The Super Barbarians (2 page)

As the outskirts of the city itself began to close in around the highway, I found myself gripped by a sense of keen anticipation. I looked on the sidewalks for other Earthmen; I hoped at each stop that someone from my own planet would get aboard so that I could shake his hand and speak an Earthly tongue for a change. The strength of the urge surprised me. I’d thought myself pretty well resigned to doing without Earthly company until my two-year contract expired.

But I saw precisely no Earthmen at all, even when the bus passed 640 north-south and we were within walking distance of the Acre. By then my excitement had begun to give way to cynisicm. After all, these rumors about the Acre of Earth were ridiculous, and sure to be exaggerated by wishful thinking. Probably the most I’d find would be a sort of ghetto.

Nonetheless it would be wonderful if…

I
TRIED TO
look at the matter objectively. We were a defeated subject race. That was the crucial point. No matter
how we tried to disguise the unpleasant truth from ourselves—by pretending that the war between Earth and Qallavarra had been a sort of draw, by referring to the end of it as the armistice instead of the conquest as the Vorra called it—we had to face facts eventually.

I was fifteen years too young to remember the war, but I knew well how tight the Great Grip was up to the time I was ten or twelve years old. Of course, I’d learned about the war—official version—in school, and I’d had plenty of opportunity to talk with old men who had fought in it. A considerable fraction of all humanity had fought in it. Moreover, since coming to Qallavarra I’d managed to piece together a Vorrish view of the most important engagement—the Battle of Fourth Orbit—from talking to the gatekeeper Swallo.

All kinds of subtle things! reminded us of our defeat. For instance, we ourselves now called that engagement the Battle of Fourth Orbit instead of its original Earthly title, the Battle of the Martian Sphere. The Vorrish, naturally, referred to the Solar planets by numbers, not names.

Not being a subspace physicist, I knew nothing of the reason why the battles of that war had taken place in such well-defined volumes of space except the parroted phrases that went with history lessons; it had something to do with Keplerian harmonic relationships in the vicinity of suns which made it impossible for large numbers of ships to emerge simultaneously into real space except at roughly the distances represented by the orbits of major planets. Being anxious to take maximum possible advantage of the fact they had subspace drive and we didn’t, the Vorrish forces always concentrated their attacks on these vulnerable points of arrival.

Subspace was merely a hypothesis to Earth physicists at the time of the Vorrish onslaught. Our ships were getting around the system on ion-drives and a somewhat erratic form of inverse gravity which by negating inertia permitted speeds fairly close to the speed of light, but which sometimes blew up unexpectedly. Oddly enough, we could find one of our few crumbs of comfort in that The first time I broached the subject of the war to him, Swallo mentioned it without prompting.

Despite the apparently disastrous technical gap between our ships and those of the Vorra, we managed to get out a computer analysis of their attack patterns and discover this relation between planetary distances and points of emergence. So when the Grand Fleet turned up at Fourth Orbit we were waiting, and managed to hit them very badly indeed. We were out-numbered, and our chief weapon was a wrecking-ray with a range of a mere thirty thousand miles; nonetheless, thanks to getting there first and being able to take advantage of the mechanical hangover which electronic equipment suffered after being dipped into subspace, we destroyed about sixty per cent of their total forces before we were rolled up. On the other hand, we lost eighty-five per cent of our own and we hadn’t any more, whereas the Vorra had.

It turned out that they were logical fighters; they were in business for what they could get out of it, and while they were prepared to make Earth a planet-wide desert if we insisted, they regarded that as a bad investment. So, acting on the principal that he who fights and runs away.. . .

They never did calm us down completely, of course. But after fifteen or twenty years of sabotage, underground resistance, assassination and other jabs where it hurt, we
came to a tacit mutual tolerance. On the Vorrish side it was tempered with a land of puzzlement. I’d been surprised to learn of it, but I had no room for doubt, because I had it direct from my employer, Pwill of the House of Pwill himself.

