Hayford Peirce - Deep-Fried Black Diamonds

Fourteen years on Earth. With fulltime medical supervision. As Isabel said, it was going to cost a fortune. And if any of us wanted to visit her, as we surely would, it was going to cost three fortunes.

Fortunately, though, fortunes were right up my alley.

I lilted my glass to clink it against Isabel’s. “Why should we pick an arbitrary figure like three fortunes? Why not say that I’m going to make us enough for ten fortunes?”

“Black diamonds,” said Ling Wong Guoy, lovingly caressing a dirt-covered truffle he had just pulled up from his own home-brewed dirt. “That’s what Brillat-Savarin called them, beautiful, beautiful black diamonds.”

“Who’s that guy?” demanded J. Davis Alexander with his usual suavity of manner.

“A nineteenth-century Frenchman who wrote a book called The Physiology of Taste. You might call him a philosopher of food.”

“A philosopher. Huh!” J. Davis Alexander rolled his beady little eyes to show what he thought of philosophers. As I’ve already hinted, the branch manager of Hartman, Bemis & Choupette was short, globuloid, and hirsute. His disposition might charitably compared to that of a famished grizzly, except, of course, while toadying to his betters—anyone who had more buckles in their portfolios than he himself. His favorite sport was firing yours truly, Jonathan Welbrook White. It was a never-ending source of wonder to me—and to much of Clarkeville—that so unprepossessing a specimen of the human race could be happily married to Miss Grain Harvest of 2273, the tallest, slimmest, blondest, and flat-out most gorgeous female creature in the entire Belt. I guess it all goes to show that beauty really is only skin deep—or entirely in the eye of the beholder. Or something. Maybe it would take a French philosopher of taste to understand it.

Now J. Davis Alexander turned his baleful eye from the truffle in Ling Wong Guoy’s hand to the man responsible for this horticultural miracle, Señor Hernandez Wong Ling. The truffle expert was—compared to me, for instance—short, exceptionally broad in the shoulders, with a wizened brown face and soulful brown eyes. “You say that all of this can be turned into a truffle field.” J. Davis Alexander gestured at the hundred yards or so of nondescript rock that was all that separated us from the horizon and—literally—the edge of the world. “But can you guarantee it?” Hernandez Wong Ling shrugged mournfully. “Nothing in life, Señor, is certain except—”

“Yes, yes, spare me,” muttered J. Davis Alexander, “death, taxes, and entropy. And a miserable death indeed if the bubble around this world ever broke. Has that ever happened?” he demanded harshly of Ling Wong Guoy, who was floating upside down just over his own hairy head.

“Never,” said the restaurateur flatly. “Not even the smallest puncture or leak. Besides which, I have several emergency shelters and ample autonomous repair machinery. We would have to be blasted almost to dust by a full-scale meteorite in order to sustain life-threatening damage.”

What he said made sense. Some of the new bubble materials are practically indestructible: light, flexible, shape-sustaining, and almost totally puncture-proof. There was serious talk that it was now feasible to bubble the entire world of Ceres itself and fill it with an atmosphere, a pleasant prospect for those of us who preferred not to live their entire lives underground.

“Hrmph,” growled J. Davis Alexander, who seemed perversely determined to find some way of keeping me from making millions of Belter buckles. “All this capital you want us to raise for you—what are you going to do with it? Buy machinery to break up the rock and—”

Ling Wong Guoy looked at J. Davis Alexander as if he were crazy. “Certainly not! We’ll use a standard agricultural virophage to convert the top two meters of rock into all-purpose soil, then start seeding it with our own special compounds.” Here he laid a finger alongside his nose in a gesture that was becoming familiar to me and cocked his head slyly. “One thing we are going to have to do, Mr. Alexander, is to import and surreptitiously dispose of many hundreds of tons of completely worthless fertilizers, additives, manures, conditioners, and toners.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Why, to keep anyone else from figuring out exactly how we grow our truffles. Let them waste their time and money investigating a thousand dead ends and wrong turnings.”

“Ahhh.” J. Davis Alexander blinked respectfully—this was the kind of double-dealing he understood. “Ha! Yes! Very good!” He rubbed his chubby hands together. “But what about the trees? How are you going to bring them in, and how long will they take to grow?”

“What trees?” asked Ling Wong Guoy innocently. “This is a farm, not a forestry station.”

“The shrub oaks. I’ve been reading up about truffles. They’re only found in conjunction with the roots of shrub oaks.”

Ling Wong Guoy smiled broadly. “So it has always been assumed—but never proven. I will say only this, Mr. Alexander: shrub oaks and their roots are not needed—though perhaps we should plant some just in order to further confuse the issue.”

“Ha!” More thinking along J. Davis Alexander-approved lines. “Well, then, Mr. Ling Wong Guoy, I think we shall have no trouble in floating your little issue. First we’ll incorporate as Black Diamond Farm, issuing ourselves, shall we say, a million shares of stock at a nominal price of one-tenth of a centavo per share. Then we’ll—”

“A moment,” interrupted Ling Wong Guoy. “These million shares —just how will they be distributed?”

J. Davis Alexander beamed. “Normally on a highly speculative offering such as this, in which the good name of the underwriters, that is to say, Hartman, Bemis & Choupette, is all that matters for a successful offering, the underwriters would take 75 percent. In this particular case, however, in order to assist one of our most distinguished local citizens, Mr. Choupette has instructed me to tell you that we will be content with a mere 51 percent.”

Ling Wong Guoy’s black eyes grew opaque. “Ah! Fifty-one percent!” He scratched his chin. “Interesting, interesting. I believe that I should best consult again with Bleine, Blinder & Miesen on Pallas. I believe that one of their officers mentioned to me in passing that they would be happy to lead such an underwriting for 7.5 percent.”

“What!” J. Davis Alexander’s eyes grew round and apoplectic. Bleine, Blinder & Misen—the infamous Three Blind Mice of the stockbroking world—were our most bitter rivals. “Never would my conscience allow you to sully yourself by dealing with such disreputable....”

Twenty minutes later the two purring cutthroats had agreed upon a split of two-thirds, one-third, the two-thirds going to Ling Wong Guoy. J. Davis Alexander was thoroughly vexed, of course, but what could he do? It was Ling Wong Guoy’s truffles and nobody else’s. If Hartman, Bemis & Choupette wanted to climb aboard the gravy train, they were going to have to do it on his terms.

“Well, then,” said Ling Wong Guoy enthusiastically, rubbing his hands together in much the same manner that J. Davis Alexander had done earlier, “I think I’m going to enjoy this. We’ll have public tastings all through the Belt. We’ll give away a thousand kilograms of free truffles, along with recipes. I’ll go on television to show how to cook them, how to savor them, how to—”

“Ahem,” I interrupted. “I, too, have been reading up on the history of truffles. Some authorities have claimed that they’re also aphrodisiacs.”

“Is that true?” demanded J. Davis Alexander, his eyes glittering.

“Who knows? Unless you’re Mr. Ling Wong Guoy here, who could possibly afford to eat enough of them to find out? Not that I need any for myself,” I added modestly, “but I don’t think it would hurt to mention the possibility when we float the issue...”