Nathan Lowell - Quarter Share

The lunch set up went off without a hitch and Cookie breezed in just before noon. “Thank you, young Ishmael. Sometimes you just have to get out and about. I feel much better and you’ve done an excellent job.” He patted me on the shoulder.

“My pleasure, Cookie. It was fun.” I brought him up to speed on the lunch status.

Pip came in for a bowl of soup just before lunch prep was over with a smug look. “I found the dyes.”

“Did you buy any?”

He shook his head. “I found that thing you were missing.”

“What was it?”

“The dyes I found here came from the Erehwon Dyeworks on St. Cloud.”

We laughed. “That’s what I was missing. I bet they have roots and berries and such to dye their own wool.”

Pip shook his head. “Snails.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, apparently when processed they yield a really rich purple. There’s also a red and a black version. That’s in addition to the plant-based dyes.”

“So, what do we take?”

Pip shrugged. “We play it safe or we play it out. We’re out of here tomorrow afternoon. Whatever we get, we have to buy it today. Safe, we go with just the ten buckles, or maybe just a few more. Or we can fill up the mass with buckles and hope they like them as much there as we do here.”

I sighed. “You know, neither of those really appeals to me. What we need is something small that we can buy a lot of cheaply here that we can sell there at twice the price without costing an arm and a leg.”

Pip got a funny look then and fished in his pocket. “Like these?” He tossed three smooth stones onto the table. There were both flattened and round stones in natural looking, circular shapes. One looked like quartz with a silvery mineral threaded delicately through it. The second one was a rich blue that looked like the stone on Beverly’s belt buckle so it was probably lapis. The last one was a lustrous black with a fine texture showing through the polish. None of them was more than three centimeters across. Each had a hole bored widthwise through the top. They looked like the accent stones on Neubert’s necklaces. I picked up one and didn’t want to put it down. The stone slid smoothly under my fingers as I rubbed it.

“Where’d you find these?”

“A guy back in the gem aisle had a booth. Just him and a couple of buckets full. They were three for a cred and I liked the way they felt.”

“How many of them do you think it would take to mass a kilo?”

Pip grinned. “A lot. These three averaged ten grams each.”

“Can you find him again? Because I think you found something here.”

“Yeah, how many do we want?”

“Let’s go with the ten buckles for the belts, twenty buckles extra. That leaves us, what? About six kilos?”

Pip nodded. “Something like that.”

“Two kilos of these would work out to about two hundred of them. The actual income isn’t very large but the margin is potentially pretty big.”

Pip shrugged. “Let’s go all six kilos. It’s not going to take that many creds so if we get stuck and need the mass we can just toss ’em.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said excitedly. “Let’s do it.”

Pip nodded and headed back out to finish the trading.

With Cookie back in the galley and lunch all ready, there wasn’t much for me to do and I had the afternoon clean up done almost as soon as lunch ended. Cookie planned a spicy beefalo dish for dinner and he began humming as he puttered around the galley. I pulled up a stool and watched for a time but he waved me off. “Go, young Ishmael. You didn’t get a break this morning, and I can certainly handle making a small batch of this by myself.” He smiled at me, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Thank you again for doing such an excellent job with the morning duty.”

“My pleasure, Cookie. I’m glad you got some time in port. Any time I can help like that, you know I’m always willing.”

“You’re a good shipmate, young Ishmael. Lois is happy to have you aboard.”

I chuckled. “I’m going for a run and a sauna then.”

He pursed his lips in question. “No environmental this afternoon?”

I shook my head. “I’ve taken enough of their time lately.”

Cookie chuckled. “I heard-sludge duty.”

“And algae! Don’t forget the algae.”

He laughed and waved as I left him humming over his sizzling beefalo.

I ran three extra laps beyond my normal workout. My wind had gotten much better and the extra exertion felt good. The showers sluiced off the grime and I had the sauna to myself. It felt odd. I enjoyed not having to share, but it seemed empty without the good-natured banter that usually filled the room along with the steam. Afterward I stretched out in my bunk and went back to reading up on being a steward. The quarterly exams were just a few weeks off.

At 16:00 I went back to the mess deck to help Cookie set up the dinner buffet. I could smell the spiced beefalo all the way from the berthing area and it made me drool. I suspected the dinner turnout would be better than usual. I was right. About halfway through, Pip showed up wearing his shipsuit and a big grin. We didn’t have time to talk until we’d secured from dinner, but he came to help me clean up after.

Cookie eyed his jaunty grin. “Judging from your smile, your trading went well.”

Pip grinned even wider. “Very well, indeed.” He turned to me. “Ingo gave us thirty buckles all at ten, so three hundred creds and just under six kilos. There’s some serious upside potential there. The rock guy was surprised that we’d want to buy them by the kilo, but he had a ton of them so he was happy to unload some. He gave me as many as I wanted for five creds a kilo. I bought the six we agreed to.”

I blinked, trying to do the math in my head. “You got about six hundred of them for thirty creds?”

He nodded. “Twenty per cred. The total upside is nothing to write home about, but even at a cred a piece on St. Cloud, the margins are huge.”

“I’ll take six hundred creds. That’s more than the salary and share I got for the Margary leg.”

“Yeah, but you have to split it with me. Even so it’s really good.”

Margary System

2352-January-15

We pulled out of Margary right on time. The captain scheduled it for just after dinner, so we didn’t have to make bento-boxes. Always thinking, Cookie called the captain and offered to distribute coffee and cookies at 21:00. That was about halfway through the evolution and a lot of bleary-eyed spacers who’d celebrated port-side until the last possible tick appreciated the pick-me-up.

Around 22:30 we set the normal watch and I could almost hear Lois sigh as we settled into the familiar routine of sailing between the stars. It didn’t often strike me, this romantic notion that we were out here in our little ship spreading our sails to catch the solar wind, but when it did I remembered a snatch of ancient poetry that my mother used to recite to me. It was a kind of lullaby she used when tucking me in. “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky. And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,” I mumbled to myself as I drifted off to sleep.

Pip and I convened what we were calling a steering committee on the first day out of Margary and invited Beverly, Diane, Francis, Rhon, and Biddy. We agreed that the finances should come as part of a sales fee, and most liked the one-percent capped at ten creds. Biddy wanted the cap at twenty and Francis wanted five because she only wanted to cover expenses, and not build up reserves. In the end, we decided on ten because it provided some contingency funding and we didn’t really know how much we’d need as startup. Diane provided the deciding argument. “You’ll have less opposition if you decide to reduce the rate than if you try to raise it.” Nobody had anything to dispute that so we left it at ten.