“Not necessarily,” said Umbo. “We have two choices. One. We can go back in time to before the Wall was made. Two. We can skip forward to right after we passed through on the way here.”
Loaf looked at Umbo for a split second and then began a low chuckle. “You sly barbfeather,” he said. “You’ve learned how to make forward jumps.”
“I’ve been to the end of the world,” said Umbo. “All of the future that we can possibly use has already been the past to me. So I can jump there now.”
“This,” said Loaf to Leaky, “is a very useful boy. I’m not sure any child of ours wouldn’t make us feel disappointed at the clever things he couldn’t do.”
“But he’ll be bigger, stronger, and not half so smug as this one,” said Leaky, “so I’ll take ours over him any day.”
Chapter 10
Lord of Walls
“So am I a Finder of Lost Things again here?” asked Rigg.
“Not in Gathuurifold, no.” Ram Odin chuckled. “No, for this wallfold you’re going to have to go back to the rich-young-man pose you carried off so well in O when you were just starting out.”
“I ended up in prison,” said Rigg.
“Because they believed you were a royal, not because they didn’t believe you were rich and educated.”
“But I’m not educated in Gathuurifold. I won’t know anything about their history or customs.”
“Gathuurifold is as large as any other wallfold. You can be from one part of it and know nothing about the other parts. Science you’ll know—more of it than they do—and mathematics. As for economics…” and here Ram Odin chuckled again, “they’ll have a bit to teach you, though I hope you don’t come away a true believer.”
“So I’m a rich young man.”
“No, you act like a rich young man. What you are, in terms they’ll understand, is this. You are my owner. And you, in turn, are directly the property of the Lord of Walls.”
“Property!” Rigg was appalled. “They have slavery here? That was done away with in Ramfold a thousand years ago. Long before the Sessamoto came out of the northwest.”
“Slavery was abolished fifteen separate times in the past eleven thousand years in Ramfold, though admittedly I’m rather proud of Ramfold that this last time it was the whole wallfold that got rid of it, and it hasn’t been reinvented yet. Though the People’s Revolutionary Council was getting close.”
“You’re saying slavery is one of those universals.”
“When you have wars, what do you do with the prisoners?” asked Ram Odin. “You can kill them all. Bloody work, that, and it encourages your enemies to fight to the death. You can send them all back home again as soon as the war is over, but in the meantime you have to feed them, and after they go home they’re a ready-made, fully-trained army.”
“I’m getting your point.”
“You can sacrifice them to your gods, which makes a difference only if they believe in the same gods. Or you can put them to work as forced labor, to earn their keep. Or, let’s see… keep them in prison camps, not working but having to be fed, until they die of old age. Which is the cruelest course?”
“You’ve made your point. So Gathuurifold is unusually warlike? So they’re constantly generating new slaves?”
“Not at all. In fact, I’d say Gathuurifold is unusually peaceful. War is quite rare. Because of all the things that slaves have been known to do, provoking wars is rarely one of them.”
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.”