Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Airships?” I demanded. “You certainly have been seeing things, Spooky!”

  “Yes, airships. There was a man called Bland in Sydney, somethin’ of a rebel himself, who designed an airship years before Ned was ever heard of. An’ you—or your ancestor—could have found those plans. You, in your ancestor’s mind, sort of nudgin’—just as Eddie an’ meself’ll be doing our own nudgin’. . . .”

  I wasn’t quite sober so, in spite of my protestations, what Spooky was saying, combined with what I had seen, seemed to make sense. So when Kelly said that we should now, all three of us, return to the past, to the year 1880, old reckoning, I did not object. I realized dimly that they had been expecting me, waiting for me. That they were needing me. I must have been an obnoxious puppy in those days—but aren’t we all when still wet behind the ears? I actually thought of bargaining. A dukedom on top of the admiral’s commission . . . the Duke of Alice . . . ? It sounded good.

  Kelly and Byrne were seated now, one on either side of me. There were controls set in the armrests of their chairs. Latticework skeps, like the one that I was wearing, were over their heads. The rotors started to spin, to spin and precess, glimmering, fading, tumbling, dragging our essences down the dark dimensions while our bodies remained solidly seated in the here and now.

  I listened to the familiar thin, high whine of the machine. . . .

  To the babble of rough voices, male and female. . . . To the piano-accordion being not too inexpertly played. . . . An Irish song it was—The Wearin’ Of The Green. . . . I smelled tobacco smoke, the fumes of beer and of strong liquor. . . . I opened my eyes and looked around me. It was real—far more real than the unconvincing reconstruction in the here-and-now Glenrowan had been. The slatternly women were a far cry from those barmaids tarted up in allegedly period costume. And here there were no tourists, gaily dressed and hung around with all manner of expensive recording equipment. Here were burly, bearded, rough-clad men and it was weapons, antique revolvers, that they carried, not the very latest trivoders.

  But the group of men of whom I was one were not armed. They were laborers, not bushrangers—but they looked up to the arrogant giant who was holding forth just as much as did his fellow . . . criminals? Yes, they were that. They had held up coaches, robbed banks, murdered. Yet to these Irish laborers he was a hero, a deliverer. He stood for the Little Man against the Establishment. He stood for a warmly human religion against one whose priests were never recruited from the ranks of the ordinary people, the peasants, the workers.

  Mind you, I was seeing him through the eyes of that ancestral Grimes who was (temporarily) a criminal himself, who was (temporarily) a rebel, who was on the run (he thought) from the forces of Law and Order. I had full access to his memories. I was, more or less, him. More or less, I say. Nonetheless, I, Grimes the spaceman, was a guest in the mind of Grimes the seaman. I could remember that quarrel on the poop of the Lady Lucan and how Captain Jenkins, whose language was always foul, had excelled himself, calling me what was, in those days, an impossibly vile epithet. I lost my temper, Jenkins lost a few teeth, and I lost my job, hastily leaving the ship in Melbourne before Jenkins could have me arrested on a charge of mutiny on the high seas.

  And now, mainly because of the circumstances in which I found myself, I was on the point of becoming one of those middle class technicians who, through the ages, have thrown in their lot with charismatic rebel leaders, without whom those same alleged deliverers of the oppressed masses would have gotten no place at all. I—now—regard with abhorrence the idea of derailing a special train on the way to apprehend a rather vicious criminal. That ancestral Grimes, in his later years, must have felt the same sentiments—so much so that he never admitted to anybody that he was among those present at the Siege of Glenrowan.

  But Ned Kelly. . . . He was in good form, although there was something odd about him. He seemed to be . . . possessed. So was the man—Joe Byrne—standing beside him. And so, of course, was John Grimes, lately second mate of the good ship Lady Lucan. Kelly—which Kelly?—must have realized that he was drawing some odd looks from his adherents. He broke the tension by putting on his famous helmet—the sheet-iron cylinder with only a slit for the eyes—and singing while he was wearing it. This drew both laughter and applause. Did you ever see those singing robots that were quite a craze a few years back? The effect was rather similar. Great art it was not but it was good for a laugh.

