Family Law 2: The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet (51 page)

"Wouldn't it be more profitable to keep its growth exclusive so there remains a high value market for the beverage?" the shopkeeper asked,

"Not for long," Lee told him. "Somebody would eventually get some seed or cuttings and smuggle them no matter how hard you tried to control it. I'm not going to grub after, uh... What do you call coins of very low value in Trade? I'd say pennies in English."

"Dint," the dealer  supplied, "the word is the same in Trade and Badger."

"A Din is a bigger coin," Talker supplied, "and most of the time a 'T' sound is the, uh... diminutive," he said in English after consulting his com pad. "But not as consistently in Trade as in Badger."

"Just borrowed Badger words?" Lee asked.

"Exactly," Talker agreed.

The dealer got up while Talker was speaking and approached the wall with all the small framed items. He pointed a small device from his pocket at one of the containers and brought it back to the table. How it worked wasn't obvious, but the wall appeared blank where he removed it. Lee found that interesting. He sat again and slid the container across the table to her.

"This is an older Dint. You won't find them in circulation as money now. It's sought by collectors for the design. It's my gift to you," he said plainly.

"Thank you," Lee said examining the container as much as the coin. It was a burnished metal frame with no corner seams, about fifty millimeters square. The metal edge was quite narrow and a transparent pane of some material was recessed on each side. If you looked closely the coin was located in the center by being in another sheet of transparent material with a hole.

"How can you open it up? Or can you without damaging it?" she wondered.

"Certainly," he got a soft cloth out of his pocket and laid on one of the pads. "One edge is marked," he said," pointing at two barely perceivable dots, no more than fly specks at opposite ends of one side. He grasped that side of the frame and the opposite, pulling. "You don't need a lot of force, but you have to maintain a pull for several seconds." The marked edge came loose and with it the center pane with the coin slid out dropping the coin on the cloth. He picked it up with the cloth, not touching it, and presented it to Lee. She didn't see how her fingers would hurt it. The coin had a dark brown patina, but she went along with his custom. The design on one side was a Badger head in profile but the other side was a complex design of curves and swirls she could not place as any real object.

"I lack a reference to know what this depicts," she admitted.

"Oh, yes if you'd never seen one it might just appear an abstraction," the dealer admitted. "It's a rather large showy flower," he said, her pad supplying the new word in English. "It was the emblem of a prominent clan and then the logo of their trading company. You'll still see it on packaged products and the front of their offices and stores."

"So then the Badger is the head honcho for the clan or company?" Lee asked.

After the computer sorted that out the storekeeper agreed. "Yes, but about six generations back."

"Hah, the computer just filled my whole screen with synonyms," Talker said amused. "The Big Wheel, President, Main Man, Big Cheese, El Jeffe, Boss, CEO, Magnate, Godfather, Director," he read off a few. He blinked a few times and looked at Lee hard. "So many of these... I don't know how to say it," he said, frustrated. "They don't make sense. I feel there is an
attitude
behind them."

"You are too polite," Lee told him. "There's
lots
of attitude. You see more of it the further you get away from Earth. Humans show a wide range of respect for authority. Earth has a lot of people who put authority on a pedestal and worship it. Fargone is full of people who will mock any display of pretentious dignity and titles. They don't go in for flowery titles and official costumes."

"Costumes?"

"Uniforms, not the sort soldiers wear so they know who is on what side, I'll give you an example. When I was in court on Earth the judge for my case sat elevated behind a special sort of platform and wore special black robes to show he was the judge. This job you have, Amiable said you were 'His Excellency the Voice' so I know you have titles. Do any of your positions with a title come with special clothing? Do you use your title out in public when you aren't doing your job?"

"No!, Talker said, horrified. "In fact, since you mentioned courts, I sometimes need to sit and listen to important court hearings. If the people the case involves don't chose to be at the hearing the judge may send me to inform them of the decision. In court they would address me as His Excellency only, never my given name, because the two are not connected. And when I read a discussion to someone I'd say 'Hear the Voice of the Court' first thing. I'm just the voice, not the court."

"Do you wear a special hat or coat or anything?"

"No, the document is given to the person after a reading and it authenticates itself with the chop of the judge and a seal. If I wanted a special hat my family would send me for a psych evaluation."

Lee sighed. The computer still needed to supply four words for that simple conversation.

"On Earth, in the English high court, the lawyers and judges not only wear robes but wigs too. My Earth lawyer once told me about needing to stand before that court and finding that buying a proper wig on short notice was rather difficult. It was an entertaining story."

Talker spent rather long on the computer. "Fake hair? We don't have such a thing.
Why
?" he asked.

"I guess when you don't have as much hair as you guys it bothers us more to not have any. And the wigs lawyers and judges wear would take a lot of work to style your real hair that way. Times have changed and people don't wear their hair so long now either. It's complicated."

"Unnecessarily so I suspect," Talker concluded.

"I agree. But Badgers have
some
ego or this fellow wouldn't have his face on one side of a coin would he?"

"Yes, but that also hasn't been the custom for the last couple generations," the trader said.

"Would you share your given name?" Lee asked him. "Do you do business often and never ask or give names? I'm Lee. I'm really First daughter of the Third love son of the Four Hundred-Seventy Third First Mother of Red Tree, by the Hero of the Chain Bound Lands, Second line of the short haired folk, of Gordon - Lee Anderson. But if you say good-morning using all that it's afternoon before you are through." 

"Now that's an interesting question. I'm so used to what is customary I wouldn't normally think about it. I just expect most of my customers won't offer names until they have done business with me three of four times. And we usually chat a bit over tea before getting down to serious business. But you may call me First if it pleases you. I was the firstborn and my parents weren't especially imaginative."

