My eyebrows shot up. “Real time?”
“No, Mr. White. Pallas is currently 1.27 AU’s ahead of Cerean orbit. The real-time differential is ten minutes and thirty-six seconds.”
“Of course. Very well, put him on.”
The upper half of the infamous Bo Wivvel appeared on my deskphone. He seemed prosaic enough for a bucket-shop swindler who had recently spent three years shoveling ore on Confinement Rock. He was as long and lean as most Belters, had an elaborate tattoo on his right cheek, apparently of a hummingbird sniffing at a flower, a long gold earring dangling from his left ear, and a muted checkerboard pattern on his eyelids. All in all, a typical enough example of a conservative young stockbroker on the way up. His recorded image smiled at me warmly from 190 million kilometers away.
“Good morning, dear colleague,” he chirped. “Bohuslav Wivvel here. I just thought I’d give you a call to thank you for everything you’ve done in helping Granddame Maynerd decide to move her main account over to my office. Without your fine work on her titanium futures I’m sure she would never have considered such a move.” His smile broadened. “Ah, that reminds me. I convinced her that she could safely leave her present little commodities account in your own capable hands: after all, the courts will want it as evidence.” He swooped his head in an elaborate, mocking bow. “So nice talking to you, dear colleague.”
I cut the deskphone in the middle of his gale of cackling laughter. Then I sat staring at the screen, wondering how many additional years it would cost me on Confinement Rock if I jettisoned Bohuslav Wivvel through the main Pallas airlock.
I was interrupted in my reverie by a squishing sensation around my toes. I looked down to see that my sandaled feet had vanished beneath the murky water swirling across my cubicle floor. I leapt to my feet with a cry of rage—and, of course, bumped my head painfully against the ceiling. I cursed and waited while I drifted slowly back into the churning maelstrom.
Something had obviously gone wrong with the Clarkeville sewage and recycling system: it seemed to have mistaken the offices of Hartman, Bemis & Choupette for the Pleasanton bean fields twenty kilometers away and was now pumping its daily irrigation quota into the cubicles of inoffensive third-story stockbrokers.
Enough was enough.
I decided to go for a drink.
“What I don’t understand,” said Isabel above the usual din of the Cafe des Mondes, “is all this stuff about futures, and going long and going short and making a fortune or losing a fortune in the time it takes to turn around and why it’s too dangerous for mere mortals like me to play around with.”
“It’s easy to understand,” I said. “Look, you know how you can sell a stock short in a regular stock account—”
“No, I’ve never understood that either.” Isabel held up a hand. “And please don’t tell me. All I want to know about is this futures business that’s got you so upset.”
I looked at her with pursed lips for a moment, then raised my tall beaded glass of nicely chilled Pernod to said lips. Isabel was infinitely pleasanter to look at than the piled-up bags of smelly garbage that now blocked our view of the cafe’s normally agreeable perspective of Westlake Park. She’s about my age, twenty-eight or twenty-nine if it matters, nearly as tall as I am, but far rounder and smoother in places of interest to practicing heterosexuals like myself.
Three or four years ago Isabel and I had planned to get married and have a couple of children, but Psych Service had turned us down. Isabel’s latent attraction to other women, they said, made the chances of the two of us having a successful twenty-three year marriage something less than 25 percent. That assessment had come as a vast surprise to Isabel, who had always considered herself as straight as a mathematician’s line, but who could argue with Psych Service? And if you want to have children on Ceres you have to guarantee that there’ll be a stable family environment until the child reaches his or her twenty-second birthday.
So no wedding bells for Jonathan and Isabel. Instead she married a lovely girl named Jin Tshei and they lived more or less happily ever after. A little while after the marriage I was invited to contribute the necessary genetic material for the creation of an adorable little girl. Now I dropped by for pleasant weekends with Isabel and Jin Tshei and three-year-old Valérie-France two or three times a month.
And the two of us still had occasional drinks together at an outside table at the Cafe des Mondes while empty saucers piled up before us and schmaltzy accordion music played softly in the background. She has a high-powered job in the assessor’s office of City Hall and normally never wants to talk about the mundane ins and outs of the brokerage business. Now, however, she did.
I gestured at the lifelike waiter in the old-fashioned black suit and white apron for another round. “If you want to understand how an old lady moneybags can lose six million buckles in futures you have to understand two things. The first is margin.”
“Margin?”
“Margin. When a solid financial citizen like yourself buys 100 shares of Magnus Mining at 75 buckles a share, you debit your account for 7,500 buckles and pay it over to whoever’s selling you the shares, along with an itty-bitty commission for your friendly stockbroker. You in turn receive a certificate proving you own the stock.”
“All right,” said Isabel tartly. “Even though my two degrees happen to be in resources allocation management and not financial flimflammery, I think I can grasp that subtle concept.”
I actually managed a faint grin. The Pernod was definitely making the world seem a little brighter. “Now it gets a trifle harder. If you wanted to, you could have opened a margin account. That would have let you buy 200 shares of Magnus Mining for the same 7,500 buckles. You would have put up your own 7,500, and the brokerage firm would have lent you the other 7,500. But instead of delivering the 200 shares to you, the brokerage house would have kept them as security against its loan of 7,500 buckles. And every month you would have to pay interest on the loan. Clear?”
Isabel frowned. “I think so. I’d buy shares on margin because I’d hope the price per share would go up enough so that when I sold them I’ve made enough profit to pay off the additional interest I had to pay.”
“Right. And because you owned 200 shares instead of 100 you’d have had twice the profit for essentially the same amount of investment. That’s why people like to play around with margin accounts. But with stocks, which are pretty closely regulated, at least here on Ceres, you can only buy stocks on 50 percent margin. In other words, for every buckle you borrow from the brokerage house, you have to put up one of your own.”
“All right, that seems clear enough. But what has margin got to do with futures and why the Procurator General will try to stick you in Confinement Rock?”
I snorted angrily. “Because with commodity futures you don’t have to put up 50 percent margin, you only have to put up 10 percent! That means you can buy a million buckles worth of pork belly futures by only putting down a hundred thousand buckles of your own. So if the price of pork bellies goes up, you can make ten times as much money as if you hadn’t bought on margin. Which means that everyone who wants to make a quick buckle is playing around with commodities.”
Isabel looked at me plaintively. “But you still haven’t told me what a future is.”
I looked up at the green and white stripes of the cafe’s picturesque but completely unnecessary awning—after all, we were sitting at least sixty meters beneath the surface. “Look,” I said, “I’ll tell you exactly what old lady Maynerd did to land me in the soup: that’ll explain what futures are. In this case, titanium futures.”