A12 Who Can Own the Stars?

by Mackey Chandler

  “I notice everybody seems to wear them here,” Gupta acknowledged. “I don’t say it to be critical, but in India, it’s not socially acceptable to wear them outside of a work environment. If servers wore them in a business the customers would object. There is a lingering fear they will be used to invade one’s privacy. Especially, to capture public figures in awkward and embarrassing moments.”

  “That would be a dangerous game here,” Irwin said. “If you offended someone like that, they might invite you to make a convincing public apology, or meet them in the north corridor in the morning to settle it with pistols at ten paces.”

  “I saw such a thing reported on the news services, but didn’t know if it was true. It was told in the harshest terms, condemning it. I didn’t give it any regard as I find it safer to believe very little of what they report.”

  “No. It’s true that we have the duel, but it’s a rare thing. Most challenges end in a retraction or an expulsion from Home,” Jeff said.

  A couple of changes of expression played over Gupta’s face. April decided he had questions but didn’t feel free to air them. Instead, he asked something safer.

  “This is quite good,” he said, lifting his plate to indicate he found all of it acceptable. “How can you get greens so crisp and fresh? It took me four days to get here with the fastest connections I could find. Surely, freight goes slower.”

  “Just about everything here came from the Moon,” April said. “Heather makes independence a primary goal. The only Earth goods here are likely grains for bread and the olives. Produce doesn’t go standby, it has dedicated priority flights.”

  “Even the prawns?” Gupta asked surprised.

  “Tank raised and fed things that otherwise would be waste and hard to recycle,” Jeff said. “They are raised in much cleaner conditions than Earth prawns or shrimp. They’re scavengers you know. What they eat in the wild is as disgusting as chickens. We haven’t wanted to get into the complexities of maintaining a saltwater environment for shrimp.”

  Gupta sighed. “It sounds like I should go see this Moon colony myself. I hadn’t planned on spending that much time.”

  “There’s never enough time for everything,” April lamented.

  “That’s exactly why I intend to live up here,” Gupta revealed. “I’m fifty-two years old and I’ve had all the legally permissible fixes and tweaks to stave off heart disease and cancer, and I have no desire to need the treatments to evade dementia. I want the full life-extension treatments. I can’t put it off forever. If I stay on Earth, I have a limited number of years left. There are places I could push the legal envelope and have more done but I can see the danger of being trapped by changing law and circumstances so I might lose my freedom to travel and to emigrate.”

  “I understand,” Jeff agreed. “I’m operating under the assumption I have more than the usual lifespan to accomplish things if I don’t do something stupid. We want to move even further away from Earth and are working to do so.”

  “Yes, I know the French went to the nearest star,” Gupta said, “but there and back is like crossing the Atlantic ocean in a rowboat. It establishes it can be done in principle, but is still a long way from making colonization a practical matter. Still, it is encouraging.”

  “We’re ahead of them,” Jeff said.

  “Really?” Gupta said, very interested.

  “Really. Now, you will probably ask for proof,” Jeff predicted. “But I don’t care to offer any right now. You’re welcome to regard my free advice as worth every centum you paid. You don’t really know me, after all. If you want to move to Home or the Moon just be aware that in my opinion, you will have access to such travel when it becomes available here sooner than from Earth and on better terms. As you said, it isn’t practical yet. If you want to get away from Earth why not take the first logical step right now?”

  “This is where I am used to getting an investment pitch,” Gupta said warily.

  “We’ve already diluted our interest as far as we care to, with partners we’ve known for a long time and with whom we share common goals,” Jeff said. “We don’t want further dilution. Our partners are all life extended too. We don’t have to worry if they’ll be around in a decade or two. Maybe some years down the road after you have had your life extension treatments and make the mental adjustments to that, we can talk.

  “I predict if you do move here, and learn to do business in this community, it will change everything for you. You will be busy for years just moving your active business and assets away from Earth. We have a friend who came into a fortune back when we separated ourselves from North America and he still hasn’t completely succeeded in doing that. You never have safe possession of anything still down there where Earth governments can take it by taxation or outright seizure.”

  “That is unfortunately true while one is still living there,” Gupta admitted. He took the opportunity to return to the hot side of the buffet, getting some Swedish meatballs.

  “I’m not changing my interest in acquiring a place on Beta,” Gupta said, gesturing forcefully with a meatball on a fork, “but I am intrigued by the possibility of breaking one of these huge properties you describe into rental units that are of limited scope. I can’t imagine everyone is interested in owning the volume beneath them to unlimited depths. People on Earth readily buy land with mineral rights and riparian rights withheld. I’m definitely going to obtain a copy of the purchase agreement for one of these properties and explore carefully if there is any prohibition on subdividing it.”

  “The safer course of action would be to simply ask the sovereign if she has any objection to doing that,” April said. “If you have her explicit permission you are golden. You two could just add an addendum to the purchase contract to that effect and initial it in case one of you fails to seat their helmet someday.”

