The Inheritors

by A Bertram Chandler

  Hard by the ship was a long, low building. As seen from the air it seemed to be mainly of wooden construction, although it was roofed with sheets of gray metal. No doubt there had been cannibalization; no doubt many nonessential bulkheads and the like were missing from the gaussjammer's internal structure.

  Billard brought the pinnace in low over the town. There were people in the streets, mainly women and children. They looked upward and pointed. Some of them waved. And then, quite suddenly, a smoky fire was lit in a wide plaza to the east of the gaussjammer. It was a signal, obviously. The tall streamer of smoke rose vertically into the still air.

  "That's where we land," said Grimes. "Take her down, please, Mr. Billard."

  "Aye, aye, sir!"

  Quietly, without any fuss or bother, they landed. Even before the door was open, even before the last mutterings of the inertial drive had faded into silence, they heard the drums, a rhythmic thud and rattle, an oddly militaristic sound.

  "Mphm?" grunted Grimes dubiously. He turned to Maya. "Are you sure the natives are friendly?"

  She did not catch the allusion. "Of course," she said stiffly. "Everybody on Morrowvia is friendly. A queen is received courteously by her sister queens wherever she may go."

  "I'm not a queen," said Grimes. "I'm not a king, even . . . ."

  "The way you carry on sometimes, aboard your ship, I'm inclined to doubt the validity of that last statement," remarked Maggie Lazenby.

  "Open up, sir?" asked Billard.

  "Mphm. Yes. But nobody is to go outside—except myself—until I give the word. And you'd better have the twenty millimeters ready for use, Mr. Pitcher."

  He belted on his pistols—one projectile, one laser—then set his cap firmly on his head. Maya said, "I am coming with you."

  Grimes said, "I'm not in the habit of hiding behind a woman's skirts."

  "What skirts?" asked Maggie Lazenby. Then, "Don't be silly, John. Maya's obviously one of them. When they see her with you they'll know that you're friendly."

  It made sense.

  Grimes jumped down from the open door to the packed earth of the plaza, clapping each hand to a pistol butt as soon as he was on the ground. Maya followed him. They stood there, listening to the rhythmic tap-tappity-tap that was, with every second, louder and louder.

  And then a women—a girl—appeared from around the end of the long, low building. She was naked save for polished high boots and a crimson sash, and was carrying a flag on a staff, a black flag with a stylized great cat, in gold, rampant over a compass rose. Behind her marched the drummers, also girls, and behind them a woman with a silver sash and with a silver crown set on her silvery hair. She was followed by six men, with spears, six female archers, and by six more men, each of whom carried what was obviously an automatic rifle of archaic design.

  Abruptly the drums fell silent and the drummers divided their ranks to let the queen pass through. She advanced steadily, followed by her standard bearer. Her skin was black and gleaming, but there was no hint of negroid ancestry in her regular features. Apart from the absence of rudimentary nipples she was what Grimes was coming to consider a typical Morrowvian woman.

  Grimes saluted.

  The standard bearer dipped her flag.

  The queen smiled sweetly and said, "I, Janine Morrow, welcome you to Ballarat—the landing place of Lode Cougar and of our forebears. I welcome you, spaceman, and I welcome you, sister."

  "Thank you," said Grimes. (Should he call this definitely regal female "Your Majesty" or not?)

  "Thank you, Janine," said Maya. "I am Maya, of Cambridge."

  "Thank you, Janine," said Grimes. "I am John Grimes, of the Federation Survey Service ship Seeker."

  17

  Grimes called the others down from the pinnace and introductions were made. Then Janine led the way to her palace, which was the long, low building hard by the ancient spaceship. In a room like the other rooms in which they had been similarly entertained there was the ritual sharing of food and water, during which the Queen of Ballarat read the letter that Maya had brought. Grimes was about to get a glimpse of it during her perusal; the paper was coarse-textured and gray rather than white, and the words had been scrawled upon it with a blunt pencil.

  Janine said, "Lilian is favored. Twice she has been visited by Captain Danzellan, and now Commander Grimes is calling on her."

  "Now Commander Grimes is calling on you," Maya pointed out.

  "And so he is." Janine smiled sweetly, her teeth very white and her lips very red in her dark brown face. "And so he is. But what brings you to Ballarat, Commander Grimes? Do you have gifts for me?"

  "I shall have gifts for you—but I have nothing at the moment. You will appreciate that we cannot carry much in a small craft such as my pinnace."

  "That is true," agreed Janine. "But every time that Captain Danzellan has wished to look for information in the museum or the library he has brought me something." She gestured toward one of the walls where a new-looking clock, with a brightly gleaming metal case, was hanging. "That is a good clock—far better than the old one with its dangling weights. This one does not have a spring even—just a power cell which Captain Danzellan tells me will be good for centuries."

  "From the way that you greeted us," said Grimes, "I thought that you were pleased to see visitors from the home world of your ancestors."

