Quarter Share: A Trader's Tale from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper (21 page)

***

Bev came to wake us in the morning. She had the watch until 06:00. “Well, what have you two been up to overnight?”

“Planning. I think we want to make the McKendrick Mercantile Cooperative a formal entity, or at least more organized by the time we get to St. Cloud.”

She nodded once. “Good. Count me in. How’d you do yesterday, Pip?”

He grinned. “I managed to hold on to ten of those belts.”

She whistled. “How many did you sell?”

“All of the rest.” His grin broadened. “Seventy in all.”

“We softened ’em up for ya.” she teased him.

“No doubt. No doubt.”

Pip headed for the galley while I considered my options.

“What’s on for today, Ish?” Bev asked.

“Shopping. We did pretty well in Gugara. Fancy a look around later?”

She gave me a thumbs up. “Sure, but I’ve been up since midnight. I’m gonna rack it until noon but I’m up for it after that.”

“Better deals in the afternoon,” I said with a grin.

She chuckled as she went back to her watch station. “You’re practically a veteran now, Ish.”

I felt bleary-eyed and foggy. Pip and I had stayed up later than normal and my feet were sore from the day at the flea market. I still couldn’t believe we’d made over three kilocreds on the belts.

I pulled out my tablet and brought up the sections explaining various economic organizations. “Co-operative” brought up several entries. The crux of the situation explained that a co-op was a group of people who banded together and worked toward the common good of their group. It wasn’t much to go on, but I started thinking about Lois McKendrick, and all the people on New Edinburgh who got together to break the stranglehold that the company held on their lives. I decided I had to see the captain again. I wanted to know more about Great-grandmother McKendrick and her co-op. But first things first, I was awake, needed to pee, and I wanted my coffee.

It felt odd to step onto the mess deck just as breakfast was being served, probably because there weren’t that many times in the last four months when I’d not been serving said breakfast. I took a mug from the rack, filled it with fresh Sarabanda Dark, and stood in line with a tray, grinning. Diane was in front of me.

She glanced over her shoulder to see who was behind her and laughed. “I’m not used to seeing you on this side of the line.”

“I’m not used to it, myself.”

“Thanks for helping with the scrubbers, Ish. That really made a difference.”

“My pleasure. We’re all in the same boat, as it were.”

“True, but not everybody would help with a slimy job like that one if they didn’t have to.”

I just shrugged and changed the subject. “You sold all your stuff the other day, right?”

She nodded but the line had moved and Pip interrupted loudly, “Excuse me, I’m trying to serve breakfast here.”

Diane turned around with a giggle. “Oh, sorry.” She held out her plate for Pip to slide the omelet on it. “Thank you so much.”

“And you, sir, how may I serve you this morning?” He laid it on with a trowel and grinned the whole time.

“Two egg omelet, some of those excellent mushrooms, a bit of onion, some crumbled bacon, and a bit of grated cheese, if you please. Moist in the middle, my good man. Mind you don’t dry it out.”

“How about I just hit you with the pan and toss your carcass out an airlock?”

I laughed. “Okay, okay, I get your point.”

Cookie must have been helping him with his skills as well, because he slid a perfect omelet onto my plate in just a couple of ticks. “Thanks, Pip. Looks great.”

He waved his spatula at me with a pleased nod of his head. “Enjoy.”

I looked around and spotted Diane sitting alone at a table. She nodded to the chair across from her.

As I settled into the seat, she braced me without preamble. “So, Francis says you guys visited him on watch last night?”

I nodded. “That’s why I was asking about whether or not you sold all your stuff. Pip sold everything we had yesterday. By all measures, this was an amazing success.”

She sipped her coffee and nodded. “It was for me. I sold stuff that I’ve been dragging around for months. And it was much easier than trying to find some buyer and haggling with them and safer then deals made in shady bars. I turned a nice profit, so I’ve got both mass and cred to spend today.”

“Yeah, me, too.” There wasn’t anybody in the mess line just then so I motioned Pip over. “What we were talking to Francis about was the possibility of getting organized before we hit St. Cloud.”

