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By Matthew Jarpe
Originally published March 2002 by Asimov's Science Fiction. Copyright © 2002 by Matthew Jarpe.

The Capitalist was the fastest spaceship ever made by humans, and it didn’t go anywhere. It orbited an unusually empty bubble of space around a black hole light years from any useful resource. Yet many considered it to be the center of the Universe.

To an outside observer, the ship was shaped like a coin, less than a meter thick. At least that’s what it would look like if an outside observer could see it. If you looked at the schematic diagram you’d see some weird twisted shape that could never hold together in flat space, but in the intensely curved spacetime around the black hole, the crazy topology protected the structure from powerful tidal forces. To the privileged industrialists living on board, the Capitalist was a cylinder, a few kilometers long and a few hundred meters across. The ship moved as close to the speed of light as anything made of matter ever could hope. And, again, it didn’t go anywhere. That wasn’t the point.

Sloan Lerner, who counted his years in the old earth way at thirty-three, was by far the youngest CEO to have the privilege of locating his home office on the Capitalist. But, of course, he was born there. His father had just stepped off the merry-go-round to take up with a new wife and had left Sloan to look after the business and his mother, and, yes, in that order, while Lerner senior sprawled on some tropical beach somewhere and drew down the corporate account until his new time frame moved him out of the picture for good.

His fellow bosses like to joke about Sloan behind his back. Silver spoon, wet behind the ears, that sort of crap. They liked to, but they didn’t get much opportunity, because he was a hell of a lot better at running the company than his father had been. Lerner Interstellar was the fastest growing company headquartered on the Capitalist. He had grown and diversified the shipping business to include mining, bioengineering, manufacturing, and agriculture. He employed sixty million people on eight planets and fifty-odd space stations. The stock chart looked like an exponential function. Not much material to joke about. Now he was even getting nods of respect from the others as he walked down the wood paneled hallway towards his office suite.

Millicent Danvers of Tri-Cluster smiled at him as she left her own office. "I hear you’re going up against Seth," she said.

"Or he’s going up against me," Sloan answered. He had no idea what she was talking about. He had learned a few lessons in business from his father, and the first was that you never let anyone know you weren’t on top of things.

"You got guts, kid." Danvers shook her head and walked away.

Sloan didn’t like to hear rumors flying around in these hallways. Things outside the ship happened too fast. It took good information and a steady nerve to run a business in this relativistic time frame. Sloan stepped up his pace, berating himself for not bringing his phone along for the fifteen minute walk to his office. Every step meant things were happening on the outside that he had no control over.

The accelerated time frame was more than just a nuisance, it was the whole idea behind the Capitalist. Physicists long ago had found that time was part of space, and that the two could not be separated. Businessmen had found out an equally important relationship, that time was money. Put those two laws together and you get the picture. Because to make money at the business of interstellar trade, you had to wait years, sometimes hundreds of years, to do a simple deal. You might have to wait generations to make any money. And the people who went into business were, not to put too fine a point on it, not interested in delayed gratification.

Back in the days of Sloan’s grandfather, the bosses of interstellar businesses used to have themselves frozen and thawed out every, say, ten years or so to check on the status of their companies. Problem was two problems: one, the whole freeze thaw thing was bad on the organs, the brain in particular. Each time it took longer and longer to get up to speed, until it eventually became clear to the boss and everyone else that the grey matter was turning to bean dip in there. Two, with the CEO in deep freeze, what was to stop the help from making some creative financial arrangements? Even the computers got in on the grab. Jesus Christ, when you can’t even trust a robot not to embezzle, best not to take the long sleep.

So the physicists, of all people, had a solution. When you hang out deep inside a steep gravity well, you get to watch time go by in the rest of the Universe a lot faster. You have your agents buy a load of ammonia somewhere out near Altair, ship it to an aggy planet around Tau Ceti, pick up some grain and schlep that back to the hive colonies of Sol. That’s thirty-six years of crawling along at an agonizing pace of 250,000 kilometers per second, but only a long lunch on the Capitalist.

The first generation of CEO’s to take offices on the Capitalist, Sloan’s father among them, loved to watch their empires grow from this godlike vantage point. But, unlike the gods, they couldn’t always keep up with everything the little people were up to. Sloan sometimes wished he could leave the ship for a little while, just to catch up on the details, but the logistics of getting on and off a near lightspeed satellite were daunting. His office was just around the next corner. Tony Arbequest moved to block his path. "What’s this deal between you and Seth?"

"Too early to say," Sloan said, and neatly sidestepped. Arbequest was on his way out. He couldn’t pay the rent, and would have to go back on the clock unless he could come up with a decent cash flow position. Sloan could afford to ignore him. But this rumor was bothering him. He didn’t want to tangle with Seth Leibowitz, not now, not ever. His father and Seth had been working together, and his father had ended up with Seth’s knife in his back. He dodged another CEO with what looked like a question on his mind, and ducked into his office.

Danny sat behind the ops desk to his right. He gave Sloan a worried look but said nothing. Margie stood up from behind the reception desk and smiled.

"Good morning, Mr. Lerner. There’s an urgent message from C&P. It’s the first one on your monitor. Is there anything…"

"Nothing, thanks, Margie. Morning, Danny." Sloan didn’t wait to hear the answer. He closed the door to his office behind him. First message, Colonization & Personnel, Planet HE-47/J, the one with the petroleum. Something about the deed, right of colonization, and a prior lien. What prior lien?

