Half Share (19 page)

Finally, Brill came to the end and grinned. “Seventy-eight!” she said triumphantly.

“Yeah, but what test?” I asked her.

“Spec two.”

“But I haven’t studied spec two,” I protested.

She wagged her eyebrows at me. “Think of how well you’ll do once you have.”

Diane’s eyes went wide. “That was amazing.”

“Okay, Ish,” Brill said, “you’re on midwatch tonight and then afternoon tomorrow, right?”

I was so
in the groove
as Rhon had called it, that I just nodded. I did not even need to look any more.

“Hit the tablet on spec two tonight. Pay attention to the sections on water purification and distillation—those were the questions you did the worst on. I’ll work with you tomorrow afternoon and we’ll see where we are after that.” Her tablet bipped and she headed out. “Time to get back to work.”

Diane and I were off duty, so we sat there for a while. “You were amazing,” she said.

I shrugged. “I guess I picked up more than I thought.”

“You decided not to go for spec one? I thought Brill said she thought you could pass it.”

“She was being overly optimistic. I’ve been wading through the material, but I really don’t have the math background to understand a lot of what I read. I picked up pieces based on the context, but that’s one of the reasons I got so frustrated. I’d been studying for over a month and I just could not get my arms around it.”

“You seemed to have picked up enough, though.”

“Maybe.”

She looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

“Okay.” I grinned. “Yes, I seem to have picked up a lot. The theory and background I could follow in the lessons. It was when they got into the explanatory math and science that I got lost.”

“Well, you got a month of watches to get it together. You can almost pass it now. You’re going to out rate me soon!”

We split up then and I stuck my head in the galley to see Pip and Sarah. “Would you guys have a few ticks around 14:00 to get together in deck berthing?” I asked.

“Yup,” Pip said. “Is this about your little project?”

“Yeah, I need to line up one more player, but if you two can be there, I think we can get a jump on Dunsany.”

“I’ll be there,” Sarah said with a smile.

I waved and went off in search of Sean.

***

When Pip and Sarah got to the berthing area they found Sean and me waiting at the table. I had given Sean a little warning about moving slowly around Sarah until she got to know him. I spent only a few ticks with introductions and by then Pip was getting anxious.

“Oh, for the love of the holy handmaidens of harridan,” he said. “You’ve been driving me crazy, now out with it. What is this big plan of yours?”

“Well, we’ve got a lot of yarn…”

“Yeah, that much I know,” he said.

Sean’s eyes got bigger. “How much is a lot?”

“Twenty kilos,” Pip said.

“Sweet mother of mohair,” Sean channeled Pip. “A hundred skeins?”

“Yeah, we took your advice back on St. Cloud and picked them up pretty cheap.” I nodded in the direction of Pip’s locker. “Would you care to do the honors?” I asked him.

He palmed the lock and opened the locker showing all the skeins stacked in there. I thought Sean looked like a kid in a candy shop when he saw them.

“Show him the other one,” I suggested.

Pip opened the other locker as well.

“That looks like a lot of yarn,” Sarah offered shyly.

“Yeah,” Pip said. “You should have seen me trying to find enough room to stow it all. I thought I was going to have to beg pantry space from Cookie.”

I reached in, pulled out a couple of the skeins, and put them on the table in front of Sean. “Okay, Spiderman. What kind of webs can you spin out of this?”

He fingered the threads of one of the skeins. “Are they all this same weight?” he asked idly as he examined it.

“Yup,” Pip said. “Only thing that is different is the color.”

“This is a nice utility-weight yarn. We could make almost anything out of it except maybe baby clothes. What’d you have in mind, Ish?”

“I know you’re making afghans from yours,” I told him. “How’s that going?”

“Pretty well, actually. I’ve almost finished my third one. I’ve had enough practice so that I can do one a week now. I should have four to sell when we get into Dunsany. Maybe five.”

“Can we see a finished one?” Pip asked.

