Vend
The Geslyon Transport Union was a fascinating glimpse behind the curtains of interstellar commerce.
For one, it was a local outfit, one of several. They covered contracts moving goods between Cammo-Caddo and Mogh, and contracts shipping between Mogh and the Casti homeworld system, Onnat.
Economics and politics were not my strong points, but I was decently confident communism and capitalism were at least somewhat opposing ideologies.
And Transport Unions like Geslyon made me really confused, because they seemed to be aggressively embodying traits of both.
Because one minute, I’d hear them talking about underbidding their competition in a cutthroat race to secure work. Then the next minute, I’d hear them talking about the collective workers’ ownership of the union, and how they could coordinate with their rival transport union if the suppliers on Cammo-Caddo got too tight fisted.
I was pretty sure I caught Casti words for ‘bourgeoise’ and ‘armed workers’ a few times in the background, but I couldn’t be sure my translation was accurate.
But fascinating as it might have been, we weren’t talking to them about the finer points of their management.
We weren’t even here for their money (that would be tomorrow).
“We’re still waiting on our ship from South Pavings,” the worker said. “They’re bringing a crew of forty, we can’t cover our operations until they get here.”
“We’re not here about the seminar,” Nai said. “This trip is mostly unrelated.”
“You backing out on us?” the Casti asked, unsure if he should be upset.
“No, we’re here looking for information,” Nai said. “Your union covers a lot of void and hears a lot of radio. You might have heard something about some people we’re looking for.”
“I thought you were a Coalition transport outfit, small scale,” the Casti frowned.
“We’re not funded consistently,” Nai said. “Have to pay the bills somehow while we look for these people.”
The Casti’s eyes drifted to me.
“I take it this one is…not unrelated to who you’re looking for?”
“[Gee,] how’d you guess?” I deadpanned. “Have you heard the Organic Authority’s advisory?”
“We keep up on our vaccinations, but that’s about all the contact we have with the Org,” the Casti said. “But, yeah, we’ve heard some gossip about the new First Contact. Didn’t think any of it was substantiative until seeing you. Actually, even then most of it’s probably swill.”
“We’re looking for abductees,” I said. “I didn’t get out into these parts of the void by choice. Someone yanked me and a lot of other humans out here, but they didn’t do a very good job and we’re scattered to every corner of every star system from here to Kraknor. I’m trying to track down my fellow abductees.”
“You want to know if we know where your kin are,” the Casti confirmed.
“Or if you know someone who might,” I nodded.
“It’s one thing to ask us, but reaching out to other unions and producers isn’t always that simple. If, and I mean if, we knew something, it could affect our bottom line. So, I can’t give you an answer right now. It’s something we’d need to take to a vote.”
“I understand,” I nodded. It wasn’t an unexpected response. We’d heard similar things from a dozen other transport unions on Sidar.
“We have some ship profiles to share,” Nai said, handing over a computer drive with blueprints of Nora’s abduction ships. “If you can just add them to your internal registry, we’d appreciate it. And if you run into any of the abductees in the future, point them our direction.”
“I think I can promise that, at least,” the Casti clicked, taking the drive. “The union will have a quorum tomorrow when our ship arrives, so we’ll bring it to a vote then. Get back to you when we do this ‘psionics’ thing?”
“Thanks for the consideration,” I nodded.
The Casti withdrew back into the hangar Geslyon leased on the station, and we started making our way back to our own digs.
“…I think they know something,” Nai said.
“They might. They operate dozens of ships right? Could be they don’t know if their comm logs have anything relevant in them.”
“Maybe…” she said. “But I think they would have said so if they weren’t sure. I think they have something valuable enough, they need to hold a vote to determine how much they’ll charge for it.”
“Should I have mentioned about how we abductees are mostly kids?” I asked. “…Or would they still charge for help rescuing kids?”
“Depends on how the vote goes,” Nai said.
“So it’ll come down to exactly how much their profit margins are impacted?”
“Not if the workers vote their conscience,” she said. “They might vote to help us even if it cuts into their bottom line a bit.”
“Great,” I said sarcastically. “Well, here’s hoping they surprise me.”
We walked to the hangar the Organic Authority had rented for our seminar. We wouldn’t be needing the whole space until tomorrow, but for today it made as good a place as any to conduct our Adept business.
“You two ready?” Nerin asked as we walked inside.
