Even freedom, when it came, came in a form of a slightly longer leash.
Most indentures, like Warmuth and Santiago, have contracts of limited duration: five, ten, twenty, or thirty years; the terms varied. They could work off that time in the allotted period or they could earn the time bonuses that permitted early release. They all knew they could look forward to a generous pension and an unlimited passport, someday. They all understood that one day they’d own themselves again.
I didn’t have that luxury. The Dip Corps had promised me lifetime protection, or as close to lifetime protection as I could expect given the certain knowledge that they’d give me up the instant they decided I was useful currency. But they were the ones capable of tearing up the contract. I had no means of severance.
I was owned and expected to be owned for the foreseeable future.
I’d gotten used to the idea.
I’d only imagined I knew what it was like.
Less than a year ago, on Catarkhus, it had come to mean something else.
activated the hytex and called up the service records of the two dead women.
I started with the most recent victim, Cynthia Warmuth, opening with a hytex image taken since her arrival at One One One. She turned out to have been a pretty young thing, lithe, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, with a tentative smile and short dyed hair determined to make a stop at every color in the rainbow. The image caught her in the act of climbing one of the hammock farm’s mesh ladders, one foot already resting one rung up. Being lit from below, like just about everything else illuminated only by One One One’s suns, gave her an odd exotic quality that she seemed to take as a reason for pride.
Of her background, there wasn’t much more than Gibb had already provided. The only notable addition was a thesis she’d written, discussing what she believed to be the impossibility of proper objectivity in the study of sentient races. New indentures in training wrote theses like this all time, most of them showing little originality and promise. Warmuth’s parroted the Dip Corps line:
I didn’t know how true that nonsense was in practical circumstances. In the course of my daily work I’d encountered any number of diplomats and exosociologists who claimed to be able to watch over intelligent alien races while themselves possessing only as much observable sentience as doorknobs.
Gibb’s personal evaluations of her were also attached to the file, and marked her for guarded praise. She had potential, he said, but she needed to learn how to curb her somewhat excessive zeal. It seemed to be more a personality thing than any problems with her skill set. On four separate occasions, under his watch alone, she’d scored highly enough, on examinations, to earn some additional time off her contract. It shortened her full hitch by less than a month—not much time at all, when you considered how many years she still had left on her contract. But not bad for an indenture who hadn’t even been cleared for her first direct contact with the locals. Either she’d excelled beyond all reason in training or Gibb was an unusually generous boss.
The first image I found of Santiago was not quite as congenial or as posed as Warmuth’s; it was a candid shot, taken from a distance, of her clinging to the Uppergrowth with all four limbs. There were four Brachiators in the background, looking less at home there than she did. About all I learned from it was that she was up to the physical demands of the work. I requested another image and got it: an awkwardly posed image of Santiago standing in a triangular corridor, arms crossed, one thin eyebrow raised. She had dark eyes, tan skin, a round face framed by tousled caramel hair, and a slight underbite that transformed her lower lip into a pout. There was no hint of a smile.
Santiago’s papers were fewer than Warmuth’s, but tinged with a bitter edge. One passage Lastogne had bookmarked for me was especially interesting. “For most sentients, belonging to their respective species means bearing the influence of the whole. Being a human being often means being outshouted by the whole. It means being a cell with no voice in the function of the organism. It means being owned.”
There it was again.
It could be a coincidence. It was a common concept among the sufficiently cynical, a parade I help to lead. Santiago’s background as a debt-slave even made it reasonable. There were too many worlds like hers, and too many people like her aching to leave those worlds behind. Their need was a large part of what staffed the Dip Corps.
A look at Santiago’s bond put the nature of the contract into sharp relief. The woman had exchanged her own debt for a ten-year contract. By the time the Dip Corps added the costs of transportation, training, and the medical treatment necessary to cleanse her lungs and body chemistry of the homeworld industrial toxins that would have left her dead or incapacitated by age forty, the time-debt on her contract had stretched from ten years to twenty.
Extended, just like Warmuth’s: a coincidence, or a link? Either way, she wouldn’t have minded. The Corps was the best form of debt slavery—the kind that ended in freedom if the job was done.
But it was still slavery. Ownership.
The kind that made people angry.
Santiago had been described as an angry person.
I looked further. Santiago had earned some mild time bonuses in her months on One One One, but had also been fined for antisocial behavior, the worst penalty coming after her confrontation with Warmuth. Once I did the math, she turned out to be earning out her contract at something approaching real time. That was a mediocre score indeed. I wondered how much of her abrasiveness was political, and how much was personality.
I thought of another abrasive personality: Lastogne.
He’d also made a reference to being owned.
He had given the words special emphasis.
He struck me as a man embittered by the deal he had made.
He had gone out of his way to tell me that he’d already heard of me.
Had he been giving me a gentle nudge in the direction he wanted the investigation to go?
Or was he obscuring the trail? Maybe he was just pushing buttons. Or maybe all his talk of Santiago’s attitude problem was a smoke screen for his own.
I directed the hytex to provide me with his file.
Nothing came up.
I went into the Dip Corps Database, and used not only the security codes I had earned but also several my superiors would have been very unhappy to know I possessed.