Four hours before arrival in Amber orbit, Bert picked up their baggage for loading on the shuttle.
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
“Yes, Bert?”
“Ma’am, some of us were wondering. With Star Dancer complete, there are still three more legs of this trip. To Tahiti, to Earthsea, and then to Arcadia. That is eighteen weeks of sitting idle, plus several more weeks at each location for loading and unloading. Perhaps twenty-two weeks total.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“As I say, some of us were wondering, ma’am. Certainly Star Dancer needs some robots aboard, to fly the cargo shuttles, prepare meals, all the normal shipboard functions. But there is no more construction to be done. Would there be things for us to do on Amber?”
“Well, there will be a new ship from the yards every month starting next month.”
“Yes, ma’am. But that is nine thousand light-years and twenty-two weeks away for Star Dancer. That’s a very long time for so many robots to be sitting idle. Won’t new robots be coming to Arcadia from Playa during that time? To meet that need?”
“Yes, very likely. I suppose I could ask President Dufort if they need any robots on Amber.”
“We would very much appreciate it, ma’am.”
“Do you wish to be left on Amber as well, Bert?”
“Me, ma’am? No, thank you. I was asking for my fellows. I am quite contented being attendant on you and your fellow passengers all the way to Tahiti.”
“What about when we get to Tahiti, Bert?”
“Then there are two choices, ma’am. One is to remain with you on Tahiti. The other is to remain with Star Dancer for its trip back to Arcadia. I understand there will be passengers for those legs as well.”
“Yes, that’s right. And which do you prefer, Bert?”
“I would remain with you and Professor Chen, ma’am, if you have need of my assistance.”
“Let me consider it, Bert. In the meantime, I will speak to President Dufort.”
“Thank you, ma’am. My associates would appreciate it.”
When Star Dancer was only a couple hours out of Amber, passengers were ordered to report to the passenger container for transfer down to the planet. Most of the crew was going planetside as well, for shore leave.
Skeleton crew and all the robots remained on the ship.
As before, ChaoLi and JieMin sat in the front with David Bolton and Chen YongLin. Despite the gravity being only two-tenths g, no one had trouble getting to their seats and getting belted in.
Once everyone going to the surface was secure aboard, Tom stood up in front of the cabin.
“We will now go to zero gravity. Please remember to have a bag ready in case of stomach upset.”
Tom sat back down and belted himself in.
There was some minor side acceleration as Star Dancer’s forward and after maneuvering thrusters, at maximum depression in the counter-rotation direction, began firing to slow the rotation of the big ship.
Pretty soon they were back in zero gravity. Most people had gotten used to it enough from last time to have no problems. The ones who had real trouble last time had taken medication in advance this time.
ChaoLi watched the forward display as the Star Dancer settled into orbit around the planet. Once they had a stable orbit, the passenger container and the shuttle above them separated from the ship and made for the planet.
ChaoLi, JieMin, David, and YongLin, as passengers, were allowed to depart the ship before the crew. They made their way down the short flight of steps to find a fellow in a suit waiting for them. A limousine stood nearby.
“Madam Chen?”
“Yes?” ChaoLi said.
“I am Michael Grant, aide to President Dufort’s chief of staff. I’m here to give you a ride to your hotel, ma’am.”
“Very well.”
The driver let them all into the back of the limousine, then closed the door. Grant got in the back with them.
“President Dufort would like to meet with all of you after you have had a chance to rest from your journey. Informal, such as over lunch. You can simply send me a mail with your availability when you know it.”
“That will be fine, Mr. Grant.”
His mission complete, Grant simply nodded.
ChaoLi spent the ride looking out the windows at the city. Amber was much like Arcadia. There were no floral-print lavalavas or people walking about nude or semi-nude, of course. Other than that, the city was very similar. It had the same feel.
They were already checked into the hotel, presumably by Mr. Grant, and a hotel staffer showed them to their suites on the penthouse floor.
Between zero gravity, re-entry, and all the other excitements of the day, they were exhausted. They went into the bedroom of the suite and collapsed on the bed.
When they got up, they found that their baggage had been delivered to the suite’s living room while they slept. They were still in the fleece loungers and booties issued by Jixing Trading for zero-gravity travel.
“Showers,” JieMin said.
“And real clothes.”
“Not topless though. And no lavalavas, I don’t think. Pants and shirts.”
ChaoLi shrugged.
“Business casual. We’ll manage.”
Once showered and changed, JieMin went over to the windows and opened the heavy drapes.
“We’re a bit out of synch with local time,” he said. “It’s midnight here.”
“How about some breakfast and putter for several hours, then back to bed and up, say, mid-morning? That should get us close.”