“Yep. Got the docs for us?” Nai replied.
“Let’s be honest, the docs are all for you,” I said. I didn’t have a grasp of complex organic Adeptry like Nai did. Even if she technically didn’t have the precision to pull it off, she still understood the concepts far better than I.
“Not like it’ll matter who they’re for once we’re Coalesced,” Nai said.
Neither Nai or I missed her sister’s awkward half-shuffle step at the mention of Coalescence. But we pretended not to see.
Nerin wasn’t thrilled with the idea of her sister fusing minds with someone, but she was trying to be reasonable instead of overprotective. It would have been rude to call attention to that with other people around.
Dyn and Deg were present in the hangar too, but every non-Adept here was just watching. I didn’t miss that Serral had put all four of the Jack’s Farnata crew members on our Adept work while the Casti stayed with the ship and talked to local authorities about humans.
It reminded me of something Tasser had told me: who would expect non-Casti to bend to Casti conventions?
Was Serral trying to circumvent problems by putting forward more Farnata faces alongside mine?
“Hey,” Nai said, snapping her fingers in front of me nose. “I’ve got the design. You ready to give this a go, or what?”
“Trial run,” I agreed, spinning up my superconnector.
Nai held out her hand and I swatted at it.
The moment our palms touched I stopped being just Caleb Hane, and she quit being just Nai Cal-Yan-Ti. A connection between our minds flared to life, and we fought to differentiate ourselves.
Our consciousnesses split into a million different parallel thoughts, and any one specific exchange became lost in the noise of all the rest.
It took us a few seconds to begin working, and while the connection stabilized I tried to follow a few tangents to help differentiation come along.
Review our goals, keep references consistent, I thought to my selves.
No. Not selves.
Just self. Keep those self-references self-referential. I was Caleb. Psionic extraordinaire, middling Adept, and illiterate in xeno-finance.
Yeah. I could focus on that.
As much trouble as I was having getting a handle on alien money, equally difficult and even more important was understanding what was valuable about Adeptry.
If you thought about it, Adept creations were something straight out of a faerie tale. Like the carriage turning back into a pumpkin at midnight, Adept constructs vanished back into nothing when they ran out of energy to hold themselves together.
Indelible Adept creations became valuable just by sticking around long enough, but that was a double-edged sword. Make something stick around long enough and no one needed to pay you to make it a second time.
Not only that, making a creation last more than a couple hours usually involves a process most Adepts casually referred to as ‘tying off’. One half of that process was deciding exactly how long the creation would persist. The longer something was scheduled to exist, the more energy it would need on the front end. But the math on that was very favorable; once something started existing it didn’t take much energy to keep it that way. Doubling the lifespan of a creation generally wouldn’t take even a hundredth of the initial investment.
No, if you were selling your work, it was the second half of tying off that you needed to focus on: separating it from yourself. Anyone buying an Adept creation would have the same concern: what if the Adept just dematerialized the creation after you paid?
Tying off a creation meant investing all the requisite energy into the creation and subsequently removing your ability to dematerialize it. Showing that the creation for sale was truly tied off was insurance against Adept fraud.
Nai was very good at the latter. Whatever inspiration had led her to Vorpal Fire, she understood energy transfer and diffusion on a deeper level. She could load absurd quantities of energy into her creations. I had little doubt that she could materialize something to last hundreds of years even without anchoring it in existing matter.
She was not so precise in determining exactly how long those creations would last, especially on the shorter side.
But teaching Nora Adeptry had seen me learn some tricks too. She and her campers had been forced to clothe seventy people with Adeptry for months. That much practice dialing in precise lifespans for every shirt, pair of pants, and much more had taught Nora a few tricks which she’d shared in turn with me.
Between Nai’s incredible capacity and my finer control, there wasn’t a single Adept alive who could match our combined skills.
We bucked against my superconnector’s binds on reflex, but the bridge between our minds held. It was getting easier to maintain differentiation while we were Coalesced. ‘I’ could still think of myself as Caleb and ‘she’ could still hold onto the idea of herself as ‘Nai’.
Most of the time anyway.
Today we were doing pretty well though.
Differentiation was staying stable and Nai and I felt ready to inch our connection between us wider, and dip fully into Coalescence.
In my mind, atoms I didn’t have words for spun together into configurations I didn’t have the first clue about. But Nai had studied the molecular chemistry we needed. She shared her understanding of what we needed, and our focus fused further together.
