The Super Barbarians Read Free

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 dangerousgamble 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 Greekas 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 apparentlyregarded 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