We arrived at Jeremy's residence in but fifteen minutes. It was one of several dozen dwellings in an anomalous residential area tucked in among the warehouses and freight transfer facilities lining the artificial lake that serves as the port of Ilnestrom. Some lapse in the planning process at a distant remove from the present time and its more stringent zoning ordinances had allowed this cluster of one, two and three story frame buildings to be erected in the shadow of the cranes and elevated traffic-ways. The neighborhood was less than fashionable, less than desirable to be honest. But when a dwelling is one of the few things the law allows to be inherited, the value of even old, rickety structures is such that no one would think of turning one's nose up at one, especially a chronically impecunious heir such as Jeremy Giffen. And in truth, the somewhat less than respectable nature of the neighborhood, I think, rather appealed to Jeremy's self-image, raffish and not entirely respectable.

A pair of entry doors faced the street, leading to Jeremy's quarters on the upper of the two floors and the other to the rented out first floor that provided him with a small but steady income. We let ourselves in and ascended the worn but still solid stairs to find the rest of the gaming enthusiasts had already arrived. Morgan Dunfey was seated at the ancient wooden kitchen table, it's top stained by many a glass and bottle until it seemed almost as if it had been made to look that way as an artistic motif. Roly Aycliff sat across from him. The two were sorting and matching up playing pieces from a jumble of tiles in the center of the table.

"Ah, caught in the act," Jeremy said, mock indignation in his voice. "Marking the pieces, were you?"

"Erasing your marks, actually," Morgan said in dry, matter of fact tone.

"Just checking that they're all here, Jerm," said Roly. He was always slow at humor. "I can still run out and get my set if you want."

"I know for a fact that your set is incomplete," answered Jeremy.

"How so?"

"Because the last time we played with your set, I stole the pieces I was missing."

I could tell by the blank look on Roly's broad face that he wasn't entirely certain whether Jeremy was joking. He would undoubtedly be sorting out his bong-chong tiles the next day.

Leaving them to finish sorting out the playing pieces, Jeremy went into the pantry attached to the kitchen and returned with an armful of beers of various brands and quality, the residue, undoubtedly, of several parties. These he deposited in the sink, following them with a layer of ice cubes. Another trip to the pantry yielded a supply of various crackers, cakes, cookies and other snack items of similarly varying age and pedigree, another archeological record of the Giffen party culture. These he set on unused corners of the table, where the others had begun organizing the playing pieces to begin the game.

"Well, shall we begin?" he said, seating himself at the head of the table. Thorley took the opposite seat. Roly and I squeezed in along one side, opposite Morgan. Bong-chong is a game normally restricted to four players at a time, but over the years we'd made accommodations in the rules to squeeze in an extra player now and then. Aside from basic hospitality, it afforded an extra bank account to tap. After a brief explanation, the ever tactful Mr. Verrill made no objections. It was not the last variance from the norm he would acquiesce to. We drew playing pieces to start.

"Anyone beat a black dragon?" Morgan asked, a slight smirk on his face, knowing the odds of drawing a better piece to be exceedingly small.

"Refresh my memory, Roly. Does my white dragon beat Morgan's black?"

Jeremy asked, knowing of course that it did.

"I am thinking that this may become a very interesting game," said Thorley.

The game soon settled down to the familiar cycle of take a piece, discard a piece and hope for a better one next draw, with occasional interruptions to explain various local rules of the game to our off-world guest. I personally was somewhat surprised by how many rules I'd never encountered before in many years of playing bong-chong with Jeremy and Morgan. But Thorley seemed to be a man of accommodating nature, never taking offense at correction, even when put at a disadvantage by some variation he was unfamiliar with. Through it all he kept up a pleasant conversation. Being quite widely traveled, and having just traversed parts of Hildred's Planet for the first time it, took little encouragement to get him talking about his observations.

