Upon a Sea of Stars (52 page)
Read Upon a Sea of Stars Online
Authors: A. Bertram Chandler
The table was cleared but the
spliks
were left for use on the next course. This consisted of cubes of a melon-like fruit rolled in a sort of aromatic sugar. To my great relief Marlene seemed to have regained control of herself and succeeded in putting at least seventy-five percent of the sweet morsels into her broad mouth, although by this time her lipstick was smeared badly.
Plates and
spliks
were removed by the attentive stewards. Goblets—where necessary—were refilled. I looked imploringly at Sir Hamish; surely he must realize that Marlene had had enough to drink, more than enough. He looked at me. There was a sardonic expression on his craggy
face that I didn’t like at all. I looked at Maggie. She knew what was passing through my mind. I could read her expression. It said,
What can I do about it?
Plashish
was next—a sort of clear soup, with shreds of something like cheese floating in it, served in shallow bowls. We all plied our
slups
, the long-handled spoons, holding them as we had been taught, by the very end of the shaft.
All?
No, there was one exception. Marlene, of course. She
did
try, I admit, but gave it up as a bad job. Then she lifted the bowl to her mouth, with two hands, and
lapped
from it . . .
The
William Wallace
people were trying to look even more shocked than their native guests but I knew that the bastards were glorying in the discomfiture of the Sassenachs. Us. And Sir Hamish—may the Odd Gods of the Galaxy rot his cotton socks!—was looking insufferably smug. He had shown the Werrississians that even though the representatives of Waverley insisted on wearing their own native dress they could comport themselves at table far more decently than the minions of Terra. And the Werrississians? They were gravely embarrassed. Their complexions had faded from the usual pale cream to an ashy grey. They were obviously avoiding looking at Marlene.
The
plashish
course was over. The
leeleeoosa
was (were?) brought in—the deep bowls of lukewarm water in which the meaty worms were swimming, the smaller bowls of sauce. I daren’t look at Marlene to see how she was managing. I was having my own troubles, anyhow. So was Maggie. So was MacMorris. We’d practised enough with
skirmos
—both aboard
Seeker
and in restaurants ashore—but somehow our acquired skill seemed to have deserted us. We’d stab, and make contact with our prey, and twist—yet every time our intended victims would wriggle free. But Sir Hamish and his people were eating as expertly as the Werrississian guests . . .
It was Maggie first who twigged what was wrong. She stared at me across the table. She raised her left hand with forefinger extended, made a circular motion. I finally realised what she was driving at. The
skirroos
at our places, those long, bronze augers, had right-handed threads. I impaled one of the tasty worms without trouble then, dipped it in the sauce, brought it up to my mouth, chewed. I felt that I’d earned it. MacMorris, as befitting an engineer, had made the discovery himself. He was eating fast and happily.
I looked down and across the table at Marlene. She was having her troubles. I tried to catch her attention but she was concentrating too hard on her bowl of
leeleeoosa
. She had her
skirroo
in both hands. She brought it down like a harpoon. She must have driven the point through the tough, rubbery skin of a worm by sheer force. She lifted it out of the bowl. She didn’t bother to dip it in the sauce but brought the wriggling thing straight
up to her open mouth. If it had made the distance it wouldn’t have mattered, but . . . It slipped off the end of the
skirroo
. It fell on to Marlene’s ample bosom. It found the gap in her shirt front where the gilt button had come undone. It squirmed into the opening.
Marlene screamed. She jumped to her feet, oversetting her
leeleeoosa
bowl. There were worms everywhere. Maggie guessed her intentions but did not reach her in time to stop her from ripping off her shirt. She was wearing nothing under it. Her breasts were her best feature, but they were
big
. It seemed as though somebody had launched a couple of Shaara blimps into Sir Hamish’s dining room.
The Waverley officers stared appreciatively. The Werrississians, male and female, covered their eyes with both hands. Sir Hamish got to his feet, glared at me—but I knew that this was a histrionic display put on for the benefit of his native guests.
“Commander Grimes,” he said, “you and your officers have abused my hospitality and gravely embarrassed my other guests. You will please leave my ship. I shall be vastly obliged if you never set foot aboard her again.”
“Sir Hamish,” I said to him, “none of this would have happened if our places had been set with the correctly left-hand-threaded
skirroos
.”