Sean went to his bunk, pulled a brightly colored blanket down, and spread it on the table. Sarah ran her hand across it. “This is lovely,” she said. “My aunt used to do this kind of work when I was a girl.”

Even Pip seemed impressed. “How much yarn did this take?”

“Four skeins for this one.”

“How much will you ask for it?” I asked him.

“I’ll ask for two hundred creds, but I’ll take one twenty-five,” he said.

Pip asked, “You think you’ll get it?”

Sean nodded. “Oh, yeah. Look around the flea next time and you’ll see a lot of this kind of work and some of it in the three hundred to five hundred cred price range depending on size, pattern, and workmanship.”

Pip looked at me then and nodded once. “Okay, Ish. I’m hooked. Tell me the punch line.”

“We have yarn and I have to confess, I don’t think yarn is going to sell on Dunsany. We’ll move a few of them, but it’s a textiles planet. They already have cotton and linen. It’s also not terribly cold so the extra warmth of wool yarn doesn’t carry a lot of benefit.”

“We’re taking container loads of wool!” Pip protested.

“Yeah, but probably to be turned into wool cloth and shipped off planet with the rest of the textile exports.”

“Okay,” Pip said, “so what’s your idea?”

“If we turn it into something that can sell at a higher price point than the raw yarn, then we have an opportunity to take a hundred creds of yarn and make a really good return.”

Sean spoke up then. “What are you thinking of making? Afghans take a lot of time and yarn.”

“What about shawls?” I asked.

Pip looked confused, Sarah thoughtful, and Sean started grinning.

“Do you have a pattern for an open-weave triangular-shaped shawl?” I asked Sean.

He scrambled from the table and headed for his locker. While he rummaged around, Pip asked, “Shawl?”

“It’s a kind of wrap that women wear around their shoulders like a cape.” I told him.

“I know what a shawl is. But you’re thinking of making them?”

I shook my head. “Not me—them.” I pointed to Sean and Sarah.

“Got it!” Sean said and brought back a picture of a woman wearing exactly the kind of shawl I had in mind.

“Perfect,” I told him. “How much yarn to make one of these?”

He consulted the text printed on the back. “Three hundred grams in rough numbers.” He picked up the skein from the table and checked the tag on it. “This kind of yarn, too, medium weight worsted. This is the most commonly used weight of yarn so you picked well.”

“So, a skein and a half per shawl?” I asked.

“Roughly,” he said. “Depends on how the pattern goes; certainly two skeins will do it with a lot of the second one left over.”

“And how much do you think we could sell them for?” I asked him.

“Depends on a lot of things, but anything from fifty to a hundred creds. I should think.”

Pip sat up at that. “Two creds worth of yarn becomes fifty?”

“Well, two creds worth of yarn and about ten stands of labor, but yeah,” Sean replied with a half shrug. “You got this yarn for a cred a skein?”

Pip nodded.

“You caught them on a good day. Double skeins of this quality are usually five creds. I paid three for mine.”

“So, basically, a day’s labor, two skeins of yarn and we get fifty creds?” I re-focused the conversation.

“At least,” Sean agreed.

“Okay, what we need then is a way to make these.” I tapped the picture on the table. “Can you teach Sarah how to do it? And loan her a hook until we get to Dunsany and I can get one for her?”

“What do ya think, Sarah? Wanna learn to tie little tiny knots?” Sean asked.

She looked at me, then at Sean, and then at the picture on the table. She nodded with a kind of hopeful puppy expression. “Do you think I could?”

Sean wrinkled his nose. “Easy. There’s nothing to it. I can have you crocheting in ten ticks. I bet you could have one of these done by the day after tomorrow.”

Pip broke into his full wheeler-dealer mode. “Okay, wait, what about the money? What kind of arrangement are we talking about?”

“If we got five creds a skein, we’d be feeling pretty good, right?” I asked him.

“Yeah. I’d be really happy with a five hundred percent margin.”

“Okay, and the shawls should go for fifty creds?” I asked Sean.

“Easily. I was getting five for my lace doilies.”

