The Super Barbarians Read Free Page A

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 minersto 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’tdare 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.

CHAPTER III

    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?