Trade Secret

by Sharon Lee

  Some few of Elthoria’s crew had taken advantage of the two, brief, late-night orbits around Thringar Six to claim a world by going to the observation deck and eyeballing it through the ports . . . but he never claimed a world he hadn’t at least landed on, else he’d have as many as anyone on the ship—captain included—but yes, starting a tour when he was just starting to breathe gave him leverage over folks who’d grown up planet side in good Liaden homes!

  Near as he could understand, Thringar Six was a biggish mush of a semihabitable planet with a few thousand workers and a bunch of sea grass and not much else, all around a biggish star that was going to go nova sometime in the next few million years. He hadn’t been needed at the trade desk for that, nor in the control room, and he’d slept through the Jump out two hours before his rising time.

  So today was a physical rest day, but as busy or busier, on the whole, for today he was his own boss, and a tough one, having waked before the subtle morning shift chime, and been in the breakfast lounge before the tea changed from night-strong to ordinary.

  Study and thought, that was the day’s job today. The topic was contracts, and he’d been in the same line of study for some while now, since he wouldn’t always be able to access the sharp memory of Norn ven’Deelin while he was away from the ship, and he’d be liable for what mistakes he brought back with his name signed in agreement—and both she and the clan—would have to back him up.

  Contracts were pretty important. After all it had been a fraudulent contract—in the form of a fake Liaden Master Trader’s card vouchsafed as firm commitment on a short-term deal—that had brought Jethri to this Liaden tradeship in the first place.

  Contract terminology, now, that was difficult stuff, with the caveat that most of it he was dealing with was Liaden to begin with, and defined over the generations by both force of custom and the sharp eyes and minds of the qe’andra.

  Words were not to be played idly in the game of trade, and since he was studying to be a specialist like none before him, intensive lessons in Liaden were backed up by heavy reading and study in Terran as well. Who knew there were so many business-essential words that shipfolk never used, never spoke, never even thought?

  Birthright.

  Jethri’d come across the term most recently in a contract from a Terran world, one allowing heirs and assigns certain rights and duties . . . and now he’d set the search going in the Liaden-centered computer, trying to see what the comparisons were. Being born to a family was enough to guarantee all kinds of things on some worlds—Terran worlds, especially—and aboard some ships, but in Liaden space, it was the delm who ultimately determined what a person owned or could own, down to being denied any part in a clan.

  Well, there—he needed to know, as a trader, how often such things might be encountered. He . . . well, as a Terran spacer he’d inherited some stuff from his father and he’d owned some stuff on his own as a kid, things given him by his father.

  That must have been birthright, because not even the ship’s captain—his mother—would deny it to him now. A couple pieces of jewelry, some fractins all collected now by the Scout, a book—his “logbook” where as a child he’d sat beside his father, Arin Gobelyn, whole shifts at a time, creating routes and manifests for trips he’d make when he was a pilot or Combine trader on the Market.

  He sighed, for he was still no pilot, and his mother had stolen the book away when his father died, and hid it, and so pre-told the true tale that he was never to be welcome as full-fledged crew there on Gobelyn’s Market, name or no, birthright or not.

  The family stuff, personal family stuff, he tried to shove that back into the receding mental cubby that was Jethri Gobelyn, since here on Elthoria he was Jethri the trader, son of the trader, ven’Deelin the family name, Ixin the clan.

  Study and thought, that was the day, and that was fine.

  In fact, the day was going well, which was what he’d come to expect when it came to dealing with tradeship Elthoria. Very few things caused a stir, very rare was a raised voice or a ruffled demeanor, very unusual indeed was there anything deemed urgent.

  Jethri admired this stability in a ship, having come from a ship which aspired to ordinary but whose days had been punctuated by angry outbursts and whimsical orders, and an overdose of what his cousin Dyk had labeled “Jethri do.”