  “We usually say, In case one of you steps in front of a bus,” Gupta said, amused.

  “Do you want to ask her right now?” April offered. “It’s the middle of the day and not her court day. She’ll probably take a call if Armstrong isn’t invading.”

  “If such a thing can be done without an appointment,” he said, uncertain.

  “If you were calling her public number cold her secretary Dakota would put you off until she had your credit history and whatever is floating around on the web about you. She’s a bit of a control freak, but Heather needs someone to do that. The sovereign of a small nation does get some very weird com calls, but Heather is our partner, so of course, we can call her directly.”

  “And you are sure you don’t need to screen me to protect her?” Gupta challenged.

  “Irwin isn’t in the habit of bringing vagrants around. We had our intelligence guy inquire of his earth contacts and local assets while you were coming over,” April said. “He likes to show off by telling us more than we asked. I stopped reading it once I saw you aren’t deeply tied to any weird political movements and aren’t linked to the kinds of businesses we’d find morally repugnant.”

  “Forgive me if I fail to explore that right now,” Gupta begged, “but is there anything of which I should be aware that your partner would hold against me?”

  “She tolerates but dislikes gambling,” Jeff said. “As far as other addictive behaviors she has expelled a couple of drunks from her domain. She reasons that when an alcoholic returns to drink he is dead sober when he decides to take that first new drink.

  “I have no deep craving for either, so perhaps we will find each other agreeable if you wish to go ahead and introduce us.”

  “House, page Heather and ask her if she can talk. Put it on the big screen.”

  After a few seconds, Heather appeared leaning back into the corner of a big sofa. She was dressed casually in a soft long-sleeved top and her lower body not visible. Her pad was set to the side face down. Whatever she was working on interrupted to take their social call on a bigger screen.

  “Ah, Dr. Gupta,” she said with a nod, eliminating the
need for any introductions.

  “You clearly have the advantage of me,” Gupta said. “I know very little about you.”

  “We can delay speaking until you can research me if you want. You are with the two people who know me best, but they may display bias in my favor. Let me assure you there are plenty of other biographers available less flattering to me.”

  “I’ll pass on that for now if you would just tell me how you knew me by sight.”

  “One of our recent additions, who partners with our primary intelligence officer, saw my partners requesting a report on you. He operates with the primary rather loosely and as a peer. He covers Europe better than our older fellow who specializes in Asia. His personal style is to not follow set procedures as rigidly, so he told me about it in case I wanted to see the report before it came in buried in the full morning brief. He anticipates things happening, rather well, obviously, since here you are,” Heather said.

  “Indeed, the man sounds like a treasure. I have a news briefing created for me and several of my executives daily, but I’ll admit it discomforts me that you sound more like a military organization than a corporation with blunt talk of intelligence operatives.”

  “We hire spies,” Heather said even more bluntly. “No point in trying to pretty it up with weasel words. I’m sovereign over a kingdom. Let me assure you, no kingdom lasts for long without some military capability. I’ve conducted military operations against both North America and China and I’m still here. My partners share some of those capabilities and some of their own that they have used against other Earth powers. I suspect you have not researched us sufficiently if I need to be telling you this. Home has no legal provisions for corporations to exist and I never intend to let that legal fiction take hold here.”

  “Yes, I can see that despite striving to be skeptical, I believed what is presented in Earth news reports too readily, as have the people advising me. I’ll try to research these things myself now.”

  “Which means that wasn’t the original purpose of your call,” Heather said.

  “No indeed, I wanted to inquire if you would sell one of the large parcels of land in which you deal, knowing that as the owner I intend to subdivide it both in the area and in its depth, into smaller units?” Gupta asked.

  “I’m surprised nobody has already,” Heather said. “I assume they are held back by the same factors I am. If you divide a large volume into many parts you need to provide utilities and services. Power, air, potable water and sewer service, elevator access, surface access, large tunnel transport and industrial sewer and disposal. Trying to let each owner provide their own utilities kilometers from the surface is unworkable. It runs into the same problem in reverse that a very tall building on Earth has. The lower levels are dominated by express elevators and service easements after so many stories.

  “If you create a system with economies of scale it’s a vast investment. If you build on a smaller scale it becomes even more expensive to upgrade later. When you have to replace a two-hundred-millimeter water line with a meter waterline you never recover that investment even if you fabricate it from durable materials and reuse it. The disassembly storage, transport, and reassembly dwarf the simple cost of the pipe. It’s much the same with all of it. You recover some from services beyond sales or rent by charging for things like elevator lift. But your buyers or renters don’t care what you have as sunk costs. They will only look at what someone else would charge for the same service as a startup. I’m doing well to finance the supply, the major roads, and defense that large landowners demand. Eventually, fees on those services will pay off, far in the future. But for now, it runs well ahead of anything I can charge.”

