"That's right," said Sharon. "It's just that when all those guys were asking to hire you on as a consultant, Magda was getting you stock deals instead of just the flat fees they were offering."

"Eh? They have those here and now?" Stoner had hardly been up to speed with capitalism as she was spoke in the twentieth century, let alone the seventeenth.

"Oh, indeed, Signor Stone," said Benjamin, drawing breath for what promised to be a serious lecture. "You see, we have had partnerships and anonymous societies and joint-stock companies for many, many years now and there are-"

Stoner laughed. "Benjamin, please! Have mercy, man. Even if you explain it in short words I'm not going to grok it, okay?"

Benjamin frowned the uncomprehending frown of someone whose learning of the English language had missed the word "grok" entirely. But he did shut up.

"So, what now?" Stoner asked into the ensuing silence. "You got me a bunch of stocks. So. I just wait for my 401-K to mature?"

Only Sharon got that, of course. "What we did was a hair less formal there, Stoner. We got everyone we had stock in to pool their buying through us, and that got us some excellent deals. They're all acting like our subsidiaries now, one big corporate group rather than a lot of little businesses that just feed their margins to middlemen. With which, I might add, this town is infested."

Benjamin didn't even twitch.

Stoner mentally vibed some respect for Benjamin; the poor guy had spent weeks in the company of two of the hardest chicks in Venice right now, and he still seemed to have it all together.

Speaking of which, Stoner realized, he'd better take some positive action before his old lady lost all respect for him. "So, all I gotta do is sign?" Stoner levered himself to his feet and reached across the table for a pen. "Is there a downside?" he asked, poised to sign the first paper. He grinned, trying to disarm his pretense at shrewdness.

"Um, well-" Sharon looked at Benjamin, "do I have this right, Benjamin, that if we lose everything-"

"This would be difficult, Signora Nichols. Very difficult, as we have interests in four fleets and nearly thirty ships."

"Yes, but-" said Stoner, realizing that Sharon probably needed this, since she was in as clear a case of done-deal euphoria as Stoner had ever seen.

"Don't worry," said Sharon, "it's hardly likely to happen. Thirty ships, all in different parts of the world sailing at different times. They can't all sink at once. Anyway, even if it all drops in the pot, we've got so many people in this town tied up in our deals that they'd never . . ." Sharon trailed off.

"What?" By now, Stoner was fairly sure that he had punctured the balloon a bit, but he still wanted to know what the downside really was. "What do we do if we lose everything?"

"Get imprisoned for debt."

"Oh. Is that all?" Stoner immediately began to sign and seal where Benjamin had penciled for him to do so.

As he did, he mentally counted off, and was up to twenty-eight before Sharon spoke up.

"You don't mind?" she asked, apparently surprised.

"Nope," Stoner said, pressing his Deadhead signet ring into soft wax.

"Nope?"

"Nope." Stoner was gratified that Magda hadn't been suckered. "How long do you think I've been in business, Miss Boojwah Nichols? You think the old hippie gets confused and scared around bread?"

"Uh-" was all Sharon could manage.

Stoner found this helpful, when Magda made him turn out to do business that she needed his face or signature at. Everyone expected Magda to be ruthless. When he did it, though, the shock somehow made it more effective. He finished the last indenture, and straightened up to look straight at Sharon. "Pain," he said.

"Pain?" Sharon was the only one of the three to say anything, but the looks Stoner was getting from the other two clearly implied the question.

"Pain," Stoner repeated, as the text of a little sermon he hadn't given in a long, long time.

"You see," he said, straightening the pile of documents and shoving it across the table to Benjamin, "all of this stuff is about pain and when and how we can inflict it. It's the big problem we all have-uh, we all had, I should say, back up-time with the bread-heads and money and all that junk. Every one of those contracts was just a charter for pain and sadism."

He let that one linger a moment.

"Run that by me again?" Sharon said, wearing a grin that had definite undertones of I'll keep him talking, someone call the guys in the white coats.

"It's simple, Sharon. Guys like Benjamin here write a whole bunch of stuff down about what the deal is, and we call it a contract, which is just a deal written down on paper or whatever. But because of this insubstantial substance we call law-ha! and they called me an impractical flower-child who believed in mystical nonsense-the deal becomes stupid serious and metaphysical instead of just a simple matter of trust and friendship."

Sharon frowned. "Well, you've got to make busting a deal more painful than keeping to it, or-"

"Or what?" Stoner demanded. "Outbreaks of gratuitous promise-breaking and other asshole behavior everywhere? Sharon, if I bought that depravity of mankind propaganda I never would have started in a commune in the first place, much less stuck with it. It's just pain-worship, that's all it is; totem and taboo; superstitious dancing before golden idols. I've had nothing but contempt for most of this stuff since, oh, before you were born, and so it doesn't surprise me that debtor's prison is a lot nearer the surface here in the down-time. It's the same deal, it's just in the shop window instead of out back for the special customers."