"One of the many surprises of this planet is the social diversity. As I was explaining to Mister Dunstan earlier tonight, I've found that the societies on most planets seem to be very much the same no matter where on the planet you go. There is not much difference between one town or village and the next, no matter how far apart they are. Homogeneity seems to be a law of social evolution; all societies seem inclined to develop towards a common outlook on life, common customs, common foibles. It is almost as if everyone looks at what their neighbor does and thinks 'that must be the way it should be done' and then proceeds to imitate him. And that seems to hold true here for the greater part. But I have noticed in my travels, limited as they have been, that in the smaller communities and rural districts there are sub-units, micro-cultures if you will, of your society that are quite at variance with the norm. Even in the cities there are groups and individuals who would be considered very eccentric on another planet."

"And some are considered very eccentric here," Morgan broke in.

"But you tolerate them. No, tolerate is not the right word. It is as if no one takes any notice that those people in that village over the hill, or living down the street, are acting different from everyone else. With the other five planets I have visited that is not always the case. And of course, on Calthar it is not considered very healthy to be too different. I must say that I consider that one of our great failings. It makes a very boring planet."

"Creating a society that is tolerant of differences was one of the main goals of our philosophical founder, the Esteemed Emmanuel Furtzig," said Jeremy. "He was the one after whom we named our unit of exchange, the furt. Diversity, according to Furtzig, is a source of strength in a society. Stability is vital, of course, but a certain amount of experimentation is also vital, or a society starts to stagnate. That was part of the reason he developed our economic system. He saw great benefits to society in freeing the ordinary person to pursue whatever avocation he or she desired, without having to worry about whether it would afford them a living. Two cardinal rules he set down were incorporated into the charter of Hildred's Planet; don't impose social structures on others, beyond the minimum necessary to maintain order of course, and don't upset the economic system that makes the whole thing work."

"And that perplexes me greatly, this economic system you have. According to our theoreticians on Calthar, your economic structure shouldn't work. They usually describe it as a hodge-potch of communalist theories that no reputable economist would consider possible of functioning without massive cooking of the books, as we say of dubious accounting standards. Utopian systems have always foundered on the rock of who's to pay for it all. They all sink beneath the sea of red ink in the end."

"We seem to be reasonably solvent," Jeremy interjected, "at least most of us. Dunstan of course has done his best to bring the system down but, as usual, without much success. I'm not sure I understand the problem."

"The problem is that utopian societies are inherently based on an artificial distribution of wealth. Distortion of the natural market forces. Reward without effort. As I understand it, your system is based on a confiscatory policy towards property and wealth. It is set in stone on Calthar that the right to hold such things is sacrosanct, the cornerstone of society and the economy. Degrade that right and society falls apart."

"Yes, I suppose it is a confiscatory policy, or more properly a redistribution scheme," said Roly Aycliff, taking over the exposition by virtue of being our resident historian, fount of esoteric information and, in his own view, philosopher and general know-it-all. Once started, there would be no stopping a full and complete explanation. When fully ramped up his face, normally about the shade of strong tea, took on more the hue of highly polished mahogany. Still, having him deliver his lecture might distract some players to the others advantage. "But we have put a bit of a twist on classic redistribution schemes. We have the decency to wait until the former holder is deceased before we grab his goods. And at that point, why should he care?"

"He may not care, but his survivors certainly do. On Calthar property, money, possessions of any type belong to the possessor and he is entitled to do whatever he will with them. Grampapa might just as well scatter his fortune among wine, song and women as pass it along to his offspring if that pleases him. It is his to do with as he will. Of course I am most grateful my grampapa was a sober and very boring, very rich old man. In the Caltharian view, if you are meant to have money, you will have it. You will inherit it, or you will be lucky in your endeavors, and you will gain it. If you are not meant to have it, then even if you inherit half the planet, you will find ways to lose it. It all works out the way destiny intends it to, no matter how you start.

"We have a saying on Calthar. Money knows its master and to him it will return. If you try to block its path you may be trampled. I think it is very self-evident to be true if you consider the fate of those societies which attempted to alter the natural order of the marketplace. There are always those who are somehow favored, by skill, fate, or whatever, to gain ever more. And there are those who seem destined to never gain anything. That at least seems to be a recurring pattern in every society, no matter how they organize their economic structure. And if you try to interfere with this natural order of things you disrupt your economy and if you disrupt your economy then everything is disrupted in the end. Pffft. You make so many arbitrary adjustments that the natural mechanism of the marketplace is distorted so that itcannot function."

