Xenofestation 2-02
~The Fence~

SAMPLE

Paragonas Vaunt

Entry 2-02/A - Loophole

Chemin des Jambons, Moore City, Luna

Arlo Frenk was a bustler.

He wouldn't use that term himself, of course, and the discreet plaque above the old-fashioned bell-push claimed otherwise too, but his fathers had all been bustlers, along with three of his mothers, and so too was the last, latest and - dare he say it? - greatest to bear the name Frenk. It was a family tradition.

Tradition bore heavily on the Frenk dynasty.

And Arlo Frenk would be the first to admit the importance of tradition, of having a firm grounding in the past. It was the reason why he had the discreet plaque, after all, above the old-fashioned bell-push. It was why he kept a showroom behind the door upon which that bell-push sat, when most other bustlers operated in the virtual marketplace alone.

Tradition and innovation, that was the thing.

Arlo liked to think he knew when to employ tradition, and when to innovate. So while his rivals might consider it quaint to have a showroom, for example, Arlo knew that when it came to the type of goods he bustled it was prudent to keep their details off-grid. Discretion was something his clients very much valued, after all, especially when it came to certain of his more exotic and perhaps questionable pieces. And yet at the same time Arlo carefully employed innovative technologies to present his wares to the most advantageous effect.

Practicality and presence, that was the thing.

Arlo prided himself on knowing how to blend the two. So while the wall behind his display counter was dominated by the floor-to-ceiling array of hundreds of little wooden drawers, like some giant apothecary's workshop, only Arlo knew that the drawers were merely an excellent (and much cheaper) facsimile of wood. Similarly, only he knew that the drawers all had little motorised catches, so he had only to call up an item in his stock database for the relevant little drawer to spring open by a few tiny millimetres, just enough that from his side of the counter he could see it standing proud of its neighbours. As far as the client could see from their side of the counter, Arlo had perfect command of exactly where in the array of unlabelled drawers a particular item could be found and could reach for it in an instant.

It was the mark of a consummate showman, Arlo felt, a born bustler.

Though he didn't call himself a bustler. The quality and discernment of his clientele demanded subtlety, and a certain distinctive cachet.

Showmanship and cachet, that was the thing.

And a different name.

Plus the use of innovation where it could add value.

And increase his profits, of course.

And, like any good bustler, a sharp eye and sleight-of-hand, whatever was needed to separate a client from their credits.

Though of course, in a sharp break with tradition, he didn't call himself a bustler.

No, Arlo Frenk was a Space Agent.

The discreet little plaque above the old-fashioned bell-push, on the door of his little workshop on the Chemins des Jambons, proclaimed that fact to the world. Proclaimed it discreetly, of course:

 

A. FRENK

SPACE AGENT

~THINGS FOUND~

Arlo was rather proud of that particular innovation.

There was just something so indefinably romantic about being an agent.

Raffish. Rakish. A little roguish, even.

In a bygone era, a man could be a real estate agent, selling actual land, real land, country estates no less, with trees and lakes and horses on them. Could sell them man-to-man, the idea of a single man actually being able to own an actual piece of land - with trees and lakes and horses on it - so ludicrously extravagant as to be almost surreal nowadays.

If you were an estate agent, back on old Terra, you had to know how to hustle. Because there were always other estate agents roaming the land, pitching their own little sign boards on your turf, trying to beat you to the sale, fighting duels with you for the best clients. And then getting out before the buyer found out what was wrong with the horses.

It was all so romantic.

Or a man could be a travel agent. Selling journeys to people who wanted to go places. Sometimes they'd even be journeys to a place the buyer genuinely wanted to go. Certainly they'd be places the buyer had dreamed about, even if the reality was somewhat different.

So there was just something so inexpressibly exotic about being an agent. An agent for hire.

Selling things and selling the dream, that was the thing.

And making your escape before things fell apart and the dream went sour.

It seemed only natural, then, for Arlo Frenk to style himself a Space Agent. It was much better than the other name. The title that was even older than bustler.

