"Evacuate them off-planet," Shatrak said. "As soon as _Algol_A Slave is a Slave

we'll load the lot of them onto _Mizar_ or _Canopus_ and haul them

somewhere. Ghu only knows how they'll live, but...."

"Oh, they won't be paupers, or public charges, Admiral," he said. "You

know, there's an estimated five billion crowns in slave-compensation,

and when I return to Odin I shall represent most strongly that these

survivors be paid the whole sum. But I shall emphatically not recommend

that they be resettled on Odin. They won't be at all grateful to us for

today's business, and on Odin they could easily stir up some very

adverse public sentiment."

"My resignation will answer any criticism of the Establishment the

public may make," Erskyll began.

"Oh, rubbish; don't talk about resigning, Obray. You made a few mistakes

here, though I can't think of a better planet in the Galaxy on which you

could have made them. But no matter what you did or did not do, this

would have happened eventually."

"You really think so?" Obray, Count Erskyll, was desperately anxious to

be assured of that. "Perhaps if I hadn't been so insistent on this

constitution...."

"That wouldn't have made a particle of difference. We all made this

inevitable simply by coming here. Before we came, it would have been

impossible. No slave would have been able even to imagine a society

without Lords-Master; you heard Chmidd and Hozhet, the first day, aboard

the _Empress Eulalie_. A slave had to have a Master; he simply couldn't

belong to nobody at all. And until you started talking socialization,

nobody could have imagined property without a Masterly property-owning

class. And a massacre like this would have been impossible to organize

or execute. For one thing, it required an elaborate conspiratorial

organization, and until we emancipated them, no slave would have dared

trust any other slave; every one would have betrayed any other to curry

favor with his Lord-Master. We taught them that they didn't need

Lords-Master, or Masterly favor, any more. And we presented them with a

situation their established routines didn't cover, and forced them into

doing some original thinking, which must have hurt like Nifflheim at

first. And we retrained the army and handed it over to Yakoop Zhannar,

and inspired Zhorzh Khouzhik to organize the Labor Police, and

fundamentally, no government is anything but armed force. Really, Obray,

I can't see that you can be blamed for anything but speeding up an

inevitable process slightly."

"You think they'll see it that way at Asgard?"

"You mean the Prime Minister and His Majesty? That will be the way I

shall present it to them. That was another reason I wanted to stay on

here. I anticipated that you might want a credible witness to what was

going to happen," he said. "Now, you'll be here for not more than five

years before you're promoted elsewhere. Nobody remains longer than that

on a first Proconsular appointment. Just keep your eyes and ears and,

especially, your mind, open while you are here. You will learn many

things undreamed-of by the political-science faculty at the University

of Nefertiti."

"You said I made mistakes," Erskyll mentioned, ready to start learning

immediately.

"Yes. I pointed one of them out to you some time ago: emotional

involvement with local groups. You began sympathizing with the servile

class here almost immediately. I don't think either of us learned

anything about them that the other didn't, yet I found them despicable,

one and all. Why did you think them worthy of your sympathy?"

"Why, because...." For a moment, that was as far as he could get. His

motivation had been thalamic rather than cortical and he was having

trouble externalizing it verbally. "They were _slaves_. They were being

exploited and oppressed...."

"And, of course, their exploiters were a lot of heartless villains, so

that made the slaves good and virtuous innocents. That was your real,

fundamental, mistake. You know, Obray, the downtrodden and

long-suffering proletariat aren't at all good or innocent or virtuous.

They are just incompetent; they lack the abilities necessary for overt

villainy. You saw, this afternoon, what they were capable of doing when

they were given an opportunity. You know, it's quite all right to give

the underdog a hand, but only one hand. Keep the other hand on your

pistol--or he'll try to eat the one you gave him! As you may have

noticed, today, when underdogs get up, they tend to turn out to be

wolves."

"What do you think this Commonwealth will develop into, under Chmidd and

Hozhet and Khouzhik and the rest?" Lanze Degbrend asked, to keep the

lecture going.

"Oh, a slave-state, of course; look who's running it, and whom it will

govern. Not the kind of a slave-state we can do anything about," he

hastened to add. "The Commonwealth will be very definite about

recognizing that sapient beings cannot be property. But all the rest of

the property will belong to the Commonwealth. Remember that remark of

Chmidd's: 'It will belong to everybody, but somebody will have to take

care of it for everybody. That will be you and me.'"

Erskyll frowned. "I remember that. I didn't like it, at the time. It

sounded...."

Out of character, for a good and virtuous proletarian; almost Masterly,

in fact. He continued:

"The Commonwealth will be sole employer as well as sole property-owner,

and anybody who wants to eat will have to work for the Commonwealth on

the Commonwealth's terms. Chmidd's and Hozhet's and Khouzhik's, that is.

If that isn't substitution of peonage for chattel slavery, I don't know

what the word peonage means. But you'll do nothing to interfere. You

will see to it that Aditya stays in the empire and adheres to the

Constitution and makes no trouble for anybody off-planet. I fancy you

won't find that too difficult. They'll be good, as long as you deny them

the means to be anything else. And make sure that they continue to call

you Lord-Master Proconsul."

Lecturing, he found, was dry work. He summoned a bartending robot:

"Ho, slave! Attend your Lord-Master!"

Then he had to use his ultraviolet pencil-light to bring it to him, and

dial for the brandy-and-soda he wanted. As long as that was necessary,

there really wasn't anything to worry about. But some of these days,

they'd build robots that would anticipate orders, and robots to operate

robots, and robots to supervise them, and....

No. It wouldn't quite come to that. A slave is a slave, but a robot is

only a robot. As long as they stuck to robots, they were reasonably

safe.

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| Errata |

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| The following typographical errors were corrected. |

| |

| |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

"Evacuate them off-planet," Shatrak said. "As soon as _Algol_ gets here,