  There was, of course, quite a difference between the driving forces behind the ship Elthoria and the ship Gobelyn’s Market. On the Market the driving force was the captain, who’d also been his mother until bare months before when he’d discovered the awkward truth. On Elthoria. the driving force was Norn ven’Deelin, who had been his rescue as a Master Trader and had become his new mother, and behind her was a clan at least as old and as proud as the Gobelyns.

  Even granting different base cultures, which Jethri was more than willing to do, the ships were more different than many of his current crew mates would imagine, for they—everyone besides him, that is—had someplace to call home that was not Elthoria. Not just a posting or a position or a job or a berth, but a home, a planetside building, mostly with roof and windows and a view at least of the underside of a sky.

  As for Jethri, he’d grown up on Gobelyn’s Market—it had been his home until the strange series of events that had brought him to Trader ven’Deelin’s office in what was to him, just another port. By then Iza had already given notice that his home ship couldn’t house him any longer. He’d become too much an extra hand, too much a reminder of agreements and perhaps even of passion that had passed years before with the death of his father, Arin.

  Technically, of course, he had a home now—which would be the distant Clan Ixin clanhouse he’d yet to enter, but inside, in his thoughts, he couldn’t call it home anymore than he could call himself Liaden, though his demeanor, his clothes, his title, and his trade-ring all screamed Liaden to unknowing dirtsiders who met him in the rounds of business.

  But there, his mother was not his mother, his ship was not his home, his clan was not his family . . . and only some of his family was family by blood and genes.

  What had he got from being born? Birthright?

  What was that exactly? The blood and genes of his father, and a few odd ends that had belonged to his father, and that in the aftermath of his father’s death had, in a roundabout way, been ceded to him.

  Oh, the other thing that might be his birthright as Jethri Gobelyn? His father’s relatives. They were still relatives as Terrans saw relations, and when thought on properly, they were something strange. What that meant for him, well, that was something Jethri, trader and changeling, would have to decide.

  He waved his hands at the keyboard, bringing his research screens to life, and lighting the reminders pad.

  He grimaced, then worked to erase that unfortunate expression from his face.

  Liadens rarely showed what they thought in their faces if they could avoid it, and he thought it one of the reasons that adult Terrans looked older than adult Liadens. Frown lines, and smile lines, too, were far less obvious on a Liaden face. To Liadens, most expressions were unfortunate, unless shared with a family member or a special, rare intimate.

  His manners tutor worked with him diligently on such points, and with a deep breath he relaxed both his face and his shoulders, lifting his elbow from the resting place that would, he knew, have a lasting impression from his time on the ship. He’d seen armrests on the Market marked with sweat and wear of decades, and had more than once as a child been accused of shirking his duties because of that Terran habit.

  Still, the reason for the grimace was not as easy to disappear from in front of his eyes as his face was to set bland: overdue correspondence, necessary action.

  He reviewed the list, knowing he was being hard on himself. Not all of the list was overdue, for many of items were voluntary. It was just that in the flow of his days, he’d not had time to focus on letters to Meicha and Miandra, nor to decide why he felt guilty about having more to say to one than the other, tw
in empaths that they were. Twins he’d known about before meeting the girls, but empath had been something new. Then there’d been the discovery that, twins or not, the girls were hardly interchangeable. Even with them knowing what he was thinking and knowing what each other was doing, they weren’t the same person and had different goals . . .

  Letters would be hard—he sometimes wished there was some way he could just hold hands with both of them and let them know that way what he felt.

  Nor had he managed to work out what he wanted to say to Khat in a letter to her that might be as well said in a broadcast letter to the whole of the Market, but he felt that he had some slight reticence to share some things with the crew entire, as he had some things more personal, more intimate for Khat than the whole of the crew. For all that she’d taken on full adult status and certainly had cares of her own, she’d often been the easiest for him to talk to.

  More pressing was the correspondence he owed to his single business partner, and that had been more getting difficult as the distance between them and the time between infoshares had grown. In hopeful theory—if the minute details could be worked out, if the language could be made dense enough and stealthy enough and, face it, Liaden-tricky enough—Tan Sim might soon be employed as an associate trader on Elthoria.

