Authors: Ian Mcdonald

The Dervish House (11 page)

BOOK: The Dervish House

8.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

In the new bourse the clamour is visual. Adnan moves through a storm of information, screens and panels swooping around him like starlings on a winter afternoon. The traders are peacock bright, far from the formal colour coding of dealers, traders and back office team. Many have customized their jackets with panels of nanoweave or had them cut from whole animated fabric. Flickering flames at cuffs, hem and lapels are the thing. Others sport Heavy Metal devils, roaring dinosaurs, spinning euro signs, nudes or football team logos. Onur Bey’s bandwidth trading team has adopted the Lâle Devri tulip motif. Adnan thinks that decadent and effeminate. He wears the front-and-back quartered red and silver of Özer. Simple, direct, unaffected; what a man should have on his back. His single affectation is his tag; it reads
DRK
. Draksor: once an Ultralord of the Universe, always an Ultralord of the Universe.

Adnan reaches up and flicks open a screen from the cloak of display panels wrapped around him. Ten minutes to the closing bell at the Baku Commodity Exchange, the big central Asian gas market. In that rush to close, price differences open between Baku and Istanbul. In those few seconds while the market reacts, dealers like Adnan Sarioğlu can make money. It’s all about arbitrage. Özer’s man in Baku is Fat Ali. Adnan met him on an Özer away-day trail-biking in Cappadocia. Adnan wasn’t a very good trail-biker. Neither was Fat Ali. They both preferred cars. They left the corporate boys to their leathers and dust and spent the afternoon drinking wine on the hotel’s rooftop terrace and speculating if buying the winery might be a sound investment. They drank a lot of wine. As well as car and wine enthusiasts they were both Cimbom fans. They work well together. But Fat Ali isn’t an Ultralord.

Adnan’s eyes flick from screen to screen to screen. Every two seconds Adnan checks the prices on Baku June delivery. The nano blowing in gales through his head makes this level of concentration sustainable.

‘Four forty-six and trading small,’ Adnan says. ‘Someone out there long? Come on Ali, one of your camel-fuckers has to be going long.’

The angel of arbitrage is the angel of the gaps. The AI agents can react to a market more quickly than any human but when they attempt to push that market any real intelligence can see them coming like a train. Some of the dealers rely heavily on their agents. Adnan trusts his own wit and his ability to see patterns those value-adding few seconds before they appear on the screens.
Come to me
,
angel of the gaps
.

‘Four forty-seven and pretty thin stuff,’ Fat Ali says in Baku. But at some point as the clock ticks down to the bell there will be some local trader buying in Baku who does not have a seat in Istanbul’s central ITB and so cannot trade there. The price will move in Baku and for the few seconds before the market shifts in Istanbul, Adnan Sarioğlu and Fat Ali can make money.

‘What’s Branobel doing?’

‘Sitting long.’

The Baku screen swoops to a halt in front of Adnan. ‘We’re at four forty-five.’ And there is the gap. Now all he needs is a way to exploit it. Adnan whirls screens around him. ‘Someone wants to sell fat. Come on you bastard, I can feel you.’

‘Flush him out and we’ll shoot him down.’

Adnan moves his hands, a dance, a code. A new offer of four hundred and forty-five dollars flows out from him across the many screens of the Money Tree like a wind rippling leaves. Instantly the AIs swarm.
This’ll rattle you out
, Adnan thinks. There will be a seller out there with a limit on the daily downward movement of his contracts. Adnan’s scare-price is designed to look as if the market is headed down further yet. Faced with the possibility of unlimited loss, that trader will be forced to sell. And there. One star, burning bright in laser light on the back of Adnan’s retina. The stop-loss seller. Adnan buys two hundred. In the same instant Fat Ali sells those same two hundred across the price gap in Baku. Buy Istanbul at four forty-five, sell Baku at four forty seven. Forty thousand euro profit for two seconds’ work. Another two seconds later the market adjusts and closes the differential. The angel of the gaps moves on. At no time does anyone sniff the gas that Adnan has arbitraged. That would be a grievous error. This is the secret of Özer Gas and Commodities: never carry any gas, never inventory any commodities, never get left holding. Promises and options of future prices are the currency.

