First Command

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Water, of course,” she told him.

  “And on special occasions?”

  “Water.”

  “Mphm.” He got up, opened his liquor cabinet. The light inside it was reflected brightly from the labels of bottles, from polished glasses.

  Maya said, “How pretty!”

  “Perhaps you would like to try . . . What would you like to try?”

  “Angels’ Tears,” she said.

  So she could read as well as speak Anglic. Grimes set out five liqueur glasses on the counter, uncorked the tall, beautifully proportioned bottle and filled them. He handed one to Maya, then served Maggie, then the two men. He lifted the remaining glass, said, “Here’s mud in your eye!” and sipped. Maya sipped. The two men sipped. Maya spat like an angry cat. The men looked as though they would have liked to do the same, but they were too overawed by their unfamiliar surroundings.

  “Firewater!” ejaculated the Morrowvian woman at last.

  Grimes wondered what the distillers on Altairia would think if they could hear their most prized product so denigrated. This liqueur was almost pure alcohol—but it was smooth, smooth, and the cunning blend of spices used for flavoring could never be duplicated off the planet of its origin. Then he remembered a girl he had known on Dunsinane. He had not minded buying her expensive drinks, but he had been shocked by the way in which she misused them. The ending of what promised to be a beautiful friendship had come when she had poured Angels’ Tears over a dish of ice cream . . . .

  He said, “Perhaps this drink is a little strong to those who are not accustomed to it. But there is a way of making it less . . . fiery.” He pressed the button, and in seconds a stewardess was in the cabin. The girl blushed furiously when she saw the nudity of the two Morrowvian men, but she tried hard to ignore their presence.

  “Jennifer,” said Grimes, “bring three dishes of ice cream.”

  “What flavor, sir?”

  What flavor ice cream had that girl used for her appalling concoction? “Chocolate,” said Grimes. “Very good, sir.”

  She was not gone long. Grimes took the tray from her when she returned; he was afraid that she might drop it when attempting to serve the naked bodyguards . He set it down on the table, then took Maya’s glass from her. He poured the contents over one of the dishes of ice cream, handed it to her. “Now try it,” he said.

  She ignored the spoon. She raised the dish in her two hands to mouth level. Her pink tongue flickered out. There was a very delicate slurping sound. Then she said to her bodyguards, “Thomas, William—this is good!”

  “I’m glad you like it,” said Grimes, handing their portions to the two men. Then—“The same again?”

  “If I may,” replied Maya politely.

  Alcohol, even when mixed with ice cream, is a good lubricant of the vocal cords. Maya, after her second helping, became talkative. More than merely talkative . . . she became affectionate. She tended to rub up against Grimes whenever he gave her the opportunity. He would have found her advances far more welcome if Maggie had not been watching amusedly, if the two bodyguards had not been present. Not that the bodyguards seemed to mind what their mistress was doing; were it not for her inhibiting presence they would have behaved toward Maggie Lazenby as she, Maya, was behaving toward Grimes . . . .

  “Such a long time . . .” gushed Maya. “Such a long, long time. . . . We knew we came from the stars, in a big ship . . . . Not us, of course, but our first fathers and mothers . . . . We hoped that some time some other ship would come from the stars . . . . But it’s been a long, long time . . . .

  “And then, after the ship called Corgi came, we thought that the next ships would land at Melbourne, and that it’d be years before we saw one . . . . The Queen of Melbourne, they say, now has a cold box to keep her meat and her water in, and she has books, new books, about all sorts of marvelous things . . . . And what are you giving me, Commander Grimes?”

  I know what I’d like to give you, he thought. The close proximity of smooth, warm woman-flesh was putting ideas into his head. He said, trying to keep the conversation under control, “You have books?”

  “‘Course we have books—but we can’t make any new ones. Every town has a copy of The History; it was printed and printed and printed, years ago, when the machines were still working. . . .”

  “The History?” asked Grimes.

  “Yes. The History. All about Earth, and the first flights away from Earth, and the last voyage of the Lode Cougar . . .”

  “The ship that brought you here?”

  “Of course. You don’t suppose we walked, do you?”

  “Hardly. But tell me, how do you get about your world? Do you walk, or ride, or fly?”

