Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [153]
“It could have been areothermal, or lightning attracted by the quartz in the tuff.”
They argued in the way people do when they are repeating a debate for the thousandth time. Art interrupted to ask again about the caliche blanco. The woman explained that blanco was a very pure caliche, up to eighty percent pure sodium nitrate, and thus, on this nitrogen-poor world, extremely valuable. A block of it sat on the table, and she passed it over to Art and went back to arguing with her friend, while Coyote bartered on with another man, talking about teeter-totters and pots, kilograms and calories, equivalence and overburden, cubic meters per second and picobars, haggling expertly and getting a lot of laughs from the people listening.
At one point the woman interrupted Coyote with a cry: “Look, we can’t just take an unknown pot of uranium that we can’t be sure we’ll get or not! That’s either gross potlatching or else ripping us off, depending on whether we can find the truck or not! What kind of a deal is that, I mean it’s a lousy deal either way!”
Coyote wagged his head mischievously. “I had to bring it in, or else otherwise you were going to bury me in caliche blanco, weren’t you. We’re out here on the road, we’ve got some seeds but not much else— certainly not millions of tons of new caliche deposits! And we actually need the hydrogen peroxide and the pasta too, it’s not just a luxury like lettuce seeds. Tell you what, if you find the truck you can burn its equivalent, and you’ll still have given us fair. If you don’t find it, then you’ll owe us one, I admit it, but in that case you can burn a gift, and then we’ll have given you fair!”
“It’ll take us a week’s work and a bunch of fuel to recover the truck.”
“All right, we’ll take another ten picobars, and burn six of it.”
“Done.” The woman shook her head, baffled. “You’re a hard bastard.”
Coyote nodded and got up to go refill their cups.
Art swung his head around and stared at Nirgal, his mouth hanging open. “Explain to me what just went on there.”
“Well,” said Nirgal, feeling the benevolence of the kava flowing through him, “they were trading. We need food and fuel, so we were at a disadvantage, but Coyote did pretty well.”
Art hefted the white block. “But what’s this get nitrogen, and give nitrogen, and burn nitrogen? What, do you torch your money when you get it?”
“Well, some of it, yeah.”
“So both of them were trying to lose?”
“To lose?”
“To come out short in the deal?”
“Short?”
“To give more than they got?”
“Well, sure. Of course.”
“Oh, of course!” Art rolled his eyes. “But you . . . you can’t give too much more than you get, did I understand that?”
“Right. That would be potlatching.”
Nirgal watched his new friend mull this over.
“But if you always give more than you get, how do you get anything to give, if you see what I mean?”
Nirgal shrugged, glanced at Vijjika, hugged her waist suggestively. “You have to find it, I guess. Or make it.”
“Ah.”
“It’s the gift economy,” Vijjika told him.
“The gift economy?”
“It’s part of how we run things out here. There’s a money economy for the old buy-and-pay system, using units of hydrogen peroxide as the money. But most people try to do as much as they can by the nitrogen standard, which is the gift economy. The Sufis started that, and the people in Nirgal’s home.”
“And Coyote,” Nirgal added. Although, as he glanced over at his father, he could see that Art might find it hard to envision Coyote as any sort of economic theorist. At the moment Coyote was tapping madly at a keyboard beside another man, and when he lost the game they were playing he shoved the man off his pillow, explaining to everyone that his hand had slipped. “I’ll arm wrestle you double or nothing,” he said, and he and the man plonked their elbows on the table and tensed their forearms, and went at it.
“Arm wrestling!” Art said. “Now that’s something I can understand.”
Coyote lost in seconds, and Art sat down to challenge the winner. He won in seconds, and it quickly