Authors: A Planet of Your Own
"I
think you understand me,"
Kynance
said.
"Property cast away upon an unclaimed celestial body is subject to
reclamation as salvage and sale by the
recoverer
after
a
period of one local or one
Earthside
standard year, whichever is the shorter. It just
so happens that the
Zygran
year is four days and five
hours longer than an
Earthside
year.
"Approximately
three hours ago this vessel—note, whether you call it
a
main station' or whatever other name you apply, it is legally of its
nature a waterborne vessel, in other words a ship!—was reclaimed as salvage by
the
Zygra
Salvage Company, who thereupon sold it to
the present owners with warranty of title. If you wish to exercise a lapsed
previous title you must purchase it back from the new owners at the currently
accepted estimate of its value. Conservatively, I'd say it's worth a thousand
million credits— wouldn't you agree?" She gave him a sunny smile.
"Woman,
you're crazy!" Shuster moaned. "Why, that's half the value of our
pelts for a year!"
"Your
pelts?"
Kynance
said
softly. "I'm sorry, but this was an unclaimed celestial body—had you
forgotten already? The pelts are the property of the
Zygra
Pelt Exporting Company."
"What?'
"They
were purchased from the
Zygra
Pelt Raising Company
about—oh—forty minutes ago. The Pelt Raising Company is the new owner of the
substations, monitors and coating-station, which they purchased about two and a
half hours ago from the
Zygra
Salvage Company."
Shuster
clamped both palms against his temples as though afraid his brain would burst
his skull. "What are all these companies you keep talking about?" he
whimpered. "You—"
"You
forgot something, Executive Shuster,"
Kynance
said. "Are you acquainted with the regulations governing the formation of
a company desirous of operating interstellar trade? I am—I studied interstellar
commerce in college, as a follow-up to my earlier courses in business
law."
"Oh," Shuster said in a dead voice.
"Got
there? Better late than never,"
Kynance
told him
sweetly. "The moment you allowed five people loose on the surface of this
planet you dug your own grave. The law states that a company such as I've
described requires five officers: president, chairman, managing director,
treasurer and company secretary, of whom not fewer than three must be citizens
of the planet where the company is registered. The holding of one office in any
given company does not debar an individual from holding the same or another
office in some other company. Am I correct?"
Swaying
a little on his feet, Shuster stared wildly from one to other of the group
facing him, gulping enormous draughts of air.
"Do
you wish to inspect the documents relating to the four companies now operating
on the planet
Zygra
?"
Kynance
asked him formally. "That is to say: the Pelt Raising Company, the Pelt
Exporting Company, the—"
"But
you can't register a company here!" Shuster shrieked. "A company also
has to be registered with a planetary government!"
Kynance
fused, dropped and exploded her last and
greatest bombshell.
She said, "We
are
a government."
XIV
And there it was
. By grace and virtue of the fact that she
had been compelled to break her contract less than one
Zygran
year but more than one
Earthside
standard year prior
to its expiry.
"Whichever
is the
shorter!
" The words rang in her memory
like a reprieve from death.
Shuster
was beyond speech. Giving him a puzzled glance, the second mate holstered his
gun and stepped forward. He said, "I—I guess I don't understand what's
gone on here."
Once,
long ago,
Kynance
had had a private dream involving
a personable young space officer. This second mate could have fit quite nearly
into the
rôle
she'd envisaged. But that was so far in the
past she felt the whole thing had happened to someone else. She only remembered
how he, and all his fellows, had shut their mouths when they must have known it
was company policy that no supervisor should return from
Zygra
.
She
said clearly, for the benefit of the records, "Don't you? You must be
either ignorant or stupid. Three conditions must be fulfilled before an
independent government can be set up on any celestial body: first, the body
must be fit for human habitation—as is evidenced by the fact that these
ex-supervisors of the
Zygra
Company have survived
without artificial aids for many years; second, it must be free of any claim of
absolute sovereignty previously registered by an empowered company—and we've
been all through that; third, it must be inhabited by members of both sexes. We
comply in all respects with these conditions.
