Keltham reviews Cheliax's feedback on his proposed interim contract. He is conscious somewhere in the back of his mind that if he is inside a generalized fiction novel then this is the exciting Trade With Aliens section where the narration zooms in to show his thoughts in tons of detail, and all the readers are carefully evaluating the logic of everything to see if they can spot where Keltham makes his dramatic fatal error, and that the part where he's occasionally distracted by thoughts of Yaisa is presumably being played for comedy in a way that implies this is definitely a story wherein Keltham is making amusing reader-spottable errors. Thankfully Keltham's probability density is mostly not in his life being run pointwise by tropes in that detailed of a way, or on there existing an audience he can reason about that way. Carissa wasn't a hidden cleric and all that.
Cheliax does seem to be on board with Keltham's basic outline of the theory behind an interim intended-to-be-replaced contract, though? Keltham expected more pushback on this.
For something like metallurgy, which was Keltham's next intended thing to try, or road-building, the plan is to have what would otherwise be an insanely onerous patent scheme, in which any Chelish metalmakers or roadbuilders adopting new techniques need to hand over to the Project 80% of their increased profits above a 20% increase, relative to a baseline they establish under untampered truthspell; alternatively the Project can directly demand a per-volume patent fee. The rough idea is that you'd expect these entities to, themselves, end up capturing half the gains from trade, so if Keltham gets nearly all their gains, he's getting around half the gains to Cheliax. This fails if those entities compete against each other too much and can capture only a small fraction of those gains, which is why Keltham can also set a coordinated per-volume fee if he notices that happening.
Chelish Governance is strongly recommended but not mandated to reimburse them for substantial amounts of the money the manufacturers pay the Project, so the manufacturers can scale operations the way they usually would given increased profits, and perhaps to subsidize purchase of the goods, to make up for its price being set higher.
If countries outside Cheliax start using the same technology, which Keltham is not actually expecting to happen that quickly, then competition from those countries will decrease pricing power inside Cheliax and the manufacturers will show less of a profit increase and the Project will get less of that increased profit. Or to put it another way, if roadmakers outside Cheliax adopt the same technology successfully, the government is allowed to hire those outside roadmakers to make roads inside Cheliax, but they must be doing a sales volume outside Cheliax at least equivalent to their sales volume within it (to fence off some overly clever functionary getting ideas about setting up a "new roadmaker" just outside the Chelish border). The Project may at its discretion arrange things so that everybody with knowledge of key engineering details is a Project employee and bound to the project by nondisclosure arrangements.
It's intended that this overly arduous and detailed arrangement will eventually be replaced by a measurement of excess general growth in Cheliax's economy relative to economies of other countries, of which Keltham captures around half, after which all this can be tossed aside and replaced by general taxation and reimbursement mechanisms.
For stuff like improved sanitation technology or anti-pandemic measures, Keltham is getting a certain impression that you can't just ask the insurers to pay for those. So this is going to be an issue of Cheliax offering the Project a price for outcomes, basically, and Keltham deciding how that gets prioritized relative to other tech based on that price. The price should take into account that other countries may adopt the same measures, because Keltham is not actually going to slow down adoption there at all; that's something where you just broadcast the knowledge, dath ilan that taught him would have wished it so. Cheliax should offer the Project a price that reflects how much they'd want to see that happen, and can maybe negotiate with other Lawful countries about upping that price.
This part can also fold into the general economic increase business, after which Cheliax and other Lawful countries can again be invited to bid on the Project inventing further sanitation tech.
Cheliax requests that, during this initial period pending a replacement contract, while things are all happening inside Cheliax anyways, two-thirds of the Project's profits go into a Cheliax-internal investment fund, which Keltham promises to actually use for investments that he expects to boost the Chelish economy, including via spending on subprojects of the Project or Project employees and infrastructure; if Keltham at some point wants to relinquish this responsibility he can hand it back to Governance. Profits of the fund go back into the fund itself. They're willing to trust Keltham's promise that the Project won't pay out in salary more than is fair.
