Authors: Alan Black
TASSO GRUNTED as the side panel for the packing crate on the huge agricultural-processing machine popped loose. The wood panel banded in metal was heavy. An anti-moisture barrier lined the inside. It ripped with a high-pitched screech as the panel cracked and slammed down at him. He dropped to the deck feeling the rush of air buffet him as the panel crashed to a stop against the side of another box across the aisle. The panel groaned and creaked, but it didn’t break and crush him. He crawled out from under the panel. The machine still had the crate on three sides plus the top and the bottom. He wondered why a manual on opening the crate was not on the crate. There should at least be a warning that a person could be crushed to death by pulling the wrong lever. There was a small note on one side that said ‘caution – packing materials may be heavy’. It definitely wasn’t worded strongly enough. “Lesson learned,” he said to himself, “or I hope so. We’ll see whether I learned it or if I ever do that again.” He didn’t plan to uncrate the whole machine. He’d only opened the one side to give him easy access to the manual and controls.
He checked his dataport for Tio Gabe’s location. The man was still at ZZ-001, the back corner where Tasso had begun cleaning the attic. ZZ-001 was where Tasso had built a sleeping pallet out of old packing material. The old man was napping there and didn’t appear to have moved.
He wasn’t worried about Tio Gabe’s health. Doctor Valenzuela had put a medical alert patch on the old gentleman after his disappearance. It would alert the medical department if he was in any physical distress. She also set the patch to send an alarm to Tasso’s dataport, so he could get to Tio Gabe in an emergency. She explained the patch was a precaution only, Tio Gabe was as healthy as a horse and mentally stable, no matter what other people thought. Tasso hadn’t known horses were a standard of health, but if the doctor said so, he was willing to accept it as fact.
So far, Tio Gabe hadn’t removed his locator Tasso had strapped to his wrist, although Tasso replaced the packing strap with a little more fashionable material. He made a special watchband for his supervisor, attaching the locator and his dataport for communications to his wrists without using packing straps. Tio Gabe seemed to treat it as jewelry; showing everyone he didn’t have to clip his locator onto his coveralls.
It only took a small adjustment on the extruder at Cherry’s Lingerie Shop to make a watchstrap with connectors to fit the locator. Tasso managed to figure it out by reading through several sections of the manual. Cherry was now having difficulty keeping the locator-dataport wristband combinations in stock.
Tasso was amazed so few people bothered to read the manuals for the equipment they used every day. He still read every manual for everything he could get his hands on. Living on a working spaceship was like living in a library. There were manuals everywhere connected to everything.
FO Graham’s team of trainee educators had tested his reading level and they passed him with high marks. They were dismayed at the limited range of literature selections Grandpa had given him to read. They wanted him to begin reading all manner of books. They were still arguing over what the best course of reading material would be. He was happy enough to read procedural manuals from other departments around the ship. When they tried to get him to read something called
Great Expectations
he balked.
He might’ve had more time to read if Security Sergeant Rodriguez and his supervisor Security Commander Shanklin decided to file assault charges against Tasso for his attack on Cruz. Tasso could’ve either spent a lot of time in jail or confined to his quarters. The whole affair confused Tasso. He admitted the attack. He was guilty. Why they didn’t file charges was a question he was determined not to ask! He refused to file charges against Cruz for battery, as Rodriguez suggested. Besides, a battery was a line of army artillery, wasn’t it?
He was happy he didn’t have to be on lockdown and was able to continue reading manuals. Here in the attic he could poke around the machinery and read at the same time. That was why he popped open the packing around the agricultural-processing unit. He identified the units with marker tabs at the request of Bill Rojo. The purser was excited to verify the units really existed. Tasso pointed out the possibility of mismarked crates, so they investigated and found out the crates contained what they said was inside. Bill hadn’t been able to find out any information on where the units came from or where they had originally been going. Tasso had crawled into the crates and come out with serial numbers, but they were still waiting for a response from the manufacturing company. Tasso hadn’t heard anything since, and his curiosity about the machines got the better of him.
