“But, Obray; the compensations are owing to the individual Masters. They should be paid in crowns. You know as well as I do that this hundred-for-one rate is purely a local fiction. On the interstellar exchange, these stellies have a crown value of precisely zero-point-zero.”
“You know what would happen if these ci-devant Masters got hold of Imperial crowns,” Erskyll said. “They’d only squander them back again for useless imported luxuries. This planet needs a complete modernization, and this is the only way the money to pay for it can be gotten.” He was gesturing excitedly with the almost-full glass in his hand; Prince Trevannion stepped back out of the way of the splash he anticipated. “I have no sympathy for these ci-devant Masters. They own every stick and stone and pinch of dust on this planet, as it is. Is that fair?”
“Possibly not. But neither is what you’re proposing to do.”
Obray, Count Erskyll, couldn’t see that. He was proposing to secure the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number, and to Nifflheim with any minorities who happened to be in the way.
The Navy took over the Elegry Palace the next morning, ran up the Imperial Sun and Cogwheel flag, and began transmitting views of its interior up to the Empress Eulalie. It was considerably smaller than the Imperial Palace at Asgard on Odin, but room for room the furnishings were rather more ornate and expensive. By the next afternoon, the counterespionage team that had gone down reported the Masterly living quarters clear of pickups, microphones, and other apparatus of servile snooping, of which they had found many. The Canopus was recalled from her station over the northern end of the continent and began sending down the proconsulate furnishings stowed aboard, including several hundred domestic robots.
The skeleton caretaking staff Chmidd had mentioned proved to number five hundred.
“What are we going to do about them?” Erskyll wanted to know. “There’s a limit to the upkeep allowance for a proconsulate, and we can’t pay five hundred useless servants. The chief-freedman, and about a dozen assistants, and a few to operate the robots, when we train them, but five hundred. … !”
“Let Zhorzh do it,” Prince Trevannion suggested. “Isn’t that what this Freedmen’s Management is for; to find employment for emancipated slaves? Just emancipate them and turn them over to Khouzhik.”
Khouzhik promptly placed all of them on the payroll of his Management. Khouzhik was having his hands full. He had all his top mathematical experts, some of whom even understood the use of the slide-rule, trying to work up a scale of wages. Erskyll loaned him a few of his staff. None of the ideas any of them developed proved workable. Khouzhik had also organized a corps of investigators, and he was beginning to annex the private guard-companies of the Lords-ex-Master, whom he was organizing into a police force.
The nuclear works on Austragonia were closed down. Mykhyl Eschkhaffar ordered a programme of rationing and priorities to conserve the stock of plutonium and radioactive isotopes on hand, and he decided that henceforth nuclear-energy materials would be sold instead of furnished freely. He simply found out what the market quotations on Odin were, translated that into stellies, and adopted it. This was just a base price; there would have to be bribes for priority allocations, rakeoffs for the under-freedmen, and graft for the business-freedmen of the Lords-ex-Masters who bought the stuff. The latter were completely unconcerned; none of them even knew about it.
The Convocation adjourned until the next regular session, at the Midyear Feasts, an eight-day intercalary period which permitted dividing the 358-day Adityan year into ten months of thirty-five days each. Count Erskyll was satisfied to see them go. He was working on a constitution for the Commonwealth of Aditya, and was making very little progress with it.
“It’s one of these elaborate check-and-balance things,” Lanze Degbrend reported. “To begin with, it was the constitution of Aton, with an elective president substituted for a hereditary king. Of course, there are a lot of added gadgets; Atonian Radical Democrat stuff. Chmidd and Hozhet and the other chief-slaves don’t like it, either.”
“Slap your mouth and say, ‘Freedmen,’ five times.”
“Nuts,” his subordinate retorted insubordinately. “I know a slave when I see one. A slave is a slave, with or without a gorget; if he doesn’t wear it around his neck, he has it tattooed on his soul. It takes at least three generations to rub it off.”
“I could wish that Count Erskyll. …” he began. “What else is our Proconsul doing?”
“Well, I’m afraid he’s trying to set up some kind of a scheme for the complete nationalization of all farms, factories, transport facilities, and other means of production and distribution,” Degbrend said.
“He’s not going to try to do that himself, is he?” He was, he discovered, speaking sharply, and modified his tone. “He won’t do it with Imperial authority, or with Imperial troops. Not as long as I’m here. And when we go back to Odin, I’ll see to it that Vann Shatrak understands that.”
“Oh, no. The Commonwealth of Aditya will do that,” Degbrend said. “Chmidd and Hozhet and Yakoop Zhannar and Zhorzh Khouzhik and the rest of them, that is. He wants it done legitimately and legally. That means, he’ll have to wait till the Midyear Feasts, when the Convocation assembles, and he can get his constitution enacted. If he can get it written by then.”
Vann Shatrak sent two of the destroyers off to explore the moons of Aditya, of which there were two. The outer moon, Aditya-Ba’, was an irregular chunk of rock fifty miles in diameter, barely
