Steven Brust - Orca

“But now we’re implicating Indus.”

“So? As far as I can tell, Vlad, we’re implicating everyone in the Empire with the possible exception of Her Majesty and Lord Khaavren.”

“I don’t think you realize what we’re dealing with here, Vlad.”

“You mean it’s that big?”

“No, I mean it’s that—I don’t know the word—pervasive. We’ve been looking for corrupt officials, and checking them off our list when we decided they weren’t corruptible. But that isn’t the point at all.”

“Go on,” he said, frowning.

“Corruption doesn’t enter into it. Oh, maybe Shortisle, or someone on his staff, is lining his pocket. But that’s trivial. What’s happening here is everyone involved in the mechanism of the Empire is working together to do his job just the way he’s supposed to.”

“Come again?”

“The Empire is nothing more than a great big, overgrown, understaffed, and horribly inefficient system for keeping things working.”

“Thank you,” he said, “for the lesson in government. But—”

“Bear with me, please.”

He sighed. “All right.”

“By things,” I said, “I mean, mostly, trade.”

“I thought putting down rebellions was the big thing.”

“Sure,” I said. “Because it’s hard to trade if there’s a rebellion in progress.” He smiled, and I shook my head. “No, I’m really not kidding. Whether a certain piece of ground is ruled by Baron Wasteland or Count Backward doesn’t make a difference to much of anyone, except maybe our hypothetical aristocrats. But if the trees from that piece of ground don’t reach the shipwrights here in Northport, then, eventually, we’re going to run out of that particular lime they have in Elde, which we use as an agent mixed with our lime to make mortar to keep our buildings from falling down.”

“Reminds me of the couple who didn’t know the difference between—”

“Hush. I’m being grandiloquent.”

“Sorry.”

“And we’d also, by the way, run out of that lovely Phoenix Stone from Greenaere that I think you know something about. That’s one of the simplest examples. Do you want to hear about how a dearth of wheat from the Northwest shuts down all the coal mines in the Kanefthali Mountains? I didn’t think so.

“The point,” I continued, “is trade. If it weren’t for the Empire, which controls it, everyone would make up his own rules, and change them as occasion warrants, and create tariffs that would send prices through the overcast, and everyone would suffer. If you need proof, look to your homeland, and consider how they live, and think about why.”

“Life span has something to do with that,” he said. “As does the tendency of the Empire to invade whenever it doesn’t have anything better to do.”

“Trade has more to do with it.”

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “I suppose. But how does all of this relate to corruption among the great and wonderful leaders of our great and wonderful—”

“That’s what I’m saying, Vlad. It isn’t corruption. It’s worse—it’s incompetence. And, worse than that, it’s inevitable incompetence.”

“I’m listening, Kiera.”

“Why does a banker go into business?”

“I thought we were talking about the Empire?”

“Trust me.”

“All right. A banker goes into business because he’s an Orca and he doesn’t like the sea.”

“Stop being difficult.”

“What do you want?”

“Obvious answers to stupid questions. Why does a banker go into business?”

“To make money.”

“How does he make money.”

“He steals it.”

“Vlad.”

“AH right. The same way a Jhereg moneylender does, only he doesn’t make as much because his interest rate is lower and he has to pay taxes—though he does save some in bribes.”

“Spell it out for me, Vlad. How does a banker make money?”

He sighed. “He makes loans to people and charges them for it, so they pay him more than he loaned them. In the Jhereg, interest is calculated so that—”

“Right. Okay. Here’s another easy one: what determines how much profit a banker makes?”

“How much money he loans, and at what interest rate. What do I win?”

“So what keeps him from running up the interest rates?”

“All the other bankers.”

“And what keeps them from getting together and agreeing to raise the rates?”

“Competition from the Jhereg.”

“Wrong.”

“Really? Damn. And I was doing so well. Why is that wrong?”

“I’ll put it another way: what keeps them from getting together, including the Jhereg, and fixing interest rates that way?”

“Uh ... hmm. The Empire?”

“Congratulations. The Empire sets limits on the rates, because the Empire has to take loans out, too, and if the Empire got rates that were too much better than everyone else’s, the Great Houses would object, and the Empire has to always play the Houses off against each other, because, really, the Empire is just the sum of the Great Houses, and if they all combined against the Empire ...”

“Got it. No more Empire.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, so the Empire fixes the maximum loan rate.”

“Rates. There are several, having to do with, well, all sorts of complicated things. That’s Shortisle’s job.”

“Got it. Okay, go on. So, in effect, the maximum profit a banker can get is set by law.”

“Nope.”

“Uh ... okay, why not?”

“Because there’s another way to maximize profits.”

“Oh, right. Loan more money. But you can’t make loans if people don’t need the money.”

“Sure you can. You can create the need.”

“You mean the land swindle?”

“No. That’s trivial. Oh, I’m sure that’s why it’s being done, but it isn’t happening on anywhere near the scale that would pull the Empire into it.”

“All right. Go on, then. How?”

“Undercut the Jhereg.”

He shrugged. “They always do that. But the Jhereg moneylenders stay in business, anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because we aren’t as fussy about making sure the customer can pay us back, because we have our own ways of making sure we get paid back.”

It was interesting that Vlad still thought of the Organization as “we,” but I didn’t choose to comment on that. I said, “Exactly. And so ... ?”

He frowned. “You mean they start making it easier to get loans?”

“Precisely.”

“But then, what if the loans aren’t paid back?”

“Vlad, I’m not talking about small stuff, like someone wanting to buy a house. I’m talking about big finance, like someone wanting to start a major shipping firm.”

He smiled. “Just to pick an example by random? Well, all right. So then what happens?” He answered his own question. “Then the banks go under. That’s stupid business.”

“Maybe. But what if you don’t have any choice?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you had a pile of cash—”

He smiled. I’d forgotten how much money he had.

“Let me rephrase. If you had a pile of cash that you wanted to put into a bank—”

“Ah!”

“Which bank would you choose?”

“I wouldn’t. I’d give it to an Organization moneylender.”

“Work with me, Vlad.”

“All right. I don’t know. I guess the one that had the best rates.”

“What if they were all the same?”

“Then the one that seemed the most reliable.”

“Right. What makes a bank reliable? Or, more precisely, what would make you think a bank was reliable?”

“I don’t know. How long it’s been around, I suppose, and its reputation, how much money it has.”

“How do you know how much money it has?”