Visitors (Pathfinder 3)

They clattered along in a carriage. The vehicle was well-sprung, but the road was not in good condition, so there was a great deal of jouncing, and for all the clatter, they didn’t make that much forward progress. “I’m not impressed with the road maintenance,” said Rigg.

“You can take it up with the master of roads,” said Ram Odin. “I’m sure you can get a lot of road repair started while you’re in the area.”

“But it won’t continue after I’m gone.”

“The master of roads belongs to someone who isn’t you. If his master wanted him to fix this stretch of road, it would already be fixed.”

“And this system works well enough to be universal?”

“I could have taken you to one of the places where it works best,” said Ram Odin. “But then I’d be deceiving you, wouldn’t I? No system works well unless good people do their jobs with integrity, and then almost any system works well enough.”

“It’s the problem with authority, at all times,” said Ram Odin. “You only know what your subordinates tell you, and your commands are only carried out as long as your subordinates feel like it.”

Rigg couldn’t argue with that. He had seen enough of that already, and it was one of the principles Father had taught him.

Father. Lord of Walls. The same mechanical men, playing different roles in different places. What Ram Odin didn’t have to say was this: If you want a job to be done by someone you can trust, who won’t lie to you, who’ll persist in his obedience, get yourself a mechanical slave.

Of course, your mechanical slave will lie to everyone else, in order to achieve your purposes. But I am lying to everybody in Gathuurifold, in order to achieve my purposes. Purity is so hard to achieve.

So far Rigg had experienced only the privileges of Wallmen, and none of their duties. They had taken the Larfold flyer to a fairly remote city, where a carriage was waiting for them, along with letters of authority and a complete set of clothing for the journey. Wallmen, it seemed, wore an unbelievably silly style of clothing involving a puffy hat and intricately arranged bright-colored straps across the chest. It could not be put on without the help of a servant. And since Ram Odin had never arranged the straps either, they spent a good deal of time in the flyer, getting instructions from the ship’s computer, until they finally got it down.

“I’m too old to learn mechanical tasks like this,” said Ram Odin.

“I think this costume is a sort of safety valve,” said Rigg. “If they make the wielders of authority look ridiculous, it takes some of the sting out of their authority.”

“I don’t see how that would help,” said Ram Odin. “And you haven’t seen yet what the other people wear.”

Soon enough he saw that every job and every social level had its uniform. The messages were complicated, but the fundamental one was this: At what level of slavery were you, and how prestigious was your owner? A single band around your neck put you at the lowest level. But what was it made of? Leather? A thin red ribbon? A gold chain? A simple string? And when the straps moved away from the neck and onto the arms, then around the chest, it expressed such nuances as your years of education, and where you were schooled, and how highly your master esteemed you, and more, till Rigg’s eyes glazed over.

The rules were all so complicated that Ram Odin was now wearing a transmitter in his ear, allowing the ship’s computer to prompt him so he could “advise” Rigg. “We’ll tell anyone who dares to ask—and almost no one will—that it’s a device for delivering medicine very slowly, directly into my brain,” said Ram Odin. “This will be taken as a sign that you esteem me highly—thank you for the great honor, O Master—and that the Lord of Walls esteems you so highly that he allowed you to festoon your prize servant with such a rare and prized adornment.”

“Which no one else in the history of Gathuurifold has ever seen or heard of before.”

“That’s what makes it rare. But you can be sure that within six months, highly prized servants of very rich slaves will all be wearing intricately decorated ear-thingies. It will probably make them half deaf and give them headaches, but . . . anything for status.”

There were no roadhouses, because there were no travelers who were free to stay where they chose. Instead, there were relay stations for changing horses, which only those within a few levels of the Lord of Walls could use, and there were the large houses of the highest-status slave in any town. Rigg, as Wallman, would call upon this person, bring the greetings of the Lord of Walls, and then accept the offer of lodging for as long as he cared to stay. Of course he would be put in the master’s own bed and bedroom.

Meanwhile, Ram Odin would stay in the relay station, in a little room over the stable. He assured Rigg that this was very fine treatment for a personal servant, and he rather liked the smell of horses.

Thus they had made their way for a week from town to town, always on their way to somewhere else.

But even so, people were already bringing disputes to Rigg. So far they had all been of the sort where the solution is easy and obvious, but people’s egos and anger were so involved that the easy solution was the one that everyone hated most. Rigg’s job, in every case, was to impose the easy solution, but to find a way to phrase it so that nobody felt that they had been repudiated or that their arguments had not been heard. It was a game of language more than law. Nobody was necessarily happy, but everyone was mollified, and Ram Odin assured him that they would abide by the decision because, after all, it was the easy and obvious solution.

Ram Odin had almost never had to whisper into Rigg’s ear to tell him of some obscure point of law. In fact, the whispering had mostly been to tell him exactly how this or that person should be addressed. Titles were very important in this land of slaves.

Rigg wondered if they could really be called slaves anymore. He already had a pretty good idea that slavery was evolving into something else, without losing the name. People had so much freedom to make economic decisions—to buy whatever they liked, and to assign their slaves to manufacture whatever they wanted. Some masters hired out their slaves to others, for a fee; others allowed their slaves to make their own arrangements to serve here or there as they could find work.

It became much clearer when he began his conversations the next day. They were judicial proceedings, to be sure, but they were called conversations and in fact that’s how they were conducted. As slaves, they had no rights, but it was always legitimate for slaves to ask for a conversation with a nearby Wallman. If the Wallman then decided to make decisions in the name of the Lord of Walls, well, that was always his option. And if there were any reprisals against a slave whose conversation might have led to unhappy results for someone, then they could be sure that the wrath of the Lord of Walls would come down on them. For it was not right for one slave to take vengeance on another for merely bringing information before the Lord of Walls or his closest servants.

It was a system that begged to become corrupt, Rigg saw at once. He would have been surprised, though, if someone had come to him with the offer of a bribe. The Lord of Walls, after all, was completely incorruptible himself, and would not be susceptible to flattery or deception by his underlings. If someone was certified as a Wallman, it was because the expendable Gathuuriex had found him to be intelligent, morally decent, and completely honest. Rigg wondered if he would have measured up to Gathuuriex’s scrutiny, if he had attempted to reach this lofty office through the normal means.

But it was not only because Gathuuriex and his men could not be bribed—it’s that every single person would have to account to their owner for what they did with their money. Or so it was, at least, in theory. This first set of conversations was being held in a part of the land that was clearly not held to the same standards as the crisply tended fields and shops they had passed through at first. Everything was just a little raggedy. People moved with less of a hurry. Rigg wondered if they worked with a kind of laziness or carelessness, too. Presumably he had been given the owner’s bedroom, as at any of the relay stations. There was running water in the privy room, which Rigg had come to expect in Gathuurifold. But the hot-water knob merely spun, as if it were decorative.

Which it turned out to be. The owner explained that he didn’t feel much of a need for hot water in the washbasin in the privy room—only the bathroom needed it, and that was downstairs, a single tub to serve the household. “They make the faucets to fit the specifications of richer folk than we are, sir. So I could only buy one with a cold and a hot. But there’s nothing to connect the hot one to, so it spins.”

It all made perfect sense. It just felt . . . if not slovenly, then slapdash.

But when it came to the conversations, people took a great deal of care. Most plainants came in with their master, or a ­steward sent by the master. And there must be some kind of legal training, even if there was no written law—slaves having no rights, except the right to petition. Make sure you say this, the master would whisper. She really meant to say, not that, but this, a steward would explain, as the plainant sat there nodding. Yes, yes, that is what I meant.