“I was born a Roamer, and I am still a Roamer,” he said. “But I’m a new kind of Roamer, because we live in a new Spiral Arm. I can guide us into the future and balance who we are with who we need to be.” He paused for a moment, letting the idea sink in. “I was just a young businessman at the end of the Elemental War and the birth of the Confederation. I was one of the first to embrace our new situation, making alliances with Roamer facilities and doing business with former Hansa industrialists.”
They didn’t react with as much enthusiasm as he had hoped. A few groans came from the audience. “That’s a good thing?” someone commented loudly enough for the whole room to hear.
“Who cares about the Big Goose?” someone asked, using the deprecating name for the Terran Hanseatic League.
After being hounded for so many years by the corrupt, repressive Hansa, Roamers still resented the idea of big business. They preferred informal family and trade connections to specific commercial guidelines. But those old thought patterns were no longer relevant.
Iswander kept his impatience in check. “It’s not the Hansa anymore—it’s the Confederation. We should all care about their markets and their facilities, and what they can mean to every one of us. I was one of the first to redraw the business maps, to stop thinking of the former Hansa as our enemy but as a new partner. In so doing, clan Iswander used our materials-processing factories to supply much of the rebuilding effort. We helped the whole human race recover.”
He looked at the man who had complained, but he couldn’t place the name. He would have to work harder at memorizing the names of people. “Talk to your parents, talk to the elders of other clans. Maybe you aren’t old enough to remember it, but ask them if they liked the war so much that they want to perpetuate it. Chairman Basil Wenceslas is long dead, and King Peter is and has always been our friend. Accept it.”
Iswander turned to the other gathered faces. “Because I was thinking big, I bought out my parents’ stake in our clan business and began building new factories. We specialized in supplying modular space habitats and prefab domes for rugged environments, where Roamers have always thrived. I made it easier, safer, and more lucrative.”
Sam Ricks let out a rude snort. “And you charge the clans as much as you charge Hansa customers. Anyone with real Roamer blood in his veins would give us better prices.”
Iswander was annoyed that Ricks would interrupt him, when he had politely endured his opponent’s bland speech. “That only proves you don’t understand business. My production costs don’t decrease because a Roamer buys the unit rather than some other customer. It’s business. Mathematics doesn’t play favorites. The clans have to stop living by the seat of their pants.”
From the Speaker’s platform, Isha Seward said, “Sam, no more interruptions. Be polite.”
A dour-faced man with a thick beard and shaggy gray hair scoffed. “Polite? Roamers sure have changed, and not in a good way. Convocations used to be an open exchange of ideas, now it’s like some prissy court dance. Should we bow and curtsy too?”
Iswander recognized the man as Olaf Reeves, Garrison’s father—an idiot by any measure. He wore traditional clothes with pockets, zippers, clips, and clan symbols embroidered on the fabric. Some might have called the clothes old-fashioned or woefully unstylish, but the clan head seemed to wear them as a badge of honor. “I don’t mind a frank and open exchange of ideas, Olaf Reeves,” he said, then couldn’t resist twisting the knife. “In fact, let me ask why you haven’t finished rebuilding Rendezvous yet? You’ve been working on it for years, and if you’d let me supply prefab modules, as I offered, you could have completed the job a decade ago. I did make your son an excellent offer.”
“We don’t need your shizzy prefabs,” Olaf said. “We’re Roamers. We’re self-sufficient. We don’t need help from outsiders.”
“I am no outsider,” Iswander said. “I am a Roamer, and Roamers adapt. I have adapted to the Confederation.” He was no fan of the stick-in-the-mud Retroamer leader, and he wondered now if Elisa’s husband had fled back to his family’s clan. Iswander crossed his arms over his chest, realized it was a defensive posture, and relaxed as unobtrusively as possible. “I offered you a way to finish your project at Rendezvous, but you tossed it aside. Aren’t Roamer clans supposed to help one another? Those who turn their backs on their cousins tend to fail.”
“You’ve had a few failures yourself, Iswander.” It was Ricks again, oblivious to the frown Speaker Seward gave him. “I checked out your business record—a lot of risky investments. Some might call them catastrophes.”
Iswander had been prepared for that. “Yes, I made some risky investments. Some failed, others were successful. Roamers can’t forget how to live on the edge—that’s where the profit is. And if Roamers made only safe choices, we would have learned nothing and petered out long ago.”
He looked around the room. “I understand what it is to be a Roamer. I also understand that we’re citizens of the Confederation now, not outlaws in hiding. It’s time to come into the daylight and be who we’re supposed to be. If you’re ready to move forward, I’d appreciate your vote for Speaker. I can see the Guiding Star, and I know where it leads.”
When it was time for his own summation, though, Sam Ricks couldn’t even articulate a reason as to why the clans should vote for him.
Iswander swept his gaze across the room, meeting as many eyes as possible. “The Roamers can have a bright future, and I’m willing to work hard for all of us to make that happen. Thank you for your time.”
Before the chamber was dismissed, Olaf Reeves bustled out with his younger son Dale and a few other family members. “Doesn’t matter which man you vote for—you’ll never be the same Roamer clans we once belonged to.”
EIGHT
DEL KELLUM
For a man who had spent most of his life in space running spacedocks, shipyards, and asteroid settlements, Del Kellum loved the ocean. He stood on the metal grid walkway (he preferred to think of it as a “balcony”) of his distillery complex that rose on stilts from the shallow seas of Kuivahr.
He told his distillery workers, unconvincingly, that he went out there to ponder the process lines for the various brews they produced. Actually, he just liked to stare out at the water.
Green waves slurped against the breakwater and pilings, curling around the fermentation towers and plankton-separation tanks, in a slow-motion waltz as the twin moons of Kuivahr pulled the tides one way and then another. Hypnotic, beautiful… and a hell of a lot more peaceful than the arguing of Roamer clans when he’d served as their Speaker.
Del closed his eyes and pulled in a deep breath, savoring the salt and iodine smell that was integral to so many ocean worlds. Instead of fresh sea air, though, he smelled the crisp, malty scent of roasting Kuivahr kelp in the seaweed kilns, blended with the sour chemical tang of plankton mash. But that was a good smell too, if he adjusted his expectations accordingly.
Gray clouds across the sky obscured the two moons. He had erected his distillery in Kuivahr’s tidal transition zone, where the shallow oceans sloshed back and forth, filling the basin with fresh frothy water for part of the cycle, pulling in rafts of succulent kelp, and leaving noisome plankton-rich mudflats when the waters receded. There was always something to harvest.
Not far away on a rock outcropping tall enough to remain above the highest tides, the ancient Klikiss race had left one of their transportals—a giant stone trapezoid that allowed access to interdimensional tunnels connecting a whole network of worlds. A quarter century ago, humans had figured out the mysterious gateways and now used the transportals as shortcuts to certain connected planets. It formed a fine subsidiary transportation system among the worlds that had once been inhabited by the Klikiss. On Kuivahr, Del was pleased that the transportal made shipping his “aqua vitae” (twenty-three varieties, so far) much easier, although cargo ships and Ildiran vessels also came here on their regular routes.