  "But I am, I am! Too, it pleases me to try to—what is the word?—to reconstruct the old rituals. I have studied The History, as have we all. Also, I have access to records which my sisters elsewhere have not. I received you as important visitors must be received on Earth . . . ."

  "Mphm."

  "I am sorry that I could not fire a salute, but we have no big guns. In any case, the supply of ammunition for our rifles is limited."

  "You did very nicely," said Grimes.

  "Bring on the marching girls . . ." muttered Maggie.

  Grimes, surreptitiously, had eased his watch off his wrist. The instrument was almost new; he had purchased it from the commissary just prior to departure from Lindisfarne. He said, "Perhaps you will accept this, Janine. It is a personal timekeeper."

  "Just what I've always wanted," she said, pleased.

  "I take it, then," said Grimes, "that you are the custodian of the books, the records, the . . . "

  "Of everything," she told him proudly. "Perhaps, while Maya and I have a gossip, you would care to be shown around?"

  "We should," said Grimes.

  * * *

  Their guide was the young woman who had carried the banner. Her name was Lisa Morrow. She vouchsafed the information that it was usually she who conducted visiting queens from other towns through the palace, but that it was the first time that she had been responsible for a party of outworlders. She did not seem to be greatly impressed by the honor, or even to regard it as such.

  The palace was more than a palace. It was a library, and it was a museum. They were taken first of all into the Earth Room, a huge chamber devoted to Earth as it had been when Lode Cougar had lifted from Port Woomera on her last voyage. This had been the overcrowded planet dominated, in its northern and southern hemispheres respectively, by the short-lived Russian and Australian Empires.

  Lode Cougar, concluded Grimes, had carried a lot of junk—but even in the days of the Third Expansion a ticket out to the stars was very often a one-way ticket; it was even more so in the days of the First and Second Expansions. Those first colonists had been so reluctant to break every tie with their home world.

  Here, in the Earth Room, were maps and photographs, reproductions of famous works of art, even files of newspapers and magazines. These latter had been chemically treated to make the paper impervious to normal wear and tear, but now were practically unreadable—and Lisa Morrow took good care her charges did not, as they would have loved to have done, leaf through them. Grimes could make out the headlines on the front page of one of the papers, The Australian. "Lode Tiger missing, feared lost." No doubt the same paper had carried s
imilar headlines regarding Lode Cougar. This had been long before the days of trained telepaths or the time-and-space-twisting Carlotti Communications System, but the established colonies had maintained a reasonably fast mail service with Earth. Grimes had read somewhere that it had taken less time for a letter to get from Port Southern, on Austral, to Sydney, in Australia, than it did to get through the post offices at either end. This state of affairs had persisted until the introduction of Carlotti radio transmission of all correspondence.

  There were books, too—real books, properly bound, although with very thin, lightweight covers and paper. There were shelves of How To volumes. House building, boat building, aircraft building . . . mining, smelting, casting . . . navigation . . . surveying . . . . Useful, Grimes supposed, if you did not, as you were supposed to do, finish up at an established colony but, instead, made a forced landing on a hitherto undiscovered world.

  There was fiction—but, in spite of their age, these books looked almost fresh from the printers. Grimes had suspected that the Morrowvians were oddly lacking in imagination. Anything factual—such as the famous History—they would read, or any book that would aid them to acquire necessary skills. But the products of the storyteller's art left them cold. This attitude was not uncommon, of course, but it seemed more pronounced here than elsewhere. What books had Danzellan given to Lilian on the occasion of his first visit? Grimes asked Lisa the question.

  She told him, "One by a man called Blenkinshop on first aid. And one about the fisheries on a world called Atlantia. We are having copies made for the library."

  "So you have a printing press?"

  "Yes, Commander Grimes. It is used only when a book is almost worn out or when there is something new that has to be printed."

  "Is it hand operated?"

  "No. We have an engine, driven by steam. Shall I show it to you now, or would you rather see the Lode Cougar room?"

  "The Lode Cougar room," Grimes told her.

  This adjoined the Earth Room, but was not as large. It contained relics of the ship herself. There were cargo manifests, log books, crew and passenger lists. There was a large photograph of the Cougar's officers taken at Port Woomera, presumably shortly prior to lift-off. It was typical of this sort of portraiture, whatever the day and age. The captain, his senior officers on either side of him, was seated in the front row, his arms folded across his chest (as were the arms of the others) to show the braid on his sleeves. Standing behind the row of seated seniors were the juniors. Grimes stopped to read the legend below the photograph.

  The captain's name was not, as he had expected that it would be, Morrow. (But in an emergency, such as a forced landing on an unexplored world, anybody at all is liable to come to the fore.) The name of Morrow was not among those of the officers. A passenger, then? Examination of the ship's passenger list would supply the answer.

  Lisa was pointing to a shelf of volumes. "And these," she was saying, "were Morrow's own books . . . ."