Conversely the Vorra puzzled us. Once things relaxed to the point where Earthmen were granted minor rights on Qallavarra itself, we had plenty of opportunities to investigate their society, and what shook us was that it was practically feudal. All power resided in the great houses, which combined in themselves the functions of nations, ethnic groupings and business corporations. There were about sixty of these houses, whose seats were in the southern temperate continent, but whose influence was more than planetary. At any given time perhaps half a dozen of the sixty shared an ascendancy over the rest Currently the House of Shugurra was most powerful of all, but the House of Pwill was due to tip the balance if things went on. That was why Pwill of the House of Pwill came to Earth as lieutenant governor for a five-year period, bringing with him half his private army, three-quarters of his space fleet, an enormous retinue of attendants and his four senior wives.

Much to our amazement, Pwill decided on arrival that he wanted an Earthly tutor for his heir, the eldest son. I was selected for a peculiar mixture of reasons. I was two inches taller, I could outrun, outswim, outwrestle and outthink Pwill heir apparent. And what mattered most, by coincidence I was twice the boy’s age on the day I was engaged, down to the very day. To Pwill, this was important.

I gradually found out that Pwill believed he could find on Earth the secret of making his house the dominant force on Qallavarra; that was why he’d taken the dangerous
gamble of absenting himself from home for five years. He wanted his heir to see things the same way, but that young bastard (figuratively; the Vorrish noble families made damned sure the heir was really the heir) preferred to spend his time whaling, gambling and running after women. So I didn’t teach him much.

However, Llaq took a fancy to me. When the time came for the family’s return to Qallavarra, she asked if I wanted to join her personal retinue for a couple of years.

I couldn’t kid myself I was of the caliber of the independents who had got Jto Qallavarra because they had valuable skills they could sell. This was my only conceivable chance to make a trip everyone wanted to make. So I accepted.

What was it that had caused this sudden interest among the Vorra in the people of Earth—a planet they had conquered and whose people they had reduced efficiently and thoroughly to the status of a dependent satrapy? I assumed that the Vorra themselves knew.

It was quite a surprise to find they didn’t.

They were only convinced that we must have something they hadn’t, which had enabled us to inflict immense damage on the Vorrish fleet against hopeless odds, which had enabled us to put ourselves together again after the armistice. The nearest comparison I could think of was the way the Romans felt about the Greeks after they had added Greece to their empire. The Greeks had been well and truly beaten; nonetheless they gave the impression of retaining some secret the Romans couldn’t take away because they were too coarse and material-minded to know what it was.

So eventually the Greeks became the most highly prized of slaves; a well-to-do family would buy an educated Greek
as a teacher for its children, and Greek became the sophisticated language with which to salt your conversation.

Whether we actually had- this important mysterious something or not, we were quick to see the advantage of the Vorrish belief that we had. Back home, a man who had actually spent some time on Qallavarra had come to see me when he heard I was going to be tutor to Pwill Heir Apparent. He told me that the chief feature of Vorrish society was its noise. Not actual, ear-battering noise, but noise in the technical sense of wasted efforts and power squandered without reason.

“They may have the subspace drive,” this man had said. “But their social organization is practically Neolithic! Look at the time they spend jockeying for position and doing one another down.

“Another thing. How many Vorra have you seen wearing a watch? Only the nobles and officers. I hear they have to teach their soldiers to read a timepiece when they join up. Things like that. And medicine—they’re ignorant. And social sciences they haven’t got, nothing more than empirical notions of how to keep down a conquered people and exploit their productivity.”

“Put like that,” I said wonderingly, “it seems impossible they should have conquered us. But they did.”

Conquered or not, we’d made an impression. It was becoming fashionable among the nobles to read translations of Earthly literature and to acquire some facility on an Earthly musical instrument, The violin was the most popular because it could readily be tuned to a Vorrish scale instead of ours.