“So two skeins at five is ten creds per shawl. You two make the shawls, and when they sell, you give us back ten creds. You pay the booth fees and keep whatever you make over that. You can also keep the leftover yarn for whatever project you want. Meanwhile, we’ll hold the yarn in our mass allotment, which means the shawls don’t get added to yours. Eventually, we’ll have to clear the mass of the leftover yarn but we can deal with that if this works out the way I think it might. We have enough yarn for sixty something shawls. That should gross something over three thousand three hundred creds. Pip and I get five hundred and whoever makes the shawls gets about twenty eight hundred and the co-op gets the fees. Assuming we turn all the yarn into shawls and sell them.”

Pip just blinked at me, trying to follow the math. “You’re good,” he said at last.

“We’re only like ten days out of Dunsany,” Sean said. “We can’t make sixty shawls in ten days.”

“We’re forty-nine days out of Betrus on the other side.” I said. “How many days do you need?”

“What if we sell the yarn in Dunsany?” Pip asked.

“Can I buy some of your yarn for my own projects?” Sarah asked.

“I want to finish my afghans,” Sean added.

It took most of a stan but we ironed out all the loose ends. In the end we agreed that we would try to sell the yarn but would set aside ten skeins for Sarah and Sean to work with to teach Sarah how to make the shawls. That still left us ninety skeins to try to sell. We would know better once we got a feel for how well the yarn itself sold. It would be a chance for us to test the idea out. Sarah had time to make a few shawls to offer at the co-op in Dunsany Roads. I suspected Sean may have a couple of his own by then, too.

Just when I thought it was all settled, Tabitha walked into the berthing area and saw the picture of the shawl. “Oh! That’s beautiful, Sean, are you making those?”

“Not yet,” he admitted, “but I’m going to teach Sarah how. You wanna learn, too?”

She got a funny look on her face. “Hon, I haven’t done any crocheting since I was a girl…” her voice tapered off and she got a little smile on her face. “My mother used to make the most gorgeous white lace.” She turned to him and asked, “You have a spare hook?”

Sean looked at me. “Same deal?”

Pip and I shared a glance. “The more the merrier,” I told him. “How many hooks do you have?”

Pip asked, “How many should we buy in Dunsany?”

Chapter 15

DUNSANY ROADS SYSTEM
2352-APRIL-13

Two days out of Dunsany Roads the captain passed the word about customs inspection. Because Dunsany was a Confederation system and not corporately owned, we had to go through an inspection exercise with the local authorities before we could leave the ship. A section in the back of the Handbook explained customs declarations and the kind of goods we were prohibited from taking into Confederation ports.

Pip and I sat on the mess deck after lunch and I asked, “What do you do if you have something that’s prohibited? It’s kinda late at this point to get rid of it.”

He grinned. “Do you have anything on the prohibited list? And can I have some?”

I laughed. “No, it’s just that none of the stuff listed is—technically—illegal on any of the corporate planets except maybe the radioactives and nerve agents.”

“And the biologicals,” Pip reminded me.

“Okay, and the biologicals, but what do you do if you have some poka-juice you just wanna pass through and sell at Betrus?”

“There’s an embargo locker down in main cargo. We put anything we don’t want to be considered in the inspection in there before we dock. The customs people put a tell-tale on the locker so that they know if it’s opened while we’re docked. Anything in there stays put and that’s all they care about. Cargo manifests are easy to check and track and they just lock the prohibited cargo canisters to the ship. We can’t leave without them.”

“Will they search the ship?”

Pip chuckled. “I doubt it. It would take forever. Commercial carriers generally operate on the honor system. They make it easy for us to comply with their rules and regs and so we do it. Occasionally you hear of some small indie captain trying to smuggle stuff into a Confederation port, but it’s really not worth it.”

“Why?”

“Ishmael?” He looked at me seriously. “Have you not noticed that we’ve just traveled through five other systems where anything you wanted to sell was legal? Why take the risk on smuggling when you can sell it legitimately in the next system over?”