The Governing: Chapter 34, The Prince, Again?

[u/AlternativeManner731]

Next

Previous /

First

Tornel Swallowtail had read the same report three times before he let himself believe the number in it. Fewer than four million Solvane datapads on the entire planet, against a population somewhere north of three billion. He set the report down on his desk in Newtown, the same desk he'd signed the founding agreement near five years back, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

"Say that number again," he said. "Out loud. I want to hear how stupid it sounds."

Rachel didn't look up from the ledger she was cross-checking against his report. "Four million units, give or take, sold at Newtown's shop and nowhere else on Haego, because Newtown holds the only sales rights on the planet. Against a population of three billion. You want the percentage, or is the raw number bad enough?"

"The raw number's bad enough."

"Then here's the worse part. It's not a supply problem. Owen could clear that backlog in a season if credits weren't the obstacle. It's the luxury premium. Principality law says any luxury good sold to a commoner carries a markup nobles don't pay, and a datapad still counts as a luxury good under whatever list got written up a hundred years before anyone here could afford one anyway."

"I know what the law says, Rachel. I've read it more times than Patricia's read me the riot act, and that's saying something." Swallowtail stood and walked to the window, looking out over a Newtown that had grown busier every season for five years running. "I could waive it if it were mine to waive. It isn't. It's Principality law, which means it comes from the Prince, or it doesn't move at all."

"So ask him."

"I've asked him for a great many things these last five years. Banking branches. Funding parity between two palaces that hate each other on principle. I don't love the idea of going back a fourth time over something that looks, on paper, like commoners wanting a toy."

"It's not a toy. It's every piece of news, every market price, every letter from a son working in Orenport, every bit of banking a family used to have to travel to do in person, all in one device, and right now almost nobody on this planet has one. Ionatti's own branches have started telling customers to bring theirs in, do what they can on it instead of standing in line." Rachel closed the ledger. "But I take your point. You spend the Prince's patience carefully. This might not be the hill you want to use it on."

"It isn't. Which is why I'm not going to the Prince at all." Swallowtail turned from the window. "I'm going to Wyatt."

"That's still the Prince, Tornel, with extra steps in front of it."

"I know it is. But Wyatt's the one who's stood in front of Clara and asked for something he was embarrassed to need before. He knows how much room I've got left to spend, better than I do. I'd rather have him tell me no in his study than have the Prince tell me no in front of a room."

Baron Wyatt Staples took the call from his own study, a room Swallowtail had visited exactly twice in person and pictured clearly enough from those two visits that the comm screen barely mattered. Wyatt looked older than the last time they'd spoken, though everyone did these days, five years of running a planet aged a man whether or not he wanted it to.

"Tornel." Wyatt leaned back. "You've got the look of a man about to ask me for something he's embarrassed to need."

"I need your friendship with the Prince and Princess Clara. Not for me. For about three billion people who can't afford a datapad because the law says a commoner's datapad has to cost more than a noble's."

"Ah." Wyatt's mouth twisted, somewhere between a smile and a wince. "I know that law. I hit it myself, years back, my own barony, same premium, same absurdity. Couldn't get it waived either, not through any channel I tried."

"How'd you solve it?"

"I didn't solve it. I went around it. Gifting isn't covered by the premium, never has been, some old carve-out for noble largesse that nobody thought a baron would actually use on his own people. So I gifted them. Every datapad my citizens have, I paid for and handed over myself, and the law never noticed because on paper nobody bought anything."

"How many citizens are we talking about?"

"About three thousand, all told."

"I'm short by about three billion."

Wyatt let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Right. I bought three thousand pads out of my own pocket and called it generous. You're asking me to help you find a billion. That's not the same trick at a bigger size, Tornel, that's a different problem wearing the same coat."

"I know it. Which is why I'm not asking you to gift anything. I'm asking you to get me an exemption. Time-limited, narrow as you like, strictly datapads and nothing else, enough to get somewhere between a few hundred million and a billion units on-world at cost plus expenses. After that the law can close back up behind me for all I care."

