How Dark the World Becomes

by Frank Chadwick

  “Interesting news just up on the feed,” he said by way of greeting. “Seems Rosen killed his girlfriend and then shot himself. A lot.”

  I didn’t say anything. The two kids looked at me, eyes wide, but Marfoglia just kept looking down. She’d hardly spoken—to either me or the kids—since I got her up. I’d started packing for her, but she’d wordlessly taken over and finished.

  Turncrank shrugged. “Don’t guess anyone in charge is going to ask many questions or shed many tears over him. Let’s get you squared away.”

  Turncrank helped us herd our floating luggage down the passageway to our cramped sleeping quarters—nothing like the suite on K’Pook or the shuttle, just four bunks and some lockers for our personal gear. Long Shot didn’t have a wheel, but the crew quarters and common areas were in a spin capsule that would deploy once we were under way. Gravity wasn’t a needless frill on a working ship, unless you considered bone density and cardiovascular health frills.

  The bunks weren’t set up for acceleration, so Turncrank took us to the control deck afterward and helped strap us in to four temporary acceleration couches on the rear wall of the small bridge. He especially helped Marfoglia, but he didn’t make eye contact, and he didn’t cross any lines. It’s funny where you find gentlemen.

  Captain Ping was already floating by the control consoles. Turncrank joined him when he was done with us, and they did the long preflight check. They were serious about it, and they did it as if they’d never done one before—strictly by the numbers, no fooling around, no shortcuts. You never know how professional people are until you see them at work. These two guys knew their business.

  Beside me, Marfoglia leaned over and spoke softly, so that no one else could hear.

  “In your entire life, Mr. Naradnyo, how many people have you killed?”

  “Thirteen,” I answered after a moment.

  I wasn’t expecting what came next. She gently patted my arm with her hand, a gesture of sympathy and understanding.

  “Thank you, Sasha,” she said, “for taking care of us.”

  I almost made a smart remark about the paycheck being all the thanks I needed, but a smart remark would have tasted strange in my mouth that morning, so I didn’t say anything.

  “Rakanka Prox, this is Stingray-Kilo-Oakum-zero-one-seven-seven-one-niner requesting scheduled release,” Ping said to his embedded comm link. We couldn’t hear the answer, but Ping nodded.

  “Seven-seven-one-niner, thank you, Rakanka Prox. Magnetic couplings are all locked in the off position. Awaiting out-vector.”

  We felt the gentle acceleration as Rakanka Proximity Control used the station’s servo bumpers to nudge Long Shot away from the cargo bay.

  “Seven-seven-one-niner, thank you, Rankanka Prox. I show three-zero meters separation. Do you confirm? . . . Roger. Bringing up ACTs . . . ACTs on line. Five second ACT burn . . . now.”

  We felt another gentle acceleration as Ping used the Long Shot’s attitude-control thrusters to speed us up a bit. He couldn’t use the main thruster until we were a lot farther away from the station. Unlike the C-lighters of the big commercial lines, Long Shot had its own maneuvering drive and didn’t use a Newton tug. It made it less efficient on the high-traffic runs, but a lot more versatile in the less developed systems, where there might not always be a Newton tug handy.

  Ping put our forward view on the big screen, and we watched as we coasted past the K’Pook in its parking orbit.

  “That is the ship you came in on?” Ping asked. “How was the service on the uBakaa, Incorporated line?”

  “It’s a Simki-Traak ship,” I said. uBakaa was one of the Varoki nations, not a corporation.

  “uBakaa, AZ Simki-Traak, it is all the same,” he practically spat. “Don’t believe me? Try pulling an inspection from an uBakai picket boat when you are running cargo in competition with AZ Simki-Traak Trans-Stellar—see how confused their database can get all of a sudden—and how long you will wait in orbit while they straighten it out.”