"One
Earthside
standard year, plus one minute, after the
abandonment of
Zygra
by any employee of the company
formerly recognized as sovereign here, we became eligible to declare ourselves
the legal government, and we did so. Our President, Hoist
Lampeter
!"
Horst
stepped forward, eyes a little narrowed against the sun, and scowled at
Shuster. He said, "Remember me?"
"Our Minister of
Planetside
Affairs:
Dickery
Evan!"
Dickery
swaggered forward alongside Horst.
"Our
Minister of Trade and Finance!"
Victor
joined the
row,
and
Kynance
fell in at his right. "I myself," she said, "am serving in the
capacity of Minister of External Affairs, and our Minister of Justice
is—"
She
gestured.
Coberley
tramped forward. This past year
his fat had melted off him, letting the hard muscles of his youth show through,
and he hunched menacingly as he approached Shuster, arms swinging loose from
the shoulder as if he were prepared to pick the smaller man up bodily and hurl
him over the side to drown among the gorgeous pelts gathering for the harvest.
In
that instant taut with menace, Shuster must have seen a vision of everything
that had combined to threaten him: the dispossession of the company for which
he had cheated and betrayed innocents and led them to their deaths, the
inevitable investigations, the relentless exposure of all the subtle pitfalls
by means of which he had ruined his victims. Beyond the mere financial collapse
of the
Zygra
Company loomed other terrors. Once it
was shown that he had deliberately tricked the supervisors into breaking their
contracts and then abandoned them to their fate, no government in the galaxy
would be able to refrain from ordering the payment of damages to those who had
suffered, or to their surviving relatives. The
Zygra
Company had lost not only its monopoly on the pelts and the means of obtaining
them, but its other assets too—its unsold stock, its interstellar freighters,
its headquarters building and everything else.
Kynance
had done some calculations; assuming the fines were levied as a percentage of
assets—the usual practice—and the damages as a percentage of the balance, she
estimated that the company would have to sell everything in order to pay a
month's salary in lieu of notice to its other employees.
A
very
satisfactory outcome.
Shuster put both hands over his face and
began to cry.
"But—but
doesn't this mean that you're going to have to stay here indefinitely?"
the second mate suggested nervously. Overhead, some sort of argument could be
heard.
Kynance
let it proceed uninterrupted. Pretty
soon the captain would turn up and the discussion could continue.' Meantime . .
.
"It
sounds as if you've swallowed your company propaganda as willingly as Shuster
did," she said. "He came to believe the big lie put out to discourage
intruders here— that it required millions of credits' worth of life-support
gear to keep a man alive on
Zygra
. Bunkum! It's
perfectly possible to live off the native vegetation, provided you have the
determination. How do you think these people managed,
hm
?"
"But in that
case—" the mate began, and stopped short.
"In that case,"
Kynance
confirmed, "
Zygra
is a greater prize than Loki,
or
Ge
, or a score of other planets that could only be
made habitable by importing
Earthside
plants, animals
and bacteria! We are wide open for immigration —or we will be, as soon as we've
disposed of our first crop of pelts."
"How are you going to do that?" demanded the mate. "You
don't own any ships!"
^
"No,
that's true,"
Kynance
admitted. "But—well,
you haven't seen the scale of port charges currently in force. For a ship of
this class, they amount to—Victor?"
"A
hundred million credits per local day," Victor said with considerable
satisfaction.
"What?" the mate
and his companions spoke as one.
"Well,
any underdeveloped planet needs to exploit its resources,"
Kynance
said. "And currently we only have one— the
pelts. Mind you, the rate applicable to the ships under charter to the
planetary government of
Zygra
is substantially lower,
and we're extremely interested in chartering a few vessels on a profit-sharing
basis."
"Do you mean shared among the
crew?"
"Well,
this would involve the setting up of a common fund," Victor said
judiciously. "But it's one of the schemes which we've worked out in some
detail. If you're interested . . . ?"
Interested!
