trade my soul for a wish

[from_scratch]

This is a successor to "call me maybe", which is getting crowded.

Cam is dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into a bowl of tomato soup when he feels the summons. He goes ahead and grabs it. Doesn't even drop the sandwich.


with Mark (kappa)

with Adanya (Aestrix)

with Sable (kappa)

with Ari (andaisq)

with Metella (kappa)

with Miles (kappa)

with Isabella (Eva)

with Steel (Rockeye)

with Daphne (Maggie)

with Edie (Maggie)

Comments

[unmarred]

"The lead time you get from sending a message versus making the trip yourself, if you're a pilot with a very fast ship, is minimal enough that you'd have to have a very predictable schedule before the other method would be worth much."

[from_scratch]

"Yes, but I think I'm willing to trade some rigidity for the time savings. Clones first, then I find a nice pilot school and on whatever passes for weekends in the thirtieth century I go work on terraforming or whatever in places my trusty human assistant has found for me. I might find multiple trusty human assistants, since you're going to be baroning it up and will only need me when somebody wants a new body."

[unmarred]

"You'll get much less value out of having me as your interface to humanity anywhere but Jackson's Whole," he concedes. "Weekends largely persist. But if I'm going to be Baron of a House whose entire source of revenue consists of you to start with, I'd like you to stick around long enough for me to find alternate sources."

[from_scratch]

"It doesn't take very long to make a body," Cam says. "If they're currently growing them and there are rarely more than a hundred at a time, the demand's not huge - I guess we can expect more customers by undercutting the price, but they'll bottleneck at the brain surgeons. How long do you want to tie me to one unpleasant-sounding planet after that's sewn up?"

[unmarred]

"Long enough. So that I can maintain a presence for you to come back to every time someone wants a clone made. I won't have a good estimate until I've put some thought into how I will maintain that presence."

[from_scratch]

"Okay. Well, get back to me when you've put in the thought."

[unmarred]

"I will."

[from_scratch]

Cam spends most of the rest of the trip reading his local books and occasionally playing violin, although he does emerge from his cabin to feed Mark and the pilot and talk to the latter about flight schools.

He also eventually reads enough things with illustrations in them to have a loose sense of the borders of fashion; he makes Mark shield nets (one with and one without a hood) and an outfit that is itself heavy enough to conceal the stiffness, complete with gloves.

[unmarred]

Just after they make the final jump into the Jackson's Whole system, Mark tracks down Cam.

"Now would be the time to make the ship you want to dock with Fell in," he says. "I have a suggested model. Small, luxurious, a little obscure, well-shielded, fast as hell. Plausibly towable by the Prospero."

[from_scratch]

"Sure. I'm not naming it for a Tempest reference, though. I think I'll call it the Gretchen." And once Cam has a name of the ship model, he produces a towing mechanism and an instance of the ship.

[unmarred]

"...I'm only guessing that's a Faust reference because I like old books and I have suspicions about your sense of humour," says Mark, "so it passes, but in general I don't want to encourage sly nods demonward. Takes all the fun out of it, I know."

[from_scratch]

"Maybe I'll make future references to demonic literature. Next ship can be the Atriama."

[unmarred]

"And who or what is Atriama?"

[from_scratch]

"Atriama is the eponymous protagonist from a - I think the nearest analogue is a ballet, but it's aerial."

[unmarred]

"Sounds pretty."

[from_scratch]

"It is. It's funny, summoners back home acknowledge that demons must value culture and media, since that's usually the first thing they try to pay us with, but I don't think a summoner has ever asked me for a recording of Atriama. Or any other demon-created anything."

[unmarred]

"I wouldn't mind one."

[from_scratch]

"What format d'you want?"

[unmarred]

He shrugs. "Can you convert it to a holovid I could watch on a standard comconsole...?"

[from_scratch]

"Eh - it's only been recorded in two dimensions, do holos work like that? If so then yes."

[unmarred]

"It'll display, yeah. It won't look as good as three, but oh well."

[from_scratch]

"Oh well." Cam hands him a holo.

[unmarred]

"Thanks. Might as well transfer to our new ship, now. I'm a competent enough manual pilot to dock at a station without hitting anything."

[from_scratch]

"I was hoping that was the case."

Off they go to the station. Goodbye borrowed pilot.

[unmarred]

"So," says Mark, "to start with, I think I'm going to claim a three-month lead time on a clone order. Short enough to hopelessly outmatch the competition, long enough to be vaguely plausible as something other than magic and to give me time to find you and drag you back here to fulfill unexpected orders if you're somewhere else when I get one. I will demand tissue samples or accurate gene sequences from customers, and we'd better actually use the provided material as the basis for growing the new body, even if you can do it another way. We should probably also whip up a convincing-looking medical lab somewhere on this ship, even though I fully intend never to let anyone access it. If someone does break in, and doesn't find any evidence of clone-growing facilities, we'll be facing some uncomfortable questions."