Zero History

“Of course.”
“That’s what Chombo was doing. Finding the order flow.”
“He found it a week before they kidnapped him, but his work, to that point, would
have been useless. Without him, I mean.”
“And the market, the whole thing, it’s no longer real? Because you know the future?”
“It’s a very tiny slice of the future. The merest paring. Minutes.”
“How many?”
Bigend had glanced around the empty lounge. “Seventeen, presently.”
“Is that enough?”
“Seven would have been entirely adequate. Seven seconds, in most cases.”
>>>
Fiona’s dress was a seamless tube, lustrous black jersey. She was wearing it with the top
rolled down, forming a sort of band across her breasts, her shoulders bare. A gift from
her mother, she said, who’d gotten it from an associate editor at French Vogue. Milgrim
knew almost nothing about her mother, other than that she’d once been involved with
Bigend, but he’d always found the idea of girlfriends having parents intimidating.
He wore his freshly dry-cleaned tweed jacket and whipcord trousers, but with a Hackett
shirt, no extraneous cuff-buttons.
Cocktails were being served in the ballroom, so-called, which ordinarily was the main
dining room. The walls were decorated with quasi-Constructivist murals of ekranoplans,
looking, as Milgrim thought they somewhat actually did, like the Pan American Airways
Flying Clippers of the 1940s, but with truncated wings and that strange canard that
supported the jet engines. As he and Fiona descended the spiral stairway, he saw Aldous
and the other driver towering elegantly above the assembled passengers, many of whom
Milgrim hadn’t seen before, as he and Fiona had been spending most of their time in the
cabin. There was Rausch, too, his black suit rumpled, his matte hair reminding Milgrim of
the stuff Chandra had used on Ajay, though with a different style of application.
As they reached the deck, Aldous arrived at the bottom of the stairs. “Hello,” said
Milgrim, not having seen Aldous since that night in the City. “Thanks for getting us out of
that. Hope it wasn’t too hard on you, after.”
“Bigend’s silk,” said Aldous, with an elegant shrug, which Milgrim knew meant lawyer.
“And the courier,” he said to Fiona, winking.
“Hullo, Aldous.” She smiled, then turned away to greet someone Milgrim didn’t know.
“I’ve been wondering,” said Milgrim, lowering his voice, glancing across the ballroom
at the polished head of the other driver, “about the testing. It’s been a while.”
“What testing?”
“Urinalysis,” said Milgrim.
“I think they discontinue that. Gone from the call sheets. But everything’s changing,