by John Brunner
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.
CHAPTER III
THE 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.
Many of Earth’s finest cities had been razed during the war; it had been a shock: to me, though, the first time I came here to find a difference between this city and any I had known at home. Through the poverty of an Earthly city, caused by the generation-long drain of our manufacturing potential to satisfy the greedy Vorra, a certain sophistication had survived. An Earthly street was colorful, and often had a basic rhythm of design. Vorrish streets never did. Everywhere the colors were drab, and the houses looked as though they had just been dumped where they stood, without thought.
The streets were busy, which cheered things up a little. As I stood checking the gridiron pattern in my mind to decide which way I had to go to arrive most quickly at my destination, women with big-wheeled trolleys pushed past me to fetch their family’s provisions, men on business errands, couriers with their red helmets providing a splash of brilliance, police in black with white-painted harness, and draymen cursing their obstinate oxen all went by.
But no Earthmen, it seemed. That was still puzzling.
I shrugged, and made to cross the road to where I had to go. A sharp voice bellowed, at me, telling me to stand where I was, and as I drew back a group of trainee soldiers came doubling around the corner, wearing insignia I could not place.
Like magic virtually everyone stopped what he or she was doing and jumped to the nearest doorway; failing a doorway, they pressed to the wall or ducked behind a cart. The same harsh voice that had bellowed at me—it belonged to the squad commander—ordered halt, dress, test weapons.
The Vorrish method of testing weapons was beautifully simple; each man raised, sighted and fired. A wall they happened to be facing when they halted, which fortunately had only one small window in it, was instantly stuck full of bullets. I had heard veterans say how childishly Vorrish infantry seemed to enjoy using their weapons after their landing on Earth, when mopping up pockets of resistance, and in particular of their fondness for spectacular blazes. They would happily spend half an hour watching a building burn down while Earthly troops took advantage of the delay to make good their escape.
Well, this was spectacular enough; they had fired magnesium bullets, which were ignited by the charge in the breech and leapt out like fireworks to become brief, blinding pockmarks of Silver glare on the wall.
A little shamefacedly, the people who had ducked for shelter began to move about again. Conscious of the impression he had created, the squad commander stamped up and down in front of his men snuffing the barrels of their guns to make certain they had all fired.
Unless they were going to start popping off again, I didn’t see any further reason for hanging about. I began to cross the street, and it was that which made people look at me closely for the first time.
Most of the Vorra were thickset, light-eyed, and shrouded in outdoor cloaks like mine; about one in eight or nine of the men going out and coming on the streets wore a house shield as I did. At first glance it wasn’t obvious that I was an Earthman. The differences that signified were mainly internal.
Nonetheless, an Earthman would always give himself away if he didn’t consciously imitate the Vorrish way of walking, the angle at which a Vorrish head set on Vorrish shoulders, and the hang of the empty hands; the Vorra kept their fingers straight by their sides.
Someone behind me said in a tone of vague disbelief, “Earthman…?”
The squad commander caught the word, glanced at me, and stiffened. Under his bristly-whiskered upper lip, I saw his teeth show.
I stopped dead in my tracks, not liking the sudden air of hostility which surrounded me, not liking the way everyone in the street had turned to stare at me.
“Squad!” said the commander. “ ‘Bout turn!”
Like mechanical dolls the men spun where they stood. At each man’s side the recently fired gun caught the sunlight.
“Aim!” said the squad commander, and the guns sprang to firing position.
Maybe he expected me? to stand where I was—I don’t know. I think perhaps I would have, because I was so astonished. But some overenthusiastic person in the crowd picked a big tuber off a wagon of vegetables and flung it at me, and that broke my trance.
I took to my heels.
There was a note of savage anger in the commander’s voice as he screamed, “Fire!”
But I had just got around the corner of a house, and the only bullet to come close to me caught the hem of my cloak.
What in hell was all this! for? A joke?
But it sounded like a very serious joke. As I went charging and leaping along the streets, mob noise followed me. I wasn’t shot at again, but things were thrown at me, and one or two eggs landed and made my cloak a sticky mess. Fortunately I was past most of the people I encountered before they caught on to what was happening and joined in the chase, but one quick-witted stallholder rolled a barrel into my path and sent me sprawling.