He checked the time on his dataport. He still had a few hours left before he had to get cleaned up. The captain ordered him to attend tonight’s football game. He was looking forward to spending some time with Anisa, but from what she said, they wouldn’t get to sit together.
He’d worked at Cherry and Ain’s last night, since the store was open on Thursday evenings. Gordo and Cherry agreed to go with Anisa and him to the football game. Gordo claimed to be an expert in the game. Most others in the store didn’t dispute his claim. Tasso really wanted to be alone with Anisa, but at the same time, he didn’t. Even with Gordo and Cherry, they might still be alone. The two seemed more focused on each other than anyone else.
He’d worked at Cherry’s every night since Sergeant Rodriguez released him from the Security Office late Saturday night. He even went in when the place wasn’t open. Cherry gave him the lock-out codes for the door. He used the after business hours time to run through the manual becoming more familiar with its applications and extruding products. He managed to keep ahead of most of Cherry and Ain’s inventory requirements by filling the store’s racks when customers weren’t around to slow him down. He spent time on Wednesday and Thursday night with customers making special request products or special color matches. He was constantly surprised at the creativity of his customers and continued to be amazed when they complimented his creativity.
He also used the time when the store was closed to generate thousands of feet of packing straps, web-nets, hoses, and tie-downs for dozens of departments who gave orders to Cherry and picked up the goods during the store hours. He managed to make each department’s straps in different colors with their department designation imbedded in the webbing. Cherry had negotiated special pricing on equipment for the ship. The pricing was much less than the ship wanted to pay and much more than Cherry and Ain wanted to charge. Tasso only had a cursory understanding of capitalism, but even to his inexperienced ear, the whole negotiation sounded backwards.
Cherry explained how the extruder was really the ship’s property, just as most of the material the extruder used was the ship’s property. Her store’s whole investment boiled down to paying Tasso part-time wages. To charge market value was gouging. She smiled when she pointed out that keeping the pricing low brought in more customers, earning them more profit in the end than charging more now. She and Ain agreed that because you could charge more didn’t mean you should.
He understood the ship’s purchasing department was more than willing to pay higher pricing to a crewmember than to an outside business. Their final pricing was much lower than they could buy the goods on the open market, so that helped with their budgets. On the other hand, Cherry and Ain would spend any excess profit within the ship at other shops and restaurants, improving the overall ship’s internal economy.
It sounded like the most backwards negotiation Tasso had ever heard of. It would certainly have given his grandfather a heart attack to hear the buyer wanting to pay more and the seller refusing to take it.
Tasso went with Sergeant Rodriguez to another store on the promenade as soon as Security un-arrested him. He was happy to have the other man with him since Cruz hadn’t retracted his edict for Tasso to keep off the promenade. Nor had the older boy retracted any physical threats against Tasso for failure to comply.
The captain ordered Cruz’s graduation from trainee to crew delayed for a year. Many people said that was a mild punishment for his part in both attacks. Rodriguez said Eber rolled over on the older boy rather than be cut from the trainee football team. Tasso wasn’t sure what rolled over meant, but he gathered it had something to do with telling the truth. Flacco and Ivan had joined Eber so fast the recorder had to work overtime to keep up.
Still, Cruz had warned Tasso to stay off the promenade Saturday and Sunday afternoons so Tasso was determined to avoid Cruz if possible. Saturday hadn’t come around again yet, but Rodriguez took him to The Big Barn Saddle and Tackle Shop last Sunday afternoon. They glanced around other shops, but the saddle shop was their ultimate destination.
Most of the equipment baffled Tasso, as did the fact that he thought a tackle was something he’d read about happening in a football game, not something you did to horses. The sergeant showed him a picture of a saddle’s cinch, gave Tasso dimensions, and described his buckle and flexibility requirements. The sergeant also tried to explain how to use a cinch on a horse. Tasso gave up trying to understand; he knew it would be something he had to see. That didn’t mean he couldn’t make one.