Regulating both our psionic link and the Adeptry we were undertaking was tough, but it was mercifully brief. From start to finish, it didn’t take more than a minute to create the brick of material we would hopefully sell two hundred more of.
I hauled the levers of my superconnector, damming up the channel between our minds.
Snapping back into one person’s perspective immediately gave me a headache, and the images of organic molecules faded from my mind as our Coalescence ended.
It felt cheap using something so personally vulnerable for profit, but Nai and I agreed it was too valuable to pass up. Coalescence itself had made it virtually impossible for the two of us to misunderstand each other. Neither of us liked cheapening that connection for profit, but we could both swallow our distaste if it kept the Jack flying.
And if nothing else, using it like this was giving us plenty of practice to better understand exactly what Coalescence was. I was forming a theory on why Nai was the superconnector’s only viable target so far.
But psionics were just the means today. Today’s end was the brick of dark grey powder Nai and I had materialized.
The brick gave off an ozone stench that quickly filled the hangar. That was actually a good sign though.
“How do you feel like you did?” Dyn asked. He cut into the block with a small knife, carefully scraping a sample of it into a vial.
“The Adeptry was good…” Nai said.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“…but Coalescence still leaves us with mean headaches,” I said. “I don’t think the superconnector was meant to be used so briefly. It’s giving me [whiplash].”
“Well, know that you’re suffering for a good cause,” Dyn said, adding a reagent to the vial.
Nai and I had nothing to lean against while we nursed our headaches. I was even sorely tempted to just lie down on the spot. But our Cammo-Caddo clients would arrive soon.
While we waited, Dyn finished checking our test batch.
“…They’re going to have better equipment and methods than me,” he said, “but still…”
“We good?” I asked.
“Oh, yes…” he chuckled, comparing our sample to a printed graph. “Yes, this is very high purity. They should be quite happy.”
·
Not quite an hour later, our clients arrived.
Escorted by station officials ready to verify the identities of everyone present, half-a-dozen Casti wheeled four flatbed carts, only one of which already carried something.
They were dressed unexpectedly plainly, but still ununiformed. With how concerned Serral had acted, I thought they might have shown up in matching cultist’s robes.
I did, however, spy four Fiansisi square & circle emblems pinned near their collar’s or sleeve cuffs.
Even if they didn’t match outfits, they certainly all had the same professional style. Gentle pastel shaded button shirts with dark pants…filtering that look through my vague impressions of Casti society…
These guys might have been dressing like the alien equivalent of hip youth pastors. Casual in a hopefully-approachable way, and neat enough in a hopefully-respectable way that didn’t stray into corporate dress code territory.
The Doriga station staff all dressed in uniform and stayed off to one side. They were only here to oversee the deal and make sure the station got its taxes from the deal.
“Greetings,” one of Fiansisi Casti said, taking the lead. “I am Senior Fuyia, these are my associates, Lucao, Mang, Turettla, Shomam, and…”
The last Casti stepped forward to introduce herself, saying, “I am Senior Kendin. Thank you for meeting us in peace today.”
So many names…I could cheat, record them psionically in my mind, and I still knew I wouldn’t remember them tomorrow.
They sounded like they were following a formal conversant structure, but they weren’t looking at any one of us while they did so.
I stood out among our group, but I also didn’t look particularly in charge.
So it was Nai and Dyn who took point.
“You are peacefully welcome…here…today,” Dyn said, fumbling his way through the fitting response.
It seemed like it should have been a simple formality to greet them, but the sheer number of variations on just the one form of greeting was, quite frankly, stupid.
“I am Rahi Dyn, and these are Rahis Nai and Deg,” Dyn said. “And this is…Caleb Hane. Ambassador Caleb Hane?”
The Cammo-Caddo Casti traded a few subtle but unsure glances. Clarity was something everyone appreciated, right? That had to include Fiansisi, surely.
“It’s a complex situation that isn’t easily summarized in completely formal or informal terms,” I suggested. “I’d prefer no formal address though. ‘Caleb’, or ‘Caleb Hane’ will be fine.
That at least didn’t see any of them look more confused. But they didn’t look reassured either.
I thought back what Fenno had told me about Casti customs. None of what I’d said really told them anything about me.
“…thank you for your patience and understanding with me,” I said giving an awkward little bow. “Meeting new aliens is rarely easy: believe me, I know.”
