Chapter 16: Building a House

August started with Jenny formally pledging to New Hope. It was getting very crowded in my living room, so Alice, Jenny and I moved to Poli's house. In addition to the House members, Eliraet and Fesinaet were there to witness.

Jenny was still very shaky in Nalu, so she pledged in English. Fesinaet didn't speak English, so I provided a simultaneous translation to him using a plasm line. The plasm-phone mechanism was proving very convenient, even for local communication. Fesinaet became the third person after me and Alice to enhance his hearing to detect plasm vibration. His modified aural brain structures could decode plasm frequency and phase modulation using a type of heterodyning I developed a few months previously. Other Nalu had to use a plasm construct as a sort of hand-set.

Fesinaet and I now had most common Nalu gathering areas "wired up" with amplified plasm strands. We had about twenty thousand miles functional, and were planning for additional expansion.

Our cramped conditions should be getting relieved around the first of September. We found a house with five large bedrooms and a huge living room, suitable for House gathering, but we had to wait for settlement. Luckily, Acker LLC was able to pay for it without going through mortgage applications.

Our plot in Texas was being developed. We drilled and extracted palladium ore exactly where expected. Once we analyzed the samples, we had several companies eager to pay development costs in exchange for a large revenue share, but we were negotiating. The initial samples yielded about $20,000 of palladium and $7,000 of platinum. There were a few other valuable mineral traces in the ore — not worth mining by themselves, but very nice byproducts of the refining process. Acker LLC was not desperate for capital, and so far we'd been paying the operating costs ourselves. According to the Nalu estimates, we had several hundred million dollars worth of ore; I wanted to be in as strong a position as possible before settling on a revenue share.

The license payments from USS and SecureDesign were paying for the house, while the Genefice acquisition was covering the mining operation.

We had three sensitive meetings to handle. Alice called her parents and scheduled a two-day visit for the three of us. So far, she introduced Jenny as her friend, accurately but incompletely. She wasn't looking forward to the explanations of our living arrangements, but true to form, she wanted to get over it as soon as possible.

The second meeting was with my parents. It was easy to arrange, since it was a much shorter ride than to the Caffreys. We still didn't know how to explain plasm-travel, so the car was our vehicle for "human" visits.

My parents had already met Alice and liked her. My engagement would be easy; it was Jenny that would be hard to explain. Or rather, easy to explain but hard to justify.

The third meeting, and the first chronologically, would be the next Nalu council. At the last council I'd had to fight for my life. It was ironic that I regarded the next one with the least apprehension of all three events. After all, the Nalu Houses were largely independent, I didn't need anybody's approval. And if some foolish Nalu decided to attack me, I would not hesitate to use deadly force right from the start. Not something I could count on for parental discussions.

It was fortunate that I enhanced Jenny's sight and hearing. The council took place in Peru. It was late in the day and heavily overcast; with human-normal eyesight it would be hard to see, but all of us were now enhanced, and had no more problems with low-light conditions than the Nalu.

Normally I helped Jenny with translation of Nalu, but for this event, Poli would do that. We were assuming I might be busy.

Not expecting another attack didn't mean I stopped working on combat spells. All of us, including the Nalu, had double shields and plasm anchors against sudden acceleration. I had several self-replicating attack constructs, including one with a dead-man's switch, and another triggered by attack on any of our shields. I was not messing around for this meeting.

It was customary to formally announce the formation of a new House at the council. In most cases it was a pure formality, since such formations were discussed for years or decades first. New as New Hope was, I doubted there were any Nalu not aware of it.