Trade Secret

by Sharon Lee

  “Say what?” asked the man, laughing, lips and mouth showing as he spoke. “Do you say that my new friend the trader has never seen a real beard?” He offered a huge hand, and it took Jethri a moment to recall his Terran duties, and reach to clasp it.

  “I’m Jay Dorster. Got a card here for you, so you won’t forget me.”

  The joke was in the words, for how could any who met him forget such a man?

  Jethri took the finely made card, saw the Jay Rivenkid Dorster, Esquire in bold type and even bolder the words Trade Law Specialist.

  “Thank you sir,” he managed, I’m Jethri Gobelyn ven’Deelin . . .”

  The big man waved his hands. “Sit. You make me tired standing there!”

  Jethri managed a bow and a thank you and found the center seat by touch as the big man sat. The beard stretched almost to his belly and Jethri needed to look up to see him clearly for all that they were sitting across from one another.

  “So, possession problems, eh? Often the way things happen when you loan things out to a third party, so I guess you’ll learn that from this little situation.”

  The big man hummed to himself as he went though a stack of paper notes, face bobbing in time to his own tune.

  “So, we got some info from Elthoria and Ixin. Makes it complicated, this Liaden side of things. Your man ter’Astin, I have his note as well, and he’s clear that there’s a mess, but before I go any further, tell me it’s true that you’re a Gobelyn because you’re Commissioner Arin Gobelyn’s git.”

  Still the same question! Could he never get beyond his father? Jethri gathered himself, the attribution of ter’Astin as his “man” unsettling as it was both misleading and appropriate.

  “Yes, it is true, sir.” He manfully put aside the Liaden protocols, thought of his father being official, tried to sit firmly and honorably in front of this force of nature. “I . . .”

  “Of course it’s true! Couldn’t be anyone but him stamp that face on a kid, but you musta heard that a million times squared. Sorry he left us so soon—had a good head on his shoulders.” The shaggy head shook sadly a moment, then said, piercing gray eyes suddenly bright beneath bushy brows, “Do you?”

  Against training, Jethri smiled, and then shrugged, formality shattered by the man across the desk top.

  “The proof’s not in on that, sir,” he admitted, which drew a laugh and a snap of the fingers.

  “Now I see, couldn’t place your accent, but that’s ship Liaden I’m hearing playing with the looper, yes it is. Guess eventually there’ll be more young traders talking with that . . .”

  Jethri suppressed the shrug this time, managed, “I’m the experiment, I guess. If it works . . .”

  The big head nodded, ringlets shaking their way out of the hair momentarily and disappearing.

  “One more question before we really start—how’d you pick up a Liaden berth, you coming from the Market? Was that a . . .”

  “I was looking for a ship,” Jethri said with some asperity, “because I was a redundant. ‘Just taking up oxygen’, the captain told one of the crew, and me. I did a turndown when the captain pointed me to an opening with one of her age-friends. Did some business that got the attention of Master Trader ven’Deelin and since I was looking for off-ship, and she had a trader berth to fill, it worked out.”

  “Redundant, eh? Well don’t I know about that? That’s what happened to me,” Dorster said reminiscently, leaning back and letting his head touch the wall while the seat he pushed back groaned, just a little. “I was on the Floydada out of Trustee, with my mother being nav officer and backup pilot, but we could all see it coming—I was getting to be too much to feed, and wasn’t a berth on board that would take me unless I folded up—I was sleeping in a chair. We got here, in fact, to Balfour, and they made it plain—fourteen or forty, I wasn’t flying with them no more.”

  He laughed then, booming voice shaking the books on the wall. “They figured Vania would set me off to school and she’d fly, but they hadn’t checked with her, and she left them on the tarmac, started a nav tutoring service. Served them right, I say. They picked up someone that Olaf-crashed them on Bumsted very next trip. Them Gorins—that’d been when your ship was still doing the north center I think . . .”