Fence.

Sometimes you could take tradition too far.

Frenk's first fortune had chiefly been built on water.

There was never enough potable water on Terra, what with eighty billion people all drinking it, and polluting it, which meant there was continual demand for top-up imports from off-world. Great bulk carriers plied their trade, bringing in ice mined from Saturn's rings or from comets, deep-space ice by the kilotonne.

But Frenk wasn't interested in that, not the bulk water. No, where Arlo Frenk had made his money was in a legal loophole.

Off-world water had to be treated before it was allowed to be imported, chemically sterilised, then boiled and re-condensed. After what had happened with Europa, nobody wanted to take any chances with contamination.

But smaller quantities could be brought in on an exemption, up to fifty thousand litres at a time. The rule had been intended to allow ships to flush their bilges without having to go through all the rigmarole of cleaning up water that was only going to be dumped anyway, but Arlo didn't see any reason why he couldn't use the same rule to bring in a little extra drinking water for his own purposes.

And his clients quite literally lapped it up.

Supply and demand, that was the thing.

Arlo flattered himself he knew how to balance the two to perfection.

On Terra, every molecule a person drank would have passed through creature after creature, a billion times or more. Somebody had once said that - after being filtered through so many kidneys - Terran water ought to be the cleanest there was. And it almost certainly was cleaner than what Arlo was importing.

But the water Arlo was importing was fresh, and that was all the difference.

Virgin water, he called it.

And it was. It had been sitting there, in some dusty comet or frozen planetary ring, or the permafrost of some backwater moon, for more than four billion years. And in all that time it hadn't passed through a single kidney. The person who drank that water would be the first person in the universe to do so.

You couldn't put a price on that.

Well, you could, and Arlo had. But it was a big price.

Creating exclusivity, he called it.

It was amazing how much people would pay for untouched water, with all the minerals and impurities left in. After all, mineral water was good for you. Everybody knew that. Even the ancients had known that. And so it probably was, as long as you didn't dwell too much on precisely which minerals might be in it. It probably wasn't actively harmful, anyway.

Probably.

Leaving aside those minerals, the water Arlo sold was just the same in every practical way as the water on Terra. It was exactly the same as the water that came in on the bulk carriers, since Arlo got much of his supply by tapping a few thousand litres direct from one of those carriers, or even its bilges, and paying the cargo handler to write the discrepancy off as "losses due to evaporation."

And all Arlo had to do then was skip the treatments intended to make the water safe to drink, but which made it both more expensive to import and practically worthless to his buyers, and then he had liquid gold. Take that virgin water, put it in a crystal polymer bottle, and suddenly it was worth ten thousand times as much.

Value-add.

Creating exclusivity and sweating the asset, that was the thing.

Maximising one's advantage.

He'd created the market. He'd stoked that market. He'd even stooped to a little discreet advertising. A few virtcast subliminals, depicting virgin lads popping their taste sensation cherries with his virgin water, tasteful things like that.

It was all about making the asset work for him.

Efficiency and effort, that was the thing.

Ancient civilizations had understood it. Push water to the top of the hill, and you could make it do work for you. And Terra was the very top of the hill, as far as Arlo was concerned.

It had started with water, but it hadn't ended there.

An engineer on an ice hauler had traded him a few unusual seeds he'd picked up from somebody just back from one of the outer colonies. Arlo had turned a handsome profit on them without much effort at all. Then a couple of artefacts. A few cuts of rare meat. Delicacies.

At first it had surprised Arlo to learn just what people would queue up to put in their bodies. Then it had amused him. Then he'd realised the opportunities it opened up for a shrewd entrepreneur, and he'd realised the virgin water was just the start.

It had snowballed.

Soon Arlo had a thriving side-line catering for the rich Terran's seemingly insatiable appetite for exotic objets de curiosité.

Military items. Religious items. Sometimes even kinky items. Occasionally, the items fit all three categories combined, and those items were the most sought-after of all.

