Crown of Slaves Read online

  She hesitated a moment. "I guess I probably shouldn't say this, but . . . what the hell, it's nothing that hasn't been speculated on in the news media. There's really only one way they could have gotten them, Web. For whatever reason, somebody in the League with big money and just as much influence must have been behind that 'pirate operation.' Nobody that I know has any idea what they were up to, but just about everybody—me included—thinks that Manpower must have been behind it. Or maybe even Mesa as a whole."

  Her scowl was now pronounced. "If we could prove it—"

  Du Havel shifted his gaze back to the Manticoran captain under discussion. With far greater interest, now. However much distance there might be between him and most, in terms of intellectual achievements and public renown, there was one thing which Web Du Havel shared with any former genetic slave.

  He hated Manpower Unlimited with a bone-deep passion. And though, for political reasons, he disagreed with the violent tactics used by the Audubon Ballroom, he'd never once had so much as a qualm about the violence itself. There was not a single responsible figure in that evil galactic corporation—not a single one, for that matter, on the entire planet of Mesa—whom Web Du Havel would not himself have lowered into a vat of boiling oil.

  Capering and singing hosannas all the while—if he thought it would accomplish anything.

  He took a deep breath, controlling the sudden spike of rage. And reminding himself, for perhaps the millionth time in his life, that if sheer righteous fury could accomplish anything worthwhile, wolverines would have inherited the galaxy long ago.

  "Introduce me, would—" He broke off, suddenly realizing the request was moot. Cathy Montaigne was already leading Captain Oversteegen toward him.

  It would be a while before they got there, however, given the press of the crowd and the fact that several people were stepping forward to offer their hands to the captain. Hastily, he whispered: "Just so I don't commit any social gaffes, why are you—and Cathy—so surprised to see him here? He was invited, was he not?"

  He heard Helen make a little snorting sound. As if, once again, the well-mannered girl had suppressed another outburst of derision.

  "Just look at him, Web. He's the spitting image of a younger Baron High Ridge."

  Du Havel's face must have registered his incomprehension. Not at the name itself—he knew enough about Manticoran politics to know that Helen was referring to the current Prime Minister—but at the subtleties which lay beneath.

  Helen pursed her lips. "I thought you were supposed to be the galaxy's expert—okay, one of maybe ten—on political theory? So how come you don't know your ass from— Uh. Sorry, didn't mean to be rude."

  He grinned, enjoying the girl's lapse from social manners. Given Du Havel's slave origins and present exalted status, most people were excessively polite around him. Obviously petrified lest they trigger off some buried resentment, of which they apparently assumed he harbored a multitude.

  As it happened, Web Du Havel was thick-skinned by nature—and enjoyed few things so much as a sleeves-rolled-up, hair-hanging-down, intellectual brawl in which quarter was neither asked nor given. Which was the reason he and Catherine Montaigne had become very close, many years earlier. That had happened the first time they met, within an hour of being introduced at a social event put on by the Anti-Slavery League on Terra.

  The argument rolling properly, Cathy had informed him, in her usual loud and profane manner, that he was a damned bootlicker with the mindset of a house slave. He, for his part, had explained to the assembled crowd—just as loudly, if not as profanely—that she was a typical upper class dimwit, slumming with the chic downtrodden of the day, who couldn't bake a loaf of bread without romanticizing the distress of the flour and the noble savage qualities of the yeast.

  It had gone rapidly downhill from there. By the end of the evening, a lifetime's friendship had been sealed. Like Du Havel himself, Cathy Montaigne was one of those ferocious intellectuals who took their ideas seriously—and never trusted another intellectual until they'd done the equivalent of a barbarian ritual. Matching intellectual wound to wound, sharing ideas—and derision—the way ancient warriors, meeting for the first time, mixed their actual blood from self-inflicted wounds.

  "Give me a break, Helen," he said, chuckling. "The real problem here is your provincialism, not mine. The ins-and-outs of the political fine points here on Manticore only seem of galaxy-shaking importance to you because you were born here. Your backyard looks like half a universe, because you have no idea how big the universe really is. Abstractly, you do—but the knowledge has never really sunk into your bones."