  “There were machines once, for riding and flying, but they wore out. We walk now. Everywhere. The Messengers are the long walkers.”

  “I suppose that you have to maintain a messenger service for the business of government.”

  “What business?” She pulled away from Grimes, stood tall and erect. It was a pity that she spoiled the effect by wavering lightly. “What government? I am the government.”

  “But surely,” Grimes persisted, “you must have some planetary authority in overall charge. Or national authorities . . . .”

  “But why?” she asked. “But why? I look after the affairs of my town, Sabrina looks after the affairs of her town, and so on. Who can tell me how much meat is to be dried or salted before the onset of winter? Who can tell me how the town’s children are to be brought up? I am the government, of my own town. What else is needed?”

  “It seems to work, this system of theirs . . .” commented Maggie Lazenby.

  “‘Course it works. Too many people in one town—then start new town.”

  “But,” persisted Grimes, “there’s more to government than mayoral duties—or queenly duties. Public health, for example. . . .”

  “Every town has its doctor, to give medicine, set broken bones and so on . . .”

  Grimes looked appealingly at Maggie. She looked back at him, and shrugged. So he plodded on, unassisted. “But you must have a capital city . . .”

  Maya said, “We have. But it does not rule us. We rule ourselves. It is built around the landing place of the Lode Cougar. The machines are there, although they have not worked for years. There are the records—but all we need to know is in The History. . . .”

  “And the name of this city?”

  “Ballarat.”

  So Morrow—presumably he had been master of Lode Cougar—was an Australian. There was a Ballarat, on Earth, not far from Port Woomera.

  “And how do we get to Ballarat?” asked Grimes.

  “It is many, many days’ walk . . .”

  “I wasn’t thinking of walking.”

  “The exercise wouldn’t do you any harm,” Maggie told him.

  “In my house there is a map . . .”

  The telephone buzzed sharply. Grimes answered it. Saul’s deep voice came from the speaker, “Captain, our orbital spy eyes have reported the arrival of another ship. Mr. Hayakawa says that it is Schnauzer.”

  So—Schnauzer had arrived, earlier than expected. Presumably Captain Danzellan’s PCO had picked up indications that other vessels were bound for Morrowvia. And presumably he would make his landing in the same location that he had used before, in Corgi. Where was it again? Melbourne. Grimes tried to remember his Australian geography. The Ballarat on Earth wasn’t far from Melbourne. He hoped that this would also be the case on this planet, so that he could kill two birds with one stone.

  Lieutenant Saul could look after the shop in his, Grimes’s, absence.

  Somebody would have to keep an eye on Drongo Kane.

  10

  Grimes would have liked to have been able to fly at once to Melbourne, to be there and waiting when Schnauzer arrived. But there was so much to be done first—the delegation of authority, the pinnace to be readied and stocked for an absence from the mother ship of indefinite duration and, last but n
ot least, to determine the location of Captain Danzellan’s arrival point with accuracy. The orbiting spy eyes would do this, of course—provided that Schnauzer was not using some device to render their data erroneous. She was not a warship—but it was safe to assume that she was fitted with electronic equipment not usually found aboard a merchantman.

  So, early in the afternoon, Grimes and Maggie Lazenby accompanied Maya and her people back to their town. Fortunately their intake of fortified ice cream had slowed the Morrowvians down, otherwise Grimes would have found it hard to keep up with them. Even so, he was soon sweating in his tropical uniform, and his bare knees were scratched by the long, spiky grass that grew on the bank of the river, and he had managed to twist his right ankle quite painfully shortly after the departure from Seeker . . . .

  Lethargic though they were, the Morrowvians made good time. Their bare skins, Grimes noted enviously, seemed proof against the razor-edged grass blades—or it could be that they, somehow, avoided painful contact. And Maggie, once they were out of sight of the ship, removed her uniform shirt and gave it to Grimes to carry. She was as unself-conscious in her semi-nudity as the natives were in their complete nakedness. Grimes wished that he dare follow her example, but he did not have the advantage of her upbringing.

