Trader Galloway
Jellia got home, took off her cap, shook out her braid, and went upstairs. A minute or so later, she was in the fresher getting her initial quick rinse. Oh, what a day. They had done dance for two hours, and she had practised her new language until her brain bubbled.
“Jellia?” she heard her mother yell.
“Yes, Mother?” she yelled back. She couldn’t even get a few minutes alone in the fresher?
“There is a man coming by in about ten minutes to meet with us, Darling, so don’t take all day in fresher.”
“He wants to see me?”
“Both of us, Darling. Dress a bit formal.”
Like she would go to some meeting in her pyjamas! Ten minutes! Well, he could jolly well wait a minute for her to get dressed.
She hurriedly soaped up, shampooed her hair, turned the water back on, frantically rinsed, and then grabbed a towel, fleeing to her room. They lived in such a small apartment you could see to the upstairs hall from the living room, and she had no desire to have some man who wasn’t even her mother’s date ogle her.
A bit formal, eh? She grabbed a nice stiff white dress that cascaded into blue. A bit long for normal wear but formal. Then she wrapped and pinned her hair and put on a matching white kerchief. She debated putting on shoes, but it was her house; she didn’t need to be that formal! Why was this guy coming anyway?
She took a quick look in the mirror, then opened her door and strode downstairs. At least, she hoped she was ‘striding’ and not mincing or running or whatever. She was doing her best to ‘act her age’, but everyone agreed it was an awkward age. Halfway down the stairs, she saw the man staring at her.
He wasn’t that bad to look at, she supposed, staring back. His short black beard was very manly. But he didn’t keep himself in good shape. He was a bit chunky. And, of course, he was her mother’s age.
“Here she is,” Mother said. “She just got home from school. She is doing very well in the hard sciences… math, engineering, and the like. I have no idea where she gets it from.”
“Daughter, make your bow to Master Trader Galloway.”
Jellia tried the bow ‘greeting honoured company’, but was rewarded with ‘enjoying beautiful sight”,… which she didn’t think at all appropriate, but a lot of men used with daughters her age. Annoying. Especially because sons her own age were too shy to use it.
“Well, let us sit down,” Mother said, and Jellia pulled up a puff chair next to the table, which had soft and snacks already on it, and sat down, staring at the man. He took a glass of hard and took a deep breath.
“Miss Jellia, your mother asked me to come over and relate my experiences on Libertas to the two of you. I am the reason that the position was open; I was the former Trade Master there.… now assigned to Grengin Station, which is not as nice a post, but I hope will not get me in so much trouble.”
Jellia stared at him. He didn’t look like someone who would have done something to get him condemned to death.
“Let me start at the beginning. Libertas is a beautiful planet, and the trade opportunities there are wonderful…”
He spent the next half an hour or so talking about price differentials between various products on Libertas vs Ephemera. Jellia zoned the whole thing out and was tempted to play some game on her wristcomp when finally! He got to the part of his story that interested her.
“So, we had met several times and had a very good working relationship. And it wasn’t like I was at all displeased with my current date. Quite the contrary. But… it just slipped out. It was so natural and appropriate to the situation. The contract was all signed, and I just looked at her and said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind dating you sometime.’The way we do all the time here! It’s almost impolite not to…”
“Anyway, she frowned, and I realised I had blown it. I left the meeting, called a skimmer, and was at the port lounge in five minutes. I got the call from the justice bureau about half an hour later, but one whole point of the port lounge is that it is not covered by Libertas justice in the normal way. You can’t kill someone or something, but this kind of mistake, well, it’s almost what it is for.”
“Anyway, I spent the next week there, saying goodbye to everyone and finalising deals and all…”
“People would still deal with you?”
“Oh, yes. Indeed, Gloria and I exchanged quite a few snips about the contract we had signed.”
“She honoured it?”
“Oh, yes. They are very big on contracts on Libertas, and the one I signed with her had no kind of ‘morality’ clause in it. Indeed, I think everyone understood what had happened. They understand that their laws are not easy on everyone.”
“So, anyway, I got a lot of snips, including the one that said I had been condemned in absentia and was liable to be executed if I returned…”
“They couldn’t have taken your testimony while at the port lounge?”
“It wouldn’t have done any good. I would either have had to lie or to confess. If I had lied, I wouldn’t have been condemned, but everyone would have known I lied, and that would have ruined our business there.”
“I don’t even think my current date… what they call an ‘en-drek-a’… was all that unhappy. I gave her permission to stay in the house for sixty days or so… I knew it would take us at least that long to replace me… so that was good for her, and once I was condemned, she was free to take another date, and then she, her kids, and her date could live for free in that very nice house… It is a very nice house, by the way. Anyway, so she didn’t seem out of reason upset.”
“So,” Jellia asked, “are we likely to just land off the ship, make some mistake, and have to leave? It seems hardly worth the trip.”
“Well, no, I don’t think so. First of all, it is harder for a man. We are taught since we are young to initiate. Secondly, I had been there quite a while, so I was past the time when they easily forgive mistakes. When I was first there, I would just say, “Exo… mistake… language problem… let me restate… and change my invitation into a compliment and say that is how we said it back home, no invitation implied.”
“Which isn’t quite true,” Mother said.
“Well, no, but they knew that. I tended not to work with females anyway in the beginning, but when I did, they were required to sign a little contract with the exo bureau, which kind of laid out ‘the mistakes men from Ephemera were likely to make’ and, as long as I said it was a mistake and didn’t get insistent at all, then it was just an awkward bump in the road.”