There's an attached note in different handwriting saying that parts of Governance aligned to old nobility will be more on board if this fund structure exists, for reasons that are probably not going to be legible to Keltham for a while - to give a not-particularly-accurate summary, they're incentivized to talk as if Keltham will take anything he's given and run to a neighboring country unfriendly to Cheliax, even though this is not true, and adding this fund structure placates them and shows their concerns are being listened-to and they're being respected about this. Keltham should not worry much about this and should leave these factions in Governance to their own delusions, so long as it doesn't actually affect the way anything goes, which they're hoping this structure accomplishes.
...right then. They're sure right that this doesn't sound to him like a consistent agent equilibrium. Possibly some predictor in Governance is bidding up the price on Keltham deciding to take his early profits and go invest in some other country instead? Keltham will ponder whether this reflects some actual state of affairs they aren't telling him about. For the interim contract he'll send back to have the amount be half rather than two-thirds, but otherwise, okay, they're yielding to him enough on other stuff.
Cheliax is pretty sure it can find a million gold pieces in actual gold to redeem money owable to the Project, without that doing anything strange to their economy. If it's more than that, they want to be able to repay him in other valuables that Keltham approves, with a fallback to a guarantee to pay in standard valuables that would be available to somebody requesting to redeem currency at the Chelish central bank. At the same value in those valuables per face-value gold-piece instrument as would have existed at the time of signing this contract, if Keltham is worried about currency devaluation. Keltham adds a note that the key date will actually be a day before Keltham's arrival, so they can't just drop all those valuations by a factor of 100 for one minute while signing the contract, but otherwise sure.
Somebody in Chelish Governance has ever heard of joint-stock corporations, there's just no general market in their shares, which makes them less popular than a dath ilani might otherwise expect. Insurance basically seems not to exist at scale, which Keltham would have expected to imply a huge obstacle towards having there be limited liability for owners and officers of those joint-stock corporations. But given that Keltham regards this issue as a blocker for obvious reasons of sanity, apparently Cheliax is willing to just say that Keltham doesn't have passthrough personal liability for the Project if somebody sues the Project for more than it's worth? Apparently this is usual for Golarion, in other countries that have corporations recognized by local governments as entities? And the excess liability doesn't have to overflow to an insurer, it can just cease to exist with nobody responsible?? This seems like a huge implicit subsidy for corporations that are doing anything risky and like it would create all kinds of awful incentives??? Keltham supposes that he can just accept this implicit gift and then not do anything awful with it.
They're basically on board with the Project's corporate structure otherwise. Though there's a note from a seventh-circle priest of Asmodeus specializing in contracts, who reviewed the whole thing, that he doesn't understand why three-quarters of this stuff has the exact form that it does. The Church bids 2000 gold on Keltham explaining it, in case it's theologically important to Asmodeus's domain of contracts.
Keltham tilts his head slightly on reading this price; he can't tell if they're weirdly undervaluing his other opportunities, or just deliberately saying that this issue is not actually important but should get done eventually. He'll ask Maillol about that, maybe.
Cheliax is actually pretty unhappy about Keltham's request to have disputes arbitrated by a priest of the Lawful Neutral banking god 'Abadar'? Abadar can be kind of weird about some things. Osirion has a terrible record on women's rights, including, for example, their ability to own their own property or get paid for their work. Abadar may be into banking but he's obviously not into fairness. A priest of the Lawful Neutral god Erecura, who lives in the center of a giant interdimensional trading city and market, who would be much better for this. Subject to that part, they're fine about mutual approval of the priest, or failing that the arbitrating priest being selected by the Golarion head of Erecura's church.
Keltham writes back that he can't just take Cheliax's choice of Lawful Neutral god here for obvious reasons, but he's fine with it being Irori instead.
Governance notes for the record that they would usually hammer things out a lot more painstakingly than this, but they also want to actually get started on that tech transfer stuff. Their unusual pliability is to be understood as a request for haste.
Keltham again tilts his head and writes back that Civilization is also not in the habit of trying to design planet-affecting contracts this quickly. Cheliax obviously knows more than him about how local law, or a Lawful Neutral god's priest, is liable to interpret contracts like this. Cheliax presumably has professional lawyers they can actually trust to help. Keltham's rapid composition of these interim contracts is to be understood as a favor for Cheliax. He's a fourth-circle cleric, and not especially likely to get sick with plague in the next month if there's a one-month delay in Project work.