"A concise description of past failures and one Furtzig would agree with. You see, he studied the fate of previous experiments in redistributive economies and devised a very simple solution to the flaws that caused them to fail. A combination of the traditional capitalist and socialist systems. We don't practice redistribution of income, since that does seem to undermine the drive needed to keep things going. But we do redistribute capital. And it only occurs once, not as an ongoing thing. When you're born, your Birthright Account is established, drawn from a common pool of financial instruments, calculated to grow to sufficient size to provide a modest but livable income by the time you reach your majority. When you die, your assets, or whatever remains of them, are returned to the pool for redistribution to another generation. We do hope, of course, that most citizens will be industrious and return a tidy sum to the pool. But whatever happens in the meantime is solely up to you. It's your stake to manage or mismanage. Thus we retain the incentive to productivity while seeing to the basic needs, at least initially, of all citizens."

"An interesting distinction to make," Thorley said after rubbing his chin for some long seconds. "I must consider it at some length before I can give you a suitable counter argument. I can tell you though that this concept of alienating wealth from the rightful heirs would not be well received on Calthar. Not among my social peers, at least."

"It wasn't well received on earth, either. Furtzig devised an argument to support it, to wit: the heirs had no part in accumulating or creating the capital, so wherein lay their claim to possess it? And to further expound on that line of reasoning, Furtzig stated that, whereas, after five thousand years of technological advance, virtually every commercially valuable process, material, machine or technique has been built upon a chain of prior discoveries and developments, by millions of individuals, leading back to the basic concepts of controlling fire, chipping flints, and making scratches on clay tablets, no one really has an absolute claim based on discovery or development to anything. In some degree, the sources of wealth are the invention and property of society as a whole, so let the first generation benefit from their efforts, and then spread the benefit around. And let the next generation build their own pile if they can. Unfortunately, Furtzig's ardent espousing of this concept resulted in his untimely death at the hands of a mob of heirs-in-waiting."

"Having benefited from my Grampapa's commercial skills, I can understand the mob's displeasure at the prospect of being so unjustly disinherited."

"Oh, justice has little if anything to do with it when you get to the core of Furtzig's thinking. It's a matter of necessity, really. You see, Furtzig's area of study centered upon the central economic relationship between producer and consumer and the changes in that relationship that caused millennia of economic heartburn for countless societies. The basic question of how to balance the exchange of goods and services. Furtzig came to the conclusion that traditional capitalism, while being generally the most efficient system for encouraging economic growth ever devised, contained an inherent flaw that was leading to its ultimate destruction, specifically a growing imbalance between productive and consumptive capacity. Consider the most primitive system of exchange."

"Oh gawd! We're in for the long version," said Morgan, reaching for another beer and splattering half the table as he opened it.

"As I was about to say, economic systems really began when one caveman discovered he was better at hunting than making spear points and another discovered he was good at making spear points, but would starve if he had to hunt for himself. By working up a trade agreement they both spent their time doing what they did best and thus produced more of their specialty than they could consume themselves, providing an excess of goods to exchange for the other things they needed."

"Yes, division of labor," Thorley said. "I seem to have heard of this concept somewhere before."

"And a relationship that pretty well balances out at their level, because no matter how hard our proto-industrialists went at it, there were physical limits to what they could each produce, and neither one could really get too far ahead of the other, never creating a big enough unsold inventory of spear points or dead rabbits to disrupt the market. Of course, it all began to change when we started thinking up ways to become more efficient, to produce ever more with less and less effort. But that didn't really disrupt the balance because we kept thinking of new things we needed, like pots and woven blankets and the excess population could go into arts and crafts, not to mention religion and public administration. It took a long time for the imbalance to become apparent because there were lots of new products and services to invent, and the amount any one person could produce, even when helped by wind, water or animal power, and later steam power, remained comparatively limited.