  Nobody saw the schoolmaster, Thomas Curnow, sneaking out but me. That was rather odd as he, fancying himself a cut above the others making merry in the hotel, had been keeping himself to himself, saying little, drinking sparingly. This should have made him conspicuous but, somehow, it had the reverse effect. He was the outsider, being studiously ignored. I tried to attract Kelly’s attention, Byrne’s attention, but I might as well just not have been there. After all I—or my host—was an outsider too. I was the solitary Englishman among the Australians and the Irish. The gang with whom I’d been working on the railway had never liked me. The word had gotten around that I was an officer. The fact that I was (temporarily, as it happened) an ex-officer made no difference. I was automatically suspect.

  But I still wanted to be an admiral. I still wanted to command those squadrons of gunboats on the Murray River, the air fleet that would turn the tide at Port Phillip Bay. (How much of my inward voice was the rum speaking, how much was me? How much did the John Grimes whose brain I was taking over ever know about it, remember about it?)

  I followed Curnow, out into the cold, clear night. The railway track was silvery in the light of the lopsided moon, near its meridian. On either side, dark and ominous, was the bush. Some nocturnal bird or animal called out, a raucous cry, and something else answered it. And faint—but growing louder—there was a sort of chuffing rattle coming up from the south’ard. The pilot engine, I thought, and then the special train.

  Ahead of me Curnow’s lantern, a yellow star where no star should have been, was bobbing along between the tracks. I remembered the story. He had the lantern, and his wife’s red scarf. He would wave them. The train would stop. Superintendent Hare, Inspector O’Connor, the white troopers, and the black trackers would pile out. And then the shooting, and the siege, and the fire, and that great, armoured figure, like some humanoid robot before its time, stumbling out through the smoke and the flame for the final showdown with his enemies.

  And it was up to me to change the course of history.

  Have you ever tried walking along a railway line, especially when you’re in something of a hurry? The sleepers or the ties or whatever they’re called are spaced at just the wrong distance for a normal human stride. Curnow was doing better than I was. Well, he was more used to it. Neither as a seaman nor as a spaceman had I ever had occasion to take a walk such as this.

  And then—he fell. He’d tripped, I suppose. He’d fallen with such force as to knock himself out. When I came up to him I found that he’d tried to save that precious lantern from damage. It was on its side but the chimney was unbroken, although one side of the glass was blackened by the smoke from the burning oil.

  And the train was coming. I could see it now—the glaring yellow headlight of the leading locomotive, the orange glow from the fireboxes, a shower of sparks mingling with the smoke from the funnels. I had to get Curnow off the line. I tried to lift him but one foot was somehow jammed under the sleeper over which he had tripped. But his lantern, as I have already said, was still burning. I hastily turned it the right side up; only one side of the chimney was smoked into opacity. And that flimsy, translucent red scarf was still there.

  I lifted the lantern, held it so that the colored fabric acted as a filter. I waved it—not fast, for fear that the light would be blown out, but slowly, deliberately. The train, the metal monster, kept on coming. I knew that I’d soon have to look after myself but was determined to stand there until the last possible second.

  The whistle of the leading locomotive, the pilot engine, sounded—a long, mournf
ul note. There was a screaming of brakes, a great, hissing roar of escaping steam, shouting. . . .

  I realised that Curnow had recovered, had scrambled to his feet, was standing beside me. I thrust the lantern and the scarf into his hand, ran into the bushes at the side of the track. He could do all the explaining. I—or that ancestral Grimes—had no desire to meet the police. For all I—or he—knew they would regard the capture of a mutineer and deserter as well as a gang of bushrangers as an unexpected bonus.

  I stayed in my hiding place—cold, bewildered, more than a little scared. After a while I heard the shooting, the shouting and the screaming. I saw the flames. I was too far away to see Ned Kelly’s last desperate stand; all that I observed was distant, shadowy figures in silhouette against the burning hotel.

