Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  “You hope,” said Grimes, adding softly, “and I hope.”

  The van stopped.

  The rear door opened to a warm darkness that was enhanced rather than dispelled by the sparsely spaced, yellow street lamps.

  Grimes and Sanchez got out.

  Without a word to them Wong Lee drove away.

  Chapter 19

  It did not seem to Grimes to be a place at which to wait for a cab—or its local equivalent—but, after a wait of no longer than five minutes, an empty trishaw, its operator pedaling lazily, drifted along, halting beside them when hailed. Yet another New Cantonese, Grimes decided, a little man, scrawny in his sleeveless singlet and baggy shorts yet with muscles evident in his thighs and calves.

  Grimes clambered into the basketlike passenger compartment, which was forward of the driver, followed by Sanchez who, before mounting, ordered, “Garden of Delights.”

  The trishaw operator grunted acknowledgment and, as soon as his passengers were seated, began pumping his pedals. The journey was mainly through quiet side streets and, Grimes decided, more or less toward the locality of Port Libertad, the glare of lights from which was now and again to the right and now and again to the left but always forward of the beam.

  They came to a street that, by local standards, was fantastically bright and bustling. There were street stalls, selling foodstuffs, from which eddied all manner of savory aromas. There were brightly lit facades, establishments whose names were picked out in multi-colored lights. The Pink Pussy Cat . . . The Dallas Whorehouse . . . The Old Shanghai . . . The Ginza . . . The Garden of Delights . . .

  The trishaw stopped.

  Grimes got out and began to fumble for money. Sanchez forestalled him, tossing coins to the operator, who deftly caught them. The two men walked into the vestibule of the Garden of Delights where, sitting in a booth that was like a miniature pagoda, an elderly Oriental gentleman who could have been Wong Lee’s slightly younger brother was sitting in receipt of custom.

  Again Sanchez paid and led Grimes through a doorway, through an entanglement of beaded curtains, into a large, dimly lit room, the air of which was redolent with the fumes of the incense burners standing on tripods along the walls and between the tables. The decor, thought Grimes, was either phonily Terran Oriental or fair dinkum New Cantonese—but he had never been to New Canton and never would go there. (Neither would anybody else; the planet was now no more than a globe of incandescent slag.) There were rich silken hangings. There were bronze animals that could have been either lions or Pekingese dogs. There were overhead lanterns, glowing parchment globes encircled by painted dragons. There was music—the tinkling of harplike instruments, the high squealing of pipes, the muted thud of little drums.

  There was a stage at one end of the hall. On it was a girl, gyrating languidly and gracefully to the beat of the music. She was attired in filmy veils and was discarding them one by one. (And what the hell, wondered Grimes, did Salome have to do with China, or New Canton?) Nonetheless he watched appreciatively. The girl was tall, high-breasted, slender-limbed. Her dance was a dance, did not convey the impression that she was disrobing hastily prior to jumping into the shower or into bed.

  Grimes’s attention was distracted momentarily by a waitress who came to their table. She was wearing a high-necked tunic that did not quite come down as far as possible, golden sandals and nothing else. She had brought two bowls of some savory mess, one of rice, what looked like a tall, silver teapot, two small silver goblets, two pairs of chopsticks. She poured from the pot into the cups, bowed and retreated.

  “Your very good health, Joachim,” said Sanchez, raising his cup.

  “And yours, Raoul.”

  Grimes sipped. He had been expecting tea, was surprised—not unpleasantly—to discover that the liquid was wine, a hot, rather sweet liquor. He put the cup down, picked up his chopsticks and with them transferred a portion of rice to the sweet-and-sour whatever it was in his bowl. He sampled a mouthful of the mixture. It wasn’t bad.

  On the stage the dancer was down to her last veil. She swirled it around her—partially revealing, concealing, affording more glimpses, concealing again, finally dropping the length of filmy fabric. She stood there briefly, flaunting her splendid nudity. She bowed, then turned and glided sinuously from the stage. The orchestra (if one could call it that) fell silent. There was a pattering of applause.

