After four months in the clinic, ChaoLi and JieMin finally reached the day they were dismissed. David and YongLin had three weeks to go, as they had extra work done due to their age, and also took longer to recover from some of the treatments.
ChaoLi and JieMin left the clinic and moved back to the hotel. When they got to their room, they found their baggage waiting, as well as a robot in the living room of the suite.
“Bert?” ChaoLi asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“OK, how did you wangle this one?”
“Wangle, ma’am? I simply assigned myself to your follow-on care.”
“I didn’t know there was any follow-on care required, Bert.”
“Required can be a fuzzy word, ma’am. In your case, there is a notation in your records for three weeks of follow-on care.”
“Which notation you put there.”
“As may be, ma’am.”
ChaoLi laughed.
“What do you do in three weeks, Bert?”
“I will swap assignments to Star Courier, ma’am.”
“Which is in fact already headed this way from Amber.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
A simple loop route out of Arcadia through Amber, Tahiti, and Earthsea would normally take seven months: four six-week legs, with one to two weeks of unloading and loading at each port. In an unmodified loop route, Star Runner would not be back to Tahiti for almost three months.
As ships continued to roll out of the shipyards, however, Jixing Trading was running expedited loop routes, in which the next iteration of the loop would be begun early, with a different ship. Star Courier had left Arcadia before Star Runner got back, and Star Runner had now been re-assigned to run an expedited loop route on a different set of colonies.
Star Courier would hit Tahiti in another two weeks, and, after unloading and loading, would not be ready to head back to Arcadia via Earthsea until just after David and YongLin were released from the clinic.
The four Arcadians would all head home together.
In the meantime, ChaoLi and JieMin both had a lot of work to do. They camped out in separate rooms of the hotel suite, as before, so each had the use of a full-function display.
JieMin was attempting to model the economic disruption of the technology advances, but found the simulation software was not up to modeling such a radical change. It assumed too many things were immutable or at least slow-moving.
JieMin took the software apart, pulled the analysis kernel out, and wrote a new one. He reassembled the parts of the prior software around the new kernel and started testing. The new software got the same answers to common problems as the original.
So far, so good.
That was as far as he’d gotten by departure time.
ChaoLi was working the socialization of Oliver Nieman’s solution, but she was doing it subtly, almost as an aside from her main discussions with planetary executives.
As the CEO of Jixing Trading, ChaoLi was the highest-ranking person in hyperspace shipping that determined what imports and exports went where. She coordinated all this activity with planetary executives across all the colony planets.
She also needed to negotiate whether it was alright to drop off robots who had completed the fitting out of a new liner on the first leg of its route. That expense, recorded in-kind, transferred to the planetary account of the receiving planet in the Bank of Earthsea, so it amounted to a sale.
Within the first couple months, every colony planet that was the first-leg destination of a hyperspace liner had gotten eight or nine hundred robots dropped off. The outfitting of that ship was complete, and they were no longer required on that ship, at least not in such numbers.
With the second new hyperspace liner on a route, the excess robots preferred to deadhead one leg, and be dropped off on the second colony planet on the route. It was pretty clear this was going to ripple through all the planets on all the routes as new hyperspace liners came into service.
ChaoLi was handling those negotiations with the planetary executives herself. She couldn’t hand them off to Naomi Thompson or another underling. A planetary executive expected to talk to the top dog.
In these discussions, whenever economic disruptions or the broader availability of any of the medical technologies came up – which they always did – ChaoLi brushed it away with ‘Oh, Playa Planetary Chairman Nieman has a plan he’s working on for that. Chen JieMin is looking at it now, and it looks good.’
JieMin’s name was a talisman in these discussions. Everybody knew who Chen JieMin was, and if he said it was good, then it was good.
“Good morning, Hank.”
“Hello, ChaoLi,” Tahiti President Henry Wang said. “How did your treatments go?”
“Very well, thank you. They do a nice job at your clinic.”
“Excellent. I’m glad. And how can I help you today?”
“I have been getting a lot of concern expressed to me by other planetary executives about potential economic disruptions of the technologies available to them now, particularly robots and anti-aging treatments.”
Wang nodded.
“I hear much of the same, ChaoLi, but you probably get a less guarded version than I do, since Tahiti is the source of one of those technologies.”
“I think you’re right, Hank. People are worried about job losses from the robots. They’re also worried about a stratification between the wealthy and the middle and lower classes with the anti-aging treatments.”