  Suddenly, without warning, I was back in my chair in that other Kelly’s laboratory. The machine, the modified Mannschenn Drive unit, had stopped. I looked at Byrne. I knew, without examining him, that he, too, had . . . stopped. Kelly was alive but not yet fully conscious. His mouth was working. I could just hear what he was muttering; “It had to come to this.” And those, I recalled, had been the last words of Ned Kelly, the bushranger, just before they hanged him.

  I reasoned, insofar as I was capable of reasoning, that Kelly and Byrne had entered too deeply into the minds of their criminal ancestors. Joe Byrne had died in the siege and his descendant had died with him. Kelly had been badly wounded, although he recovered sufficiently to stand trial. I’d been lucky enough to escape almost unscathed.

  I’m not at all proud of what I did then. I just got up and left them—the dead man, his semi-conscious cousin. I got out of there, fast. When I left the Glenrowan Tower I took a cab to the airport and there bought a ticket on the first flight out of the city. It was going to Perth, a place that I’d never much wanted to visit, but at least it was putting distance between me and the scene of that hapless experiment, that presumptuous attempt at tinkering with Time.

  I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d left Curnow to his fate, if I hadn’t stopped the train. The course of history might well have been changed—but would it have been for the better? I don’t think so. An Irish Australia, a New Erin, a Harp in the South . . . New Erin allied with the Boers against hated England during the wars in South Africa . . . New Erin quite possibly allied with Germany against England during the First World War . . . The Irish, in many ways, are a great people—but they carry a grudge to absurd lengths. They have far too long a memory for their own wrongs.

  And I think that I like me better as I am now than as an Hereditary Admiral of the New Erin Navy in an alternate universe that, fortunately, didn’t happen.

  She said, “Thank you, Commodore, for a very interesting story.” She switched off her trivoder, folded flat its projections, closed the carrying case about it. She got to her feet.

  She said, “I have to be going.”

  He looked at the bulkhead clock, he said, “There’s no hurry, Kitty. We’ve time for another drink or two.” He sensed a coldness in the atmosphere and tried to warm things up with an attempt at humour. “Sit down again. Make yourself comfortable. This ship is Liberty Hall, you know. You can spit on that mat and call the cat a bastard.”

  She said, “The only tom cats I’ve seen aboard this wagon haven’t been of the four-legged variety. And, talking of legs, do you think that I haven’t noticed the way that you’ve been eyeing mine?”

  His prominent ears reddened angrily but he persisted. “Will you be at the cocktail party tonight?”

  “No, Commodore Grimes. Station Yorick isn’t interested in boring social functions.”

  “But I’ll be seeing more of you, I hope. . . .”

  “You will not, in either sense of the words.” She turned to go. “You said, Commodore, that the Irish have a long memory for their own wrongs. Perhaps you are right. Be that as it may—you might be interested to learn that my family name is Kelly.”

  When she was gone Grimes reflected wryly that now there was yet another alternate universe, differing from his here-and-now only in a strictly personal sense, which he would never enter.

  Grimes at the Great Race

  “I DIDN’T THINK that I’d be seeing you again,” said Grimes.

  “Or I you,” Kitty Kelly told him. “But Station Yorick’s customers liked that first interview. The grizzled old spacedog, pipe in mouth, glass in hand, spinning a yarn. . . . So when my bosses learned that you’re stuck here until your engineers manage to fit a new rubber band to your inertial drive they said, in these very words, ‘Get your arse down to the spaceport, Kitty, and try to wheedle another tall tale out of the old bastard!’ ”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes, acutely conscious that his prominent ears had reddened angrily.

  Kitty smiled sweetly. She was an attractive girl, black Irish, wide-mouthed, creamy-skinned, with vivid blue eyes. Grimes would have thought her much more attractive had she not been making it obvious that she still nursed the resentment engendered by his first story, a tale of odd happenings at long-ago and far-away Glenrowan where, thanks to Grimes, an ancestral Kelly had met his downfall.

  She said tartly, “And lay off the Irish this time, will you?”

