Xiatoktok maintained his usual genial façade. The day had been exhausting, the staff frequently treacherous, and omens of doom seemed to be queuing up to menace him. Even his carriage seemed to be reminding him of impending annihilation.
The morning had been bright and cool, midday was dismal and cold, and come evening, it had decided to snow. Not very much, perhaps half a centimeter. It made the two story brick homes, with their steeply gabled terracotta roofs, very pretty. Less pretty was thinking about his expensive, steel rimmed carriage wheels skidding across the snow-slicked cobbles.
He glared at the wheels. ’Mia and ’Te followed his eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“I wanted restrained opulence for my carriage.”
“I would dispute the word “restrained,” but- what seems to be the problem? You love this carriage.” ’Te asked.
“Loved. I loved this carriage. It’s the wheels. The carriage looks sharp, but all the really luxurious features are hidden inside. The wheels were meant to be the most obvious display of wealth. Protecting the wheels with metal rims? Discreet, but not too discreet. Except now, every random Langpopo seems to have enough steel to give our metal merchants nightmares, and the Collective seems to have an almost unlimited supply.”
“Which is disturbing, and I would very much like to know how it's possible, but I am not sure what that has to do with your wheels?” ’Mia asked.
“Now, my very luxurious, if selectively modest, carriage is just… a carriage. Nobody cares about the steel rims.”
“You are vain about the damndest things.”
“I am correctly conscious of my appearance. Come on, at least it’s warm inside.”
They rattled along in superb comfort, only occasionally sliding sideways or jerking forward depending on the state of the roads and how fast the coachman had to stop. The streets were well broomed by those who lived along it, but never totally snow free. It wound up taking forty minutes to get to The Greenhouse.
The Greenhouse was an early contribution by the Xia to the city, and it had been lovingly updated over time. Still a Clan property, of course, but the fresh produce it could generate in the middle of winter was very welcome. There was not a lot of free sunlight in a densely settled city, so only the roof was glass. Thick panes, heavily reinforced with sturdy ironwood beams. It had to be sturdy, given seven months of snow. But the Xia could bring in the thick, tempered glass panes, and could bring in heat stones to stop things from freezing, and could bring in cores that could provide ordinary, "clear" light, and the purple and red lights that were apparently necessary for optimum growth. He understood, vaguely, why you needed specially carved cores to generate just the right sort of light. He just couldn’t quite shake the idea that they were buying magic rocks to make their plants grow in the winter.
He led everyone over to long, waist high planters. Tall, thin plants grew in tidy rows. Their green stems popped with shockingly bright yellow flowers. The flowers jutted out perpendicular to the central stem, and clustered into a sort of crown of four petaled diadems at its top. The tops of the flowers were just over everyone's heads, thanks to the raised planters. Call it… one meter on the low end, with some bullying their way up to two meters.
“Any guesses what this is?”
“Nope.”
“None.”
“Fair enough. This is one of two crops I want to show you. The trade name for this varietal, when it was developed back in the Third Swabian Empire, is Pelican Black. Pelican Black was hugely popular in the Third and Fourth Empire, but went extinct after the fall of the Fourth Empire.”
He reached out and gently touched a blossom.
“Each of these blossoms will turn into a seed pod; between sixty and a hundred pods per plant. Closer to a hundred is projected for this specific varietal. Each pod has roughly thirty tiny little seeds in them. And I do mean tiny- smaller than a lentil.”
“Any good to eat?” Asked ’Mai.
“Good question- the answer is both no and yes. No, you would not find eating the seeds pleasant. Yes, because the seeds are a little over fifty percent oil. These plants were so common, they were just called “Oilseed” plants, and their oil was sold cheaply throughout the Empire. So with a little processing, yes, you could happily eat it. According to archival records, the flavor is extremely bland. It is excellent for high temperature cooking, baking and numerous other applications. For example, lighting. You can use it as a fuel oil for lamps, or solidify it for candles. With extensive processing, it can even fuel motors, or be turned into bioplastics. Totally competitive, performance-wise, with the algae plastics currently in use.”