  “I’m used to developing large projects,” Gupta said. “Nothing of what you said surprises me except the economy with which you explained it. I’m planning to move from Earth to Beta so I can have the full Life Extension Therapy. That will allow me to tackle projects with such a long pay-back period. After speaking with your partners, I wanted to know primarily if you would have any objections to such a project. Indeed, if it would interfere with your plans.”

  “No, no objections in principle,” Heather said. “However, I do not intend to expose my subjects and residents to an absentee landlord on Beta, who isn’t experienced with our ways of doing business or assimilated into our culture. We have plenty of territory within our claim markers. There will still be lots for sale later. If you still want to do this sort of project in a couple of years come back and talk to me. I don’t want to have a big mess to clean up if you bungle it.”

  Gupta looked at Heather thoughtfully and finally nodded agreement. “Nothing up here was exactly what I expected, including you. I can’t remember the last time I was told I needed any qualifications to invest beyond having the funds. It may take me more than two years to figure it all out, but thank you for setting your terms. Your partners have been quite kind to me too, and I appreciate that.”

  “Since you mentioned having some expectations shaped by the news outlets, I’m curious what you expected?” Heather asked. “We watch North America and China very closely because they have set themselves against us. And we are developing allies elsewhere. But we don’t always know how the rest of the world views us.”

  Gupta looked embarrassed. “A lot of Indians still favor the BBC. The Indian news services are less kind to spacers. Even though we have our own launch industry, there is a feeling we have lagged in manned flight by not having a habitat. I’m afraid the resentment and being disrespected, colors their attitude towards others. I try to maintain a skeptical attitude, but it’s hard when you only hear one side.”

  When Heather didn’t press her question but just looked interested, Gupta forced himself to say a little more. “I’m afraid they don’t take you seriously. They make jokes like they would about a tiny island nation that gives itself the airs of a great power.”

  Heather looked amused rather than offended. It was April who laughed out loud.

  “I’m sure they would feel the same way about our ally Tonga. They have two of the plots Heather sells and likely more people in space than India, but they certainly put on no airs about it. They are just quietly establishing themselves and making sure it is not a drain on their finances for prestige, but solidly profitable. In the future, they will have a significant body of personnel who know the space trades and culture.”

  “Tonga? I had no idea,” Gupta admitted.

  “Tonga has the ideal of a basic right to real property that they weren’t able to fulfill for a long time due to the reality of their population density. They are correcting that to the extent they can by offering cubic here. I won’t grant them sovereign status,” Heather said, “but anyone who comes here will retain a right of return as will their descendants. We hope and intend to eventually offer them other territories that will be a real sovereign extension of Tonga.”

  “Off, separated from your holdings?” Gupta asked. “Is there that much unclaimed lunar area to establish a separate holding?”

  “We plan on being much further away than the Moon,” Heather assured him.

  “Oh,” Gupta was not stupid. He put that together with Jeff’s comment and didn’t ask for the obvious to be confirmed as others might.

  “None of this alters my original intent to buy a residence on Beta. It just confirms it is a good idea for more reasons than I thought. Thank you for briefing me,” he told Heather and turned and nodded to include her friends.

  “I’ll show you the rest when we’re done eating,” April promised, “but if you can, get a place looking toward the inside of your ring like this. You’ve surely noticed how the view changed several times as it rotates. The light and shadows play back and forth. Sometimes, as the hab orbits around a center point, the Moon is visible too. It’s much nicer than an outside unit.”

  “Yes, and that’s a level of realism someone might not have felt important to capture in a virtual walkthrough. Thank you for thinking of this, Irwin.
”

  “My pleasure. Just remember me please, when it comes time to open local accounts. I intend to have new offices on Beta, and Gamma too, as soon as they are open.”

  “But of course we’re open everywhere with virtual offices,” Jeff reminded him.

  And that is what passes for cut-throat competition locally. Gupta thought.

  Chapter 5

  Dr. Holbrook was a broad-spectrum polymath. Despite being socially irritating, like so many brilliant people, he valued others as sources of information even they had no idea they held, if you just found the proper key to bring it forth. You simply had to input the search in the proper format. Some people could be word searched like a paper. Some people had even wider matching abilities if presented with images. Even if they were partial, wildly distorted, or noisy images.

  Since the device he was examining didn’t make any sense at all to him, he went fishing in other minds to find some direction to pursue. He had an image of the alien device that was frustrating him taken by non-invasive scanning. They were far too early along to start cutting pieces and altering what they had. They hadn’t even risked cleaning the Martian soil off other than a light brushing. The tech he approached was an older fellow who not only worked with electronics professionally but as a hobby and private interest since elementary school.

  Holbrook approached him at his workbench and stood, not pressing him too closely. The fellow knew he was there. He appreciated the same sort of respect for his personal space and attention when others interrupted him.