By natural extension of this power, the emperor also had the right to approve or disapprove any change of power over any planet, whether occasioned by heredity, war or other cause. In each of these cases, the change of fief-holder was supervised by an official called a "Judge of the Change." These officials were appointed by the Landsraad High Council and the emperor jointly and answered to both of these institutions once the change was completed. One should not be misled by the participation of the High Council in this matter, however. The Great Houses were naturally concerned in these instances that the forms be obeyed and wished to keep an eye on all changes of fief in order that they might be aware of any significant shifts of power. But the legal power here was the emperor's, for it was he who granted fiefs and legally bestowed nobility.
This power was never expressed more clearly than in the ceremonies which accompanied grants of newly conquered worlds to new lords. Behind all the endless panoply, the almost limitless trains of Landsraad lords, the regal to-ing and fro-ing of court officials, lay one hard fact: the emperor was granting a new fief, and the emperor was creating a new noble. When the Duke Leto, father of Paul, called himself a chevalier of the Imperium, as his family histories recount, this was not just rodomontade. When the Duke assumed power over Arrakis as total fief, he published the traditional formal announcement: "Our Sublime Padishah Emperor has charged me to take possession of this planet and end all dispute." The Duke thought of this as a fatuous legalism, but he published the announcement, and so did Glossu "Beast" Rabban when he took charge in his turn. A fatuous legalism it may have been, but it was also an age-old expression of the legal source of power of the Great Houses.
F.M.
Further references: PROCÈS-VERBAL: IMPERIUM FEUDAL PATTERNS OF: BATTLE OF CORRIN: Bergen Perobler, "History of Process-Verbaux," 3 Quadrant Law Review, Ser. 23, 34:1147-76; V. Colivcoh'p, The Text of The Great Convention, after the Material from Arrakis (Placentia: Santa Fe).
IMPERIAL MONETARY SYSTEM
Despite the relative scarcity of economic information in the documents of Rakis so far examined, a fair amount is known about the commercial and financial systems of the Imperium. Account books and similar materials are among the most widespread and long-lived of all human records; some Richesan insurance records are known to be at least twenty thousand years old. Thus we are able to discuss with some confidence the money matters of the human universe born before the establishment of the Guild monopoly and after that establishment made the development of a uniform monetary system both possible and necessary.
In the millennia before the Butlerian Jihad, trade among the twelve to fifteen thousand inhabited planets was common, intense, and disorderly. Even after the development of the Landsraad there was no strong central government, and among the wildly different planetary governments and social systems there was no widespread agreement about the bases of economic value. Thus there was no general medium of exchange. The usual method of interstellar commerce, then, was barter, which method maintained until 491. Until that time, CHOAM and the Great Houses were content to measure fundamental wealth in commodities.
But the Guild could not conveniently accumulate commodities. Having no fixed bases, the Guild had no secure storehouses, and its only coin for barter was its service. Sometime during the second century of its monopoly the Guild quietly began to campaign for the establishment of a universal monetary system. In this effort it was probably supported by the Bene Gesserit and perhaps Tleilax and Ix, all of whom would have had some difficulties accumulating great wealth in the form of commodity holdings. (We should recall that most Tleilaxu and Ixian products were of doubtful morality and undoubted illegality.) The Houses Minor would benefit, too, from a money economy, but it seems unlikely that any of them could have exercised much influence in those times.
The Guild did, of course, build stores of one unique commodity: melange, the "spice of spices." It was extremely precious, and the supply of it was small though not fixed. Taking it as the standard would have helped keep inflation rates low by limiting the increase of money while yet allowing some increase with the expansion of the economy. The Guild could never permit this use of melange, however, as the nature of their own use had to be kept secret. The Guild apparently tried for a while to reintroduce the ancient lust for precious metals or jewels, hoping, perhaps, to make gold or sapphires a standard, but some of these materials were insufficiently rare, and none of them could be made universally desirable. Human greed had taken on too many different colorations.
In the end, the Guild concluded that in a stable, hierarchical and controlled society, there was no reason not to employ an entirely artificial currency. They bent their efforts to persuading House Corrino and the other directors of CHOAM of the advantages of money. A traditional advantage such as portability could not be emphasized, since it would tend to soften the rigidity of the faufreluches. Other advantages, such as easy transferability, would outweigh the dangers associated with them. Finally, two chief elements carried the Guild case: interest and leverage. The first appealed to the desire for wealth, the second to the desire for power. The Guild never tired of pointing out that commodities must be produced; they increase in quantity only through further production. But by the charging of interest, money may be made to reproduce. The Guild also repeatedly demonstrated how the judicious spending or investment of a sum of money may affect the movements of much larger sums in ways advantageous to the spender or investor. The statesmen of the Guild were happy to show the many ways in which interest and leverage can work in concord with each other, to the great profit of those who hold money.
