Superimposed upon the indefinite outlines of the schoolroom, cities soared across Amalfi’s vision, cities aloft, in flight, looking for work, cracking their food from oil, burrowing for ores the colonial planets could not reach without help, and leaving again to search for work; sometimes welcomed grudgingly, sometimes driven out, usually underpaid, often potential brigands, always watched jealously by the police of hegemon Earth; spreading, ready to mow any lawn, toward the limits of the galaxy-He waved a hand annoyedly before his eyes and looked for a monitor, found one standing at his elbow, and wondered how long he had been there—or, conversely, how long Amalfi himself had been lulled into the learning trance.
“Where’s Karst?” he said brusquely. “The first serf we brought in? I need him.”
“Yes, sir. He’s in a chair toward the front of the room.” The monitor—whose function combined the duties of classroom supervisor and nurse—turned away briefly to a nearby wall server, which opened and floated out to him a tall metal tumbler. The monitor took it and led the way through the room, threading his way among the scattered couches. Usually most of these were unoccupied, since it took less than five hundred hours to bring the average child through tensor calculus and hence to the limits of what he could be taught by passive inculcation alone. Now, however, every couch was occupied, and few of them by children.
One of the counterpointing, subaudible voices was murmuring: “Some of the cities which turned bindlestiff did not pursue the usual policy of piracy and raiding, but settled instead upon faraway worlds and established tyrannical rules. Most of these were overthrown by the Earth police; the cities were not efficient fighting machines. Those which withstood the first assault sometimes were allowed to remain in power for various reasons of policy, but such planets were invariably barred from commerce. Some of these involuntary empires may still remain on the fringes of Earth’s jurisdiction. Most notorious of these recrudescences of imperialism was the reduction of Thor V, the work of one of the earliest of the Okies, a heavily militarized city which had already earned itself the popular nickname of ‘the Mad Dogs.’ The epithet, current among other Okies as well as planetary populations, of course referred primarily—”
“Here’s your man,” the monitor said in a low voice. Amalfi looked down at Karst. The serf already had undergone a considerable change. He was no longer a distorted and worn caricature of a man, chocolate-colored with sun, wind and ground-in dirt, so brutalized as to be almost beyond pity. He was, instead, rather like a fetus as he lay curled on the couch, innocent and still perfectible, as yet unmarked by any experience which counted. His past—and there could hardly have been much of it, for although he had said that his present wife, Eedit, had been his fifth, he was obviously scarcely twenty years old—had been so completely monotonous and implacable that, given the chance, he had sloughed it off as easily and totally as one throws away a single garment. He was, Amalfi realized, much more essentially a child than any Okie infant could ever be.
The monitor touched Karst’s shoulder and the serf stirred uneasily, then sat up, instantly awake, his intense blue eyes questioning Amalfi. The monitor handed him the metal tumbler, now beaded with cold, and Karst drank from it. The pungent liquid made him sneeze, quickly and without seeming to notice that he had sneezed, like a cat.
“How’s it coming through, Karst?” Amalfi said.
“It is very hard,” the serf said. He took another pull at the tumbler.
“But once grasped, it seems to bring everything into flower at once. Lord Amalfi, the Proctors claim that IMT came from the sky on a cloud. Yesterday I only believed that. Today I think I understand it.”
“I think you do,” Amalfi said. “And you’re not alone. We have serfs by scores in the city now, learning—just look around you and you’ll see. And they’re learning more than just simple physics or cultural morphology. They’re learning freedom, beginning with the first one—freedom to hate.”