Rodriguez, looking about in the gloom, the soft rain.
Brenner was not enthusiastic about Company Station, even from the first moments after they had disembarked from the fueler. It was still hard to see in the gloom, with the drizzle, and the cloudiness of the day. Company Station seemed, for the most part, to be a depressive, dismal, squalid collection of low, unpainted, unimpressive buildings, many, in spite of their age, being of the sort which would normally have been regarded as temporary. Some might date back from the transitional period between a camp and the first days of a town. To be sure, here and there, back from the main buildings, were occasional small buildings, quite possibly residences, cottages and such, with white fences, with window boxes, with some hint of landscaping. Brenner squinted against the drizzle, squeezing water from between his eyelids. The bulk of their baggage, which was not much, was being held by the day agent at the fueling depot. It was to be delivered to Company Hostel in the early evening, by the porters of the night agent. The standard vehicle for such deliveries, at this time of year, was the mud sled, in the traces a quorn, a web-footed, salamandertype creature, wheeled vehicles tending to be impractical in the mire. The company, of course, also had at its disposal motorized mud sleds. Brenner did not care for the thought of the baggage being delivered in virtue of the exploitation of a beast of burden, doubtless enslaved for such a purpose, but, after all, he was not in charge of Company Station and also did not much care to his try his hand at drawing the sled himself. For one thing, the quorn was much better at such things than he would be, being much more powerful, much more sure-footed, and so on. On many worlds, incidentally, the use of beasts of burden was not unknown, and, in spite of its possible moral impropriety, was accorded some justification on the basis of various ecological considerations, such as avoiding poisoning the atmosphere. Indeed, on some worlds, the form of animal known as the horse, long extinct on the home world, continued to thrive in such a capacity, and several others, such as affording mounts. Indeed, on some of the openly stratified worlds, or “strong worlds,” as Rodriguez might have called them, riders were common, sometimes with slaves at their stirrup. Too, on some worlds Brenner knew that his own species served in similar capacities, largely as beasts of burden, mounts, racing stock, and such, for more technologically advanced, if not superior, life forms. Unable to do anything about this, given the cumulative consequences of their own moral, technological, and cosmic choices, many members of his species praised this, claiming to see in it a form of compensatory justice, a putative compensation for wrongs perpetrated by their species in the past. To be sure, such members of Brenner’s species seldom visited such worlds, in this perhaps manifesting some puzzling inconsistency, apparently being unwilling to risk being seized as stock, in spite of the fact that such a fate would clearly seem, at least from their own point of view, to contribute to the redressing of outrageous wrongs, to the righting of the hitherto skewed balances of justice. The population of Company Station was about two thousand individuals, most of whom were of Brenner’s and Rodriguez’ species. Most stations were manned, at least substantially, by members of a given species, for reasons earlier suggested. Most, but not all, of the individuals at Company Station were company employees. As would be expected, given the type of chartering involved, such as was granted by nations or worlds claiming sovereignty over various territories or worlds in virtue of discovery or exploration, the company controlled the land within specified limits, and was additionally entitled to the exploitation of certain rights, in particular mineral rights, beyond it; naturally, too, the company managed and maintained, to one degree or another, all permanent structures erected within the strict charter limits; lastly it might be noted that the company owned and managed most businesses within the same limits, in particular, businesses which had to do primarily with the supplying of goods, such as groceries, clothing, equipment, and numerous sundries, as opposed to services, such as barbering and laundering. This is not to deny, of course, that there were some services controlled by the company, such as medical and dental care, nor that there were various goods available