“Yes. We’ve been thinking about how to address that, ChaoLi, but we haven’t gotten very far.”
“That’s why I’m calling, Hank. Playa Planetary Chairman Nieman has come up with a solution. JieMin has been looking at it, and he thinks it will work really well.”
“Really.”
“Yes, so I was calling you to encourage you to call Oliver and have him explain it to you. He’s put a lot of thought into it, Hank, and he’s eloquent on the subject.”
“All right, ChaoLi. I’ll do that. What’s the next step, then, assuming Oliver’s solution is a good one?”
“JieMin’s writing up an analysis of the plan, and he’ll publish that. Then I think it may be time to call a meeting of the planetary executives to consider it.”
“Who would call such a meeting, ChaoLi?”
“I would think either you or Oliver could, Hank. For that matter Arcadia Prime Minister Milbank could, but Rob’s been sensitive about having Arcadia be any more high-profile than it is already. He much prefers the colonies continue down the path of an association of equals.”
Wang nodded.
“I see, ChaoLi, and I agree with him on that point. All right, let me talk to Oliver and see where we get. I’ll let you know what happens. And please get me a copy of JieMin’s paper as soon as it is compete.”
“Of course, Hank. Thanks.”
“Thank you, ChaoLi.”
It was several days later that Tahiti President Henry Wang called ChaoLi back.
“Hello, ChaoLi.”
“Good morning, Hank. How are you today?”
“Good. I wanted to let you know I spoke with Oliver a couple of days ago. My staff has been going over his proposal since. They think it might work, and are waiting on JieMin’s analysis.”
“That’ll be a while, Hank. He is having to build his own analysis engine, because nothing we have will handle the problem.”
“I can see that. But we’re very hopeful this is a true solution. As you said, Oliver was eloquent on the point.”
“Oliver is always eloquent, Hank.”
“Yes, indeed, although talking to him always makes me hungry. Next time I will have my own plate of cookies.”
ChaoLi laughed.
“I recommend the apple fritters here at the hotel, Hank. They’re wonderful.”
“One of my favorites. Cookies aside, I think he’s on to something, ChaoLi.”
“I worry that we haven’t considered the balance of trade issues, Hank. How do those work out?”
“Balance of trade? But in a barter system between planets, ChaoLi, trade is always in balance.”
“What? I’m sorry, Hank, but I don’t get that.”
“The only time you can have a trade imbalance is when there is an outside store of value. In a pure barter between planets, a trade imbalance cannot exist. Not for long.”
At ChaoLi’s puzzled expression, Wang continued.
“Consider. You bring tea, and coffee, and robots, and, soon, other trade goods here to Tahiti, right?”
“Yes,” ChaoLi said slowly.
“And you take apples and, soon, medicines and treatments from here to other colonies, right?”
“I’m with you, Hank.”
“All right. So now you get to Arcadia, and you sell the apples, and you find you can only make enough local currency to buy half as much tea as last time, right?
“OK.”
“Do you now take just as much tea to Tahiti?”
“No. I would have to be compensated somehow.”
“Correct. Such as with an interstellar currency, or some other reference to an external store of value. Without that, the trade settles to the highest volume it can maintain given local prices.”
“Then what do you do if you want more tea, Hank?”
“Export more apples, or more medicines, or otherwise raise the market-clearing value of our exports. But it’s the market-clearing value, in local currency, on that other planet. The destination planet.”
“And if apples are more valuable on Olympia, say?”
“Then it would make more sense for you to take on more apples here, and trade them for distilled spirits or fusion power plants on Olympia. But that’s your job. Jixing Trading’s job. To take every product to its best destination. But it still sells at the market-clearing price at that destination.”
“That doesn’t sound right, Hank, but I can’t see the hole in it.”
“Oh, it’s right, ChaoLi. Check with JieMin. But that’s why I would oppose any sort of interstellar currency, or naming any currency a reserve currency, in which transactions are tracked. That becomes an external store of value. In that case, you get currency manipulation, dumping, and every other violation and corruption of honest trading practices. Some of my people here are very clear on the historical precedents, and are, as you say, eloquent on the subject.”
“You got an earful, I take it.”
“Oh, yes. Both ears, in fact.”
“But that makes Jixing Trading the clearinghouse for value, Hank.”
