Sass had shut her mind off, as well as she could, and tried not to see the faces and bodies she handled. She had Lunzie’s in her arms, and was halfway to the end of the pier, when she recognized it. A reflexive jerk, a scream tearing itself from her throat, and Lunzie’s corpse slipped away, thumped on the edge of the pier, and splashed into the water. Sass stood rigid, unable to move. Something yanked on her collar; she paid it no heed. She heard someone cry out, say, “That was hersister! “ and then blackness took her away. The rest of her time on Myriad, those few days of desperate work and struggle, she always shoved down below conscious memory. She had been drugged, then worked to exhaustion, then drugged again. They had loaded the choicest of the ores, the rare gemstones which had paid the planet’s assessment in the FSP Development Office, the richest of the transuranics. She was barely conscious of her link’s concern, the care they tried to take of her, the gentle brush of a hand in the rare rest periods, the way they kept slack in her collar-lead. But the rest was black terror, grief, and rage. On the ship, after that, her link spent its allotted time in Conditioning, and the rest in the tight and smelly confines of the slavehold. For them, no drugs or coldsleep to ease a long voyage: they had to learn what they were, the pirates informed them with cold superiority. They were cargo, saleable anywhere the FSP couldn’t control. As with any cargo, they were divided into like kinds: age groups, sexes, trained specialists. As with any slaves, they soon learned ways to pass information among themselves. So Sass found that Caris was still alive, part of link 18. Januk had been left behind, alive but doomed, since no adults or older children remained to help those too young to travel. Most of The City’s adults had died trying to defend it against the pirates; some survived, but none of the children knew how many.
Conditioning was almost welcome, to ease the boredom and misery of the slavehold. Sass knew - at least at first - that this was intentional. But as time passed, she and her link both had trouble remembering what free life had been like. Conditioning also meant a bath of sorts, because the pirate trainers couldn’t stand the stench of the slavehold. For that alone it was welcome. The link stood, sat, reached, squatted, turned, all as one, on command. They learned assembly-line work, putting together meaningless combinations some other link had taken apart in a previous session. They learned Harish, a variant of Neo-Gaesh that some of the pirates spoke, and they were introduced to Chinese.
The end of the voyage came unannounced - for, as Sass now expected, slaves had no need for knowledge of the future. The landing was rough, bruisingly rough, but they had learned that complaint brought only more pain. Link by link the pirates - now unarmored - marched them off the ship, and along a wide gray street toward a line of buildings. Sass shivered; they’d been hosed down before leaving the ship, and the wind chilled her. The gravity was too light, as well. The planet smelled strange: dusty and sharp, nothing like Myriad’s rich salt smell. She looked up, and realized that they were inside something - a dome? A dome big enough to cover a spaceport and a city?
All the city she could see, in the next months, was slavehold. Block after block of barracks, workshops, factories, five stories high and stretching in all directions. No trees, no grass, nothing living but the human slaves and human masters. Some were huge, far taller than Sass’s parents had been, heavily muscled like the thugs that Carin Coldae had overcome inThe Ice-World Dilemma.
They broke up the links, sending each slave to a testing facility to see what skills might be saleable. Then each was assigned to new links, for work or training or both, clipped and undipped from one link after another as the masters desired. After all that had happened, Sass was surprised to find that she remembered her studies. As the problems scrolled onto the screen, she could think, immerse herself in the math or chemistry or biology. For days she spent a shift at the test center, and a shift at menial work in the barracks, sweeping floors that were too bare to need sweeping, and cleaning the communal toilets and kitchens. Then a shift at assembly work, which made no more sense to her than it ever had, and a bare six hours of sleep, into which she fell as into a well, eager to drown.
She had no way to keep track of the days, and no reason to. No way to find her old friends, or trace their movements. New friends she made easily, but the constant shifting from link to link made it hard for such friendships to grow. Then, long after her testing was finished, and she was working three full shifts a day, she was unclipped and taken to a building she’d not yet seen. Here, clipped into a long line of slaves, she heard the sibilant chant of an auctioneer and realized she was about to be sold.
By the time she reached the display stand, she had heard the spiel often enough to deaden her mind to the impact. Human female, Gilson stage II physical development, intellectual equivalent grade eight general, grade nine mathematics, height so much, massing so much, planet of origin, genetic stock of origin, native and acquired languages, specific skills ratings, all the rest. She expected the jolt of pain that revealed to the buyers how sensitive she was, how excitable, and managed to do no more than flinch. She had already learned that the buyers rarely looked for beauty - that was easy enough to breed, or surgically sculpt. But talents and skills were chancy, and combined with physical vigor, chancier yet. Hence the reason for taking slaves from relatively young colonies.
The bidding went on, in a currency she didn’t know and couldn’t guess the value of. Someone finally quit bidding, and someone else pressed a heavy thumb to the terminal ID screen, and someone else - another slave, this time, by the collar - led her away down empty corridors and finally clipped her lead to a ring by a doorway. Through all this Sass managed not to tremble visibly, or cry, although she could feel the screams tearing at her from inside.
“What’s your name?” asked the other slave, now stacking boxes beside the door. Sass stared at him. He was much older, a stocky, graying man with scars seaming one arm, and a groove in his skull where no hair grew. He looked at her when she didn’t answer, and smiled a gap-toothed smile. “It’s all right - you can answer me if you want, or not.”
“Sassinak!” She got it out all at once, fast and almost too loud. Her name! She had a name again.
“Easy,” he said. “Sassinak, eh? Where from?”
“M-myriad.” Her voice trembled, now, and tears sprang to her eyes.
“Speak Neo-Gaesh?” he asked, in that tongue. Sass nodded, too close to tears to speak.
“Take it easy,” he said. “You can make it.” She took a long breath, shuddering, and then another, more quietly. He nodded his approval. “You’ve got possibilities, girl. Sassinak. By your scores, you’re more than smart. By your bearing, you’ve got guts to go with it. No tears, no screams. You did jump too much, though.”
That criticism, coming on top of the kindness, was too much; her temper flared. “I didn’t so much as say ouch!”
He nodded. “I know. But you jumped. You can do better.” Still angry, she stared, as he grinned at her. “Sassinak from Myriad, listen to me. Untrained, you didn’t let out a squeak… what do you think you could do with training?”
Despite herself, she was caught. “Training? You mean…?”
But down the corridor came the sound of approaching voices. He shook his head at her, and stood passively beside the stacked cartons, at her side.