For the Win, Cory Doctorow [english novels for students .TXT] 📗

then she did kick him, the foetid water spraying off her shoe's saturated toe as it connected with his big, stupid ribcage. Something snapped in there -- maybe several somethings, and oh, didn't that feel wonderful?

He was every man who'd scared her, who'd shouted filthy things after her, who'd terrorized her mother. He was the bus driver who'd threatened to put them out on the roadside when they wouldn't pay him a bribe. Everything and everyone that had ever made her feel small and afraid, a girl from the village. All of them.

She turned around. He was clutching at his side and blubbering now, crying stupid tears on his stupid cheeks, luminous in the smudgy moonlight that filtered through the haze of plastic smoke that hung over Dharavi. She would up and took another pass at him, one step, two step, kick, and crunch, that satisfying sound from his ribs again. His sobs caught in his chest and then he took a huge, shuddering breath and howled like a wounded cat in the night, screamed so loud that here in Dharavi, the lights came on and voices came to the windows.

It was as though a spell had been broken. She was shaking and drenched in sweat, and there were people peering at her in the dark. Suddenly she wanted to be home as fast as possible, if not faster. Time to go.

She ran. Mala had loved to run through the fields as a little girl, hair flying behind her, knees and arms pumping, down the dirt roads. Now she ran in the night, the reek of the ditch water smacking her in the nose with each squelching step. Voices chased her through the night, though they came filtered through the hammer of her pulse in her ears and later she could not say whether they were real or imagined.

But finally she was home and pelting up the steps to the third-floor flat she had rented for her family. Her thundering footsteps raised cries from the downstairs neighbors, but she ignored them, fumbled with her key, let herself in.

Her brother Gopal looked up at her from his mat, blinking in the dark, his skinny chest bare. "Mala?"

"It's OK," she said. "Nothing. Sleep, Gopal."

He slumped back down. Mala's shoes stank. She peeled them off, using just the tips of her fingers, and left them outside the door. Perhaps they would be stolen -- though you would have to be desperate indeed to steal those shoes. Now her feet stank. There was a large jug of water in the corner, and a dipper. Carefully, she carried the dipper to the window, opened the squealing shutter, and poured the water slowly over the her feet, propping first one and then the other on the windowsill. Gopal stirred again. "Be quiet," he said, "it's sleep-time."

She ignored him. She was still out of breath, and the reality of what she'd done was setting in for her. She had kicked the idiot nephew -- how many times? Two? Three? And something in his body had gone crack each time. Why had he blocked her? Why had he followed her into the night? What was it that made the big and the strong take such sport in terrorizing the weak? Whole groups of boys would do this to girls and even grown women sometimes -- follow them, calling after them, touching them, sometimes it even led to rape. They called it "Eve-teasing" and they treated it like a game. It wasn't a game, not if you were the victim.

Why did they make her do it? Why did all of them make her do it? The sound of the crack had been so satisfying then, and it was so sickening now. She was shaking, though the night was so hot, one of those steaming nights where everything was slimy with the low-hanging, soupy moisture.

And she was crying, too, the crying coming out without her being able to control it, and she was ashamed of that, too, because that's what a girl from the village would do, not brave General Robotwallah.

Calloused hands touched her shoulders, squeezed them. The smell of her mother in her nose: clean sweat, cooking spice, soap. Strong, thin arms encircled her from behind.

"Daughter, oh daughter, what happened to you?"

And she wanted to tell Mamaji everything, but all that came out were cries. She turned her head to her mother's bosom and heaved with the sobs that came and came and came in waves, feeling like they'd turn her inside out. Gopal got up and moved into the next room, silent and scared. She noticed this, noticed all of it as from a great distance, her body sobbing, her mind away somewhere, cool and remote.

"Mamaji," she said at last. "There was a boy."

Her mother squeezed her harder. "Oh, Mala, sweet girl --"

"No, Mamaji, he didn't touch me. He tried to. I knocked him down. Twice. And I kicked him and kicked him until I heard things breaking, and then I ran home."

"Mala!" her mother held her at arm's length. "Who was he?" Meaning, Was he someone who can come after us, who can make trouble for us, who could ruin us here in Dharavi?

"He was Mrs Dibyendu's nephew, the big one, the one who makes trouble all the time."

Her mothers fingers tightened on her arms and her eyes went wide.

"Oh, Mala, Mala -- oh, no."

And Mala knew exactly what her mother meant by this, why she was consumed with horror. Her relationship with Mr Banerjee came from Mrs Dibyendu. And the flat, their lives, the phone and the clothes they wore -- they all came from Mr Banerjee. They balanced on a shaky pillar of relationships, and Mrs Dibyendu was at the bottom of it, all resting on her shoulders. And the idiot nephew could convince her to shrug her shoulders and all would come tumbling down -- the money, the security, all of it.

