“Did you notice something else?” asked Ram Odin. “Something personal about their response to you?”
“Yes,” said Rigg. “Nobody looks away from my face. I’m apparently much prettier here.”
“You’re a Wallman,” said Ram Odin. “Power and authority make any man handsome.”
“I liked being a Finder of Lost Things much better.”
Rigg went ahead and held the next conversation. He put in a full day and was exhausted by suppertime. He and Ram Odin ate a pretty good meal, considering that slaves normally didn’t have much choice about what they ate, so the culinary arts had no financial incentive to improve.
At breakfast, Ram Odin looked perfectly well rested. “She’s not in danger at all,” said Ram Odin. “Half an hour in, the ship gave me a full prognosis, and I went in to where the poor fellow was busily trying to sleep in the room with his two boys. I took him into the hall, told him the good news. Of course, I had to phrase it as your decision based on my medical expertise—that’s part of the reason you bring me along. Just in case anyone asks.”
“Now you’re a doctor.”
“I have been a doctor, more or less, when
I started up the colony in Odinfold. Of course, with the ship’s equipment, anybody could be a doctor.”
“He believed you?”
“I didn’t leave till he was really asleep in the boys’ room.”
“Now if the wife dies of a heart attack . . .”
“He can’t complain,” said Ram Odin. “He’s a slave. And we did nothing wrong, because we had the best available medical advice. Did you have a better plan?”
“I had no plan at all,” said Rigg.
“So what are you thinking? How you ought to shut down the Wall and bring the rampaging Sessamoto legions to do away with this whole repulsive system?”
“Bad as this system is,” said Rigg, “I know enough about history—and about the Sessamids—to be skeptical about bringing about any actual improvement. As you pointed out, the system is no worse than the people running it, which is you.”
“Indirectly,” said Ram Odin.
“And there’s a serious danger of the Sessamids liking the idea of universal slavery and importing it to Ramfold.”
Ram Odin chuckled. “I hadn’t thought of that. They’d fail, but they’d be envious of the idea of owning everybody.”
“I think what matters here is that they’ve accommodated slavery to human proportions. They’ve adapted it so people can bear to live with it.”
Ram Odin gestured for him to go on.
“Slaves owning property, including other slaves. That means that nobody’s a pure owner—they’re all accountable to somebody above them. With the Lord of Walls and the Wallmen as a court of last appeal. It’s a check on the power of ownership.”
“But it’s still ownership,” said Ram Odin.
“Yes. People have surrendered a huge amount of personal choice. But not economic choice. They still decide what to spend their money on.”
“That’s why there’s still an economy,” said Ram Odin. “Very good.”
“Economic freedom means that relative prosperity is still possible—even for the slaves at the bottom of the ownership heap. They can aspire. And slavery itself appeals to people who don’t want the risks of freedom. If their lives go bad, there’s always someone else to blame. They don’t have to think and decide and bear the consequences of their own choices.”
“Very good,” said Ram Odin. “I think of slavery in Gathuurifold as a kind of climax feudalism. As feudalism was supposed to work but never did. And this system did not work well when there was a small ownership class and bribery was rampant. Corruption sapped all prosperity out of the system and the owners did what they wanted, spreading misery and havoc.”
“But that would have led to revolution, eventually,” said Rigg. “A revolution that you eliminated by instituting this benign Lord of Walls.”
“That’s true,” said Ram Odin. “And I would be duly ashamed of myself except that near-universal slavery persisted for centuries, corrupt and oppressive in the extreme, and there was no revolution. And then we were getting close enough to the end of the world that I decided that instead of letting millions die in a social upheaval that would not only mean bloody war but also economic dislocations that would lead to poverty and starvation and misery on a large scale, I would simply tidy things up and let all these people have what happiness was possible within this strange, oppressive system, until the Destroyers come and wipe them all out.”
“I don’t know if that was a good decision,” said Rigg. “You could just as easily have decided that since they were going to die anyway, you might as well let them die fighting for freedom as passively waiting like cattle in the slaughterhouse.”