Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  Meanwhile, his passage had been arranged on the Lornbound Rim Cayman, aboard which Missenden would also be traveling on the first leg of his long and miserable voyage home. It came as a surprise, therefore, when he received a personal telephone call from the Honorable Clifton Weeks, the Rim Worlds’ ambassador to Tharn. “I hope that you’re in no hurry to be getting home, Commodore,” said the fat man. Grimes could tell from the Ambassador’s expression that he hoped the reverse.

  “Not exactly,” admitted Grimes, enjoying the poorly concealed play of expressions over the other’s pudgy features.

  “Hrrmph! Well, sir, it seems that our masters want you on Mellise.”

  “What for, sir?” asked Grimes.

  “Don’t ask me. I’m not a spaceman. I didn’t open the bloody world up to commerce. All that I’ve been told is that you’re to arrange for passage to that planet on the first available ship. You’re the expert.”

  On what? wondered Grimes. He said sweetly, “I’m looking forward to the trip, Mr. Ambassador.”

  Part 3

  The Tin Fishes

  COMMODORE JOHN GRIMES was proceeding homeward from Tharn the long way around—by way of Groller, Stree and Mellise, by the route that he, in the old Faraway Quest, had opened and charted so many years ago.

  On all the worlds he was still remembered. On Tharn the spaceport was named after him. In Breardon, the planetary capital of Groller, a huge statue of him stood in Council Square. Grimes had stared up at the heroic monument with some distaste. Surely his ears didn’t stand out that much, and surely his habitual expression was not quite so frog-like. He made allowances for the fact that the Grollens, although humanoid, are a batrachian people, but he still inspected himself for a long time in a full-length mirror on his return to the ship in which he was a passenger.

  And then Rim Kestrel, in which Grimes had taken passage from Tharn, came to Mellise.

  Mellise was a watery world, fully four-fifths of its surface being covered by the warm, mainly shallow seas. The nearest approach to a continent was a long, straggling chain of islands almost coincident with the equator. On one of the larger ones was the spaceport. There was no city, only a village in which the human spaceport personnel and the Rim Confederacy’s ambassador and his staff lived. The Mellisans themselves were an amphibious race; like the Earthly cetacea they returned to the sea after having reached quite a high stage of evolution ashore. They could, if they had to, live and work on dry land, but they preferred the water. They dwelt in submarine villages where they were safe from the violent revolving storms that at times ravaged the surface. They tended their underwater farms, raising giant mollusks, great bivalves that yielded lustrous pearls, the main item of export. Their imports were the manufactured goods needed by an aquatic culture: nets, cordage, harpoon guns and the like. They could make these for themselves but, with the establishment of regular trade between themselves and the Confederacy, they preferred not to. Why should an essentially water-dwelling being work with fire and metals when pearl farming was so much more comfortable and pleasant?

  Grimes rode down to the surface in Rim Kestrel’s control room. Captain Paulus, the ship’s master, was nervous, obviously did not like having his superior there to watch his ship-handling. But he was competent enough, although painfully cautious. Not for him the almost meteoric descent favored by other masters. His Inertial Drive delivered a thrust that nearly countered the planet’s gravitational pull. The Kestrel drifted surfaceward like a huge balloon with barely negative buoyancy. But Paulus reacted fast enough when a jet stream took hold of the ship, canceling its effect by just the right application of lateral drive; reacted fast again when the vessel was shaken by clear air turbulence, pulling her out of the danger area with no delay. Nonetheless, Grimes was making mental notes. The efficiency of the spaceport’s meteorological observatory left much to be desired; Paulus should have been warned by radio of the disturbances through which he had passed. (But he, Grimes, had made his first landing here before there was a spaceport, let alone spaceport facilities. He had brought the Quest down through the beginnings of a hurricane.)

  The Commodore looked at the vision screen that showed, highly magnified, what lay aft and below. There were the islands, each one raggedly circular, each one ringed by a golden beach that was ringed, in its turn, by white surf. There was the cloudy green of shallow water, the clear blue of the deeper seas. Inland was the predominant purple of the vegetation.

