Anne’s voice and face were sober. “Of course. This is the kind of thing we came all this way for.”
“Like royalty,” Chandra said, rubbing his hands together. “I think we’re about to learn what the term ‘Roman splendor’ means.”
Draco glanced sourly toward Ahmed nearby, into whose ears Yusuf was pouring all they’d gleaned from the thoughts of the star men. Amazing that the ancients exposed their thoughts so freely. It was obvious they had no awareness at all of telepathy.
They rode on toward the City, both Draco and Ahmed digesting what they had learned, their earlier awe of the ancients replaced by a compound of greed and caution. Now they would have to agree on where, in the palace, the ambassadors would be quartered. It might take an adjustment of sectors to find a suitable apartment in a neutral location; neither would willingly let the other have control of them.
Nikko Kumalo’s searching had reached a dead end. She could not place the word orc.
In their small cabin aboard the Phaeacia she listened to Matthew’s slow even breathing. Usually she fell asleep quickly, but tonight her riddle had kept her awake. She had asked the computer what the word meant. It had printed out—Orc: Any of several large fish-like mammals of earth, especially Grampus Griseus.
But her subconscious insisted that was not the source of the word’s familiarity.
It would come to her eventually, she was sure.
VII
Within the City of Kazi were approximately 22,000 slaves.
In a totally despotic society it can be difficult to define “slave”; in a sense, everyone below the ruling class is a slave. Within the context of the orc society, I have classified as slaves all who were not orcs.
A majority of the slaves, roughly 18,000 of them, were women and girls who served several purposes. They did most of the common labor and almost all of the domestic service. They provided the major sexual outlet for the orcs and were the source of almost all the vicious boy children who grew up, or more often died, in the rigid and brutalizing orcling pens. The orcs were the children of the slaves, and it was the orcs who victimized the slaves.
Slaves also provided the skilled labor and professional services upon which the city depended. They were the stone masons, smiths, armor artificers, mechanics; the civil engineers, physicians, accountants and bureaucrats. Skilled slaves enjoyed a degree of protection from the capricious cruelty and casual abuse of the soldiers, the degree of protection depending on the importance of the slave and the rank of the soldier. Slaves who were important enough were allowed to have families—in a very few cases even small harems or androecia—and given apartments. The consul Ahmed was the son of one such slave, although to apply the term “slave” in such a case rather stretches the concept.
But except at the uppermost level, security was tenuous even for the slave elite. An imprudent thought monitored by an orc telepath, an unintended offense to an officer, a momentary lapse in one’s servility, could collapse that small “private” world and expose the slave to the full force of orc brutality.
In such a society one might expect an underground to exist. But in a society using telepathic surveillance and ruthless repression—given to uninhibited and in fact mandatory sadism—that underground was certain to be small, fearful, and largely ineffectual.
Over the years there must have been innumerable small acts of opportunistic sabotage carried out on the spur of the moment by individuals and involving no conspiracy. But the term “underground” does not include such unaffiliated individuals. The real underground, in the sense of conspiratorial groups, consisted primarily of artisans and bureaucrats, slaves with some degree of private life—a slave intelligentsia, so to speak. It also included a very few orcs who had been sensitized by attachment to some slave and who had reacted against the culture which ravaged the slave.
Apparently the underground groups were all very small and not generally in contact with one another.
A substantial part of their small total membership seems to have consisted of telepaths. In the underground, telepaths would seem to have a better chance of surviving than non-telepaths. And perhaps telepaths tend to have more empathy for other humans, although Kazi, a remarkably able telepath, was nothing less than satanic.