But it was important to keep a tight rein on supply. A rare object wasn't rare if everyone could get one, and if everyone could get one it wasn't valuable either. Just like the water, the aura of exclusivity drove the price. Increased the appeal.

Appeal and exclusivity, that was the thing.

His bell rang.

Arlo checked the security feed, and smiled. He smoothed down his pin-stripe suit, smoothed down his hair, spiv-style, and buzzed in his first client of the day.

Claire.

Claire was exactly the sort of client he liked to cultivate most of all.

Naïve, acquisitive, feckless about her goals. Very, very wealthy.

Her funds seemed limitless, as was her appetite for xeno artefacts. Not only would she buy whatever he had to offer her today, she'd doubtless buy whatever he got in stock next, regardless of the price.

And, nearly as alluring to him as her expensive tastes, she was utterly free with her body.

Arlo liked to think of himself as an aesthete, attuned to the finer points of life. Claire was undeniably one of those finer points.

She was small, almost elfin, her slight figure clad today in a neat little plaid dress in a quaint pinafore style, with a hem which ended very high up her legs, revealing a pleasing length of slender thigh above knee-length white sox, and glossy black platform shoes with silver buckles. Her coal-black hair was cut in a short bob, pinned back over tiny ears with an emerald band that matched her vivid green eyes.

Arlo always made time to take note of Claire's finer points.

And if he played his hand right, he might get a chance at those finer points today.

Tits and ass, that was the thing.

Oh yes, he'd sweat her assets alright.

Realistically, Arlo knew he wouldn't normally have any prospect with somebody like Claire, who was a nine, possibly even a nine-point-five on a good day, while he knew - visually at least - he was barely a five. But it was all about maximising one's advantage, wasn't it? And that had put him on her pedestal more than once.

Even if he was easily twice her age. Her apparent age at least.

That was the odd thing about Claire.

One time, out of curiosity, Arlo had taken the opportunity to obtain a discreet DNA sample. It was only prudent to research a little about the background of one's clients, and the sample hadn't been hard to obtain. He'd got it off the lube sheath they'd used the time they'd celebrated concluding the sale of a honey trap kernel.

But when the results had come back, and identified Claire as somebody reputed to be quite high up in The Syndicate, that had given Arlo pause.

The Syndicate. The Old Firm. Il impresa. The organisation had many names, many fingers in many pies. It was nigh-on impossible to operate in his market without coming into contact with them, even having to square things with them sometimes, pay off a customs operative here, make a "donation to a union fund" there, that sort of thing. So really, having one of his most valued clients be a name in their hierarchy was likely to do him more good than harm, leastways so long as he kept her happy.

So Arlo wasn't worried because of the association itself.

Nor was he worried that the sample result named her as one Ichika Inoue, a dome resident from somewhere in Mare Fecunditatis, rather than the "Claire" under which she'd introduced herself. His clients were perfectly entitled to use whatever discreet appellation they chose, so long as their money was good. So if Claire wanted to run under as many different names as her organisation did, then good luck to her.

No, the vexing point was that - according to the public record - Ichika Inoue was fifty-six years old, more than double what he would have estimated for this "Claire" now standing before him.

And also dead.

The fact there were two of them running around out there -"Claire" and her identical twin "Julie" too - seemed almost a detail point in comparison to that.

Still, whoever she really was, Claire was very wealthy, and very generous, so Arlo wasn't going to turn her down.

On this particular morning, Claire seemed to be on a particularly single-minded mission as she marched into his showroom and slapped her particularly pretty hand down on his counter.

"Do you have it?" she asked without preamble.

"Good morning, young lady, and may I say it's always a pleasure to see you? Will your sister be joining us today?"

Those pretty fingers flexed irritably. Arlo found himself wondering how they might feel wrapped around his cock.

"She's busy. Do you have it?"

That was another thing with Claire. She came right to the point. No prevarication.

Arlo smiled widely, the smile of a predator scenting its prey.

A client in a hurry was a client not in full command of their proper sense of caution.

"Step into my parlour, young lady, and I'll show you my wares..."