Family Law 2: The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet (34 page)

"What is purple heart?" Gordon asked.

"A wood that is naturally purple, or at least a nice lilac in color. It makes good flooring too. We also need to get wintergreen sent out. We don't have any but when I put on some lotion that had it as an ingredient the Badgers went nuts on it."

"For the scent?" Lee asked.

"Uh, sort of. Have you ever seen a cat with catnip? I went and washed my hands and it took Talker a half hour to get the silly grin off his face."

"We'll have to explore drugs, very carefully," Gordon decided.

"Yeah, opium poppies, Cannabis, all that stuff. We haven't talked mushrooms at all. I don't know if they have a fungus equivalent. We are also getting a 'shoe' tree that you peel the bark and it makes a great substitute for leather. Some of these things may not have a market on Earth, but will be good for colony worlds."

"See if they would be interested in cork trees," Gordon suggested and Prosperity made a note.

"We get a funny little moss that grows in freezing conditions. It makes its own antifreeze and will even grow on glaciers from just little pockets of windblown dust. I figure that for Terraforming too."

"How about ornamentals? People will pay a lot for pretty stuff," Gordon said.

"Oh, we'll both have lots of those, but they are specialty items. They won't generate the income of the practical sort of things we're trading now, but we'll get to them."

"I agree," Lee said. "First things first, because eventually we'll see other ships from our sector here, competing for these in trade. Let them get the leftovers after we go for the big stuff."

"And last item for this trade, we get a plant that has a bunch of long spiky leaves. It's pretty and a lot of Badgers keep one growing in a pot. You grab a spike and pull it out, which is pretty easy with the ones on the outside edge and it bleeds a thick clear sap. You
don't
want to get it on your hands. I swear the stuff can glue just about anything. I want to try gluing stuff on Teflon. They glued a little cube of steel on a steel plate," he showed them with his fingers the size, "and invited me to get it off. I had to hit it with a big hammer so hard one end was mushroomed to get it off."

"Why would a plant do that?" Lee asked.

"It's an air plant, it propagates by the outside spines blowing away and they stick where they hit."

"Hah! Sounds like the barnacles that grow on Earth ships," Gordon said. "All this sounds good, but I'd urge you to make as many trades as you can while we are here. Lee makes a good point we'll have competition eventually. I'd acquire some of their important food plants even if you are not sure we'll be able to eat them. If we can modify them they may have some use."

"That's a point. They are very conservative about modifying their plants. They had a few unfortunate accidents early in their gene engineering programs and created an exotic that almost crowded the original out of existence. We can screen all of them for drugs too. Even if we synthesize them after we discover them, living systems always have completely new compounds."

"Yeah, look at the money Thorn generates," Gordon agreed. "It way too inhospitable to colonize, but the pharmaceuticals are still coming out of the jungles twenty years since it was discovered."

"All right. Thanks for your approvals. I'll do what you said and try to peddle off every organism we have for
something
. And we haven't even started on cultures of microorganisms or animals."

* * *

The
Dart, Sharp Claws and
Roadrunner
all got in tight formation and went ballistic. Tight being relative. The
Dart
and
Sharp
Claws
were bright dots like stars  from the view port of the
Roadrunner
. They used the shuttle externally grappled on the
Sharp Claws
to take their people to the
Dart
. Chance kept his crew, they'd already had a station liberty, if cut short, and he still felt the circumstances too risky to want to leave his command again.

The Badgers going back to the
Sharp Claws
were able to use the Human seats with little trouble. A minor matter of adjusting belts and they worked fine. The zero G toilet was a little harder, but with care it was useable too. Frost worried about everything and belatedly asked if the system could process Badger wastes for sure. The engineer seemed amused and informed him it could handle a whole Badger if you could fit one down the toilet. Thankfully their guests didn't hear that conversation.

The Badgers were awkward in zero G. They were used to having the gravity plates and neither of them were of a specialty who went into weightlessness regularly for their work. They asked belatedly and were assured they not get ill from lack of gravity in the planned time frame.

