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.
Endnotes
-
There’s an uncorrected error here: the third element is “Sarfalddavas” above but “tirfalddavas” below. This wasn’t changed in later versions of the text, so it’s not clear which is correct. The capitalized one would be consistent with the other names, and the “Sar—” implies a relationship with the first element, which is in the same group. Or maybe the character misspoke, in her excitement? —Transcriber ↩
Colophon
Short Fiction
was compiled from short stories published between 1947 and 1962 by
H. Beam Piper.
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