Withûr We

by Matthew Bruce Alexander

  “Well met and happy returns.”

  “You mean our return or an investment’s returns?” asked Alistair.

  “Why does it have to be one or the other?”

  With the spoils of their conquest spread out around them, with the curious and eager crowd gathered to celebrate their success, with the prospects of prosperity in the forms of the goods and the talents of the men and women there, with Darion’s breezy cheerfulness infecting him, Alistair felt exultant. When Floralel was taken he felt relieved and in need of rest. With the details of the looting of the city pressing down on him he felt strained once again. Now, for the first time, he felt almost giddy and could not suppress a smile.

  “Darion, allow me to present to you Shukri Abdiaziz, Amina and Faisa Abdirahman, Akihiro Sawagato and Raja Gulyanov. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Darion Chesterton of Aldra, my homeworld.”

  The Singulatarians nodded and Darion executed another bow, deeper than the first, that finished with a flourish of his cane.

  “Very pleased,” said Darion.

  “You’ll be working with them to survey the goods, and then I’ll need you with me tonight when we have the auction.”

  “Excellent. But let’s have some lunch first.”

  So saying, he clapped his hands and three men, burdened with baggage, rushed forward to prepare a sort of picnic there on the ground. One laid out what on Srillium passed for a fine tablecloth, while the other two set out the serving dishes, plates and silverware. Darion could not help but notice the expression on Alistair’s face as he regarded the servants, the bemused expression a man exudes when he is not precisely uncomfortable, but not in his element either.

  “After a man raises himself out of the dirt, his first order of business is a good bath,” Darion explained. “Then, he must find his style. Ah! By the way, our cotton plants are surviving.”

  “They are?”

  “Most. They are a tad withered but they’ll make it through, I think. I dug a moat around them and filled it with burning embers. There is nothing I can do for sunlight, but at least they won’t freeze.”

  “Get rid of the seeds of the ones that did not survive.”

  “Cull the herd?”

  “If we want a cotton harvest on this rock we’ll need the plants to adapt to it.”

  “A first rate idea. But right now let’s get some sustenance. We have an auction tonight!”

  As if waiting for Darion’s pronouncement, Srillium began to change. Its edge continued to grow brighter, and a ray of sunlight, bright and powerful, peaked out from the side, and immediately they were touched by it they felt the warmth grow on their faces. The snowflakes glinted as they passed through it. The land brightened to the level of dawn, and short shadows jumped out everywhere. As the sun began its job of attacking the snow, Alistair felt Giselle embrace him, and again he smiled.

  ***

  The boulder was pushed aside, and once again the shaft in the hilltop exposed. Long shadows returned with the setting sun, and on the bare top of the hill the Singulatarians, Miklos, Taribo, Giselle, Gregory, Layla, Darion, Santiago, Ryan and Alistair, who was the new owner of the shaft, cut dark figures into the pink and orange and purple sky. Miklos, with feckless curiosity, leaned over the shaft and spit into it. Apparently satisfied with the result of the experiment, he stood up straight again.

  “That’s deep.”

  “I expect it is,” said Darion, more amused than appalled.

  “Raja is the youngest of us,” said Shukri to Alistair. “He is eager to explore. However, unless my guess is wrong, he will not be able to solve this for us. That will have to wait until we can get some of the equipment running.”

  “Which means batteries,” said Alistair.

  “Which means industry,” said Santiago.

  “Which means capital,” finished Darion. “No one man can make a battery.”

  “I will go until I cannot,” said Raja, the halting English passing through his smile, and he produced from his white robes a small stick with an orb of crystal at the end. With a squeeze he set it glowing and then fastened it to his rope belt. His four companions gathered around, giving him encouraging squeezes on the shoulder or, in Faisa’s case, a touch of foreheads.

  “This will be a while,” advised Shukri as Raja stepped to the edge of the shaft and, like a boxer in his corner before the bell, prepared to begin. “Say goodbye and go to your meeting. We will wait here.”

  “The other guy said he thought he made it maybe half a kilometer down before he gave up and came back,” said Alistair.

  “Raja will go farther than that,” said Amina.

  Akihiro strapped on Raja’ backpack, which held a few tools for climbing as well as a sack Raja could attach to the metal rungs to rest. In addition it held three meals and plenty of water. Lastly, a communication headset was fixed to his head to keep him in contact with the others. Akihiro, upon finishing the preparations, stepped away from Raja, as if giving him room to launch.

  “On your way, my friend,” said Shukri, and the others all produced a goodbye after their own fashion.

  Then Raja disappeared into the hole. No more than five seconds gone, his voice came through the speaker of Shukri’s communicator.

  “Testing equipment,” he said in Mandarin, a language he spoke only a little better than English.

  “We read you,” returned Faisa.

  This acted as cue for the others to go. Alistair enlisted them all for the evening’s auction, an event he fully expected to last until the sun appeared on the opposite horizon the next morning. As he moved to descend the hill, he peered out over the lowlands to the north. There, torches were stuck in the ground, recently lit. A large table was built for the occasion in a location Mordecai considered sufficiently neutral to suit him. This task seemed a lavish waste of time to Alistair, who was just as happy sitting on the ground or a tree stump, but the event took on a life of its own beyond his ability to control. Even now he spotted a procession led by a man he knew must have been the Druid, with Clyde by his side. The young Aldran was pleased to arrive only after the Gaian blessing and consecration.