The Sharp Claws sent one Derf and three Humans to the
Dart
, mindful of the Derf being in cramped quarters, two of them would have a hard time passing in their corridors. More so because they had gravity plates in the flight deck, central corridor and for bunks. Squeezing past in zero G would be easier. The gravity in bunks was adjustable unlike what they'd seen in the stations.

The Derf, Mozart, had full armor and weapons, not the ceremonial stuff, but modern. Two of the Humans had the only two sets of Human powered armor and heavy weapons the
Sharp Claws
carried. The extra Human got stuck in a cabin with the Derf, because his fellow's gear took up a full cabin. That still made a Badger hot bunk with an off shift crewman.

If the Bills station saw them ease acceleration for a bit and then correct course and resume they didn't comment on it.

The Badgers were invited to the flight deck of the
Sharp Claws
to occupy the two jump seats that could be pulled down for guests. They had a bit more of a tail than Derf, but it seemed to be more fluffy than substantial. They tucked it between their legs to sit or use a pressure suit.

"How would you like to be addressed?" Frost asked the Badgers. "If your name is too complex you can use a translated English word. My English name Frost, is after a poet I admire. My full Derf name is a genealogy you wouldn't want to repeat over and over. My second here is Barbara."

"I'm of rank over my fellow here, just so you know if the situation calls for orders. My name is a very simple short sound, I don't think you will have trouble forming, it is Sin. Can you handle that?"

"Oh Sin is easy, Barbara said, grinning."

"That seems to amuse you. Is it something inappropriate as a name in English?"

"I don't think it inappropriate. It is amusing however. Sin in English means those behaviors that are often forbidden by religious conventions."

"Ah, well there are not many in the space services heavily religious. I doubt that will be a problem then. Just because I am curious, what do your religious see as sins?"

"Oh, there are different views among various Earth cultures, but there is a classic list of seven sins common to English speakers. They are Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy and Pride."

The other Badger was cracking up and did a face stroking that seemed to calm it, even though it shed no tears like a Human might. "That will mostly do nicely for my commander," he allowed, after checking the translator. "Although I'd never accuse him of Sloth and if he has any Envy he's always hidden it well."

"Well, what does Sin mean in Badger?" Barbara asked.

"It's shiny or bright," Sin allowed, but I'll keep it. Having an amusing name doesn't bother me. I'm seeing your Fargoers have outrageous names, so I can too."

"And what shall we call you," Frost asked the other Badger.

"Ta-ta-ta doesn't seem natural to English, so call me Chipper or Frisky. It means having a natural good mood, not a bad thing, unless done to excess early in the morning before stimulants."

"Ah yes, we also have morning people and
not
morning people," Frost agreed.

"I wonder, would it be offensive to ask to feel what your fur is like? To touch you? If it isn't customary just tell me to forget it," Barbara asked.

"Oh, Badgers aren't fussy about bumping or getting crammed in together. Go ahead if you'll do it as a trade," Chipper offered.

Barbara felt around his ears and stroked one carefully flat with the natural lay of the hair like you would a cat.

"Damn, you're hired. You'd pay good money to have somebody brush you like that at a vacation resort. Especially after a nice hot shampoo and air dry." He felt the back of her hand and then her hair briefly, moving on to her face, especially the ear and then pushed her nose over gently."

"That doesn't hurt?" he asked cautiously.

"No, there's bone up higher," she said, touching that part, "it gets broken a lot if we get smacked in the face, but the bottom part is very flexible. We like to get rubbed, but not brushed obviously. But a good hard rubbing, a massage, by somebody with strong hands is nice. They often use a little oil, because our hands are very grippy." She rolled her hand over. "See all the fine ridges?" she asked.

"That's interesting. It keeps it from sliding?"

"Yes and you can identify people from the pattern they leave behind if they touch things. We call them finger prints."

"That's kind of creepy. I think I'd wear gloves for the privacy issues."

"Oh it takes a little effort, but yeah, you don't leave prints at the scene of a crime."