  He paused, giving the slowly approaching captain another glance. Still plenty of time, he decided, to continue the girl's education.

  "The Star Kingdom is a polity of five whole settled planets in only three star systems, since Trevor's Star's annexation—and assuming you can call Medusa a 'settled planet' in the first place. Even with San Martin added, your total population does not exceed six billion. There are five times that many people living in the Solar System alone—or Centauri, or Tau Delta, or Mithra, or any one of several dozen of the Solarian League's inner systems. The 'Old League,' as it's popularly known. The Solarian League as a whole has an official membership of 1,784 planets—that's not counting the hundreds more under Solarian rule in the Protectorates—which exist in a volume of galactic space measuring between three and four hundred light-years in diameter. Within that enormous volume, there are literally more stars than you can see here at night with the naked eye. No one has any idea what the total population might be. The Old League alone has a registered population of almost three trillion people, according to the last census—and that census grossly undercounted the population. No serious analyst even tries to claim they know how many more trillions of people live in the so-called 'Shell Worlds' or the Protectorates. I leave aside entirely the untold thousands—millions, rather—of artificial habitats scattered across thousands of solar systems. Each and every one of which star polities has its own history, and its own complex politics and social and economic variations."

  The captain and Cathy were getting close, now. It was time to break off the impromptu lecture, since he still needed to know the reasons for Helen's bemusement at Oversteegen's appearance at the event.

  "Let me just leave you with the following thought, Helen: It's only been since the human race spread across thousands of worlds that political science has really deserved the term 'science'—and it's still a rough-and-ready science at that. Sometimes, it reminds me of paleontology back in the wild and woolly days of Cope and Marsh, battling it out over dinosaur bones. If nothing else, the preponderance of the League in human affairs skews all the data. But at least now we have a range of experience that allows us to do serious comparative studies, which was never possible in pre-Diaspora days. But that's really what someone like me does. I look for patterns and repetitions, if you will. The number of individual star systems whose political details I'm familiar with is just a tiny percentage of the whole. The truth is, I know a lot more about ancient Terran history than I do about the history of most of today's inhabited worlds. Because that's still, more often than not, the common history we use as our initial crude yardstick."

  Suitably abashed, the girl nodded.

  "And you still haven't explained—in terms I can understand—why you and Cathy are so surprised that Captain Oversteegen showed up. Or, for that matter—given the surprise—why she invited him in the first place."

  "Oh. It's because he doesn't look like High Ridge by accident. He's part of that whole Conservative Association bunch of lousy—well. The crowd I don't like, let's put it that way. Cathy hates them with a passion. He's related to the Queen—distantly—on his father's side, but his mother is High Ridge's second cousin. As his looks ought to tell anyone who lays eyes on him!"

  Du Havel nodded, the picture becoming clearer in his mind. He was more familiar with Manticore's politics than that of most star sys
tems, naturally. Even leaving Catherine Montaigne aside, Manticore played a far more prominent role in the Anti-Slavery League than its sheer weight of population would account for. He understood the nature and logic of the Conservative Association well enough, certainly. It was an old and familiar phenomenon, after all, as ancient as any political formation in human affairs. A clique of people with a very prestigious and luxurious position in a given society, who reacted to anything which might conceivably discommode them with outrage and indignation—as if their own privileges and creature comforts resulted from laws of nature equal in stature to the principles of physics. Very fat pigs in a very plentifully supplied trough, basically, who attempted to dignify their full stomachs by oinking the word "conservative."

  Given that W.E.B. Du Havel considered himself, by and large, to be a conservative political theorist—using the term "conservative" loosely—he found the phenomenon not only understandable but detestable.