  Turncrank grunted in agreement and nodded. I just settled back in the couch. Who ever said the market was free, competition was fair, or government was honest? Not me, that’s for sure. I glanced over at Barraki, though, and his eyes had gotten a bit bigger. It’s a creepy feeling to hear someone who doesn’t know who you are talk, even indirectly, about your family, and maybe say some ugly things you don’t know anything about. He looked over at me, a question in his eyes. I just shrugged. Who the hell knows?

  About twenty minutes later we coasted across the control boundary between Rakanka Proximity and Rakanka Orbital and got the go-ahead to make our primary acceleration burn.

  “Ita mai, Rakanka-Bat,” Ping said into his comm link to the Varoki proximity controller—see you later.

  Rules were rules: all traffic instructions and replies had to be in the ship’s official language. Once we were past the control boundary, though, there was no rule against being friendly. The logic behind the language rule was sound. It was safer to make sure the controllers were fluent in the six official aerospace languages of the Cottohazz than it was to count on every single starship crew knowing another language well enough to take detailed maneuvering instructions. At least that was the theory. I’d heard that a few East Asian captains might have been more understandable in aGavoosh than English, but if so, Ping wasn’t one of them.

  Ping started the burn, and the orientation of the cabin seemed to change, the way it always did when you went from zero gee to one gee. Now we were on the “floor” and both Ping and Turncrank were on acceleration couches slung from the “ceiling” about two meters above us, with an access ladder between them on the “wall.” The hatch we’d entered was now on the “floor” to our right.

  Actually, we were pulling more than a gee. Not two gees, but I’d guess something like a gee and a quarter or more—not enough to be painful, but enough that you didn’t feel like getting up and dancing.

  “Very sorry for the extra weight,” Ping said from above us. He unstrapped and leaned over the edge of his couch to look down at us. “We have a tight jump window. We are carrying relief supplies—a lot of medicine and some hydroponic seed proteins—for K’Tok, and the government people are anxious to get them there ASAP. That’s why we got the contract instead of one of the big carriers—we can get them there quicker.”

  “Is your ship faster, Captain Ping?” Barraki asked.

  “Argh, it’s not speed we have, boyo,” he answered, reverting to his gravelly pirate voice, “it’s what I’d call a creative approach to astrogation. We’ll not be going deep out-orbit to escape Rakanka’s gravity well. Instead, we’ll be making the jump from the L-1 Lagrange point. That’ll cut five score hours off our transit time—five score hours be four days, lad.”

  “What’s a Lagrange point?” Barraki asked.

  “They be the places in a multi-body system where the gravitational attractions of the different bodies balance each other, giving you a stable orbit. It’s the L-1 point that’s important; that’s the place between two planets where the gravities actually cancel each other out, leaving a near-perfect zero-gee point,” Ping answered.

  “How many large moons does Rakanka have?” I asked. You need moons with fairly substantial gravity to get a useable L-1 point near a large gas giant.

  “Well, I suppose that depends on what you mean by large,” he answered, and gave us a big, toothy grin. “Rakanka has no stable L-1 Lagrange point, as such. But it happens there are two small moons coming into close conjunction, and we think they’ll give us enough gravity for a useable jump point.”

  We think?

  The gas giant Rakanka, two moons, and the residual gravity of Seewauk, the system primary—unless I was mistaken, that made this a four-body math problem, and as far as I knew, there wasn’t a reliable solution to the four-body problem, no matter how hot your computers were, and I said as much.

  “Aye, that be so,” Ping the pirate answered, nodding thoughtfully. “But that’s why w
e have the best gravitometer money can buy.”

  Turncrank laughed at that, which wasn’t encouraging. Ping frowned at him and then turned back to us.

  “Pay no attention to that lubber. Belike, the computers will get us close enough, and the gravitometer won’t let us go into the hole unless we’re in the green . . . or a little in the yellow.” He grinned again and shrugged.

  “And this saves us a king’s ransom in reaction mass,” he added. “All them gas scoopers back at Rakanka are Katami-owned boats, and Katami are terrible thieves—steal the coins off a dead man’s eyes, they will.” He looked at Tweezaa, repeated it in aGavoosh, and pointed to his eyes with his two index fingers while making what I guess was supposed to be a dead man’s face—his eyes crossed and tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth. Tweezaa giggled.