He had their complete attention.
“It was grown in vast monoculture fields. Thousands upon thousands of acres of it. Not right around here, but not far from here either. All across the plains. Not only is it cold tolerant, it is a cold season crop. And those mad bastards of the Third Empire managed to shorten the growing cycle down to just two and a half months, shaving nearly an entire month off the normal growth cycle for seeds like this. It’s easy to harvest too, and pressing it is also easy. It is, in some ways, the perfect cash crop.”
“And yet, it is extinct.” ’Te sniffed a flower, and was unimpressed.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Mostly extinct, or at least, this specific varietal is. All that amazing performance had to come from somewhere. A lot of it was greensmithed into the plants themselves, but not all of it. Soil depletion is no joke-”
“Soil depletion?” ’Te asked.
“Plants need specific nutrients in the soil. Nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus are the three most important. The way most people keep their soil healthy these days is by carefully managing a crop rotation, or even an entire miniature ecosystem, around maintaining those nutrients in the soil.
“But these were huge monoculture fields growing cash crops. How much crop rotation was going on?” ‘Mia looked interested.
“I don’t know. I would assume some. That wasn’t how the Third and Fourth Empires dealt with the problem, though. They went for that old standby- additives.”
“Oh Gods.” Mia muttered, looking much less interested.
“Now, now, what’s a few minor ecological collapses when there is money to be made?” ’Te asked in his most patronizing voice.
“It’s not quite that bad. Basically, you had to toss loads of dead plant matter over the fields- usually the bits of the plant that weren't the seeds from your last harvest, plus whatever else you thought might go well. Then you hosed everything down with a special blend of water and a powder you got from either a licensed merchant company or whoever owned the estate you were farming. And the owners would have gotten it directly from the manufacturer.” ’Tok started slowly rubbing his hands together.
“The powder was basically nutrients and dry bacteria. Some short lived fungus too, but the bacteria is the important bit. Mix with water, the bacteria wake up, eat the nutrients and reproduce. Spray your bacteria water on the organic matter, and they start breaking it down. Very, very fast. The fungus just shreds the tougher stuff, and the bacteria breaks down the smaller bits. Highly greensmithed bacteria, only ate plants, and a limited number of plant varieties at that. They broke down the plant matter into the perfect growing medium for specifically this varietal of oilseed. This is the crucial point- it was perfect for only Pelican Black. And by the strangest coincidence, if Pelican Black doesn't get the perfect nutrition with the exact right chemical markers in it, it grows very poorly. Oh, and the bacteria only reproduce so many times before they mutate to the point where they aren’t creating recognizable chemical markers. Generally enough for exactly one crop. By amazing coincidence.
“So many amazing coincidences. It truly is a marvel that it went extinct as soon as the Fourth Empire collapsed.” ’Te’s voice was bone dry. “But since we are having this conversation, I am assuming that you have the solution?”
“The greensmithing lab here was able to identify the seeds, and once they did, they were able to find the instructions for greensmithing the bacteria. Which was a… significant challenge, as you might imagine. A lot of messages shot around the continent at enormous expense. Then hiring a very, very expensive contractor to synthesize the bacteria, and force the first crop to grow much faster than it normally would.” He patted a mature stalk.
“Soon, we should have enough seed for a field. Two and a half months later, we will have enough seeds for several fields, and two and a half months after that, a vast number of fields. At which point, we can start harvesting for oil production. And shortly thereafter, we start arguing about how to invest the shockingly large sums of money we are earning.”
