The scion of House Silvia had finally found someone to marry. Some quiet and unknown blonde girl from Auview. Final signings were scheduled within a couple months. Since I have nothing to do with family planning, my only assignment in this role was a type of last-minute interview where I’m meant to go over the expectations of the marriage and answer any questions either party has. The objective is to make note of any potential conflicts or issues of character and build a profile on the next generation of the House. It’s supposed to be useful in case of future incidents, but I think the Directory is just trying to play the blackmail game without dirtying themselves.

My first interview was with the girl. Her address was in a plainer section of Auview. In fact, I think it may be the only neighborhood that managed to have no views whatsoever of Auview's scenic coastlines. The place was a pit and the home was considerably modest. The girl herself was also considerably modest. She spent the entire meeting sinking into the darkest corner of the room. Her parents, one of them at least, were quite vocal.

The father opened the door before I reached it. No wave or salutation, but an “About time one of you came here.”

I asked him what he meant.

“Well I been down to those offices enough times already and I’m tired of them pretending not to know what I’m talking about. There were agreements made that aren’t written in this contract you all sent and I’m not having anything go forward until that’s corrected.”

I asked him if we could speak about this inside. He reluctantly turned and lead me in. The room was brown with lighter shades of brown. The parlor was the kitchen was the dining room. His wife carried over a wooden stool for me and then took her place by her husband on a hard wooden bench. “I haven’t been involved with this contract so far. Could you explain these agreements that you say are missing?” I asked them both.

The father started in again, “We agreed on a price. A, what are you calling them, dories or something—“

“Do you mean a dowry?”

“That’s it. He’s supposed to pay us a dowry and we agreed that with him, but I don’t trust it if it ain’t in these contracts.”

“To be clear, dowries haven’t been an element of the marriage process since the Directory’s inception. There’s perhaps been a misunderstanding—“

“Obviously there has. We had a deal with that boy. He gets a nice wife who’ll mind her own business and we receive compensation for giving away our only work-aged child.”

“Did you make this arrangement with Martin Silvia directly?” I looked around the room to see if the girl was still there.

“Settled the matter myself.”

I finally spotted the girl hovering awkwardly behind a utensil cabinet. “How did you two meet?” I asked her.

Her father spoke instead. “They met in the market. I was there with her. We met sometime after to discuss the matter.”

“Some time?”

“Week or so.”

I left it at that, thanked them for their time, and promised to be in contact within a couple days. From their house, I went to find a service phone so I could get the family planners to set up an interview with Marty. I needed a day or so to work through what the girl’s tiresome father had and had not told me. Imagine my shock when I find young Martin Silvia waiting for me at my Auview office.

I would never have described him as nervous, but there we were facing other across my desk with him sheepishly waiting for me to speak first.

“Already received my notice have you?” I said.

“What? No. I mean, I heard that you were going to see my…”

“Future wife? How did you hear that?”

“Her father wired. He doesn’t like me.”

“Really? I hadn’t gotten that impression.”

“Well, it’s not so much about me as it is the money he thinks I have.”

“That I did hear a little about. Why don’t you explain that to me.”

“We had agreed upon a payment, like a dowry payment, you know. But now he wants me to pay his monthly expenses. For the rest of his life. Since he’s gotten a copy of the contract he’s been wiring every day about how I tricked him and got the planners to leave the dowry out. I tried telling him I don’t get to decide anything about the contract, and that you all wouldn’t listen to me if I asked you to do something like that.”

“Can I interrupt? The Directory doesn’t do dowries, hasn’t done them in the past. They were consciously left out of the marriage process laws.”

“I didn’t know that exactly, but I do know a lot of people who had them.”

“Members of other Houses, I assume. They’re not outlawed, so there is little the Directory can do to prevent them. They’re simply not acknowledged and no effort would be made to enforce one. The courts will never hear a case on one. I don’t doubt you’ve known people with off-record dowries, but whatever you have going on with this man is truly between you two and it’s only as binding as you two are willing to make it.”

“Is there a way I can cancel this? The whole thing?”

“That’s a question for the planners, but I would doubt it.”

“Why? I wasn’t assigned a marriage. I picked her because I was told to go pick someone.”

“Yes, but that became less relevant when you and she submitted your intent documents to the family planners.”

“So I’m stuck with this? He gets to blackmail me and I have to ruin my House because the Directory doesn’t care about dowries?”

“Calm down. I only said I doubted, and that was merely my informed opinion. I’ll tell you this, if there’s any way that I can help you I’m not going to know about it unless one of you starts giving me some real information. So, I’ll start by asking you the same questions I asked them. First, how did you meet this girl?”

“I haven’t. I’ve only met her father.”

“I see. What motivated you to marry the girl sight-unseen, and pay for the opportunity to do so?”

Marty sighed like the stuffing got knocked out of him. “I’m running out of time.”

“You mean the closing date? That can be pushed back perhaps, not by too long though.”

“It’s not that. That’s not what I mean. It’s my father. He told me I have until his Winterturn gala to find a wife, or else he would name my brother heir.”

“Your father doesn’t have that authority. Not anymore.” I thumbed the Silvia case file I’d been carting around all day. “And besides, it looks like Cesare isn’t married and is also unassigned. I’ve met your father. I spent a week working with him in this very office a few years ago. He’s not an easy man to be around, I’ll give you, but I took a lot of that for bluster. This sounds like it may just be the pushiness of an old man.”

“He told me he had proof that any marriage of mine is likely to be ‘unproductive’.”

I quickly swept the file again. Marty’s last physical was the pristine, no-special-remarks outline of a youth in his prime. I looked at him for some sign of deterioration. I was finding my words when he said them for me.