  “We can’t just divvy up the loot,” he muttered. “We’ve got to try and add some mystical significance to it all.”

  “You’ll find humans are like that,” said Gregory, walking by Alistair’s side. “We often need more than just the practical fact of something. It’s in our nature, and this is a significant event.”

  “Not significant enough by itself, apparently,” Alistair replied, though in a tolerant humor. “We have to pile some mysticism and ceremony on it.”

  Gregory patted his friend on the back, and they left the hill.

  Chapter 75

  The narrow channel between Odin’s Island and the main continent was now little more an impediment than a puddle. So long as their fuel lasted – water purified to an extreme level of limpidness – it would remain so, though they were without means to purify more. Thus, most made the decision to return to the mainland, leaving behind only a few who preferred to continue the work they deemed most profitable. Among such work was the farm with which Darion was charged, though Darion himself returned to the mainland.

  No sooner had he set foot on soil than he was hiring prospectors to search out new locations for mines. It was long a commonplace that the best locations for the really interesting resources were the craters of meteors that brought heavier elements to the relatively light crust of a planet. Srillium, held in close proximity to a gas giant whose gravity was a great magnet for space debris, was the victim of far more meteorite impacts than a typical terrestrial planet. Darion was drooling to get at them.

  It was also a commonplace that money was the lifeblood of an economy, but any serious reflection reveals this metaphor is not entirely fitting. Money was more like lubrication, facilitating the exchange of goods, allowing the shoemaker to buy fish even when no fisherman desires his shoes. The true lifeblood of an economy is its energy, its power source, that w
hich drives actual work. To this end a powerplant was planned directly they discovered a suitable source of moving water.

  The labor for such an undertaking proved readily available. Indeed, so many of the barbarian tribes came flocking to them that Alistair purchased the services of his workers at prices that scandalized Gregory, who immediately protested. Red in the face, he came storming up to Alistair as soon as he heard about the situation.

  “It seems the pharaohs have returned,” he growled while Alistair was looking through a stack of papers with Giselle. Startled, they looked up at Gregory and, unable to form an immediate reply, blinked. “I just got the most unbelievable news that my friend was resorting to slave labor for the powerplant.”

  “The pharaohs didn’t use slave labor,” Alistair replied. “That’s a common misconception.”

  “I don’t give a damn about ancient Egypt! Is it true what I heard about their salaries?”

  “Probably. I’m not paying them very much.”

  “I don’t fucking believe it!”

  “But they’re not slaves. They agreed to work for the wages I’m offering.”

  “That’s a technicality! It doesn’t matter they’re not actually slaves.”

  “I think it does, since that was your charge.”

  “Goddammit.” Gregory collapsed into a nearby chair. “Alistair…”

  “I forgot this was going to be a problem with you.” Alistair sighed, dropped the quill in his hand and leaned back in his own chair.

  “How can you expect a society to be healthy with salaries like that?”

  “You know, Greg, they are getting paid with money Darion and I coined. There was no such thing as a salary until we came and offered them one. We don’t owe them a damn thing, but we offered them a job because we wanted labor. They agreed to work for it; I can only presume they prefer a salaried job, however slight the salary, to the tribal barbarism they lived under until just a day ago.”

  “You’re not giving them very much.”

  “They’re not giving me very much. Their tools are hardly better than what Homo erectus used. They don’t produce much, so they don’t get paid much. And there are a lot of them. Too many of them.”

  “So take advantage of them?”

  “So earn as much of a profit as I can and make my position more attractive and theirs less. We have more labor than we need; we need more businessmen and entrepreneurs. The cheaper labor is, the more workers will decide to try their own hand at starting a business. The higher the price of labor, the fewer workers will try to strike out on their own. And I need workers to strike out on their own. I need tools. I need nails. I need screws. I need I-beams. I need all sorts of things a bunch of men in animal skins, working in tents, can’t make. If labor is paid well when there is too much of it there is no incentive to change. But if men start making their own businesses…”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Gregory, rising from his seat and making a gesture as if dismissing him. “You’ve got an answer for everything.”

  “If I’ve got an answer for everything that might mean something!” he yelled as Gregory left.

  Giselle gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  “Women can do those things too, my dear,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “You said you needed men to start businesses.”

  “Oh, don’t start,” he said but a smile broke through.

  More difficult than the labor was the technical know-how. The Singulatarians were invaluable in this endeavor. Upon first arriving at Srillium, they were at a loss as to how to go about building from scratch. Though not specialists in the field, they went back to their basic scientific knowledge and designed a miniature power plant in their cave near Floralel, rethinking fundamental ideas in an effort to build something so rudimentary. With this experience to build on, they now designed a grander powerplant to drive more than a homemade light bulb.