  Grimes looked around. There were not, he saw, many customers. There were men, dressed as he and Sanchez were. At two of the tables there were obvious spacers. At one of these the waitress was being mauled. Obviously the girl was not enjoying having those prying hands all over her body but she was not resisting.

  “You’ll not get shows like this out in the country, Joachim,” said Sanchez.

  (And that, thought Grimes, was the pilot’s way of telling him that there could be bugs here; it was very hard, these days, to find a place that was not bug-infested.)

  He said, “That was a lovely dollop of trollop. On the stage, I mean.”

  “She’ll not be that way long, Joachim. The signs were there. Her eyes—didn’t you notice?”

  Grimes admitted that he hadn’t paid much attention to her face.

  “That faraway look. Dreamsticks. Soon she’ll start to wither. The waitresses, too. But there are plenty more where they came from. Don’t tell me that you haven’t had the recruiters around your plantation yet.”

  “I thought that they were selling encyclopedias,” said Grimes.

  “Ha, ha!”

  The music had started again, a livelier tune. The dancer who came on the stage might have been beautiful once, still possessed the remains of beauty. But her movements were clumsy; her strip act was just that and nothing more. When she was completely naked she stood there, swaying, beckoning to various members of the audience. Grimes felt acutely ashamed when he, briefly, was the target of her allure. He was ashamed for his cloth when, finally, one of the spacers got to his feet and shambled to the stage.

  “They aren’t going to do it here!” he whispered to Sanchez.

  “There are rooms at the back, Joachim. She’ll want to go through his pockets in privacy. Her habit’s expensive. But let’s get out of here. It’s not very often that you have a night on the town and there are more places to sample.”

  “Wait till I’ve finished my sweet and sour,” said Grimes.

  The Dallas Whorehouse was their next port of call. The girls there were all tall and blonde, the music a piano on which a tall, thin and very black man hammered out old-time melodies. He was far better than the instrument upon which he was performing. Grimes recognized “The Yellow Rose Of Texas” and, in spite of himself, was amused by the very well-endowed young lady who borrowed two twenty-cent pieces from a spacer sitting just under the stage and placed one over each nipple, after which she counter-rotated her breasts without dislodging the coins. When she was finished she deftly flipped them into the cupped hands of the spaceman.

  “In a few weeks’ time,” said Sanchez sourly, “she’ll have to use paper money—and stick it on with spit.”

  “A pity,” said Grimes sincerely.

  The pilot looked at his wrist companion. “Finish your beer, Joachim. I have to show you that the big city’s not all boozing and wenching, otherwise you’ll be going back home with a false impression.”

  “Give me time to finish the tacos and this chili dip,” grumbled Grimes.

  Chapter 20

  The next place that they went to was a very dowdy house, one of a terrace, in a poorly lit side street. As they approached it Grimes wondered what sort of entertainment would be offered in such a venue: something unspeakably sordid, he thought.

  There was a doorkeeper, a burly man wearing the inevitable frayed denims and the almost-as-inevitable heavy beard.

  “Your contributions, comrades,” he growled, gesturing toward a battered metal bowl on the table before him. There was a clink and rattle of coinage as Sanchez paid for himself and Grimes.
/>   The two men passed through a curtained door into a hall, took seats toward the back. Grimes looked around curiously. The room, he saw, was less than half full. There were both women and men there, some of them obviously Liberians, some New Cantonese, some Negroid, some blondly Nordic. As yet there was nobody on the platform, behind which were draperies of black-and-scarlet bunting, at the end of the room.

  Grimes was about to ask what was going on when a tall, heavily bearded man mounted the platform. He was followed by a fat woman, by two other men of average height and, finally, by a girl who was more skinny than slim, whose protuberant front teeth gleamed whitely in her dusky face. She took her seat at a battered upright piano; the others sat behind a long table on which were water bottles, glasses and what looked like (and were) old-fashioned microphones.

