A Slave is a Slave

by H. Beam Piper

saying."They won't be fools enough to attack us here, and all the Masters aredead, except for the ones we're sheltering."

  "How many did we save?" Count Erskyll asked.

  Eight hundred odd, Shatrak told him. Erskyll caught his breath.

  "So few! Why, there were almost twelve thousand of them in the city thismorning."

  "I'm surprised we saved so many," Lanze Degbrend said. He still worecombat coveralls, and a pistol-belt lay beside his chair. "Most of themwere killed in the first hour."

  And that had been before the landing-craft from the ships had gottendown, and there had only been seven hundred men and forty vehiclesavailable. He had gone out with them, himself; it had been the firsttime he had worn battle-dress and helmet or carried a weapon except forsport in almost thirty years. It had been an ugly, bloody, business; onehe wanted to forget as speedily as possible. There had been times, afterseeing the mutilated bodies of Masterly women and children, when he hadbeen forced to remind himself that he had come out to prevent, not toparticipate in, a massacre. Some of Ravney's men hadn't even tried.Atrocity has a horrible facility for begetting atrocity.

  "What'll we do with them?" Erskyll asked. "We can't turn them loose;they'd all be murdered in a matter of hours, and in any case, they'dhave nowhere to go. The Commonwealth,"--he pronounced the name he hadhimself selected as though it were an obscenity--"has nationalized allthe Masterly property."

  That had been announced almost as soon as the Citadel telecast-stationhad been unjammed, and shortly thereafter they had begun encounteringbodies of Yakoop Zhannar's soldiers and Zhorzh Khouzhik's police who hadbeen sent out to stop looting and vandalism and occupy the Masterlypalaces. There had been considerable shooting in the Servile City;evidently the ex-slaves had to be convinced that they must not pillageor destroy their places of employment.

  "Evacuate them off-planet," Shatrak said. "As soon as _Algol_ gets here,we'll load the lot of them onto _Mizar_ or _Canopus_ and haul themsomewhere. Ghu only knows how they'll live, but...."

  "Oh, they won't be paupers, or public charges, Admiral," he said. "Youknow, there's an estimated five billion crowns in slave-compensation,and when I return to Odin I shall represent most strongly that thesesurvivors be paid the whole sum. But I shall emphatically not recommendthat they be resettled on Odin. They won't be at all grateful to us fortoday's business, and on Odin they could easily stir up some veryadverse public sentiment."

  "My resignation will answer any criticism of the Establishment thepublic may make," Erskyll began.

  "Oh, rubbish; don't talk about resigning, Obray. You made a few mistakeshere, though I can't think of a better planet in the Galaxy on which youcould have made them. But no matter what you did or did not do, thiswould have happened eventually."

  "You really think so?" Obray, Count Erskyll, was desperately anxious tobe assured of that. "Perhaps if I hadn't been so insistent on thisconstitution...."

  "That wouldn't have made a particle of difference. We all made thisinevitable simply by coming here. Before we came, it would have beenimpossible. No slave would have been able even to imagine a societywithout Lords-Master; you heard Chmidd and Hozhet, the first day, aboardthe _Empress Eulalie_. A slave had to have a Master; he simply couldn'tbelong to nobody at all. And until you started talking socialization,nobody could have imagined property without a Masterly property-owningclass. And a massacre like this would have been impossible to organizeor execute. For one thing, it required an elaborate conspiratorialorganization, and until we emancipated them, no slave would have daredtrust any other slave; every one would have betrayed any other to curryfavor with his Lord-Master. We taught them that they didn't needLords-Master, or Masterly favor, any more. And we presented them with asituation their established routines didn't cover, and forced them intodoing some original thinking, which must have hurt like Nifflheim atfirst. And we retrained the army and handed it over to Yakoop Zhannar,and inspired Zhorzh Khouzhik to organize the Labor Police, andfundamentally, no government is anything but armed force. Really, Obray,I can't see that you can be blamed for anything but speeding up aninevitable 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 Ishall present it to them. That was another reason I wanted to stay onhere. I anticipated that you might want a credible witness to what wasgoing to happen," he said. "Now, you'll be here for not more than fiveyears before you're promoted elsewhere. Nobody remains longer than thaton a first Proconsular appointment. Just keep your eyes and ears and,especially, your mind, open while you are here. You will learn manythings undreamed-of by the political-science faculty at the Universityof Nefertiti."

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

  "Yes. I pointed one of them out to you some time ago: emotionalinvolvement with local groups. You began sympathizing with the servileclass here almost immediately. I don't think either of us learnedanything 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. Hismotivation had been thalamic rather than cortical and he was havingtrouble externalizing it verbally. "They were _slaves_. They were beingexploited and oppressed...."

  "And, of course, their exploiters were a lot of heartless villains, sothat made the slaves good and virtuous innocents. That was your real,fundamental, mistake. You know, Obray, the downtrodden andlong-suffering proletariat aren't at all good or innocent or virtuous.They are just incompetent; they lack the abilities necessary for overtvillainy. You saw, this afternoon, what they were capable of doing whenthey were given an opportunity. You know, it's quite all right to givethe underdog a hand, but only one hand. Keep the other hand on yourpistol--or he'll try to eat the one you gave him! As you may havenoticed, today, when underdogs get up, they tend to turn out to bewolves."

  "What do you think this Commonwealth will develop into, under Chmidd andHozhet and Khouzhik and the rest?" Lanze Degbrend asked, to keep thelecture going.

  "Oh, a slave-state, of course; look who's running it, and whom it willgovern. Not the kind of a slave-state we can do anything about," hehastened to add. "The Commonwealth will be very definite aboutrecognizing that sapient beings cannot be property. But all the rest ofthe property will belong to the Commonwealth. Remember that remark ofChmidd's: 'It will belong to everybody, but somebody will have to takecare of it for everybody. That will be you and me.'"

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

  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 onthe 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 knowwhat the word peonage means. But you'll do nothing to interfere. Youwill see to it that Aditya stays in the empire and adheres to theConstitution and makes no trouble for anybody off-planet. I fancy youwon't find that too difficult. They'll be good, as long as you deny themthe means to be anything else. And make sure that they continue to callyou 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, anddial 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 operaterobots, and robots to supervise them, and....

  No. It wouldn't quite come to that. A slave is a slave, but a robot isonly a robot. As long as they stuck to robots, they were reasonablysafe.

  +--------------------------------------------------------------+| Errata
|| || The following typographical errors were corrected. || || |Page |Error |Correction | || |4 |Terrohuman |Terro-human | || |10 |present; |present, | || |19 |tessallated |tessellated | || |28 |announcemnet |announcement | || |28 |intransigeant |intransigent | ||