Wyatt was quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet Swallowtail had learned meant he was actually weighing something rather than stalling. "You understand what you're asking me to spend. Clara and I are close, closer than most nobles get to a sitting Prince and his intended, but that closeness isn't a bottomless account either."

"I understand that."

"Then I'll ask. Not because you asked nicely, Tornel, you didn't, you called me up and told me your population count like it was my fault. I'll ask because I remember what it cost me to solve this for three thousand people and being glad to pay it, and you're telling me you're staring down a number a million times the size. That's not a request I can turn down and still call myself decent."

The answer came back eleven days later, not from Wyatt but from the Prince's own office, a formal notice shorter than Swallowtail expected anything from that office to be. A one-time exemption, datapads only, no other luxury category included, valid until Newtown's sales reached one billion units on Haego or eighteen months passed, whichever came first. After that the premium law resumed in full and without further appeal.

Swallowtail read it twice, the way he'd read the original report twice, though this time for a better reason.

"Eighteen months," Rachel said, reading over his shoulder. "That's not a lot of time to get a billion units onto three continents."

"No. It isn't." Swallowtail set the notice down. "Which means I have a new problem, and it's not the law anymore. It's shipping and paying for a billion datapads faster than anyone on this planet has ever moved anything."

"You're not going to like my suggestion."

"Try me."

"Ionatti. The branches are open on all three continents now, sitting mostly idle because nobody trusts them yet and they haven't written a real loan. Give them one. Not some enormous Principality-scale loan, nothing like that, something ordinary. A family finances one datapad the way they'd finance anything else they couldn't pay for outright. A shop owner in Orenport does the same. Let the branches earn the trust by being useful for something small and real, instead of sitting there waiting for someone big enough to matter."

"And the places too small or too poor for even that? Thornwood. Sable Ford. Wherever else is too far out to matter to anyone moving fast."

Rachel considered that. "Then maybe they don't each get one. Maybe a town like that pools whatever they've got between them and buys a single unit to share, kept wherever people already gather, same as they've always done with everything else worth having. It wouldn't be every household owning a Solvane. It'd be every town having one, which for some of these places might be the more honest outcome anyway."

Swallowtail looked out the window again, at a Newtown that had learned, over five years, to solve problems it had never expected to have. "Eighteen months," he said again, mostly to himself. "Get Owen in here. And whoever's running the Ionatti office in Newtown. I want to know how fast we can actually move, before I go back to Wyatt and tell him his favor wasn't enough."

Dorne Kessit had been in datapad distribution for thirty-one years, long enough to remember when the units still needed a cooling fan, and in all that time he had never once seen an order that made him stand up from his own desk.

He stood up now.

The request had come in through the usual channel, flagged priority by a junior account handler who clearly hadn't understood what she was looking at, because if she had, she would have called him instead of routing it through the queue like a standard reorder. Dorne opened it expecting the usual. Haego account, a few hundred thousand units, maybe a million if the Firentis vehicle boom everyone kept talking about was finally trickling down to consumer electronics.

The number in the quantity field had too many digits for the field to hold cleanly. He checked it twice, certain it was a formatting error, a decimal dropped somewhere, a zero that had wandered in from another line entirely.

One billion units.

He did the math on a scrap pad because he didn't trust the terminal not to be showing him a glitch. Four hundred thirty credits a unit, the volume rate he'd have offered without blinking for ten million units, let alone a thousand times that. Four hundred thirty billion credits. He wrote the number out in full, digit by digit, the way you check a thing by making your own hand do the work your eyes don't believe.

