Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Set us down there,” she said.

  “Not bloody likely,” I said.

  “Set us down there.”

  She was standing now and her hand was on my shoulder, gripping it painfully. And . . . And . . . How can I describe it? It was as though some power were flowing from her to me, through me. I fought it. I tried to fight it. And then I tried to rationalize. After all, the metal of which Little Sister was built, an isotope of gold, was virtually guaranteed to be proof against anything. If anything should happen to her I could go to her builders on Electra and demand my money back. (Not that my money had paid for her in the first place.) Joke.

  I had the ship back on manual control. I made a slow approach to the central island, hovered above it. I had been expecting trouble, difficulty in holding the ship where I wanted her, but it was easy. Too easy. Suspiciously easy.

  I let her fall, slowly, slowly, the inertial drive just ticking over. I felt the faint jar, a very faint jar, as she landed on the flat top, the perfectly smooth top of the truncated cone.

  She said, “Open the airlock doors.”

  I tried to protest but the words wouldn’t come.

  She said, “Open the airlock doors.”

  I thought, And so we fill the ship with stinking, sulfurous gases. But the internal atmosphere can soon be purified.

  On the console before me I saw the glowing words as I actuated the switch. INNER DOOR OPEN. OUTER DOOR OPEN.

  She was gone from behind me, back into the main cabin. I got up from my chair, followed her. She was going outside, I realized. She should have asked me for a spacesuit; it would have given her some protection against the heat, against an almost certainly poisonous atmosphere. Some of this was already getting inside the ship, an acridity that made my eyes water, made me sneeze. But it didn’t seem to be worrying her.

  She passed through both doors.

  I stood in the little chamber, watching her. She was standing on the heat-smoothed rock, near, too near to the edge of the little plateau. Was the silly bitch going to commit spectacular and painful suicide? But I was reluctant to leave the security—the illusory security?—of my ship to attempt to drag her to safety. No, it wasn’t cowardice. Not altogether. I just knew that she knew what she was doing.

  (If I’d known more I should have been justified in going out to give her a push!)

  She stood there, very straight and tall, in black silhouette against the dull glow from the lake of fire. Her form wavered, became indistinct as a dark column of smoke eddied about her. Still she stood there while the smoke thinned, vanished. It was as though it had been absorbed by her body.

  But that was impossible, wasn’t it?

  She walked back to the airlock. The skin of her face seemed to be much darker than it had been—but that was not surprising. It seemed to me—but that must have been imagination—that her feet did not touch the surface over which she was walking.

  She said as she approached me, “Take me back to the city.”

  I obeyed. No matter what her order had been, no matter how absurd or dangerous, I should have obeyed. When first I had met her I had been conscious of her charisma but had learned to live with it, to distrust it and to despise it. Now neither distrust nor contempt would have been possible.

  We got upstairs.

  No sooner were we on course than the volcano blew up. The blast of it hit us like a blow from something solid. I wasn’t able to watch as I was too busy trying to keep the ship under some sort of control as she plunged through the fiery turbulence, through the smoke and the steam and the fiery pulverized dust, through the down-stabbing and up-thrusting lightning bolts.

  And, through it all, she was laughing.

  It was the first time that I had heard her laugh.

  It was an experience that I could well have done without.

  “I need some more beer,” he said, “to wash the taste of that volcanic dust out of my throat. After all the years I still remember it.” She refilled his mug, and then her own. “Did the dust get inside your ship?” she asked. “It got everywhere,” he told her. “All over the entire bloody planet.”

  We set down in that same field where we had made our first landing. According to the chronometer it wanted only an hour to local, apparent noon, but the sky was overcast. The air was chilly. She ordered me to open one of her trunks. In it was a further supply of the cast-off clothing that she had brought from Warrenhome. And there were books. Bibles, I assumed, or the perversion of Holy Writ adopted by Her church. I opened one but was unable, of course, to read the odd, flowing Stagathan characters.

