I mentioned the debt and mortgage our father took on to insure an education for his children. He was in arrears on the payments, of course, because all peasants were. That was the way of life on Callisto. My father, Major Hubris, was an intelligent man with minimal formal education. He knew very well that the big landowners were systematically cheating the peasants, but didn't know how to stop it. I had progressed far enough in my education to have a fair notion of the situation, and was confident that by the time I reached maturity I would be able to set about reversing the downward trend for our family. But until that time, the Hubrises were vulnerable—and that vulnerability had abruptly been exploited. Foreclosure—that finished us before we could begin to fight back. We had three days to vacate, unless we could pay off the mortgage in its entirety before that deadline. Of course we could not.
