Slavemakers by Joseph Wallace Read Free Book Online Page A

the very end, just before Jason’s own free life ended, he’d learned of a wasp that injected a virus along with an egg into its host. Some kind of beetle, it had been, though he couldn’t remember what. Maybe a ladybug?
    But that wasn’t the important thing. What mattered was that wasps were strong and clever enough even to enslave viruses—themselves organisms able to ravage life on earth—and turn them to their own purposes. In this case, the virus, replicating inside the host’s body, would transmit the wasp’s commands. And the helpless beetle would abandon all its own natural behaviors to do nothing but guard the cocoon in which the newly emerged wasp would live.
    Nor were mammals immune from enslavement. Every day, his own life proved it.
    *   *   *
    THIS AFTERNOON, HE’D come to the breeding chambers to retrieve the corpses of a pair of colobus monkeys. He was accompanied this time by a ridden slave, lost in whatever dreams filled the minds of these creatures. Its rider was perched on the back of its neck, the stinger sliding in and out of its flesh in some complex pattern Jason would never understand. The ridden slave, as always, oblivious to the insertion of the needle.
    Jason had known this slave’s name once, he thought.
    As the surviving monkeys huddled in the back of their cell, he and the ridden slave picked up the stiffening bodies. Eyeless, of course, their thick black-and-white fur coarse and matted with blood, the swellings on their abdomens now as soft and flaccid as popped balloons.
    As they carried the corpses up to the fort’s main plaza, Jason could see some slaves heading back from the fields and pastures, others starting to prepare the simple evening meal. This was the most brilliant thing about the workings of the camp: how closely it resembled a colony that would have been run by, and occupied entirely by, humans. Food, shelter, procreation—all the same needs and desires addressed.
    At first glance, this camp
could
have been a human colony. A colony of free humans.
    Until you looked more closely, saw and smelled the thieves, noticed the riders.
    Until you understood that even those who’d stayed human this long were here to serve the slavemakers.
    *   *   *
    THERE WAS NO need for iron bars or high walls here because there was no place to go, nowhere to run. The slavemakers saw all, knew everything, and always—in every case—pronounced sentence and administered punishment.
    It had been years since anyone had tried to escape.
    *   *   *
    THE OVEN WAS located on the fort’s roof, overlooking the ruins of the old city, the channel, and Manda Island across the way. Sometimes the coals were kept banked—never extinguished—but now they were burning fiercely. Otherwise, their heat would not be strong enough to consume the bones of the dead.
    Beside him, the thief rider pulled its stinger out of the flesh of its slave’s neck. It must have nicked a capillary, Jason noticed, because its usually shining white stinger was smeared with pink, and a tiny pearl of blood formed at the insertion point.
    Then the rider rose into the air, hovering fifteen or so feet above them. At the beginning, Jason had wondered if separating a rider from its slave might let the slave become human again, but, of course, it hadn’t.
    Not that it mattered. Riders and ridden were never apart for very long. And if a rider was killed—something Jason had seen happen twice—then another soon took its place.
    Once this rider was safely above, Jason dropped the dead colobus on the ground. Bending over, he pickedup a few of the ragged cloths—someone’s old T-shirt, what must once have been a festively dyed beach towel but was now just a smear of brown—that were piled on the reddish roof tiles around the oven and wrapped them around his palms.
    Then, grabbing the oven’s steel