The Trust

The Trust keeps the Hundred Granaries, and its entire doctrine fits in one sentence: the reserve exists in order not to be used. Foreign visitors take this for an evasion and it is nothing of the sort. A store never once opened for a political reason will be filled by everybody. A store opened once for a political reason is a magazine, the growers who fill it begin quietly holding back, and inside a generation there is no reserve left to argue over.

So the keepers hold what they are given, inspect it, turn it, and release it against famine, contract and ordinary trade, and against nothing else whatever. They do not own it. The Estates could instruct them, the compact of regional governments and landholding houses that appoints them could instruct them, and neither ever has, which the Trust regards as the sum of its standing and guards more jealously than it guards the grain.

What makes it a power rather than a staff is that the arithmetic is public. Aurel has never threatened a moon with hunger and has never had to, because the Granaries sit there being counted by people whose governments can do the sum without assistance.

The keepers’ own anxiety has nothing to do with sieges. It is that the reserve has grown so large and so old that no living Aurelian remembers a season it was wanted, and a thing kept against a contingency that never arrives starts to look, to legislators, like capital lying idle. The Trust has beaten that argument eleven times and keeps a list of them.