“Look, I know how I seem with women. That is, I remember you from that elevator in Auview. It’s all an act. My chaperone told me you were with the Directory when he saw you. I’ve gotten good at acting like a rake over the years, but it’s the most that ever happens between me and women. Those antics, the shitty comments, it’s just so I don’t have to tell them ‘no’. If the tabloids talk about me it’s the story of a womanizing scion. Not really the stuff of sensationalism.”

“Unlike the intriguing story of a scion who isn’t interested in womanizing, let alone women? Is that it?”

“My father found out because someone I used to…see, was short on money. He decided our House would be a lucrative resource. He came to me first and I gave him some money. I still thought of him as a friend. It wasn’t enough apparently, so he found me again. I hadn’t just given him my petty cash, it was a substantial sum. He’d been through it in a week. Paying debts, he said. I told him I could help him anymore and he threatened to go to my father. I didn’t think he’d really do it. I didn’t know that he hated me so much. Shows what I know. The truth is, there’s not nearly as much in the coffers as some may think. You’ve been around my father, you’ve seen how pricy his tastes are. He’s kept a lid on it so far, for the security of the House, but it won’t last.”

“Did your blackmailer also tell that girl in Auview’s father?”

“Yes. He thought it would make them break it off.”

“Instead you’ve got a second snake to deal with. Well, I can’t see what the Directory could do that wouldn’t make it worse. If they arrest your blackmailers they’ll learn the story, and their pragmatic approach will be similar to your fathers, but they’ll likely skip the part about giving you a chance and name Cesare the heir while stripping you of your past and future titles. This is assuming that your blackmailers don’t sell the story to the tabloidists first.” His face was bloodless, but he bored into my eyes with a desperation so piercing that I could hardly doubt the truth of it. “Martin, I’ve never asked anyone this, and I wish you could answer me like I wasn’t what I am, but do you truly want to inherit the rank?”

“I do. It’s not just pride or entitlement. I know how you all view my House, or at least, I know your view is a wary one. That’s not unjustified, again, you’ve met my father. But I want to start doing better. My father put me in charge of the tenancies a couple years ago. He told me I’d only need to bother with them when they skipped a dues payment. I didn’t do that. I spent months meeting every tenant, and their families. I toured their vineyards and inspected their homesteads. I learned whose soil was too rocky, whose child was born sickly, who had been widowed. You won’t believe me, none of you Directory people will, but I do care about them. Once my father steps away I’ll be able to make the land more productive with proper investment. My brother, however, aligns with my father’s views. Maybe that’s what you all want.”

“You can put that bit away. What the Directory wants is usually not something I’m privy to, not on this kind of thing. I can guess and guess better than you, but that’s as far as I know of their intentions with House Silvia. That being said, I think I believe you. I certainly want to. Do you think you could maintain a productive marriage, with a different woman, if it insured your inheritance?”

“Could I get her pregnant, you mean?”

“Two minimum, three maximum. You don’t have to love her, but you do have to do your job. If someone can be found you’ll need to be prepared to marry soon, sooner than your date now even, otherwise the Directory will doubt your ‘good faith’. I turned to look for the file I was considering and to grab the OFS bloodline book. I heaped this all on my desk and gave Marty a moment to prove his earnestness. The girl on my mind was Isme Dion, the only daughter of House Dion. She had once had a very high-profile marriage assignment, the scion of House Bourbon. The Directors had naively believed that the marriage would soothe House Dion’s resentment for their lowered station. The contract was shelved due to the sins of her elder brother, which I’m still not ready to go into. She was reassigned to House Usher, which no one was happy about. The second contract fell through when House Usher requested physicals and Isme was found, in the official term, Compromised.

“Martin, does your House have any history with House Dion?”

“The Highland family that got sent to the wastes?”

“Fauxpool, it’s called. But you’re not wrong about the spirit of it. Would you take umbrage to marrying a girl of that House?”

“I guess not, but if your people were going to allow it, why didn’t they assign me in the first place.”

“Things change and sometimes quickly. Your House was the last to be released and these first-generation assignments were made piecemeal as each House was re-structured. I can’t promise you anything, but I think I can make a convincing argument for your Houses.”

“The story—“

“It never happened. You’ve never met those men, do you understand? If this contract can be approved, you’ve never heard of those men because they won’t exist. This is the only way it works.”

AIRTEL TO:

[REDACTED]

Shock Testing

The application of Operations Research to the study of the national economy has been obvious to any of you who understand the fundamentals of shock tests.

Our economic engineers are studying the behavior of the markets and the consumer public by carefully selecting a staple commodity like meat, coffee, or sugar, and then applying a sudden change to its price or availability. This alters purchase habits across ranks. Engineers then observe the resulting shock waves by monitoring the changes in advertising, prices and sales of the selected commodity as well as other commodities.

The aim of these studies is to build a databank that enables the Directory to set the public economy into a predictable state of motion. We may even create a self-destructive state of motion that can be used to convince the commons that certain “expert” people need to control the money system and re-establish stability. When the subject citizens are rendered unable to control their financial affairs, they naturally become more dependent. Thus, a source of cheap labor, when needed.

Shock tests can be applied to the availability of labor. Labor strikes provide excellent shock tests to an economy, especially in the critical service sectors of transportation, communication, and public utilities. By shock testing, it has been found that there is a direct relationship between the availability of money flowing in an economy and the psychological outlooks and responses of masses of people dependent upon that availability.

For example, there is a measurable qualitative relationship between the price of oil, and the probability that a person would experience a headache, feel a need to watch a violent sport, smoke tobacco, or go to a tavern for a mug of beer.

By observing and measuring the economic modes by which the public seeks relief from their stressors, and by applying the mathematics of Operations Research, it is possible to program our databanks to predict the most probably combination of created events (shocks) which will bring about the most complete economic control. A shaking of the plum tree.

[CONCLUDED]