April 5: A Depth of Understanding (12 page)

"If it's a close thing come and see me," April offered. "I would buy in on a book and give you an advance on it and for
much
less than half. That's usurious."

"It still beat what the court would have taken," he said, shrugging. "But it's nice to know as a backup. That's pretty brave of you when you haven't read anything of mine. Or have you?"

"No, but it doesn't matter. I went to a Dim Sum restaurant in Honolulu and it wasn't my thing. But I'd invest in it if invited in a heart-beat, because it was packed out and people were lined up for the busy dinner hour when we came out. You said your first three did well, so there's a market, whether I might like them or not."

He nodded, surprised. "Some people invest in their passions, I think your way is better."

"I've been trading my own account since I was twelve. Of course it had to be in my dad's name then, but he let us manage it, my brother and I both. The best way to learn something is to
do
it, but my brother got into all sorts of calls and puts and straddles and things I never wanted to take the time to understand and follow. I just held stuff long and sold it when I thought it was a decent move, or hopeless to recover. I made a little money but no big killing."

"Did your brother do better then, with his passion for complex deals?"

"I don't really know. As he got older Bob became secretive. He might give me a tip to buy something, or he might not. At the end he had more money than I thought likely, but I only knew because I was his heir. Where it came from is a very good question. His brokerage account didn't have that much in it when I got it. I doubt I'll ever know where some of it was from." She didn't intend to tell him some might have been dirty money from the USNA.

"So, do you think I should set my children up with small accounts and let them experiment and learn to trade?"

"Oh no. They'd never appreciate what they are risking if you just
give
them funds to invest."

"Then how did you fund your accounts?"

"My brother and I used to run errands, call it courier service. We would run to the cafeteria and get a lunch pack for somebody who was busy working and didn't want to break for lunch, or go to dock and pick up a UPS package or to housekeeping and get sani-wipes or masks or gloves for somebody who couldn't wait for the regular delivery. Sometimes people were sick and didn't want to go out. I ran to a dispenser and got footies for people a few times. We ran and got handballs for the fellow who runs the courts a few times. Because he can't come down to full G. Little errands and jobs like that."

"We saved our money up and then invested it locally. My brother used to buy the tourist's dirty laundry. It was worth more dirty and used here than they'd paid for it new down below. He'd get the down leg shipping credits for the luggage and sell them too. One time he grew mushrooms to sell, but that didn't work out so well. But most of his ventures made something and we saved it until we had enough to invest in stocks. You invest it a whole lot differently if you earned it yourself, ten and twenty dollars at a time."

"But it's illegal to hire underage and you have to have business licenses and tax numbers."

"We have none of that and even before the revolution, we pretty much ignored any of those stupid regulations that didn't make sense to us up here. Nobody was enforcing them, certainly not station security, which was Mitsubishi company staff. My mom and dad left us alone in our home lots of times before we were eighteen. We were taught how stuff worked and neither one of us were stupid. We weren't going to bust anything or make a mess, much less start a fire or breech pressure."

"There's reasons for those laws. There are people who aren't mature enough to do the things you are saying and get in trouble. By eighteen, or twenty-four for some things, like alcohol, most people seem to be ready."

"Why not wait until thirty? Or forty? Even the really slow ones should be ready by then. You are disturbingly quick to defend the same statists who tried to take two thirds of everything you'd earn the rest of your life. If you only want to keep your money, but embrace all the other fascist crap you may not fit in here. Because if you start advocating micromanaging other people's lives here they are going to ship you back down to the slum ball."

"It's hard to accept that much change," he admitted. "I've been told every day since I was little that these things are for our own good. It's been tough to reject
any
of it. Cut me a little slack. It's difficult to change
everything
I'm used to all at once."

"I can understand that, talking to you privately, but if you get up in the Assembly and start proposing Earth style licensing and regulation and laws about curfews and what you can wear... Well, you'll have a half dozen people invite you to meet them in the North Hub at 0600 hours and defend your position, or buy a shuttle ticket home."

