free trade

Floating Market (3/3)

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“Jennis Inurian, captain-owner of the free trader Transfinite Revenue, inhaled deeply as the airlock door rolled back, catching the rich, spicy scent of myriad species and goods crammed into too few hab modules with too little organized air reprocessing. It smelt promising enough.”

Among the floating markets of the Starfall Arc, it’s said that the best traders have “a good nose”. That’s only partially a metaphor; in a crowded habitat, one hearty sniff can give you a good feel for who’s selling there, and what they have for sale. Sweet spices, exotic fruits – and hidden treasures at every stall, delightfully reflected in this soap.

Yes, folks, it’s crossover day here at the Eldraeverse, with my wife and I’s other business, Foam on the Range, making a soap inspired by this piece of fiction! Good for your skin, good for your nose, and good for your Humble Author – how can you turn it down?

The soap: Sweet spices, exotic fruits, a riot of colors – and inside each bar, a different small spheroid of miscellaneous other soap. You never know what you’re going to get.

Click here for more delicious details and to purchase it on Etsy!

(Patreon patrons, you get a special 20% discount on this soap, and indeed any other soap you choose to buy from us! Check the page there for details.)

Floating Market (2/3)

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Jennis Inurian, captain-owner of the free trader Transfinite Revenue, went through her traditional pre-disembarkation ritual – checking the telltale lights on her emergency pack and the collar of the skinsuit she wore under her spacer’s leathers, adjusting her trader’s signet to best show the Confraternity seal, and testing the charge on her pocket pistol. (While the Market Peace was an ancient custom, it wasn’t a guarantee.) This done, she glanced over her shoulder at her would-be assistants.

“All right, ‘prentices. You all know the market rules by now. These are my rules. Don’t trade anything on the Revenue’s account, buy or sell, without checking with me first. Don’t even suggest that it might be possible until you check back with me. You can buy and sell on your own account, but for Covalan’s sake, don’t sell anything unless you know exactly what it is and it’s nailed down in the contract. Whatever you buy, I get to review before it comes on board, and if you bought something internal, that means I get to review you before you come back on board. If you want to be careful about it, page me and I’ll take a look at it for you.”

The outer airlock door rolled back, and she inhaled deeply, catching the rich, spicy scent of myriad species and goods crammed into too few hab modules with too little organized air reprocessing. It smelt promising enough. A glance up and around the circumference of this first module showed a decent spread of goods, anyway: synthetic rations, starship parts, new skills for old…

Gold girders, gold ballast, gold trusses, gold frames. That’s cute. Should sell nicely to the barely-out-of-the-well crowd.

…wreckyard pickings, salvaged prototypes, used bodies…

A fourth stable isotope of hydrogen? Yeah, kid, and your wormhole has three ends.

…nanoferns, pleasant memories, protected-planet artifacts…

And the linobir are selling softwar exploits and security consultancy out of the same temp. Subtle as ever, but, hell, doing good business at both ends.

…zombie goo, dark ice, vengeance fish…

“Genuine Primordial Pathogens: Experience infectious disease for the first time, the way your ancestors did!”

…bond salvage, influence lottery, little hats…

Greenjack servitors, of course. Crude learning systems crammed into cheap mass-market bioshells. Delightful. Just the thing if you like a side order of photosynthetic ooze with your helping of incompetent minions.

…war salvage, knock-off geasa, lots of mixed jetsam…

Cháldar-vendors offering a special deal on vengeance. Suitable for serving at any temperature you like, with a choice of mixers. Perhaps not. Or bottled enlightenment? Now that’s just crass.

…exotic pets, energy weapons, cheese…

Is that really a collection of amusingly-shaped asteroids? If I turn my head and squint, it looks like… Moving on.

…unknowable brooches, cleaning roaches, authentic forgeries…

127 bits of tangle, destination unknown? Someone’s getting their brain eaten today. However many “guaranteed efficacious prayers” they buy next door.

…bottled solar plasma, mood-of-the-day drugs, reputation laundry…

“Forbidden Memes”? The kind that thought-police and godgrovellers take a dislike to, or the kind that eat you alive and spit you back out as heggie-swarmchow?

Ah, he’s letting the customers sample the wares. The first kind, then.

…but nothing too out of the ordinary.

“This is a good place for your first taste of the floating trade, gentlesophs. It may seem mundane compared to the stories, but be thorough. Hidden gems are what this business is about. If you need me, page me; I’ll be up-spine, looking through the exotica. Those of you who do well here will be joining me there on future shifts. Now get to it, and deal well!”

Floating Market (1/3)

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Sometimes, a Floating Market forms.

No-one knows when or where – they are emergent phenomena. Free traders accumulate oddities in their holds, the detritus of a thousand speculative trades on a thousand worlds – some trash, some too unique or exotic to sell, some which could be either. Slash-traders, smugglers, walkers of the dodgy path, have goods to unload that few legitimate markets will take. Relativists bring goods from the Outback, unheard of in charted space.

When enough fall together, a Market forms. Luggers and trade-ships, prefab modules, inflatable temps, all docked together without a plan. The long-standing Flern market drifted in the deep, tethered loosely to an infalling comet. News of the first few draws in the many in hope of a successful trade, and more come to supply the traders with necessities in turn. Opportunists arrive, hoping for their big score; agents of a hundred organizations come, seeking an advantage; the lost turn up, as they always do. The Market makes its own rules, respecting only the Sacred Deal and the Market Peace, a proplyd of free commerce out in the deep black.

