Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  As Corsair closed the range the squadron ahead was detected on her instruments, the slight flickering of needles on the faces of gauges, the shallow undulation of the glowing traces in monitor tubes, showed that in the vicinity were other vessels using the interstellar drive. They were not yet visible, of course, and would not be unless temporal precession rates were synchronized. And synchronization was what Grimes did not want. As far as he knew, his Corsair was typical of her class (as long as her damaged side was hidden from view) but the humans (if bodiless brains could still be called human) aboard the ships of the squadron were not spacemen, knew nothing of subtle differences that can be picked up immediately by the trained eye.

  Grimes wished to be able to sweep past the enemy, invisible, no more than interference on their screens, and to make his landing on Stree before the squadron fell into its orbits. That was his wish, and that was his hope, but Branson, since the breakdown, did not trust his Mannschenn Drive unit and dared not drive the machine at its full capacity. He pointed out that, even so, they were gaining slowly upon the enemy, and that was evidence that the engineers of those vessels trusted their interstellar drives even less than he, Branson, did. The Commodore was obliged to admit that his engineer was probably right in his assumption.

  So it was when Corsair, at last, cut her Drive and reentered normal Space-Time that the blockading cruisers were already taking up their stations. Radar and radio came into play. From the transceiver in Corsair’s control room squeaked an irritable voice: “Heenteer tee Ceerseer, Heenteer tee Ceerseer, teeke eep steeteen ees eerdeered.”

  Ella Kubinsky, who had been throughly rehearsed for just this situation, squeaked the acknowledgement.

  Grimes stared out of the viewports at the golden globe that was Stree, at the silver, flitting sparks that were the other ships. He switched his regard to Williams, saw that the Executive Officer was going through the motions of maneuvering the ship into a closed orbit—and, as he had been ordered, making a deliberate botch of it.

  “Heenteer tee Ceerseer. Whee ees neet yeer veeseen screen een?”

  Ella Kubinsky squeaked that it was supposed to have been overhauled on Tharn, and added some unkind remarks about the poor quality of humanoid labor. Somebody—Grimes was sorry that he did not see who it was—whispered unkindly that if Ella did switch on the screen it would make no difference, anyhow. The ugly girl flushed angrily, but continued to play her part calmly enough.

  Under Williams’ skilled handling, the ship was falling closer and closer to the great, expanding globe of the planet. But this did not go unnoticed for long. Again there was the enraged squeaking, but in a new voice. “Thees ees thee Eedmeereel. Wheet thee heell eere yee plee-eeng et, Ceerseer?”

  Ella told her story of an alleged overhaul of reaction drive controls and made further complaints about the quality of the dockyard labor on Tharn.

  “Wheere ees yeer Cepteen? Teell heem tee speek tee mee.”

  Ella said that the Captain was busy, at the controls. The Admiral said that the ship would do better by herself than with such an illegitimate son of a human female handling her. Williams, hearing this, grinned and muttered, “I did not ride to my parents’ wedding on a bicycle.”

  “Wheere ees thee Ceepteen?”

  And there was a fresh voice: “Heeveec tee Heenteer. Wheere deed shee geet theet deemeege?”

  “All right,” said Grimes. “Action stations. And get her downstairs, Williams, as fast as Christ will let you!”

  Gyroscopes whined viciously and rockets screamed, driving the ship down to the exosphere in a powered dive. From the vents in her sides puffed the cloud of metallic particles that would protect her from laser—until the particles themselves were destroyed by the stabbing beams. And her launching racks spewed missiles, each programmed for random action, and to seek out and destroy any target except their parent ship. Not that they stood much chance of so doing—but they would, at least, keep the enemy laser gunners busy.

  Corsair hit the first, tenuous fringes of the Streen atmosphere and her internal temperature rose fast, too fast. Somehow, using rockets only, taking advantage of her aerodynamic qualities, such as they were, Williams turned her, stood her on her tail. Briefly she was a sitting duck—but Carter’s beams were stabbing and slicing, swatting down the swarm of missiles that had been loosed at her.

  She was falling then, stern first, falling fast but under control, balanced on her tail of incandescence, the rocket thrust that was slowing her, that would bring her to a standstill (Grimes hoped) when her vaned landing gear was only scant feet above the surface of the planet.

  She was dropping through the overcast—blue-silver at first, then gradually changing hue to gold. She was dropping through the overcast, and there was no pursuit, although when she entered regions of denser atmosphere she was escorted, was surrounded by great, shadowy shapes that wheeled about them on wide wings, that glared redly at them through the control room ports.

  Grimes recognized them. After all, in his own continuum he had been the first human to set foot on Stree. They were the huge flying lizards, not unlike the pterosauria of Earth’s past—but in Grimes’ Space-Time they had never behaved like this. They had avoided spaceships and aircraft. These showed no inclination towards doing so, and only one of the huge brutes colliding with the ship, tipping her off balance, could easily produce a situation beyond even Williams’ superlative pilotage to correct.

  But they kept their distance, more or less, and followed Corsair down, down, through the overcast and through the clear air below the cloud blanket. And beneath her was the familiar landscape—low, rolling hills, broad rivers, lush green plains that were no more than wide clearings in the omnipresent jungle.