  There was one welcome halt on the way. One of the bow-women called out, and pointed to a swirl that broke the otherwise placid surface of the slow-flowing river. She unhitched a coil of line from the belt that encircled her slim waist, bent the end of it to a viciously barbed arrow. She let fly, the line snaking out behind the missile. When it hit there was a mad, explosive flurry as a creature about half the size of a full grown man leaped clear of the water. Two of the men dropped their spears, grabbed the line by its few remaining coils. Slowly, with odd growling grunts, they hauled it in, playing the aquatic creature like an angler playing a fish, towing it to a stretch of bank where the shore shelved gently to a sandy beach.

  Grimes and Maggie watched as the thing was landed—she busy with her camera.

  “Salmon,” announced Maya. “It is good eating.”

  “Salmon?” thought Grimes. It was like no salmon that he had ever seen. It was, he supposed, some kind of fish, or some kind of ichthyoid, although it looked more like a scaly seal than anything else. But what it was called made sense. Long, long ago somebody—Morrow?—had said, “Give everything Earth names—and then, when this world is rediscovered, nobody will doubt that we’re an Earth colony.”

  A slash from a vicious looking knife killed the beast, and it was slung from a spear and carried by two of the men. The journey continued.

  They reached the town at last. It was a neat assemblage of low, adobe buildings, well spaced along dirt streets, with trees, each a vivid explosion of emerald foliage and crimson blossom, growing between the houses. Maya’s house (palace?) was a little larger than the others, and atop a tall post just outside the main entrance was a gleaming five pointed star, wrought from silvery metal.

  There were people in the streets, men, women and children. They were curious, but not obtrusively so. They were remarkably quiet, except for a group of youngsters playing some sort of ball game. These did not even pause in their sport as the queen and her guests passed them.

  It was delightfully cool inside Maya’s house. The small windows were unglazed, but those facing the sun were screened with matting, cutting out the glare while admitting the breeze. The room into which she took Grimes and Maggie was large, sparsely furnished. There was a big, solid table, a half dozen square, sturdy chairs. On one wall was a map of the planet, drawn to Mercatorial projection. The seas were tinted blue, the land masses either green or brown except in the polar regions, where they were white.

  Maya walked slowly to this map. Her fingers stabbed at it. “This,” she said, “is the River Thames. It flows into the Atlantic Ocean. Here, on this wide bend, is Cambridge . . . .”

  “Mphm.” And this Cambridge, thought Grimes, is about in the middle of a continent, an island continent that straggles untidily over much of the equatorial belt, called—of all names!—England . . . And where the hell is Melbourne? He studied the map closely. There was a North Australia, another island continent, roughly rectangular, in the northern hemisphere. And there was a River Yarra. His right forefinger traced its winding course from the sea, from the Indian Ocean, to the contour lines that marked the foothills of the Dandenongs. Yes, here was Melbourne. And to the north of it, still on the river, was Ballarat.

  He asked, “How do your people cross the seas, Maya? You said that all the machines, including the flying machines, had broken down years ago.”

  “There are machines and machines, Commander Grimes. We have the wind, and we have balloons, and we have sailing boats. The balloons can go only with the wind, of course, but the sailing boats—what is the expression?—can beat to windward. . . .” Then she said abruptly, “I am a poor hostess. You must be thirsty. . . .”

  Not as thirsty as you must be, thought Grimes, after gorging yourself on that horrid mixture.

  “I could use a drink, Maya,” said Maggie.

  The Morrowvian woman went to the shelved cupboard where pottery, brightly and pleasingly glazed, was stacked. She took out six shallow bowls, set them on the table. Then she took down a stoppered pitcher that was hanging on the wall. This was not glazed, and its porous sides were bedewed with moisture. She poured from this into three of the bowls. The remaining vessels she filled with food from a deep dish that she extracted from the depths of a primitive refrigerator, a large unglazed earthenware box standing in a small bath of water. She used her hands to transfer cubes of white flesh from the dish to the bowls. There was no sign of any knives, forks or spoons.

  She lifted her bowl of water to her mouth. She grinned and said “Here’s mud in your eye!” She lapped the liquid, a little noisily. Grimes and Maggie drank more conventionally. The water was pleasantly cool, had a faint vegetable tang to it. Probably it was safe enough—but, in any case, all of Seeker’s people had been given wide spectrum antibiotic shots before landing.

