Small Change

The buyer wanted a childhood, and Yara had two good ones left to sell.

They met under the sodium glare of the Mnemosyne Exchange, where the rain fell warm and faintly sweet. The terraforming crews had gone home with the sky still half-built, and it had rained the same tepid, chemical rain over Kestrel ever since. The buyer was corporate — softwear-pale, a courier's case cuffed to his wrist like a second hand. He gave no name. Nobody who bought memories gave a name; that was the whole architecture of the trade.

"Ages four to nine," he said. "A warm one. A mother in it, if you have a mother."

She had a mother. She could feel the shape of the woman somewhere behind her sternum, the way you feel a tooth that's gone — a socket, a tenderness, a place the tongue keeps returning to. She had sold the face years back. What was left was the socket.

"Eight hundred," she said.

"Six."

"Eight. There's a smell in it. Bread, or something close to bread. Buyers pay for smell."

He looked at her then — really looked, the way they did when they were pricing your desperation. She let him. On Kestrel desperation was just another product; you learned to display it clean, like fruit.

The first thing anyone sold was always the worst thing. That was the Exchange's small mercy and its long hook. You came in carrying something that hurt — a death, a betrayal, the precise weight of a door closing forever — and a trode no thicker than an eyelash lifted it off your neural spine, and they paid you, and for a week you walked lighter than you had ever walked in your life. You forgot to grieve because you had, quite literally, forgotten the grief.

Then the rent came due again.

And the thing about grief, Yara had learned, was that it was the only renewable resource on a dying colony. You could always make more. But joy was finite. You were born with a fixed measure of it, and every gram you sold was gone for good.

She had been saving eleven years to buy back a single afternoon.

She knew its catalogue number the way the devout know a prayer — MN-774-K, logged on a Tuesday, sold in the bad winter when the oxygen tariff tripled and her account went red and the child needed a lung-course. Sela. The child had a name; Yara had paid the surcharge to keep the name when everything else went. The lung-course cost exactly one afternoon in a green place — the only green place Yara had ever stood in, real grass under a working sky, before Kestrel.

She had sold the afternoon. She had kept the child breathing. She had told herself the arithmetic was clean.

But you cannot keep a daughter and sell the memory of her at once, not forever, because the account is always red again and the Exchange is always open and grief makes such convenient collateral. Piece by piece she had sold Sela down. A birthday. A first word. The exact weight of her asleep against a shoulder. Each time telling herself the same lullaby: I still have the real one, warm and loud and thirteen in the next room. These are only copies. Who needs the copy when the thing itself is sleeping down the hall?

The corporate buyer paid eight. The credits bloomed green in her account, greener than anything she had ever sold, and for the first time in eleven years the number climbed past the line she had been scaling her whole adult life.

Enough. Enough for MN-774-K.

She rode the lift down into the cold heart of the Exchange, where the retrieval booths waited like confessionals, and she keyed the number she had carried like a second pulse, and she set the trode to the socket behind her ear, and she bought her daughter back.

The green came first — wet, impossible, the green of a world with a finished sky. Then the small hand folding into hers. Then the face, turning up toward her —

And the face was blank.

Not dark. Not missing. Blank the way a coin goes blank when it has passed through too many hands, the die worn smooth by circulation. MN-774-K had been a good memory, a warm one, a mother-and-daughter-in-a-green-place memory, and so the Exchange had done to it exactly what the Exchange did to everything good: copied it, split it, sold it a thousand times to a thousand strangers who wanted a childhood and did not care whose. Every copy a little thinner. Every sale sanding the face down further — until what came home to her after eleven years was the shape of a daughter with no daughter left inside it.

She sat in the booth with the piped-in sound of warm rain, meant to comfort, and she tried to call up Sela's face the old way, from the meat and not the machine. She found the socket. Only the socket. The tenderness the tongue keeps returning to.

Because there was no room down the hall, and there never had been. There had been a bad winter, and an oxygen tariff, and a lung-course that one afternoon in a green place had not, in the end, been enough to buy. The warm, loud thirteen-year-old sleeping through the wall was the most expensive thing Yara had ever purchased — a comfort logged under someone else's catalogue number, jacked in on the worst night of her life so she could go on selling the real Sela down without feeling the socket where the girl had been. It had worked beautifully. It had been worth every credit. It was a lie.

Somewhere on Kestrel tonight a stranger would jack in a secondhand afternoon and feel a warmth they had no name for and no right to: a green place, a small hand, a mother's love thinned to homeopathy but still, faintly, sweet. The buyers always paid for smell.

Yara drew the trode from her ear. Her account was red again — retrieval cost precisely what the sale had paid; the Exchange was scrupulous that way. Upstairs the rain went on falling on the half-built world, warm as breath. She rose into it to make some more grief, because grief was the only thing she had left that the selling never used up.