He said, “I thought that I was doing you a favor. All my people have found it far easier to use right-handed
skirroos
of our own manufacture.”
And so we slunk off
William Wallace
in disgrace, what little dignity remaining to us dissipated by the tussle that we had with Marlene to stop her from stripping completely; she was convinced that one of the spilled worms had wriggled from the floor up her leg.
Back aboard
Seeker
we almost literally threw the fat, drunken girl into her cabin. MacMorris—whose mind was reeling under the shock of having been thrown off a Scottish ship—went to his quarters to sulk and to console himself with whisky.
Maggie came up to my flat to console me. We held a post mortem on the disastrous evening. We’d thought that we, playing along with the local prudery regarding dress while the Waverley crew flaunted their short kilts, had made ourselves the most favored aliens. But Sir Hamish had turned the tables on us. Of course, Marlene’s strip act had been an unexpected bonus to him.
So that was that. I had to carry the can back, of course—after all, I was the captain. My popularity rating with the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty sank to what I thought must be an all time low.
“If you had the sense to stick to civilized food,” said Kitty Kelly, “that sort of thing would never happen . . . But I don’t know much about the Galaxy outside the Shakespearian Sector. This Werri-whatever-it-is . . . I suppose that it’s now well and truly inside the Waverley sphere of influence.”
Grimes laughed. “As a matter of fact it isn’t. I heard that after we’d left Sir Hamish and his senior officers were invited to a very genteel garden party thrown by no less a dignitary than the Grand Coordinator. It was a windy day. They should have had sense enough to wear their winter weight kilts . . .
“It was the Shaara, of all people, who got a foothold (talonhold?) on Werrississa. After all, you don’t expect a really alien alien to have the same nudity taboos, the same table manners, as you do. We humans are so like the Werrississians that every difference was exaggerated.”
“Just as differences between members of the same species are,” she said. “Some like raw fish and seaweed. Some don’t.”
Grimes and the Odd Gods
FARAWAY QUEST,
the Rim Worlds Confederacy survey ship, was still berthed at Port Fortinbras, on Elsinore. She was still awaiting replacements for the rotors of her outmoded inertial drive unit. More than once, in strongly worded Carlottigrams, Commodore Grimes had requested, demanded almost, that he be allowed to put the repairs in the hands of one of the several local shipyards. Each time he received a terse reply from the Rim Worlds Admiralty’s Bureau of Engineering which, translated from Officialese to English, boiled down to
Father knows best
. He unburdened his soul to the Rim Worlds ambassador on Elsinore.
“Can’t
you
do something, Your Excellency?” he asked. “There’s my ship been sitting here for weeks now. My crew’s becoming more and more demoralized. . . .”
“As well I know, Commodore,” the ambassador agreed. “You’ve some hearty drinkers aboard your vessel, and when they drink they brawl. Perhaps you could stop the shore leave of the worst offenders. . . .”
“And have them drinking and brawling aboard the
Quest
? Or, if I really put my foot down, slouching around in a state of sullen sobriety? There’s only one thing to do. Get them off this bloody planet and back where they belong, back to their wives and families or, in the case of the tabbies, to their boyfriends.”
“Some of your female personnel are even greater nuisances than the men,” said the ambassador.
“You’re telling
me
. But as an ambassador, Your Excellency, you pile on far more Gs than a mere commodore, a commodore on the reserve list at that. Can’t
you
do something?”
“I’ve tried, Grimes. I’ve tried. But it’s all a matter of economics. The Confederacy just does not have the funds in any bank in the Shakespearean Sector to pay for a major repair and replacement job. Those rotors will have to be manufactured on Lorn, and then carried out here in whatever ship of the Rim Runners fleet is due to make a scheduled call to Elsinore. . . .”
“And meanwhile,” the commodore said, “there are mounting port dues. And the wages that everybody aboard
Faraway Quest
is getting for doing nothing. And the three square meals a day, plus snacks, that all hands expect as their right. And. . . .”
“I’m a diplomat, Grimes, not an economist.”
“And I’m just a spaceman. Oh, well. Theirs not to reason why, and all that. And now I’ll be getting back to my ship, Your Excellency.”
“What’s the hurry, Commodore? I was hoping that you would stay for a few drinks and, possibly, dinner.”
“I have an appointment,” said Grimes.