That seemed to soften a few of their expressions, but I still felt I’d lost points with them for deviating from more traditional responses. I fought the urge to look at Nai and roll my eyes.
Tasser was rubbing off on me, and for good reason. It was probably for the best he wasn’t here. He wouldn’t have been able to resist mocking the stilted and forced exchange of greetings.
“Captain Serralinitus indicated the product would be materialized on site?” one of them said, reaching for some of the equipment they brought on one of the flatbed carts. “Were our molecular specifications sufficient?”
Tasser had been mercifully right. If getting some parts of the formal greetings wrong miffed them, it wasn’t enough to distract them from what we were selling.
“I think so,” Nai said.
“We have a sample of test product if you’d like to inspect it,” Dyn said, offering them the rest of the brick we’d practiced with.
“Smells good,” one remarked. Two more were prepping lab equipment for more refined testing.
“Phosphate formation is within margins. Give me a moment for a better…oh wow. Point nine-nine-nine-eight. Virtually zero byproducts.”
“Half-life?”
One of the senior Casti—I’d already forgotten which was which—stuck some probes in our brick.
“The half-life should be at least four years,” Nai said. “But I understand you’ll want to test the larger batch once we make it too.”
“I’m prepared to move the fee,” the senior Casti said. “Agreeable?”
The murmurs they shared amongst themselves must have been good, because they pulled out a hefty radio handset.
“Hello, finance office? Yes, confirm the funds.”
Adept deals could be tricky. A good station like this one was willing to oversee transactions like ours, acting as a middleman for the money at least. But equally confusing could be exactly what we were selling in the first place.
Because, it was easy to mistake the granular powder we’d made for some kind of fertilizer, or rare organic molecule, but those weren’t the case.
Creating goods that lasted long enough to be valuable was only one half of industrial Adeptry.
The other half was the immense field of Adept-made catalysts.
People were leery about just being around unfamiliar Adept materials, much less buying them. With how dicey chemistry could get if real molecules and Adept creations were allowed to interact…it was just bad form to create something both long lived and chemically compatible with real matter.
Especially if it was an organic creation. It was totally possible to make Adept-starch, and have that molecule be absorbed into someone’s body. There were endless ways that on it’s own could be harmful to the person, another myriad of possibilities if the molecule were dematerialized after it had been absorbed and utilized by someone’s body.
No Adept made chemical reagents were a bit taboo unless you knew what you were doing.
But eighth grade science class tells us there’s another type of material in some reactions: the catalyst. Instead of making Adept materials to use, it could be equally lucrative to create an Adept material that let anyone make very-not-Adept materials.
As long as the Adept making the catalyst was smart and designed the catalyst to be separable from the non-Adept products it facilitated, you could reliably keep any Adept made materials out of the food supply and environment. Not to mention that, even if someone did ingest it for some reason, if the catalyst didn’t chemically bond itself to molecules inside someone’s body and simply remained chemically inert in the body, it could be dematerialized safely in almost all circumstances.
You didn’t run the risk of accidentally demyelinating someone’s nerves if the molecule you were getting rid of was never taken into the body’s many biochemical cycles.
Which wasn’t to say Adept catalysts couldn’t be dangerous. Quite the opposite in fact. Nai knew of a series of exotic metals that would spontaneously catalyze methane gas when exposed to virtually any organic molecule.
Catalysts in ordinary chemistry made certain chemical reactions proceed more easily. Catalyitic converters relied on the fact carbon monoxide became carbon dioxide more easily in the presence of platinum. The Haber process used iron to facilitate ammonia production without consuming the metal in the reaction. Any number of reactions could be helped along by the right catalyst.
Adept catalysts took the same principle and went wild. Instead of gently ‘helping reactions along’, Adept catalysts could take an otherwise tame set of chemicals and see them react in previously impossible ways. Often violently.
Seemingly non-interactive sets of molecules could be made to react spontaneously just by the presence of the right exotic material.
Medicines, weaponry, construction, engineering, the possibilities about what real materials could be made by engineering the right Adept catalyst was every bit as complex as Adeptry itself was.
And today’s Cammo-Caddo Casti were interested in doing just that for their agriculture firm.
Like I said, the finer points of our grey brick eluded me. If I wasn’t Coalesced with Nai, I didn’t understand exactly what the material was, or the molecules it was meant to transform.
