spectacular non-sentient xenoc species were included. The grooves moved at an infinitesimal speed, causing the birds to flap their wings, the animals to run; their cycles lasted for hours. The table was made from halkett wood (native to Kulu), a rich gold in colour, with bright scarlet grain. Three antique silver candelabras were spaced along the polished wood, with slender white candles tipped by tiny flames.
There were six people at the dinner. Parris himself sat at the head of the table, looking spruce in a black dinner-jacket. The formal evening attire suited him, complementing his curly silver-grey hair to give him a distinguished appearance. At the other end of the table was Symone, his current lover, a beautiful twenty-eight- year-old whose geneered chromosomes had produced a dark walnut skin and hair a shade lighter than Dominique’s, a striking and delightful contrast. She was eight months pregnant with Parris’s third child.
Joshua and Dominique sat together on one side of the table. And Dominique’s long legs had been riding up and down his trousers all through the meal. He had done his best to ignore it, but his twitching mouth had given him away to Ione, and, he suspected, Symone as well.
Opposite them were Ione and Clement, Parris’s son. He was eighteen, lacking his big sister’s miscreant force, but quietly cheerful. And handsome, Ione thought, though not in the mould of Joshua’s wolfish ruggedness; his younger face was softer, framed with fair curly hair that was recognizably Parris’s. He had just returned from his first year at university on Kulu.
“I haven’t been to Kulu yet,” Joshua said as the white-jacketed waiter cleared the dessert dishes away, assisted by a couple of housechimps.
“Wouldn’t they let you in?” Dominique asked with honeyed malice.
“The Kulu merchants form a tight cartel, they’re hard to crack.”
“Tell me about it,” Parris said gruffly. “It took me eight years before I broke in with fabrics from Oshanko, until then my ships were going there empty to pick up their nanonics. That costs.”
“I’ll wait until I get a charter,” Joshua said. “I’m not going to try head-butting that kind of organization. But I’d like to play tourist sometime.”
“You did all right penetrating Norfolk,” Dominique said, eyes wide and apparently innocent over her crystal champagne glass.
“Hey, neat intro,” he said enthusiastically. “We just slid into that subject, didn’t we? I never noticed.”
She stuck her tongue out at him.
“You got off lightly, Joshua,” Parris said. “Me, I get lumbered with her subtlety all day every day.”
“I would have thought she was old enough to have left home by now,” he said.
“Who’d have her?”
“Good point.”
Dominique lobbed a small cluster of grapes at her father.
Parris caught them awkwardly, laughing. One went bouncing off across the moss carpet. “Make me an offer for her, Joshua, anything up to ten fuseodollars considered.”
He saw the warning gleam in Dominique’s eye. “I think I’ll decline, thanks.”
“Coward.” Dominique pouted.
Parris dropped the grapes onto a side plate, and wiped his hand with a napkin. “So how did you do it, Joshua? My captains don’t get three thousand cases, and the Vasilkovsky line has been making the Norfolk run for fifty years.”
Joshua activated a neural nanonics memory cell. “Confidentiality coverage. Agreed?” His gaze went round the table, recording everyone saying yes. They were legally bound not to repeat what they heard now. Although quite what he could do about Ione was an interesting point, since her thought processes were Tranquillity’s legal system. “I traded something they needed: wood.” He explained about the mayope.
“Very clever,” Dominique drawled when he finished, though there was a note of respect in amongst the affected languor. “Brains as well as balls.”
“I like it,” Parris said. He studied his cut-crystal glass. “Why tell us?”
“Supply and demand,” Joshua said. “I’ve found a valuable hole in the market, and I want to fill it.”
“But the
Joshua had wondered how smart the lad was. Now he knew. A real chip off the Vasilkovsky block. “That’s right. I need a partner, a big partner.”
“Why not go to a bank?” Dominique asked. “Charter some ships for yourself.”
“There’s a loose end which needs tying up.”
“Ah,” Parris, showing some real interest at last, leant forward in his seat. “Go on.”
“The power mayope has over Norfolk lies in keeping it a monopoly, that way we can keep the price high. I have a provisional arrangement with a distributor on Norfolk who’s agreed to take as much as we can ship in. What we need to do next is pin down the supply to a single source, one that only we can obtain. That is going to take upfront money, the kind which can’t be explained away to bank auditors.”
“You can do that?”
“Parris, I have never been on a planet more corrupt than Lalonde. It’s also very primitive and correspondingly poor. If you, with all your money, went there, you would be its king.”
“No, thank you,” Parris said sagely.
“Fine, but with money pushed into the right credit disks we can guarantee that no one else gets an export licence. OK, it won’t last for ever, administration people move on, traders will offer counter-bribes when they find what we’re doing; but I figure we ought to get two of Norfolk’s conjunctions out of it. Two conjunctions where your ships are filled to capacity with Norfolk Tears.”
“Every ship? I do have quite a few.”
“No, not every ship. We have to walk a fine line between greed and squeeze. My Norfolk distributor will give us most favoured customer status, that’s all. It’ll be up to us to work out exactly how much we can squeeze them for before they start to protest. You know how jealously they guard their independence.”
“Yes.” Parris nodded thoughtfully.
“And what about Lalonde?” Ione asked quietly. Her glass was dangling casually between thumb and forefinger, she rocked it from side to side, swirling the champagne around the bottom.
“What about Lalonde?” Joshua asked.
“Its people,” Symone said. “It doesn’t sound as though they get a very good deal out of this. The mayope is their wood.”
Joshua gave her a polite smile. Just what I need, bleeding hearts. “What do they get at the moment?”
Symone frowned.
“He means they get nothing,” Dominique said.
“We’re developing their market for them,” Joshua said. “We’ll be pumping hard cash into their economy. Not much by our standards, I admit, but to them it will buy a lot of things they need. And it will go to the people too, the colonists who are breaking their backs to tame that world, not just the administration staff. We pay the loggers upriver in the hinterlands, the barge captains, the timber-yard workers. Them, their families, the shops they buy stuff from. All of them will be better off. We’ll be better off. Norfolk will be better off. It’s the whole essence of trade. Sure, banks and governments make paper money from the deal, and we slant it in our favour, but the bottom line is that people benefit.” He realized he was staring hard at Symone, daring her to disagree. He dropped his eyes, almost embarrassed.
Dominique gave him a soft, and for the first time, sincere kiss on his cheek. “You really did pick yourself the best, didn’t you?” she said challengingly to Ione.
“Of course.”
“Does that answer your question?” Parris asked his lover, smiling gently at her.
“I guess it does.”
He started to use a small silver knife to peel the crisp rind from a date-sized purple fruit. Joshua recognized it as a saltplum from Atlantis.
“I think Lalonde would be in capable hands if we left it to Joshua,” Parris said. “What sort of partnership were you looking for?”