  The thin girl assailed the keyboard of her instrument. The people behind the table stood up. With a shuffling of feet and a subdued scraping of shifted chairs those in the body of the hall stood up. Everybody—excepting Grimes—started losing.

  The faith of our fathers lives on in our hearts,

  The flame of their courage burns on,

  Their banners still fly. let us lift them on high.

  In the light of Liberia’s sun . . .

  There was more, much more. Grimes hummed along with the rather trite music while he listened to the words. This was a political meeting to which Sanchez had brought him, he decided, a gathering of the Original Anarchists. At last the song was over. Everybody sat down but the big, bearded man on the platform.

  “Comrades,” said this person. “Comrades, and honorary comrades . . .” (The New Cantonese? wondered Grimes. The refugees from New Dallas and other devastated worlds? So even the OAP was capable of discrimination . . .)

  “Comrades. Honorary comrades. Again there is hope. Again Earth has sent us a Governor, one who may take our part, as Governor Wibberley did, against the tyranny of O’Higgins and Bardon. But I must warn you, all of you, not to place too much faith in him. After all, the man is no more than a common pirate. . . .” (Piracy, thought Grimes, wasn’t exactly a common trade.) “We will support him if and when he confronts O’Higgins and Bardon. We will stand against him when he attempts to re-impose the rule of Imperial Earth.

  “But what manner of man is this new Governor, this pirate Commodore Grimes? With whom shall we have to deal when the time comes? What say you, Chiang Sung?”

  One of the New Cantonese got to his feet.

  “I am only an under-chef at the Residence, Comrade. I have little contact with him. I have seen him, of course. He has inspected the kitchens. He was very affable. He appreciates good food. It will be a pleasure to work for such a gentleman. But Su Lin, his maidservant, can tell you more than I.”

  “And where is Su Lin?” demanded the fat woman. “Where is the Pekingese Princess? The airs and graces that she puts on when she’s no more than a governor’s trollop . . . Come to that—where is the Lord High Mandarin Wong Lee? With all due respect to Comrade Chiang Sung, we should exercise far greater discrimination.”

  “And where,” demanded one of the smaller men on the platform, “is Captain Raoul Sanchez?” He went on, sneering heavily, “Oh, he came crying to us after that wench of his died and after his brother was murdered—or so he says. But I suppose that now he’s found himself a new girl and, as we know, he’s inherited his brother’s soft job he’ll scrub us.”

  Grimes heard Sanchez growl softly and gave him a sharp nudge with his elbow.

  He sat through a long and boring speech by the Comrade Chairman. The more he heard the less he was puzzled by the fact that the Liberian authorities tolerated the OAP. Probably many of the men and women at this meeting were government agents. Possibly these same agents, as dues-paying members, made quite heavy contributions to the OAP working expenses. He listened to horror stories from various refugees, men and women in domestic service whose masters and mistresses, according to them, were unduly harsh. Most of such tales left him unmoved. Those servants would not have lasted long in like capacities aboard any spaceship, naval or mercantile. Those who make a practice of insolence, dumb or otherwise, should not be surprised when their employers take counter measures.

  The meeting came to a close just as Sanchez was beginning to fidget and snatch ever more frequent glances at his wrist companion. The pianist again battered the long-suffering keyboard. Everybody stood up.

  Arise, ye prisoners of starvation.

  Arise, ye wretched of the world,

  For Justice thunders condemnation

  And the flag of Hope’s unfurled!

  Then comrades come rally

  And the last fight let us face.

  Fraternity and Liberty

  Unite the human race!

  “Time we got going, Joachim,” said Sanchez.

  They made their way toward the door, accepting handfuls of leaflets as they did so. They were almost out and clear when they were accosted by a large, heavily moustached man.

  “New here, comrades?”

  “Yes, comrade,” said Sanchez. “We’re up from our plantation. Somebody told us that there was an OAP meeting so we thought we’d look in.”

  “Interested, comrades?”

  “Yes. We have drifted away from the old ideals.”