  Grimes paused on his way to the display cases in which the ship's documents were housed. Books told one so much about their owner's makeup. His eye swept over the fiction titles. He realized, with pleased surprise, that he had read most of them, when he was a cadet at the Academy. Early Twentieth Century—and even late Nineteenth Century—science fiction aboard a starship! But it was no more absurd than to find the same science fiction required reading for future officers of a navy whose ships, even though they had yet to penetrate to The Hub, fared out to The Rim. The Planet Buyer . . . that had been good, as he remembered it. The Island Of . . .

  His wrist transceiver was buzzing. He raised the instrument to his mouth. "Captain!" Saul's voice was urgent. "Captain, I would have called you before, but we've been having transmitter trouble. Drongo Kane left in his pinnace at first light this morning, heading north. He's got Sabrina with him and three of his own people, all armed."

  "You heard that?" Grimes demanded of his officers.

  They nodded.

  "Thank you for your attention," Grimes said to Lisa, "but we must get back to our pinnace."

  "Is Drongo Kane a friend of yours, that you are so eager to greet him?" she asked innocently, and looked bewildered when Grimes replied, "That'd be the sunny Friday!"

  18

  Grimes paused briefly in the room where Janine was still gossiping with Maya. As he entered he heard Maya ask, "And how do you deal with the problem of the uncontrollable adolescent?"

  He said, "Excuse me, ladies. I've just received word that Drongo Kane is on his way here . . . ."

  "Drongo Kane?" asked Janine, arching her silver brows.

  "The captain of a ship called the Southerly Buster," Maya told her. "A most generous man."

  "Goodie goodie," exclaimed her sister queen. She looked rather pointedly at Danzellan's gleaming clock on the wall, then at Grimes's watch that was strapped around her slim, brown wrist.

  "Perhaps he'll give you an egg timer . . ." suggested Maggie Lazenby.

  "What is that?" asked Janine.

  "It's not important," said Grimes impatiently. "Excuse us, please."

  He led the way out of the palace, to where his pinnace was grounded in the middle of the plaza, looking like a huge, stranded silver fish. He looked up at the clear sky. Yes—there, far to the southward, was a tiny speck, a dark dot against the blueness that expanded as he watched. Then he was aware that the two queens had followed him outside.

  "Is that Drongo Kane?' asked Janine.

  "I think it is," he replied.

  "Then I must prepare a proper reception," she said and walked rapidly back to her palace. Maya stayed with Grimes.

  She said, "Janine prides herself on doing things properly."

  "If she were doing things properly," Grimes told her, "she would have a battery of ground to air missiles standing by."

  "You must be joking!" she exclaimed, shocked.

  "Have our own armament in readiness, sir?" asked the navigator.

  "Mphm. I was joking, Mr. Pitcher. But it will do no harm to have the twenty millimeters cocked and ready."

  Two women were building another fire in the brazier that had served Grimes for a beacon. One of them produced a large box of oversized matches from the pouch that she wore slung from her shoulder, lit the kindling. Almost immediately the column of gray smoke was climbing skyward.

  Kane's pinnace was audible now as well as visible, the irregular beat of its inertial drive competing with the more rhythmic efforts of Janine's drummers, warming up behind the palace. It was coming in fast, and it seemed that it would overshoot the plaza. But Kane—presumably it was he at the controls—brought the craft to a spectacular, shuddering halt when it was almost directly over Seeker's pinnace, applying maximum reverse thrust. That would not, thought Grimes disapprovingly, do his engines any good—but he, himself, had often been guilty of similar showmanship.

  Oddly enough no crowd had gathered—but no crowd had gathered to greet Grimes. There were only a few deliberately uninterested bystanders, and they were mainly children. On no other world had Grimes seen such a fanatical respect for privacy.

  Drongo Kane was dropping down now—not fast, yet not with extreme caution. His vertical thrust made odd patterns in the dust as the pinnace descended, not unlike those made in an accumulation of iron filings by a magnetic field. When there was little more than the thickness of a coat of paint between his landing gear and the ground he checked his descent, then cut his drive.

  The door in the side of the pinnace opened. Drongo Kane stood in the opening. He was rigged up in a uniform that was like the full dress of the Survey Service—with improvements. An elaborate gold cockade ornamented his cocked hat, and his sword belt was golden, as was the scabbard. A score of decorations blazed over the left breast of his frock coat. Grimes thought he recognized the Iron Cross of Waldegren, the Golden Wings of the Hallichek Hegemony. Anybody who was highly regarded by those two governments would be persona non grata in decent society.

  Kane jumped lig
htly to the ground, seemingly unhampered by his finery. He extended a hand to help Sabrina from the pinnace. Jewels glittered on her smooth, golden skin, and a coronet ablaze with emeralds was set on her head. She was inclined to teeter a little in her unaccustomed, high-heeled sandals.

  "Cor stone me Aunt Fanny up a gum tree!" whispered Maggie.

  "Captain Kane is generous," murmured Maya.

  "Mphm," grunted Grimes.

  Inside the pinnace two of Kane's officers—and they were dressed only in their drab working uniforms—were setting up some sort of machine, an affair of polished brass, just within the doorway. Grimes stared at it in amazement and horror.