Dreaming Again

by Jack Dann

  To one side stood the remainder of the villagers, watching proceedings. Their faces were a mixture of sorrow and relief. They had once revered the sacred hill for the mystical journeys it had enabled them to take, but they had spent the past few months in increasing terror at the evil spirits the hill had begun to spit forth.

  They watched the men and the cross vanished within the hill, then the shamans after them. The villagers shuffled a little in their tension.

  They hoped the shamans were powerful enough to successfully combat the evil spirits.

  After a short while the six men returned, their burden left within the hill. They stood to one side on the entrance, eyeing the tools and the great pile of stone and rubble that stood waiting.

  Once the shamans returned (if they returned), the men would seal off this remaining doorway.

  The two shamans stood in the centre of the crossroads, deep within the hill. They were illumed by two small burning torches and the very faint patch of light that made its way inside from the entrance at their backs. Before them stood the stone cross, the Long Tom.

  The shamans regarded it silently for a long moment, then the older of them, the senior shaman, stepped forward. He began to murmur an incantation, at the same time running the fingers of both hands lightly over the teeth set into the circular stonework. The younger shaman bowed his head, remaining silent, concentrating on sending his elder all the strength he could manage.

  ‘It is done,’ the senior shaman said eventually. He stepped back from the Long Tom, his hands trembling with his weariness.

  ‘The evil spirits will not return?’ the other shaman said.

  ‘Not so long as this cross stands here to protect the passageways,’ said the senior shaman. ‘We will seal the entrance, and it will never be moved, and our land and people will be safe, for ever more. Now, come, let us leave this place.’

  Once outside the senior shaman nodded to the villagers standing anxiously, to let them know it had been done, then murmured a word to the six men waiting with tools and stone. The men bent down immediately, beginning to shift the stones.

  By morning the entrance would be sealed for evermore.

  The two shamans moved down to the river bank. There waited an earthenware pot. The younger man bent and picked it up, then unceremoniously broke the pot against a rock and tipped its contents into the water.

  Creamy-grey dust and crushed bone fragments — the cremated remains of all the Londoners who had taken the wrong exit — scattered over the water, creating an oily film that slowly moved away from the river bank into the current to drift eastwards toward the sea.

  It was not, all things considered, the exit the chubby gloved hands had promised.

  AFTERWORD

  I have long entertained the idea of writing about one of the abandoned stations in London’s Underground. I thought I would need to create a fictionalised station for this story, but when I was doing the research, I came across the strange tale of King William Street Station, destined to be closed due to ‘an engineering blunder’ less than a year after it had opened; it was the first London Underground station to be abandoned. I did not need to look further.

  King William Street Station still exists. You can reach it via the emergency stairs leading down from a manhole in the basement of Regis House which stands on the corner of King William Street next to the Monument. The gas lamps are still there, as is the signalman’s box with its twenty-two hand-operated levers, and most of the Victorian white tiles used to line the ceiling and walls. The twin exit tunnels remain, as do the chubby gloved hands helpfully pointing the way to the exit.

  I would advise you not to visit, nor to attempt the way to the exit.

  — Sara Douglass

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  GRIMES AND THE GAIJIN DAIMYO

  A. BERTRAM CHANDLER

  The late A. BERTRAM CHANDLER began writing for John W. Campbell’s germinal science fiction magazine Astounding in 1944 and became one of science fiction’s most popular and prolific authors of space opera adventure. Along with Doc E. E. Smith, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, A. E. Van Vogt, Lester Del Rey, Jack Williamson, L. Ron Hubbard, and Isaac Asimov, he was also a popular ‘Golden Age’ writer. That period from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s was ushered in by John W. Campbell and — to quote Sean McMullen in Paul Collins’s The Melbourne University Press Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction & fantasy — ‘is often referred to as the Golden Age of science fiction because the older adventure-based forms were giving way to stories with more realistic technology at their core.’ Chandler, who immigrated to Australia from the United Kingdom in 1956, was a veteran seaman and commanded merchant marine ships under Australian and New Zealand flags; and he used his specialised knowledge and experience to chronicle the epic adventures of the spacefarer John Grimes, his best-known character. Chandler’s John Grimes/Rim World adventures have been rightly compared to C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series; critic John Clute has written in The Encyclopedia of Science fiction that ‘Grimes himself establishes a loyalty in his readers rather similar to that felt by readers of Hornblower.’