The ambassador laughed. “Another interview for Kitty’s Korner? I always watch that program myself. And I’ve heard that Station Yorick’s ratings have improved enormously since Miss Kelly persuaded you to treat her viewers and listeners to your never-ending series of tall tales.”
“Not so tall,” growled Grimes.
“Perhaps not. You have had an interesting life, haven’t you?”
An hour or so later, in his sitting room aboard the old ship, Grimes and Kitty Kelly were enjoying the simple yet satisfying meal that had been brought to them by one of the stewardesses. There were sandwiches constructed from crisply crusty new bread, straight from
Faraway Quest
’s own bakery, and thick slices of juicy Waldegren ham, the flavor of which derived from the smoldering sugar pine sawdust over which the meat had been smoked. (Almost alone among the ship’s personnel, Grimes liked this delicacy; that was a good supply of it in the ship’s cool stores. He was pleased that Kitty, hitherto inclined to be an unadventurous eater, enjoyed it, too.) There was a variety of cheeses—Ultimo Blue, Aquarian Sea Cream, and Caribbean Pineapple and Pepper—altogether with assorted pickles and the especially hot radishes that Grimes had insisted be cultivated in the ship’s hydroponic farm. There was Australian beer—some while ago Grimes had done a private deal with the master of a Federation star tramp not long out from Earth—served in condensation-bedewed pewter pots.
Nibbling a last radish with her strong while teeth, Kitty slumped back in her chair. Grimes regarded her appreciatively. As she always did, she was wearing green, this time a long, filmy, flowing dress with long, loose sleeves. Above it, the food and the drink had brought a slight flush to the normal creamy pallor of her face, a healthy pallor, set off by the wide scarlet slash of her lips. Below her black glossy hair, this evening braided into a sort of coronet, her startlingly blue eyes looked back at Grimes.
She murmured, “Thank you for the meal, Commodore. It was very good.”
He asked, “And will you sing for your supper?”
She said, “You’re the one who’s going to do the singing.” She looked at the bulkhead clock. “It’s almost time that we got the show on the road again. And what are you going to talk about tonight? Your adventures as a pirate?”
“Not a pirate,” he corrected her stiffly. “A privateer.”
“Who knows the difference? And who cares? Or what about when you were governor general of that anarchist planet?”
“Too long a story, Kitty,” he said. “And too complicated. By All the Odd Gods of the Galaxy, there never were, before or since, such complications!”
She said thoughtfully, “That . . . that oath you often use . . . By All the Odd Gods of the Galaxy . . . Did you ever get tangled with any of these Odd Gods?”
He told her, “I’m an agnostic. But . . . there have been experiences.”
She got up from her chair, went to the case containing her audiovisual recorder, opened it, pulled out the extensions with their lenses and microphones.
She said, peering into the monitor screen. “Yes, that’s it. Pipe in one hand, tankard in the other . . . And now,
talk
.”
“What about?”
“The Odd Gods, of course. Or, at the very least, One Odd God.”
He said, “Oh, all right. But I must get my pipe going first.”
As you know (he started at last), I left the Federation Survey Service under something of a cloud after the
Discovery
mutiny. For a while I was yachtmaster to the Baroness Michelle d’Estang, an El Doradan aristocrat, and on the termination of this employment she gave me the yacht’s pinnance, which was practically a deep-space ship in miniature, as a parting gift. I called her—the pinnance, not the baroness—
Little Sister
and set up shop as Far Traveler Courier Services. I’d carry anything or anybody anywhere, as long as I got paid. There would be small parcels of special cargo. There would be people waiting to get to planets well off the normal interstellar trade routes.
It was a living.
I didn’t make a fortune, but there was usually enough in the bank to pay port’s dues and such and to keep me in life’s little luxuries. It was lonely for quite a lot of the time but, now and again, there were passengers who were pleasant enough company . . . Yes, female ones sometimes, if you must know. But it was the female ones who usually got me into all kinds of trouble. Mphm.
Well, I’d carried a small parcel of urgently needed medical supplies to a world called Warrenhome—no, the inhabitants weren’t descended from rabbits but the name of the captain who made the first landing was Warren—where they were having some sort of plague. A mutated virus. After I’d made delivery and received the balance of the payment due to me, I lost no time in placing the usual advertisements in the usual media. I decided that I’d wait around for a week and then, if nothing came up, get off the planet. There was talk that that virus, a nasty one, might mutate again.
