Theemile wrote:SoV has points which counter this, mentioning specifically that they don't know they are slaves.
s
p
o
I
l
e
r
s
many of the people from Houdini didn't know where they were going
Chapter Seventy-Five
“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Zachariah McBryde asked quietly, standing behind Gail Weiss on the balcony. She was a tall woman, but he was still taller, and he shook his head as he gazed out across the city’s lights across her shoulder. “I always figured there had to be some kind of…I don’t know…an arsenal world, I guess, like Haven’s Bolthole, out there somewhere, but I never imagined this.”
as for the slaves....
What he’d found was a world whose every citizen subscribed enthusiastically to the realization of the Detweiler Plan. More than three quarters of those citizens—well over eighty percent of them, in fact—were clones, produced and decanted with all the expertise Manpower Incorporated had developed over the centuries. The proportion was beginning to drop as the first generations aged and old fashioned natural childbirths expanded, yet for decades to come, vat-grown, cloned children would continue to hugely outnumber those born naturally. Under Mesan law—which wasn’t the same as Dariusan law, to be fair—those clones were the property of whoever had produced them. In that sense, they were genetic slaves at birth just as much as anyone Manpower had ever packaged and sold. But once these “slaves” had been decanted, they’d been raised by a human surrogate parents. They’d been educated and nurtured, not brutalized—treated as valued human beings, not so many animate pieces of property. They’d been encouraged to think for themselves, to value themselves.
...
Of course, there were a few small holes in the average Dariusan’s education. They knew about genetic slavery, for example, but they regarded it as a grim, dark and perverted legacy of the way in which the galaxy at large had demonized Leonard Detweiler and his fellow visionaries. They were taught that Leonard would have rejected the terrible cancer which had grown within the society of Mesa as its members gave up the struggle and accepted—embraced—the outlaw status the rest of the galaxy had forced upon them, and that the Alignment had arisen in large part as a reaction against that institution. The Alignment’s great mission was to reclaim Leonard’s original, glorious vision. To be its defender, its champion—its standard bearer. That vision must be carried to triumph, and if the benighted parochialism of the rest of the galaxy rejected the brightness of its promise, then the people of Darius were prepared for whatever struggle might be required.
...
But at least part of it’s an enormous lie. The thought went through his brain like a bittersweet strain of music. They don’t know the truth about Manpower, about the way the Alignment’s used it for so long. What happens if they ever ask themselves why something like the Alignment, with the resources to colonize Darius—to build all this infrastructure in the first place—was never able to root out genetic slavery on its own homeworld? What happens, once they’re allowed out of Darius—when they storm out of Darius, manning the Alignment’s warships? Do they go right on accepting what they’ve been taught? Or do they start to ask questions? The kinds of questions Jack may have asked himself.
The important piece is that there is a Darian law - which the citizens of Darius know about, and MESAN law, which considers them slaves. And unlike, say, Manticorian law, which doesn't give 2 flipps about what the Mesans say on the topic and considers all humans, humans - with all the rights that confers, Darian Law appears to be under Mesan law; and while the daily laws that Darian citizens use give them rights, in reality, they have none.