"The problems began when technology really began to take off and population growth began to level off. It happened with agriculture first of course. Once it took a hundred farmers to produce enough surplus to keep a couple artisans or priests or government clerks. Now the ratio has gone drastically the other way, something like one farmer for some thousands of non-farmers. And so with everything else. It took a little longer to become apparent in manufacturing since, with food there is a very definite market. Once that market is saturated, there's nothing you can do to sell more to it. In manufacturing new products could be developed to meet needs consumers didn't even know they had and that staved off saturation for a long time.

"But consider the automotive industry. On Hildred's we have several thousand people employed in engineering, research and that sort of thing, plus quite a few in the distribution and promotional end, and the service fields. But in the actual production of vehicles, actually in the factory doing work directly connected to putting vehicles out the door, how many do you think?"

"It would be hard to say. Your population is on the order of a quarter billion I think? I couldn't say."

"This is one of those facts that you run across periodically that's just seems so incongruous that it sticks in a back corner. I have been given to understand that the entire land vehicle industry, on average, employs all of forty-eight persons in the production sector. There are, of course fluctuations, seasonal things, retooling, and so forth. But the autofacs are so heavily automated that a few dozen humans are all that are needed to keep enough products rolling off the line to supply the entire planet. And this was an industry that on old Earth, before the great migrations, employed literally millions.

"Early technology, wind, water, animal power and steam power, better tools, better understanding of materials and techniques, mostly just augmented manpower, helped people crank out more things for the same effort. The later stages brought ways to replace humans workers altogether. And the people running the factories thought this was a wonderful idea, since, as markets started to become saturated and competition sharpened, human workers were increasingly seen as too expensive if the same work could be done by a machine. But the employees of one industry are everyone else's customers. Unemployed workers make poor consumers, which in turn makes for smaller markets, which makes for harsher competition, more impetus to reduce costs, and even fewer jobs. Hence the spiraling crisis Furtzig saw developing in traditional capitalism."

"You will not be surprised, I think, when I tell you that this is not earth-shattering news. It would seem to me to be a subject every economist studies in his first year of school. It has been intensively studied on Calthar, where we have devised an extensive system of rules, minimum required staffing, limited product life, and such. It is not perfect, but it does keep employment levels up."

"And how has that affected the natural functioning of your unfettered marketplace?"

"Your point is noted. We are not as pure as we should like to be, but it has been necessary to make some adjustments. I think this is true of all industrialized planets."

"Furtzig's primal moment of inspiration came when he realized that the very instrument that was bringing about the downfall of the ancient structure of exchange had nearly reached the point where it could be the basis for a new structure. The means of mega-production should be unleashed. Let the machines, and the handful of individuals needed to guide them, produce all the mass consumption items. The average citizen in the future would have a primary role as a consumer rather than a producer. Where ownership, and therefore distribution of the profits, had increasingly tended to cluster among a few individuals, spread the ownership and the profits out, to enable the masses to continue to consume. Keep the cycle going, putting money in at the bottom and letting it work its way up the economy."

"Excuse me," Morgan broke in. "If it's not too much of an interruption, I believe I have a bong here."

"Curse you, Dunfey!" Jeremy said. "I needed that six of bamboo to bong-out."

The lecture recessed for a time while Morgan's winning hand was duly verified and the participants returned their attention to the game. The next round started.

"It still sounds much to artificial to be sustainable," Thorley said after several rounds had passed. "Like a pyramid scheme that can run for a time, but only a short time, before it collapses. If we had more time, and had had less to drink, I should like to run some statistics to see if we could spot a fatal flaw or some blatant finagling of numbers."

"The key is to have a very stable society and steady economic growth. A given number of people die every year. A given number, slightly more than the replacement rate, are born. We hope not so few that growth is depressed nor so many that the pool becomes drained. There is of course the assumption that, with steady, vigorous economic activity, the wealth of most citizens will grow during their lives. Obviously, the administrators in charge of this are overjoyed when a very wealthy citizen checks out."

"I understand they're considering declaring a national day of celebration when Uncle Grump goes," Jeremy chipped in. "When his legacy goes back into the pool, they'll be able to allow a regular population explosion."