Stoner looked around the room again. Benjamin's face had gone very professional indeed. Magda was used to his foibles, and was giving him a look that promised a pleasant rebuttal later. Sharon's grin was now just relaxed. She obviously still thought he was nuts, but wasn't looking over her shoulder for the guys in the white coats.

"So, let's recap some, hey, guys? Stoner said. "We've got, what, all the feedstocks that the guys back at Grantville wanted?"

"Yes. The people who wanted zinc will be pleased in particular," said Magda. "We will have two hundred tons of Japanese zinc within a year of midsummer's day."

"Oh." He wasn't too thrilled to hear that. Zinc was handy stuff, all right, but Stoner wondered about the market for galvanized buckets in a time that still had as many coopers as it did. Of course, the stuff could be used for making brass and batteries too, but-he bit down, hard. It was nearly a year and a half before that zinc arrived, and a lot could happen in that time.

"What else?" he asked, in lieu of the rant he could feel building. "Or, perhaps you should say what we didn't get?"

"Well, thorium," said Sharon. "We're probably going to have trouble with the borax, too. The Turks seem to be the only ones who've got it, and they're not being real friendly so far."

"Right," said Stoner, "that's not actually much of a downside, is it?" Apart, he thought, from all that goddammed zinc.

"We have done well, I think," said Magda. "The telephone people are particularly pleased that we were able to source good English graphite, they thought there was not any. Sharon saw it in a pencil from Naples, and asked around about where it came from, and it seems that we should have been asking for wad from England. We have ordered much of that. We also have much lac coming from India, which will come soon. There was a difference between what they said that they needed and what was the smallest lot we could buy. So we have sent a trade fleet with English fustians-"

"What?"

"Cloth," Magda explained, "made with wool and cotton, and woven in the north of England. The return trip will bring batiks and spices and some other things we can sell on for profit."

"Some of the phone stuff," Sharon interjected, "we got right here in Venice. All of the insulators are being made in Murano, just across the lagoon. They're doing them to quality standards to train apprentices, they said, rather than working to the tolerances that the people at Prague said would do." She smiled. "I sent a wireless message to Tanner and Ellie telling them about the tolerances we'd gotten on the samples, and they sent back asking how we'd mechanized so quickly."

Stoner nodded. He'd been surprised himself a few times by that sort of thing, since he'd assumed that craftsmen around Thuringia from whom he'd ordered glasswork for the dye factory could do quality or volume but not both, and been pleasantly surprised. Of course, if you watched how fast a competent journeyman could work and then sat down and did the math, it wasn't so surprising. And if they had to turn out a big batch of something quickly, they reorganized the workshop to throw man-hours at the project until it was done.

"Tell him about the aqua vitae, Sharon," Magda said.

"Oh, yeah, that's a good one. There's a fair bit of wine gets rejected when it's imported here, and some of the local product is pretty poor too. There are a fair few good old-fashioned 'shiners as well. When I drew a Liebig condenser for them, there were a few guys slapping foreheads, and a couple of the glassware shops did a roaring trade in the things for a couple of weeks. They use copper pipes and leather fittings, but they work. Now they're making alcohol a lot cheaper and purer than anywhere else, and with about eleventy-seven businesses back in the USE fighting over the supplies of good alcohol there's a good market. We did middleman trade on that for a while, and got a cut out of nearly a whole year's production even before the factories we took shares in turned a profit. Anyway, we got paper for most of those payments and cash for some of them, which was good, since we fed that back into the mill on the Rialto. Some of the alcohol factories have managed to do mail-order deals back to the USE and cut out the middlewomen, but that's okay, we'll make it up elsewhere. For now we've got cash flow."

"And what are we doing with that cash flow?"

"Servicing the term loans," said Magda promptly, with the air of a woman who regarded memoranda and ledgers as management tools for lesser minds. "With the term loans we underwrote the stock issues. The ghetto already has SEC rules and-"

"What?" Stoner began to feel he was really, really overusing that word.

"Ah," said Benjamin, sitting forward in his chair. "Perhaps I can explain this one best. There was a brief description of your Securities and Exchange Commission and your stock exchanges in several of the management and business textbooks in Grantville, and Admiral Simpson was kind enough to furnish some excellent seminars in the matter. We already had most of the things they variously described, and combining them into more organized and consistent markets impressed many of us as a good idea, if it could be made practical. So we circulated the ideas we found most helpful."