  In the end, progress was delayed while Darion hunted down new mines and searched for new minerals and chemicals. This too was delayed while food was found to sustain the men who were out prospecting. Giselle remarked several times how difficult it was to get the project underway, that she had figured it to be a matter of hiring workers and building. Alistair muttered a reply about the importance of savings, that no such project could be accomplished without it.

  With the design finally resolved, and labor available, the last remaining problem was funding. Alistair, Duke, Wei Bai and Darion each put up capital for the project, but hesitated to sink too much of their own money too early. What remained unfunded would be solved, they decided, by issuing bonds, and these they set about marketing. There was no regulatory board before which they had to present their plan for a stamp of approval, there were no politicians to be bribed, no monopoly privilege granted to prevent their entry into the market. The four men held a meeting, decided how much they wished to raise in bonds and according to what schedule, agreed upon an interest rate, and hired a few salesmen. If the bonds did not sell, it was a swift and simple matter of adjusting the terms.

  ***

  When Alistair and his men approached the tribes with their offer, extending promises of property protection to all paying customers, an offer they made while gripping weapons the primitive tribal chiefs could not hope to match, the tribes disintegrated in a matter of minutes. The wide open lands that frequent warfare made too dangerous to plow were homesteaded at a dizzying pace. Farms appeared overnight, and each day the cultivated areas expanded, stopping only at the hastily erected stone walls, usually only ten inches high, demarcating the borders of property.

  Not every tribesman, of course, elected to hire Alistair. Duke and Wei Bai’s firm, called Bedrock, attracted many, and Mordecai’s The Shield also took a good share. Some small communities formed and took care of their own problems without outside help. A few chose to risk no protection at all. New firms sprang up, far from the transformation’s epicenter, and cultivated their own client base. Within a single week the entire area was being farmed or used for some other productive purpose, and the effect spread much like falling dominoes, and almost with the same rapidity.

  Alistair’s arrival and announcement touched off a storm that flew out of his control. Each new tribe, upon hearing the news and the firepower in possession of the new security firms, broke apart, all exhortations by the tribal chief notwithstanding. Upon observing the inescapable trend and seeing so much land to be claimed for the mere price of settling down and working, men deserted their tribes, driven by an impulse most had never felt before. The phenomenon extended beyond Alistair’s ken. He truly had no idea how large an area, on any given day, was affected by the revolution.

  He made it clear all disputes could be resolved without outside interference. This was surprisingly effective, and even Gregory remarked at how little conflict there was between homesteaders claiming land.

  “This is no surprise,” he replied. “For the fireworks display on Foundation Day, do you ever remember a fight breaking out on the lawn when we gathered to watch? Everyone brings a blanket and lays it out, and everyone has an innate sense of how much space should be allowed for that purpose. The first to arrive are the first to choose their space, and everyone respects that. Simple and natural.”

  “I think claiming property is a bit different from gathering on a lawn to watch fireworks for an hour,” Gregory countered.

  “It’s not fundamentally different. We all naturally accept the principle that the first to arrive has first claim. We have at least a basic idea of how much land should be allotted for a given purpose. Conflict is minimal, as it would have to be for any society to function, government or not.”

  For the purpose of farming, a certain amount of territory was allotted to each homesteader as soon as he worked the land for that purpose, but even Alistair was surprised to discover it was not he and his business associates who determined what acreage to allow per farm. A general determination evolved on its own through the interactio
ns of the homesteaders. It being different than their original determination, they quickly changed their standard to conform to the market, and Alistair chided himself for having presumed to set a standard to begin with.

  Bottom up, not top down, he reminded himself. Always.

  ***

  The price of labor paid to those who longed to hold some sort of coin in their hands, and quickly, soon rose as other jobs sprang up and demand for workers increased. With land as cheap and accessible as it was, Alistair had to make his wages more attractive lest his workers decide to become farmers, or work for any number of other fledgling industries, or become entrepreneurs.

  The result of the limited productivity of their society was that certain jobs did not get done, or were long delayed. The greatest desires were satisfied first. This meant that, idle aircraft being relatively abundant for Ashley Security and Arbitration, no offices were constructed, nor any dormitories in which to sleep. Giselle’s office was in the cargo space of a box-like craft not unlike the one that brought the dreadbot to Odin’s Island. There she stored her papers and files as well as met with clients. Her working conditions were almost luxurious compared to what she had grown accustomed to. Even after several days the novelty of her new position was still keen. She counted herself fortunate, felt like royalty when she worked, and faced each day with glee, even when working with former warriors.

  There were muddy tracks all over the floor, and without proper cabinets she had to improvise her filing, which left her papers somewhat vulnerable to the elements. These elements invaded the craft with regularity because, to conserve energy, the exit ramp was left down, thus leaving the entrance covered only by a hanging animal skin curtain. The clientele laborers who showered only when it chanced to rain, and never with soap, did little to improve the surroundings.

  The specimen in front of her was a typical example. His skin glistened with sweat in the hot and humid air and bore dark smudges of dirt, most of them streaked where perspiration trickled down. His red hair was long, like his beard, and both were gnarled and frizzy. In his mouth were at least two gaps where teeth once were and two prominent scars adorned his warrior’s face.