The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

“Who’ll look out for ya? You’ll get your throat cut.”

“Maybe not. I’ve learned a lot.”

Breslov stood. “Your sentiment for your friends is admirable, but you are wasting my time. Are you enlisting?”

“He is,” Mark said. “Thank you, Lieutenant.” He followed the Marine guard back to the corridor and began washing the bulkhead, scrubbing savagely, trying to forget his misery and despair. It was all so unfair!

V

Tanith was hot, steaming jungle under a perpetual orange and gray cloud cover. The gravity was too high and the humidity was almost unbearable. Mark had no chance to see the planet. The ship landed at night, and the convicts were marched between tall fences into a concrete building with no outside windows. It was sparsely furnished and clearly intended only for short-term occupancy.

The exercise yard was a square in the center of the massive building. It was a relief to have space to move around in after the crowded ship, but shortly after they were allowed in the yard a violent rainstorm drove them inside the prison building. Even with the storm the place was sweltering. Tanith’s gravity seemed ready to crush him.

The next day he was herded through medical processing, immunization, identification, a meaningless classification interview, and both psychological and aptitude tests. They ran from one task to the next, then stood in long lines or simply waited around. On the fourth day he was taken from the detention pen to an empty adobe-walled room with rough wooden furniture. The guards left him there. The sensation of being alone was exhilarating.

He looked up warily when the door opened. “Biff!”

“Hi, kid. Got something for you.” Dugan was dressed in the blue dungarees of the CD Navy. He glanced around guiltily. “You left this with me and I run it up a bit.” He held out a fistful of CoDominium scrip. “Go on, take it, I can get more and you can’t. Look we’re pullin’ out pretty soon, and . . .”

“It’s all right,” Mark said. But it wasn’t all right. He hadn’t known how much friendship meant to him until he’d been separated from Dugan; now, seeing him in the Navy uniform and knowing that Dugan was headed away from this horrible place, Mark hated his former friend. “I’ll get along.”

“Damned right you will! Stop sniffing about how unfair everything is and wait your chance. You’ll get one. Look, you’re a young kid and everything seems like it’s forever, but—” Dugan fell silent and shook his head ruefully. “Not that you need fatherly advice from me. Or that it’d do any good. But things end, Mark. The day ends. So do weeks and months.”

“Yeah. Sure.” They said more meaningless things, and Dugan left. Now I’m completely alone, Mark thought. It was a crushing thought. Some of the speeches he’d heard in his few days in college kept rising up to haunt him. “Die Gedanken, Sie sind frei.” Yeah. Sure. A man’s thoughts were always free, and no one could enslave a free man, and the heaviest chains and darkest dungeons could never cage the spirit. Bullshit. I’m a slave. If I don’t do what they tell me, they’ll hurt me until I do. And I’m too damned scared of them. But something else he’d heard was more comforting. “Slaves have no rights, and thus have no obligations.”

That, by God, fits. I don’t owe anybody a thing. Nobody here, and none of those bastards on Earth. I do what I have to do and I look out for number-one and rape the rest of ’em.

* * *

There was no prison, or rather the entire planet was a prison. As he’d suspected, the main CD penal building was intended only for classification and assignment, a holding pen to keep prisoners until they were sold off to wealthy planters. There were a lot of rumors about the different places you might be sent to: big company farms run like factories, where it was said that few convicts ever lived to finish out their terms; industrial plants near cities, which was supposed to be soft duty because as soon as you got trusty status, you could get passes into town; town work, the best assignment of all; and the biggest category, lonely plantations out in the sticks where owners could do anything they wanted and generally did.

The pen began to empty as the men were shipped out. Then came Mark’s turn. He was escorted into an interview room and given a seat. It was the second time in months that he’d been alone and he enjoyed the solitude. There were voices from the next room.

“Why do you not keep him, hein?”

“Immature. No reason to be loyal to the CD.”

“Or to me.”

“Or to you. And too smart to be a dumb cop. You might make a foreman out of him. The governor’s interested in this one, Ludwig. He keeps track of all the high-IQ types. Look, you take this one, I owe you. I’ll see you get good hands.”

“Okay. Ja. Just remember that when you get in some with muscles and no brains, hein? Okay, we look at your genius.”

Who the hell were they talking about? Mark wondered. Me? Compared to most of the others in the ship, I guess you could call me a genius, but—

The door opened. Mark stood quickly. The guards liked you to do that.

“Fuller,” the captain said. “This is Herr Ewigfeuer. You’ll work for him. His place is a country club.”

The planter was heavy-set, with thick jowls. He needed a shave, and his shorts and khaki shirt were stained with sweat. “So you are the new convict I take to my nice farm.” He eyed Mark coldly. “He will do, he will do. Okay, we go now, ja?”

“Now?” Mark said.

“Now, ja, you think all day I have? I can stay in Whiskeytown while my foreman lets the hands eat everything and lay around not working? Give me the papers, Captain.”

The captain took a sheaf of papers from a folder. He scrawled across the bottom, then handed Mark a pen. “Sign here.”

Mark started to read the documents. The captain laughed. “Sign it, goddamit. We don’t have all day.”

Mark shrugged and scribbled his name. The captain handed Ewigfeuer two copies and indicated a door. They went through the adobe corridors to a guardroom at the end. The planter handed the guards a copy of the document and the door was opened.

The heat outside struck Mark like a physical blow. It had been hot enough inside, but the thick earthen walls had protected him from the worst; now it was almost unbearable. There was no sun, but the clouds were bright enough to hurt his eyes. Ewigfeuer put on dark glasses. He led the way to a shop across from the prison and bought Mark a pair of dark glasses and a cap with a visor. “Put these on,” he commanded. “You are no use if you are blind. Now come.”

They walked through busy streets. The sky hung dull orange, an eternal sunset. Sweat sprang from Mark’s brow and trickled down inside his coveralls. He wished he had shorts. Nearly everyone in town wore them.

They passed grimy shops and open stalls. There were sidewalk displays of goods for sale, nearly all crudely made or Navy surplus or black-marketed goods stolen from CD storerooms. Strange animals pulled carts through the streets and there were no automobiles at all.

A team of horses splashed mud on Ewigfeuer’s legs. The fat planter shook his fist at the driver. The teamster ignored him.

“Have you owned horses?” Ewigfeuer demanded.

“No,” Mark said. “I hadn’t expected to see any here.”

“Horses make more horses. Tractors do not,” the planter said. “Also, with horses and jackasses you get mules. Better than tractors. Better than the damned stormand beasts. Stormands do not like men.” He pointed to one of the unlikely animals. It looked like a cross between a mule and a moose, with wide, splayed feet and a sad look that turned vicious whenever anyone got near it. It was tied to a rail outside one of the shops.

There were more people than Mark had expected. They seemed to divide into three classes. There were those who tended the shops and stalls and who smiled unctuously when the planter passed. Most of those wore white canvass jackets. Then there were others, some with white canvass jackets and some without, who strode purposefully through the muddy streets and finally there were those who wandered aimlessly or sat on the street corners staring vacantly.

“What are they waiting for?” Mark said. He hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but Ewigfeuer heard him.

“They wait to die,” the planter said. “Ja, they think something else will come to save them. They will find something to steal, maybe, so they live another week, another month, a year even; but they are waiting to die. And they are white men!” This seemed their ultimate crime to Ewigfeuer.