  In 1981 Chandler wrote: ‘Quite a few years ago Robert Heinlein said, “Only people who know ships can write convincingly about space ships.” At the time I thought that was very true. I have not changed my opinion. I believe that the crews of the real spaceships of the future, vessels going a long way in a long time, will have far more in common with today’s seamen thon with today’s airmen. I freely admit that my stories are essentially sea stories and that John Grimes, my series character, is descended from Hornblower.’

  A. Bertram Chandler wrote over two hundred short stories and forty-four science fiction books, which include the Empress Irene series and Australian historical novels. Here are just a very few of his titles: The Road to the Rim, To Prime the Pump, The Hard Way Up, False Fatherland, The Inheritors, The Broken Cycle, The Big Black Mark, Into the Alternate Universe, Contraband from Outer Space, The Way Back, Bring Back Yesterday, The Hamelin Plague, and Beyond the Galactic Rim.

  He won the Australian Ditmar Award in 1969,1971,1974, and 1976. He also was a recipient of Japan’s Seium Sho Award, the Invisible Little Man Award, an Australian Literature Board Fellowship, and was guest of honour at the Chicago World Science Fiction Convention.

  A. Bertram Chandler passed away in 1984.

  But it is my great pleasure to present his only (as far as we know) unpublished John Grimes/Rim World story. All credit goes to Paul Collins, who originally purchased the story some thirty years ago. Paul has kindly agreed to write the Afterword.

  So here is our one last chance to sail with Commodore John Grimes, who, while comfortably settled in the day cabin of his ship Faraway Quest, will narrate his latest dangerous adventure in time and space to you himself…

  Kitty Kelly, by this time, did not need to be told to make herself at home in Grimes’ day cabin aboard Faraway Quest. The old ship had now been a long time, too long a time, on Elsinore while repair work on her inertial drive unit dragged on, and on, and on. Shortly after the Quest’s arrival at Port Fortinbras, Kitty had interviewed Grimes for Station Yorick and had persuaded him to tell one of his tall — but true — stories. The commodore, sitting at ease with pipe and glass to hand, had gone over well with Station Yorick’s viewers. Soon he became a regular guest on Kitty’s Korner, as Ms Kelly’s programme was called.

  ‘And still you’re here,’ she remarked brightly as she set up her recording apparatus, adjusting lenses and microphones.

  ‘A blinding glimpse of the obvious!’ he growled.

  Still, he thought, watching the raven-haired, blue-eyed, creamy-skinned girl in the emerald green dress that left very little to the imagination, there were compensations, or at least one compensation — and she was it. He would feel a strong twinge of regret when, at long last, Faraway Quest was again spaceworthy and on her way.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said finally, getting briefly to her feet and then subs
iding into an easy chair, facing Grimes in his, stretching her long, shapely legs before her. ‘Ready to roll. But pour me a drink first, Johnnie boy.’

  Grimes had learned not to wince at this appellation. (After all, during a long and, according to some, misspent life he had often been called worse.) He went to his liquor cabinet, poured an Irish whiskey for Kitty and constructed a pink gin for himself.

  ‘Here’s mud in your eye!’ she toasted, raising her glass.

  ‘And in yours,’ he replied.

  After what was more of a gulp than a ladylike sip she switched on the audio-visual recorder. ‘And now, Commodore,’ she said, ‘can you tell us, in non-technical language if possible, why your ship, the Rim Worlds Confederacy’s survey vessel Faraway Quest, has been so long on Elsinore?’

