Unbidden, Hamilton walked to stand above the sixth pen, the one obviously holding nothing but wide-eyed, mostly silent in shock or weeping with terror and despair, black and colored children aged from about six to nine or ten.
God is never going to forgive me for this, he thought. For that matter, I am never going to forgive me for this.
"You seem upset, baas," Alice said, standing in front of a seated Hamilton and wearing little but a short silk robe. "Can I help?" Before Hamilton could answer she dropped to her knees and began to undo his trousers.
"Later, Alice," he said. "Please. Later tonight I'd be very happy to have you again. For now, I just need to think."
"As you wish, baas," she answered, rising to her feet gracefully. "If you change your mind, just call. I'll be at the desk working on my studies."
South Africa had produced high quality wines and beers for centuries. Wine or beer, however, just wouldn't do. And the local whiskey was . . . charitably . . . not good.
The brandy, however, was superb. Hamilton poured his own drink from a net-wrapped, amber bottle labeled "Klipdrift."
Damned shame, he thought, that I can't allow myself to get drunk. Crimes like the ones I'm engaged in cry out for sweet oblivion.
Is there a way out of this? Caruthers was right; better two hundred should be enslaved than that four or five billion, and civilization itself, should die. But it would be better still if nobody were enslaved and all those billions, plus civilization, lived.
Is that possible, though? Is there any way I can save these kids? Save their mothers down in the slave pens? Do that while still stopping VA5H? I doubt it.
And what if I do? I mean, just imagine I had the money to buy every one of them down there and free them. What does that do? It improves the market so that more people get sold off. I could save those kids . . . but I can't do a damned thing about the two hundred that will be enslaved to make up for them. The demand will still be there . . . and that demand will be filled. And there is precisely nothing I can do about it.
Fuck.
As it turned out, Hamilton couldn't make love to Alice. She tried her very fine best to make it happen, of course, but under the circumstances her very fine best was not up to the task. No woman's would have been.
Even after he told her to give it up, and waited until she began softly to snore beside him, he still lay awake thinking of the problem of the slave children . . . and of slavery in general.
It has always existed, John, he told himself. Wars have been fought to end it, and it survived those. Alliances were formed to crush it; still it endured. Almost the whole world united against it, and still it survived.
It makes no legal sense, in that it puts an undue burden on everyone to protect the intelligent, self-willed, and dangerous property of a few. It makes no economic sense; you can get more profit paying a free man well than you will ever get from a slave that you pay nothing. Morally, it is not better than killing them; slavery is just death drawn out, the absence of liberty which is the absence of everything life is about, of everything that makes it worthwhile to live.