Barbara reached up barely touched his nose and stroked down the side of his muzzle flattening the whiskers. His eyes got big and his commander laughed so hard he curled a little and held his middle like a Human.

"Keep that up and Chipper will be inviting you to his cabin," he told her.

"Oh, is that bad?" she asked jerking her hand back.

"No, it's very, very good. But very strange that it feels so good from a non-Badger, but I guess I'm...I don't know how to say it," he said, checking his pad. "What do you say – having a set involuntary biological responses?" he asked.

"Ah, we use a lot of electronics that can be programmed to do different things, so we've come to call biological systems that can only respond one way as "hard wired" like very simple electronics.

"Yes and it doesn't help that you smell good."

"How about us?" Frost asked. "Do Derf smell good too or bad?"

"I honestly can't smell you at all," Chipper said. "Maybe if I stick my nose right against you I'll get something, but I smelled the Humans as soon as I took my helmet off. I just wasn't sure
what
I was smelling until Barbara had her hand right by my nose and it was a strong scent."

Barbara leaned close and sniffed by his ear. "I'm not getting much either," she said, "but most Humans don't have a terribly keen sense of smell. Can you smell them Frost?"

"I can, but it's complex. It would be really hard to explain it to you. They don't have a strong odor like an Earth dog, but it's a little stronger than Human to me. Not to offend, but it's more pleasant."

"That's OK," Barbara allowed. "When somebody messes up and feeds a Derf cheese, you'll have a whole new olfactory experience," she warned them.

* * *

"I've got some subordinates working at it, because you brought so many seeds. Next trip we need to bring a lot of cuttings of things that don't seed. We have two more sets of ten plants to trade and working on more. I'll try to have a match for every one you have. I don't think it is worth going over item by item like we did the first ten," Prosperity said.

"You're right," Gordon agreed, waving away the opportunity to review the trades with a true hand. "You're doing a fine job and we're not experts in it anyway. But I appreciate hearing about the first set so we have an idea what sort of trades we're getting."

"The Badgers are very interested in our advanced plastics. They have little in the way of very strong plastics. Some of the Bucky tech we offered them was for plastic matrixes, but they also were interested in sapphire and boron nitride reinforced and plastics with Bucky tubes and aligned Graphene. They don't have much of any plastic tech that works past two hundred, two hundred-fifty degrees max. And they don't have anything that works well for body armor. They never did much with plastic lenses either." "What are they offering?" Lee asked.

"They have more ceramic tech. Not the flexible stuff we got already, but this stuff is very strong even if it has a failure mode more like what we are accustomed to. It can be formed to very complicated shapes and work at high temperature under tension. The other stuff we bought would creep in something like a turbine. They can make the neatest little gas turbines," he demonstrated with his hands a size like a two liter bottle, "suitable for ground cars and stationary power. They have very complex blade shapes and run at such a high temperature differential that they are very efficient. Hard to believe, but they make gun barrels from ceramic and trust them."

"That's nice but it seems like we should get more than these little turbines and barrels for the whole huge spectrum of our plastic tech. Maybe trade for
some
of it?" Gordon suggested.

"I agree. And that's what I told Talker, the other thing he offered was a system they have to grow diamond. Now I know we can grow gem quality and we can grow a diamond film on things, either polycrystalline or aligned. But they can grow sheets a meter across anywhere from a fraction of a millimeter thick to about fifteen millimeters thick. And at the high end both faces can be flat within about three atomic diameters. It isn't super fast or cheap, but we can't do it at all."

"Is there that much use for it?" Lee wondered.

"Our people seemed to think so. They started talking about doping it for semiconductors and optics. I believe it would be superior to some of the polycrystalline stuff on a substrate we are using for heat sinks right now.

"All right, I guess every deal doesn't have to be to our advantage," Lee allowed. "We'll make it up on others I expect."

"They also proposed we trade all our glass tech in an even swap, one for one. We each have certain things that are attractive to the other, but neither side has a clear lead."