Goods are offered – some comprehensible, most not. Business is done, with or without mutual understanding. Sometimes you walk away with an ancient dreaming Power, its substrate sold as a paperweight; sometimes with containers of rotted vegetation. Sometimes the rotted vegetation sells for millions of exval as an exotic spice; sometimes it calls a public health cautery squad down on your head.

Fortunes are made, and fortunes are lost, before the Market eventually disperses. The same could be said of lives.

So what are you waiting for?

Trope-a-Day: Low Culture, High Tech

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Low Culture, High Tech: Happens an awful lot, due to the absence of any Alien Non-Interference Clause, and the common interpretation of general free trade statutes by free traders as “can (and will) sell anything to anybody who wants it”.  If they don’t read the manual (or, in many cases, the encyclopedia) – well, at least what happens subsequently is unambiguously their own damn fault, and they haven’t a leg to stand on if they come back to you in the future to bitch about it, unlike the problems that arise if you try to play regulator to their technological development.

(More sensible low-tech societies go out and hire some professional uplift consultants to avoid this biting them on the ass too hard.)

Smuggling

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“Smuggling is a prestigious career with a long and honorable tradition – being invented something like seven minutes after trade itself.  Ideologically speaking, the smuggler and the Market Liberty Oversight Directorate are identical in theory, only differing in application.  Markets, like information, want to be free.  Demand leads to supply, which leads to trade, which leads to mutual profit, which leads to prosperity – and rot any corporation, government, or bunch of prodnosed kveth-lickers who say it ain’t so!  Folks have a right to trade, and to buy what they want, and for me to sell it to ‘em, and damned if that changes just ‘cause some jackass tells us elsewise.”

“Of course, there are those who disagree.  That’s what makes it fun.”

– Líse Varavélen, master of IS Favorable Supply Curve

Passing the Handbasket

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To my successor in office:

I’m leaving you this unofficial note to welcome you to the unique position of being an ambassador to the Empire, to pass on a few hopefully useful pieces of advice, and frankly, to wish you more joy of the position than I had, even before the FO recalled me.

I’ve left contact details in the database for my more useful contacts in State & Outlands.  They can help you out on any of the routine administration that comes up under one of the twelve Accords – but only the routine stuff, unfortunately.  I’d also call Meris Solanel-ith-Serquel to your particular attention if you find yourself charged with any special negotiations; she’s a good back-channel contact and willing to tell you directly if you’ve any chance of getting anywhere.  Which most of the time, you won’t.

As for other matters that will come up:

One might be forgiven for thinking that a country with no visa requirements wouldn’t cause you many problems with visitors, but that’s to ignore their willingness to refuse entry to anyone insane (by their – rather broad – standards), and anyone one of their truth machines deems insufficiently honest when signing up to the statement of rights and obligations they require of anyone entering.  Given how much they preen publicly about their devotion to rationality and principle, this catches less people than you might expect, but your staff will still be arranging repatriations on a regular basis.

You might also expect that their equally proclaimed refusal to impose any tariffs or trade regulations would make that a relatively trouble-free area, too.  Here, your problems will come from the home office, as while the Imperial government declines to use such things in response to those we set up, any number of corporations, trade cartels, and out-and-out smugglers will shamelessly connive to circumvent ours – and even our prohibitions on certain products – with the tacit aid of local banking privacy laws and the non-cooperation of the Market Liberty Oversight Directorate.  I have collected and passed on a myriad of eloquent, polite ways to say, “We regret that we won’t enforce your unethical laws for you,” in my time here, and you will undoubtedly collect still more.

Cultural and military affairs are also problematic.  In the name of freedom of speech and information, they insist that people be allowed to publish practically anything and to read anything that’s published, and are not even willing to discuss this issue with us, whatever the reasoning and whatever their notorious data havens may contain.  On the military side, you may be able to get some action taken against a particularly controversial intervention, even if it’s only likely to be getting the admiral in question beached for a few centuries until everyone’s forgotten the issue in question; but so far as they’re concerned, mercenary work is legal, privateering is legal, attempting to overthrow or to subvert someone’s government using any technique that isn’t violent is legal, and while they’ve never actually come out and said that filibustering is also legal…

Go ahead and file some protests on any of these if you like; it’s worth it just to listen to one of their State & Outlands people pour honey in your ear for an hour or three.  But you’ll realize the next day they talked for all that time without saying anything, and I’ll promise you right now, that’s all you’re ever going to get.

And lastly, extradition.  You will face three problems, here.  First, they will not extradite anyone for something that is not a crime under their law.  Second, if their law would impose a more severe penalty than ours for a given crime, and it’s one they consider particularly serious, they will try their hardest to insist that we prosecute him in their courts, so that they need not accept a criminal back.  And third, the inability to reconcile which – in the viKeruaz case – proved my downfall, they may insist on the second at the same time as public sympathies at home demand that he not be prosecuted in their courts.

I wish you the best of luck, and a quiet term of posting.

Sev Din Alar,
Ambassador of the League of Meridian (former)