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 Lady Macbeth hasn’t got the capacity to do it by herself,” Clement said. “Right?”
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?”
“Sixty-forty in your favour,” he said amicably.
“Which would cost me?”
“I was thinking of two to three million fuseodollars as an initial working fund to set up our export operation.”
“Eighty-twenty,” Dominique said.
Parris bit into the saltplum’s pink flesh, watching Joshua keenly.
“Seventy-thirty,” Joshua offered.
“Seventy-five-twenty-five.”
“I get that percentage on all Norfolk Tears carried by the Vasilkovsky Line while our mayope monopoly is in operation.”
Parris winced, and gave his daughter a small nod.
“If you provide the collateral,” she said.
“You accept my share of the mayope as collateral, priced at the Norfolk sale value.”
“Done.”
Joshua sat back and let out a long breath. It could have been a lot worse.
“You see,” Dominique said wickedly. “Brains as well as breasts.”
“And legs,” Joshua added.