Rigg thought about this for a moment. “You mean everybody in Gathuurifold is a slave?”
“Slavery became pervasive, with this wrinkle, that slaves could own property which did not belong to their owners. That meant that slaves can own slaves, who own slaves, who own slaves.”
“If you can own property, how are you a slave?” asked Rigg.
“Because your owner can move you to one place or another, can break up your marriage, can sell your children to some other owner, can decide how much education you’ll receive, and what work you’ll do, and what hours you’ll keep.”
“And this system persists?” asked Rigg.
“I’m not saying I like it,” said Ram Odin. “It’s just another way of organizing human life. It’s only been like this for fifteen hundred years or so, and Wall-to-Wall for only nine centuries. But in human terms, nine centuries might as well be forever. People here have little idea that society can be organized any other way.”
“Everybody owns everybody?” Rigg asked.
“Everybody is owned by somebody,” said Ram Odin. “There are plenty of people who don’t own anybody.”
“So who’s at the top of this pyramid? Who owns him?”
“I own him,” said Ram Odin. “Or, properly speaking, you do, since you are now the master of all ships. But since you didn’t know about this system, you haven’t been giving him any instructions. Therefore he continues to follow the last instructions I gave him. And for our purposes in Gathuurifold, you are posing as his slave.”
“Gathuuriex,” said Rigg. “The Lord of Walls is the expendable.”
“Who else?” said Ram Odin. “He never dies. He travels wherever he wants in his flying house, to make sure that his slaves are doing his will. I’ve instructed him to govern with a light hand. Whenever possible, he adjudicates disputes by making them work it out themselves, within certain parameters. He only goes after the Savages when they become particularly destructive, which he forestalls by making sure there are feeding stations in hard winters and droughts.”
“Savages? So not everyone is in this slave system?”
“No system is good for everybody,” said Ram Odin. “So yes, some people run away and escape into the wild. But most of them come back. The wild isn’t safe. Nobody knows who they belong to, and so there are no rules.”
“You make it sound like slavery is a good idea,” said Rigg.
“I think slavery is a terrible idea,” said Ram Odin. “But the whole idea of the wallfolds was to see what humans would do, what they would become with eleven thousand years of noninterference. Gathuuriex did absolutely nothing to promote slavery. He only stepped in to become the Lord of Walls—at my instructions—when there were getting to be too many murders among the top families.”
“How kind of you,” said Rigg. “Maybe that would have brought down the whole system, did you think of that?”
“I did,” said Ram Odin. “But this was only two hundred years ago, so I knew the end was coming, and these feuds had turned into wars before during the previous seven centuries of universal slavery. So I sent in Gathuuriex to become the owner of the top owners. He broke up the conspiracies, ended the feuds, arranged a few key divorces, dispersed the children who were the most tyrannical to learn some humility farther down the slave chain. I thought it wouldn’t hurt anything to have a few centuries of peace in this place.”
“Why not eleven thousand years of peace?”
“I didn’t create the slave system,” said Ram Odin. “For a long time I truly hated this place worse than any except Vadeshfold. I thought of it as a failure.”
“So you intervened.”
“No. It had already stopped being such an evil place a couple of thousand years ago. But no more talking about it, Rigg. I could have given you a history lesson about Gathuurifold and heard your tut-tuts and tsk-tsks back in Larfold. We have work to do.”
“Work?”
“There are certain responsibilities involved in being a slave directly owned by the Lord of Walls. Because everybody answers to someone who answers to someone who answers to the Lord of Walls, nobody can tell his slaves that they don’t have a right to travel wherever they want. But in return, such traveling Wallmen, which by the way is your official title, function as itinerant judges, auditors, inquisitors, and arbiters.”
“I have no idea how to do that!”
“Neither does any other human being, yet we do all those jobs, all the time, whenever we get the chance. Rigg, you’re the one who wanted to tour all the wallfolds. I can assure you that if you don’t travel as a Wallman, you don’t travel at all unless you have an owner who sends you on a specific errand. And since you don’t belong to anybody, you would only have two choices.”
“Become a Savage,” said Rigg.
“Which you would not like, and which would not tell you much about how the vast majority of the people in Gathuurifold live.”
“And the other choice?”
“Find somebody willing to take you on as his slave.”
“And who wouldn’t want a fine specimen like me?” asked Rigg.
“A self-assured, independent young man with a mouth on him? They would think your owner had done a bad job of training you and they wouldn’t want to bring trouble into their house.”
“I was being ironic,” said Rigg.
“I wasn’t,” said Ram Odin.
“Couldn’t I be your slave?”
“Nobody would send an old man like me out on extended errands. Much more convincing if you’re the Wallman, and I’m your old clerk and adviser. If you were the slave, then I’d have to treat you like one, and you would truly, truly hate that. No, if you want freedom of action, you have to be a Wallman, and that means you have to do a Wallman’s job. Suck it up, Rigg, and take it like a man.”
“But the decisions I make as a judge—”
“Are final. There is no appeal. And you’ll have this wise old adviser at your side. Trust me. You’ll do as well as any of the other Wallmen.”
They clattered along in a carriage. The vehicle was well-sprung, but the road was not in good condition, so there was a great deal of jouncing, and for all the clatter, they didn’t make that much forward progress. “I’m not impressed with the road maintenance,” said Rigg.
“You can take it up with the master of roads,” said Ram Odin. “I’m sure you can get a lot of road repair started while you’re in the area.”
“But it won’t continue after I’m gone.”
“The master of roads belongs to someone who isn’t you. If his master wanted him to fix this stretch of road, it would already be fixed.”
“And this system works well enough to be universal?”
“I could have taken you to one of the places where it works best,” said Ram Odin. “But then I’d be deceiving you, wouldn’t I? No system works well unless good people do their jobs with integrity, and then almost any system works well enough.”
“It’s the problem with authority, at all times,” said Ram Odin. “You only know what your subordinates tell you, and your commands are only carried out as long as your subordinates feel like it.”
Rigg couldn’t argue with that. He had seen enough of that already, and it was one of the principles Father had taught him.
Father. Lord of Walls. The same mechanical men, playing different roles in different places. What Ram Odin didn’t have to say was this: If you want a job to be done by someone you can trust, who won’t lie to you, who’ll persist in his obedience, get yourself a mechanical slave.
Of course, your mechanical slave will lie to everyone else, in order to achieve your purposes. But I am lying to everybody in Gathuurifold, in order to achieve my purposes. Purity is so hard to achieve.
So far Rigg had experienced only the privileges of Wallmen, and none of their duties. They had taken the Larfold flyer to a fairly remote city, where a carriage was waiting for them, along with letters of authority and a complete set of clothing for the journey. Wallmen, it seemed, wore an unbelievably silly style of clothing involving a puffy hat and intricately arranged bright-colored straps across the chest. It could not be put on without the help of a servant. And since Ram Odin had never arranged the straps either, they spent a good deal of time in the flyer, getting instructions from the ship’s computer, until they finally got it down.