, and reluctantly Dominic followed.

"How deep are we?" he subvocalized.

"Approximately 174 meters below the seafloor, if you don't mind my rounding off."

"And how much time is left?"

"You still have over seventeen hours. Don't give up, son. I'll get you through this."

"Oh, right. You've been an immense help so far."

Later, as Dominic and Benito were leaving the latrine, a woman waved to get their attention. She had some kind of pump container slung over her shoulder in a harness, and a long spray nozzle snaked from the top of it. "Hold out your hands," she ordered.

The woman spritzed them up to the elbow with a fine, liquid mist. "Carbolic acid and water," she said. "Sling it off quick, or it'll burn ya."

She was right. Dominic and Benito began slinging their hands like mad to stop the sting. Benito even hopped up and down.

The NP grunted. "That's what I call primitive."

Given their resources, Dominic was impressed that they even made the attempt. Aloud, he asked the woman where he could find water to drink.

She motioned with her head. "Along that way." She was already spritzing her next group of customers.

The corridor in this section rumbled with foot traffic, and at one point, he had to press flat against the wall to let a heavy cart roll by. Two men struggled to pull it, while a woman and a child pushed from behind. Its wobbly load of electronic scrap still dripped seawater—fresh salvage from the underwater junk piles.

At that moment, Benito came running toward him through the crowd. Dominic hadn't even noticed when the boy slipped away. Benito carried his yellow pencil clamped between his teeth, the way Dominic often carried his laser torch, and the striped shorts ballooned around his legs like a clown's pantaloons. He ran right in front of the overloaded cart, and just as he ducked under the wheel, a bulky metal case slipped off the load and fell. The boy dodged it by a hairsbreadth.

"You little idiot!" Dominic scooped him up. "You could've been killed. Watch where you're going."

Benito took the pencil out of his mouth and clasped his arms around Dominic's neck. "Little idiot," Dominic muttered again as he walked on through the dense pedestrian traffic, carrying the boy against his chest.

"Let the brat take his chances. I call it population control." The NP's growl made a wheel of tiny sparks around Dominic's peripheral vision. "Just tell me why you're hauling this kid around."

"You wouldn't understand," Dominic subvocalized. "Bit-brains lack human feeling."

The NP cackled. "Since when are you such a paragon of human feeling? You're just like me, hard-nosed and clearsighted, because that's what it takes to run ZahlenBank. That's one thing we always agreed about."

Dominic didn't answer. By now, he was so dehydrated, all he could think about was finding water. They moved with the thickening traffic to the brink of an enormous pit that could only be a natural underground formation. Jury-rigged metal stairs spiraled down its inner walls, loaded with people, and the noise of so many voices and thumping feet reverberated in a steady roar. Dominic could see no other way to go.

"Can you gauge the depth of this pit?" he subvocalized to the NP.

"Hey, I'm a nanoquantronic array the size of a pinhead. You're asking a lot," the genie said. "Okay, yell something really loud, and I'll time the echo."

"Ahoy!" Dominic shouted down the pit. His voice barely registered above the crowd noise.

"Just over 15.4776 meters. Close enough for you?"

"Splendid." Dominic shook the metal rail, remembering Tooksook's instructions to go straight up. - The makeshift staircase looked severely overburdened. He checked the bolts attaching it to the stone wall, and they seemed undersized for the weight they were supporting. He wouldn't even consider taking this route if he weren't so thirsty. When he stepped onto the first tread, it gave under his weight, and he could feel the rail vibrate with the heavy tramp of the crowd. Benito jumped down and scampered ahead, darting through people's legs. Dominic took another cautious step down, peering over the rail into the dimness below. He couldn't see the bottom.

"Going down, friend?" Someone behind him wanted to pass, so he had no choice but to enter the stream of traffic.

The deeper he descended, the denser the noise grew, as if sound itself were condensing under its own weight. Movement on the stairs was sluggish. When he finally hopped off the last shuddering tread, he drew a relieved breath, then choked and started coughing. The air at the bottom of the pit was rank. He caught the familiar smell of braziers. People were cooking food, and smoke roiled through the flickering light of handheld lanterns. The odor was almost tactile. Human sweat, fried spore-bread, ozone.