  I filled a backpack with the clothing. While I was so doing she took something else from the trunk. It was a whip; haft and tapering lash were all of three meters long. It was an evil-looking thing.

  We left the ship. She took the lead. I trudged behind. As she passed one of the flowering bushes, its blossoms drab in the dismal gray light, she slashed out with the whip, cracking it expertly, severing stems and twigs, sending tattered petals fluttering to the ground.

  We walked into the city.

  We came to the central square, with the obelisk (but it was casting no shadow), the great gong (but it was now no more than an ugly disk of dull, pitted metal), the celebrants and the worshippers.

  But there was nothing for them to worship. The sky was one uniform gray with not so much as a diffuse indication of the position of the sun. The people were all, as they had been at that other service, naked but now their nudity was . . . ugly. A thin drizzle was starting to fall, but it was mud rather than ordinary rain, streaking the shivering skins of the miserable people.

  The priest standing by the gong, the man with the striker, was the first to see us. He pointed at us, shouting angrily. He advanced towards us, still shouting, menacing us with his hammer. Behind him others were now shouting, and screaming. They were blaming us for the dense cloud that had hidden their god from sight.

  She stood her ground.

  Suddenly her lash snaked out, whipped itself around the striker and tore it from the priest’s hands, sent it clattering to the mud-slimed marble paving. It cracked out again, the tip of it slashing across the man’s face, across his eyes. He screamed, and that merciless whip played over his body, drawing blood with every stroke.

  And She was declaiming in a strong, resonant voice, with one foot planted firmly upon the squirming body of the hapless, blinded priest, who had fallen to the ground, laying about her with the whip.

  Even then, at the cost of a few injuries, they could have overpowered her, have taken her from behind. But the heart was gone from them. Their god had forsaken them. And She . . . She was speaking with the voice of a god. Or was a god speaking through her? She was possessed. The black charisma of her was overpowering. I opened the backpack and began to distribute the cast-off clothing. Hands—the hands of men, women, and children—snatched the drab rags from me eagerly. And there was something odd about it. It seemed as though that backpack were a bottomless bag. It could never have held sufficient clothing to cover the nakedness of a crowd of several thousand people. Sometime later, of course, I worked things out. Converts must have gone back into their homes for the ceremonial black robes that they doffed at the dawn service and resumed at sunset. But, even so . . . How could those robes have assumed the appearance of, say, ill-cut, baggy trousers? Imagination, it must have been. Even though I could not understand what she was saying, I was under the spell of Her voice.

  And it frightened me.

  I felt my agnosticism wavering.

  And I like being an agnostic.

  Oh, well, at a time of crisis there is always one thing better than presence of mind—and that is absence of body.

  I left her preaching to the multitude and walked back to the ship. I did worse than that. When I was back on board I collected everything of hers, every last thing, and lugged it out through the airlock on to a plastic sheet that I spread on the wet grass, covered it with another sheet.

  And
then I lifted off.

  After all, I had done what I had contracted to do. I had carried her from Warrenhome to Stagatha (and the money for her fare had been deposited in my bank). I had stayed around until she had become established as a missionary. (Well, she had, hadn’t she?)

  I broke through that filthy overcast into bright sunlight. I began to feel less unhappy. I looked down at Stagatha. The entire planet, from pole to pole, was shrouded with smoke, or steam, or dust or—although this was unlikely—just ordinary cloud.

  I wondered when their god would next show himself to the Stagathans and set course for Pengram, the nearest Man-colonized planet, where I hoped to be able to find further employment for Little Sister and myself.

  “I don’t think much of your Odd Gods,” said Kitty Kelly. “After all, sun-worship is common enough. And so are evangelists of either sex who preach peculiar perversions of Christianity and are charismatic enough to make converts. But I would have expected you to behave more responsibly. To go flying off, the way you did, leaving that poor woman to her fate. . . .”

  “Poor woman? I was there, Kitty. You weren’t. Too, I haven’t finished yet.”