Pip joined us. “Yeah, next time around we should be better prepared. I suspect that there are people aboard who could have used the space and didn’t know we were doing it because the whole thing was so slapdash.”

“We’ve been thinking that we should actually form the McKendrick Mercantile Cooperative,” I put in. “You know, like on the banner? We thought we’d ask the other traders on the crew to join. Together, we can coordinate coverage on the booth and expenses. With a little investment we could put together a booth that looks like we know what we were doing.”

Diane laughed. “I’m being double-teamed here, but I think you’re right. What will it take?”

I shrugged. “Even if all we do is get the word out to the entire crew that’s more than we had going on in Margary.”

“Good point,” she agreed.

Pip plunked down beside me. “I’m trying to think of this like a business. I don’t want to share everybody’s profits because that’s not right. But there’s a lot of things we can pool that would help everybody.”

“Like what?” Diane looked at him.

I snickered. “Like chairs. My feet are still recovering.”

“Mine, too.” Diane grimaced.

Pip nodded. “Exactly. So, the co-op invests in things like chairs, but the expense should be shared by all the members somehow.”

Diane cut off a piece of her omelet and chewed it for a moment before speaking, “That makes sense, but whose mass allotment takes the hit?”

Pip and I glanced at each other before I answered her, “I’m thinking we ask Lois.”

Pip grinned. “I was thinking the same thing.”

Diane looked confused. “Lois who?”

“Lois McKendrick, of course.” I smiled at her confusion.

She blinked at me a couple times, maybe trying to decide if I was kidding. “Let me know how that works out for you.”

Pip smirked. “Oh, I think we’ll convince her.”

Diane looked doubtful. “Well, if we do this, we’ll need creds for expenses: booth rental, chairs, signs, cargo totes—”

“Grav-pallet?” I suggested.

Her face lit up at the thought. “Ooh, that would be excellent, but maybe a bit of a stretch all things considered.”

I nodded. “True, but we’re on the right track. I’m willing to toss a few creds in the pot as seed money, but how do we replenish the pot?”

Diane ate some more of her omelet while she considered. Finally she nodded once as if she’d made up her mind. “Okay, I see three ways: dues, buy in, or fees.”

I grimaced. “I thought of dues, but that’s a problem because it limits who can participate. If you don’t pay your dues then you can’t sell, but if you want to drop out halfway through the period, how can we give a refund?”

Pip nodded his head in agreement. “How would the buy in idea work? You pay a fee to set up in the booth at the next port?”

Diane nodded.

“Down side is that you have to pay before you have the income. If you don’t sell anything it would be tough,” Pip said.

We sat there looking at each other for a couple of ticks. Finally, I broke the silence. “It sounds like we go with fees then. How are you thinking this would work?”

Diane gestured with her fork. “If you sell in the booth you should pay some nominal amount. Like one percent. We could cap it at some amount, say ten creds, and the trader would pay whichever is smaller. That way somebody who doesn’t sell a lot can still get in. People who sell more won’t get smacked to hard.”

Pip nodded slowly. “Rental here in Margary is ten a day, the table cost an extra cred. With that arrangement just one person would cover that easily.”

Diane pointed out the obvious. “If we’d been operating under that rule during this past exercise, all four of us would have paid ten creds for that first day.”

I shook my head. “No, ten creds is one percent of a thousand. Bev and I only made about a hundred each, but that big bundle of belts would have covered it easily.”

Diane shrugged. “Well, I made almost a kilocred on all my stuff, so I’d have made up the difference.”

Pip nodded his agreement. “And yesterday, Rhon Scham, Biddy Murphy, and I would have also.”

Diane looked back and forth between us. “That seems fair to me. I’d gladly have kicked in ten creds for what I got out of it.”

Francis came in looking for breakfast so Pip went to get him an omelet.

“Thanks, Diane. That was kinda what I was thinking, but you really solidified it for me.”

She speared the last bite of her omelet. “My pleasure, Ish. Count me in on whatever you’ve got going forward, okay?”

I nodded and paused for a moment. “Hey, do you know anything about mushroom farming?”

“Huh?” She blinked at me for a few heartbeats and a wry smile twisted her lips. “Do you know what the phrase smooth change of subject means?”

