Suddenly my whole body was consumed with the most horrible, agonizing pain I had ever known. I cried out and fell, senseless to anything but the pain, rolling about the grassy earth in sheer agony. I could not bear if, the pain was so intense, so all-encompassing. Almost immediately I longed for death, for anything to give me release.
And just as suddenly the pain was gone. The relief was tempered by echoes of the agony in my nervous system and the burning memory in my brain. I just lay there face up on the grass, panting.
“Get up!” Kronlpn ordered.
I hesitated, still in shock and unable to get my bearings fully. Instantly the pain was back, if only for a fleeting second that seemed like an eternity. I turned, I crawled, I scrambled to my feet, still trembling and gasping.
Kronlon watched, a look of amused satisfaction on his face. He had done this many times before. I hated him worse than I ever hated anyone in my life.
But he still wasn’t through.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Tre—Tremon,” I gasped. “Cal Tremon.”
The agony was back, knocking me down again; then it was released.
“Get up!” the supervisor commanded. I tried to get back to my feet once more, making it on the second try. He waited patiently until I succeeded.
“Now, you’ll address me as ‘sir’ always,” he warned. “You will put ‘sir’ at the beginning of every statement to me, and you will put ‘sir’ at the end of it You will stand straight when I am around and face me always, and when you are given an order you will bow slightly and then do it. You will speak to anyone not of your class only when spoken to, and only in reply to their questions or commands. Understand that?”
I was still gasping for breath. “Yes… sir,” I responded. The pain returned.
“Not what I ordered, Tremon! What kind of a dumb shit are you? Now get up, you bastard, and we’ll try it again.”
For a moment I was confused, hesitant, until I realized he was deadly serious. The pain and agony he could inflict without moving a muscle was horrible, intense. By now I feared that more than anything, the memory so vivid that I would do almost anything to avoid it. It was horrible to know that I had been so easily humbled and beaten, so quickly broken—but broken I was. I wasn’t even thinking straight any more. I just wanted to avoid that pain.
We spent what felt like hours out in that field, with quick applications of the pain followed by increasing demands, over and over again, a terrible torturer’s delight. It was a process not unfamiliar to me, but one in which I’d never participated on the receiving end. Keep at the victim: administer pain, then demands, then pain again. Never be pleased, never be satisfied.
Agents were trained to black out after a certain threshold was reached, but I found even that suddenly beyond my power. Agents could also will themselves to death, of course, but that was the one point at which he was not going to win, not yet.
If I were being interrogated about a mission, or jeopardizing a mission, other people, anything, I would not have hesitated to take the death-wish route—but such was not the case. Nor was any torture mechanism being used—just one short, squat, brutish man standing there in a field, doing nothing at all.
As Kronlon had warned, there were only two routes for any thinking human being to take in this situation—death, or absolute, unquestioning obedience. My ego shattered in the waning sun, and my will seemed to recede into nothingness. Before sunset I was, on command, licking his stinking, duty feet.
As we rode into the small village, me sitting dully at his side, a small corner of the old me, all that seemed to remain on the conscious level, kept saying over and over, “And a Master is ten times as powerful as a Supervisor and a Knight is ten tunes a Master and a Duke is ten times a Knight and a Lord is like a god…”
I don’t even remember entering the little village of straw and mud huts. It was nearly sunrise when I awoke.
Chapter Five
Village Routine
The pawns lived a miserably primitive life, I soon discovered, sleeping crammed into those huts with only more of the straw like bunti plant that formed the hut covering the floor so deeply that it actually gave slightly under the weight of human bodies.
For several days I remained in nearly complete withdrawal, going through the motions like an automaton, thinking little and feeling nothing. The other pawns seemed to understand what a newcomer went through,’ even though most of them were native-born and had been raised on this horrible system and probably hadn’t gone through quite what I had. There was no attempt to rush me, or to establish normal contact with me. They seemed content to wait until I snapped out of it, if I ever did, and initiated the contact myself.
We were routed out at dawn, and everybody crowded into a huge communal eating area in the center of the “village,”—as it were, where food-service pawns put out enormous, mostly tasteless rolls and a fair supply of good-tasting pulpy yellow fruit Then the supervisor arrived; actually, he lived right there, in a hut just like the rest of us, only privately. But his food, the same as ours, was served to him by the food-service pawns in his hut—and someone would dean the place while work was being done.
Incredibly, despite the enormous power Kronlon possessed, on Lilith he was only a slight notch, just a hair really, above us, the lowest of the low. Just one look at his modest bunti hut and that castle up on the mountain told of the gulf separating him from his own bosses.
The work consisted mostly of loading and hauling. How soft mankind has become, even on the frontier. On Lilith, life was frozen in the stone age: all labor was manual; all tools were crudely fashioned and usually temporary.
Two rivers flowed from the mountains down to those small lakes, causing the twin problems of flood control and irrigation. It rained heavily at some point almost every day, yet the duration was short, the runoff quick. The mountains clearly absorbed the brunt of the storms on their other faces and allowed only the worst to get over to Zeis Keep. Therefore irrigation canals had to be dug by hand; the mud and muck was carried out by hand to carts, then hauled by men pulling those carts to fill areas near the lakes, where the silt would be formed into crude earthen dikes. Hundreds of kilometers of drainage and irrigation canals were constantly silting up; so when you finished the whole route, it was time to start again.
Men and women worked equally in the fields and in those jobs. Of course the strongest and hardiest took on the heaviest labor, and job assignment was clearly based on physique, age, and the like. Children—some as young as five or six I guessed-—worked along with their elders, doing what they could under the watchful eyes of the oldest and most infirm. The social system was crude and primitive but well thought out. It worked, on the most basic, tribal level. Once, when mankind evolved on its mother world into what we now know as human beings, all people must have lived something like this.
Days were long, punctuated regularly by very short breaks and by four food breaks during the sixteen-hour work cycle. When darkness finally fell across the valley and the distant castle blazed with light was there rest. But the nights, too, were long. Zeis Keep was only 5 degrees south of the equator, which made the periods roughly equal all year.
Social time for the pawns was at night, and it was as basic and primitive as everything else. They had some dances and songs, for anybody who was in any condition to join in, and they talked and gossiped in an elementary way. They also made love then, seemingly without regard for any family unit or other permanent attachments. Marriage and such seemed alien concepts to these people, though if both partners felt like it, they married.