The Lawyer

“Darling?” Fenestra asked Iloh.

“Yes?” The two were eating breakfast by themselves, Jellia having taken a called-skimmer. Which had obviously made Fenestra very nervous. But Iloh knew the kesh needed to learn to use a called-skimmer… kesh half her age did so casually. And this left him and his new en-drek-a eating breakfast alone, which was a pleasant thing.

“I sent a snip yesterday to my, that is, our companies, legal advisor. I need to create a new contract for a new deal I am working on. And he casually said he would come by… here… a little later this morning.”

“Yes?”

“Well, umm, I don’t want to violate code and custom but I didn’t actually find anything that covers. Is it, umm, normal for a male to come to a meeting with a female, all alone in her house?”

Iloh looked at her. The question seemed nonsensical. She had ‘dated’, which he  understood meant that many men… oh. “Are you worried it will be a code violation?”

“Well, sort of. I was worried it wouldn’t make you happy. And…”

“Yes?”

“Well, back on  Ephemera… just to give you background… I would never have a male over without notifying our building safety. So, if I hit the panic button on my wrist comp, or my pulse spiked at an irregular time….”

He almost choked on his juice.

“I didn’t think I was being funny,” she said, pouting.

“It is… it was an odd turn of phrase. So, you are worried about your safety? We will have your comp cont snip me your pulse and blood pressure. If I trigger it I will have full video access, and I could even signal the neighbors.”

“What would they do?”

“They would arm themsleves and come over. They could be here long before myself or an enforcer… although I would only be a few minutes away myself.”

“Umm, very well. And, well, his snip, there was sort of an automatic addition to it, that said he would be armed.”

“That is normal.” At her look he explained, “It is perfectly normal for him to be armed, and  it is normal that when someone makes a hold to mention of that fact. It is a simple courtesy.”

She took a deep breath. “Simple to you, perhaps, but very odd to me.”

He gave her a significant look. “I’m sure that much of what we do here seems odd to you.”

She smirked, “I assure you that what you are thinking of is not that odd to me.”

—

Fenestra wasn’t sure what she thought out the idea of a son coming over for a meeting at her house, but Iloh had said it was perfectly normal, no big deal, and her wrist comp would alert him if her pulse spiked and he could screeny into the meeting. And had offered her his extra gun which she had, very relucantly, hid under a blanket in the great room.

The beautiful doorbell went off and she hurried to the door, opening it to a tall man, indeed a tall thin man, in a rather strange goatee. And… and he had a gun on his hip!

“Legal Consult Martin Jones,” he said, kissing her as if he didn’t have a gun on his hip and wasn’t coming in her house.

“Trade Master Fenestra Kiladi,” she said, remembering just in time not to merely call herself ‘ska’, and kissing him back and waving him in.

“Ah, good, you have a large screenie,” he said, sitting down in the great room. “Let me connect and, there we go.”

Fenestra looked at the screenie and sighed. “One thing I hate about trading are the contracts.”

“This is not a contract. This is the pre-contract. Since you wish to deal with a new company, you need to have a pre-contract. I copied this from your previous pre-contracts with other companies. It is long, indeed, but they tend to deal in plain language. What you will need to do is read through it, make sure you understand all of it, and then see if anything has changed or is different in your dealings with this company versus the one I copied. I did my best to find one that is the most similar in the size of companies, etc.”

Fenestra perused it, getting so lost in the contract she forgot about the male, with a gun, that was sitting across from her. “Well, I certainly am hoping to increase my purchases from them, but they don’t need to know that.”

“What? Yes, indeed, they do. You have no desire for a pre-contract violation. By how much do you wish to increase sales?”

“Well, it depends on how well it sells… but you can’t tell them that!?”

“Certainly you can. It is standard.”

“I’ve never heard the like. You’re giving away my negotiating position!”

“Indeed not. They will also be required to put that kind of thing in their pre-contract.”

“Well, I never!”

“You will find it very pleasant doing business here, once you get used to the concept. But you need to be very, very careful when writing the pre-contract to be honest and upfront.”

He leaned back. “I have studied up on Ephemera, and have worked with people from there for a long time. There are some extreme differences between here and there. One is in the issue of what you might call ‘consent’, and we call ‘contract’. Or even ‘pre-contract’. You see there are two great moral failings that one can have here. One is to fail to follow through on one’s contracts. But the other, and the one we are dealing with here, is to trick someone into a contract.

“We consider each party to a contract to have the full right to all  of the information they need to make the contract… and then we hold them to it. Suppose you were to make a great deal with this supplier, and start to count on them… and they already know that in six months they are going to have to shut down for a month for some maintenance or something.

“The Libertas view is that that would make all of their previous contracts fraudulent. If you had known they were going to shut down, you might have gone with someone else instead of them.”

“So they tell me?”

“Exactly. Every contract you sign here will have as much information as the other party can give you… and so will yours. A contract, a duly signed contract, can only have the punishments that are written in it. But a failure to be honest in a pre-contract… there is no limit to the punishment for that.

“If your Endrk had said he was two meters tall, and he was short by one centimeter… and knew it… that would be a failure not of the contract, but of the pre-contract. If he says he will give 80% and only gives 79%, that is just a failure of the contract. But you deserved to know how tall a ska you were contracting with.”

Fenestra stared at the pre-contract with new eyes. This attitude was going to change everything about the way she did business. Well, no, that was stupid. Good trade was good for both sides, and it sounded like that’s what they wanted in a good contract. She could work with that.

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Von