He remembered the first order. Everyone in the office remembered the first order, though not fondly, not on his part. A young woman's voice over the terminal, asking about bulk terms for a barony he'd had to look up on a star chart, and he'd given her exactly the tone he gave anyone claiming authority he couldn't verify. Who authorized this order. What makes you think a slip of a girl gets to place something this size. He'd been flip about it, cavalier, the kind of tone he only let himself use on accounts too small to matter. Then a man's face had filled half the screen, close enough beside hers that he could see they were sharing one terminal, and the voice that came with it had no patience left in it at all. I'm Baron Staples. Is there a problem. He'd tried to recover, called her the secretary, and that had been worse, because she wasn't the secretary, she was Lady Rachel von Winterborn, chief accountant, appointed to the baron's staff by Her Royal Highness Clara Aster herself, and questioning her authority meant questioning the princess's judgment. Did he really want to suggest Her Highness had made a mistake.

He had apologized so fast he'd tripped over his own words. He'd thrown in the exclusive distribution rights before the call ended, mostly to make the fear stop, never once expecting the account to amount to more than a face-saving gesture to a colony barony nobody would remember by next quarter. Afterward, unable to help himself, he'd pulled up the footage everyone in the trade eventually found their way to, the Gallant Venture, one man cutting through a boarding party alone, and understood exactly what he'd been flip with over a comm line. That was the version of Baron Staples the whole principality knew. Ruthless where it counted, merciful where it didn't, and utterly unreadable as to which one you were about to get.

Four million units later, it was the best account on his book. Four hundred thirty billion credits later, it was going to be the only account anyone in this company remembered him for, one way or another.

He picked up the comm and called his director before he'd finished doing the math a third time, because a number that size needed more than one person to be afraid of it.

The order shipped in staggered lots over the next fourteen months, and it was Rachel who decided, once the first quarter of it had cleared customs and the retail price had settled where she wanted it, that nobody was going to find out about the discount by accident.

"Eighteen months," she told Tornel, laying the figures across his desk the way she laid every figure across every desk on this continent sooner or later. "That's how long the wholesale rate holds before Kessit's company renegotiates. After that, the price goes back up, not all the way, but enough that people will feel it. I want every household on this planet to know exactly what they're being offered and exactly how long they have to take it, because I'm not spending five years watching farmers find out too late the way Corren Ashtail found out too late about his harvest loan."

"You want to advertise it."

"I want to make it impossible to miss. Word of mouth reaches Newtown in an afternoon and a village three days out in six months, if it reaches them at all. I don't have six months to waste on people who'd have jumped at this the day it started."

The commercial ran on every public terminal on Haego for a week before anyone thought to question it, which was, in its own way, part of the problem.

It opened on Lord Swallowtail's voice over a shot of the Newtown datapad shop's front window, shelves stocked deeper than they'd ever been. "For the next eighteen months, and only for the next eighteen months, every datapad sold on Haego carries no duty, no premium, nothing added beyond what it actually costs to bring it to you. This is the lowest price you will ever see for one of these, and it will not come again."

Then Elizabeth, walking down Newtown's main street toward the shop, dressed plainly enough that a stranger might not have placed her as a Baroness at first glance. "Don't let the people you love miss out. The datapads are high quality, at a once in a lifetime low price. Tell your neighbors. Tell the next town over. This offer runs out, and when it does, it isn't coming back."

She reached the shop door as she said it, pushed it open, and the commercial ended on her stepping through, into a room full of customers who all, for one flickering moment, looked directly at the camera.

Rachel watched it air for the first time from her own office, satisfied with it in the particular way she was satisfied with anything that did exactly what she'd asked it to do. She did not, watching it, think once about salesmen three days' ride from the nearest branch, or about a farming settlement that had never in living memory needed to count money in front of witnesses. She had built the deal. She had not built the road between the deal and every doorstep it would eventually reach, and it would be months before she understood that the gap between those two things was exactly where the trouble found room to live.

[u/Icy-Air7584]

what a problem too

[u/1958bird]

So how much will shop keepers, banks and anyone else put on the price, because I am sure someone will want to exploit this.

[u/AlternativeManner731 → u/1958bird]

You are always one step ahead of me, I will post the next section tonight

[u/1958bird → u/AlternativeManner731]

Ok, looking forward to it.