Retro Review - "We Purchased People" (1974) by Frederik Pohl (*MAJOR SPOILERS*)

"Retro Review of

'We Purchased People' (1974)

by Frederik Pohl,"

(c) 2012

by Jordan S. Bassior

Introduction: 

Frederik Pohl (b. 1919) is a grand master of science fiction, most famous for his novel (co-written with C. M. Kornbluth) The Space Merchants (1952), which was one of the first American science fictional examples of a corporate-dominated future society; and his "Gateway" stories about humans exploring the relic interstellar travel system left by the vanshed Heechee.  This is a short but powerful story about a man who has been enslaved to aliens.


Synopsis:

Not so far in the future -- perhaps some time in the early 21st century --  several races of interstellar aliens have made contact with Earth by tachyonic radio, and rather than send starships or build android agents, have instead adapted a naturally-occurring resource to their ends:  human beings.  And most of the human race doesn't mind this, for the aliens have a lot of knowledge to offer in trade.

... the star people had established fast radio contact with the people of Earth, and ... in order to conduct their business on Earth, they had purchased the bodies of certain convicted criminals, installing in them tachyon fast-radio tranceivers.

The aliens control and communicate with these "purchased people" through the FTL links, and use them to carry out various tasks:  mostly, diplomacy and the purchase of objects interesting to the aliens for their own not-always-comprehensible reasons.

Art objects they admired and purchased.  Certain rare kinds of plants and flowers they purchased and had frozen at liquid-helium temperatures.  Certain kinds of utilitarian objects they purchased.  Every few months, another rocket roared up ... and another cargo headed for the Groombridge star, on its twelve-thousand-year voyage ...

Or longer, or shorter, depending on the particular group of aliens.  As for the economics:

Each rocket cost at least $10 million.  The going rate for a healthy male paranoid capable of three or more decades of useful work was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they bought they by the dozen.

Wayne Golden, a serial killer who murdered several young women out of obscure and foul impulses

I never molested any of them sexually, you know.  I mean in some ways I'm still kind of a virgin.  That wasn't what I wanted, I just wanted to see them die.  When they asked me at the pre-trial hearing if I knew the difference between right and wrong I didn't know how to answer them.  I knew what I did was wrong for them.  But it wasn't wrong for me; it was what I wanted.

is one such purchased person.  As with all of these slaves, they've installed his tachylink behind an oval gold plate in his head.  Everyone who sees him knows what he is, despises him for his status and for the crimes he must have committed to be sold to the aliens, and knows his economic importance.

Most of the time, Wayne runs errands for the Groombridge aliens.  The aliens can control him through his implant, either directly or by sending him pain when he does something they don't like, or fails to do something they desire.  They can read his thoughts, and they send him pain if he thinks something they sufficiently dislike:  mostly regarding his past murderous actions.  Self-maintenance (eating, sleeping, hygiene) must be performed in moments of time snatched between these errands.

Every now and then, at unpredictable intervals, they give him some time off.  During these periods, he can do what he wants, as long as it's neither self- or other-destructive.  Wayne greatly values these times, as one might imagine.

Improbably, Wayne has fallen in love with another purchased person, Carolyn, whom he has met on assignement.  She is owned by the same group of aliens, which means that they can hope for some vacation at the same time, but so far they have never been able to do more than snatch minutes here and there for conversation.

Then, Wayne is given an indefinite leave, and he is able to meet Carolyn.  They go to a hotel.  She tells him that this has been arranged by the Groombridge aliens, who would be interested in observing them having sex through the link.  This repulses Wayne, but then (as he perceives) the aliens take him over through the link and

************SPOILER SPACE*************
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
make him kill Carolyn.

Or at least he thinks that the aliens made him do it.

But then, switching to the alien POV, we learn that actually

It was discovered that when control was withdrawn he became destructive, both to others and to himself.  The conjecture has been advanced that that sexual behavior which had been established as his norm -- the desruction of the sexual partner -- may not have been appropriate in the conditions obtaining at the time of the experimental procedures.  Fufther experiments will be made with differing procedures and other sexual partners in the near future.  Meanwhile Wayne Golden continues to function at normal efficiency, provided control is not withdrawn at any time, and apparently will do so indefinitely.

Analysis:

It's not that the alien control made Wayne kill Carolyn.  It's that the alien control was what was preventing Wayne from killing Carolyn (and possibly other people) as he did before:  when it was withdrawn for a sufficiently long period  of time, and he was presented with a sexual opportunity, Wayne reverted to his normal state of being a sexually-motivated serial killer.

Wayne, of course, didn't see it that way.  He blamed it on the aliens:  not in the sense in which it really was their fault (they'd set up the encounter as an experiment) but in the delusion that they had taken him over when he murdered Carolyn.  In fact it was Wayne's own sick and evil nature which was directly responsible for the killing:  he could not handle the reality of sexual attraction to a woman.

In a way this is analogous to the Earth's selling of slaves to the aliens.  It is true that the aliens offer knowlege for large amounts of financial credit, and offer the credit thus gained for their living drones.  But the transaction is voluntary on our part:  it is our desire for easy knowledge, and the lack of value we place on the lives of the severely and violently insane, which provides people for purchase.

There is of course an obvious analogy here with the West African slave trade.  The Europeans came bearing items relatively cheap for Europe to manufacture, because of Europe's slightly more advanced technology (cloths from mechanically-better looms, liquors from more advanced chemical processes, and so on) and were able to exchange these to native potentates (usually through Arab middlemen, though this is digression) in return for human beings who for whatever reason the native rulers no longer valued (they were often previous slaves, prisoners of war, or criminals).  Without this cooperation from the natives, the slave trade would have been difficult, or perhaps impossible.

