Freelance On The Galactic Tunnel Network by E. Foner (best beach reads of all time TXT) 📗

“Are you a retailer?”

“I’ve got a mother and a sister. If I had a retail shop, I would have asked the price for the whole stack.”

“How about one ten?” Ellen offered.

“All I’ve got is a hundred.”

“Cash?”

The woman produced a hundred-cred coin.

“I’ve got to check this,” Ellen said, and slotted the coin in the mini-register just to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit. “All right. Pick out three.”

“You really are liquidating,” Marshall said after the customer left with her tablecloths. “I’m sure you could at least have gotten your money back anywhere else in the galaxy.”

“And here I’m selling at fifteen creds under my cost, each,” she acknowledged. “But I got a bonus from the Galactic Free Press that covered my losses, and the Syndication Coordinator gig will keep me healthy going forward. Reporting that I actually sold at a loss will help make the point in my story, and besides, I don’t really know anything about tablecloths or art glass.”

“If you put it that way, I suppose there’s a certain logic to making a clean start,” Marshall said. “Will you go back to crafting goods?”

“I can hardly wait,” Ellen replied with a grin. “Hey, do you see anything you want?” she asked, gesturing at the goods on her blanket. “I know you’d rather barter than buy, but it’s hard to beat below cost.”

“I went to a bankruptcy auction not long ago and it made me feel like a vulture picking over a corpse. In the end, the only thing I bought was a meal for the trader who had been foreclosed.”

“I’ve heard of traders quitting the business but never a bankruptcy auction. Do you mean the Sharf repossessed and sold everything on board?”

“Not the Sharf, the trader had refinanced with some Earth company. I’ve known plenty of traders over the years who gave up and sold out, but there’s always a demand for the ships. The Sharf never cared who took over the payments as long as the mortgage got paid. The trader whose stuff was being auctioned said she had friends interested in buying her ship, but the mortgage holder insisted on getting the missed payments and penalties upfront. There were also a bunch of would-be traders at the auction waiting to bid on the ship, but in the end, the auctioneer announced a reserve bid that was way over the value and that was it.”

“I don’t understand. You’re saying that they only sold the trader’s inventory and not the ship?”

“Right.”

“But the mortgage was on the ship, not her inventory!”

“That’s what you’d think, but apparently the refi deal was secured by all of the borrower’s personal assets, not just the ship. Right after the meal, Bethany, that was the trader’s name, headed for the local labor exchange to sign up for an alien contract to restore her finances. She said she’d had enough of dealing with her own people.”

“You know what? I should make that my next story. I know that the Sharf sold my mortgage to some Earth outfit because that’s when I found out about Advantage, but I didn’t think I had a reason to care who held the note on the ship.”

“I might have heard a rumor that EarthCent Intelligence is already looking into it.”

“Yeah, but they don’t have any agents on Earth.”

“Ah, the noninterference deal that EarthCent made with the governments here. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“So you’re not with them?”

“EarthCent Intelligence?” Marshall rubbed his nose and laughed. “They’ve only been around for two decades at the most, and I’ll need more of a history than that before I go pledging my loyalty. I know plenty of traders who dabble in it, though, so if you need a contact…”

“Thanks, but I’ve got a good friend who’s in deep with them, even though he pretends it’s only a sideline. I just wondered because you’re traveling alone and you’re much friendlier than most solo traders your age I’ve met.”

“It’s not an easy life, and a lot of my generation saw it as a zero-sum game, where more traders meant less business. Some of the old hands blame young traders for everything from high wholesale costs to low retail prices, but I see it the opposite way.”

“You think that new traders lower wholesale costs and raise retail pricing?”

“I mean that trade isn’t a zero-sum game. The more of us there are, the more marketplaces become available. If you gave me a choice between rolling out the blanket somewhere with no other traders within a light-year or participating in an active fair like this one, I’ll take your company every time. It’s much easier to draw customers when there are a bunch of us together.”

“But every great trading story I know involves visiting some isolated population that has valuable trade goods they’re willing to barter for common merchandise they can’t get otherwise,” Ellen protested.

“I’ve been in this business longer than you’ve been alive and it’s never happened for me or anybody I’ve known well enough to trust.  Think about it. The Sharf two-man traders most of us fly can’t jump on their own, they need tunnel access to cover interstellar distances. The Stryx don’t open tunnels to sparsely occupied systems, so the only way a trader is likely to encounter an isolated population is on some neglected moon or a large mining asteroid.”

“But a few weeks ago I set down in a town not that far north of here that was only occupied by deer and coyotes.”

“Going into the acorn trade?” Marshall asked with a wink.

“You know about the Huktra?”

“I saw something about the Traders Guild adding acorns to the export commodities list while I was catching up with the news on my way back from the Moon.”

“My friend was right about trade secrets being the most fleeting of all,” she said.