  A shake of the head—“Well after that, I got schooling and a specialty ’cause I knew about ships and stuff. What happened after you got left off?”

  “After? I . . .”

  Jethri paused, looking for the right phrase to cover the rather awkward fact of his having two mothers these days. “After that, turned out there were protocol issues and extra training being needed—on account of culture differences. I got myself in some melant’i trouble that might have been fatal, and that got solved by bringing me in-clan, to Ixin. The only way they could make it stick was to make me a son of the clan.”

  Dorster listened intently. A rolling hand motion encouraged Jethri to go on . . .

  “Likely next time there’s a Terran riding trader for Liadens, if there is one, it ought to be a swap—even up—with a bit more experience all the way around, and a few more rules established.”

  The beard shivered as Dorster nodded quickly.

  “Yes, yes, by damn! Someone should have done that a bunch of Standards ago. Ought to be a protocol, not just for trade, but for mixing traders! Well now, that gives me a—hold on!”

  He raised his head, shouted out the door: “Vania, I need a new folder made up, dated today. Two of them. One’s got this fellow’s name on it. The other, call it—umm . . . wait.”

  A large hand disappeared beneath the beard and the bright eyes closed for several seconds, opening about the time the mouth did to say, “Here it is Van, other new file, dated today, is Mixed Trader Swap Protocol Proposals; I’ll need that crossed to . . . whatever it gets crossed to plus I’ll have notes later, remind me!

  “Now, what happened that’s got one of these scouts playing taxi driver for a Gobelyn? Why’s there property rights in it? I’ll be clear with you: this is confidential, but I may need room to work. Just asking some questions is enough to—well, you know how it works, right? Once you ask someone where you are, they start to want to know where you’re going or where you come from. Asking a question is a wave with ripples. But before you start on the property, the rest of the questions I have up front are . . .”

  * * *

  Most of the up-front questions were simple, made harder by Dorster’s intent eyes. The man watched as if everything Jethri said was in doubt, and demanded to see all the ID he had on him.

  “My name will go on documents for you, my signature, and me and my good name is what may stand between you and being in jail someday. So tell me and show me what I ask and we may be able to solve problems so they won’t happen, heh?

  “And so, my friend, for the record, there is something not clear here—we need a date for your birth!”

  Jethri felt an odd dread. “A date?”

  “Yes, you know, one day you were connected to your mother’s support systems and then, spank-a-whop! Out you were launched into the cold and dangerous universe, untethered, to eat and breathe and make noises on your own. That day—we must add it to some documents.”

  Jethri gave him the ship-year.

  “A day. The single day, if you will!”

  Jethri sighed, repeated the ship-year, finally recalling the most uncelebrated day on his so-called birth ship.

  “Ship day two hundred and twelve,” Jethri said, adding as carefully as he could, “That’s day two hundred and twelve, ship cycle one seventeen, that’s what my father specified, and that’s what we celebrated, until he died.”

  Dorster blinked. “But when you were added to the rolls—at what port? They should have got you on the roster . . .”

  “I think, you see, they didn’t add me to roster immediately—I found out after . . .”

  Dorster smiled. “I guess so. I do guess so.”

  Jethri suppressed his grimace and let the blush go . . . �
��Ship habit, sir. Not until I got my name . . . so it was sometime before I went on roster.”

  “Ah—right, I forget. Are you crew or are you passenger, eh? Well I know that, too!”

  The big man tapped his fingers on the desk, Jethri’s IDs in front of him.

  “I see, well, then. A lifetime of ship-time, and not on planet long enough to get a homeworld? And there’s space-time, Jump—they make things a little harder for us, my friend, and on some worlds it matters by day count, on others by date count to some silly local event. So we must be able to provide if you are sixteen Standards or sixty. Somewhere there should be a cross-reference for you—was your name announced in a bulletin somewhere? When were you first listed on a crew manifest, with birth info?”

  “Not sure we did really, the birth date thing. They just listed me as adult crew a few years ago when I started doing out-ship assists—gave me a crew card and that was it.”

