Free Nomads of Gor by John Norman Page A

the least inconsistency or even hesitation, as
      though the girl were attempting to recollect or reconcile the
      details of a fabrication, it would have been instantly de"
      tected.
      During all this time, and torches had been brought, the
      hours of the night being burned away, Elizabeth Cardwell
      was not permitted to move, but must needs retain the posi-
      tion of the Pleasure Slave, knees properly placed, back
      straight, head high, the gleaming chain of the Sirik dangling
      from the Turian collar, falling to the pelt of the red tart on
      which she knelt.
      The translation, as you might expect, was a difficult task,
      but I attempted to convey as much as I could of what the
      girl, piteously, the words tumbling out, attempted to tell me.
      Although there were risks involved I tried to translate as
      exactly as I could, letting Miss Cardwell speak as she would,
      though her words must often have sounded fantastic to the
      Tuchuks, for it was largely of a world alien to them that she
      spoke a world not of autonomous cities but of huge na-
      tions; not of castes and crafts but of global, interlocking
      I, -
    _
     
     
     
                                                 46 NOMADS OF GOR   |
       industrial complexes; not of batter and tarn disks but of |
       fantastic systems of exchange and credit; a world not of tarns I
       and the tharlarion but of aircraft and motor buses and
       trucks; a world in which one's words need not be carried by
       a lone rider on the swift kaiila but could be sped from one
       corner of the earth to another by leaping through an artifi-
       cial moon.
       Kutaituchik and Kamchak, to my pleasure, tended to re-
       strain judgment on these matters; to my gratification they did
       not seem to regard the girl as mad; I had been afraid, from
       time to time, that they might, losing patience with what must
       seem to them to be the most utter nonsense, order her beaten
       or impaled.
       I did not know then, but Kutaituchik and Kamchak had
       some reason for supposing that the girl might be speaking the
       truth.
       What they were most interested in, of course, and what I
       was most interested in, namely, how and why the girl came
       to be wandering on the Plains of Turia in the Lands of the
       Wagon Peoples they, and I, did not learn.
       We were all, at last, satisfied that even the girl herself did
       not know.
       At last Kamchak had finished, and Kutaituchik, too, and
       they leaned back, looking at the girl.
       "Move no muscle," I said to her.
       She did not. She was very beautiful.
       Kamchak gestured with his head.
       "You may lower your head," I said to the girl.
       Piteously, with a rustle of chain, the girl's head and shoul-
       ders fell forward, and though she still knelt, her head touched
       the pelt of the larl, her shoulders and back shaking, trem-
       bling.
       It seemed to me, from what I had learned, that there was
       no particular reason why Elizabeth Cardwell, and not one of
       Parth's countless others, had been selected to wear the mes-
       sage collar. As yet the collar had not been removed and
       examined. It was perhaps only that she was convenient, and,
       of course, that she was lovely, thus a fitting bearer of the
       collar, herself a gift with the message to please the Tuchuks,
       and perhaps better dispose them toward its contents.
       Miss Cardwell was little different from thousands of lovely
       working girls in the great cities of Barth, perhaps more
       intelligent than many, perhaps prettier than most, but essen-
       tially the same, girls living alone or together in apartments,
       in''.'
      working in offices and studios and shops, struggling to earn a
      hying in a glamorous city, whose goods and pleasures they
      could ill afford to purchase. What had happened to