"John Norman - Gor 01- Tarnsman of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

political theory he spoke to me. I gathered that he knew of such a man. "Until," he repeated
slowly, "he is ruthlessly deposed."

The next morning it was back to Torm and his interminable lessons.

In large outline Gor, as would be expected, was not a sphere, but a spheroid. It was somewhat
heavier in its southern hemisphere and was shaped somewhat like the Earth like a rounded, inverted
top. The angle of its axis was somewhat sharper than the Earth's, but not enough to prevent its
having a glorious periodicity of seasons. Moreover, like the Earth, it had two polar regions and
an equatorial belt, interspersed with northern and southern temperate zones. Much of the area of
Gor, surprisingly enough, was blank on the map, but I was overwhelmed trying to commit as many of
the rivers, seas, plains, and peninsulas to memory as I could.

Economically, the base of the Gorean life was the free peasant, which was perhaps the lowest but
undoubtedly the most fundamental caste, and the staple crop was a yellow grain called Sa-Tarna, or
Life Daughter. Interestingly enough, the word for meat is Sa-Tassna, which
means Life-Mother. Incidentally, when one speaks of food in general, one always speaks of Sa-
Tassna. The expression for the yellow grain seems to be a secondary expression, derivative. This
would seem to indicate that a hunting economy underlay or was prior to the agricultural economy.
This would be the normal supposition in any case, but what intrigued me here, perhaps for no
sufficient reason, was the complex nature of the expressions involved. This suggested to me that
perhaps a well-developed language or mode of conceptual thought existed prior to the primitive
hunting groups that must have flourished long ago on the planet. People had come, or had been
brought to Gor possibly, with a fully developed language. I wondered at the possible antiquity of
the Voyages of Acquisition I had heard my father speak of. I had been the object of one such
voyage, he, apparently, of another.

I had little time for speculation, however, as I was trying to bear up under an arduous schedule
which seemed designed to force me to become a Gorean in a matter of weeks or perhaps see me die in
the attempt. But I enjoyed those weeks, as one is likely to when learning and developing oneself,
though to what end I was still ignorant. I met many Goreans, other than Torm, in these weeks-free


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Goreans, mostly of the Caste of Scribes and the Caste of Warriors. The Scribes, of course, are the
scholars and clerks of Gor, and there are divisions and rankings within .the group, from simple
copiers to the savants of the city.

I had seen few women, but knew that they, when free, were promoted or demoted within the caste
system according to the same standards and criteria as the men, although this varied, I was told,
considerably from city to city. On the whole, I liked the people I met, and I was confident that
they were largely of Earth stock, that their ancestors had been brought to the planet in Voyages
of Acquisition. Apparently, after having been

brought to the planet, they had simply been released, much as animals might be released in a
forest preserve, or fish stocked free in a river.

The ancestors of some of them might have been Chaldeans or Celts or Syrians or Englishmen brought