  “Do you have that card?”

  “You hold the ID I carry.”

  “Ah, so Elthoria, which is not on port, will admit of you? Well, that is useful, not very! You will always need to remember, spacer, that you ought to have ID with current relationship to a planet or a port of power!”

  Jethri considered. “Keravath’s key—do you suppose that’s enough of an ID?”

  “Well, here, here in this office, it is enough ID—I know who you are for I was expecting you, and it matches Elthoria’s information. We must get you a permanent card, and we must do it before you leave. You can’t be out and about on worlds without a ship to back you up unless you have good ID. As it happens, I’m certified.”

  In the end, with cross-checking trade lists, they came up with what Dorster allowed was an acceptable haibinja, a date they could call his own start date without math-and-calc reference all the way back to his zero-day.

  Then, the hard part, explaining the promises the Scout had made, and the thing with the fractins . . .

  “Here, of course, right here on Balfour, you can find yourself your body weight and times ten, too, in fractins if you want ’em—you can’t recycle the things and you can’t just dump ’em in a pile because they’ll still be there in a hundred years if you dig them back up. There’s still the whispers that somehow some way, they might do something!”

  “Yessir, I know that. The one I had, it was my lucky piece. The other thing, that was in a pile of stuff I inherited. Arin might have been able to teach me how to use it, but the Scouts were sure of themselves and—by Liaden rules, anyhow—the Befores were in their custody, and so they went to them. The book, though, that was mine—I wrote in it, and so did Arin, and that was to come back and be returned, no question.”

  “Sure,” the big man said. “There’s lots to work with, I think. Just got to find the right orbits . . .”

  Dorster stretched in his overworked chair, making it creak once more, his hand disappearing under his beard and reappearing fingers first as he ruminated, then slowly moving his head until it covered his ear. The eyes still looking elsewhere, the hand moved across the busy mustache, came to rest over the nose and half across the eyes as he made a slow humming noise.

  This went on until Dorster stood without warning—

  “Come on. You’re shipfolk—let me get you some ’mite while I do a bit of research. Won’t be long at all, I think. Not too long, anyway. And Vania, she’ll get your docs together so we can get you out of here straight as Pythagoras when the time comes.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Keravath, on Port, Balfour

  Jethri was still looking at the screens, the datastick in his inner pocket something he ought probably to share with the Scout. He had some points to make, and some questions to ask. Some of the questions were easy, and some were not.

  Too, he’d had to make a decision and sign his name, and hand over live coin from his own pocket. There’d been a melant’i play in his head over that—the question of was he Terran now, or Liaden, and he’d made his choice that he was Jethri and needed to be covered wherever he was, like Dorster said.

  The being covered wasn’t as easy as it should have been though, on account that Iza never had done all that she should have when Arin died. She had neglected it on purpose, possibly, or just overlooked it. It was simple, really—with Arin gone, Jethri should have had a vouch-home, but Iza hadn’t really done that, had not put him on the ship’s roster as full crew even after he was trading, had not certified him on New Carpathia—where the ship was registered like most of the loop ships—had not even certified him as Terran, hadn’t set up a proper chain of succession for his goods and rights in case he died, hadn’t . . .

  So now, besides being Jethri Gobelyn ven’Deelin doing business as Jethri Gobelyn, he was back-certified a Terran, on account of his father’d been certified and had Commission records so Jethri had a history that didn’t depend entirely on the good will of Khat and Paitor, him counting no will at all in Iza’s direction.

  Paitor’d bought him a ten-year trade key based on his good work on the trade that got the refit going for Gobelyn’s Market, but the key was for Jethri Gobelyn—so he had to keep that straight. On the other hand, to be able to face Liadens in court—even a Terran court— he’d have to be on record as being a clan member. That status was easy enough to prove, because it had been published in The Gazette at Solcintra, Liad, a kind of combination gossip sheet and newspaper of record for Liaden clans. All of this was now certified here on Balfour.