  “I’d like to send you some more literature, comrades. Put you on our mailing list.”

  “We’d be pleased with that,” Sanchez said. He pulled out his notecase, took out a card and gave it to the man. “And now, if you’ll excuse us. We have a date. With two of the girls from the Whorehouse.”

  “But you’re contributing to their degradation, comrades.”

  “Come off it, comrade. They like their work. Or they will with us—eh, Joachim? Come on, man. We mustn’t keep the ladies waiting.”

  As they waited for a trishaw Grimes said, “Raoul, surely you could see that the man was some sort of undercover agent.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “But you gave him a card . . .” ,

  “I didn’t say that it was mine, did I?” He hailed an approaching trishaw. “Come on, Joachim. We mustn’t keep Wong Lee waiting.”

  Chapter 21

  Sitting in the back of Wong Lee’s truck they talked.

  “What did you think of the OAP meeting, sir?” asked Sanchez.

  “Not much,” said Grimes frankly. “Just an occasion to blow off harmless steam under the watchful eye of the authorities.”

  “You’re right, sir. And the other places?”

  “I’ve seen worse on other worlds.”

  “Including the encouragement to drug addiction?”

  “Even that.”

  “But not in the same way, sir. On other planets there are pushers—but surely they are not employed by the government. The policy here, on Liberia, is that the refugees shall become so dependent on dreamsticks and other drugs that they lack the drive to achieve full citizenship.”

  “Are there any emancipists?” asked Grimes.

  “Emancipists?”

  “It’s a term from Australian history, Raoul. During the days when New South Wales was a penal colony the emancipists were convicts who had been granted their freedom. More than a few of them became wealthy and influential men.”

  “We do have the equivalent here, sir, but there aren’t many of them. There’s Calvin McReady, who’s one of our minor grain kings and all set to become a major one. There’s Sin Fat, who owns the New Shanghai. But they regard themselves as Liberians, not as refugees, or ex-refugees. They are as money- and power-hungry as any of the native-born Establishment.”

  “So it was, all too often, in New South Wales,” said Grimes. “But tell me, Raoul, why are you in the GAP? Is it only for personal reasons?”

  Sanchez fell silent for a while, quietly smoking one of his long cigars.

  Then, “There are more than personal reasons, sir. When I was a child I was taught the history of Liberia. After I left school—before, even—I could not help bu
t see the disparity between the ideals of our founding fathers and what we have—despite all the lip service—now. . . .”

  “Mphm. You went into an odd trade, didn’t you, for one of your political beliefs. A spaceman has to accept discipline, take orders. Once he becomes captain he has to give orders.”

  “But I wanted to become a spaceman,” Sanchez said. “I want to become a real spaceman, not a ferry master. Oh, I could never stand Survey Service discipline and spit and polish, such as you were once used to—but merchant ships are run on fairly democratic lines.”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes dubiously.

  “Of course, sir, what would be ideal would be a little ship, with no crew, of which I was owner-master. Something on the lines of that Little Sister of yours. . . .”

  “Either accumulate at least a million credits or hire yourself out as yachtmaster to a billionairess who’ll give you such a ship as a parting gift.” Grimes laughed. “I did it the second way. I certainly couldn’t have done it the first.”

  “But you must know people, sir.”

  “I do, Raoul. I do, Hinting, are you? Well, if all goes well I just might—only might, mind you—be able to get you a berth as a very junior officer in a deep space ship. After that it’d be up to you—getting in your deep space time, passing examinations and all the rest of it. There are no instant captains in deep space. But forget that we’re spacemen. I’m a planetary governor who’s been traveling incognito among his people. You’re my guide. Tell me about the dives we were in tonight.”

  “First, sir, the Garden of Delights. It’s owned by Colonel Bardon and Estrelita O’Higgins. The manager is one Chiang Sooey. Chiang is not yet a citizen but hopes to become one. The turnover rate of entertainers is high—Chiang likes them to take their pay in dreamsticks and the like rather than in money. . . .”