“The Employership?” Lanze Degbrend deadpanned.
Erskyll looked at him angrily. “This is something,” he told the chief-freedmen, “that should not belong to the Employers alone. It should belong to everybody. Let us call it the Commonwealth. That means something everybody owns in common.”
“Something everybody owns, nobody owns,” Mykhyl Eschkhaffar objected.
“Oh, no, Mykhyl; it will belong to everybody,” Khreggor Chmidd told him earnestly. “But somebody will have to take care of it for everybody. That,” he added complacently, “will be you and me and the rest of us here.”
“I believe,” Yakoop Zhannar said, almost smiling, “that this freedom is going to be a wonderful thing. For us.”
“I don’t like it!” Mykhyl Eschkhaffar said stubbornly. “Too many new things, and too much changing names. We have to call slaves freedmen; we have to call Lords Master Lords-Employer; we have to call the Management of Servile Affairs the Management for Freedmen. Now we have to call the Mastership this new name, Commonwealth. And all these new things, for which we have no routine procedures and no directives. I wish these people had never heard of this planet.”
“That makes at least two of us,” Patrique Morvill said, sotto voce.
“Well, the planetary constitution can wait just a bit,” Prince Trevannion suggested. “We have a great many items on the agenda which must be taken care of immediately. For instance, there’s this thing about finding a proconsular palace. …”
A surprising amount of work had been done at the small tables where Erskyll’s staff of political and economic and technological experts had been conferring with the subordinate upper-freedmen. It began coming out during the pre-dinner cocktails aboard the Empress Eulalie, continued through the meal, and was fully detailed during the formal debriefing session afterward.
Finding a suitable building for the Proconsular Palace would present difficulties. Real estate was not sold on Aditya, any more than slaves were. It was not only un-Masterly but illegal; estates were all entailed and the inalienable property of Masterly families. What was wanted was one of the isolated residential towers in Zeggensburg, far enough from the Citadel to avoid an appearance of too close supervision. The last thing anybody wanted was to establish the Proconsul in the Citadel itself. The Management of Business of the Mastership, however, had promised to do something about it. That would mean, no doubt, that the Empress Eulalie would be hanging over Zeggensburg, serving as Proconsular Palace, for the next year or so.
The Servile Management, rechristened Freedmen’s Management, would undertake to safeguard the rights of the newly emancipated slaves. There would be an Employment Code—Count Erskyll was invited to draw that up—and a force of investigators, and an enforcement agency, under Zhorzh Khouzhik.
One of Commander Douvrin’s men, who had been at the Austragonia nuclear-industries establishment, was present and reported:
“Great Ghu, you ought to see that place! They’ve people working in places I wouldn’t send an unshielded robot, and the hospital there is bulging with radiation-sickness cases. The equipment must have been brought here by the Space Vikings. What’s left of it is the damnedest mess of goldbergery I ever saw. The whole thing ought to be shut down and completely rebuilt.”
Erskyll wanted to know who owned it. The Mastership, he was told.
“That’s right,” one of his economics men agreed. “Management of Public Works.” That would be Mykhyl Eschkhaffar, who had so bitterly objected to the new nomenclature. “If anybody needs fissionables for a power-reactor or radioactives for nuclear-electric conversion, his chief business slave gets what’s needed. Furthermore, doesn’t even have to sign for it.”
“Don’t they sell it for revenue?”
“Nifflheim, no! This government doesn’t need revenue. This government supports itself by counterfeiting. When the Mastership needs money, they just have Ridgerd Schferts print up another batch. Like everybody else.”
“Then the money simply isn’t worth anything!” Erskyll was horrified, which was rapidly becoming his normal state.
“Who cares about money, Obray,” he said. “Didn’t you hear them, last evening? It’s un-Masterly to bother about things like money. Of course, everybody owes everybody for everything, but it’s all in the family.”
“Well, something will have to be done about that!”
That was at least the tenth time he had said that, this evening.
It came practically as a thunderbolt when Khreggor Chmidd screened the ship the next afternoon to report that a Proconsular Palace had been found, and would be ready for occupancy in a day or so. The chief-freedmen of the Management of Business of the Mastership and of the Lord Chief Justiciar had found one, the Elegry Palace, which had been unoccupied except for what he described as a small caretaking staff for years, while two Masterly families disputed inheritance rights and slave lawyers quibbled endlessly before a slave judge. The chief freedman of the Lord Chief Justiciar had simply summoned judge and lawyers into his office and ordered them to settle the suit at once. The settlement had consisted of paying both litigants the full value of the building; this came to fifty million stellies apiece. Arbitrarily, the stelly was assigned a value in Imperial crowns of a hundred for one. A million crowns was about what the building would be worth, with contents, on Odin. It would be paid for with a draft on the Imperial Exchequer.
“Well, you have some hard currency on the planet, now,” he told Count Erskyll, while they were having a pre-dinner drink together that evening. “I hope it doesn’t touch off an inflation, if the term is permissible when applied to Adityan currency.”
Erskyll snapped his fingers. “Yes! And there’s the money we’ve been spending for supplies. And when we start compensation payments. … Excuse me for a moment.”
He dashed off, his drink in his hand. After a long interval, he was back, carrying a fresh one he had gotten from a bartending robot en route.
“Well, that’s taken care of,” he said. “My fiscal man’s getting in touch