He nodded, looking pained. "I'll keep my mouth shut in public, for a good long while, until I see how things are done. I've kind of burned my bridges. If I had to go back to Earth now I might as well just let a duelist shoot me in the head." He stopped and thought awhile and April didn't add anything.

"You said you guys ignored stupid laws that didn't make any sense. We actually do that a lot down below. Maybe more than you realize. You said you wanted me to explain about how the underground economy works. I actually have been thinking about how to do that. It's so pervasive it's difficult to estimate how big it is, even using it. I only saw the little parts of it I touched."

"The main thing to remember is, it depends on trust. You don't do business completely off the books with someone you don't know. The government has all kinds of informants and you don't buy or sell from someone even on a recommendation. You need to know who a person is and who he's related to and what he does for a living. If you get greedy or careless you end up in prison. But there are lots of ways to shave price and get discounts too."

"So what kind of stuff did you buy that way? Was it to get things cheaper, or to buy things you couldn't at any price elsewhere?

"Cheese is a good example. The rules on how cheese is made now makes it pretty tasteless to anybody who has known the real thing. There are people who smuggle European cheeses in, that's really expensive and there are folks with a dairy farm who manage to divert some of their production and make cheese, usually in a relative's home. The Feds watch farm owners too closely to risk doing it in their own home. But you practically have to be known to them from birth to buy from them. Even then they may take your money and direct you to a 'drop' where your product will be waiting for you. There are lots of things like that you can't sell anywhere legally. Raw honey, garden seeds, kittens or puppies, fish people have caught, old coins with gold or silver or copper in them. Old books that tell how to made chemicals or explosives from scratch, books on gunsmithing or how to make moonshine. Anything that is illegal to do now, it is illegal to propagate the information how to do it. Then there is doing deals on legal products."

"For example, there is an art to asking for a cash purchase discount. You couldn't just come straight out and ask, "How much for cash?" Because that's the same as saying they will cheat on their taxes in court now. There is a presumption of guilt. But say you stopped at a hotel for the night, instead of offering a credit card, if the advertised price was four hundred dollars, you'd lay down four hundred dollar bills in a row on the front desk. If they'd play that way they would pick up three of them and just ignore the one. Of course sometimes they would scoop up all of them and there was nothing you could say, but you wouldn't go back there again either."

"If you are buying something that the government is controlling size and price because it has wheat flour in it, like bagels, the baker may sell a dozen and count them off and them say "Baker's dozen," but throw in two or three instead of the one extra. He'll show some of his production as spoiled, or burnt, or unsold."

"Of course it can work the other way. If you are buying something the merchant can't get enough of and the price is regulated, say cosmetics for women, he may lay down two lipsticks and say, "That's three for thirty four dollars." If you don't want to pay the surcharge you just change your mind."

"But doesn't his books show he sold more than he received?" April asked.

"No, he doesn't sell them
there
, he'll sell them black market or wholesale them to somebody for other black market goods. He may need prescription drugs, or parts to repair his home, whatever is needed and hard to get."

"You can't go in a store and buy a couple switches and wall receptacles now unless you show them you have pulled a permit from the city. So when a licensed electrician does a repair job he may inflate the goods from six switches to seven and a dozen wall outlets to fourteen. So he has parts to trade that don't need a permit pulled to do electrical work. That means maybe a three hundred dollar permit and a two hundred buck 'gratuity' to the inspector somebody saves."

"Gratuity? You mean a bribe?"

"What an ugly word to hear from the mouth of an innocent young girl. And when things get so expensive it means if somebody breaks in and burglarizes your home while you are on vacation they don't just take your electronics and appliances. They pull all the light switches and wall plugs, the lighting fixtures and the bulbs in them, your sinks and faucets. They may even rip your towel racks and toilet paper holder out. I remember hearing of one place the robbers took a man's bathtub out."