  ‘Because my inertial drive is on the blink,’ he said.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘First of all it was the governor. There were no spares available here. Too, the inertial drive unit is a very old one; it came with the ship — and she’s no chicken! So there were no spares anywhere at all for this model. A new governor was fabricated in our workshops at Port Forlorn, on Lorn. It was shipped out here. Then my engineers had to turn down the shaft so that it would fit the bearings. The drive was tested — and the main thruster fell to pieces. And so on, and so on …’

  ‘I’m only a planet lubber,’ she said, ‘but it seems to me that much time and money would have been saved if your Faraway Quest’s inertial drive unit had been renewed, in its entirety, long before it got to the state that it’s in now. After all, the Rim Worlds Navy, to which your Quest belongs, is not some penny-pinching star tramp outfit.’

  Grimes laughed. ‘Except in times of war, navies are as expert at penny-pinching as any commercial shipowner! And I often think that the only bastard who really wants to keep the old Quest running is me.’

  ‘You have been in her a long time, haven’t you, Commodore?’

  ‘Too right. She started life as one of the Interstellar Transport Commission’s Epsilon Class freighters. When she became obsolescent, by the Commission’s rather high standards, she was put up for sale. I happened to be in the right place at the right time — or the wrong place at the wrong time! — on the world about which her lay-up orbit had been established. Very temporarily I had too much money in my bank account. So I bought her, changing her name from Epsilon Scorpii to Sister Sue. She became the flagship — and the only ship — of my own star tramp company, Far Traveller Couriers. She replaced a deep space pinnace that I’d been running single-handedly, called Little Sister. Well, I tramped around for quite a while, making not too bad a living. It helped that che Federation Survey Service, into which I’d sort of been dragged back with a reserve commission, organised the occasional lucrative charter for me. And then, while I was trying to weather a rather bad financial storm, I drifted out to the Rim Worlds. At that time Rim Runners, the Confederacy’s merchant fleet, were going through a period of expansion. They were buying anything — anything! — that could clamber out of a gravity well and still remain reasonably airtight. They offered me a good price for the ship and offered, too, to absorb myself and my people with no loss of rank or seniority while guaranteeing repatriation to those who did not wish to become RimWorlders …’

  ‘But you became a RimWorlder, Commodore.’

  ‘Yes, Kitty. And the ship was renamed again — to Rim Scorpion. For a while I stayed in command of her. Then, at about the same time that I got a shore job, as Rim Runners’ Astronautical Superintendent, the ship had another change of name, to Faraway Quest. She was converted into a survey ship. Every time that she was required for survey work — which wasn’t all that often — Rim Runners would second me to the Navy, in which I held, and still hold, a reserve commission. After all, I know the ship and, too, held command in the Federation Survey Service before I became an owner-master.’

  Kitty laughed sympathetically. ‘We can understand very well how much this ship means to you, Commodore.’ She laughed again. ‘Now I’m talking off the top of my head — but what a pity it is that you can’t modify your Mannschenn Drive unit, your Time-twister, to take the ship back into the Past so that she can be refitted with a suitable inertial drive at a pre-inflation price. After all, there was that first story you told me, about the Siege of Glenrowan, when a modified Mannschenn Drive was used to send you back to 1880, Earth Old Reckoning, so that you could change the course of history.’

  ‘I didn’t change the course of history,’ said Grimes stiffly. ‘I prevented the course of history from being changed.’

  ‘Ensuring,’ snapped Kitty, ‘that my ancestor, the sainted Ned himself, was awarded a hemp necktie.’

  ‘In any case,’ Grimes told her, ‘there was no physical Time travel. I was just sent back to occupy the mind of one of my own ancestors who was among those present at the siege.’

  ‘And so even though your interstellar drive, your Mannschenn Drive, does odd things to the Space-Time Continuum, even though FTL flight is achieved by having the ship, as you told me once, going astern in Time while going ahead in Space, physical Time-travel is impossible? But isn’t it true that most governments have forbidden research into possible techniques for using the Mannschenn Drive for real Time-travel, physical as well as psychological?

  ‘Have you ever been involved in such research?’ She grinned. ‘After all, Commodore, there’s not much that you haven’t been involved in.’

  Grimes made a major production of refilling and lighting his pipe. He replenished Kitty’s glass, and then his own. He settled back in his chair.