  It was a bold idea, given the enmity between Ixin and Rinork, and it had been Jethri’s innocent question about the propriety of him, an apprentice trader, hiring Tan Sim, a full trader, as an assistant that had begun the entire project. His mother had smiled at the idea at first, seeing it both an amusing and a confounding idea since it would of course be a Balance game of sorts, a winning of melant’i for both Jethri and Ixin, if Rinork’s best young trader could be willfully brought to serve with Jethri at Jethri’s behest.

  Ixin’s needs were not simple in the situation, though, since a straight buyout from Rinork was unlikely, given the spite that had placed Tan Sim under the contract carrying him away from Wynhael, Rinork, and Rinork-to-be.

  The point of that contract had been to punish Tan Sim for his insolence, to place him in an isolated position on a ship not of Rinork where Rinork could still publicly claim he’d been given responsibility and opportunity.

  The sense Jethri’d made of the contract, and the one taken by Norn ven’Deelin as well, was that the lad was meant to fail miserably. The ship’s route was such to make speculative trading difficult at best, and the ship’s owner and captain one with little enough capital. Indeed, it appeared that Rinork’s part was to sell the contract at an absurdly low price, place Tan Sim on a route with diminishing returns so that one might point to slow genes perhaps and his father’s failure, and then to crush him by disallowing his escape from the contract.

  To the few Liadens Jethri could discuss it with, it appeared a slow death sentence, the assumption of failure and disgrace meaning that a dutiful child would do away with himself rather than embarrass the clan. To Jethri, that—at first sight—looked like a good reason to jump ship. On consideration, since he’d been reading among the Code and histories, Jethri knew that wasn’t likely and so they’d needed another way.

  Tan Sim’s part in the whole was tricky: in theory he oughtn’t be party to contravening his delm’s will. If he’d been Terran there might have been cause for him to right the wrong as son of a swindle victim, but as Liaden that was an awkward idea—the melant’i of it failing several tests and passing several others. But for Jethri, having been threatened by Bar Jan and falsely accused of assault, there, there could be Balance, and with Jethri having—however casually it had been done—put himself in Tan Sim’s debt, yes, there could be an exquisite Balance worthy of the playhouse.

  Given Norn’s own willingness to pursue that Balance, they’d put in motion an enormously complex set of subtle negotiations. What was necessary was to find a third party to transfer Tan Sim’s contract away from the ship Rinork had sold him to, and then to transfer the allegiance of the third party and the contract in a way that Elthoria and Ixin would have benefit of the trader and his presence without an openly slap-face insult. Subtle insult, now, that was fine and more than fine, and was surely part of the equation.

  The thing was that Jethri wasn’t permitted to talk about any of that in a letter for security reasons, to explain things, and as a result Tan Sim was feeling left out, worse so since there’d been some issues with more of their salvage cargo being impounded by the Scouts than originally expected, and Tan Sim feeling the blame. When exactly Tan Sim might escape, that had Jethri depressed. Norn had said she was willing to let it go a dozen Standards if need be!

  Well, Balance was like that for Liadens, but Jethri didn’t need to like it. Easy enough to put off the communication another planetfall or two, or until the end of the route, if need be.

  So, next on the list was Terran trade, adjusting a Terran ten-year key to a Liaden ship’s data structure wasn’t simple and the thing would have to be done, yessir, for he wasn’t going to give up his status with them and no one on the worlds he’d been on was willing to press the launch button on his suggestions for how to make it work.

  And too, he ought to have been more forward with writing his note to Scout ter’Astin. True, he was still much more than merely peeved with the whole of the Scout organization for their grab for his book and fractins and all the things that had been his by birth . . . and that . . . he sighed, still not having activated a single writing file.

  His tutor wanted him to understand Balance, the subtle flow of things like honor and necessity that were the underpinnings of Liaden society, in particular that all-powerful melant’i—that concept that had, on the execution of a single bow, led to a simple Terran apprentice trader candidate becoming the appointed son of Clan Ixin.