Someone stepped on his foot and apologized, and someone else jostled his elbow. People jammed the area near the bottom of the stairs, all hurrying in different directions. He moved aside.

"This is the deepest level we've found yet," the NP informed him. "I'm detecting three atmospheres of pressure."

"It's some kind of junction," Dominic said. Above people's heads, he could make out the tops of several tall, arched openings on the other side of the pit. Pedestrians flooded in and out, carrying bundles and dragging carts. After studying the pit closer, he realized tunnels radiated from it in every direction, but which one led to the Dominic Jedes?

"Which way?" he asked the NP. With the deafening noise, he no longer troubled to keep his voice down.

The NP's laughter throbbed through his temple. "Admit it, son. You need me."

"Which way?" Dominic shouted again.

"Okay, okay. Checking compass memory. We want the passage directly across from this one."

"You're sure?"

"No, I'm not sure. If you want certainty, get me better source data."

Dominic studied the packed floor of the pit. He'd have to cross right through the center to reach that tunnel. Where was Benito? He'd lost sight of the boy. He circled back to the rickety staircase and climbed up for a better view.

"What the hell are you doing?" the NP said. "You're looking for that brat."

Dominic cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, "Benito, where are you?"

He was squinting through the smoky air, searching for the boy, when he noticed the raised platform at the center of the pit. Something odd was going on there. He couldn't see well, but it looked as if half a dozen protes in bright-colored jackets were standing on the platform, pointing into the crowd and writing on handheld slates. Around the platform, people below stood three meters deep and waved white cards in the air. Were they taking bets? Was it an auction? The scene entranced Dominic. He barely noticed when Benito shinned up his back and took a perch on his shoulders.

"Yeah, I'm curious, too," the NP said. "Let's investigate."

As Dominic eased his way toward the platform, he realized the hall was much wider than he'd first imagined. Several race-car stadiums would fit inside this cavern. The thickest traffic clumped around the tunnel openings and staircase. Elsewhere, people stood in knots, talking and handing objects back and forth. What was going on? Dominic edged toward one of the smaller groups to eavesdrop. Three men and a woman were studying an object a fourth man held in his open palm. It was a small plastic mirror, the industrial type used in laser torches and holo displays.

"I can deliver a thousand of these by Tuesday," the man was saying. "My brother's a diver. He found a barge full of these things."

"Sorry, we don't need mirrors. Have you talked to anyone with antibiotics?"

"No, but if you meet anyone who needs mirrors, I'll be here."

The group drifted apart, and Dominic moved to another group. Three prim juvenile girls sat on the floor, counting out bundles of copper wire from a large basket. The wire had been done up in neat skeins like knitting yarn, and the girls laid them out in even rows. Several men and women bent over and touched the wire. One women hefted a bundle as if to judge its weight. Then she laid down a pair of scissors in its place. —

"Deal," one of the girls said, grinning. The scissors disappeared into the girl's basket, and the woman walked away with her wire.

"This is a market," Dominic said.

The girls glanced up at him, and one of them giggled. He moved away.

"How cute," said the NP. "The protes have built themselves a little emporium. Find out what's happening on that platform, son. It's bound to be good for a laugh."

Dominic shifted Benito to a more comfortable position and marched toward the platform. "They rely on word of mouth," he said. "That leaves so much to chance. And it's straight barter. One item for another. They have no medium of exchange."

"No money," the NP said.

"How do they calculate value? It's random guesswork."

"This is a perfect demonstration of why we don't want protes running the world."

"Right," Dominic said, but his mind was elsewhere. He could think of a dozen simple changes to make this trading floor more efficient. The challenge engaged his mind, and he forgot his thirst and walked about, glancing at the wares people were exchanging. Window glass. Lidded containers. Spools of waterlogged thread. He suspected each item had been painstakingly mined from the underwater junk heaps.

His brain churned ideas. They could hang a large board listing goods for sale and goods wanted, in alpha order for quick reference. And they could paint a numbered grid on the floor so people could find each other. And they would certainly have to establish a currency. Metal coins stamped with numbers, some logical way to define value, and some way to keep track of it. What they really needed was a bank.