He slowed down and read the message more carefully. Information Services had uncovered a flight pattern that put a transport en route to Planet HE-47/J, said transport leased to The Sculptor Group. Seth Leibowitz, in other words. His transport papers claimed a right to colonize the planet, and the space transit authorities had let it through. Legal had checked the deed and had confirmed that there was in fact a lien on the planet, a leftover from the ruined deal between Lerner Interstellar and Sculptor, under the tenure of Lerner senior. There had been a civil trial in lower court, then an appeal in Interstellar Court that had overturned one of the two claims of the suit. As it stood, after two years of legal wrangling, both companies had equally valid right of colonization of the planet. This had all happened since Sloan had left his apartment on his way to the office. It would have to happen on the day he forgot his phone.

Sloan checked the time frame in standard binary. The days on his display flipped by at a speed of one per second, as always. C & P had sent a colony ship to HE-47/J and it was supposed to arrive in just seventy years. Sculptor’s flight plan showed their ship arriving just a year later. His people would just have time to unpack the colony and fire up the factories in that amount of time.

HE-47/J was a dead world, no life left on the surface but a lot of complex organic stuff in the ground. Easy to build on, but tough to survive. A hot, sandy, windy planet. Tough enough to get things going without another colony competing for resources.

Sloan called up his deal-tracker program, the one that could keep straight the calculations of time and distance and all of the other complications that came with the running of an interstellar business. HE-47/J was about fifty light years away from the Capitalist, give or take. If he sent the message in the next couple of hours, it would reach the transport ship just in time for him to tell it to turn around. But he couldn’t afford to give up that petroleum. Seth Leibowitz had the same window, give or take a few minutes, but he probably wouldn’t back down either. What would these people do once they ran into each other? If he couldn’t convince Seth to call off his ship, he’d soon find out.

"Sloan, Seth Liebowitz here. Hey, kid, it looks like our legal departments have been busy on the clock this morning. You got time to sit down?"

No way. There was no way Sloan was meeting with Seth in person at this point. He was still trying to get all the information, and his off-the-clock legal team was slogging through years of trial transcripts that were still uploading. "Kind of busy, old man, how’s…" he pretended to check his calendar… "never?"

"Aw, hell, Sloan, lets cut the crap. We’ve got two colonies about to land on one goddamned planet. You know that can’t work. There ain’t enough water on that dustbowl for one. We’ve got to work something out."

"OK, how about you tell your people to turn around and we put this whole thing behind us?"

"Now kid, you know that isn’t going to happen. Your old man used that planet as collateral in a legally binding arrangement, and he defaulted. I’m not just going to walk away from forty trillion barrels of crude oil. Look, now this is not a threat, it’s just a simple statement of fact. Lives are going to be lost over this."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"I’m talking about war, young man. Something you, obviously, know nothing about. My people are not going to tolerate the presence of your people on that planet. Your employees are going to have a serious problem on their hands. Remember, this is not a threat. This is going to happen. I’m just telling you straight out."

"My people are ready to handle that contingency," Sloan said. As he said it, he pulled up the company manual and had it search out the S.O.P for self defense.

"What do you got on that transport, kid? Bunch of Drabs? It is Drabs, isn’t it? You cheap bastards. You know who I got to colonize that sand dune? Bedouins. You heard of Bedouins? They’re war-like people, indigenous to Earth’s Sahara. They’re tough, and they’re bred to survive in just the sort of conditions we got down there on, what is it, HE-47/J? What the hell kind of a name is that for a planet? You people got no imagination."

And Seth, for all of his faults, did. That was something everyone knew. While Lerner Interstellar populated every planet it owned with a quiet and sturdy people that was made up of every race of old Earth blended together, Sculptor went out of its way to match the people with the terrain. If they had a snowball, they found some Inuits to live there. If it was a tropical jungle, they scoured the Amazon rain forest for the few remaining tribes and offered them a trip to the stars and a great benefits package.

But Sculptor was already a huge company, and Seth could afford to do things in style. Lerner Interstellar’s mission statement was to create a large, multi-functional corporation without becoming distracted by extravagance. And the Drabs fit right into that business model. They had a strong work ethic, they weren’t very excitable and rarely caused trouble. And they loved their company.

"You’d be surprised at what my people are capable of, Seth. Don’t consider the outcome of a war to be a foregone conclusion."

"Bullshit, Sloan. You and I know that your Drabs won’t last five weeks in a fight against my Bedouins. They can’t even take a shit without consulting the company manual."

Speaking of the manual, Sloan found the chapter on self defense and his heart sank as he read the instructions. They were technically workable. Everything you would want to know from how to target an enemy bunker to how to prepare a unit of field rations was covered. In fact, it was the degree of detail that concerned him. The Drab soldiers would stand exactly where the company manual told them to stand while the Bedouins ran circles around them. And no one had thought to send an innovator along with the colony. They’d be on their own. He had to find another way to bluff his way out of this one.

"I see two ways this can go, Seth. Either we just let these people land on the planet and fight it out. See who wins, see who’s liable for all those deaths on both sides, see what the courts have to say about a company who sends warriors to a planet without clear right of colonization, knowing there’s a legitimate colony on the way. Or, second choice, you can call your people and tell them to turn back before anyone gets hurt. I’d even be glad to compensate you for agreeing to settle this out of court. I’ll send you a list of assets I think are quite generous in exchange for what is, at best, a dubious claim of right of colonization. Look it over. You have two hours. Your choice, Seth. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a staff meeting."

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