Kinds of Service
There is no fixed set of slaves. There is a fixed set of things households need done, and a slave does whichever she was purchased for. Roles are assigned by skill and temperament, which is the obvious way to buy and is also the philosophy applied: placing a person where her nature fits is what the whole arrangement claims to do, and a slave visibly wrong for her work is a mark against whoever put her there. The role is advertised at sale by the ribbon system (see The Slave Market#Reading a slave at market). She can be moved — he owns her — but a slave trained to a thing is worth more doing it.
- Domestic service
- By far the largest group: cooking, cleaning, carrying, laundry, the door, and everything else that keeps a house running. An upper-middle household keeps none or one; a wealthy one between one and four; larger establishments are conspicuous.
- Attendants
- Close personal service — grooming, dressing, bathing, company. An attendant is not necessarily a sexual slave; the two are separate roles at sale, and what makes her an attendant is proximity. Often chosen for beauty as well as skill, because a household displays what it keeps, and frequently one who submitted voluntarily, since it is close work. In many households she is the person he is closest to. What the two of them are to each other is their business; what the law says is that he owns her.
- Skilled service
- Secretaries, bookkeepers, correspondents, tutors, medical assistants, musicians, dancers, performers. Expensive, and bought for what they know. Performance slaves are a category within it; a household with a good dancer lends her to occasions the way it would lend anything worth showing.
- Supervisory service
- Household management, childcare, training younger slaves, care of the elderly — the work experience buys, and where a long-serving slave often ends up. A good household does not sell her at that age; it moves her to lighter work. A slave sold at that age has usually been sold by someone who could not afford to keep her, and everyone assumes that first.
- Sexual service
- A slave bought because that is the work, rather than one who happens to share her owner's bed; the world observes the distinction. Most who fill the role are people who want it — the arrangement is unbearable otherwise, and everybody knows that too. Taverns are frequently also brothels, and the tavern slave, owned outright or rented from a slaver house, is the visible face of it, dressed to be identified and wearing a colored rental collar. Her refusal holds in a tavern as it holds anywhere, and a patron who does not understand that is thrown out by people who deal with it regularly.
- Heavy labor
- Dockwork, farmwork, hauling, the physical trades — the same work free laborers beside her are doing, marked out only by the collar. None of the forms apply in a field; nobody kneels to hand a man a tool.
- The mines
- Where a slave goes when no household will have her: murderers sold on, criminals whose sentences made them property, war captives with nothing to recommend them. The Bill of Chattel says why they are there, and free miners work the same seams — the difference is that they can leave. A slave sent to the mines understands it is an ending, and it usually is; the rare buy-out is talked about when it happens.