Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [188]
"All done with native labor?" Fassa interrupted his explanation. "But everybody knows the Loosies are too stupid to do anything useful."
Blaize put one finger to the side of his nose and winked, a gesture borrowed from an old tri-D show called Fagin and His Gang. "Amazing what even a veg-head can do with the proper . . . incentive," he drawled.
"Where d'you store the whips and spiked sticks?" That was pudgy Darnell, bright-eyed as if he actually expected Blaize to produce a panoply of torture instruments and demonstrate their use.
"You've no subtlety, Overton-Glaxely," Blaize reproved the man. "Think. The—er—Loosies were starving when I came here, kept alive only by PTA ration bricks. The task of distributing the ration bricks, naturally, belonged to the PTA representative on Angalia. Me."
"So?" Darnell really was amazingly slow. Not for the first time, Blaize wondered how he'd made such a success out of OG Shipping and the smaller corporations that OG Enterprises had swallowed up over the years.
"So," Blaize drawled, "I saw no reason to give away PTA ration supplements when they could perfectly well be used to train the natives. We have a simple rule of life now on Angalia, my friends—no work, no eat." He pointed towards the entrance to the corycium mine. "And it's not just applied to building the master's bungalow. I hold the title to that mine. United Spacetec abandoned it because they couldn't keep human miners on Angalia. I use the native resources to mine the native resources, so to speak—you'll see the day shift coming out in a few minutes."
"And you pay them with ration bricks, which come free via PTA?" Alpha gave Blaize an approving smile that chilled him to the bone. "I must admit, Blaize, you're not as stupid as you look. Anything you make from the corycium mine is profit, free and clear."
Blaize opened his mouth wide in simulated shock. "Dr. Hezra-Fong! Please! I am deeply shocked and disillusioned that you should think such a thing of me. Any profits accruing from the corycium mine naturally belong to the natives of Angalia." He waited a beat before continuing. "Of course, since the natives of Angalia do not have Intelligent Sentient Status, they can't have bank accounts—so the credits do, perforce, go into a Net account in my name. But held in trust for the Loosies—you understand?"
The others chuckled knowingly and all agreed that they did indeed understand, and that Blaize was a clever lad to have found such a good way of covering his tail in the event of a PTA inspection. All but Polyon de Gras-Waldheim, who was tapping one finger against the seam of his black trousers and staring at the thunderclouds on the horizon.
"You've done pretty well, considering," Darnell admitted, "but with creatures as dumb as these, surely you have—er—discipline problems?" He was getting that whips-and-chains expression again.
"If he does, maybe regulated doses of Seductron would be the answer," cooed Alpha. "I've just about got the bugs worked out of the dosage schedule now, and it might be interesting to test it on non-humans."
Blaize forced himself to smile. Time for his demonstration. He'd planned it beforehand, in case there was need to make an additional impression on the others, but had hoped it wouldn't be necessary. Messy, it would be. And wasteful. But apparently they still weren't convinced of his firm control over the Loosies.
"Thanks, Alpha, but Seductron wouldn't quite do the trick; the Loosies are passive and malleable enough already. What they need is occasional stimulation, and that," he said with a low laugh, "that I can arrange for myself." He raised one hand in the air and brought it down with a swift chopping motion.
Two of the tall rock pillars beside the garden wall moved forward in the shambling, awkward gait characteristic of the Loosies. With movement, their features and humanoid shapes could be dearly seen, although until a moment earlier they had blended in with the real stones making up the rest of the wall. Between them they hauled a third "rock," a native whose double-jointed