I laughed. “Sorry, my brain is hopping around this morning. Did you know that Margary is the mushroom capital of the galaxy or something?”

“You’re kidding.”

I shook my head. “They have plenty of dark tunnels here to grow them in. I thought I’d try to find out more about what it takes besides dark and space. It has got to take some kind of growing medium, but what do they have out here in the Deep Dark?”

She looked me straight in the eye and grinned at the realization. “Sludge.”

“That’s my thought, too. Fancy a little exploration?”

“Ten minutes. Main lock.”

“I’ll be there.”

I waved at Pip and Francis as I bussed my tray and headed to change into my civvies.

***

Fifteen minutes later, Diane and I were standing on the docks. She gave a half shrug. “So, how do we find a mushroom farm?”

“Look for someplace dark?”

“That’s most places here, I would think.”

I smacked myself on the forehead. “I’m so stupid,” I said as I grabbed my tablet and pulled up the ship’s stores records. The invoice for what looked like a huge amount of mushrooms was on file along with the name of the supplier and their information. Their office was on deck twelve and there was a contact number.

Diane smiled when she saw what I was doing. “Hmm, there’s a comm-link right over there. Think we can get an appointment?”

“All they can say is no.”

We crossed the deck and I keyed the contact number from the invoice. “Margary Mushrooms, Helen speaking. How can I help you?” The woman answered on the first ring. She looked like a typical front door greeter on the screen.

“Hi. My name is Wang. I work in the galley on the freighter
Lois McKendrick
. You sold us a quantity of mushrooms day before yesterday…?”

“Yes, Mr. Wang, is there a problem?”

“No, they’re excellent, but my colleague and I are interested in how they’re grown out here in the Deep Dark. It must be fascinating. We were wondering if we could talk to someone about it?”

“Let me connect you with Mr. Cameron. He’s in charge of our field operations.”

A moment later a red, pudgy face filled the screen. “Cameron, here. How can I help you?”

“Hello, Mr. Cameron, My name is Wang and I’m from the freighter
Lois McKendrick
. Your company has sold us some mushrooms and my colleague and I would like to learn more about how they’re grown out here.”

“Well, Mr. Wang, we grow them in tunnels in the mined-out asteroids. Thank you for your interest.”

“Is there a chance we might visit one of these asteroids this morning?

“I’m really sorry, kid, but we’re terribly busy here, and I don’t know how we’d find the time…”

Diane, who had been off camera for the conversation, sighed and shook her head. She unbuttoned the top of her blouse and elbowed me out of the way. She practically cooed into the comm, “Mr. Cameron, is it? I’m Diane Ardele. We’re sorry to be such a bother but we’ll be leaving tomorrow and this is our last chance to come and see your excellent operation up close.” She leaned into the pickup so the breathy voice she used would carry clearly. “Don’t you think you could find some errand boy to take us on a tour of just one little mushroom farm?”

I thought he was going to turn purple as Diane idly stroked one finger up and down the edge of her collar. “Well, yes, that is, I think my next meeting was just canceled. Let me check. Yes, I’m free after all. I could take you, Ms. Ardele—”

“Oh, please call me Diane,” she interrupted, breathily.

“D-Diane, yes. I could take you over to see a farm. Oh, and Mr. Wang, too, of course. Could you meet me at lock forty-two on the dock level in say, twenty ticks?”

Diane squealed convincingly. “Ooh, that would be just
so perfect
. Thank you ever so much, Mr. Cameron. I’ll look forward to meeting you.”

“Likewise Ms. Ardele…I mean D-Diane.”

“Toodles until then.” Diane waved her fingers in the direction of the pickup before cutting the connection.

I just stood there staring at her. “You know, you’re shameless.”

She gave me a smug little grin. “Yes, and thank you for noticing. The nice thing about clichés is that they only can become one if enough people recognize them. Trust me, Ish, that man is a cliché.” She shook her head and sighed.

Fifteen ticks later, the very busy Mr. Cameron was shaking our hands outside a private shuttle dock halfway around the station from the
Lois
. He wasted no time getting us into the ship and we boosted away from the station. It took less than half a stan for us to cruise to a nearby asteroid. We watched the approach through the shuttle’s ports.