  He said, ‘There was one rather odd business in which I played my part. In this very ship …’

  She asked sweetly, ‘And did you interfere as you did at Glenrowan, changing the course of history?’

  ‘I did not change the course of history on either occasion. I kept history on the right tracks.’

  ‘But have you ever thought that these are the wrong tracks, that we’re living in an alternative universe that could never have come into being but for your interference?’

  ‘I like being me,’ he told her, ‘and I’m pretty sure that you like being you. And we are us only because our history has made us what we are. In an alternative universe we might have no existence at all.’

  She laughed. ‘We’re neither of us cut out to be philosophers, Commodore. Just do us all a favour and wear your storyteller’s hat for the next hour or so.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ said Grimes. He got up, recharged glasses, refilled and lit his pipe, then settled down back in his chair. ‘You want a story. Here it is.’

  It was quite a few years ago, he said, more than just a few. It was when this ship was still called Sister Sue and I was both her master and her owner. It was during that period when the Federation Survey Service was still throwing charters my way like bones to a hungry dog. Very often I’d be carrying Survey Service cargoes from Earth to the various Survey Service bases throughout the Galaxy.

  This was such an occasion. A cargo of sake and soy sauce and assorted pickles to Mikasa Base, the personnel of which was then, and probably still is, Japanese. Rather unusually I was loading not at Port Woomera in Australia but at the new spaceport just outside Yokohama in Japan. I still think that spaceports should be well away from heavily populated areas but the Japanese wanted one of their very own and they got it. Of course there were very strict regulations — inertial drive only, when landing or lifting off. No, repeat and underscore no, use of reaction drive when in the spaceport vicinity. But my inertial drive wasn’t in the same mess that it’s in now and I was reasonably sure that shouldn’t need a squirt of superheated steam in an emergency.

  It was my Mannschenn Drive that got me into trouble.

  Well, even though Japan is a very small target compared to Australia, I found it without any trouble, and found the spaceport and set down in the middle of the triangle formed by the marker beacons. And then, as so often happens, especially when
governmental agencies are involved, it was a case of hurry up and wait. The cargo wasn’t ready for me. This pleased me rather than otherwise. The ship was on pay, which meant that myself and my officers were on pay. I treated myself to a couple or three weeks leave and booked on a JAL airship from Narita to Sydney, changing there to a Qantas flight to Alice Springs. My parents were pleased to see me. My mother was her charming, hospitable self and my father, as always, was both a good listener and a good talker — and could he talk on his pet subject, history! As I’ve told you before he was an author of historical romances and always prided himself on the thoroughness of his research.

  He asked me about my impressions of Japan and told me that he had visited that country, doing research for one of his novels, a few weeks prior to my arrival. ‘Yokohama,’ he said, ‘is handy for two shrines that you will find worth a visit. There’s Admiral Togo’s flagship Mikasa, in which he defeated the Russian Navy during the Russo-Japanese War, preserved for posterity as the English have preserved Nelson’s Victory. And, on a hilltop on the Miura Peninsular, is the tomb of Will Adams and his Japanese lady wife …’

  ‘Will Adams?’ I asked. ‘But that’s not a Japanese name, surely? Why should a foreigner be honoured by having his grave regarded as a shrine?’

  My father laughed. ‘Oh, Will Adams was a gaijin, a foreigner, when he first set foot on Japanese soil. He was the first Englishman — although not the first European — in Japan. He was an Elizabethan — the first Elizabeth, of course — sea dog. He was pilot major — senior navigator — of a small fleet of Dutch ships that sailed to Japan in an attempt to get some share of the trade that had become the monopoly of the Portuguese. Only one ship, Adams’ ship, reached Japan. Adams was sort of adopted by the Shogun, the real ruler — the Emperor was little more than a figurehead — and was made a Samurai, and then a Daimyo, which translates roughly to ‘Baron’. He was known as the Anjin-sama — Pilot-lord — and as the Miura Anjin, after the estates on the Miura Peninsular that he was granted. He held the rank of admiral in the Japanese Navy …’