“Works for me.”
As the best hotel in Amber, room service had breakfast twenty-four hours a day – a formulation that still bothered ChaoLi, from twenty-five-hour-a-day Arcadia – so they ordered breakfast.
After breakfast, ChaoLi took the display in the living room of the suite and JieMin took the one in the bedroom. She worked on approvals for things going on with Jixing Trading on Arcadia, while he worked on his two current problems.
A solution for the traveling salesman problem, and a formulation for a stable robot-based society.
Several hours later, ChaoLi sent a mail message to Michael Grant and YongLin and they went back to bed.
They woke at about ten o’clock local time. ChaoLi had mail messages from both YongLin and Michael Grant.
“Everything’s all set for us to meet with President Dufort for lunch,” she said. “He’s going to send his car around.”
“That works.”
“Jean, how nice to meet you finally,” ChaoLi said.
“And you, ChaoLi. Welcome to Amber.”
“Thank you. This is my husband, Chen JieMin, and our friends, David Bolton and Chen YongLin.”
“Very nice to meet you all. Vaclav Brabec here is my chief of staff, and I believe you’ve all met Michael Grant already.”
After hellos all around, they were seated at the table in Dufort’s private dining room in his presidential offices. Staff brought out a salad course, and conversation continued throughout the meal.
“Well, I must say it is impressive to see Star Dancer orbiting Amber,” Dufort said. “I went out to look at it last night when it passed overhead.”
“It’s even more impressive to go up in a shuttle from one planet and come down in the same shuttle to a different planet six weeks later,” ChaoLi said.
“Moving something that large between planets. Amazing. And how is the finishing work going? That was in progress on the way, right?”
“Oh, yes. It’s complete.”
“The ship is completely finished now?” Dufort asked. “In six weeks?”
“Yes. Jean, you would have to see it to believe it. The robots swarmed the work. They organized into teams and just had at it. They worked around-the-clock. They were relentless. And they were finished before we dropped out of hyperspace here.”
“That’s incredible.”
“Yes, and it brings up another question,” ChaoLi said. “I now have nine hundred excess robots aboard, who are looking at five months of deadheading before they can get back to Arcadia and be redeployed. There’s simply no more work on the ship for them to do.”
“Well, that’s not an issue is it? Star Dancer can just take them back to Arcadia.”
“The problem with that is that they hate to be bored. They love to be working. They asked me before I left the ship if there isn’t work here they could do. On Amber.”
“Well, of course, there is,” Dufort replied. “Building houses, for instance. We have a bit of a housing shortage.”
“Yes, but, Jean, you have to understand. If you put nine hundred robots on it, in a month you won’t have a house. You’ll have a subdivision. Which brings up other issues.”
“Yes, I see. What do all the carpenters and electricians and plumbers do for a living.”
“Exactly,” ChaoLi said. “What happens to the economy when anything that can be specified well enough simply gets done, and in record time, by an army of robots?”
“I have been looking into this question,” JieMin said.
Dufort looked at him with interest. He knew very well who Chen JieMin was. If Chen JieMin said he was looking into a problem, that problem was– not finished, exactly. Under assault, though.
“What have you found, JieMin?” Dufort asked.
“The general problem has come up before, and we have some pretty good data on it, at least in some places. If you look at the percentage of the workforce in the old United States of North America in 1880, for example, and again a hundred years later, the differences are profound.
“Fully half of the employment positions were gone. The two biggest sectors in terms of losses were farming and domestic help. With the industrial revolution, farming became much more mechanized and less manpower intensive.
“Similarly with equipment for cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry. People no longer moved the furniture and took rugs out to beat the dust out of them, they simply vacuumed. People no longer had to cut and chop wood for the stove in order to cook, or boil water to do laundry by hand. Domestic help was no longer necessary.
“And yet, a hundred years later, we don’t see fifty percent of the workforce unemployed, despite fifty percent of the 1880 jobs being gone.”
“What happened, JieMin?” Dufort asked. “Where did they go? The other half of the workforce, I mean.”
“Into other occupations that had not previously existed. The automobile industry. The aviation industry. The entertainment industries, including movies, music, and sports. The medical industry, which finally became a science. Huge industries that had not existed before.
“Industries that had been minor or nonexistent became the biggest industries in the economy.”
“The biggest industries in the economy, JieMin?” ChaoLi asked.
“Yes, the two biggest industries became healthcare and entertainment. Healthcare in 1880 was a joke, and didn’t really become a science until the 1900s. When you got sick, you either died or recovered, and doctors had little to do with it other than to worsen your chances. The entertainment industry was also minor, because people worked such long hours that they didn’t need to be entertained. They had no time for it.