  I’d almost forgotten about Stagatha (he went on) when, some standard years later, I ran into Commander Blivens, captain of the survey ship Cartographer. I’d known Blivens slightly when I was in the Survey Service myself. Anyhow, I was at Port Royal, on Caribbea, owner-master of Sister Sue, which vessel had started her life as one of the Interstellar Transport Commission’s Epsilon Class star tramps, Epsilon Scorpii. (She finally finished up as the Rim Worlds Confederacy’s survey ship Faraway Quest. Yes, this very ship that we’re aboard now.) But to get back to Blivens . . . I was in the Trade Winds Bar with my chief officer, Billy Williams, quietly absorbing planter’s punches when I heard somebody call my name. I couldn’t place him at first but finally did so.

  Then, for a while, it was the usual sort of conversation for those circumstances. What happened to old so-and-so? Did you hear that thingummy actually made rear admiral? And so on.

  I got around to asking Blivens what he was doing on Carribea.

  “Just a spell of rest and recreation for my boys and girls,” he told me. “And for myself. At one time I used to regard a rather odd but very human world called Stagatha as my R & R planet. The people as near human as makes no difference. Sun worshippers they were, happy sun worshippers. Unpolluted atmosphere, solar power used for everything. And not, like this overpriced dump, commercialized.

  “But it’s ruined now.”

  “How so?” I asked him.

  “They’ve changed their religion. Some high-powered female missionary decided to save their souls. I suppose that some money-hungry tramp skipper carried her from her own planet, Warrenhome, to Stagatha. Somebody should find out who the bastard was and shoot him. And then, really to put the tin hat on things, there was a catastrophic volcanic eruption which threw the gods alone know how many tons of dust into the upper atmosphere and completely buggered the climate. So there was a switch from solar power to the not-very-efficient burning of fossil fuels—and still more airborne muck to obscure the sunlight.

  “The missionary—the Lady Bishop, she called herself—called aboard to see me. She scared me, I don’t mind admitting it. You’ll never guess what her staff of office was. A dirty great whip. She demanded that I release one of my engineer officers to her service. The odd part was that she knew his name—Terry Gowan—and all about him. And Mr. Gowan seemed to know of her. It made sense, I suppose. He was one of those morose, Bible-bashing bastards himself. And, apart from the Bible in some odd version, his only reading was books on the engineering techniques in use during the Victorian era on Earth. He used to make models, working models, of steam engines and things like that.

  “I gave him his discharge—which, as a Survey Service captain, I was entitled to do. You know the regulation. Should a properly constituted planetary authority request the services of a specialist officer, petty officer or rating for any period, and provided that such officer, petty officer or rating signifies his or her willingness to enter the service of such planetary authority, and provided that the safe management of the ship not be affected by the discharge of one of her personnel with no replacement immediately available, then the commanding officer shall release such officer, petty officer or rating, paying him or her all monies due and with the understanding that seniority shall continue to accrue until the return of the officer, petty officer or rating to the Survey Service.

  “Anyhow, I don’t think that anybody aboard Cartographer shed a tear for Gloomy Gowan, as he was known, when he was paid off. And he, I suppose, has been happy erecting dark, satanic mills all over the landscape for Her Holiness.”

  “And so everybody was happy,” I said sarcastically.

  “A bloody good planet ruined,” grumbled Blivens.

  A few more years went by.

  Again I ran into Blivens—Captain Blivens now—quite by chance. He was now commanding officer of the Survey Service base on New Colorado and I had been chartered by the Service—they often threw odd jobs my way—to bring in a shipment of fancy foodstuffs and tipples for the various messes.

  I dined with Blivens in his quite palatial quarters.

  He said, towards the end of the meal, “You remember when I last met you, Grimes . . . I was captain of Cartographer then and we were talking about Stagatha. . . .”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “Well, I went there again. For the last time. Just one of those checking-up-showing-the-flag voyages that I had to make. But there wasn’t any Stagatha. Not anymore. The sun had gone nova. And as there hadn’t been a Carlotti station on the planet no word had gotten out. . . .”

