Part 7 (2/2)
”Nifflheim, no! This government doesn't need revenue. This government supports itself by counterfeiting. When the Masters.h.i.+p needs money, they just have Ridgerd Schferts print up another batch. Like everybody else.”
”Then the money simply isn't worth anything!” Erskyll was horrified, which was rapidly becoming his normal state.
”Who cares about money, Obray,” he said. ”Didn't you hear them, last evening? It's un-Masterly to bother about things like money. Of course, everybody owes everybody for everything, but it's all in the family.”
”Well, something will have to be done about that!”
That was at least the tenth time he had said that, this evening.
It came practically as a thunderbolt when Khreggor Chmidd screened the s.h.i.+p the next afternoon to report that a Proconsular Palace had been found, and would be ready for occupancy in a day or so. The chief-freedmen of the Management of Business of the Masters.h.i.+p and of the Lord Chief Justiciar had found one, the Elegry Palace, which had been unoccupied except for what he described as a small caretaking staff for years, while two Masterly families disputed inheritance rights and slave lawyers quibbled endlessly before a slave judge. The chief freedman of the Lord Chief Justiciar had simply summoned judge and lawyers into his office and ordered them to settle the suit at once.
The settlement had consisted of paying both litigants the full value of the building; this came to fifty million stellies apiece. Arbitrarily, the stelly was a.s.signed a value in Imperial crowns of a hundred for one.
A million crowns was about what the building would be worth, with contents, on Odin. It would be paid for with a draft on the Imperial Exchequer.
”Well, you have some hard currency on the planet, now,” he told Count Erskyll, while they were having a pre-dinner drink together that evening. ”I hope it doesn't touch off an inflation, if the term is permissible when applied to Adityan currency.”
Erskyll snapped his fingers. ”Yes! And there's the money we've been spending for supplies. And when we start compensation payments....
Excuse me for a moment.”
He dashed off, his drink in his hand. After a long interval, he was back, carrying a fresh one he had gotten from a bartending robot en route.
”Well, that's taken care of,” he said. ”My fiscal man's getting in touch with Ridgerd Schferts; the Elegry heirs will be paid in Adityan stellies, and the Imperial crowns will be held in the Commonwealth Bank, or, better, banked in Asgard, to give Aditya some off-planet credit. And we'll do the same with our other expenditures, and with the slave-compensation. This is going to be wonderful; this planet needs everything in the way of industrial equipment; this is how they're going to get it.”
”But, Obray; the compensations are owing to the individual Masters. They should be paid in crowns. You know as well as I do that this hundred-for-one rate is purely a local fiction. On the interstellar exchange, these stellies have a crown value of precisely zero-point-zero.”
”You know what would happen if these ci-devant Masters got hold of Imperial crowns,” Erskyll said. ”They'd only squander them back again for useless imported luxuries. This planet needs a complete modernization, and this is the only way the money to pay for it can be gotten.” He was gesturing excitedly with the almost-full gla.s.s in his hand; Prince Trevannion stepped back out of the way of the splash he antic.i.p.ated. ”I have no sympathy for these ci-devant Masters. They own every stick and stone and pinch of dust on this planet, as it is. Is that fair?”
”Possibly not. But neither is what you're proposing to do.”
Obray, Count Erskyll, couldn't see that. He was proposing to secure the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number, and to Nifflheim with any minorities who happened to be in the way.
The Navy took over the Elegry Palace the next morning, ran up the Imperial Sun and Cogwheel flag, and began transmitting views of its interior up to the _Empress Eulalie_. It was considerably smaller than the Imperial Palace at Asgard on Odin, but room for room the furnis.h.i.+ngs were rather more ornate and expensive. By the next afternoon, the counter-espionage team that had gone down reported the Masterly living quarters clear of pickups, microphones, and other apparatus of servile snooping, of which they had found many. The _Canopus_ was recalled from her station over the northern end of the continent and began sending down the proconsulate furnis.h.i.+ngs stowed aboard, including several hundred domestic robots.
The skeleton caretaking staff Chmidd had mentioned proved to number five hundred.
”What are we going to do about them?” Erskyll wanted to know. ”There's a limit to the upkeep allowance for a proconsulate, and we can't pay five hundred useless servants. The chief-freedman, and about a dozen a.s.sistants, and a few to operate the robots, when we train them, but five hundred...!”
”Let Zhorzh do it,” Prince Trevannion suggested. ”Isn't that what this Freedmen's Management is for; to find employment for emanc.i.p.ated slaves?
Just emanc.i.p.ate them and turn them over to Khouzhik.”
Khouzhik promptly placed all of them on the payroll of his Management.
Khouzhik was having his hands full. He had all his top mathematical experts, some of whom even understood the use of the slide-rule, trying to work up a scale of wages. Erskyll loaned him a few of his staff. None of the ideas any of them developed proved workable. Khouzhik had also organized a corps of investigators, and he was beginning to annex the private guard-companies of the Lords-ex-Master, whom he was organizing into a police force.
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