“Which should be easier for us anyway since we are both female.”
“Yes.”
“How did you get your date, anyway?” Jellia asked. “Is there some special way that sons ask for dates there?”
He laughed. “I guess your briefing packet wasn’t detailed enough. The regular way for a male to get a date, there is to submit his resume into the system. Then some female picks him.”
“He doesn’t get to meditate on her or anything?”
“Nope. Now, it was a bit different for me because I had a house and because I was exo. My resume not only was a bit different, but the match had to be approved by the exo bureau as well as the en-drek bureau.”
“What did the house have to do with it?”
“On Libertas, the females own the houses, pretty much exclusively. A male can buy a house, there is nothing stopping, but it doesn’t make that much sense financially, and makes him harder to get chosen, which isn’t a good thing.”
“But why?”
“Because most of the choosing is being done by ska-drek-i-u, who may have several kesh-u… sons and daughters. And they aren’t eager to move around with every contract.”
“And that’s bad that it is hard for you to get chosen?”
“Well, yes. You always want to get chosen right away; it costs you less. But I always was, because my house was so nice. And because I didn’t have to pay for it, I got a higher take-home.”
“What?”
“Well, the way it works is you pay 80% of your income into the household fund, which the woman… the ‘en-drek-a’… takes with her from contract to contract. So if I were to make 1,000 credits a week, I would have to pay 800 credits into the fund.”
“OK.”
“But they count the house as part of the ‘income’. So if I make 1,000 credits, and the house is valued at, say, 500 credits a month, that would make my income 1,500 credits…”
“For which you would owe 1200 credits, but the house is already 500 credits, so you could keep three hundred a month instead of 200.”
“Exactly. Now, it usually goes the other way since the woman owns the house.”
“Oh, yes, I see. But… what happened when you got back? Jellia asked.
“Oh, they understood what happened. I’m not saying it helped my career, but it didn’t kill it. Grengin Station has nothing like the trade potential of a whole planet, but it is still a good posting; very busy. And rather cosmopolitan. A whole lot of laws and regulations, but most of them are very difficult to break accidentally. Even abstinates don’t mind if you ask them for dates; there, they just tell you they are abstinates and go on their business.”
“And, of course, it is nowhere near as beautiful.”
He looked at Mother, and something thing to go on that Jellia didn’t catch, and she was rather surprised when he said, “Would you like me to spend the night?”
Mother didn’t seem at all surprised, though and merely answered, “That would be nice. Did you bring a pack?”
He pointed to his pack, which was sitting right next to his chair.
“Fresher is upstairs, straight on,” Mother said, and he hopped up, gave her a kiss… nothing dramatic but intimate… and went up the stairs, not running but close.
When Jellia heard the fresher door close, she looked at Mother. “What was that about? Why did you accept? I mean, he’s ok to look at, but he’s kind of chunky.”
“He did us a great favour, coming over like this, Darling. It hardly seemed fair to send him right home. And when he snipped me about this, he did mention that he didn’t have a date for tonight. And so my asking him to come over and explain to us, well, he did bring his pack. You mustn’t tease men; I’m sure I’ve told you that.”
She walked off to the kitchen, Jellia following. “Sons get frustrated if they don’t get enough dates, Darling. Much more easily than daughters. There are very few abstinate sons. And he still works for the company, and I may well have business with him. Expanding from Libertas to Grengin Station would not be out of the question.”
“So he would be mad at you if you didn’t accept him?”
“Certainly, and rightly so.… if I wasn’t going to accept him, I should have said something earlier, about a date later today. And then he could have said that, well, it wouldn’t work for him to come over, and then we wouldn’t have gotten to meet like this… I’m going to pick his brain all night, you know…”
“So, what’s for dinner?” Jellia heard from about halfway down the stairs.
“I’m still deciding,” Mother said. “Come on in and help me.”
Jellia did not wish to be around while Mother and a new date tried to decide what to have for dinner, so she brushed past Trader Galloway in the doorway and went up to her room, closing the door so she could have her privacy and not hear the adults downstairs. Or have to see them.
Jellia: How’s it going, Creia?
Creia: Oh, fine. You?
Jellia: Oh, Mother has a date over. He’s the last guy who held her post on the planet we are going to, and he told us his story.
Creia: Wow. What’s it like?
Jellia: Beautiful. There is a really big house, and it’s within walking distance to a nice part of town. The climate is really awesome, with mostly the wind blowing off the ocean, so it doesn’t tend to get all that cold, even during the cold season… maybe a foot of snow, max, in deepest winter…
Creia: Awesome. So what’s he like?
Jellia: Nice enough. A bit chunky. I’m up in my room. I don’t want to be there for their date.
Creia: Yea.
Thank you for reading Von’s Substack. I would love it if you commented! I love hearing from readers, especially critical comments. I would love to start more letter exchanges, so if there’s a subject you’re interested in, get writing and tag me!
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Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
Links
Contract Marriage Chapters, Newest to Oldest
I would like to give credit for the genesis of many of these ideas to the Liaden series by Mr. and Mrs. Steve Miller, which is available for free on the web. They do a great deal of cultural exploration, although they rather dramatically skip the moral exploration. (And their math doesn’t work.)
Other concepts were taken, in one form and another, from the book Freehold by Michael A Williamson.