The Currents of Space by Isaac Asimov

breeze brought him the heavy night odor of the kyrt blossoms. A few minutes now and he would be out in the relative safety of the open fields where there were no regular patroller beats and where, through the ragged night clouds, he would see the stars again. Even the hard, bright yellow star that was Sark’s sun.
    It had been
his
sun for half his life. When he first saw it through a spaceship’s porthole as more than a star, as an unbearably bright little marble, he wanted to get on his knees. The thought that he was approaching paradise removed even the paralyzing fright of his first space flight.
    He had landed on his paradise, and been delivered to an old Florinian who saw to it that he was bathed and clothed becomingly. He was brought to a large building, and on the way there his elderly guide had bowed low to a figure that passed.
    “Bow!” the old one muttered angrily to the young Terens.
    Terens did so and was confused. “Who was that?”
    “A Squire, you ignorant farm hand.”
    “He! A Squire?”
    He stopped dead in his tracks and had to be urged forward. It was his first sight of a Squire. Not twenty feet tall at all, but a man like men. Other Florinian youths might have recovered from the shock of such a disillusion, but not Terens. Something changed inside him, changed permanently.
    In all the training he received, through all the studies in which he did so well, he never forgot that Squires were men.
    For ten years he studied, and when he neither studied nor ate nor slept, he was taught to make himself useful in manysmall ways. He was taught to run messages and empty waste-baskets, to bow low when a Squire passed and to turn his face respectfully to the wall when a Squire’s Lady passed.
    For five more years he worked in the Civil Service, shifted as usual from post to post in order that his capacities might best be tested under a variety of conditions.
    A plump, soft Florinian visited him once, smiling his friendship, pinching his shoulder gently, and asked what he thought of the Squires.
    Terens repressed a desire to turn away and run. He wondered if his thoughts could have imprinted themselves in some obscure code upon the lines of his face. He shook his head, murmured a string of banalities on the goodness of the Squires.
    But the plump one stretched his lips and said, “You don’t mean that. Come to this place tonight.” He gave him a small card, that crumbled and charred in a few minutes.
    Terens went. He was afraid, but very curious. There he met friends of his, who looked at him with secrecy in their eyes and who met him at work later with bland glances of indifference. He listened to what they said and found that many seemed to believe what he had been hoarding in his own mind and honestly had thought to be his own creation and no one else’s.
    He learned that at least some Florinians thought the Squires to be vile brutes who milked Florina of its riches for their own useless good while they left the hard-working natives to wallow in ignorance and poverty. He learned that the time was coming when there would be a giant uprising against Sark and all the luxury and wealth of Florina would be appropriated by their rightful owners.
    How? Terens asked. He asked it over and over again. After all, the Squires and the patrollers had the weapons.
    And they told him of Trantor, of the gigantic empire that had swollen in the last few centuries until half the inhabited worlds of the Galaxy were part of it. Trantor, they said, would destroy Sark with the help of the Florinians.
    But, said Terens, first to himself, then to others, if Trantorwas so large and Florina so small, would not Trantor simply replace Sark as a still larger and more tyrannical master? If that were the only escape, Sark was to be endured in preference. Better the master they knew than the master they knew not.
    He was derided and ejected, with threats against his life if he ever talked of what he had heard.
    But some time afterward, he