The dispensers were coin-operated. I thanked my luck and bought tannin secretion pills for the first time in a year and a half. I downed four at the fountain, then made my way back to the hammock.

I watched black water and bright islands, their centers marked by white city glow or yellow lamplighter glow, with the electric blue flash of breakers to outline their rims. Presently one crept near. I watched while Wyvern descended to a mooring and a spiral stair came snaking up to us.

Passengers were boarding at Thelinda’s Island; others were getting off. I got off.

My phone was listed under Graynor, not Hebert. I called Outbound Enterprises.

Ice Trireme would lift for Home in four days, more or less. Milcenta Graynor and a child were frozen solid and doing fine. I was expected; Milcenta had already signed me in. Was I aware that Milcenta was carrying a child? Special techniques had been required, and a surcharge had been added. It had been too long since I’d had my physical. I’d need another before I could board, and that, too, required a surcharge, which Milcenta had paid.

She’d done it! She’d retrieved Jeena; she’d reached the terminal and checked us all in and kept her cool until they cooled her down and had never made a mistake.

My turn now.

The real Martin Wallace Graynor had played the futures market. It had broken him. Feather had made him an offer, and I had become Mart Graynor.

I had taken up his habit. I bought options to buy (or sell) shares of cargoes on outgoing spacecraft, sold the option if the price went up (or down), sometimes exercised the option instead. I’d been doing that for over a year, ever since I had reasoned out how it worked. I was down a few thousand, but that wasn’t the point. Mart Graynor held options on cargoes bound for Home.

Ice Trireme was carrying a fertilizer package: cattle dung seeded with minerals, earthworms, and small life-forms including unicellular rock eaters. The stuff would be treated like a concentrate, mixed into rock dust, and used as soil. Mart Graynor owned an option to buy at a set price.

I bought it all.

I would own it when it landed on Home, and there I would sell it. Money moving between stars might be noticed, but fertilizer packages were supposed to move.

Next: the apt in Pacifica, in Milcenta Graynor’s name. Should I do something about that? But Sharrol had been so efficient. She might well have put it up for sale herself.

Or we could just let the lease lapse. I left it alone.

Twenty minutes gone. Plenty of time to cross the slidebridge to Baker Street Island, put coins in a booth, and be waiting on Landis Island when the dirigible Wyvern touched down.