“That’s the other thing that happened. The full-time work week went from six twelve-hour days a week to five eight-hour days a week. From seventy-two hours to forty hours.”
“How did people earn a living, though, working so many fewer hours?” Dufort asked.
“With more productivity, wages went up. A lot. Working forty hours a week, the real incomes of working people went up tenfold compared to what they made working seventy-two hours a week a century before.”
“That’s incredible,” ChaoLi said.
“Yes, but the secret to it having worked out may have been the time it took to happen. The fifty percent of the people who were working in new industries weren’t the same people who had been working in farming and domestic work a hundred years before. There were generations to adapt.”
“And we don’t have that,” Dufort said.
“No,” JieMin said. “I’m still working on how to make it work. But the general lesson is that the increased productivity should result in higher standards of living with less time spent working, in the medium to long term.”
“If we can navigate the short-term effects of displacement,” ChaoLi said.
“Exactly.”
“Which brings us back to the problem of your nine hundred robots, ChaoLi.”
“It sure does.”
“Let me think about it,” Dufort said. “In the meantime, how is your cargo business getting started?”
“Good, at some level. I mean, everybody is carrying something somewhere. But if you want a specific thing to end up in a specific place, that’s another thing altogether. We have spices and teas from Arcadia. When we leave here, we’ll have coffees from Amber. And we’ll have apples from Tahiti.
“But it will be thirty-two weeks before Star Dancer is back here spacing this circuit. If you wanted chocolate from Aruba, or cognac from Olympia, when could I have them here?”
“So what’s the solution, ChaoLi?”
“Hub-and-spoke operations. A ship flies from Arcadia direct to every planet, taking whatever that planet wants from the orbital freight station on Arcadia. It comes out here, drops everything, takes on an entire load of coffee and goes back to Arcadia. Next round, anybody who wants coffee can have it.”
“So any planet to any planet shipping is always two hops,” Dufort said.
“More or less. We would also have the Aruba freight station, which shortens the length of the hops in that direction, but adds a hop to things going to Arcadia.”
“Sounds good, ChaoLi.”
“Yes, but I don’t have enough ships for that. I won’t have twenty-one ships until May of next year or so. Fourteen months away. In the meantime, your imports are going to be sort of catch-as-catch-can.”
“Once you have that, what do you do with additional ships that come on-line?”
“Add them to the routes with the most traffic.”
“So then you have two ships on that route.”
“Right. I’ll probably eventually end up with five ships on every route. Which will still only mean a departure every three weeks, even for the closest destinations like Amber.”
“Which is over a hundred ships. How do you even staff that operation?”
“I have the robots, Jean. They actually do a pretty good job of personal service, and they can cook like anything.”
“They’re very good in the kitchen,” YongLin said, nodding.
“I don’t mean to have been ignoring you, David, YongLin. I just find all this fascinating.”
“That’s all right, Jean,” David said. “We do as well. And we hadn’t heard all this yet.”
“So why are you on this trip?” Dufort asked.
“We go to Tahiti for the anti-aging treatments,” YongLin said.
“As do JieMin and I,” ChaoLi said. “And then we go back to Arcadia, and David and YongLin will become Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu, and Chen MinChao and Jessica Chen-Jasic will retire.”
YongLin nodded.
“We will relieve them,” she said, “and then they go to Tahiti for the treatment, so they may have a longer retirement together.”
“And then you will be the Chen?” Dufort asked.
“Yes,” David replied. “MinChao and Jessica think we are ready.”
“What do you think, David?”
“I think that their judgment in this matter is superior to my own.”
Dufort laughed. He turned back to ChaoLi.
“This talk of Tahiti and anti-aging treatments brings up another question. There are some people here who wish to make the trip as well. Get those treatments. Are you ready to take on revenue passengers yet, ChaoLi?”
“Yes, Jean. I wasn’t sure the robots would get Star Dancer done in time. But we’re ready. The one thing we don’t know yet is the market-clearing price. Everything right now is being carried on the books in kind. I can’t yet quote them a price.”
“Make the numbers big,” Dufort said, shrugging. “Prices can come down over time. Right now, compared to deadheading Star Dancer’s passenger spaces, it’s free money for you.”
“Are anti-aging treatments then going to be reserved for the wealthy, Jean?”
“Initially, they probably will, ChaoLi. The wealthy and other early adopters subsidize the technology, which makes prices come down for everybody else. If Tahiti is making enough money on treatments, they can use that to build clinics on other colonies. In the meantime, your prices will continue to fall as you gain experience and begin paying off the investment.”
“That is exactly correct,” JieMin said.
“In the meantime, ChaoLi, make the numbers big. These people simply don’t care what it costs.”