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. I feel like a fraki and I doubt if I'll ever learn to be a Trader."
Her face was suddenly sad. "You were free once. It's a hard habit to get over."
"Huh?"
"You've had violent dislocations, Thorby. Your foster father -- your first one, Baslim the Wise -- bought you as a slave and made you his son, as free as he was. Now your second foster father, with the best of intentions, adopted you as his son, and thereby made you a slave."
"Why, Margaret!" Thorby protested. "How can you say such a thing?"
"If you aren't a slave, what are you?"
"Why, I'm a Free Trader. At least that's what Father intended, if I can ever get over my fraki habits. But I'm not a slave. The People are free. All of us."
"All of you . . . but not each of you."
"What do you mean?"
"The People are free. It's their proudest boast. Any of them can tell you that freedom is what makes them People and not fraki. The People are free to roam the stars, never rooted to any soil. So free that each ship is a sovereign state, asking nothing of anyone, going anywhere, fighting against any odds, asking no quarter, not even cooperating except as it suits them. Oh, the People are free; this old Galaxy has never seen such freedom. A culture of less than a hundred thousand people spread through a quarter of a billion cubic light-years and utterly free to move anywhere at any time. There has never been a culture like it and there may never be again
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