Diane dropped the cutie-pie routine when we settled on the shuttle. Mr. Cameron was too intent on her cleavage to notice, but he played the tour guide role well.

“This is one of the larger residential rocks in the system.”

“I thought we were going to visit a farm?” Diane turned from looking out of the port.

“We are.” He beamed a self-satisfied smile. “Our farms are all in the residential areas.”

“Really? Is it because you need labor?” She kept her face straight and I gained a new level of respect for her acting skills at that moment.

Again, he made with the condescending smile. “Oh, no.” He reached over and patted her hand. “We need their—” He stopped in mid sentence realizing what he was about to say and casting about for some other way to say it.

“Sludge?” I suggested.

He seemed to notice for the first time that I was aboard. “Yes,” he said at last, “the…ah…sludge.”

The shuttle docked in a fully enclosed landing bay and we walked into a processing area. It was all enclosed and automated but Cameron pointed out the salient parts. “This is where we harvest the mushrooms and freeze dry them for transport. We keep a few for fresh product, but the real money is in dried. Less mass, you know.”

Diane nodded. “Oh really, how interesting.”

He showed us to the next room, a large chamber with several noisy machines. Cameron shouted so we could hear him over the racket. “We get the growing medium in big cakes from the environmental sections. We run it through these mills to break it up to make it easier for the mushroom’s roots to grow.” He beckoned us through the next door and the noise level dropped. He showed us piles of flaked sludge being mixed with some kind of wet, green plant material. “We mix the by-products from our hydroponics with the flaked medium here and form it into what we call logs.” He pointed out where a machine extruded the mixture into loose net tubes like sausages a quarter meter in diameter and a meter long. I could see Diane biting her lip to keep from laughing. The environmental crew had a rather literal view of their work. That view colored their perception of the world and tended to make them laugh at common euphemistic digressions.

Cameron pointed to where a small diameter tube stuck each log before being clipped onto an overhead track and trundled down a long dark tunnel. “Here we inoculate the log with mushroom spawn. It takes about a month for the roots to spread through the log. After that the roots start pushing through the surface and forming mushrooms which we harvest.”

Like some magician, he flung open a nearby door and showed us a nearly identical track bearing logs now studded thickly with fresh mushrooms out of another long dark tunnel. The track ran into a large machine. “We strip off the netting, shake out the medium, and separate the mushrooms from their roots.”

“Mycelium.” Diane corrected him with a wry smile.

“I beg your pardon?” Her comment took Cameron off guard.

She gazed at him for a moment. “They’re not
roots
but
mycelium
, or probably more correctly, hyphae. Do you use the same growing medium for all your varieties?”

Cameron blinked rapidly, trying to catch up with where he had been derailed. “Yes, basically. Some require temperature variations and other get different nutrient baths but I couldn’t tell you which gets what.”

Diane nodded and held out her hand. “Thank you ever so much, Mr. Cameron.” She cooed and dropped smoothly into cutie-pie mode and let him get back on his internal script. “Do you think we could go back to the station now? All this excitement has made me a little dizzy.” She fanned herself with her free hand.

Cameron became immediately solicitous. “Of course, my dear, of course. Please, right this way…”

It took less than a stan for us to get back to Margary and bid our fond adieus to Mr. Cameron. The hard part was not laughing ourselves silly before we got out of sight and earshot.

After the worst of the giggles tapered off, I turned to Diane. “So, what do you think?”

“I think sludge just got a lot more interesting.”

“Yeah, me too. If we were going to grow mushrooms on the
Lois
, what would we need?”

“So that’s your game. I knew you were up to something. Changing the whole trading culture isn’t enough?”

I just chuckled and shrugged. “What can I say, I’m frugal. My mom raised me not to waste anything and when I heard we were giving away sludge cakes as terraforming base, I got this wild idea that there must be something better we could do with it.”

Diane laughed. “You want to make money on sewage?”

I shrugged. “The more money the ship makes, the more money I make. I don’t care what it starts life as, so long as it ends as a cred in my account.”

She looked me up and down before speaking, “Ishmael Wang, I like the way you think.”