"To cut to the heart of it, sir, it's assigning a value to things in a foreign currency. Each planet has already got a dominant currency. They're completely competent to perform whatever conversions are needed between that and the minor ones that are still used in various out-of-the-way places on their own world. They can do this because there's at least some bit of overlap, some places where people are able to use more than one kind of money to pay for the same bit of goods or services. But that's not the case between the two worlds. They've never made any sort of exchange that called for payment from one to the other. That's what's different, sir."
"Tell me something, then. What's backing their money?"
"Backing it sir? I don't understand. All of our money is created at will. When a bank gets a request for funds, it simply nets out a matching debit and credit. What are you talking about?"
"It's arcane, but long before we figured out how to create wealth the way the universe creates matter, people used to exchange objects that had some intrinsic value, like a precious metal, for whatever goods or services they wanted. From what I've read, the practice made it extremely difficult to generate new wealth, because first you had to dig the stuff out of the ground."
Gruthner made a face. "You've got to be kidding."
I never kid. I thought you might have learned that by now. Or have you forgotten what got you that assignment in the first place?
The captain wilted. "No, sir. Do you have to keep bringing that up?"
"Be that as it may," Polk said gently, satisfied that he had reasserted his dominance in the exchange, "would you answer my question? What is backing their money?"
"Well, from what I've learned about the Ghrilsjorm, I'd have to say that it's equivalent to some calculated percentage of the labor performed by a typical government statistician. They do have a tendency to revert to that metric whenever a contract is drawn up."
"And the others? What did you call them? The Purple?"
"Plurfl, sir. I mispronounced it that way once, and horrified the gentleman I was speaking with. Apparently, purple translates into a rather crude reference to a popular work of fiction. A horror story, as I understand. In any case, the Plurfl always fall back to a metric based on the time it takes to complete one of their more advanced exercises in symbolic morphology."
"Come again?"
"Symbolic morphology, sir. It means assigning meaning to a change in something. They use it in a great deal of their art."
Polk threw up his hands. "It doesn't really matter. The point is that both cultures use a measure of labor to peg the value of their principal currency. So there is a commonality to work with."
"Except, sir," Gruthner said meekly, "that they have no way to evaluate the relationship between these two measures of value. Neither planet has even a single person able to creditably perform the task used by the other as the basis of their money. They can't work out an exchange rate between them until that becomes possible."
"And you proposed a solution that they both accepted?"
"Tell me something, then. What's backing their money?"
"Backing it sir? I don't understand. All of our money is created at will. When a bank gets a request for funds, it simply nets out a matching debit and credit. What are you talking about?"
"It's arcane, but long before we figured out how to create wealth the way the universe creates matter, people used to exchange objects that had some intrinsic value, like a precious metal, for whatever goods or services they wanted. From what I've read, the practice made it extremely difficult to generate new wealth, because first you had to dig the stuff out of the ground."
I never kid. I thought you might have learned that by now. Or have you forgotten what got you that assignment in the first place?
The captain wilted. "No, sir. Do you have to keep bringing that up?"
"Be that as it may," Polk said gently, satisfied that he had reasserted his dominance in the exchange, "would you answer my question? What is backing their money?"
"Well, from what I've learned about the Ghrilsjorm, I'd have to say that it's equivalent to some calculated percentage of the labor performed by a typical government statistician. They do have a tendency to revert to that metric whenever a contract is drawn up."
"And the others? What did you call them? The Purple?"
"Plurfl, sir. I mispronounced it that way once, and horrified the gentleman I was speaking with. Apparently, purple translates into a rather crude reference to a popular work of fiction. A horror story, as I understand. In any case, the Plurfl always fall back to a metric based on the time it takes to complete one of their more advanced exercises in symbolic morphology."
"Come again?"
"Symbolic morphology, sir. It means assigning meaning to a change in something. They use it in a great deal of their art."
Polk threw up his hands. "It doesn't really matter. The point is that both cultures use a measure of labor to peg the value of their principal currency. So there is a commonality to work with."
"Except, sir," Gruthner said meekly, "that they have no way to evaluate the relationship between these two measures of value. Neither planet has even a single person able to creditably perform the task used by the other as the basis of their money. They can't work out an exchange rate between them until that becomes possible."
"And you proposed a solution that they both accepted?"
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