  Yes, it was a pleasant world, Mellise. Even here, out on the Rim, it could have been developed to a holiday planet, rivaling if not surpassing Caribbea. If the Mellisans had been obliged to deal with the Interstellar Federation rather than with the Rim Worlds Confederacy, this probably would have been the case. Grimes, whose first years in space had been as an officer in the Federation’s Survey Service, knew all too well that the major Terran galactic power was far more concerned with the rights of other intelligent races in theory than in practice—unless there was some political advantage to be gained by posing as liberator, conservator or whatever.

  He could see the white spaceport buildings now, gleaming in the light of the afternoon sun, startlingly distinct against their backdrop of purple foliage. He could see the pearly gray of the apron, and on it the black geometrical shadows cast by cranes and conveyor belts and gantries. He could even see the tiny, blinking stars that were the three beacons, the markers of the triangle in the center of which Rim Kestrel was to land. He wished that Paulus would get on with it. At this rate it would be after sunset by the time the ship was down.

  After sunset it was, and the night had fallen with the dramatic suddenness to be expected in the low latitudes of any planet. Overhead the sky was clear and almost empty, save for the opalescent arc that was the upper limb of the Galactic Lens, low on the western horizon. Paulus had ordered all ports throughout the ship opened, and through them flowed the warm breeze, the scents of growing and flowering things that would have been cloyingly sweet had it not been for the harsh tang of salt water. There was the distant murmur of surf and, even more distant, a grumble of thunder.

  “Thank you, Captain Paulus,” said Grimes formally. “A very nice set-down.”

  And so it had been. Merchant captains, after all, are not paid to put their ships in hazard.

  Port formalities were few. The Mellisans cared little about such matters as health, customs and immigration regulations. The port captain, a Rim Worlder, took care of all such details for them; and insofar as vessels owned by the Confederacy were concerned there was not even the imposition of port dues. After all, the levying of such charges would have been merely robbing Peter to pay Paul. The rare outside ships—the occasional Interstellar Transport Commission Epsilion Class tramp, the infrequent Empire of Waverley freighter, the once-in-a-blue-moon Shakespearian Sector trader—were, presumably, another matter. They would at least pay port dues.

  Grimes sat with Captain Paulus and Stacey, the port captain, in Paulus’ day cabin. Cold drinks were on the table before them. The Commodore was smoking his foul pipe, Paulus was nervously lighting one cigarette after another, and Captain Stacey had between his fleshy lips a peculiarly gnarled cigar of local manufacture. It looked as though it had been rolled from dry seaweed, and smelt like it. (“An acquired taste,” Stacey had told them. “Like to try one?” They had refused.)

  “Only a small shipment of pearls this time,” Stacey said. “The pearl fishers—or farmers—are having their troubles.”

  “Disease again?” asked Paulus.

  “No. Not this time. Seems to be a sort of predatory starfish. Could be a mutation. Whether it is or not, it’s a vicious bastard.”

  “I thought, Captain Stacey,” said Grimes, “that the people here were quite capable of dealing with any of the dangerous life forms in their seas.”

  “Not this new starfish,” Stacey told him. “It’s a killer.” He sipped his drink. “The natives knew that you were coming here almost as soon I did, Commodore. Telepathy? Could be.
But, sir, you are almost a local deity. Old Wunnaara—he’s the boss in these parts—said to me only this morning, ‘Grimes Wannarbo’—and a Wannarbo is roughly halfway between a high chief and the Almighty—‘will us help. . . .’ Really touched by his faith, I was.”

  “I’m not a marine biologist,” said Grimes. “But couldn’t you, with your local knowledge, do something, Captain Stacey?”

  “I’m not a marine biologist either, Commodore. It takes all my time to run the port.”

  And I recommended you for this appointment, thought Grimes, looking at the fat man. I thought that this would be an ideal job for anybody as notoriously lazy as yourself. I thought that you couldn’t do any harm here, and that you’d get on well with the Mellisans. But you can’t do any good either.

