“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’d have nowhere to go. The Commonwealth,”—he pronounced the name he had himself selected as though it were an obscenity—“has nationalized all the Masterly property.”
That had been announced almost as soon as the Citadel telecast-station had been unjammed, and shortly thereafter they had begun encountering bodies of Yakoop Zhannar’s soldiers and Zhorzh Khouzhik’s police who had been sent out to stop looting and vandalism and occupy the Masterly palaces. There had been considerable shooting in the Servile City; evidently the ex-slaves had to be convinced that they must not pillage or 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 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
