make," Erskyll began.

"Oh, rubbish; don't talk about resigning, Obray. You made a few mistakes
here, though I can't think of a better planet in the Galaxy on which you
could have made them. But no matter what you did or did not do, this
would have happened eventually."

"You really think so?" Obray, Count Erskyll, was desperately anxious to
be assured of that. "Perhaps if I hadn't been so insistent on this
constitution...."

"That wouldn't have made a particle of difference. We all made this
inevitable simply by coming here. Before we came, it would have been
impossible. No slave would have been able even to imagine a society
without Lords-Master; you heard Chmidd and Hozhet, the first day, aboard
the _Empress Eulalie_. A slave had to have a Master; he simply couldn't
belong to nobody at all. And until you started talking socialization,
nobody could have imagined property without a Masterly property-owning
class. And a massacre like this would have been impossible to organize
or execute. For one thing, it required an elaborate conspiratorial
organization, and until we emancipated them, no slave would have dared
trust any other slave; every one would have betrayed any other to curry
favor with his Lord-Master. We taught them that they didn't need
Lords-Master, or Masterly favor, any more. And we presented them with a
situation their established routines didn't cover, and forced them into
doing some original thinking, which must have hurt like Nifflheim at
first. And we retrained the army and handed it over to Yakoop Zhannar,
and inspired Zhorzh Khouzhik to organize the Labor Police, and
fundamentally, no government is anything but armed force. Really, Obray,
I can't see that you can be blamed for anything but speeding up an
inevitable process slightly."

"You think they'll see it that way at Asgard?"

"You mean the Prime Minister and His Majesty? That will be the way I
shall present it to them. That was another reason I wanted to stay on
here. I anticipated that you might want a credible witness to what was
going to happen," he said. "Now, you'll be here for not more than five
years before you're promoted elsewhere. Nobody remains longer than that
on a first Proconsular appointment. Just keep your eyes and ears and,
especially, your mind, open while you are here. You will learn many
things undreamed-of by the political-science faculty at the University
of Nefertiti."

"You said I made mistakes," Erskyll mentione