The Form and the Fund
I have filled out the Territory business-registration renewal every year for nineteen years, and every year there is a line on it that I did not understand until this spring, when I finally called the number printed at the bottom and asked a man named Petrel what it meant. The line asks whether any portion of my receipts came from currency not issued by the Monetary Authority. I always wrote "no." I wanted to know why they were asking.
Petrel explained it in the patient voice of a man who has explained it many times. Nobody but the Monetary Authority may issue money in the Republic. Not a State, not a Territory, not a bank, not Valedon across the road. The line on my form is how the Territory confirms, business by business, that nobody down here has started taking scrip from the Valedon side or minting their own — which, he said, has been tried, in hard years, in border places, and always ends the same bad way. I told him I take Republic marks and nothing else, same as always. He said that was the correct answer, and also the whole point.
I have thought about that line differently since. I am not a woman who trusts institutions on principle. I trust my scale, my ledger, and my supplier in Tessom who has never once shorted me. But I will say this for the Monetary Authority: in nineteen years the money in my till has been worth the same on Monday as it was on Friday. My mother kept a shop in a place and time where that was not true, and she told me about it enough that I understand what the boring answer on my form is buying me. Boring is a kind of luxury. You only notice it when it stops.
So that is the part I am grateful for. Here is the part I am not.
The Valedon road floods every third spring where it dips past the Kessel culvert, and it has flooded there every third spring since before I was born, and it is still not fixed. When it floods, my feed deliveries stop, and the ranchers who buy that feed drive to Valedon instead, where the road is paved because the Valedon government paved it. I have written to the Territory authority. The Territory authority writes back that culvert reconstruction is in the capacity request, and the capacity request is with the fiscal equalization people, and the fiscal equalization people have certified — I am quoting the letter — that Morantine's baseline is "under review pending the Territory's audit posture." Which is a very long way of saying that because we are Provisional and not a State, the money that fixes the culvert is somewhere up a ladder I cannot see the top of.
I looked it up, because that is apparently the kind of person I have become this year. There is a provision — the number is §12.8 — that is supposed to guarantee every State and Territory enough capacity to meet its basic obligations. Roads are in there, or roads are close enough to what is in there. And there is a Monitor whose job is to certify whether it is actually working, and to file something within a set number of days if it is not. I do not know if anyone has filed anything about my culvert. I know the culvert is not fixed.
So here is where I have landed, and it is not tidy. The same Republic that keeps the money in my till honest cannot keep the water off my road. The constitution that thought carefully enough about currency to put a line on my renewal form thought — I am told — just as carefully about fiscal equalization for Territories, and yet one of these things I can feel in my hand every day and the other one is a letter that quotes itself. I do not think the document is lying to me. I think the document is a promise, and I think the culvert is what a promise looks like when it has to travel through four offices and a Provisional audit posture to reach a dip in a road outside Tessom.
Petrel, when I had him on the phone, told me one more thing I keep turning over. He said the reason a Territory gets the same currency protection as a State — no asterisk, no lesser Morantine mark — is that some things in the Republic are not supposed to depend on your status. The money is one. He said it like it settled the matter. For the money, it does. I am still waiting to find out which list the culvert is on.