  “They must produce pearls,” stated Paulus, “if they’re to pay for their imports. They’ve nothing else we want.”

  Nothing else that we want. . . thought Grimes. But the Rim Confederacy is not alone in the galaxy. He said, “Surely, Captain Stacey, you’ve found out what sort of weapons would be most effective against these things. They could be manufactured back on Lorn or Faraway, and shipped out here. And what about protective netting for the oyster beds?”

  “Useless, Commodore,” Stacy told him. “The starfish just tear to shreds even the heaviest nets, made from wire rope. As for weapons—poison has always been effective in the past, but not any longer.”

  “We have to do something to help these people,” Grimes said definitely. “And, frankly, not altogether from altrusitic motives. As you should know, both Waverly and the Shakespearian Sector are anxious to expand their spheres of influence. If they can help Mellise and we can’t . . .” The unspoken words “you’ll be out of a soft job” hung in the air between them.

  “They seem to rely upon you to help them, sir,” Stacey grumbled.

  “And perhaps I can,” Grimes told him. “Perhaps I can.”

  Perhaps he could—but, as he had said, he was not a marine biologist. Even so, he knew of the parallel evolution of life forms on all Earth-type planets. And in the course of his career he had tangled with unfriendly and hungry beasts on more than a century of worlds; he was still around and the hostile animals were not. Variations on familiar patterns or utterly alien, all had fallen victim to human cunning and human weaponry—and human savagery. Man, after all, was still the most dangerous animal.

  He said good night to Stacey and Paulus, told them that he was going outside the ship to stretch his legs. He made his way down to the after air lock, then down the ramp to the smooth, clean concrete of the apron. He walked away from the direction of the administration buildings and the human village, found a path that must lead down to the sea. On either side of it the feathery fronds of the trees rustled in the warm breeze. Overhead, Mellise’s single moon, a ruddy globe with an almost unmarked surface, rode high in the sky.

  Grimes came to the beach, to the pale, gently shelving stretch of coarse sand beyond which the surf was greenly luminescent. He kicked off his sandals and, carrying them, walked slowly down to the edge of the water. He missed Sonya.

  He saw that a black, humanoid shape, outlined by the phosphorescence, was waddling ashore, splashing through the shallows. From its dark head two eyes that reflected the light of the moon stared at Grimes. The teeth glinted whitely in the long muzzle as it spoke. “Meelongee, Grimes Wannarbo.” Its voice was like that of a Siamese cat.

  “Meelongee,” replied Grimes. He remembered that this was the word of greeting.

  “You have come back.” The English was oddly accented but perfectly understandable. “Yes. I have come back.” “You . . . help?”

  “I shall try.”

  The native was close to Grimes now, and the Commodore could smell the not unpleasant fishy odor of him. He could see, too, that he was old; in the moonlight the white hairs about the muzzle and the white patches of fur on the chest were plainly visible.

  “You me remember?” There was a short, barking laugh. “No? I was cub when first you come to Mellise, Grimes Wannarbo. Now I am chief. My name—Wunnaara. And you, too, are chief—not of one skyship, but of many. I am chief—but known little. You are chief—but know much.”

  “The Rim Kestrel lifts tomorrow,” said Grimes.

  “But you will stay, Wannarbo? You will stay?”

  Grimes made his decision. If there was anything that he could do he would be furthering the interests of the Confederacy as well as helping the natives of Mellise. Stacey, it was obvious, would not lift one fat finger. The ambassador, like the port captain, was a no-hoper who had been sent to a planet upon which no emergencies were ever likely to arise. Grimes had not yet met him, but he knew him by repute.

  “I will stay,” he told the Chief.

  “Then I tell my people. There is much to make ready.” Wunnaara slipped back into the water, far more silently than he had emerged from it, and was gone.

  The Commodore resumed his walk along the beach.