There were chortles of assent from around the table.

"We assume that as a whole a generation's wealth has increased somewhat over the years. The pool is also supplemented by some modest taxes, assorted royalties and fees on this and that. It is not a zero sum system by any means. It depends on steady, stable growth and a lack of surprises. If the long term projections don't holdup, the entire edifice starts to topple, becomes something like a pyramid scheme, as you say. It's really quite a juggling act. But so far it has worked."

"Another thread of argument has occurred to me. Calthar has many old sayings. We have a saying for any occasion, if you will. If I remember this one correctly, it goes something like a carrot will encourage a hungry mule. A stick will encourage any mule. When you have a fat and happy population, where is the goad to succeed? To excel? Why should anyone take it upon himself to produce this growth you find necessary? It takes both fear and greed to keep a society and an economy vibrant, always moving ahead. If people become too complaisant, too comfortable, if they don't have to get up every morning and strive, then the entire economy, and the society as well, will start to stagnate."

"There is some truth to that, I suppose," Roly said, after some minutes of contemplation. "However, the system was designed to preserve reward for effort. You can live comfortably but austerely if you do nothing, but you can live better if you get out and actively try to augment your income. And some people are predisposed by nature to strive harder than others, beyond what most others would consider reasonable even. A case in point is the infamous Uncle Grump. He could have retired to a life of leisure many years ago, spending his accumulated wealth profligately and, with his pile, never being in any danger of running short before his eventual demise. Yet, he continues to get up early every morning and go back to the battle, because that's just the way he is. When he's on his death bed, he'll still be working the angles to squeeze a few extra furts out of his final deal.

"But don't forget that achievement takes multiple forms. Having a secure, adequate, if modest, income allows our people to follow pursuits that would not be economically viable otherwise. Artisans for example. We really have two markets for consumer goods here. There's the mass production market, all the identical or partially customized thingamajigs that come pouring out of the autofacs at prices driven to the floor by cheap production costs. Then you have the market catered to by hundreds of thousands of artisans and craftsmen working by themselves or in small cooperatives, turning out small quantities of labor intensive goods that sell for a premium price. Without their independent incomes, most of them would be unable to make enough to support themselves. They would have to charge so much for their goods the market would disappear. There wouldn't be enough customers able to afford handmade honey drizzlers and such.

"Besides the artisans, you have the services segment of the economy. You have no doubt noticed how many eating establishments we have. The restaurant trade has always and everywhere been notoriously difficult to make a living at. But, since virtually everyone has a base income, they can afford to take jobs as poorly paid chefs or waiters. And the restaurants can afford to serve meals at affordable prices that bring in customers."

"And sometimes the food is even edible," Jeremy added.

"True enough. Hildred's Planet has probably the greatest number of abominable restaurants in the known universe. But to balance that we can make a fair claim to having the greatest number of excellent restaurants per capita, because the culinarily inclined have the opportunity to perfect their craft.

"And then there's intellectual properties. The system affords a goodly number of citizens the ability to hunker down in a stone cottage on the coast and think. Or hideaway in disused warehouses turning blocks of marble into tiny chips. Hildred's Planet has a remarkably large community of artists. But no starving artists. Unless, of course, they decide to starve for the sake of art. Most produce nothing of note, but a few produce masterpieces.

"And we have an uncommonly large number of educational institutions here with a commensurately high student population. The system enables many of our people to continue on in academia where they otherwise might have to stop for financial reasons. And many of the technically inclined have the opportunity to pursue research that has little likelihood of producing a financial reward. But a few make major discoveries. You were questioning earlier the financial stability of the system. One of the underpinnings of the system, what really enables us to balance the books, is off world sales of intellectual properties."

The lecture, and Roly, had wound down. Silence took over, broken only by the sound of tiles being moved on the wooden table. Then Jeremy spoke up.

"When you boil it all down, Thorley," he said, "Hildred's works the way all societies and economic systems work. We've all agreed on how we think it should work, and we've all agreed to pretend that that is the way it really does."

"With that I can agree," Thorley said.

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