  Grimes looked at her, at her translucent, emerald green blouse that concealed little, at the long, shapely legs under the skirt that concealed even less. He thought, There’s one of the Irish, right here, that I’d like to lay on.

  With deliberate awkwardness he asked, “If I’m supposed to avoid giving offense to anybody—and you Elsinoreans must carry the blood of about every race and nation on Old Earth—what can I talk about?”

  She made a great show of cogitation, frowning, staring down at the tips of her glossy green shoes. Then she smiled. “Racing, of course! On this world we’re great followers of the horses.” She frowned again. “But no. Somehow I just can’t see you as a sporting man, Commodore.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Grimes stiffly, “I did once take part in a race. And for high stakes.”

  “I just can’t imagine you on a horse.”

  “Who said anything about horses?”

  “What were you riding, then?”

  “Do you want the story or don’t you? If I’m going to tell it, I’ll tell it my way.”

  She sighed, muttered, “All right, all right.” She opened her case, brought out the trivi recorder, set it up on the deck of the day cabin. She aimed one lens at the chair in which Grimes was sitting, the other at the one that she would occupy. She squinted into the viewfinder. “Pipe in mouth,” she ordered. “Glass in hand . . . Where is the glass, Commodore? And aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

  He gestured towards the liquor cabinet. “You fix it. I’ll have a pink gin, on the rocks.”

  “Then I’ll have the same. It’ll be better than the sickly muck you poured down me last time I was aboard your ship!”

  Grimes’s ears flushed again. The “sickly muck” had failed to have the desired effect.

  My first command in the Survey Service [he began] was of a Serpent Class Courier, Adder. The captains of these little ships were lieutenants, their officers lieutenants and ensigns. There were no petty officers or ratings to worry about, no stewards or stewardesses to look after us. We made our own beds, cooked our own meals. We used to take turns playing with the rather primitive autochef. We didn’t starve; in fact we lived quite well.

  There was some passenger accommodation; the couriers were—and probably still are—sometimes used to get VIPs from Point A to Point B in a hurry. And they carried Service mail and dispatches hither and yon. If there was any odd job to do we did it.

  This particular job was a very odd one. You’ve heard of Darban? No? Well, it’s an Earth-type planet in the Tauran Sector. Quite a pleasant world although the atmosphere’s a bit too dense for some tastes. But if it were what we call Earth-normal I mightn’t be sitting here talking to you now. Darban’s within the Terran sphere of influence with a Carlotti
Beacon Station, a Survey Service Base, and all the rest of it. At the time of which I’m talking, though, it wasn’t in anybody’s sphere of influence, although Terran star tramps and Hallichek and Shaara ships had been calling there for quite some time. There was quite a demand for the so-called living opals—although how any woman could bear to have a slimy, squirming necklace of luminous worms strung about her neck beats me!

  She interrupted him. “These Hallicheki and Shaara . . . non-human races, aren’t they?”

  “Non-human and non-humanoid. The Hallicheki are avian, with a matriarchal society. The Shaara are winged arthropods, not unlike the Terran bees, although very much larger and with a somewhat different internal structure.”

  “There’ll be pictures of them in our library. We’ll show them to our viewers. But go on, please.”

  The merchant captains [he continued] had been an unusually law-abiding crowd. They’d bartered for the living opals but had been careful not to give in exchange any artifacts that would unduly accelerate local industrial evolution. No advanced technology—if the Darbanese wanted spaceships they’d have to work out for themselves how to build them—and, above all, no sophisticated weaponry. Mind you, some of those skippers would have been quite capable of flogging a few hand lasers or the like to the natives but the Grand Governor of Barkara—the nation that, by its relatively early development of airships and firearms, had established de facto if not de jure sovereignty over the entire planet—made sure that nothing was imported that could be a threat to his rule. A situation rather analogous, perhaps, to that on Earth centuries ago when the Japanese Shoguns and their samurai took a dim view of the muskets and cannon that, in the wrong hands, would have meant their downfall.