Faces tightened all around the table, and Du Havel nodded thoughtfully.
"I hadn't really considered that," he admitted, "and I should have. It's the sort of propaganda factor the ASL's tried to keep in mind for a long time. But you may well have a point, Dr. Wix. If this wormhole had started attracting a lot of through traffic, then there'd have been a lot more potentially embarrassing Solarian witnesses to the mortality rate among the members of their planet-side slave labor force, wouldn't there?"
"That's what I was thinking," Wix agreed. Then he snorted. "Mind you, that's a pretty sophisticated motive to impute to anyone stupid enough to be using slave labor to harvest and process pharmaceuticals in the first place! Completely leaving aside the moral aspects of the decision—which, I feel confident, would never have darkened the doorway of any Mesan transtellar's decision processes—it was economically stupid."
"I tend to agree with you," Du Havel said. "On the other hand, breeding slaves is pretty damned cheap." His voice was remarkably level, but his bared-teeth grin gave the lie to his apparent detachment. "They've been doing it for a long time, after all, and their 'production lines' are all in place. And to give the devil his due, human beings are still a lot more versatile than most machinery. Not as efficient at most specific tasks as purpose built machinery, of course, but versatile. And as far as Manpower and Mesans in general are concerned, slaves are 'purpose built machinery,' when you come down to it. So from their perspective, it made plenty of sense to avoid the initial capital investment in the hardware the job would have required. After all, they already had plenty of cheap replacement units when their 'purpose built machinery' broke, and they could always make more."
"You know," Kare said quietly, "sometimes I forget just how . . . skewed the thinking of something like Manpower has to be." He shook his head. "It never would've occurred to me to analyze the economic factors from that perspective."
"Well, I've had a bit more practice at it than most people." Du Havel's tone was dry enough to create an instant Sahara . . . even on Torch. "The truth is that slavery's almost always been hideously inefficient on a production per man-hour basis. There've been exceptions, of course, but as a general rule, using slaves as skilled technicians—which would be the only way to make it remotely competitive with free labor on a productive basis—has had a tendency to turn around and bite the slaveowner on the ass."
He smiled again, chillingly, but then the smile faded.
"The problem is that it doesn't have to be efficient to show at least some profit. A low return on a really big operation still comes to a pretty impressive absolute amount of money, and their 'per-unit' capital costs are low. I'm sure that was a major element in their thinking—especially when you consider how much capital investment in slave-production facilities Manpower would have to write off if it were even tempted to 'go legitimate.' Not that I think it would ever occur to them to make the attempt, you understand."
"No, I guess not." Kare grimaced, then gave himself a shake. "On the other hand, whatever the Mesans' motives for leaving this particular wormhole unexploited, it gives me a certain warm and fuzzy feeling to reflect on the fact that when it starts producing revenue for you people, that cash flow's going to find itself being plowed into your naval expansion."
"Yes," Thandi Palane agreed, and her smile was even colder than Du Havel's had been. "That's a possibility I've been spending quite a bit of my own time contemplating. We've already managed a couple of ops I'm pretty sure have pissed Manpower off, but if we can get our hands on a few more hyper-capable ships of our own, they're going to be very, very unhappy with the results."
"In that case," Kare replied with a smile of his own, "by all means, as Duchess Harrington would put it, 'let's be about it.' "
Chapter Fourteen
"So what's on the agenda today?" Judson Van Hale asked cheerfully as he walked into the office.
"You," Harper S. Ferry replied repressively, "are entirely too bright and happy for someone who has to be up this early."
"Nonsense!" Judson gave him a broad, toothy smile. "You effete city boys simply have no appreciation for the brisk, bracing, cool air of dawn!" He threw back his head, chest swelling as he inhaled deeply. "Get some oxygen into that bloodstream, man!" he advised. "That'll cheer you up!"
"It would be a lot less strenuous to just kill you . . . and a lot more fun, now that I think about it," Harper observed, and Judson chuckled. Although, given Harper S. Ferry's record during his active career with the Audubon Ballroom, he wasn't entirely certain the other man was joking. Pretty certain, but not entirely. On the other hand, he figured he could rely on Genghis to warn him before the ex-Ballroom operative actually decided to squeeze the trigger.
Unlike Harper, Judson had never personally been a slave. Instead, he'd been born on Sphinx after his father's liberation from the hold of a Manpower Incorporated slave ship. Patrick Henry Van Hale had married a niece of the Manticoran captain whose ship had intercepted the slaver he'd been aboard, and, despite the fact that Patrick had been young enough to receive first-generation prolong after he was freed, he'd still had the perspective of Manpower's normally short-lived slaves. He and his new bride hadn't wasted any time at all on building the family they'd both wanted, and Judson (the first of six children . . . so far) had come along barely a T-year after the wedding.
Both Patrick and Lydia Van Hale were rangers with the Sphinx Forestry Service, and, although as a citizen of Yawata Crossing Judson had scarcely been the backwoods bumpkin he enjoyed parodying, he had spent quite a lot of his time in the bush during his childhood. His parents' employment explained most of that, and Judson had fully intended to follow in their footsteps. In fact, he'd completed his graduate forestry classes and his internship in the SFS when the liberation of Torch changed everything.
The fact that he'd never personally been a slave hadn't diminished his hatred for Manpower in any way, and he and his family had always been active in supporting the Anti-Slavery League. Judson's parents had never subscribed to the Ballroom's approach, however. They believed that the Ballroom's atrocities (and, even now, Judson figured there was no better word to describe quite a few of the Ballroom's operations) played into the hands of slavery's supporters. That wasn't a point on which Harper would have agreed with them, and truth to tell, Judson himself had always been a bit more ambivalent about that than his parents were. He'd wondered, sometimes, if that was because he felt as if he'd personally had a "free ride" where slavery was concerned. If he was more willing to see violence as the proper response because he felt hypocritical condemning those who resorted to violence against an abomination they'd experienced firsthand . . . and he hadn't. He'd escaped it before he'd even been conceived, after all, and the Star Kingdom of Manticore was one of the few star nations where no one really cared, one way or the other, if someone was an ex-slave or the son of ex-slaves. You were who you were, and the fact that you'd been designed as someone else's property was neither stigma nor a badge of victimhood.
In that respect, Judson knew he would never be able to fully share his parents' attitude. Both of them were fiercely grateful to the Royal Manticoran Navy for his father's freedom and equally fiercely loyal to the Star Kingdom of Manticore for the safe harbor and opportunities it had given him, but Patrick Henry Van Hale also remembered being a slave . . . and he'd been designed as a "pleasure slave." Even though he'd been only around nineteen T-years old when he'd been freed, he'd already undergone the full gamut of what Manpower euphemistically called "training." Lydia Van Hale hadn't . . . but she'd been the one who'd spent years helping him deal with—and survive—the dehumanizing trauma of that experience. In ways they would never be able to escape, Patrick's slavery still defined who both of them were, and it was an experience Judson had never shared. They'd never harped on that, never indulged in the "if only I'd had it as good as you do" school of child rearing, yet he'd become only increasingly aware of that difference between them as he'd grown older. And as he'd also become increasingly aware of the lifetime scars they both carried with them from his father' experience, his hatred for Manpower and all things Mesan had only grown.