Luckily (I thought at the time) I didn’t have long to wait for my next job. I returned to
Little Sister
, after a yarn with the Port Captain, just before any usual lunchtime. I saw that a tall woman was approaching the airlock door from the opposite direction to myself. She was dressed in severe, ankle-length black with touches of white at throat and wrists. On her head was an odd sort of hat, black, with a wide, stiff brim. The skin of her strong-featured face was white; even the lips of her wide mouth were pale. Her eyes were a hard, steely blue.
She stated rather than asked, “Captain Grimes.”
Her voice was deep for a woman, resonant.
I said, “I have that honor, Miz . . . ?”
She said, “You may call me Madame Bishop.”
I asked, “And what can I do for you, Miz Bishop?”
She said coldly, “Bishop is my title, Captain Grimes, not my surname. I understand that you are seeking employment for yourself and your ship. I shall employ you.”
I let us both into the ship, seated her at the table in the cabin while I went through into the little galley. I asked her what she would like to drink. She told me coldly that she would appreciate a glass of water. I brought her one, and a pink gin for myself. She looked at this disapprovingly. I pulled out my pipe and filled it. She as good as ordered me to put it away. It wasn’t so much the words that she used but the way in which she said them. But I had been learning, ever since I set up in business for myself, that the customer is always right. I put my pipe back in my pocket.
She asked, “How soon can you lift ship, Captain Grimes?”
I said, “As soon as I’ve paid on my bills and cleared outwards.”
“Today?”
“Yes.”
She asked, “Are you capable of making the voyage to Stagatha?”
I’d never heard of that world, but
Little Sister
was capable of going just about anywhere in the galaxy. I told her yes.
“What will be the single fare for one passenger?”
I couldn’t answer this at once. I didn’t know where Stagatha was or how far it was from Warrenhome. I asked her to wait while I switched on the playmaster. She told me that she did not approve of frivolous entertainment. I told her that the playmaster screen served as the read-out for
Little Sister
’s computer and library bank. I don’t think she believed me until the requested data began to appear.
In a short while I had all the information required. The voyage would take six weeks. Then there were all the various expenses accruing over this period—depreciation, insurance, consumption of stores, the salary that I—as owner—was paying to myself as master. And so on, and so on. After all, I had to show a profit. I told her how much I should be asking.
She said, “We are not a rich church, Captain Grimes, but we are not a poor one. And has it not been written that the laborer is worthy of his hire?” She allowed herself the merest hint of a smile. “Too, you are the only laborer available at this moment of time.”
“Is this voyage a matter of some urgency?” I asked.
“The Lord’s work is always urgent,” she told me.
And so it was that I contracted to carry Bishop Agatha Lewis, of the Church Of The Only Salvation, from Warrenhome to Stagatha.
He paused, looking down into his now-empty tankard. Kitty refilled it for him, refilled her own.
She said, “So far we haven’t had any Odd Gods. These Only Salvation people seem to have been just another nut cult, probably with their own translation of the Christian Bible slanted to make it fit their own beliefs.”
He said, “Even without special translations you can interpret the Bible in a very wide variety of ways, find in it Divine Authority for just about every aberration of which the human race is capable. But the Church Of The Only Salvation did have its own Bible. Bishop Lewis gave me a copy. I tried to read it but the writing was appallingly bad. As far as I’m concerned there is only one Bible. The King James version.”
After she was gone, to get herself organized, I made myself a sandwich lunch and tried to get more information about Stagatha from the library bank. It was an Earth-type planet with about the same proportion of land to water. The inhabitants were humanoid. I’ve often wondered why there are so many humanoid, as near as dammit human, races throughout the galaxy. Was there some Expansion, from Somewhere, before the dawn of history? But on every world there is the evolutionary evidence that cannot be denied that Man descended from lower life forms. Or is there some Divine Plan?
But I’m just a spaceman, not a philosopher.
There were photographs of typical Stagathans. These could have been taken on practically any beach on Earth or any Man-colonized planet. The males were, to all outward appearances, well-endowed (but not abnormally so) men. The females tended to be busty, but firm-breasted. The only thing odd was that these photographs had been taken in the streets of a Stagathan town, not at a seaside resort. I finally got around to looking at the vehicles and buildings in the background. Electric cars (I thought). Dwellings, offices, shops—but nothing over one story and everything with a flat roof.