With battered knees and filthy hands—for this street was thick with market refuse—I picked myself up and hurried on, heart pounding.
Unconsciously I was heading for the Acre. I had only a Couple of blocks to go, but they seemed like miles. When I risked a glance back I saw that I had at least a score of pursuers.
What had I stumbled into?
Suddenly I saw ahead of me, hanging above a mean little alleyway, a store sign in Earthly lettering. Miracle! I thought, and dived towards it. A few paces ahead of me a youth—maybe twenty or younger—who had been attracted by the shouts behind me, stepped into the alley. I practically fell over him.
“Earthman?,, he said, quite calm, as though this happened every day.
“Yes!” I gasped, having hardly enough breath to pronounce a single word.
“In the alley. Gustav! Marijane!”
I went past him. From the same doorway where he had appeared, another youth and a girl with untidy fair hair came out. They seemed to size up the situation in an in’ stance. Linking arms with my rescuer, the girl in the middle, they blocked off the end of the alley with their bodies.
I thought at first they were insane, for when my pursuers came to the alley mouth they were ranting and waving cudgels. Yet the sight of the three young people calmly waiting seemed to act on them like a dash of cold water. Only one hothead came forward, ahead of the rest, to point his club threateningly.
“What have you done with him?” he demanded in Vorrish, using superior-to-inferior forms.
My rescuer’s face was turned away from me, so I couldn’t see his expression, but I heard his scratching voice. “The Acre starts here,” he said. “If you want to come in, you come alone and with empty hands.”
What he actually said was “empty paws,” in effect, because he used the human-to-animal forms which were reserved for pets, domestic cattle and the filthiest insults. Huddled in the doorway of the shop, I closed my eyes. Surely no Vorra was going to take that from anyone!
Only there was no noise of fighting. When I looked again, someone else from the crowd had stepped forward and was leading the hothead away, fuming and casting angry glances back over his shoulder.
The three of them waited till the crowd had dispersed unwillingly. Then they dropped their linked arms and dusted their hands with an air of satisfaction. As they returned to where I was skulking, I stood up feeling curiously ashamed.
“Thank you,” I said. “I wasn’t ready for that.”
“What happened?” the one called Gustav inquired.
“A trainee army squad—wanted to use me for target practice.” I tried to sound as offhand and casual as they did.
“You shouldn’t have been out on your own, then,” Gustav retorted. “They’ve been making shows of strength all round the Acre for a good thirty days now.”
A puzzled look came across his face. “How come you were on your own, anyway?” he said. “And who are you? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”
/> “Ken! Gustav!” The girl Marijane spoke in a commanding tone. She threw out her arm and pointed.
I had been standing half in the embrasure of the shop door, and my left arm, with my house shield, was in shadow; it was dark in the alley anyway because the buildings were too closeset for such sun to pass between them.
The youths followed the pointing arm. One moment later, and an expression of more hostility than I had seen even in the eyes of my pursuers lit their faces. Ken strode forward, taking my right arm, twisting it savagely behind my back and levering me into the middle of the alley; from a sheath behind him Gustav produced a knife and presented it to my goggling eyes, while Marijane caught the rim of my shield in two hands and jerked it around for the others to inspect so sharply my elbow was almost sprained.
“House of Pwill!” said Gustav thoughtfully. “Well, he sold himself to a high bidder, obviously. I didn’t know we had anyone in service there.”
Marijane let go of the shield as though it were red-hot, and gave me a disgusted look. Hell and damnation—what had I done that the first Earthly woman I saw in seven months was so revolted by me?
“Don’t be so cynical, Gustav!” she snapped. “High bidder, high schmidder—he’s still a dirty serf! Should have left him to the mob out there, if you ask me.”
Abruptly Ken let go my right arm. I straightened up, rubbing the sore place where his hands had closed; he had muscles, that young man.
“Calm, Marijane,” he said. “Well, serf? What brings you?”
Helplessly confused, I said, “I have to—have to do something for my employer’s ninth wife.”
“Such as what?”
“I’m not sure! I just have to go to this address in the Acre and repeat a message she gave me, and—”
I broke off. Ken had pursed his lips and was nodding his head back and forth, “i see,” he said. ‘I see. An address on 660 at 127 by any chance?”