“Wonderful. I do, however, see a few small problems.” It was ’Mia’s turn to use the extremely dry voice. “One- Who is going to grow all this? One A and subsequent subsections are the related issues of where will it be grown, how do we get the fields, how, exactly, does one plant and harvest this stuff, prepare the fields and all that. Two- Money. How do we pay for everything in point one, not to mention processing the seeds into oil, packaging, shipping and selling the oil to whoever, and all other attendant costs. Three- So minor, I hesitate to even mention it. There is the teensy, probably irrelevant factor of a major war breaking out, with all the threats to trade and agriculture that implies. I mean, if I knew there was a field full of things that were fifty percent accelerant, I know where my raiders would be bringing their torches.” ’Mia grinned nastily. ’Te’s grin was, somehow, nastier.
“We make nice with the Nomeki’s. We get them to pay for it. Maybe even leverage the joint venture into them taking over all that Red Mountain sovereign debt. That would clean up our balance sheets very nicely.”
’Tok nodded approvingly. “Yes, but they can’t cover the cost alone, nor would I care to let them have that big a piece of the action. Jerri can be trusted to be Jerri, which means she can’t be trusted at all. We have a potentially huge pie here, but to get it baked, we need to sell a lot of little slices first.”
He pointed at a small, empty looking planter being carefully watered by a lab assistant. “What you aren’t seeing in that planter is a rhizome. That is a sort of plant stem that acts like a base for loads of roots to shoot out of. It is growing well, if much more slowly than the oilseed. In about a year, we will have enough rootstock to plant a small field. The first field in millennia to grow Sylphium. A highly reliable, generally safe birth control medication. I personally look forward to testing its rumored aphrodisiac qualities. Though frankly, just thinking about the potential profits is enough to make me act up.”
’Tok grinned at their blank looks.
“The problem you aren't seeing with either crop is that we don’t own the seeds and the rhizome outright. We own ninety five percent, and have a right to eighty five percent of the gross profits. Our currently silent partners also have a revocable license for the use of the materials, or put it another way, they can shut the business down on very short notice. They also have auditing rights.”
“And who are these very generous partners?” ’Te asked.
“The prospectors who discovered the cache they came out of.” ’Te and ’Mia immediately looked bored. Prospectors were non-entities, somewhere below “disposable serf” in their mental hierarchies. Throw them a few Rads, show them some cooked books if they could read, get them high and toss them into bed with sex workers, job done.
“Those prospectors, or the rights holders as it may be, are, in no particular order, The Leoinidas Collective, The Cold Garden Sacred Grove of the Humble Worshipers of the Great Dusty World, The Nimu Caravan Company, The Independent Traders Association Pension Fund, and a nice young man by the name of Mazelton. Who, after yet more very expensive research, I was able to determine is likely the only surviving grandchild of Malima, the terrible Hag of Old Radler. And his uncle Matele is the Patriarch of the Lone Pine Ma.”
It took a solid minute to process that list. “How-”
“Discovered during a caravan journey to the New Territory. Just how the charter worked out. Some of those rights were assigned to others, obviously.”
“Wait, are you saying that a Ma has moved into the New Territories?”
“Is that really the most important point, ’Mia?”
“No, I agree with her. I felt a weird ache in my balls this morning. Now I know why.”
“Of everyone at the investment meeting, he was the most pleasant. He and ’Mia could bond over a shared love of food. And I had to take that damn meeting because of all the interests represented in the room. Ate up almost two days, but you know what? I think it was worth it.”
“Leaving all that aside, how do we solve the problems I flagged earlier? And the ones you just mentioned?”
“The current rights holders will hold a vote. We have complete managerial rights, incidentally, so no need for a quorum of the other stakeholders. We vote to assign the rights to exploit these new crops to a new company, which will assume the costs of exploiting the crops and pay a very sizable licensing fee to the rights holders as well. The new company will be owned, fifty one percent plus, by the original company. As for the other forty nine percent-” The usually dapper and urbane Xiatoktok turned bloodthirsty.
“The other forty nine percent we sell. I want to bring back the joint stock company, and feed on the world.”