I only knew what it would turn them it into: some kind of high flexibility nutritional supplement for crops. Some kind of fertilizer?
“[Let’s get it over with,]” I told Nai, speaking in English so the Casti wouldn’t understand me.
“Quicker we start, quicker we’re done,” she agreed.
Once again we high-fived and the superconnector surged to life between us again. Coalescing again so soon after last time saw the headaches creep in before we were even done.
But the pain was manageable for now.
Nai and I set about creating more of the catalytic stuff.
When we’d first taken the job, there were a number of criteria the agriculture firm had requested of the material.
Lightweight, limited solubility in water, two-year minimum lifespan, and many more.
The list had been daunting going into things, but that was what practice was for. And Dyn was right, our practice brick held up magnificently.
We walked along the tables set up in the middle of the hangar while we first materialized empty plastic wrappings, and then inside those created more bricks of the crumbly gray powder two at a time. Casti from the agri-firm walked behind us, testing the bricks at regular intervals.
“Nine nine nine eight again,” one said, impressed. “It’s not just pure, it’s incredibly homogenous. I haven’t gotten any other result yet.”
“Not that we don’t trust you,” one of the senior Casti said to us, “but check with other instruments. I’d hate to get a false reading.”
“By all means,” Nai and I both spoke. “Scrutiny is welcome.”
Two Adepts speaking in unison creeped the Casti out, but equally demanding of their attention was the Casti testing our material’s lifespan.
“Getting the first half-life readings…” the Casti said. They had a number of samples of the product separated into the vials of a machine. “We’ve got…thirty-eight, thirty-nine…wait, that can’t be right….”
“It is,” I told them.
“What’s the problem?” the senior Casti asked.
“I’m getting an—” the Casti threw me a disbelieving glance, “—improbable result. I’m measuring an average half-life of almost exactly forty-thousand hours. Variance is down to the tens of hours.”
“That’s on purpose,” I said, nodding toward Dyn’s stack of graphs and papers with some of our own targets for their criteria.
A forty-thousand-hour half-life would see this stock last well beyond their desired two-year lifespan.
“This purity and this lifespan?” one Casti remarked. “Improbable is correct, but not impossible…I don’t understand the consistency. I’ve never seen two Adepts create such identical products before.”
“It’s a bit complicated,” Nai and I said in unison again. “But suffice to say we just have advantages communicating with one another.”
It wasn’t worth explaining the whole truth right now. Right now Nai and I weren’t two Adepts, but just one.
The two senior Casti exchanged a few hushed words. We caught word of ‘sufficient funds’ and ‘authorization’.
It was a bit cutthroat to overdeliver like this, because Serral had predicted and warned us what they would say next.
“We realize this is improper and short notice,” the Casti said, “but given the quality of your product, would it be possible to scale our order by a time-and-a-half?”
All five of us from the Jack traded satisfied looks. We’d known this was coming.
“Same rate?” Nai asked.
“Of course, we have the funds cleared too.”
“It would be our genuine pleasure,” I said.
Making fifty percent more product didn’t take Nai even fifteen minutes, but we earned an extra fifty percent for the trouble.
As soon as we ended our Coalescence, Nai and I both materialized cold packs for our poor skulls.
Weighing the exact amount we were actually selling them took ten times as long as actually creating it. Fussing over every last ounce of the several hundred pounds of polymerase-isobutane-or-whatever catalyst was a madding task, in fact. Even with my headache, I still felt compelled to help with the measuring, packaging, and loading. I didn’t feel like this had been that much work, but Adeptry wasn’t fair.
“Thank you all,” the Casti said, bowing to us as a goodbye.
Dyn and Nerin were ready to match their bows, so I was happy to see at least Deg be caught off guard like I was. We awkwardly bowed as they wheeled their not-so-small fortune in organic catalyst toward their hangar’s ship.
When all was said and done, two hours work netted us an exorbitant amount of cash. I was still hopeless when it came to finance, but roughly estimating the value of the currency Cammo-Caddo dealt in, I calculated we’d been paid several million dollars for one afternoon’s work.
Maybe I was highballing that figure, but it honestly didn’t matter. We’d be able to operate the Jack free of financial pressure for months.
The five of us made our way back to the Jack to crash for the night . We’d completed one of our objectives at the station, but it was the other two that I was really looking forward to.