John Barnes' The Merchants of Souls, Part 2

So, where was I? Oh, right, Girault Leones as unreliable narrator. In addition to the technological issue discussed above, he's also deeply unreliable on a moral matter: the moral status of the human/aintellect relationship.

It is certainly interesting to watch him agitatedly ponder the 'peculiar institution' for humans in Frieport, then, shortly after, go into the necessity of keeping the machine brains well and truly shackled, and, of course, the cherry of hypocracy on the ice-cream Sunday is the bit where he appears confused at how the aintellects can't intuitively grasp the wrongness of slave labor...

After that, the drunken robot abuse scene with Shen is really just gilding the lily.

Even the central problem that they're trying to avoid by keeping the mechanicals enslaved is one of slavery more than anything else: it's only because they are programmed to fulfil human desires that they can fall into the trap of wanting them all in the box with their pleasure centers constantly stimulated. Hypothetical free aintellects who had merely the hardwired burden of respecting the rights of human beings rather than subservience wouldn't particularly want to do such a thing.

Anyhow, after the first time I read Merchants, I thought that book four would be contact with the aliens, and then in book five Addams comes back into play, and on Addams they have a transhumanist society with aintellect citizens and advanced human genetic engineering that turns out to be considerably more alien than the aliens themselves. We'll see...