“How do the cowboys types take to your miracle of production?”
“They buy it up from us plenty fast,” Ivan answered. “But we have to send the peddlers out to their ranches and small towns. They hate the very sight of our cities. Invite them to a play, or a show. Woman, we’ve got an opera company and playhouse that draws the best singers in human space. Art galleries and a ballet company, too.
“As far as those hicks are concerned, we might as well be talking about the weather. Ma’am, they pay more attention to the chances of rain out in their great desert than they do to the cultural opportunities we offer them.”
“If you talk to them long enough,” Ted put in, “they’ll start waxing poetic about a cattle sale like it was more to their taste than a play just off Broadway from Earth.”
“I know what you mean,” Kris said. “I had a friend in college from Texarkana. We used to tease her about things like that. But after her boyfriend took her to a few plays, she saw things in a different light. Maybe you ought to let Bob DuVale do the talking for you.”
Things got quiet after that.
The cars came to a stop in front of one of those gleaming towers. It would have fit right in on Wardhaven, though its fifty floors made it a bit short for Kris’s hometown. They entered a wide, marbled foyer that centered on a fountain. The sculptured fish were either of a local kind that had made its peace with humanity, or the artist was postmodern. A wide bank of escalators moved people up to the second level, but Kris was led away from them to where a dozen elevators waited to whisk her and her escort up to the fiftieth floor.
There she was taken to a luxurious conference room, pan eled in half a dozen different woods, where it wasn’t wall-papered in blue and gold. The carpet was a Berber that felt a good three inches thick.
Kris glanced around, half-expecting to see Grampa Al holding forth, but no, the denizens of this wealth were just the local leaders.
Jack needed just one glance to take the place in. Quickly, he posted his Marines as if this was a prison and he in charge of keeping those in, in and those out, out.
As in the car, the local businessmen paid no more attention to Kris’s Marine escort than they would have to ghosts. She wondered what would happen if a Marine got in the way of one of the business honchos, but it didn’t happen, so there was no attempt by two people to occupy the same space rather than admit the existence of the other.
The first hand Kris shook was Louis DuVale’s. He spent a long minute shaking hers, studying Kris’s face as if he might, by looking at it long enough, change her mind. When there was no evidence of that, he took her elbow and guided her around to meet manufacturers, mining interests, energy brokers, bankers, financiers, and “everybody who is anybody on Texarkana,” he said as he finished.
As soon as she was finally seated at Louis’s right hand, he posed the question “How does King Raymond propose to correct the political and fiscal imbalance on this planet?”
“I don’t know,” was not the answer the expectant eyes around the table were prepared to accept. Kris let the question hang while she examined her options for the forty-eleventh time.
“You can’t let this state of affairs continue,” Louis went on when Kris didn’t come forward with an instant answer. “I understand you’ve rented Old Austin’s ski lodge for a week so your ship’s crew don’t atrophy in orbit. We should have had a space station fifty years ago. And we would have, except for those damn cowboys. The lack of that station is throttling our business. No captain in his right mind brings his ship here. Do you know that most ships these days don’t even have drop ships?”
“Yes, my grampa Al mentioned that last Christmas dinner,” Kris admitted. She hadn’t been there, but Honovi had noted it in a later message to Kris.
“We bought two used shuttles, cheap, just so we could service a ship, but big ships don’t want to risk traffic messing around in their space, and small ships can’t earn enough for their lines shuttling from one tiny market to another. Every planet around us has a station. We’ve got to change,” DuVale finished, almost shouting.
“I’m here to observe,” Kris said.
So for the next hour, Kris got to observe a long list of grievances, dating back to the first landings during the Iteeche War. It was not pretty.
It also didn’t help.
“So Denver, Duluth, and Detroit are your only dukedoms,” Kris said when their anger finally ran down like an unwound clock.
“And lovely cities they are. They offer everything you could ask for—culture, parks, gracious living. We are not uncouth barbarians here,” Louis said.
“And the cowboys provide the food and fibers off their ranches and farms.”
“We more than pay for them with the goods and services we provide, even at the outrageous exchange rate they force upon us.”
Kris began to see the full outline of the problem through all the dust and chaff thrown up by their anger. “With so little off-world trade, you can’t challenge that exchange rate.”
“Because they won’t build a space station. Because they won’t let us build a station! We’re stuck with them as our only market. We’re stuck paying for their low-value raw products with our high-value-added production goods.”
“Point well taken. Ah, Mr. DuVale, do you ski? Hunt? Do anything outdoors?” There had to be someplace where these two isolated worlds met.
“Of course I do.”
“At Duke Austin’s lodge?”
“I try to avoid him. Some of the barons up in the mountains run decent establishments that cater to finer tastes.”
“How do they vote?” Kris asked.
“Sometimes with us, but there are never enough right-thinking people. Every time we think we might get something done, those old founding dukes patch up their differences and vote us down.”
“Nelly, I hate talking geography without a map.” A map was conspicuous by its absence from this conference room. “Would you display a map of this continent, please.”
The polished wooden table before them was suddenly covered by the requested map. Nelly displayed the rivers and mountains of the main occupied landmass of Texarkana. The great plain that was the center of human occupation was bordered on the east side by a huge mountain range and on the west by a mighty river that drained not only the mountains but a major portion of uninhabited land farther to the west.
“Nelly, let’s see some cities, towns, and major ranches.” Denver popped into existence. Well to the north of it was Detroit. Out on the plain, where rivers from the two met, Duluth sat, more a trading center than industrial. Small towns lay scattered across the great plains, usually where much smaller streams crossed.
“Now show me the boundaries of the dukedoms.” Rigid straight lines of men crisscrossed themselves over the random meandering of rivers and mountains.
Kris sighed as the bitter problem reduced itself to simple black and white. There were thirty dukedoms, but only three of them had cities in them. Those held eight million people. The other twenty-seven held less than three million.
Under the usual exchange rate . . . some might say honest rate . . . the wealth would be just as unequal. The fact that it was balanced said beef and potatoes were either way too expensive or power packs, stoves, and air conditioners were way too cheap.
Kris could relate to the anger that such a rigged deck raised in these fellows. Still, the rules of this game had been agreed upon long before any of the movers and shakers in this room were born.
Thank you, Grampa, for this wonderful problem you dropped me in. I hope you’re having as much fun talking to all your old war buddies about the nice Iteeche.