Jack Vance - Gaean Reach 01 Read Online Free

community I’ve ever known. Really, it’s most exhausting.”
    Valtrina beckoned to a tall woman with long blonde ringlets. Her over-large features were exaggerated by cosmetics into a clown’s mask; Schaine wondered if she mocked the world or herself. Valtrina spoke in her hoarsest contralto: “This is Glinth Isbane, one of our celebrities: she taught three morphotes to play desisto and won all kinds of strange booty. She’s secretary of SFS and far more profound than she likes to appear.”
    “What’s SFS?” asked Schaine. “Excuse me, I’m just back on Koryphon.”
    “SFS means ‘Society for a Free Szintarre’.”
    Schaine laughed incredulously. “Isn’t Szintarre free now?”
    “Not altogether,” said Glinth Isbane in a cool voice. “No one wants—I should say, no one admits that he wants—to exploit toil or discomfort for gain, but everyone knows that this is often the case. Workers therefore have banded into guilds to protect themselves. And now, who wields more raw power than the Director of the Associated Guilds? I need not remind you of the abuses from this direction. The SFS has therefore organized a force which we hope will exactly counter-balance the excesses of the guilds.”
    Another person had joined the group: a tall young man with guileless gray eyes, soft blond hair, pleasant half-humorous features which instantly appealed to Schaine. He remarked: “Both groups—the SFS and the Associated Guilds—support my particular organization. Hence, both must be sound, and your conflicts are pettifoggery.”
    Glinth Isbane laughed. “Both groups endorse SEE, but for quite different reasons. Our reasons are the decent ones.”
    Schaine said to Valtrina, “I’m confused by all these organizations. What is SEE?”
    Valtrina, rather than explaining, brought forward the blond young man. “Elvo, meet my charming niece, just arrived from Tanquil.”
    “With great pleasure.”
    “Schaine Madduc; Elvo Glissam. Now Elvo, explain the meaning of SEE, but don’t mention me or my expensive footmen or I’ll have them fling you out into the street.”
    “SEE is Society for Emancipation of the Erjins,” said Elvo Glissam. “Please don’t think us maudlin; we’re truly attacking a serious injustice: the enslavement of intelligent beings. Valtrina, with her erjin servants, is one of our prime targets, and we’ll have her behind bars yet. Unless she displays remorse and frees her slaves.”
    “Ha! First demonstrate two things—no, three. Prove to me that Sim and Slim are intelligent beings rather than domestic animals. Then prove that they would prefer to be emancipated. Then find me two other domestics with as much docility, style and dependability as my black-and-mustard beauties. In fact, I intend to buy three or four more and train them as gardeners.”
    One of the erjin footmen had just entered the chamber, rolling a service wagon. Looking over her shoulder Schaine cringed away. “Don’t they frighten you? The buck that chewed up Kelse wasn’t much bigger, if at all.”
    “If I were running things,” said Kelse, “I’d shoot them all.”
    Glinth Isbane’s voice took on an edge. “If they’re intelligent, it’s murder. If they’re not, it’s brutality.”
    Kelse shrugged and turned aside. A few minutes previously Gerd Jemasze had appeared on the scene; now he said: “We fear our erjins; you don’t. Incidentally, I don’t notice any societies which advocate taking erjin mounts away from the Uldras.”
    “Why don’t you form one?” snapped Glinth Isbane.
    Erris Sammatzen chuckled. “As for the erjins and Vv. Glissam’s SEE, the labor guilds are understandably anxious: the erjins represent cheap labor. Vv. Glissam is presumably motivated by other concerns.”
    “Naturally. The Gaean Charter prohibits slavery, and the erjins are enslaved: benignly here at Olanje, not so benignly in Uaia. And the Wind-runners, whose role everyone ignores, are slavers, pure and simple.”
    “Or