  If he were to be Jethri ven’Deelin in face and action, he must permit the Scouts their madness. The original Jethri Gobelyn, apprentice trader—that young man might have easily died at the hands of offended Liadens several times now.

  A collection of breath, a move to research, since clearly he still was not up to correspondence.

  In the back of his mind was the knowledge that Balance was still possible. Yes, Balance, both by him, and by those who thought his mere existence an affront worth murder. The Scouts . . . not all the Scouts deserved Balance, but some did. Not all Liadens, but some. He had much to learn.

  With a sigh, Jethri brought the comparative contracts part of the day’s study live, with the Terran, Trade, and Liaden standard and legal dictionaries tabbed along with Traders Guild Concise Guidebook of Common Contracts. He laughed gently—he’d miss-called it the Guidebook of Common Conflicts to the librarian . . . who’d known exactly what he’d meant.

  Pressing the incoming mail button to hold, he stared straight ahead, and said, “Go.”

  Taking Delivery was the topic he was starting with today. Lunch, four hours away, was his goal.

  Chapter Two

  Clan Ixin’s Tradeship Elthoria, in Jump

  Delivery was not so much the successful unloading of a ship at a specific place as it was a state of ecstasy achieved when—and if—a signature of acceptance and a signature of release of invoiced goods in good order as agreed (with exceptions noted and countersigned) could be affixed to the same document (in both hardcopy and electronic format, preferably) without reservation.

  Jethri pressed on. Some things were not as obvious as they appeared.

  The fact that stuff was dumped at a dock was good enough in some places—by deep mud he’d seen it himself with Paitor and Dyk shoving a last lonely plascrate of a make-weight shipment of protein flour into the dust at Marrakesh, the ship’s ventilation working so hard it sounded like they had drifted too close to a star instead of landed on a habited world. In some places, it took multiple vid-captures, signatures on five lines of paper and stick-seals, ribbons, stamps, customs clips and . . . and . . .

  Ownership of goods changed at different times and different places, too. Sometimes, the book warned, things were sold that
weren’t owned—and so one needed to have financial recourse available, which varied by trade guild as well as by system, and even by planet and sometimes depending where on a planet . . .

  Recourse for goods being mishandled varied. In Liaden-run systems, the Code and its spin-offs were guides, but guides only, dealing with reputable people was especially important with Liadens because melant’i was serious stuff with them. In other places . . .

  Jethri routed the recourse stuff away to his notes: more of the legal stuff he wasn’t exactly keen on. On non-Liaden worlds—which meant Terran mostly—there might be other things to do, other legal remedies and other legal requirements. He read on, skimming, knowing he’d have to come back and knowing that if he ever had his own ship he’d employ himself a law-jaw or an assistant who had that training, at least. Skimming, Terran basis shipping law special actions . . . See Writ of Completion, Writ of Garnishment, Writ of Safe Passage, Writ of Progression, Writ of Replevin, Writ of Certiorari . . . and back to normal trade without problems . . .

  Right. The proper bow of acknowledgment was the final finish on some ports, while in point of fact, in some delivery situations getting off-port without being fired on seemed to do the trick.

  He bowed a bow—a bow of acknowledgment—and the snap of his wrist startled him. He really needed to move more.

  Jethri let his mind focus and took delivery of the message that, yes, once again he’d let the words catch him, and the concepts, and he’d gone an extra hour. He, at least, was not on a firm food schedule at the cafeteria this day, but his stomach was growling and he really should see if the rest of the universe existed. His stomach growled again. More than once Paitor had explained to him the difference between proper study and too much study, especially if he forwent stinks duty for it. He knew he really should take a break, get lunch . . .

  Pushing away from the desk he stood, immediately dropping into one of the static defense poses he was learning, and followed that with a whirling countermove that left the snapping sounds of stiff muscles bouncing in the air for longer than he liked. The yawn came unbidden, and unwanted. He was, he knew, to exorcise that particular habit from anything but intentional use, just as he was to unship his basic comfortable and agreeable face for the noncommittal and boring trade face of the professional.