“Uh—” was all Sharon could manage.
Stoner found this helpful, when Magda made him turn out to do business that she needed his face or signature at. Everyone expected Magda to be ruthless. When he did it, though, the shock somehow made it more effective. He finished the last indenture, and straightened up to look straight at Sharon. “Pain,” he said.
“Pain?” Sharon was the only one of the three to say anything, but the looks Stoner was getting from the other two clearly implied the question.
“Pain,” Stoner repeated, as the text of a little sermon he hadn’t given in a long, long time.
“You see,” he said, straightening the pile of documents and shoving it across the table to Benjamin, “all of this stuff is about pain and when and how we can inflict it. It’s the big problem we all have—uh, we all had, I should say, back up-time with the bread-heads and money and all that junk. Every one of those contracts was just a charter for pain and sadism.”
He let that one linger a moment.
“Run that by me again?” Sharon said, wearing a grin that had definite undertones of I’ll keep him talking, someone call the guys in the white coats.
“It’s simple, Sharon. Guys like Benjamin here write a whole bunch of stuff down about what the deal is, and we call it a contract, which is just a deal written down on paper or whatever. But because of this insubstantial substance we call law—ha! and they called me an impractical flower-child who believed in mystical nonsense—the deal becomes stupid serious and metaphysical instead of just a simple matter of trust and friendship.”
Sharon frowned. “Well, you’ve got to make busting a deal more painful than keeping to it, or—”
“Or what?” Stoner demanded. “Outbreaks of gratuitous promise-breaking and other asshole behavior everywhere? Sharon, if I bought that depravity of mankind propaganda I never would have started in a commune in the first place, much less stuck with it. It’s just pain-worship, that’s all it is; totem and taboo; superstitious dancing before golden idols. I’ve had nothing but contempt for most of this stuff since, oh, before you were born, and so it doesn’t surprise me that debtor’s prison is a lot nearer the surface here in the down-time. It’s the same deal, it’s just in the shop window instead of out back for the special customers.”
Stoner looked around the room again. Benjamin’s face had gone very professional indeed. Magda was used to his foibles, and was giving him a look that promised a pleasant rebuttal later. Sharon’s grin was now just relaxed. She obviously still thought he was nuts, but wasn’t looking over her shoulder for the guys in the white coats.
“So, let’s recap some, hey, guys? Stoner said. “We’ve got, what, all the feedstocks that the guys back at Grantville wanted?”
“Yes. The people who wanted zinc will be pleased in particular,” said Magda. “We will have two hundred tons of Japanese zinc within a year of midsummer’s day.”
“Oh.” He wasn’t too thrilled to hear that. Zinc was handy stuff, all right, but Stoner wondered about the market for galvanized buckets in a time that still had as many coopers as it did. Of course, the stuff could be used for making brass and batteries too, but—he bit down, hard. It was nearly a year and a half before that zinc arrived, and a lot could happen in that time.
“What else?” he asked, in lieu of the rant he could feel building. “Or, perhaps you should say what we didn’t get?”
“Well, thorium,” said Sharon. “We’re probably going to have trouble with the borax, too. The Turks seem to be the only ones who’ve got it, and they’re not being real friendly so far.”
“Right,” said Stoner, “that’s not actually much of a downside, is it?” Apart, he thought, from all that goddammed zinc.
“We have done well, I think,” said Magda. “The telephone people are particularly pleased that we were able to source good English graphite, they thought there was not any. Sharon saw it in a pencil from Naples, and asked around about where it came from, and it seems that we should have been asking for wad from England. We have ordered much of that. We also have much lac coming from India, which will come soon. There was a difference between what they said that they needed and what was the smallest lot we could buy. So we have sent a trade fleet with English fustians—”