  The news shocked me.

  All those people, incinerated.

  And I couldn’t help feeling that I was somehow responsible.

  But it was just a coincidence.

  Wasn’t it?

  “Of course it was,” said Kitty Kelly brightly.

  “Was it?” whispered Grimes. And then: “For I am a jealous God. . . .”

  Grimes and the Jailbirds

  “HAVE YOU EVER, in the course of your long and distinguished career, been in jail, Commodore?” asked Kitty Kelly after she had adjusted the lenses and microphones of her recording equipment to her satisfaction.

  “As a matter of fact I have,” said Grimes. He made a major production of filling and lighting his pipe. “It was quite a few years ago, but I still remember the occasion vividly. It’s not among my more pleasant memories. . . .”

  “I should imagine not,” she concurred sympathetically. “What were you in for? Piracy? Smuggling? Gunrunning?”

  “I wasn’t in in the sense that you assume,” he told her. “After all, there are more people in a jail than the convicts. The governor, the warders, the innocent bystanders. . . .”

  “Such as yourself?”

  “Such as myself.”

  It was (he said) when I was owner-master of Little Sister. She was the flagship and the only ship of Far Traveler Couriers, the business title under which I operated. She was a deep-space pinnace, and I ran her single-handed, carrying small parcels of special cargo hither and yon, the occasional passenger. Oh, it was a living of sorts, quite a good living at times, although, at other times, my bank balance would be at a perilously low ebb.

  Well, I’d carried a consignment of express mail from Davinia to Helmskirk—none of the major lines had anything making a direct run between the two planets—and I was now berthed at Port Helms waiting for something to turn up. The worst of it all was that Helmskirk is not the sort of world upon which to spend an enforced vacation—or, come to that, any sort of vacation. There is a distinct shortage of bright lights. The first settlers had all been members of a wowserish religious sect misnamed the Children of Light—it was founded on Earth in the late twentieth century, Old Reckoning. Over the years their descendants had become more and more wowserish.

  The manufacture,
vending, and consumption of alcoholic beverages were strictly prohibited. So was smoking—and by “smoking” I mean smoking anything. There were laws regulating the standards of dress—and not only in the streets of the cities and towns. Can you imagine a public bathing beach where people of both sexes—even children—are compelled to wear neck-to-ankle, skirted swimming costumes?

  There were theaters, showing both live and recorded entertainment, but the plays presented were all of the improving variety, with virtue triumphant and vice defeated at the end of the last act. I admit that some of the clumsily contrived situations were quite funny, although not intentionally so. I found this out when I laughed as a stern father turned his frail, blonde daughter, who had been discovered smoking a smuggled cigarette, out into a raging snowstorm. Immediately after my outbreak of unseemly mirth, I was turned out myself, by two burly ushers. Oh, well, it wasn’t snowing, and it was almost the end of the play, anyhow.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if the local customs authorities had not done their best to make sure that visiting spacemen conformed to Helmskirkian standards whilst on the surface of their planet. They inspected my library of playmaster cassettes and seized anything that could be classed as pornographic—much of it the sort of entertainment that your maiden aunt, on most worlds, could watch without a blush. These tapes, they told me, would be kept under bond in the customs warehouse and returned to me just prior to my final lift-off from the Helmskirk System. They impounded the contents of my grog locker and even all my pipe tobacco. Fortunately, I can, when pushed to it, make an autochef do things never intended by its manufacturer, and so it didn’t take me long to replenish my stock of gin. And lettuce leaves from my hydroponics minifarm, dried and suitably treated, made a not-too-bad tobacco substitute.

  Nonetheless, I’d have gotten the hell off Helmskirk as soon as the bags of express mail had been discharged if I’d had any definite place to go. But when you’re tramping around, as I was, you put your affairs into the hands of an agent and wait hopefully for news of an advantageous charter.