To a few Great Houses, the Guild advanced a third argument, that the introduction of money would make interstellar commerce more efficient, in a sense cheaper, and so more readily accessible. Commodity-poor Houses who owed their standing to court politics or military achievements would find the prospects for their economic advancement enhanced by money. An incomplete document in the Rakis collection records the response to this argument of Marco Atreides (385-445), Count of Thuestes: "In my mind I know no doubt that the introduction of a common currency and an Imperial banking system will give my House its only good chance for a dominant political position. We can never build palaces on pundi rice. But I fear grievously that the price of money will be the honor of the Houses that covet it. Lust for glory may make a man a warrior; lust for fogwood may make him an artist; lust for women may make him no worse than a fool. But lust for money will make him a bookkeeper. An Atreides drawn to money will be an Atreides drawn to death" ("Letter to Dona," Lib. Conf. Temporary Series 763).
Whatever the merits of Duke Marco's sensibility, he saw clearly enough something the Guild did not often mention in its arguments and proposals: there could be no introduction of money at the interstellar level without the concomitant introduction of interstellar banking. Other documents show that Marco rightly understood the Guild to be the only organization able to assume the banker's role. But Marco's House either did not share his misgivings or found reason to ignore them; in 485 Count Nikos, Marco's grandson, is recorded with the majority on the crucial Landsraad vote that would, six years later, put the solari into circulation.
The same vote made the Guild, in effect, banker to the Imperium. There was never an Imperial bank as such, nor any sort of central bank, but, as Marco saw must happen, the Guild controlled interstellar banking because it controlled interstellar communication. Information, like people and plasteel and portyguls, went from star to star only in the holds of Guild ships. Thus money, as a form of information, could circulate only through the medium of the Guild. Every heighliner and most of the Guild's smaller spaceships carried at least one purser, empowered to collect and disburse, loan and borrow, hold in trust, broker for a second party, extend and withdraw credit, cash drafts and make change. To some extent, each such officer was an entrepreneur, because the gains and losses to the Guild from his conduct of business would be reflected quickly and directly in his standin
g on the non-navigational side of the Guild hierarchy and, so, in his access to the geriatric spice. No Guildsman had reason to accumulate many solaris, and no way to accumulate many personal possessions, but one could accumulate years for his lifespan.
Since the solari was only a name, a bit of ricepaper, and a number in a ledger, it had to be defined in terms of its purchasing power, To some extent, once the monetary system was in place and functioning, its value defined itself, simply by the practice of money users. But most of the years between the Landsraad vote of 485 and the initial distribution of solaris in 491 were devoted to intricate negotiations to fix the starting point for the system. The Guild subtly and effectively resisted any tendency of the emperor or the Landsraad to single out the price of spice as a fundamental determinant. Instead, the Guild negotiators proposed a complex formula of commodity equivalents. The commodity market processes had become rather sophisticated over the centuries, and the Guild, of course, had detailed current and historical records of weight/number/value ratios. Their proposed formula was a scrupulously honest effort to preserve the relative economic standings of all the Houses. It was debated for over four years.
The conflicting ambitions, rivalries, and enmities among the Houses tended eventually to cancel each other, and the weight of House Corrino gradually settled on the side of the Guild formula. Although only the final version of that formula is known, it had certainly been modified by the debate, and some Houses, inept or careless in financial calculations, suffered thereby. House Atreides, for instance, could not have profited from the equation of one tonne of pundi rice to twenty-nine grams of molybdenum. But no House was pauperized, nor did any become rich in Solaris that was not already rich in tangible goods.
As the Guild had predicted, the operation of the market brought about changes in the relative values of products and materials which in turn changed the practical definition of the solari. Every twenty-five years the financial staffs of the Guild, the emperor, and the Landsraad met to review market history and make appropriate revisions of the solari value formula. The basic rule of these conferences was that the formulaic changes must leave relative economic standings unchanged. Although the conferences were politically charged events, the basic rule seems to have been generally well observed. Most artificial manipulations of value were done to encourage or discourage production of specific kinds of goods. Apparently, however, no price was kept fixed for more than three years at a time (about the period it took for an economic "wave" to propagate across the Empire), and the Guild bankers could probably intervene to buy in the case of dumping, or to sell in the case of hoarding.
During the God Emperor's reign economic management became a great deal more rigid. Leto, concerned with the present only as it opened to the future, interested in relationships only as they flowed and changed, ironically presided over the last flexible currency in Imperial history. For instance, for over twenty-five centuries, no matter what the supply, no matter what the demand, one solari bought one kilogram of pundi rice. The God Emperor never minded a few famines. Intent upon teaching the race the deadlines of stability, committed to forcing an explosion of unpredictable change along his Golden Path, Leto became a policeman enforcing bad laws so that stricture would provoke repeal. The Scattering was certainly a repeal of the Imperium, and one result of that outburst was the polyvariant "funny" money system familiar to us today. Like the Guild, the solari has become an element of the past.
M.M.
