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appropriate marriage to an
American
refugee, a former Floridian, who spoke as little as possible about her previous means of support while adventuring through the high life and low spots of the Green world’s playgrounds.
    Eric, too, enjoyed this palmy lifestyle, until the age of nineteen, when a consortium of Ukrainian wheat syndics got together the financing to purchase a string of cloud-cover generators in an attempt to restore the viability of their farmlands.
    This was moderately successful from the point of view of the Ukrainian wheat syndics, but the usual unforeseen side effects elsewhere, in this case a lowering of the temperature and a return of snowfall to certain parts of the Carpathians, were disastrous to the Esterhazy family fortune.
    Dad’s way of dealing with this altered economic reality was to drink enough booze and do enough drugs—toward the end on credit—to insure that he wouldn’t be around to face the eventual music.
    Leaving Mom and Eric with a small mountain of debt to some less than sympatico people.
    But Mom was a survivor. Mom was not about to give up her lifestyle. Mom had connections. Mom could get a twenty-year-old with no apparent marketable skills work.
    Mom, it turned out when push came to shove, was an honorably inactivated citizen-shareholder in Bad Boys, and with old lovers well placed in the syndic.
    Well placed enough to get her son in.
    Chez Mom, Bad Boys may have been formed by elements of the Russian and Italian mafias, Oriental triads, Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, and assorted other less than punctiliously legal operations, but under a righteous syndic charter that not only required that all its enterprises now be legal within the sovereignty in which they were practiced, but that forbade the hiring of wage slaves and granted all Bad Boys operatives down to the lowliest field hand in a coca plantation citizen-shareholder status.
    Bad Boys was no more “Bad” than the “Boys” who ran it were callow adolescents. Indeed, according to possibly apocryphal syndic lore, the name in the original draft of the syndic charter had been “Wild Boys” until a literarily sophisticated citizen-shareholder who had read the twentieth-century novel had pointed out that this had certain undesirable homoerotic references.
    Many Bad Boys enterprises were no shadier than high-risk, high-profit operations that required pocket politicians, legislative adjustments, and forceful persuasion to succeed. Much of the rest involved the marketing of goods and services—produced in small sovereignties where they had been made legal—in major markets where they werenot, well, not exactly, well, we wouldn’t be the Bad Boys if we didn’t bend our charter a little when necessary. . . .
    Bad Boys wasn’t some gang ruled by cigar-smoking godfathers or a predatory capitalist corporation owned by cigar-chomping plutocrats; it was a proper syndicalist democracy with a board of directors elected by its citizen-shareholders.
    And, moreover, the syndic was as Green as it got; if they knew how, Bad Boys would turn the whole planet into one big endless tropical summer playground for the enjoyment of everyone, since, after all, most of their profits came from some sort of leisure trade.
    “The godsons of Robin Hood and Jesse James and the Buccaneers, crusading against evil nationalism and revenant capitalism and for this balmy green lifestyle as we would like to continue to know it, now wouldn’t we, Eric?” Mom told him when he seemed less than entirely enthused. “Or maybe you got a better idea, kiddo?”
    Well, this certainly had its romantic appeal to a kid whose alternatives were nothing he cared to contemplate, and so Eric signed the Bad Boys charter, accepted his shares, and began his career at the bottom, gophering for middle management around Europe.
    After a while, no doubt under the prodding of Mom, the powers that be were given to realize that Eric’s family Eurotrash background gave