  "Bunch of lousy swine will do nicely, Helen. But you can't confuse the individual with the group. Does Oversteegen himself belong to the Conservative Association? And, if so, why did Cathy invite him? And, if so—and having invited him nonetheless—why did he choose to come?" He gave the large crowd a quick overview. Diehard members of the Liberal Party, for the most part—and the ones who weren't, with not more than a handful of exceptions, departed from the Liberals to the left of the political spectrum. "I'd have thought that as likely as a Puritan agreeing to attend a witches' Sabbath."

  "What's a 'Puritan'?" she asked. "And why would witches—silly notion, that—hold a soirée on— Never mind." Cathy and the captain were almost there. Quickly, Helen whispered: "I don't think he's in the CA. Truth is, I don't know much about his own personal opinions. Not sure many people do. But—"

  A last, quick, hissed few words: "Sorry. You'll have to find out the rest from him, I guess."

  * * *

  A moment later, Cathy was making the introductions. And Web Du Havel began getting his answers.

  He was delighted, of course. Except that, within a few minutes, he was back to silently cursing his ridiculous costume.

  There was no way to roll up the sleeves!

  Chapter 5

  "Been wantin' t' meet you for years," the captain stated, speaking in a drawl which Du Havel immediately recognized. Not specifically, of course—the galaxy had easily ten times as many dialects and verbal mannerisms as it did languages and inhabited worlds. But he knew the phenomenon for what it was, since it, too, was as ancient as privilege. Members of an elite group—"elite," at least, in their own minds—almost invariably developed a distinctive style of speech to separate themselves from the common herd.

  Oversteegen, smiling thinly, gave the crowd his own quick overview. "Only reason I agreed t' come t' this Walpurgis Night of prattlin' political heathens."

  He bestowed the smile on Cathy, widening it a bit. "Present company excepted, of course. I've long had a grudgin' admiration for the Countess here—former Countess, I suppose I should say. Ever since the speech she gave at the House of Lords which got her pitched out on her ear. I was there in person, as it happens, observin' as a member of the family since my mother was indisposed. And I'll tell you right now that I would have voted for her expulsion from the Lords myself, had I been old enough at the time, on the simple grounds that she had, in point of fact, violated long established protocol. Even though, mind you, I agreed with perhaps ninety percent of what she'd said. Still, rules are rules."

  Cathy smiled back. "Rules were meant to be broken."

  "Don't disagree," Oversteegen replied immediately. "Indeed they are. Providin', however, that the one breakin' the rules is willin' t' pay the price for it, and the price gets charged in full."

  He gave Cathy a deep nod, almost a bow. "Which you were, Lady Catherine. I saluted you for it then—at the family dinner table that night, in fact. My mother was infinitely more indisposed thereafter; tottered back t' her sick bed cursin' me for an ingrate. My father was none too pleased, either. I salute you for it, again."

  Turning back to Du Havel: "Otherwise, breakin' rules becomes the province of brats instead of heroes. Fastest way I can think of t' turn serious political affairs int' a playpen. A civilized society needs a conscience, and conscience can't be developed without martyrs—real ones—against which a nation can measure its crimes and sins."

  Du Havel's interest perked up sharply. He understood the logic of Oversteegen's argument, naturally. It would have been surprising if he hadn't, since it was a paraphrase—not a bad one either, given the compression involved—of the basic argument Du Havel had advanced in one of his books.

  Oversteegen immediately confirmed his guess. "I should tell you that I consider The Political Value of Sacrifice one of the finest statements of conservative principle in the modern universe. Havin' said that, I also feel obliged t' inform you that I consider the arguments you advanced in Scales of Justice: Feathers Against Stones t' be—at best!—a sad lapse int' liberal maudlinism. Principles are principles, Doctor Du Havel. You, of all people, should know that. So it was sad t' see you maunderin' from one compromise t' another, tradin' away clarity for the sake of immediate benefit. Sad, sad. Practically gave social engineerin' your blessin', you did."

  Hallelujah! Du Havel began plucking at his sleeves, in a vain attempt to find the buttons so he could roll them up.