Adnan’s AIs book the sale and throw it to Kemal in the back office. Forty thousand euro. A waft of woman-warmed sun-scalded neoprene waves across his money. It was a sweet deal and few play it better than Adnan Sarioğlu and Fat Ali but it’s not where the real money lies. Commodities money will always be quickie money, money you have to cajole into coming to you, wit and speed money. For you to make it means someone has to lose it. It’s a closed system. There are no draws in Özer. But Turquoise, that’s real money. That’s money enough to get out of the wheedling and the carpet-selling. Turquoise is magic money that comes out of nowhere. Five minutes to close in Baku, an hour to the bell in Istanbul. Adnan Sarioğlu opens his hands, pulls the twenty-four-hour spot price screen in before his face. There’s something in there; a shadow of a pattern, a watermark in a banknote.
Now how can I make money here?

Leyla at the Nano Bazaar. This wall of pressed construction carbon business units is the caravanserai of the business of the infinitesimally small. Banners and windsocks share the roofline of Big Box industrial units with the Turkish crescent moon and the European Union stars. The street wall is decorated with a huge mural depicting the orders of magnitude of the universe, from the cosmological on the left to the quantum on the extreme right, worked in the floral abstractions of Iznik ceramics. The centre, where the gate like the entrance to a han has been cut, represents the human scale. As Leyla reads the wall of Nano Bazaar a dozen trucks and buses and dolmuşes draw up or depart, mopeds and yellow taxis and little three-wheel citicars steer around her. Leyla’s heart leaps.

This is always always always what she wished a bazaar to be. Demre, proudly claiming to be the birthplace of Santa Claus, was direly lacking in workshops of wonder. Small corner stores, an understocked chain supermarket on the permanent edge of bankruptcy and a huge cash and carry that serviced the farms and the hotels squeezed between the plastic sky and the shingle shore. Russians flew there by the charter load to sun themselves and get wrecked on drink. Drip irrigation equipment and imported vodka, a typical Demre combination. But Istanbul; Istanbul was the magic. Away from home, free from the humid claustrophobia of the greenhouses, hectare after hectare after hectare; a speck of dust in the biggest city in Europe, anonymous yet freed by that anonymity to be foolish, to be frivolous and fabulous, to live fantasies. The Grand Bazaar! This was a name of wonder. This was hectare upon hectare of Cathay silk and Tashkent carpets, bolts of damask and muslin, brass and silver and gold and rare spices that would send the air heady. It was merchants and traders and caravan masters; the cornucopia where the Silk Road finally set down its cargoes. The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul was shit and sharks. Overpriced stuff for tourists, shoddy and glittery. Buy buy buy. The Egyptian Market was no different. In that season she went to every old bazaar in Sultanahmet and Beyoğlu. The magic wasn’t there.

This, this is the magic. This is dangerous, like the true magic always is. This is the new terminus of the Silk Road; central Asia’s engineers and nanoware programmers the merchants and caravan masters of the Third Industrial Revolution. Leyla steps boldly through the gate.

The air of Nano Bazaar air is heady; every breath a new emotion. She reels from blissed-up euphoria into nervy paranoia into awed dread in as many steps. Dust swirls in front of her, glittering in the pinhole sunbeams shining through the patchy plastic awning. The dust coalesces into a ghostly image of her face. It frowns, moves its lips to speak and is gone in a burst of glitter. Tiny ratbots scuttle around her heels. Windows flicker with oil-sheen television pictures, rolled-down shutters drip big brand logos; all the lovely labels she will enjoy when she gets proper marketing-job money. Bubbles waft across her face, she recoils as they burst, then gives a little ‘oh!’ of delight as each delicate detonation plays a fragment of Gülsen’s last-summer hit
Şinaney
. The birds that look down from the gutters of the industrial units aren’t birds. Atatürk’s face on a passing T-shirt suddenly turns its eyes on her and scowls. Leyla wants to clap her hands in wonder.

‘Unit 229?’ she asks a bearded man with curly hair. He’s bent over the engine of a little three-wheeler delivery truck.
Bekşir Borscht and Blini
, it says on the side. She’s heard Russian food is very fashionable with these tech guys. Vodka freezing in the reactor cooling cells. The lad frowns at her and mutters something in Russian. She knows it well from too many drunken tourists. A guttural, peasant tongue to her, next to the music of Turkish, but here it’s exciting, salty, exotic. Two dozen languages from as many nations ring around this former military airbase on the cheap edge of Fenerbahçe.

