"Mm-hm. How long does it take to learn to fly a ship through the visible music?"

"Variable. Minimum of a few months, I think."

"Okay. So that is for after setting up the business with the clones but probably before getting going on terraforming. I am going to be on the lookout for a trustworthy or at least thoroughly buyable human assistant as a backup or secondary summoner so I can cut transit time, though. The music is pretty but it's not worth days in ships every time I want to go somewhere, so once the urgent stuff is handled I think I'll prefer to get around via scheduled dismissal and resummoning."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

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

"I will."

"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.

"...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."

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

"And who or what is Atriama?"

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

"Sounds pretty."

"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."

"I wouldn't mind one."

"What format d'you want?"

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

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

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

"Oh well." Cam hands him a holo.