“Yes, in a way, but you are being policed, on the individual planets, by the market. I’m good with that.”
“I have to check that with JieMin, Hank.”
“Of course.”
“As to Oliver’s solution, where did you leave it with him?”
“We’re going to wait on JieMin’s paper, ChaoLi, then I’m going to invite everybody to a meeting. Since Oliver is going to present his solution, and be an advocate for it, we both thought the chair should be someone else. And he understood why Rob Milbank would want to hold back from it as well.”
ChaoLi nodded.
“All right, Hank. I’ll get JieMin’s paper to you and Oliver as soon as it’s complete.”
“Thanks, ChaoLi.”
ChaoLi played her conversation with Henry Wang to JieMin that night after supper. They were sitting in the living room of the hotel suite.
“Interesting,” JieMin said.
“I don’t understand it, JieMin. That can’t be right, can it? That there can be no trade imbalance?”
JieMin had been far away, his eyes unfocused. He started.
“What? Oh, yes. That actually explains something I’m seeing.”
“It does?” ChaoLi asked.
“Yes. When I don’t have an interstellar currency, or a reserve currency, like Bank of Earthsea credits or something, trade imbalances go to zero in my model. I thought it was simply because there was no currency to track them in. But from what Hank says, it may be more than that. It may be structural.”
“Which, do you think?”
“He may be right,” JieMin said. “The trade levels drop a bit for some colonies in the model. Like he said, if their product exports aren’t up to snuff in the destination markets, the level of trade drops to match the clearing price.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“Think about it this way. If I have two apples for lunch, and that’s it, but you have a big ham-and-cheese sandwich, double what you can eat, but no fruit, what do we do?”
“Split the sandwich and each get an apple,” ChaoLi said.
“Right. But which is worth more, the apple or half of the ham-and-swiss sandwich?”
“If it’s a Tahiti apple, the apple.”
“What if it’s Chen ham with Earthsea cheese?” JieMin asked.
“Then it’s the other way?”
“No, because the second half of the sandwich is worth less to the sandwich owner than an apple, and the second apple is worth less to the fellow without a sandwich than half the sandwich is. They both trade, and both are better off.”
“OK, that I get,” ChaoLi said.
“What’s the balance of the trade?”
“In what currency? What’s the pricing?”
“You see, ChaoLi. You do understand. Absent an external store of value, as President Wang phrased it, there is no imbalance. I think he’s right. It’s structural.”
“Hmmm.”
“Look at it the other way. There’s an external currency. What is everyone trading for?”
“More currency,” ChaoLi said.
“Correct. They’re all playing a game scored in tokens. What do you get when people are playing a game like that?”
“Cheating. That’s an easy one.”
“Exactly correct,” JieMin said. “That’s what drove the creation of the World Authority on Earth. Corrupt trade practices were driving people to war. They formed the World Authority instead.”
“And how well did that work out, JieMin?”
“Mixed results, but better than war.”
ChaoLi nodded.
“OK, JieMin. I think I’m starting to get it. It’s just counter-intuitive is all. Run that lunch example past me again, but in colony terms.”
“All right. Tahiti has twenty million population or so, right? They all have anti-aging treatments, and Tahiti manufactures half a million doses a year to treat people as they hit twenty-five.”
“All right.”
“And now with trade, and two hundred million or so new people over twenty-five to treat, they ramp up production so they’re making twenty million doses a year.”
“All right.”
“What are those twenty million doses they can’t use domestically worth to them, compared to a lot of robots they don’t have, or anti-cancer treatments they don’t have, or medical nanites they don’t have?”
“And by transporting those anti-aging treatments to planets that don’t have them, we increase their value a lot,” ChaoLi said.
“Yes, exactly. So Jixing Trading brings the things we need to have to trade for those anti-aging treatments. We actually sell what we bring and buy the anti-aging treatments in local currency, but we could barter them as well.”
“And if someone charges exorbitantly for their products, JieMin?”
“We don’t have to unload there, you know” JieMin said. “We can just say, ‘Sorry. No deal,’ and leave.”
“On to the next planet?”
“Yes, to trade with someone else, for a different product.”
“How is this different than mercantilism?” ChaoLi asked.
“At some level, it’s not. The big difference is all the colonies are high-technology planets with solid goods and services to trade. There is no third-world planet here to be exploited.”
“Everybody’s pretty much on an equal basis.”
“Yes. That’s the difference.”