‘Unit 229?’

The guy has just bought coffees from a franchise wagon; one in each hand, those Western-style coffees that are just flavoured milk and come in cardboard buckets with wooden stirrers. He’s tall and sallow and lanky with an older face than his clothes, a slightly over-defined jaw and thoughtful puppy eyes that keep darting away from her gaze.

‘That’s over in Smaller.’

‘Where?’

‘We’re arranged in order of technology scale,’ he says. ‘Milli, micro, nano. Small, Smaller, Smallest. Small is beautiful. Size matters. I’m going that way.’

Leyla offers a hand. Her business card is primed. The man lifts high his buckets of coffee in apology.

‘I’m Leyla Gültaşli, I’m a freelance marketing consultant, I’ve an appointment with Yaşar Ceylan from Ceylan-Besarani.’

‘So what do you want with Yaşar?’

‘He wants me to build a business development plan to upscale the company. Access finance, White Knights, venture capitalists, that sort of thing.’

‘Venture capitalists.’ He sucks in breath. ‘You see, I find money talk kind of scary.’

‘It’s not when you know what to do with it.’

Despite Sub-Aunt Kevser’s explanation Leyla still isn’t clear how she’s related to Yaşar but he was nice and polite when she called him, interested with none of the geeky self-fascination.

‘Fenerbahçe, yeah, got that.’ It was a trek; five different modes of transport. With good connections it was an hour and half. Give it three. Once again she showered in costly water, ironed out the frustration rumples in her going-to-interview suit, set out with plenty time.

‘Nanotechnology.’

‘Sort of yes.’

Nanotechnology, even sort-of nanotechnology; what does she know about nanotechnology? What does anyone really know about nanotechnology, except that it is the hot new revolution that promises to change the world as radically as information technology a generation before. Leyla has no preparation other than a well ironed suit and her own insuperable belief in her own ability. This is as far as she could possibly be from Demre.

‘Unit 229.’ The man gestures with his coffee cups. He follows Leyla through the low door into an anonymous single bay front office. ‘Yaşar, this is Leyla Gültaşli. She’s our freelance marketing consultant.’

‘Oh, ah, yes; pleased to meet you.’ Leyla fights down the blush of her mistake as she shakes the hand of the young man getting to his feet from the cramped seat pressed up by the desk against the wall. Yaşar Ceylan’s hair is too long and his belly is too big and he has facial hair but his eyes are bright and he holds her look and his grip is sincere. Information crackles, palm to palm, business card to business card.

‘I see you’ve already met Aso, my business partner.’

‘Business partner, yes, of course, I should have guessed, Aunt Kevser didn’t tell me, partner, of course.’ She’s gabbling, gabbling; gabbling girl from the sticks.

‘And Zeliha.’ The fourth person in the tiny office is a woman in her late twenties almost lost behind the piles of invoices and print-outs that cover her tiny desk. She frowns at Leyla, looks baffled and buries her face in one of the coffee buckets. Two desks, three chairs, a filing cabinet with a printer on the top, a row of too too fashionable ugly Urban Toy figures on the window ledge behind Yaşar. The four of them fit into the tiny office like segments of an orange.

‘So what is it you actually do here?’

Yaşar and Aso look at each other.

‘Programmable nucleic bio-informatics.’

‘Okay,’ says Leyla Gültaşli. ‘Maybe this is the point where I should tell you that I haven’t a clue what that means.’

‘And you’re not really a marketing consultant either,’ says Yaşar. ‘Sorry. Aunt Kevser. She told me.’

Zeliha sniggers into her coffee.

‘But we still need you,’ Aso adds quickly. ‘We know as little about marketing as you do about programmable nucleic bio-informatics.’

‘Except that if I’m to pitch it, I need some comprehension of what it is.’

Yaşar and Aso look at each other again. They’re like comedy presenters on children’s television.

‘You see, we’re small,’ Yaşar says.

‘But not smallest,’ Aso concludes.

BOOK: The Dervish House