  He came to a shallow bay, a crescent-like indentation in the shoreline. There was somebody out there in the water swimming—and by the flash of long, pale arms Grimes knew that it was not a native. Too, there was a pile of clothing on the sand. Grimes quickly stripped. It was a long time since he had enjoyed a swim in the sea. He divested himself of his clothing without embarrassment. Even though he was no longer a young man his body was still compact, well-muscled, had not begun to run to belly. He waded out into the warm salt water.

  Suddenly he was confronted by the other swimmer. Only her head and smooth, bare shoulders were visible above the surface. Her eyes and her wide mouth were very dark against the creamy pallor of her face.

  “Can’t you read?” she was asking indignantly. “Didn’t you see the notices? This beach is reserved for ladies only.”

  Her accent was not a Rim Worlds’ one; it was more Pan-Terran than anything. That would account for her indignation; only on parts of the home planet did the absurd nudity taboo still persist. But this was not the home planet.

  Grimes said mildly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” He turned to leave the water.

  She said, “Don’t run away. We can talk, at this depth, modestly enough.”

  “I suppose we can.”

  “You’re from the ship, aren’t you? But of course, you must be . . . let me see, now . . . I’ve a good ear for accents, and you haven’t quite lost the good old Terran twangs—Commodore Grimes, would it be?”

  “Guilty,” admitted Grimes. He was amused to note either that the tide was going out fast or that this companion had moved closer inshore. Her full breasts were fully exposed now, and there was more than a hint of the pale glimmer of the rest of her below the surface.

  She said, “It’s rather a pity that you’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “You’re not?” she asked sharply.

  “No. I promised Chief Wunnaara that I’d stay to look into this plague of starfish.”

  “You promised Wunnaara . . .” Her voice was scornful. “But he’s only a native, and has to be kept in his place. That’s why I insisted on having this beach made private. I hated to think that those . . . things were spying on me, leering at me while I was swimming.”

  “And what about me, leering and spying?” Grimes asked sarcastically.

  “But you’re a Terran—”

  “Ex-Terran, young lady. Very ex.”

  “—and we Terrans should stick together,” she completed with a dazzling smile.

  “I’m a Rim Worlder,” Grimes told her severely. “And so must you be, if you’re employed at the spaceport, no matter where you were born.” He asked abruptly, “And what do you do, by the way?”

  “I’m in the met. office,” she said. “Then I shall see you tomorrow,” stated Grimes.

  “Good!” Her smile flashed on again.

  “I shall be calling in to register a strong complaint,” the Commodore went on.

  He attempted to step pa
st the girl, intending to swim out to the first line of breakers. Somehow she got in his way, and somehow both of them lost their balance and went down, floundering and splashing. Grimes got to his feet first, pulled the young woman to hers. He was suddenly conscious, as she fell against him, of the firmness and the softness of the body against his own. It was all very nice—and all a little too obvious. But he was tempted, and tempted strongly. Then, but with seeming reluctance, she broke away from him and splashed shoreward, her slim, rounded figure luminous in the moonlight.

  Her voice floated back to him, “I still hope that it’s a pleasant meeting tomorrow, Commodore!”

  It was not as unpleasant as it could have been. The girl, Lynn Davis, was second in charge of the spaceport’s meteorological office. By daylight, and clothed, she was still attractive. Her hair was a dark, dull-gleaming blonde and her eyes were so deep a blue as to be almost black. Her face was thin and intelligent, with both mouth and nose a little too pronounced for conventional prettiness. There was a resemblance to Sonya, his wife, that strongly attracted Grimes; more than a physical likeness, it was a matter of essential quality. This, at once, put Grimes on his guard. Sonya had held the rank of commander in the Federation’s Survey Service, and in the Intelligence branch at that. But now Federation and Rim World Confederacy worked together, shared all information, kept no secrets from each other. Even so. . . .

  Lynn Davis had all the answers ready. Rim Kestrel had been given no information on jet streams and clear air turbulence because there had been a breakdown of radar and other instruments. This, Grimes was made to feel, was his fault; the Rim Runners’ Stores Department should have been more prompt in dealing with requisitions for spare parts. “And after all, Commodore,” she told him sweetly, “you made the first landing here without any aid at all from the surface, didn’t you?”