That was an understatement,
Kynance
told herself with
cynical satisfaction. Her experience before taking off from Nefertiti to come
here had shown beyond a doubt that these men were greedy. A share in the most
profitable cargoes in the galaxy had looked like the quickest route to their
loyalty, and apparently it was working like magic.
"Here's the captain, I see," she
murmured. "I wonder how
hell
feel
about chartering the ship to us."
It took a whole day, but it worked out.
Patiently, citing authority after authority with the assurance due to a solid
Earth year of milking the legal data banks installed in the central computer of
the main station,
Kynance
showed how it could be
done. First came the question of ownership of the cargo: Philpot-
Soames
and Honegger versus the Transit Company of Loki,
2094, pointed out that it was illegal to transport cargo without the permission
of the owners, and hence they could not load pelts without the
Zygran
government's say-so.
The
Zygra
Company owned
nothing
on
Zygra
. They had sent the ship to bring away someone else's
property, and this was piracy within the meaning of the precedent set by
Balewa
and
Chatterji
versus Earth-Luna
Shuttle Corporation back in 1997.
No company—
vide
Olaf
Gunarson
versus
Phobos
Metals, 2045—could compel any employee to engage in illegal undertakings; hence
the captain and his entire crew were free to accept work with any other
employer.
And
so forth, and so forth. When she had finished,
Kynance
was in a state like a waking dream, soaked in perspiration and hoarse with
hours of non-stop explanations. But she knew she had done it. She had set
precedents which would take years to filter through the successive courts of
the galactic legal system, but they would complete the course as surely as the
extract of
blockweed
would come out of the
Zygra
coating-station—changed, refined, fortified, but
ultimately turned into a solid layer of nourishment for many years ahead, to be
transmuted by the living pelt on which it was spread into something with far
more meaning, far more importance, and almost infinitely greater value. Not
price.
Value.
A
sort of beauty.
Kynance
shivered.
Loaded, chartered, under orders, the renamed
vessel
Kynance
Foy
dwindled towards the
shredded clouds of
Zy-gra's
sky. Victor,
Coberley
and Evan were somewhere below in the supervisor's
quarters, celebrating their elevation to ministerial rank in this youngest of
planetary governments with the help of some
Gean
wine
bought on credit from the ship's stores, but
Kynance
wanted to wait a while before joining them. She stood with hands shading her
eyes, watching her namesake ship head for the stars.
Abruptly she
begame
aware that Horst was watching too—not the ship, but her.
She laughed self-consciously and smiled at
him. He didn't return the smile.
He
said, "I said you were extraordinary. The most extraordinary thing of all
is—well, I've realized just this minute that none of us know anything about
you. Even after a year, jammed together aboard this floating box of ours. No
wonder we're all a little afraid of you. You seem like a machine, a computer
full of miracles."
"I know,"
Kynance
said after a pause. "I had to be, didn't
ir
rYes
-
"
"Well,
I've hated it. And thank you for reminding me before it was too late and I got
into the habit for life!" She laughed this time without embarrassment.
"I'll
tell you something I've never told anyone else," she went on. "When I
left Earth, I had this secret dream. I was going to come home wearing a
zygra
pelt and a
blase
expression, just to jolt the hell out of all my friends who said I'd never make
it. By the time I ran into Shuster, I was ready to settle for a square meal and
a ticket home, and I didn't give a
damn
about
zygra
pelts. Now, if I go home, I'll be able to take
cases and crates and shiploads of the things, and this is simply
ridiculous!"
" 'If'
you go home
...
? Don't you
want to go back to Earth?"
"Surely.
It has its points. But—I've been on Earth, Horst.
I
don't mind going back the long way around."
"I
used to think Earth was the only place in the galaxy where I might fit
in," Horst muttered. "But that's not true any longer, is it? There's
a planet called
Zygra
where people like me can fit
in.
...
I wonder
if they'll realize that."
"I
think so. I estimate—oh—half a year before the first applicants for immigration
show themselves."
"I
tell you one thing," Horst smiled. "If you're going to stop behaving
like a machine and start acting like a woman, there had damned well better be
some more women among those early immigrants!"