That was the biggest injustice of all, the injustice that had driven her to kick and kick and kick -- this oaf of a boy knew that he could get away with his grabbing and intimidation because she couldn't afford to stop him. But she had stopped him and she could not -- would not -- be sorry.

"I can talk with Mr Banerjee," she said. "I have his phone number. He knows that I'm a good worker -- he'll make it all better. You'll see, Mamaji, don't worry."

"Why, Mala, why? Couldn't you have just run away? Why did you have to hurt this boy?"

Mala felt some of the anger flood back into her. Her mother, her own mother --

But she understood. Her mother wanted to protect her, but her mother wasn't a general. She was just a girl from the village, all grown up. She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to become, someone who ran from her attackers because she couldn't afford to anger them.

She wouldn't do it.

No matter what happened with Mr Banerjee and Mrs Dibyendu and her stupid idiot nephew, she was not going to become that person.

This

scene is dedicated to Borders, the global bookselling giant that

you can find in cities all over the world -- I'll never forget

walking into the gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in Singapore and

discovering a shelf loaded with my novels! For many years, the

Borders in Oxford Street in London hosted Pat Cadigan's monthly

science fiction evenings, where local and visiting authors would read

their work, speak about science fiction and meet their fans. When I'm

in a strange city (which happens a lot) and I need a great book for

my next flight, there always seems to be a Borders brimming with

great choices -- I'm especially partial to the Borders on Union

Square in San Francisco.

Borders

worldwide

If you want to get rich without making anything or doing anything that anyone needs or wants, you need to be fast.

The technical term for this is arbitrage. Imagine that you live in an apartment block and it's snowing so hard out that no one wants to dash out to the convenience store. Your neighbor to the right, Mrs Hungry, wants a banana and she's willing to pay $0.50 for it. Your neighbor to the left, Mr Full, has a whole cupboard full of bananas, but he's having a hard time paying his phone bill this month, so he'll sell as many bananas as you want to buy for $0.30 apiece.

You might think that the neighborly thing to do here would be to call up Mrs Hungry and tell her about Mr Full, letting them consummate the deal. If you think that, forget getting rich without doing useful work.

If you're an arbitrageur, then you think of your neighbors' regrettable ignorance as an opportunity. You snap up all of Mr Full's bananas, then scurry over to Mrs Hungry's place with your hand out. For every banana she buys, you pocket $0.20. This is called arbitrage.

Arbitrage is a high-risk way to earn a living. What happens if Mrs Hungry changes her mind? You're stuck holding the bananas, that's what.

Or what happens if some other arbitrageur beats you to Mrs Hungry's door, filling her apartment with all the bananas she could ever need? Once again, you're stuck with a bunch of bananas and nowhere to put them (though a few choice orifices do suggest themselves here).

In the real world, arbitrageurs don't drag around bananas -- they buy and sell using networked computers, surveying all the outstanding orders ("bids") and asks, and when they find someone willing to pay more for something than someone else is paying for it, they snap up that underpriced item, mark it up, and sell it.

And this happens very, very quickly. If you're going to beat the other arbitrageurs with the goods, if you're going to get there before the buyer changes her mind, you've got to move faster than the speed of thought. Literally. Arbitrage isn't a matter of a human being vigilantly watching the screens for price-differences.

No, arbitrage is all done by automated systems. These little traderbots rove the world's networked marketplaces, looking for arbitrage opportunities, buying something and selling it in less than a microsecond. A good arbitrage house conducts a billion or more trades every day, squeezing a few cents out of each one. A billion times a few cents is a lot of money -- if you've got a fast computer cluster, a good software engineer, and a blazing network connection, you can turn out ten or twenty million dollars a day.

Not bad, considering that all you're doing is exploiting the fact that there's a person over here who wants to buy something and a person over there who wants to sell it. Not bad, considering that if you and all your arbitraging buddies were to vanish tomorrow, the economy and the world wouldn't even notice. No one needs or wants your "service" but it's still a sweet way to get rich.

The best thing about arbitrage is that you don't need to know a single, solitary thing about the stuff you're buying and selling in order to get rich off of it. Whether it's bananas or a vorpal blade, all you need to know about the things you're buying is that someone over here wants to buy them for more than someone over there wants to sell them for. Good thing, too -- if you're closing the deal in less than a microsecond, there's no time to sit down and google up a bunch of factoids about the merchandise.

And the merchandise