  * * *

  We were the only passengers on this trip, and Ping and Turncrank were the entire ship’s complement—it doesn’t take many hands to run a commercial vessel. Ping was the master, which meant pilot, astrogator, and business manager. Turncrank, the mate, was cargo master and system technician. In practice, both of them could handle each other’s jobs, but you needed two guys so you could spell each other at the controls—that way both guys could catch some sleep and some one-gee time in the spin habitat.

  There was a common room in the spin capsule, with repeaters of the important sensors, so everybody could get together for meals once in a while. First night out all six of us ate together. Turns out Ping was the cook as well as the captain, and he served a pretty good curry. Even Barraki and Tweezaa liked it, although the curry sauce was on a different protein filet for them. I don’t know how Ping knew the curry would go with that type of Varoki meat substitute—not from tasting it himself, that’s for sure.

  When we were done eating, and the small talk had died down a bit, Captain Ping looked across at Marfoglia.

  “So, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, in his “normal” voice, not Pirate Joe’s.

  “What’s that?”

  “I know what a marketing consultant does, but what does a market consultant do?”

  She shrugged at first, not out of confusion, I thought, so much as dismissal, as if it wasn’t a very important thing.

  “I explain how markets work,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “Okay,” Ping said. “Explain how markets work.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Yes, why not?” he answered, and then lapsed into his Cap’n Ping pirate voice. “Argh, but make it simple, for I be a simple man.” Then he winked at Barraki, who giggled in reply.

  “Of course you are,” she said skeptically. “Very well. It’s not hard to keep it simple, because it really is. Suppose you’ve got three farmers. One has an apple orchard, one has a peach orchard, and one has an orange grove. They all work just as hard, all have pretty much the same kind of land, each grows a quantity of fruit. But they get tired of eating the same fruit all the time, so they get together and trade fruit with each other. That’s a market.”

  “And?” Ping asked.

  “That’s pretty much it,” she answered. “There are things that can distort the market—maybe one farmer is better at bargaining, maybe one has a poor crop, but if everything’s equal, when the market gets done, every farmer ends up with the same number of apples, oranges, and peaches as every other farmer.”

  “Argh, efficient allocation of resources,” Ping said, still in his pirate voice, but she shook her head.

  “No, not necessarily. That’s not what a market does.”

  “But you said—”

  “—that the farmers all end up with the same amount of fruit. Right. That’s what a market does: it levels. And that’s all it does. It’s pretty good at leveling, but that’s not the same thing as efficiency.”

  “Aye, but in the long run . . . ,” he started, but she was shaking her head. She wasn’t kidding around anymore, either; he had her pretty solidly locked into PhD mode.

  “The market can’t read a calendar; it doesn’t know long run from short run. It has no mind of its own—it’s just the economic manifestation of a universal tendency toward stasis in systems. One room has oxygen, the next room is a vacuum. Open the door between them and the pressure equalizes. That’s not necessarily the most efficient way to allocate the oxygen, especially if the original single-room pressure was sufficient to sustain Human life and the new ambient pressure isn’t, but that’s how nature works; it levels.”

  “So you’re not one to hold with . . . the invisible hand?” Ping asked, leaning forward and saying it slowly, as if it were a secret organization of assassins.

  She chuckled.

  “Poor old Adam Smith. He’s probably the most widely quoted economist in history whom hardly anyone has actually read. The Wealth of Nations runs to hundreds of pages, and all anyone knows about it is that it talks about the invisible hand. How much does he talk about it, Captain Ping? Do you know?”

  He shook his head.

  “Once,” she answered. “In the entire Wealth of Nations, he mentions the invisible hand exactly once. One of the bedrock theses of the work—the concept that labor is the basis of any economic system, not a transactional commodity within it—is always ignored by people who want to make workers interchangeable consumable units, like ingots of steel. Instead, they invoke ‘The Invisible Hand’ as if it’s an incantation, calling forth the blessings of the Archangel Adam Smith. No, I don’t believe in the invisible hand, not the way some economists do.”