  Yes, it was familiar, and the Commodore could make out the site of his first landing—one of the smaller clearings that, by some freak of chance or nature, had the outline of a great horse.

  Inevitably, as he had been on the occasion of his first landing, Grimes was reminded of a poem that he had read as a young man, that he had tried to memorize—The Ballad of the White Horse, by Chesterton. How did it go?

  For the end of the world was long ago

  And all we stand today

  As children of a second birth

  Like some strange people left on Earth

  After a Judgment Day.

  Yes, the end of their world had come for the Rim colonists, in this Universe, long ago.

  And could Grimes and his crew of outsiders reverse the Judgment?

  Chapter 18

  SLOWLY, CAUTIOUSLY Corsair dropped to the clearing, her incandescent rocket exhaust incinerating the grasslike vegetation, raising great, roiling clouds of smoke and steam. A human-built warship would have been fitted with nozzles from which, in these circumstances, a fire-smothering foam could be ejected. But Corsair’s builders would have considered such a device a useless refinement. Slowly she settled, then came to rest, rocking slightly on her landing gear. Up and around the control room ports billowed the dirty smoke and the white steam, gradually thinning. Except for a few desert areas, the climate of Stree was uniformly wet and nothing would burn for long.

  Grimes asked Mayhew to—as he phrased it—take psionic soundings, but from his past experience of this planet he knew that it would be a waste of time. The evidence indicated that the Streen practiced telepathy among themselves but that their minds were closed to outsiders. But the saurians must have seen the ship land, and the pillar of cloud that she had created would be visible for many miles.

  Slowly the smoke cleared and those in the control room were able to see, through the begrimed ports, the edge of the jungle, the tangle of lofty, fern-like growths with, between them, the interlacing entanglement of creepers. Something was coming through the jungle, its passage marked by an occasional eruption of tiny flying lizards from the crests of the tree ferns. Something was coming through the jungle, and heading towards the ship.

  Grimes got up from his chair and, accompanied by Son
ya, made his way down to the airlock. He smiled with wry amusement as he recalled his first landing on this world. Then he had been able to do things properly, had strode down the ramp in all the glory of gold braid and brass buttons, had even worn a quite useless ceremonial sword for the occasion. Then he had been accompanied by his staff, as formally attired as himself. Now he was wearing scanty, dirty rags and accompanied by a woman as nearly naked as he was. (But the Streen, who saw no need for clothing, had been more amused than impressed by his finery.)

  The airlock door was open and the ramp was out. The Commodore and his wife did not descend at once to the still slightly smoking ground. One advantage of his dress uniform, thought Grimes, was that it had included half-Wellington boots. The couple watched the dark tunnel entrance in the cliff of solid greenery that marked the end of the jungle track.

  A Streen emerged. He would have passed for a small dinosaur from Earth’s remote past, although the trained eye of a paleontologist would have detected differences. There was one difference that was obvious even to the untrained eye—the cranial development. This being had a brain, and not a small one. The little, glittering eyes stared at the humans. A voice like the hiss of escaping steam said, “Greetings.”

  “Greetings,” replied the Commodore.

  “You come again, man Grimes.” It was a statement of fact rather than a question.

  “I have never been here before,” said Grimes, adding, “Not in this Space-Time.”

  “You have been here before. The last time your body was covered with cloth and metal, trappings of no functional value. But it does not matter.”

  “How can you remember?”

  “I cannot, but our Wise Ones remember all things. What was, what is to come, what might have been and what might be. They told me to greet you and to bring you to them.”

  Grimes was less than enthusiastic. On the occasion of his last visit the Wise Ones had lived not in the jungle but in a small, atypical patch of rocky desert, many miles to the north. Then he had been able to make the journey in one of Faraway Quest’s helicopters. Now he had no flying machines at his disposal, and a spaceship is an unhandy brute to navigate in a planetary atmosphere. He did not fancy a long, long journey on foot, or even riding one of the lesser saurians that the Streen used as draught animals, along a rough track partially choken with thorny undergrowth. Once again he was acutely conscious of the inadequacy of his attire.

  The native cackled. (The Streen was not devoid of a sense of humor.) He said, “The Wise Ones told me that you would not be clad for a journey. The Wise Ones await you in the village.”

  “Is it far?”

  “It is where it was when you came before, when you landed your ship in this very place.”

  “No more than half an hour’s walk,” began Grimes, addressing Sonya, then fell suddenly silent as an intense light flickered briefly, changing and brightening the green of the jungle wall, the gaudy colors of the flowering vines. Involuntarily he looked up, but the golden overcast was unbroken. There was another flare behind the cloud blanket, blue-white, distant, and then, belatedly, the thunder of the first explosion drifted down, ominous and terrifying.

  “Missiles . . .” whispered the Commodore. “And my ship’s a sitting duck. . .”

  “Sir,” hissed the saurian, “you are not to worry. The Wise Ones have taken adequate steps for your—and our—protection.”

  “But you have no science, no technology!” exclaimed Grimes, realizing the stupidity of what he had said when it was too late.

