The Rim Gods

by A Bertram Chandler

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

  In which Commodore Grimes (whose last appearance here was in "Grimes and the Odd Gods" June 1983) takes on a temporary job—shipping supplies to a prison satellite—with unusual consequences . . .

  "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 b
alance 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.

  So Messrs. Muggeridge, Whitelaw, and Nile were supposed to be keeping their ears to the ground on my behalf, and I was getting more and more bored, and every day doing my sums—or having the ship's computer do them for me—and trying to work out how long it would be before the profit made on my last voyage was completely eaten up by port charges and the like. For the lack of better entertainment I haunted the Port Helms municipal library—at least it was free—and embarked on a study course on the history of this dreary colony. Someday I shall write a book—The Galactic Guide to Places to Stay Away From . . . .

  The fiction in the library was not of the variety that is written to inflame the passions. It was all what, during the Victorian era on Earth, would have been called "improving." The factual works were of far greater interest. From them I learned that the incidence of crime—real crime, not such petty offenses as trying to grow your own tobacco or brew your own beer—on Helmskirk was surprisingly high. Cork a bottle of some fermenting mixture—and any human society is such a mixture—too tightly and the pressures will build up. There was an alarmingly high incidence of violent crime—armed robbery, assault, rape, murder.

  I began to appreciate the necessity for Helmskirk's penal satellite, a smallish natural moon in a just under twenty-four-hour orbit about its primary. Not only was it a place of correction and/or punishment for the really bad bastards, but it also housed a large population of people who'd been caught playing cards for money, reading banned books, and similar heinous offenses. If I'd been so unfortunate as to have been born on Helmskirk, I thought, almost certainly I should have been acquainted with the maze of caverns and tunnels, artificial and natural, that honeycombed the ball of rock.

  As the days wore on I'd settled into a regular routine. The morning I'd devote to minor maintenance jobs. Then I'd have lunch. Before leaving the ship after this meal, I'd make a telephone call to my agents to see if they'd anything for me. Then I'd stroll ashore to the library. It was a dreary walk through streets of drably functional buildings, but it was exercise. I'd try to keep myself amused until late afternoon, and then drop briefly into the agents' office on the way back to Little Sister.

  Then the routine was disrupted.

  As I entered the premises, old Mr. Muggeridge looked up accusingly from his desk, saying, "We've been trying to get hold of you, Captain."

  I said, "I wasn't far away. I was in the municipal library."

  "Hmph. I never took you for a studious type. Well, anyway, I've a time charter for you. A matter of six local weeks, minimum."

  "Where to?" I asked hopefully.

  "It will not be taking you outside the Helmskirk System," he told me rather spitefully. "The prison tender, the Jerry Falwell, has broken down. I am not acquainted with all the technical details, but I understand that the trouble is with its inertial drive unit. The authorities have offered you employment until such time as the tender is back in operation."

  I went through the charter party carefully, looking for any clauses that might be turned to my disadvantage. But Muggeridge, Whitelaw, and Nile had been looking after my interests. After all, why shouldn't they? The more I got, the more their rake-off would be.

  So I signed in the places indicated and learned that I was to load various items of stores for the prison the following morning, lifting off as soon as these were on board and stowed to my satisfaction. Oh, well, it was a job and would keep me solvent until something better turned up.

  * * *

  It was a job, but it wasn't one that I much cared for. I classed it as being on a regular run from nowhere to nowhere. The atmosphere of Helmskirk I had found oppressive; that of the penal satellite was even more so. The voyage out took a little over two days, during which time I should have been able to enjoy my favorite playmaster cassettes if the customs officers had seen fit to release them. But rules were rules, and I was not leaving the Helmskirk System. And the moon, which was called Sheol, was very much part of it.

  On my first visit I did not endear myself to the prison governor. I'd jockeyed Little Sister into a large air lock set into the satellite's surface and then left my control room for the main cabin. I opened the air lock doors and then sat down to await whatever boarders there would be—somebody with the inevitable papers to sign, a working party to discharge my cargo, and so on and so forth. I was not expecting the ruler of this tiny world to pay a call in person.

  He strode into the ship, a tall man in dark gray civilian clothes, long-nosed, sour-featured, followed by an entourage of black-uniformed warders. "Come in, come in!" I called. "This is Liberty Hall. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"

  He said, "I do not see any cat. Where is the animal? The importation of any livestock into Sheol is strictly contrary to regulations."

  I said, "It was only a figure of speech."

  "And a remarkably foul-mouthed one." He sat down uninvited. "I am the governor of this colony, Mr. Grimes. During each of your visits here you will observe the regulations, a copy of which will be provided you. You will be allowed, should time permit, to make the occasional conducted tour of Sheol so that you may become aware of the superiority of our penal system to that on other worlds. There will, however, be no fraternization between yourself and any of our inmates. There will be no att
empt by you to smuggle in any small luxuries. One of the officers of the Jerry Falwell made such an attempt some months back. He is now among our . . . guests, serving a long sentence."

  "What did he try to smuggle in?" I asked.

  "It is none of your business, Mr. Grimes. But I will tell you. It was cigarettes that he had illegally obtained from a visiting star tramp. And I will tell you what he hoped to receive in exchange. Mood opals. And the penalty for smuggling out mood opals is even greater than that for smuggling in cigarettes."

  * * *

  "What are mood opals?" asked Kitty.

  "Don't you know? They were, for a while, very popular and very expensive precious stones on Earth and other planets, especially the Shaara worlds. The Shaara loved them. They weren't opals, although they looked rather like them. But they were much fierier, and the colors shifted, according, it was said, to the mood of the wearer, although probably it was due to no more than changes in temperature and atmospheric humidity. They were found only on—or in, rather—Sheol. They were actually coprolites, fossilized excrement, all that remained of some weird, rock-eating creatures that inhabited Sheol and became extinct ages before the colonization of Helmskirk. The mood opals became one of Helmskirk's major moneymaking exports. They were never worn by anybody on Helmskirk itself, such frivolity as personal jewelry being illegal."