Further references: CHOAM; D.W. Aliti, Current Accounts: The Banking Principles and Practices of the Spacing Guild (Kaitain: Linthrin UP); Dik Benat, The Application of the Solari Value Formula, 1285-5085, 3 v., tr. Hiizman Suradees (Gruuzman; Isabel); Sian Esva, Cross-Variant Analysis of Spice Production and the Solari Value Formula, 8895-11000 (Kaitain: Varna); Hokosima Galant, Lost Mass: The Commodity Market and the Adoption of the Solari (Grumman: Hartley UP); K. Gerun, A Study of Guild Accounts from the Rakis Records (Butte: Sunimo-Scama); Harq al-Ada, ed., The Atreides Letters, Lib. Conf. Temp. Series 763.
IMPERIAL POETRY, 10000-10400
No period in the history of literature has been more praised for its accomplishments than the four centuries following the turn of the eleventh millennium. Yet far from springing like wildflowers from a single stem — a metaphor that expresses well the first half of this period — the glories of the second half are like a garden full of artificially transplanted and carefully nurtured blossoms. As the metaphor implies, the period falls easily into two halves, the first spanning the final two centuries of the reign of House Corrino, and the second initiating the rule of the Atreides.
CORRINO PERIOD. In the first period, Galach held an unquestioned supremacy as the language of culture and the arts; it was the official language of the Imperium, and the native tongue of billions of speakers on the settled worlds. Studied as a second language in thousands of schools, it was the language of law and military, and the pathway to political and social advancement. Although every planet had its unique, traditional poetic and narrative forms, Galach was readily adaptable to use in these forms, and for thousands of years before the fall of the Corrinos, the literature of many worlds was ornamented with works stamped unmistakably with the character of the planetary society, yet written in a language understood by the whole empire. Consequently, the literature of Galach under the Corrinos tended to be diffuse, casual in meter though mannered in form, and marked by a native vigor conveyed in a cosmopolitan language.
But changes in that literature, especially in its lyric forms, were noted by 10100. As if in response to a prescience of change in the universal order, the literature of Galach reached heights over the next few generations seldom equalled before. Many of the best known works from that time express a sense of foreboding, of uneasiness, of anticipation, or at the least, a sense of new cosmic beginnings. One of the most famous lyrics of the time is "The Earthquake,"1 written by the Corrino Court Poet Henoor Sentraks (10035-10163) late in his life after a mild tremor had been felt at the court on Kaitain in 10159. As an omen, the tremor, rare to a geologically stable world like Kaitain, sparked much popular anxiety. Note the sense of a new creation expressed in the concluding lines. "Romalina" was the resort area near the capitol in which Sentraks was staying, giving instruction in poetry to vacationing courtiers.
It was in Romalina that I found,
First-hand, my knowledge that the earth could shake
Like a drying dog. It seemed the quake,
Or tremor, rather, started as a sound
As if a thousand sprinters stamped the ground
In rattling unison. The mad mistake
Of ancient strata made its break
With the sane surface and slowed like a watch unwound.
Outside the palace chamber lay a gravel plot,
With stones heaped straight in regimented rows
That went unseen from being plain in view.
At the class's end, I stopped my work, and thought
I saw, as One who saw creation knows,
The stones, like primal earth, spread flat and new.
A second example of the odd warnings of onrushing change that poets — as the intuitors of their culture — felt comes from the works of Dwaidr Kauznet (10110-10170). Kauznet, whose poetry was unpublished in his lifetime, was an overaged junior officer on Illerdan, a fief of House Kaastaar, in the garrison at Lodengorod. He was one of the most decent men serving in the ranks of those monsters of perversion. His poem "93"2 evokes questions that cannot be answered because they cannot be precisely stated. These questions cannot be the contradiction of Kauznet's commission in the Illerdan army (determined by the inflexible faufreluche system), because that quandary — what an honest man can do in an evil system — was clear to Kauznet even if its answer was not.
93
With rank and fame and comfort all the best,
A hatchet strikes and hews my ribs of trees;
Deep sounds knock soft in a bone-bound chest,
Its hidden contents stir, lost are its keys.
There is a question missing on the test,
And yet the answer should spring with ease
To the bewildered brain I've wrung and pressed
To decipher the hollow guts and shaking knees.
And I face fate in the game chessed
To the last pawn I lose in aged lees
Of life, and all my days and nights I quest
The missing piece to pay the unknown fees.
But keys and test and pawn point to a space
Gapped in this partial man, unfull of grace.
As tensions increased between Houses Kaastaar and Atreides, Illerdan became the center of contention, and Caladanian agents infiltrated the garrisons there, probing for weaknesses. Kauznet, still a junior officer at sixty, seemed a likely target, but spies found only the poems he had been secretly writing. Nevertheless, the poems were copied and forwarded to Intelligence on Caladan for inspection. The Bureau found them of no military use, and the papers passed from hand to hand as a curiosity until they came to the attention of the young na-Baron Leto. To say that he found the poems moving and memorable is an understatement, and, perhaps informally at first, he began gathering the copies of Kauznet's work.
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