Tribesmen of Gor Read Free

Samos, left the chamber. "She will have to learn Gorean, and quickly," said Samos, referring to the blondish girl.
          "Let slaves, with switches, teach her," I said.
          "I will," said Samos. There was no swifter way for an Earth girl to learn Gorean, providing that candies and pastries, and little favors, like a blanket in the pen, were mixed in. Learning was closely associated, even immediately, with reward and, punishment.   Sometimes, months later, even when not under the switch, a girl would, upon a mistake in grammar or vocabulary, wince, as though expecting a fresh sting of the switch. Goreans do not coddle their slave girls. This is one of the first lessons a girl learns.
          "You learned little from her?" asked Samos.
          I had interrogated the girl when she had first came to the house of Samos.
          "Her story," I said, "is similar to those of many others. Abduction, transportation to Gor, slavery. She knows nothing. She scarcely understands, now, the meaning of her collar.
    Samos laughed unpleasantly, the laugh of a slaver.
          "Yet one thing you had from her seems of interest," said Samos, preceding me down a deep corridor. In the corridor we passed female slave. She dropped to her knees and put her head down, her hair upon the tiles, as we passed.
          "It seems a random thing, meaningless" I said.
          "In itself, meaningless," he said. "But, with other things, it induces in me a certain apprehension."
           "The remark she overheard, in English, concerning the return of the slave ships?" I asked.
          "Yes," said Samos. When I had probed the girl in the pens, mercilessly, forcing her to recall all details, even apparently meaningless scraps of detail, or information, she had recalled one thing, which had seemed puzzling, disturbing. I had not much understood it, but Samos had evinced concern. He knew more than I of the affairs of Others, the Kurii, and Priest-Kings. The girl had heard the remark drowsily, half stupified, shortly after her arrival on Gor. She, stripped, half drugged, the identification anklet of the Kurii locked on her left ankle, had lain on her stomach, with other girls, in the fresh grass of Gor. They had been removed from the slave capsules in which they had been transported. She had risen, to her elbows, her head down. She had then been conscious, vaguely, of being turned about and lifted, and carried, to a different place in the line, one determined by her height. Usually the tallest girls lead the slave chain, the height decreasing gradually toward the end of the chain, where the shortest girl is placed. This was a "common chain," sometimes called a "march chain" or "trekking chain"; it was not a "display chain: in the "display chain," or "selling chain," the arrangement of the girls may be determined by a variety of considerations, aesthetic and psychological; for example, blondes may be alternated with brunets, voluptuous girls with slim, vital girls, aristocratic girls with sweet, peasant wenches, and so on; sometimes a girl is placed   between two who are less beautiful, to enhance her beauty; sometimes the most beautiful is saved for the last on the chain; sometimes the chain is used as a   ranking device, the most beautiful being-placed at its head, the other girls then competing with one another constantly to move to a new wrist-ring, snap-lock or collar, one higher on the chain.   She had been thrown to her stomach in the grass, and her left wrist drawn to her side and down. She had heard the rustle of a looped chain, and the periodic click of the wrist-rings. She felt a length of chain dropped across the back of her thighs. Then, about her left wrist, too, closed the wrist-ring, and she, too, was a girl in a coffle. A man had stood by, making entries in a book. When her identification anklet had been removed, after she was in the wrist-ring, the man removing it had said something to the man with the