As he worked closer toward the raised platform, he watched the people in the bright jackets writing on their slates, and he noticed the audience straining to hear their shouts over the echoing noise.

"Divers? Any scuba divers? We need anyone who can swim." A woman in a cobalt blue coat waved her arm over the crowd like a conductor's baton, but no one answered. She frowned at her slate and chewed a thumbnail. Dominic saw that her slate was not the usual electronic tablet, but a wafer-thin piece of dull black metal. And her fingers were dusty with chalk. She was writing by hand.

"Okay," the woman said, "any young people willing to learn to swim?"

Arms shot up all around. People were waving white cards, shouting for the woman's attention. Dominic saw the cards were marked with names. O'Toole. Duong. Almirez. Vrtiak.

"You, Vrtiak, how many?" the woman shouted.

Vrtiak's broad smile showed the gaps of many missing teeth. "Four. All women. Ages fourteen, seventeen, twenty-nine, forty-one."

"I'll take 'em. Report to deck nine." The woman wrote something on her slate. "You, Duong, how many?"

"Six boys, two girls," Duong answered. "And me. I'm sixty-six. I can learn."

Dominic watched people slapping the man named Vrtiak on the back as he eased out of the crowd. "This is a labor market," Dominic whispered.

The NP laughed. "They're trading work contracts. Can you believe it?"

Vrtiak was heading toward one of the tunnels, so Dominic followed and grabbed his shoulder. "Excuse me. I'm new here. Can you tell me how things work?"

The man looked Dominic up and down, and winked at Benito, who had clenched his little arms around Dominic's forehead. Vrtiak was pale-skinned, muscular and balding. He flashed his gap-toothed smile. "You've been to college, eh? I hear it in your voice."

"Tell me," Dominic said, "did you just sell your daughters' labor contracts?"

The man's smile vanished, and his pasty face grew dark. "Sell my daughters? You think I'm a devil? How can you use that aristo talk here?"

"But I thought—" Dominic didn't get to finish. The man shoved him away and stomped off.

Frowning, Dominic moved back toward the platform. Prote behavior continued to baffle him. He saw a small white-haired man standing a little apart, counting on his fingers. In his hand was a card with the name, Duong, printed in block letters. Dominic tried again.

"Hello, sir. I'm new here. This thing with the white cards, what's going on?"

Duong grinned shyly. He smoothed his card and showed it to Dominic, then waved at the people onstage. "This is the matching hall," he said in a thick American accent. "You come here with something you need or something to give, and with luck, you find a match."

"So you 'gave' your family's work contacts, is that right?" Dominic chose his words with caution. He didn't want to blunder again.

"No contracts. No, we just work."

"But who pays you? The council?"

"Payment, no no. You're thinking in the old way. We live here. We do what needs to be done, that's all."

"Utopian bullshit," the NP grunted.

Dominic thanked the man and turned away. Again, his mind was filling up with ideas. The matching hall. Fascinating concept. He was witnessing the emergence of a nascent market—only instead of information packets traveling on carrier waves, these people were milling around like molecules in Brownian motion, knocking into each other and chaotically making deals. The poetry of it appealed to his imagination. 'This might work," he said aloud.

"Socialism fell on its ass two centuries ago," the NP said. "It's stupid."

"It's simpleminded, I agree. But for a small group, this manual exchange is the spontaneous first stage of commerce. Naturally, it will evolve. Values will mass together and create imbalances. Eventually, they'll see the need for private wealth and centralized accounting. But for now, with so much to be done in such a short time—"

"Dominic, you sound like you wanna see these lunatics win!"

He barely heard the NP. He was watching the people on the platform call out job openings and write on their slates. "The matching hall," he said to himself, "of course."

Colored lights exploded across his retina. "Remember which side you're on! These protes wanna destroy Zahlen-Bank."

"No, the Orgs want that," Dominic said. "They're using these protes as game pieces."

"Game pieces? They're fucking runaways. Son, your mind's turning to mush!"

Dominic didn't bother to answer. Benito was fidgeting, so he set the boy down on the stone floor. "Stay close, Benito. Come when I call."

