Nomads of Gor (12 page)

 
dropped her head.

 
Kutaituchik seemed satisfied.

 
"It is the only Gorean she knows," Kamchak informed

 
him.

 
"For the time," said Kutaituchik, "it is enough." He then

 
looked at the man-at-arms. "Have you fed her?" he asked.

 
The man nodded.

 
"Good," said Kutaituchik, "the she-slave will need her

 
strength."

 
The interrogation of Elizabeth Cardwell took hours. Need-

 
less to say, I served as translator.

 
The interrogation, to my surprise, was conducted largely

 
by Kamchak, rather than Kutaituchik, called Ubar of the

 
Tuchuks. Kamchak's questions were detailed, numerous,

 
complex. He returned to certain questions at various times, in

 
various ways, connecting subtly her responses to one with

 
those of another; he wove a sophisticated net of inquiry

 
about the girl, delicate and fine; I marveled at his skill; had

 
there been 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, -

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46 NOMADS OF GOR
 
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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 her

 
might, I gathered, have happened to any of them.

 
She remembered arising and washing and dressing, eating a

 
hurried breakfast, taking the elevator downstairs from her

 
apartment, the subway, arriving at work, the routines of the

 
morning as a junior secretary in one of the larger advertising

 
agencies on Madison Avenue, her excitement at being invited

 
to interview for the position of assistant secretary to the head

 
of the art department, her last-minute concern with her

 
lipstick, the hem of her yellow shift, then steno pad in hand,

 
entering his office..

 
With him had been a tall, strange man, broad of shoulder

 
with large hands, a grayish face, eyes almost like glass. He

 
had frightened her. He wore a dark suit of expensive cloth

 
and tailoring, and yet somehow it seemed not that he wore

 
it as one accustomed to such garments. He spoke to her,

 
rather than the man she knew, the head of the department,

 
whom she had seen often. He did not permit her to take the

 
seat by the desk.

 
Rather he told her to stand and straighten herself. He

 
seemed to scorn her posture. Angry, she nevertheless did so

 
until, embarrassed, she stood insolently erect before him. His

 
eyes regarded her ankles with care, and then her calves and

 
she was acutely aware, blushing, that standing as she did, so

 
straight before him, the simple yellow, oxford-cloth shift ill

 
concealed her thighs, the flatness of her belly, the loveliness

 
of her figure. "Lift your head," he said, and she did, her chin

 
high, the lovely, angry head set proudly on her aristocratic