  “Aye,” Ping said after a moment, “well, forget the invisible hand, then. But the way people respond—your three farmers—that’s resource allocation, ain’t it?”

  She nodded. “Absolutely. But who says the way they respond is efficient?”

  “Well, if not, someone else comes along and takes over their farm.”

  She smiled, but shook her head.

  “You’d think so, but their efficiency is only related to meeting the demands of the market, and my point is that the demands of the market itself are not necessarily efficient. Let me give you an example. We came to Rakanka from Peezgtaan—the capital city actually, what they call Crack City. Do you know how many Humans died of deficiency diseases last year in Crack City?”

  He shrugged. How would he know? She turned to me.

  “Mr. Naradnyo?” she asked.

  “I don’t know . . . a lot.”

  “About six hundred urban poor Humans died from deficiency-related diseases last year,” she answered, “or a dietary deficiency was a significant complicating issue in their health collapse.”

  “Six hundred? That many?” the captain asked, the pirate gone from his voice.

  She nodded.

  “They should be mass synthesizing Human-specific vitamins and dietary minerals,” she went on, talking to everyone at the table, “enriching the soya paste that’s the basis for most Human-consumed protein on Peezgtaan, but they aren’t. But Human criminals are synthesizing Laugh.” She turned to me. “Why is that, Mr. Naradnyo?”

  That made me a bit uncomfortable, as you might imagine, and she must have seen it in my face. She frowned and shook her head impatiently.

  “No, this isn’t a moral question. I’m asking as an economist talking to someone who is an expert on the local economy. Why—economically—are suppliers synthesizing Laugh instead of Human vitamin complex?”

  “’Cause that’s where the money is.”

  “Yes, of course,” she agreed, and nodded vigorously, looking around the table again. There were times when she might look like a fashion model, but that wasn’t one of them. At that moment, there was nothing elegant or graceful about her mannerisms, nothing practiced about her speech. For a moment, she was an economics teacher, so absorbed by her subject that it made her geeky and almost likeable.

  “Because that’s where the money is,” she repeated, sill nodding jerkily. “But does that make Laugh more useful than vitamins, just becaus
e it’s what the money in the market is chasing? The argument that the market allocates resources efficiently presupposes that the distribution of money demand within the market is based on some rational, economically efficient model. But what if it’s not? What if, for example, it’s driven by an uncontrollable addiction?”

  She looked around to let everyone think that over for a couple seconds before going on.

  “Alternatively, what if half the money in a market is controlled by one man? That market is going to allocate a disproportionate amount of its resources to satisfying that one man’s whims, isn’t it? But what’s efficient about that?”

  “But eventually it gets leveled out, ain’t that so?” the pirate captain asked.

  “That’s what markets do; they level,” she answered, nodding again. “Here’s the problem: how did one man get all that money to start with? Not from the market. Significant disparities in wealth are never the result of pure market forces—they are the result of market distortions, and you can’t rely on market forces to level a non-market imbalance. If the market by itself could correct the imbalance, then the imbalance would not have developed in the first place, would it?”

  “Well, you lost me there,” he said. “Why can’t it correct one that just, well . . . happens?”

  “Because imbalances do not just happen; they are the result of structural constraints, either natural or artificial, which are beyond the ability of markets to change.

  “Case in point: innovation. Every advanced society we know of has made the determination, for right or wrong, that the market itself does not sufficiently reward dramatic and costly innovations. Someone comes up with an innovation, they enjoy a transitory advantage, but the pressures of the market drive everyone else to adopt the same innovation as quickly as possible and re-level the field. If the innovation was particularly difficult or costly to develop—say a new drug—the original innovator’s momentary advantage is not enough, it is argued, to justify the investment. So the market encourages many simple and inexpensive innovations, but discourages major leaps forward.