A saddle cinch was like a bra snap extender in that he would have to see one in use to understand the whole concept, but he still made Cherry a couple dozen of the bra snap extenders. He would rather see how the bra snap extender worked in action rather than a saddle cinch, but Rodriguez was excited about the saddle straps. He was even more excited when Tasso offered to include his name, his horse’s name, his wife’s name, along with a picture of his new baby on the cinch, and make it all in his favorite color.
The owner of the saddle shop asked Tasso to stop cutting into his business. The man laughed when he said it. Tasso readily agreed to stop selling anything else the man sold. He also readily agreed to make and supply the man with cinches, bridle straps, and dozens of other pieces of gear he didn’t understand. He asked for an inventory list from the owner and offered to make special orders for custom equipment. Tasso explained costs and pricing were up to Cherry. Strangely enough, Cherry and the man came to a quick agreement. The pricing was much less than the man was willing to pay and much more than Cherry and Ain wanted to charge. Their deal included the saddle shop owner passing on some of the cost savings to his customers.
Tasso was looking forward to his date with Anisa tonight at the football game. He wasn’t sure she thought of it as a date, but he was. He made sure he had a clean change of clothes and he was planning to leave the attic early enough to shower and shave before meeting her. He wanted to ask Gordo about what he was supposed to do on a date, but he was too embarrassed to admit he’d never been on a date before.
He really wished he had a manual on dating. Since he didn’t, he turned back to the manual on the agricultural-processing plant. Like all manuals, he started reading at the beginning. He was amazed that the first chapter in the manual was about reading the manual. He didn’t expect anything to happen, but he opened a panel, twisted a few knobs, and depressed a button. A slow grinding noise made him jump back. A panel slid open and a chair slowly slid open for the processor operator. He was not sure what power supply the system had, but there was enough power still available after all these years to get to the operating systems. It sounded like a little lubricant would be a good thing to make the chair slide out smoothly and quietly, but it’d worked. He slid onto the chair, its position making it the perfect height to read. He was into the third chapter when he stopped. He called up the index, scanned through a section, and then another.
“Liars and thieves!” he shouted. He knew talking to yourself was a sign of going crazy, but he was angry. Extracting chiamra seeds from the stalks wasn’t too difficult for this machine. Seed extraction was a simple by-product of extracting the spice. In fact, the standard processing instructions were to pull seeds for replanting; it took additional processing instructions to leave the seeds in the stalks.
He and Grandpa had to buy back seeds under the guise that they were hand-extracted, whereas the machine performed the function with a simple procedure. Not only were they paid less than their spice was worth, they were charged for something that should’ve been theirs to begin with. The buyers told them the plant stalks and leaves required special handling because they were highly toxic, but the machine could easily convert the excess plant material to a nitrogen rich fertilizer. It could concentrate the nitrogen enrichment or dilute it depending on the buyer’s requirements. He didn’t know about other farming requirements, but according to the machine’s manual, the fertilizer process was an important part of the overall function and one of its original design requirements.
The machine had started out generations ago as a garbage and lawn clipping composting machine turning excess plant cellulose into hemp jute. Grandpa had a small composting machine for their gardens. They always put every left over organic material they could find into the little machine and worked the product back into the soil. Reworking the dirt was necessary to make the thin Saronno soil grow earth-style vegetables. He was sure the fertilizer wouldn’t be as valuable as the spice itself. On a nitrogen-loaded planet like Saronno, their plant sludge was so nitrogen rich it became worthless as a fertilizer or soil additive, but he was sure it had value in its own right on some planet. He made a mental note to ask Purser Rojo about the price of fertilizer. Maybe reworked organic compounds didn’t pay enough to transport by spacecraft.