  “We have science, man Grimes. We have machines to pit against the machines of your enemies. But our machines, unlike yours, are of flesh and blood, not of metal—although our anti-missiles, like yours, possess only a limited degree of intelligence.”

  “These people,” exclaimed Grimes to Sonya, “are superb biological engineers.”

  “I know,” she said. “And I have little doubt that their air umbrella of pterodactyls will last longer than our furry friends’ supply of missiles. So I suggest that we leave them to it and go to see the Wise Ones.” She looked dubiously at the jungle, then turned to call to a woman inside the ship, “Peggy! Bring us out a couple of machetes!”

  “You will not need them,” commented the Streen, “even though your skins are too soft.”

  They did need them, even though their guide went ahead like a tank clearing the way for infantry. The vines and brambles were springy, reaching out with taloned tentacles as soon as the saurian had passed. Grimes and Sonya slashed until their arms were tired, but even so, their perspiration smarted painfully in the fresh scratches all over their bodies. They were far from sorry when they emerged into another clearing, a small one, almost completely roofed over with the dense foliage of the surrounding trees.

  There were the usual huts, woven from still-living creepers. There was the steaming compost pile that was the hatchery. There were the domesticated lizards, large and small, engaged in their specialized tasks—digging the vegetable plots, weeding and pruning. There were the young of the Streen, looking absurdly like plucked chickens, displaying the curiosity that is common to all intelligent beings throughout the Galaxy, keeping a respectful distance from the visitors, staring at them from their black, unwinking eyes. There were the adults, equally curious, some of whom hustled the community’s children out of the path of the humans, clearing a way to the door of a hut that, by Streen standards, was imposing. From the opening drifted blue eddies of smoke—aromatic, almost intoxicating. Grimes knew that the use of the so-called sacred herbs, burned in a brazier and the smoke inhaled, was confined to the Wise Ones.

  There were three of the beings huddled there in the semi-darkness, grouped around the tripod from the top of which was suspended the cage in which the source of the smoke smoldered ruddily. The Commodore sneezed. The vapor, as far as he could gather, was mildly euphoric and, at the same time, hallucinogenic—but to human beings it was only an irritant to the nasal membranes. In spite of his efforts to restrain himself he sneezed again, loudly.

  The Streen around the tripod cackled thinly. The Commodore, his eyes becoming accustomed to the dim lighting, could see that they were old, their scales shabby and dulled with a lichenous growth, their bones protuberant beneath their armored skins. There was something familiar about them—sensed rather than visually recognized. One of them cackled, “Our dream smoke still makes you sneeze, man Grimes.”

  “Yes, Wise One.”

  “And what do you here, man Grimes? Were you not happy in your own here-and-now? Were you not happy with the female of your kind whom you acquired since last we met, otherwhen-and-where?”

  “You’d better say ‘yes’ to that!” muttered Sonya.

  Again the thin cackling. “We are lucky, man Grimes. We do not have the problems of you mammals, with your hot blood. . . .” A pause. “But still, we love life, just as you do. And we know that out there, falling about our world, are those who would end our lives, just as they would end yours. Now they have not the power, but it is within their grasp.”

  “But would it matter to you?” asked Sonya. “I thought that you were—how shall I put it?—co-existent with yourselves in all the alternative universes. You must be. You remember John’s first landing on this planet—but that was never in this here-and-now.”

  “You do not understand, woman Sonya. You cannot understand. But we will try to explain. Man Grimes—in your here-and-now what cargoes do your ships bring to Stree?”

  “Luxuries like tea and tobacco, Wise One. And books. . . .”

  “What sort of books, man Grimes?”

  “History. Philosophy. Novels, even . . . poetry.”

  “And your poets say more in fewer words than your philosophers. There is one whom I will quote to you:

  And he who lives more lives than one

  More deaths than one shall die.

  “Does that answer your question, woman Sonya?”

  “I can feel it,” she murmured. “But I can’t understand
it.”

  “It does not matter. And it does not matter if you do not understand what you are going to do—as long as you understand how to do it.”

  “And what is that?” asked Grimes.

  “To destroy the egg before it hatches,” was the reply.

  Chapter 19

  ANYBODY meeting the seemingly primitive Streen for the first time would never dream that these saurians, for all their obvious intelligence, are engineers. Their towns and villages are, to the human way of thinking, utterly innocent of machines. But what is a living organism but a machine—an engine that derives its motive power from the combustion of hydro-carbons in an oxygen atmosphere? On Stree, a variety of semi-intelligent lizards perform the tasks that on man-colonized worlds are performed by mechanisms of metal and plastic.

  Yes, the Streen are engineers—biological and psychological engineers—of no mean caliber.

  In their dim hut, what little light there was further obscured by the acrid fumes from the brazier, the Wise Ones talked and Grimes and Sonya listened. Much of what they were told was beyond them—but there was emotional rather than intellectual acceptance. They would not altogether understand—but they could feel. And, after all, the symbiosis of flesh-and-blood machine and machine of metal and plastic was not too alien a concept. Such symbiosis, to a limited extent, has been known ever since the first seaman handled the first ship, learning to make that clumsy contraption of wood and fiber an extension of his own body.