CALIPHATE(70)

"I won't," Hamilton assured his ostensible servant and genuine boss. "But I've got to ask: How the hell do you stand it, day after day, year after year?"

"You can get used to anything," Bongo replied. The subterranean elevator doors opened to the sound of wailing and moaning and utter human misery. "Some things are just a lot harder than others.

"This is one of the hardest," Bongo whispered, before taking the lead and saying aloud, "This way, baas, your lot is right over this way."

There were six pits below the elevator walkway. Separated by some kind of tough, clear plastic, they allowed the staff of the complex to walk between them to distribute food and water. The oddest thing, to Hamilton's eye, was that to one or two sides of each of five of the six pits women, some black, some brown, a few obviously with some white in their ancestry, stood staring at the sixth, their hands seeming desperate to push through the clear barriers that held them.

"Why—"

Bongo answered before the question was fully formed. "Those are mothers, pining for their children. The children—our cargo—are in the sixth pen."

Unbidden, Hamilton walked to stand above the sixth pen, the one obviously holding nothing but wide-eyed, mostly silent in shock or weeping with terror and despair, black and colored children aged from about six to nine or ten.

God is never going to forgive me for this, he thought. For that matter, I am never going to forgive me for this.

"You seem upset, baas," Alice said, standing in front of a seated Hamilton and wearing little but a short silk robe. "Can I help?" Before Hamilton could answer she dropped to her knees and began to undo his trousers.

"Later, Alice," he said. "Please. Later tonight I'd be very happy to have you again. For now, I just need to think."

"As you wish, baas," she answered, rising to her feet gracefully. "If you change your mind, just call. I'll be at the desk working on my studies."

South Africa had produced high quality wines and beers for centuries. Wine or beer, however, just wouldn't do. And the local whiskey was . . . charitably . . . not good.

The brandy, however, was superb. Hamilton poured his own drink from a net-wrapped, amber bottle labeled "Klipdrift."

Damned shame, he thought, that I can't allow myself to get drunk. Crimes like the ones I'm engaged in cry out for sweet oblivion.

Is there a way out of this? Caruthers was right; better two hundred should be enslaved than that four or five billion, and civilization itself, should die. But it would be better still if nobody were enslaved and all those billions, plus civilization, lived.

Is that possible, though? Is there any way I can save these kids? Save their mothers down in the slave pens? Do that while still stopping VA5H? I doubt it.

And what if I do? I mean, just imagine I had the money to buy every one of them down there and free them. What does that do? It improves the market so that more people get sold off. I could save those kids . . . but I can't do a damned thing about the two hundred that will be enslaved to make up for them. The demand will still be there . . . and that demand will be filled. And there is precisely nothing I can do about it.

Fuck.

As it turned out, Hamilton couldn't make love to Alice. She tried her very fine best to make it happen, of course, but under the circumstances her very fine best was not up to the task. No woman's would have been.

Even after he told her to give it up, and waited until she began softly to snore beside him, he still lay awake thinking of the problem of the slave children . . . and of slavery in general.

It has always existed, John, he told himself. Wars have been fought to end it, and it survived those. Alliances were formed to crush it; still it endured. Almost the whole world united against it, and still it survived.

It makes no legal sense, in that it puts an undue burden on everyone to protect the intelligent, self-willed, and dangerous property of a few. It makes no economic sense; you can get more profit paying a free man well than you will ever get from a slave that you pay nothing. Morally, it is not better than killing them; slavery is just death drawn out, the absence of liberty which is the absence of everything life is about, of everything that makes it worthwhile to live.

And then, too, what values does a slave learn? Looking out for number one, if they have any sense. And still they get manumitted, regularly. Hell, some Moslems buy slaves expressly to manumit to earn a few brownie points with God. But those slaves enter civil society with the "looking out for myself" attitude they learned as slaves. And they never lose it . . . but pass it on to the next generation . . . and the next.

And I'm going to deliver two hundred children to that? Fuck, fuck, fuck!