"Who wants a used toilet paper holder?" April protested, wrinkling her nose up.

"Somebody trying to build a house who doesn't have fifty bucks for a new one. There are even folks who rent an apartment that doesn't have individual alarms and they go off on vacation and sell the door code. Some old buildings it's just a three number code on a key-pad and allow the place to be stripped out while they can prove they were far away. Of course you can only do that once, or at least years apart, before it is obvious it's deliberate and you'll get black listed and never be able to rent a place again."

"Then there are services. If I'm going to drive to the next state and see relatives I'll start telling coworkers and friends well ahead of time. If somebody wants stuff taken that direction they can ask you to take it. Or even have a passenger ride along. You never pay for it. You find reason for the cash to trade hands for a legal reason. Having your hair cut, house cleaning, lawn mowing, bushes and flowers planted or trimmed. Even dental work. You trade favors or find a reason to gift the person with something else. Some small towns I doubt if they
have
a legal barber or a taxi paying all the proper licenses and fees."

"There is a lot of counterfeiting. It used to be people made fake designer clothing and expensive wrist watches. Now you can buy homemade shampoo and laundry soap. People divert bulk purchases at hotels and hospitals and things. They take a small bottle in and take a little each day and cut down what they put in each load for work. People don't throw away jars and bottles and cardboard or foam board boxes. There's too much use for everything and if you can't use it somebody will give you a dime for four small boxes or a couple gallon jugs."

"I very rarely see a coin on Home," April said. "Our bank is making coins, but they are twenty five grams of gold or platinum, not steel or like a plastic Yuan. A dollar is pretty much our smallest unit of money. Just about anything is worth a buck if it's worth bothering with."

"People still trade for nickels and pennies,  even though they aren't legal money anymore and were all supposed to be turned in and destroyed. Two pennies go for a dime. The reissued dimes and quarters are steel and the few fifty cent pieces and dollar coins were a flop and don't circulate. There are not enough dollar bills in circulation either and they get pretty raggedy. Nobody really wants to mess with dimes either, except kids for collecting jars and boxes and stuff like I mentioned. You can sell a big bag of packing peanuts or sheets of foam for a dime too."

"It all seems like a lot of trouble to go to," April observed.

"Well of course!" Matt said surprised and a little upset. "It takes time you'd rather be working or relaxing. It makes everything just a little harder. It makes
life
harder. I hate to think how much of a drag it is on the economy, because it's just so inefficient."

"But the really poor people do things for each other that people with more money, people they'd consider middle class, would charge to do. If you have some boxes or a bag with some old clothing you can write on it who it's to go to and ask somebody taking a bus across town that direction to carry it. It's a matter of honor not to steal something worth a few cents and it may take a week and go through six or seven hands, but it almost always gets to the person without being stolen, even in the city. But once it gets to the address where the person lives, you can't just leave it by his door. There are bums and homeless who would take it, because they didn't get it from somebody's hand and so they aren't known to be responsible for it.

 "Sometimes you'll see a note posted on a utility pole or on an apartment bulletin board saying, "I have a bag for Greg Mason in Glen Oaks apartments, does anybody know where he went?" It may even end up following him to another city a year later, bit by bit."

His breakfast long finished, Matt excused himself. "I may think of other stuff, but does that help you understand how you manage down below?"

"A lot," April agreed. "I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that. I owe you some help here when you have questions."

"You already helped me some today. Told a little rougher than I wanted to hear maybe, but I needed it, thanks."

April nodded and watched him take his tray to empty. He'll probably do OK, she decided.

Chapter 10

Faye questioned Chen's son Deming about using an airlock. His answer was much better than a few weeks ago, but ungrammatical. Something that is a matter of life and death requires precision and clarity. It wasn't that he wouldn't speak well in a year or so, but it wasn't fast enough. That was even with him knowing some English phrases for travel and ordering in a restaurant when he came up.