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Updated: September 24, 2025
He stubbed out his cigarette and rose, and as he did, Erskyll came out of his daze and onto his feet. "Commodore Shatrak! I mean, Admiral," he corrected himself. "We must re-impose martial rule. I wish I'd never talked you into terminating it. Look at that!"
Count Erskyll chatted with forced affability while the departing committeemen were being seen to the launch that would take them down. When the airlock closed behind them, he drew Prince Trevannion aside out of earshot of their subordinates. "You know what you're doing?" he raged, in a hoarse whisper. "You're simply substituting peonage for outright slavery!" "I'd call that something of a step."
"I never had to do that more than once in any group, and I only had to do it three times in all. After that, when I asked questions, I was answered promptly and fully. It is surprising how rapidly news gets around the Citadel." "You mean you had those poor slaves beaten?" Erskyll demanded. "Oh, no. Beating implies repeated blows. We only gave one to a customer; that was enough."
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.
In spite of other urgent calls on his resources, Ravney landed troops to seize these, and a party of engineers followed them down from the Empress Eulalie to make an inspection. At lunch, Count Erskyll was slightly less intransigent on the subject of the wage-employment proposals.
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.
Everybody on the Adityan side seemed uneasy with these strange hermaphrodite creatures who were neither slaves nor Lords-Master. "Well, gentlemen," Count Erskyll began, "I suppose you have been informed by your former Lords-Master of how relations between them and you will be in the future?" "Oh, yes, Lord Proconsul," Khreggor Chmidd replied happily.
There had been times, after seeing the mutilated bodies of Masterly women and children, when he had been forced to remind himself that he had come out to prevent, not to participate in, a massacre. Some of Ravney's men hadn't even tried. Atrocity has a horrible facility for begetting atrocity. "What'll we do with them?" Erskyll asked.
There are no more Masters." "The Employership?" Lanze Degbrend dead-panned. Erskyll looked at him angrily. "This is something," he told the chief-freedmen, "that should not belong to the Employers alone. It should belong to everybody. Let us call it the Commonwealth. That means something everybody owns in common." "Something everybody owns, nobody owns," Mykhyl Eschkhaffar objected.
He was getting coffee; he gulped it at once. "It was very smart work, Commodore. I never saw a landing operation go so smoothly." "Too smooth," Shatrak said. "I don't trust it." He looked suspiciously up at the row of viewscreens. "It was absolutely unnecessary!" That was young Obray, Count Erskyll, seated on the commodore's left.
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