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remember that booth. Ten creds is a lot for a small wooden artifact, but they might be worth every bit of it. The craftsmanship on them is spectacular, and each one seems to have captured the essence of its subject. That heron looked like it might reach out and strike a fish.”
    She nodded. “It was lovely.”
    “Why didn’t you get it?” I asked.
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it but as soon as he said the price, I didn’t really want it anymore.” She shook her head slightly as if just waking up. “I mean, I wanted it, but I didn’t want to buy it.” She blinked and looked confused. “I don’t know what I mean. How about you? Why didn’t you buy some?”
    “I don’t know either. I just want to think about it.”
    “Yeah, I can see that. Ten creds is a bit much.” We continued down the aisle. Around the next corner was a booth selling powdered dyes and it reminded me of a conversation I had with Pip on Margary.
    I nudged Brill with an elbow and pointed. “You were looking for trade goods?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Back on Margary, Pip and I were thinking we should buy dyes as private cargo and bring them to St. Cloud. We thought there might be a market because of all the yarn producers here. But when we did a little research, we discovered that St. Cloud dyes are kind of a cottage level export.”
    “Makes sense. If you have the yarn, you’ll find ways to dye it.”
    We drifted into the dye booth and examined the dye packets. The couple behind the counter, a woman and her husband, were pleasant and business-like. The dye was packaged in paper packages from a few grams up to a quarter kilo. Each packet had a small sample of yarn attached to it showing the color the particular dye would produce.
    Brill asked, “Do you have these in larger packages?”
    The man laughed, but the woman shook her head and grinned. “The quarter kilo packets will dye ten kilos of wool to full saturation,” she explained. “That’s a lot of wool. For most normal uses, the hundred gram packets are preferred.”
    The packets were spread on the table in a color wheel pattern with the purples on one end arching around to red on the other. There were no white dyes, of course, but blacks took up space in the center of the curve. I took out my tablet and snapped a digital of the display and sent it off to Pip.
    “We’re crew from the Lois McKendrick ,” I explained. “We’re looking for things to take with us out of the system. I’m interested, but I’d like my partner to come see.”
    “Please, take a card,” the man said, offering a small item. “We’re happy to offer wholesale prices.”
    I took the data-card and thanked them before Brill and I moved on.
    “What do you think?” she asked as we turned a corner to head down another aisle.
    “I’m not sure. The dyes are a good idea in practice, but I’m thinking of what they’d look like on the co-op table. As a trade good, they lack something.”
    “Yeah, I see what you’re saying. It does seem like a specialty kind of item. Either you want it or not.”
    It was just about then when we came to a section that was dedicated just to yarn. There were dozens of vendors, and as we worked our way through them, we found Sean Grishan about halfway down the aisle. Sean was a short guy with a pug nose and sandy hair, a spacer apprentice in the deck division. He carried several skeins of a soft-looking yarn in a wide variety of colors. As hard as it was to believe, he spent quite a bit of his downtime on the ship knitting and crocheting. Back on Margary, his handmade lace earned him a pile of creds in the booth. Judging from the skeins in his bag, I suspected he had some new projects in mind. He waved when he saw us and had a kid-in-a-candy-store grin plastered on his face. “Hey, shippies,” he called.
    “Hi, Sean,” Brill returned. “You look like you’re gonna be doing some knitting. How much yarn do you have there?”
    “About five kilos worth, but