  Maya, using one hand only, quite delicately helped herself to food from her bowl. Without hesitation Maggie followed suit. Her fine eyebrows arched in surprised appreciation. Grimes took a cautious sample. This, he decided after the first nibble, was good. It reminded him of a dish that he had enjoyed during his last leave on Earth, part of which he had spent in Mexico. This had been fish—raw, but seasoned, and marinaded in the juice of freshly squeezed limes. He would have liked some more, but it would be a long time, he feared, before he would be able properly to relax and enjoy whatever social amenities this planet afforded.

  Maggie, having followed Maya’s example in licking her hands clean, had unslung one of her cameras, was pointing it at the map. She explained, “We have to have a copy of this, so that we can find our way to Melbourne.”

  “It will not be necessary. I can send a Messenger with you. But I warn you, it is a long journey, unless you go in your ship.”

  “We shall not go in the ship, Maya,” Grimes told her. “But we shall not be walking, either. We shall use a pinnace, a relatively small flying boat.”

  “I have never flown,” said Maya wistfully. “Not even in a balloon. Do you think that I . . . ?”

  “Why not?” said Grimes. Why not? he thought. She’ll be able to introduce me to her sister queen in Melbourne.

  “When do we leave?” she asked him.

  “In the morning, as soon after sunrise as possible.” That would be a good time; Melbourne was only a degree or so west of Cambridge. The flight would be made in daylight, and arrival would be well before sunset.

  She said, “You will excuse me. I must make arrangements for my deputy to run affairs during my absence.”

  “I must do likewise,” said Grimes.

  They looked at each other gravely, both monarchs of a small kingdom, both with the cares of state heavy on their shoulders. It was unkind of Maggie to spoil the effect by snickering.
/>   “I shall send an escort with you,” said Maya.

  “It is not necessary. All we have to do is to follow the river.”

  “But wolves have been reported along the river bank . . . .”

  And if the “wolves” of Morrowvia bore the same relationship to Terran wolves as did the Morrowvian “salmon” to Terran salmon, Grimes didn’t want to meet them. He said so to Maya.

  So he and Maggie, escorted by four spearmen and two bow-women, walked back to the ship. The members of the escort were too awestricken by the visitors from Outside to talk unless spoken to, and after ten minutes or so of very heavy going no attempt was made at conversation.

  11

  Grimes did not get much sleep that night.

  He did not want to leave his ship until he was reasonably sure that the situation was under control. Drongo Kane was the main problem. Just what were his intentions? Southerly Buster had been kept under close observation from Seeker, and all the activity around her airlock had been filmed. Highly sensitive long-range microphones had been trained upon her—but Kane had set up some small noise-making machine that produced a continuous whup, whup, whup . . . . Hayakawa, disregarding the Rhine Institute code of ethics, had tried to pry, but Myra Bracegirdle, Kane’s PCO, was maintaining an unbreakable block over the minds of all the Buster’s personnel. He had then tried to pick up the thoughts of the people in the town of Oxford, with little more success.

  Grimes studied the film that had been made. He watched, on the screen, Kane talking amicably with Sabrina, the Queen of Oxford. He seemed to be laying on the charm with a trowel, and the Morrowvian woman was lapping it up. She smiled smugly when Drongo hung a scintillating string of synthetic diamonds about her neck, and her chubby hand went up to stroke the huge ruby that formed the pendant of the necklace, that glowed with crimson fire between her ample, golden-skinned breasts. She looked, thought Grimes, like a sleek cat that had got its nose into the cream. If it had not been for that annoying whup, whup, whup he would have heard her purring. It was shortly after her acceptance of this gift that Kane took her into the ship. Dreebly and two others—a little, fat man who, to judge by his braid, was the second mate and a cadaverous blonde in catering officer’s uniform—remained by the table, handing out cheap jewelry, hand mirrors, pocket knives (a bad guess, thought Grimes amusedly, in this nudist culture), pairs of scissors and (always a sure way of buying goodwill) a quite good selection of children’s toys. But it was the books that were in the greatest demand. The lens of one of the cameras that had been used zoomed in to a close-up of the display. Their covers were brightly-colored, eye-catching. They were, every one of them, handouts from the Tourist Bureaus of the more glamorous worlds of the galaxy.