Benito immediately dashed off to watch a young man painting pictures on scraps of sheet metal. Dominic observed from a distance as the painter sketched a quick caricature of the boy with a few brushstrokes. At once, Benito squatted on the floor and began to draw with his pencil, but the young man gave him a piece of metal instead.

"Let the kid go. He's found his mentor," said the NP. "We have barely seventeen hours, and our tunnel's straight ahead."

Dominic still didn't answer. He watched Benito and the painter exchange drawings and solemnly admire each other's work. Turning around, he saw the same exchange enacted in a dozen more scenes, people trading handmade items and raw materials in plain barter. Without the expertise of bankers or attorneys or regulatory agencies, this matching hall had bloomed like a beautiful life-form. Too bad ZahlenBank's surveillance web didn't reach into this place. This would make a rich data source for the Ark. Dominic knew this embryonic marketplace would continue to grow in a multitude of unforeseeable directions, and he wished he had the time to stay and witness it, perhaps offer a suggestion here and there, a gentle tweak.

"You look lost," someone said.

A trim, middle-aged man with iron-colored hair was standing at his side. The man wore a neat mustache, and he stood with a stiff, military bearing. Like most protes, he was shorter than Dominic. "Maybe you're lost in thought," he said with a quick smile. "What happened to your eye? You got a real shiner there."

Dominic touched the swollen tissue where Benito had hit him earlier. He'd almost forgotten the black eye, not to mention the whack on his jaw and the lump on his head. His face roust be several shades of purple by now.

"I'm Massoud. Ship's bursar. I think I know who you are."

"You're in charge here?" Dominic shook the bursar's outstretched hand. "I have some questions."

"You're the coin dispenser. Nick. Am I right?" Massoud pinched his mustache and rocked on his heels. His eyebrows rose and fell three times in quick succession. He seemed to pulsate with energy. "You like coins? I've got a ton of 'em. I've got all the copper scrip Nord.Com left behind."

"Coins? Excellent. Why aren't they in circulation?"

"You're joking." Massoud thumped him in the arm hard enough to leave a bruise, and Dominic tried not to flinch. "You of all people should know why. Because every one of them carries a miserable ZahlenBank logo."

With some effort, Dominic kept himself from reacting.

Massoud made a rude gesture. "As soon as we build a furnace, we'll melt 'em down and make toilet bowls."

"Fucking prote," said the NP.

Dominic clamped his jaw and held himself very still, thinking how glad he was to be traveling incognito.

Massoud smiled roguishly. "Step into my office, Nick. We'll talk."

The NP sputtered sparks. "Seventeen hours, zero minutes, six seconds. Forget this jerk. Son, you've got other business."

"You're not even sure which way we should go," Dominic subvocalized. "I want to hear about this market."

"Do I have to remind you what'll happen if you fail? It won't just be the ruin of ZahlenBank, son."

"I'm not your son." Dominic ignored the splinters of light chasing each other across his left eye.

Massoud led him to a tall narrow tent made of green plastic tarps wrapped around three stacked sections of metal scaffolding. With rapid gestures, Massoud ushered him inside and pointed to a strip of cloth on the floor— apparently a place to sit. Dominic moved in cautiously. Overhead, caches of strange objects dangled in plastic bags tied with string and bungee cords. Massoud's office looked like the inner workings of some bizarre plastic grandfather clock. Scattered on the floor were warped and rusted appliances, apparently rescued from the junk heaps. Dominic sat down, and was startled to see an old flat-screen computer flashing a Japanese animation. He noticed a bedroll stuffed in one corner.

"You sleep here?"

"I like to be close to the action." Massoud folded himself into the remaining floor space and gestured again. Apparently, he couldn't talk without waving his hands. "Nick, you're an educated man. So am I. Nord.Com trained me as an accountant."

Dominic leaned forward. "Then you know the practical uses of currency."

"They taught you that old scam?" Massoud fished something out of his pocket and stuck it between his teeth. He kept talking with the object in his mouth, and a gleam of spit appeared at the corner of his lip. "That's the old way. We're in a revolution, Nick."

