Science Fiction: The Year's Best (2006 Edition). Аластер Рейнольдс

angle, through the commotion created by the swans, but a hit anywhere on the armor would wear it down.

      Dead swans dropped into the water in front of Sabor. The gap between the two hulls narrowed. The side of the other boat loomed over them. On Sabor’s display, the omniscient eye of the electronic system presented him with a less pessimistic picture. Three hardbodies had dropped out of the line—presumably to recharge their armor. Two swans were still defying the pitiless hands closing around their necks.

      Three hardbodies jumped across the gap. Boots pounded on the deck over Sabor’s head. He scurried away from his firing position and aimed his gun at the hatch he had used to enter the hold.

      A hardbody suddenly started firing his gun. The display responded to the shift in Sabor’s attention and presented him with two figures in skintight wetsuits. Two more figures were crowding in behind them. In the water, just a few meters from the boat, three seal riders were standing on their mounts as they poured a stream of projectiles into the hardbodies.

      * * * *

      “I requested a son who was restless and adventurous,” Sabor’s mother had told him. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when he tells me he wants to put twenty-two light years between himself and all the pleasures he’s been enjoying since his eyes first registered the light.”

      “As far as I can tell,” Sabor had responded, “the only pleasures I’m leaving behind are the pleasures that are irrevocably associated with my family. The only difference between the ship and the home I’ve been honored to share with you and my sisters is the fact that the ship will be moving away from the sun instead of traveling around it. I’ll have almost every luxury I have here. We’ll still have fabricators when we reach Fernheim. The first thing I’m going to fabricate after we make landfall is a bottle of Talini.”

      Sabor had been fifty-two when he had broken the news. His mother had been reigning over their family enterprises for almost a century. Billions of neils and yuris bounced around the cities of the asteroid belt during every twenty-four hour day-period and their economists estimated that thirty percent of the total visited their databanks during its rambles.

      Rali Haveri was a placid woman for all her power. She had produced him, Sabor believed, because she felt her life needed a dash of turbulence. Adventurous people stirred her. Most of her temporary consorts had been self-centered erratics.

      Sabor had reached maturity in an environment that surrounded him with gentle music, decorous parties, and amiable personalities. Alajara had been one of the pleasantest cities in the asteroid belt—a mansion inhabited by ten thousand people who were all employees of his family’s business. Sabor mastered three musical instruments, pursued his hobbies and enthusiasms with equipment that would have made most professionals groan with envy, and dallied with his choice of concubines when he reached the appropriate age. His mother and his older sisters took care of the details that generated the family income.

      There had been a time when many visionaries thought the fabricator would make bankers obsolete. Press the right buttons and your magic box would generate a fully cooked roast on demand. Press another combination and it would extrude furniture for your dwelling place, clothes for your body, and toys for the idle hours it had bestowed on your life. Why would anyone need money?

      Fortunately, it hadn’t quite worked out that way. Fabricators had been universal household appliances for two centuries and Sabor’s family was still engaging in its traditional business. The introduction of the fabricator had disrupted Earth’s economic system for approximately two decades. It had triggered a catastrophic massive deflation. Prices and wages had tumbled by seventy percent, by most calculations. But when the turbulence had subsided, Sabor’s family had still been negotiating loans and pulling profits out of microscopic variations in interest rates.

      Fabricators could provide you with the basics at a ridiculously low cost but they still needed energy and raw materials. They needed programs that directed their operations and time to run the programs. And there were commodities that couldn’t be manufactured by the best machines available. Fabricators couldn’t manufacture social status. Fabricators couldn’t engage in the genetic manipulations and the years of post-natal management that produced personalities like Purvali and Choytang. Above all, fabricators couldn’t manufacture expertise and imagination. They couldn’t design their own programs. They couldn’t visualize the new products that would make consumers lust after the programs that would produce them.

      Money, Rali Haveri liked to remind him, was essentially irrational. It had value because people agreed it had value. She had placed two million yuris in Sabor’s account when he had established his residence on the Carefree Villa and everyone on the starship had agreed he could use it to buy goods and services and make loans. They had accepted it as money through three rests and four awakes and they had continued to accept it when he had landed on Fernheim. They even accepted the additional numbers his mother had radioed him since he had landed on the planet. The fact that every message had to travel for twenty-two years made no difference. Human societies needed some sort of monetary system and he was the son of a woman who could obviously bless him with any sum he could reasonably desire. The financial system in the solar system even recognized the numbers he transmitted when he paid his mother the interest she charged him.

      “I would be avoiding my maternal responsibilities if I didn’t demand interest,” Rali had lectured him across the light years. “I’m only imposing the same discipline on you that I would try to impose on myself—the same discipline the solar financial system imposes on me.”

      Sabor reentered the boathouse and dropped into a corner two minutes after the captain returned their boat to the main channel. Purvali ran a test on the boathouse fabricator and ordered pharmaceutical drinks that would moderate their emotional stress. Colonel Jina’s immobilized soldiers were being relieved of their armor and weapons and placed on the deck of the other boat. The boat itself would be turned around and sent back upstream under its own control.

      The Primary Coordinator had already advised Colonel Jina he could pick up his soldiers’ equipment in two days. There would be no request for ransom or damages.

      “We try to maintain good business relations with Colonel Jina,” the Primary Coordinator had explained. “We usually use his services when we hire guards for our more valuable shipments.”

      Purvali swayed toward Sabor with a drinking cup in her hand. He held up three fingers as she bent over him.

      “We have three projects we have to advance simultaneously,” Sabor said. “We have to organize our fellow bankers into a united front, we have to find a weakness we can exploit, and we have to prepare for a sojourn in the splendors of the unterrestrialized wilderness. I’ll start work on number one. I want you to work on the others. Assume we’ll embark on our wilderness holiday as soon as we’re properly equipped.”

      Purvali checked her display. “They only have eight widemounts in the whole commune.”

      “Try to purchase four. I’d like to pack a few comforts.”

      The effects of the drink flowed through Sabor’s muscles and nerves. His display projected his own image in front of him and he observed his delivery as he created his message to his three colleagues.

      “I regret to tell you that I have just fended off an armed attack financed by Possessor Kenzan Khan. I believe we should immediately suspend all dealings with Kenzan Khan. I will be taking other actions shortly but I believe an unequivocal display of unity is absolutely essential.”

      He paused the recording and took another swallow of his drink. Purvali had flavored it with banana and coconut—an aroma he had treasured since he had first savored it sometime around his fifth birthday.

      “Kenzan has become obsessed with his long term feud with Possessor Dobryani. He wants to mount an armed occupation of the land around the mouth of Winari Brook. Kenzan and Dobryani have both been eyeing that area and Kenzan has convinced himself Dobryani is preparing to seize it by force. He wants me to finance the purchase of one hundred soldiers. I have decided I have to refuse. I’ve been subsidizing his excesses since he first took control of his