There were all kinds of fields which the Vorra had apparently
regarded as beneath their notice where we were superbly efficient. This bus I was riding in, for example, was built on Earth and powered with Earthly solar cells; fifty years ago the Vorra had subspace ships but at home they made do with draft animals for anyone below noble rank and rather inefficient steam buggies for the rest. This road had been slagged with an Earthly machine which fused silica soil—this part of Qallavarra was sandy—into a rough but serviceable surface for highways. They’d built the Sahara Highway with it.

I had a lot of reasons to be glad the Vorra were so impressed, myself. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been here.

Not, come to think of it, that it was doing me a lot of good. I’d had visions of being able to get about on Qalla-verra and see this alien world. Instead, I’d seen—after nearly seven months—the estate of the House of Pwill, one or two Other houses where Llaq had taken me on courtesy visits, and part of the capital city.

Oh, I was fairly content. The pay was good; I had comfortable quarters. My duties consisted largely in administrative tasks and occasional instruction of the younger children in a few Earthly accomplishments to let them keep up with, or a few steps ahead of, the Vorrish equivalent of the Joneses. But I had no friends, and I suddenly realized that was getting me down.

The estate, of course, was enormous. There were three great houses situated near the city—Pwill, Shugurra and another of less power. Each house was almost a town in itself; the population of Pwill numbered upwards of eight thousand in a great complex of buildings surrounded by a wall, and beyond that twelve thousand or so vassal peasants, the army, the spacecrews, all the technical staffs from miners
to metallurgists whose townlets scattered across the four hundred thousand square miles of the estate clear to the sea’s edge two hundred and twenty miles from the house. None of the estates controlled by the six largest houses was much smaller than that. And it didn’t stop with the sea, of course; on other continents the device of Pwill looked on mines, plantations and resources of manpower.

Altogether something like two and a half million people owed direct allegiance to the House of Pwill. And at least as many again only enjoyed status as private individuals by paying off installments on a manumission debt.

Some ninety per cent of the population of Qallavarra was nominally free; they controlled their own lives and nothing more. Those in bond to a house had to jump when ordered, but were better off in the sense that they got a slice of whatever was going before anyone else did. People in the cities were almost all free, and the mutual jealousy of the houses assured they would stay so. A few centuries before, powerful houses had tried to seize prosperous cities for themselves, but the habit had died out in favor of exploration of other worlds. How many others, we couldn’t be sure; we thought four, besides Earth, and possibly others controlled by small alliances of houses and jealously guarded.

Earth was the only one which had had to be reduced by all the houses working in unison. This was another point they bore in mind when dunking of us.

And that was why Earthmen were the only subject race of the Vorra permitted to walk occasionally on the surface of Qallavarra. That was why there was an Acre of Earth and not an Acre of any other planet. That was why there were rumors about Earthmen having literally taken over the city blocks in which they lived until Vorrish police didn’t
dare enter the streets. Vanish nobles had to come in person if they wanted to do business, and the human languages were the ones spoken.

But I told myself that after a mere ten years such notions were Incredible. I prepared for a complete disappointment; I was ready to find not a grain of truth in all those tales.

That was why it shocked me so to find they were absolutely true.

T
HE BUS HAD
gone straight as an arrow through the city, picking up and dropping the occasional passenger; none of my original companions had stayed on. It made a turn at 656, though. The reason for this turn came to me at once—and I dismissed it.

Refusal to run through the Acre? Absurd!

Nonetheless, this was apparently as close as I was going to be brought. I worked my way to the door at the next stop and got down on the street, blinking.

By now, I was fairly used to the city’s unchanging provincial look. The buildings—say houses, and the idea is clearer; the houses, then, were mostly rather mean, few of them more than three stories high. They were built of a dull sandy colored concrete. At ground level there were trading establishments. Butchers, clothiers, trinket shops, and frequent taverns predominated in this district. The streets were narrow and although well paved were muddy, because the drainage system was poor and refuse from the houses generally choked the soakaways. Moreover, most of the wagons
and carts were drawn by draft cattle, and their droppings were rather seldom washed away completely by the rain.