Dominic studied the curious object between Massoud's teeth. "Some of the old ways make sense," he said. "Standard valuations. A medium of exchange. You can't just toss out—"

"Whoa. Hold up, Nick. You're getting way too serious." Massoud took out a small pouch and opened the zipper. The pouch was stuffed with matted gray-green fibers. He took a pinch between his fingers and rubbed the twiggy bits together. "You were trained to dispense coins. Naturally, that's what you believe in. I bet they taught you the money game."

Dominic frowned. "I studied economic game theory, if that's what you mean."

Massoud took the object out of his mouth, and Dominic finally recognized it—an old-fashioned clay pipe. The bowl was charred from use, and the stem had been chewed to splinters. Massoud grinned. "The money game, yeah. Basically, it's a fight between two guys, each trying to take the most coins for himself and leave the least behind for the other guy. Is that about right?"

"Competitors try to maximize earnings. It's a primary game rule."

"My point is, we don't do that anymore. We let the pattern develop organically."

Pinwheels of light flared on Dominic's retina as the NP said, "Why are you talking to this imbecile? You can't possibly expect a literate discussion."

When Massoud finished stuffing the bowl with matted fibers, he clicked a plastic lighter, and Dominic watched the flame dive into the pipe bowl as Massoud sucked at the stem.

"Granted, your matching hall works now," Dominic said, "but eventually, you'll need a formal management structure to maintain balance. You'll have to start a bank."

Massoud's eyes darted up at him. The fibers in the pipe caught fire, and blue smoke leaked from Massoud's nostrils. He spoke tensely, as if trying not to exhale. "Maybe ZahlenBank'll locate a branch office here—if we ask nice."

Dominic recognized the odor. Ersatz marijuana. This man was getting high on pot. When he offered the pipe, Dominic took it in reflex and studied the chewed mouthpiece.

The NP gasped. "Don't put that in your mouth!"

Dominic sniffed it, then took a drag and exhaled with a cough. The weed burned his throat. It wasn't the silky blend he'd sometimes sampled at exec dinner parties. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. "Do you have any water?"

Massoud leaned to his left and searched through a pile of objects, knocking some aside. He found a half-full water sack and bounced it in his hand like a flaccid ball. Dominic eyed it.

Massoud said, "What if I tell you this water costs five million deutschdollars? And the only way you can earn that much is by working for me your whole miserable life?"

"I'd say that's disproportionate."

"You mean outta whack, right? But look, I got the water."

"I'll find water elsewhere."

Massoud smiled and jerked at his mustache. "What if I cut a deal with the waterworks so I own it all?"

Dominic handed the pipe back to Massoud. "I understand. You mink the markets victimized you. But still, the concept of money . . ."

Just then, Dominic noticed a bright, beautiful droplet of color to his right, and he turned to see what it was. A small faceted crystal hung on a string in Massoud's tent, and as it twirled slowly in the air current, its glassy faces shimmered blue-green, crimson and amber. Dominic stared.

"Fine weed, huh?" Massoud laughed and sucked another drag of the ersatz pot. Blue smoke eddied out of his mouth when he said, "Somebody found a bale of this stuff last night in the dump. It's got a salty aftertaste, but it's mellow."

Massoud tossed the water sack, and Dominic turned just in time to catch it between his knees. "See? No coins. The water's free," Massoud said. He leaned back against a stack of what looked like microwave ovens and crossed his wiry arms over his chest.

Dominic lost his train of thought. He felt light-headed. When he squeezed a stream of water into his mouth, it tasted like sweet wine. He drank for a long time, then laid the water sack on the floor and vaguely noticed Massoud jerking it up to close the nozzle. He saw a wet spill, dark gray on pale gray, spreading like an organic form across the floor. All the objects in the tent flared with luminous auras, like holographic halos. Perhaps he was dreaming all of this. He touched something that looked like a stuffed black mouse with big ears and white, gloves. He sensed that he and this mouse were exactly where they belonged. A place for everything, everything in its place. He fell off the crate.

"Ow!" His forehead smacked against the corner of a metal strongbox. The left side again, directly above his swelling black eye.

"You did that on purpose!" the NP said.

When Dominic rubbed the wound, it felt like a metal spike driving through his temporal lobe. "I was going to say something vital," he wheezed.

Massoud slapped his knee. "Coin guy, you need to relax."

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