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!
Okay, so it's an unutterable evil; what the fuck can I do about it? Anything? Am I lying here sleepless from guilt or from impotence.
He laughed at himself as that last thought. Surely Alice thought he must have a problem in that department.
No matter, he thought, suddenly, and the thought made Hamilton feel much, much better about himself. Yes, it looks impossible to do both, stop the VA5H and save those kids. But perhaps the horse will learn to sing; perhaps I can teach it to. I'm sure Laurie would have wanted me to try, at least. And . . . if I am too impotent to succeed, I am still not too impotent to try. Speaking of which . . .
"Alice . . . how asleep are you?"
Slave Pen Number Five, KHR House Holding Facility, Cape Town, South Africa,
19 October, 2113
One wall of the children's pen opened up with an echoing clatter of wheels, chains and gears. Black and colored security personnel in KHR House livery immediately entered the pen and began prodding the children out, forcing them through the newly opened wall and into two waiting cattle cars. Though the children were quiet enough, the mothers set up an awful wail as their babies were herded away. Their hands scraped helplessly at the clear plastic barriers holding them. Some cursed; others fainted; not a few wept to God for deliverance. Most of the children kept turning around, until forced onward, for a last glimpse of mothers they never expected to see again.
Hamilton's face was a cold stone mask, a fact that pleased Bongo. Perhaps the boy's learning.
Hamilton was reasonably certain he could not have maintained the stone mask if he hadn't determined that he was not going to let these kids be sold. Of course, even if I can save the kids, the mothers left behind I will not be able to save. I will not be able to reunite the families. Still, I must and will do what I can, save what I can. Now if I could only figure out how.
The cattle trucks backed up to the looming bulk of the airship scheduled for the northern flight to am-Munch, in the Caliphate's province of Baya. Liveried guards formed up to either side, with two more guards between the pair of cattle trucks. The drivers dismounted and unlocked the back gates, turning cranks to allow the gates to descend from lower pivots to form ramps. Some of the children, most of them, really, came out willingly enough when the drivers beckoned them. Not all did, however, until the drivers set off shrieking alarms inside the cargo sections. These drove the remaining boys and girls out, most of them wailing in terror.
Cargo slaves assigned to the airship stood inside to guide the children to their pen on the cargo deck. Whatever the cargo crew's feelings on the subject, their faces remained stone masks.
Hamilton's face mirrored those of the cargo slaves. He wondered, Okay, let's assume I can somehow free them. How do I then get them out of the Caliphate without returning them to South Africa? Little kids are not going to be doing any forced marching. And there are too many to put in one truck, even if I could drive them out through every checkpoint between am-Munch and the Channel or the Adriatic. How then? An airship? I can't fly an airship.
Fuck.
The Great Rift Valley spread below as Hamilton knocked on the cockpit of the airship. A small closed circuit camera emerged from the wall and proceeded to look him over, head to shoes. A door opened and one of the flight crew emerged asking, "Can I help you, Mineer De Wet?"
"I've never been in the cockpit of an airship," Hamilton said. "I was wondering if you good volk might be willing to give me a little tour, show me the ropes. Never know when it might be useful in my business."
The crewman shrugged and called out over one shoulder to his captain.
"Sure," the captain said. "Always glad to show hospitality to a member of KHR. C'mon in, mineer. Klaas, get up and give Mineer De Wet your seat."
No, way, Hamilton thought, after two hours of instruction and the captain of the ship even allowing him to take the controls. No way I can fly this thing except on autopilot and then only to one of the programmed airship ports. Which would mean predictability which would mean the kids and I would be shot down within minutes. No way to land the thing either, except under the same circumstances. Fuck.
The captain says he or his copilot, or any experienced pilot, could do all that alone in a pinch . . . but I am not, nor will I be, an experienced pilot. Again, fuck.
Take a crew hostage and force them to fly me? That's a thought. But then, how do I arrange to have the crew waiting? And even if I do, what keeps the caliph's Air Force from shooting us down anyway?
"They do build them pretty, no?" said the flight engineer to Hamilton, pointing as he spoke out a porthole towards another airship heading in the opposite direction. Hamilton read the name, "Retief," on the engineer's uniform.
"Who builds them pretty?" Hamilton asked. To him, all airships looked pretty much alike, differing only in size and, at unknown distances, not even in that.
"The Chinks," the flight engineer answered. "That's one of theirs, an Admiral Cheng Ho class, if I'm not mistaken . . . that, or a Long March. They differ only in size, not in shape. The Long March class carries about five- or six hundred tons more."
"Well," Hamilton said, "all airships are pretty. What makes that so special?"
"The lines of the thing." Retief shook his head, saying, "You don't see it, do you?"
"I confess not."
"Oh, well." The engineer sighed. "I suppose the Parthenon wouldn't have been pretty to the Maya, either. Just trust me, though, that is one beautiful ship."
"If you say so," Hamilton half-agreed.
"The other thing is," Retief added, "the Chinks don't use theirs much to carry slaves."
"You don't approve of the slave trade?" Hamilton asked, stone mask descending once again.