  "Social engineering, is it? Ha! Explain to me, Captain Oversteegen, why it is that so-called 'conversatives'—nothing of the sort, mind you; just dinosaurs with pretensions—only object to social engineering when it threatens to hang over into their own—invariably lush and well-kept—front gardens? Yet never have the slightest objection to social engineering when it created those palatial grounds in the first place?"

  Oversteegen drew himself up a bit, looming even taller than ever. Cheerfully—except for the problem with the sleeves; dammit, where were the buttons?—Du Havel plunged on.

  "Consider your own aristocratic system here on Manticore, if you would. Blatant social engineering, Captain. As crude as it gets. A pack of rich people, creating a constitution deliberately designed—with greed aforethought, if not malice—to keep themselves and their descendants in a blessed state of privilege. Or are you going to try to argue that the principles of aristocracy arose from the native soil of what was then an alien planet? Like weeds, as it were—which, by the way, is a pretty apt analogy for any variety of caste system. Weeds, preening like roses."

  Oversteegen grinned, acknowledging the hit. A splendid intellectual warrior, Du Havel noted gleefully, not fazed in the least by a mere dash of blood. He was practically clawing at the sleeves, now.

  "You'll get no argument from me on that issue, Doctor. Indeed true. Can't even argue that my ancestors were better murderers and robbers and rapists than anyone else, I'm afraid, the way a proper Norman baron could. Just bigger moneybags and an earlier arrival date, that's all. Lamentable, isn't it, the lengths to which modern nobility is driven by the advance of social conscience? Still, I'll argue in favor of an aristocracy."

  A high-pitched, derisive snort issued from his long and bony nose. "Not because I believe for an instant that Conservative Association babble about good breedin', much less their downright superstitions on the subject of so-called good birth. No, the issue isn't the worth of the individuals in any given aristocracy. It's simply the social advantage which havin' any aristocracy gives a nation. Pick 'em by lottery, for all I care. But just the fact it exists gives the nation manifold benefits."

  Cathy interrupted. "Web, those sleeves can't be rolled up. The style doesn't allow for it."

  He glared at her. "Is that so? Hmph. Watch this."

  Du Havel had been bred a J-line by Manpower. That was—supposedly; as usual, their claims fell wide of reality—a breed designed for technical work. Thus, an emphasis on mental capability, at least of a low and mechanical variety. But also, since J-lines were designed basically for engineering work, a breed which was physically quite
sturdy. Web wasn't particularly tall, and his long years of sedentary intellectual activity had put thirty kilos of fat on his frame. But the frame beneath was still square and solid.

  So were the muscles which went with it.

  Riiip. Riiip.

  "Ah. That's better. Let me begin, Captain, by pointing out that you're paraphrasing—not badly at all, either—Jutta's argument in her Barriers Needed for Progress. Good for you. An excellent book, overall, even if I think Angelina's too prone to rigidity. But let me go on to point out that those barriers—I prefer to think of them as 'limits' or 'frames'—are themselves the product of social engineering. Goes all the way back to the original program which Jutta praises so highly—yet she never mentions was itself a deliberate project to engineer the society its founders wanted. I refer, of course, to the Constitution of the ancient United States. The thing was practically an architect's dream. A carefully balanced allotment of powers; limitations on democracy which were absurd on the face of it—just to give one example, why in God's name should the members of small provinces be given the same power as those in larger and more important ones? and if so, why only in one house instead of all?—you name it, and if it was possible to engineer, they did it. Tried, I should say, since naturally half of their schemes came unraveled within a few generations. Their sanction of slavery, for instance."

  By now, naturally, a large crowd had gathered around. Naturally, also, it contained the inevitable know-it-all-who-didn't.

  "That's not possible," the man proclaimed firmly, frowning. "I know my ancient history, and the United States—you are referring to the American one, yes?—arose long before genetic slavery." He half-sneered. "Long before they even knew anything about DNA, for that matter. Bunch of primitives."

  Du Havel closed his eyes briefly. God, give me the patience to suffer fools gladly.

  Alas, he was an atheist.

  "Who said anything about genetic slavery? Slavery's been around since the dawn of civilization, you—you—"