The story is chilling on multiple levels.  On the most obvious level, it is horrifying because it is being told mostly form the POV of one of the "purchased people," and we get to see just how unpleasant it can be.  For instance, at one point, he is forced to soil himself in front of a whole international conference because the aliens forget he needs to go to the bathroom -- this incident is in some ways more painful to read than the ones where the aliens outright make him do things, because while few of us have been mind-controlled by aliens, all of us have at one point or another at least come close to losing excretory control in public.

On the next level, it is horrifying because Wayne Golden is a rather disgusting person.  He's no undeserving victim, he really did kill a bunch of innocent young women for the sake of gratifying his own depraved  sexual impulses, and one of the questions raised by this story is "Does he deserve this?" 

His fate is indeed horrible (enslaved to aliens until the day he dies, and dies probably because they've decided he's now useless to them), but then his deeds were also horrible.  Human justice, in the absence of aliens, would have gotten him either death, life imprisonment or (his actual previous state) probable lifelong incarceration in an insane asylum.  It is arguable which fates are worse:  the ones he meted out to his victims, the one he was previously suffering in the mental hospital, or the one to which he has been sold.

It is horrible that he should fall in love only to murder the object of his adoration.  It's obvious that what Wayne was feeling was some sort of love:  how true was the love is open to debate.  There was some obvious self-deception here:  Wayne's perversion obviously comes in part from a combination of sexual desire and an inability to accept the reality of female sexuality, as witness his excuse to himself for murdering an eleven-year-old girl, nine years ago:

... if I hadn't done her she would have been twenty or so.  Screwing all the boys.  Probably on dope.  Maybe knocked up or married.  Looked at in a certain way, I saved her a lot of sordid, miserable stuff, menstruating, letting the boys' hands and mouths on her, all that ...

(at which point the aliens send him pain to stop this line of thought).

Note Wayne's assumptions and logic, or lack of logic.  That being "twenty" means being promiscious or addicted to drugs.  That pregnancy and marriage are worse than being violently murdered.  That killing someone is "saving" them ... from life?  Keep in mind that Wayne neither knew his victim nor had any real reason to assume that any of the bad things on his list would have happened (well, aside from menstruation), and most humans would probably consider the combination of sex, preganancy and marriage to be an overwhelmingly good life path, if not combined with the promiscuity and drug abuse.

Pohl here has the mentality of a certain type of serial killer dead accurate:  the killer rejects life in general, and murders from nihilism, constructing rationalizations to avoid hating himself.  Wayne in point of fact is not someone one would want to have freely wandering the world:  the combination of his impulses and his rationalization makes it highly likely that he will kill again and again if not kept under control, whether in the crude physical sense of incarceration or the more advanced mental sense of the alien mindlink.

Which puts one in the interesting position of defending slavery.  For the aliens' offer makes sense:  it's good for the vast majority of people on the Earth, and the few people for whom it is really, really bad (the slaves) are people who in any case would be sentenced to death or life imprisonment, either of which is arguably worse than slavery to the aliens.

On the other hand, do we really know that all the Purchased People are at least as bad as Wayne?  And slavery to the aliens does mean death in the end -- from overstrain and eventual disposal in "three decades" or more, or as an experimental subject as happened to Carolyn.  We incidentally have no idea what Carolyn did to be sold into slavery -- it might have been something for which the normal penalty would have been far short of life imprisonment or death. 

And what about the wrongfully-convicted?  There is, as far as we know, no appeal from being Purchased, though it's possible that the aliens might in some cases allow resales.  Certainly the Purchased Person himself would lack the time to start any sort of appeal, even if the aliens did not stop him from doing so on his free time.  It seems to me that an innocent Purchased Person would be as unlikely to ever be released to return home as would a black slave already in the New World.

This gets into the final chill I get from the story.

People Purchase -- especially of the worst criminals -- makes sense.  Not only in the context of the storyverse, but in general.  Assuming the technological ability to implant mind control units, and some distance or other reason why you wouldn't want to use your own valued people to do the job, it's economically and even socially reasonable to use society's rejects as living drones.  It's socially easier the less they are wanted:  obviously it would be much more acceptable to use someone like Charles Manson for this purpose than  it would be to use Harry Hooch the alcoholic who lives under a bridge.

And it is a plausible alien contact scenario.  Aliens might find it difficult to physically cross interstellar distances, or to live under our environmental conditions.  Living remotes -- essentially bioroid drones -- would be an obvious alternative, especially if they had FTL radio (which might be easier under real-life physics to develop than would be macroscopic FTL travel).  If they have enough of an understanding of living neural nets, using the existing bioroids -- us -- might make more sense than either transporting them across interstellar distances, or assembling them on site on Earth.

Indeed, if the story were being done today, one obvious variant would be to use some sort of mind-control meme --- essentially a "computer virus" transmissible to our brains --- compelling the slave to check in at intervals through a single shared FTL radio -- rather than the FTL radio implants, which might be difficult to put in the limited space of a human cranium.  This is if anything a creepier idea, since it would then be much less obvious at a glance who was a Purchased Person, and what if the meme was inter-human transmissible and the aliens decided to do a little freelance slaving ...?

Conclusion:  In short, a deeply chilling and yet mostly hard-SF horror story, which I recommend to one and all.