"Thank you, First." She put the coin back in its hole and pushed pieces together. It popped right back open with a little click. "We may both be old before I've been here three or four times given what a trip it is. I appreciate moving things along."

"You have to hold it closed for a moment for it to latch, just like there was a delay in opening."

Lee closed it and said, "One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus, three hippopotamus," and let loose of the frame tentatively. It stayed closed this time.

Talker and First looked at each other amused. "What?" Lee asked. "It just helps you mark the time more accurately than counting silently in your head."

"Indeed, but our short unit of time is the willet. We say one willet, two willet, three willet just the same. A willet takes about a willet to
say
in a normal voice."

"That would be handy. A second isn't long enough spoken normally. But is that sufficient chit-chat over tea so we can talk some real business?" she asked, lifting a bag of coins to the table.

"Yes it is Lee, what do you propose?"

* * *

"Oh My God... " Probity said aloud, but he still had his wits about him enough to send the video to the Captain's console as well as the rest of the bridge.

Fenton's mouth was a hard line. He might have reproved Probity if he hadn't looked at his screen.

Their hosts were coming out to inspect the trade goods. They entered from a door that looked like any hatch on a human ship but just barely missed being flush to the deck.

"Well, we finally found something that's
really
different," Wong said. He said it so softly you'd think he was afraid the aliens would hear him out in the hold. Nobody else volunteered anything. They just watched.

There were three of them. Long and segmented, about waist high, a coppery hue and shiny, but whether they were soft or hard wasn't readily apparent. The front segment had not two eyes but a two clusters of eyes of various sizes wrapped around to each side. There were limbs underneath. Or perhaps they were tentacles. They were thin and moving and far too many to count. If they were jointed it wasn't obvious. It was almost like a brush under them. In the front there seemed a T-shaped mouth of some sort barely visible, so low it was almost underneath. There were appendages on each side of the mouth. They were without a doubt tentacles because they moved fluidly, two sturdy ones on each side and a bunch of finer ones in descending thickness and length.

"It's interesting. The infrared reading says they are hot blooded," Probity told them.

"The whiskers... feeding aids?" Fenton asked.

"Maybe. Looks kind of like a catfish that way. I think some animals have chemical or electric sensors in them. Usually to feel around in a dark environment," Wong said.

"But catfish have eyes don't they?" Probity asked, like the idea confused him.

"Sure. They have both, just like these guys."

"You have good video feeds? We don't want to lose this," Fenton demanded.

"Video, audio, and even radio just in case they are carrying com gear," Probity assured them.

"Who know? They might have organic radio built in those whiskers," Wong speculated.

They went straight to the blanket ignoring the ship. Two stopped about their own length back and the third approached the edge of the blanket and stopped overhanging it a bit looking. He produced two artifacts from somewhere underneath. One cylindrical shape he held with one of the large tentacles slightly over his head and pointed down at the trade items. The other was a cylinder with complex shapes on the end. That he waved over the goods, sometimes in a circling or stroking motion."

"Tell me what you think he has there," Fenton invited his crew.

"Well the way he's pointing it, the thing over his head has to be a camera of some sort," Wong said.

Probity was nodding agreement.

Summer Hokkaido sat the systems board dealing with engineering. They hardly ever heard a word out of him on duty or off, but he spoke up. "That potato masher thing has to be some sort of multi-sensor instrument. I'd love to know what it can see."

"I had to look up potato masher," Wong told him. "It does bear an uncanny likeness.

"The one who didn't hang back and is doing all the real work – do you notice he's not only shorter but doesn't have as many segments?" Fenton said.

"You're right. Maybe they add segments as they age? Could be he is younger," Wong agreed.

"Or a different gender," Summer speculated.

The shorter alien touched everything with a whisker after waving the device over it. Whatever the mechanical sensor was good for he still wanted to sense it with his whatever his tentacle touch told him apparently. He hadn't picked anything up though.

When he got to the gravity plate that changed. He scanned it and conferred with the others in a soft hooting and cooing somewhat different than their radio recordings. He flipped the gravity plate over and scanned it again. The vase seemed to mystify them. They hooted about it a little then one said something shrill, much more like their radio broadcasts. The junior, or at least shorter alien picked the container up and tilted it. The vase crashed against the end and he almost dropped it. He definitely jerked hard when it slid inside. He sat it back down much more carefully than he picked it up.

After he looked at it a little more he laid a larger tentacle along the seam of the container as if to open it. A short sharp word from one of the others made him withdraw the tentacle.

"Somebody there just called on a radio. It was really low power, not even a watt, but it was definitely some of their speech," Probity told them, "not data or video."

It was only about fifteen seconds before another alien entered from the same doorway. He was a short one too. There were three little plates following along behind him like dogs at heel. Sleds or gurneys or whatever you wanted to call them they were self propelled. They didn't have any visible support, just floating a few centimeters off the deck.

The container with the vase was carefully dragged, not picked up, onto one transport. The other carrier received the plate with no special care or ceremony. They small pile of gold coins was lifted one by one and put on the third plate.

"Uh – Oh. I don't think they figured out that these are trade goods," Wong decided.

However once it was loaded the alien reversed the operation and stacked them all back on the paper on the blanket. Actually he stacked them neater than they'd been before.

"I'll be damned if he wasn't
weighing
them," Captain Fenton declared in surprise.

Sure enough the process was repeated with the silver before the fellow leading the plates left the hold with them. They never opened the book. Perhaps they didn't understand it opened. Or possibly they'd scanned the interior so thoroughly they didn't need to open it. The jade carving however was picked up and carried to one of the alien staying back. He rolled it around in his tentacles and seemed reluctant to hand it back to be returned to the paper.

Another alien came in with more plates, but these were not bare. He drew them up and allowed the fellow who did all the grunt work to unload them.