“Well, two creds worth of yarn and about ten stands of labor, but yeah,” Sean replied with a half shrug. “You got this yarn for a cred a skein?”
Pip nodded.
“You caught them on a good day. Double skeins of this quality are usually five creds. I paid three for mine.”
“So, basically, a day’s labor, two skeins of yarn and we get fifty creds?” I re-focused the conversation.
“At least,” Sean agreed.
“Okay, what we need then is a way to make these.” I tapped the picture on the table. “Can you teach Sarah how to do it? And loan her a hook until we get to Dunsany and I can get one for her?”
“What do ya think, Sarah? Wanna learn to tie little tiny knots?” Sean asked.
She looked at me, then at Sean, and then at the picture on the table. She nodded with a kind of hopeful puppy expression. “Do you think I could?”
Sean wrinkled his nose. “Easy. There’s nothing to it. I can have you crocheting in ten ticks. I bet you could have one of these done by the day after tomorrow.”
Pip broke into his full wheeler-dealer mode. “Okay, wait, what about the money? What kind of arrangement are we talking about?”
“If we got five creds a skein, we’d be felling pretty good, right?” I asked him.
“Yeah. I’d be really happy with a five hundred percent margin.”
“Okay, and the shawls should go for fifty creds?” I asked Sean.
“Easily. I was getting five for my lace doilies.”
“So two skeins at five is ten creds per shawl. You two make the shawls, and when they sell, you give us back ten creds. You pay the booth fees and keep whatever you make over that. You can also keep the leftover yarn for whatever project you want. Meanwhile, we’ll hold the yarn in our mass allotment, which means the shawls don’t get added to yours. Eventually, we’ll have to clear the mass of the leftover yarn but we can deal with that if this works out the way I think it might. We have enough yarn for sixty something shawls. That should gross something over three thousand three hundred creds. Pip and I get five hundred and whoever makes the shawls gets about twenty eight hundred and the co-op gets the fees. Assuming we turn all the yarn into shawls and sell them.”
Pip just blinked at me, trying to follow the math. “You’re good,” he said at last.
“We’re only like ten days out of Dunsany,” Sean said. “We can’t make sixty shawls in ten days.”
“We’re forty-nine days out of Betrus on the other side.” I said. “How many days do you need?”
“What if we sell the yarn in Dunsany?” Pip asked.
“Can I buy some of your yarn for my own projects?” Sarah asked.
“I want to finish my afghans,” Sean added.
It took most of a stan but we ironed out all the loose ends. In the end we agreed that we would try to sell the yarn but would set aside ten skeins for Sarah and Sean to work with to teach Sarah how to make the shawls. That still left us ninety skeins to try to sell. We would know better once we got a feel for how well the yarn itself sold. It would be a chance for us to test the idea out. Sarah had time to make a few shawls to offer at the co-op in Dunsany Roads. I suspected Sean may have a couple of his own by then, too.
Just when I thought it was all settled, Tabitha walked into the berthing area and saw the picture of the shawl. “Oh! That’s beautiful, Sean, are you making those?”
“Not yet,” he admitted, “but I’m going to teach Sarah how. You wanna learn, too?”
She got a funny look on her face. “Hon, I haven’t done any crocheting since I was a girl…” her voice tapered off and she got a little smile on her face. “My mother used to make the most gorgeous white lace.” She turned to him and asked, “You have a spare hook?”
Sean looked at me. “Same deal?”
Pip and I shared a glance. “The more the merrier,” I told him. “How many hooks do you have?”
Pip asked, “How many should we buy in Dunsany?”
Chapter 15
DUNSANY ROADS SYSTEM
2352-APRIL-13
Two days out of Dunsany Roads the captain passed the word about customs inspection. Because Dunsany was a Confederation system and not corporately owned, we had to go through an inspection exercise with the local authorities before we could leave the ship. A section in the back of the Handbook explained customs declarations and the kind of goods we were prohibited from taking into Confederation ports.
Pip and I sat on the mess deck after lunch and I asked, “What do you do if you have something that’s prohibited? It’s kinda late at this point to get rid of it.”
He grinned. “Do you have anything on the prohibited list? And can I have some?”
I laughed. “No, it’s just that none of the stuff listed is—technically—illegal on any of the corporate planets except maybe the radioactives and nerve agents.”
“And the biologicals,” Pip reminded me.
“Okay, and the biologicals, but what do you do if you have some poka-juice you just wanna pass through and sell at Betrus?”
“There’s an embargo locker down in main cargo. We put anything we don’t want to be considered in the inspection in there before we dock. The customs people put a tell-tale on the locker so that they know if it’s opened while we’re docked. Anything in there stays put and that’s all they care about. Cargo manifests are easy to check and track and they just lock the prohibited cargo canisters to the ship. We can’t leave without them.”
“Will they search the ship?”
Pip chuckled. “I doubt it. It would take forever. Commercial carriers generally operate on the honor system. They make it easy for us to comply with their rules and regs and so we do it. Occasionally you hear of some small indie captain trying to smuggle stuff into a Confederation port, but it’s really not worth it.”
“Why?”
“Ishmael?” He looked at me seriously. “Have you not noticed that we’ve just traveled through five other systems where anything you wanted to sell was legal? Why take the risk on smuggling when you can sell it legitimately in the next system over?”
“Oh,” I said.
The forms themselves were easy and I did not have anything to put into the embargo locker. Still, I could tell we were in for a rather different experience on Dunsany Roads than our other ports. Pip went for his afternoon run and I headed down to deck berthing to see how the crochet work was coming.
Sean had taught Sarah and Tabitha how to crochet. Tabitha only really needed a refresher because she had done simple lace tatting as a girl. Sarah knew the theory, but had never held a hook before. They had been at it about a week by the time we docked and I was shocked to see how much they had done. Sean, of course, had almost finished his afghans and supervised the shawl work. I found the three of them in Sean’s quad, Sean and Tabitha sat on opposite ends of Sean’s bunk and Sarah occupied the lower bunk across from them. Sean was working on his sixth—and last—afghan.
They seemed cozy, all settled in and surrounded by their yarn and talking softly together. Sarah looked as comfortable as I had ever seen her, and Sean looked pleased to have Tabitha nearby. They had not talked about the arrangement when in the sauna so I wondered if they were keeping the project quiet for some reason. Tabitha kept up the queen bee posture when in the sauna, but I thought she and Sean had an easiness between them while they