  Certified records were trackable and being certified Terran, as he’d done first, meant he could buy a fall-back, which he’d also done. Worse came to worst, he could now stick Homeport, Waymart, on any record that needed it and that gave him law-jawing rights based on Waymart laws if he needed them—wherever he needed them—which he did, if there was any hope of getting the Balance they were working on fixed.

  The trick was, he’d retained Dorster for himself. So he had, now, seven different tracks of what to do if and when they came face-to-face with the miscreants, and four of those tracks up for settling in the morning with his meeting—well, their meeting, since he’d need the Scout to be witness and do some swearing, too, at the hearing.

  Now he just needed to explain all of that to ter’Astin, who still wasn’t back. Sitting in the second chair he felt the circulation kick up a notch. Right, the storms coming through often meant temperature changes. He knew something about weather from his time on Irikwae so if it was getting warmer outside, then the ship was doing right by itself. It was nosier than usual, too, which probably meant that, despite closed airlocks, it was “breathing” and filtering local air—for all he knew it might be good enough air to fill some extra tanks.

  He thought about dinner—ter’Astin had told him to expect fresh food coming in, but he was getting short in the stomach fuse department—and sighed gustily as he stretched, glancing over the board, seeing familiar lights in the right spots, switches where they belonged, screens large and small.

  He stood, planning on changing out of the trade clothes he’d worn to the mall, his eyes drifting back over some anomaly in front of him.

  He’d almost figured it out when he heard ter’Astin’s tone ring, indicating that he’d started the airlock cycling. The Scout wasn’t one to run with both sides of an airlock open at the same time, like some family ships might on world; the interlocks were not to be messed with—one door open at a time was the rule. The outer lock closed and pressure equalized—that’s when the boards knew ter’Astin was back and the onboard line on the oxy use chart lit up.

  There it was.

  There on the housekeeping section there were three lines on the day’s oxy chart. His, the Scout’s, and crewman number three. Crew number three’s record stopped not more than five minutes ago.

  * * *

  “Have you moved beyond this area since you reboarded?”

  The food smelled delicious, but the containers remained unopened on the counter as the Scout brought his boards live and scanned Jethri’
s captured video images. He grimaced and brought up a sub-board Jethri hadn’t seen before, and his hands blurred as he ran routines . . .

  “Not at all. I was sitting here . . .”

  “Excellent,” the Scout allowed, “Please take your board again; we have a lot of work to do.”

  There were twin thunks behind them then, and the young trader realized the pressure doors separating the tiny flight deck from the tiny berths had been activated, effectively locking those. Could there be a stowaway?

  As Jethri sat, the Scout called the tower, requesting a feed of recent area scans, asking if there were comm feeds pending, if it was the habit of Maintenance to wander through ship-zone without being asked and offering to supply a copy . . .

  “You, Jethri,” the Scout said, barely glancing at him as he was now balancing three ship-to-shore conversations, “will run a check of the airlock records for the last ship-day, and match open and closing records against your own movements and against those of mine you know. Compare them with the pressure and usage charts you’ll find for the cabin, as well, and if you select these controls—” Here Jethri’s main screen lit up file areas he’d never thought to investigate.

  “It is well of you to inquire if we have added crew, and admire that you noticed the added crew mark. Keravath rarely travels with three aboard, and if you will bring those usage records forward when you have them—we can check the sealing and unsealing of the berths as well, in the drop-downs.

  “Yes, thank you. It is very wise of you to have the operating cameras on rotation, if I may say so, and would appreciate that as hardcopy as soon as possible. As well, perhaps you will be able to identify this person from our records, then, which I transmit.”

  Jethri matched the timelines on the outer lock, saw his own exit and return reflected clearly, and assumed the second exit of the day was ter’Astin, and knew, too which one was the Scout’s return. Within very few moments of ter’Astin’s exit there was another outer lock usage . . .