"Not my problem."
"No. But Tweed's a rich man. Other bootleg teachers can be found, but they're expensive."
Vaffa considered it. "I'll ask the Boss."
The next day brought confirmation from Tweed. He would pay the money to the mothers of the children. It seemed to surprise Vaffa; she had asked the question mainly to satisfy Lilo, to whose judgment she had begun to defer in small ways.
It came as a big surprise to Cathay, who was elated and tried not to show it to Vaffa. Lilo saw it, and it made her feel good. It occurred to her that it was almost the only thing she had been able to do on her own initiative since her escape from prison. But even then she wondered if Tweed had foreseen it, else why the quick acceptance? Did money matter that little to him? Did he buy her argument that it would placate Cathay, make him useful to Tweed after his return? Or did he fear that without the money the mothers would become angry enough to denounce Cathay—leading to an investigation and possible trouble themselves? As usual, Tweed's motives were opaque to her.
But now they had to obtain a ship, and Vaffa didn't know the first thing about doing it. Lilo didn't, either, but she acted as if she did, and she did not doubt that she would be better at it than Vaffa.
Working from Cathay's phone, they quickly got the idea of what the market in second-hand ships were like. There were always ships for sale; they became available as holehunters went bankrupt and had to sell out. But the market was brisk, and prices were always high. Lilo checked with a dozen brokers, and relayed the results to Tweed through Vaffa. The most encouraging thing she could report was that by paying three times the already inflated market value, they might be able to obtain a ship in four to five months.
"Why so much?" Vaffa asked.
"It's complicated," Lilo said. "There's more buyers than sellers. You have to get on a waiting list. The courts award the assets of a bankrupt hunter to a broker, who collects a commission. As soon as a hunter who's gone bust comes in, the ship is sold. They can ask almost anything for it. The waiting list runs to three or four years. To move up on the list, you pay a bribe to the broker. To move way up, the bribe can be three times the price of the ship."
"Isn't that illegal?"
"No, strangely enough. They were very open about it. The broker makes the list. The courts have nothing to say about whom the ship is sold to. So the broker cleans up. It sounds like a nice racket."
"What about dealing directly with a holehunter?"
"Nope. The ones that are solvent aren't selling, at any price. The ones who're broke don't own a ship any more. They go into receivership, and the courts always give them to brokers. I told you it was a racket."
"And what about new ships?"
"An even longer waiting list, higher prices, and bigger bribes."
Vaffa looked sour. Business was not her field of expertise. "I'll relay it to the Boss."
"You might mention something else," Lilo said, thoughtfully. "We only need this ship for the one trip. It seems silly to buy it. Also, can you fly one?"
"I thought you let the computer do that."
"True. But holehunters go a long way out. A lot of them don't come back, because something goes wrong, maybe with the computer, and they don't know how to fix it. A lot of those people think hunting holes is as easy as getting from Luna to Mars, but they're wrong. Fifty percent don't return from their first trip. So you're going to need a pilot, because I don't know anything about fixing ships, and neither does Cathay. I can do computer work, as long as it's not too complicated. But I don't know anything about fusion engines. We'll need someone who does."
Vaffa sighed. "So what are you proposing?"
"I don't know if this is possible, but we could give it a try. Maybe we could charter a ship, one that belongs to a hunter. Even one tenth of the price of a ship would be attractive, I'd think. That is, unless money is no object. I don't know just how rich the Boss is."
I don't think you can get rich enough that money is no object. If you think that way you either don't get rich or you don't stay rich. Tweed was fabulously wealthy, but he was interested in my idea. I don't blame him; some of the prices we quoted him would have run a fair-sized city for a year.
I didn't care one way or the other about Tweed's money. What was important to me was that you could buy a ship over the phone. To charter one, you had to go out and look for holehunters. There were no agencies that handled charters; who ever rented a ship that size, anyway?
Vaffa would not be able to handle it, certainly not alone. That meant I would get to go outside, to stir around, to get my bearings. If I saw a perfect chance, who knows...?
After two weeks they had got nowhere. Day after day they had returned to residential corridors lit by widely spaced pale blue nitelites, and collapsed into bed.
Tweed was beginning to get impatient. Vaffa said he was talking about a deadline; if they had not managed to charter a ship in another two weeks, he was going to have them buy one. By that time, they would already have lost a month, and he was unwilling to let any more time go by before getting his bid down.
Lilo was not happy about it. She didn't care about the lost time, but thought that if they bought a ship they would still be faced with the same problem: hiring a pilot. There were plenty of them around but Lilo was sure it would be hard to hire one. And for the same reasons they were having trouble chartering a ship. Vaffa scared the hunters away.
Holehunters were as quirky a group of people as the human race had ever produced. In many ways, they were almost as different as a human paired with a symb. It takes a special temperament to seal oneself into a single-seat ship for a trip that would last from twenty to forty years. Most of the ships had about fifty cubic meters of living space; some had less. The endpoint of a voyage could be as much as half a light-year from the sun. The people who survived such loneliness for such a time tended to be different.
"Most of them didn't really like people much before they went out," Cathay said. "When they come back, they haven't seen anyone for at least twenty years. A lot of them decide they didn't miss all that much."
They were back at Cathay's home after another day of haunting the pleasure palaces around the spaceport. Tonight Cathay had done as Lilo suggested, lowering the air temperature so it would be cozy to huddle around the fireplace which concealed the electric heater. They had all applied a mild hallucinodisiac cream onto their genitals, then inhaled a muscle-relaxant powder. They had coated their bodies with lucent oils: Lilo was lavender, Cathay was pearl, and Vaffa crimson. The result had been a stretched hour of slow-motion slithering, low-key and undemanding. Now they were lying face down, Lilo in the middle.
She felt good. It was like the peace that could be achieved when you had regained your breath after a ten-kilometer run, but without the pain and exhaustion that would have preceded it. She had wanted Vaffa in a good mood for what she was about to propose, and it looked as though she had succeeded. Vaffa was inclined to be perfunctory about copping; Lilo assumed that the woman had never attracted anyone to love her and had decided, like so many, that sex was overrated. Tonight might well have been the first time she had experienced copping as a sensual delight, not merely the pursuit of orgasm.