The New Economy
A pamphlet entitled “the New Economy,” distributed anonymously throughout the Seven Corners:
Ask a dozen random berks in the street what the secret of the multiverse is and you’ll get a dozen different responses. Such is the nature of the multiverse. Maybe one will describe the ineffable functions of the Great Maker, one will sing songs of the Eightfold Path to Virtue, one will try to convert you to the Burned God’s faith. Chances are none will tell you the true secret of the multiverse, which I now shall relate to you.
The secret of the multiverse is its unity, which stems entire from the strands of commerce that connect it. Consider: in the Citadel of Red Glass on Acheron, a high-towered fastness where the world of Charn connects to the Great Wheel, there is a fried-lizard stand wherein the hungry traveler may buy pan-sautéed traditional nifilheimer cuisine. The lizards the vendor hawks have traveled a distance of halfway around the Great Wheel, from Ysgard to Acheron, and yet they cost only a piddling four coppers.
Those four coppers themselves represent the essential unity of the multiverse. Throughout the Inner and Outer Planes, coins of platinum, gold, silver, and copper circulate. While dozens of mints produce coinage (usually honoring some commerce-god or local holiday) all by dint of tradition weigh one-fiftieth of one pound, eight-twenty-fifths of one ounce. Every moneycounter in the cosmos exchanges one platinum coin for five gold coins for fifty silver coins for five hundred coppers. The pound of silver is the basis of currency not just on one world but on every world. Every commodity may be exchanged for pounds of silver, and the true value affixed to the satisfaction of every possible party.
The truest expression of the unity of the multiverse, however, lies in the demonstrable trust we place in extraplanar authorities. I buy a set of carpentry tools from you, price four pounds silver, and rather than give you coins I give you a note issued by the Glacial Finance Corporation entitling its bearer to remove five pounds of silver from its central vault on the Quasielemental Plane of Mineral. You accept the banknote without comment and give me a similar note, entitling the bearer to withdraw one pound of silver from Tiamat’s Trust in the City of Dis on the 500th Layer of the Abyss, as change. That neither of us have ever been to the Quasielemental Plane of Mineral, much less the city of Dis where mortals such as ourselves would be flayed alive, troubles neither of us. That the banknotes we use for currency are mere pieces of paper stamped with (we are assured) uncounterfeitable eldritch runes, this troubles us neither.
For truly these are the end times, when all worlds are one world, and no differentiation is made. Surely the Yellow Bells toll the end of discrimination, and at last all men will be made equal. The last vestiges of difference, of separation, of privilege, of good or evil: these are as one blown away by the fury of the tolling of the Yellow Bells.
Order is a hateful thing. Order denies unity. Order takes the fundament of the multiverse, as plain as a pike, and reasons it away. Order lies to us. Order is an unnatural imposition.
Order puts the high in high towers and the low in the gutters. Order ties down the verdant vine and commands it to be nothing more than the vinter’s slave, to stay where it was planted and to think no thoughts. Order forbids vines to think. Order forbids the poor to spend wealth and live in comfort. Order insists that some of us are alive and some of us are dead and there can be no middle ground or spectrum. Order classifies and limits. Order limits by classifying. Order makes hierarchies, elf above man above orc. Sky above sea above ground. Goddess above queen above peasant above beast. Them above them above us.
But the Bell is tolling! You can hear it now. It’s faint now, but with time it will toll louder and louder, it will unmake these artifical distinctions between now and then, between life and undeath, between me and you, between us and them. The Bell tolls, and it rings in change and it rings out distinction. Soon all men will be made equal.