Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

Aren’t I a Burra Sahib? wondered Grimes.

  He followed the man into the penthouse with Su Lin a couple of steps behind him. Sanchez was staying with the ship; it had been decided not to ignore the warning, dummy bomb that had been planted at the Me Ready estate. The rooftop shelter was a big one, being intended for the handling of freight as well as passengers. Grimes sniffed suspiciously. The air still carried a sickly sweet aroma. Dreamweed. It would not be wise, he thought, to inhale too deeply.

  There was a large car for cargo, a much smaller one for passengers. Inside this cage the air was free of taint. The downward journey was smooth and swift. The vestibule into which they emerged had a tiled floor, black and white in a geometrical pattern which was repeated on the tiled walls. From somewhere came the tinkling music of a fountain accompanied by bird song. This could have been a recording but Grimes didn’t think that it was.

  The butler led Grimes and Su Lin through a succession of arches, bringing them at last to a large, airy room, the floor of which was covered with beautiful carpets. There were others, even more beautiful, on the walls, tapestries almost, with strutting peacocks, prowling tigers and brightly clad horsemen doing unkind things to fierce looking boars with their long lances.

  At a low table Eduardo Lopez and Marita Lopez were sitting on piles of cushions, sharing a narghil. The fat little man, in white silk shirt and trousers, with crimson cummerbund and slippers, could have been an old-time Oriental potentate. His wife, in gauzy white trousers and bodice, could have been an overblown harem beauty.

  “Lopez Sahib,” announced the butler, “the Governor Sahib and . . .” He paused to look doubtfully at Su Lin. “The Governor Sahib and his servant.”

  Lopez put down the mouthpiece of the pipe onto the inlaid surface of the table. He got slowly to his feet. His wife remained seated.

  “A good day to you, Your Excellency. Had we been expecting you we would have arranged a proper reception.”

  “I like to keep things informal,” said Grimes.

  Meanwhile Su Lin had collected more brightly covered cushions, had put them down by the table.

  “Please be seated, Your Excellency,” she said to Grimes.

  Grimes sat, cross-legged. Lopez resumed his own seat. He, his wife and Grimes were the points of an equilateral triangle about the round table. Grimes sniffed the fumes that were drifting from the bowl of the water pipe. Mainly tobacco, he decided, but with some addition.

  “You will smoke, Your Excellency?” asked Lopez. He clapped his hands. “Ram Das! A pipe for the Governor Sahib!”

  “I’ll use my own, thanks,” said Grimes hastily. “And my own tobacco.”

  Su Lin made a major production of filling and lighting the vile thing for him. Mrs. Lopez went into a paroxysm of coughing.

  When she was quite finished Lopez inquired, “And how may we serve you, Commodore Grimes? And may I presume to ask why you are honoring us with your presence?”

  “A sort of captain’s inspection,” said Grimes. “A tour of spaceship Liberia. Just finding out what lives where and what does what. After all, this world is my new command.”

  “It could be argued,” said Lopez mildly, “that Madam Estrelita O’Higgins is the captain of spaceship Liberia.”

  “A sort of staff captain, perhaps,” Grimes said. “And, carrying on with the astronauticai analogy, Colonel Bardon is the master at arms. But I am the master. My name is on the register.”

  “I am not a spaceman,” said Lopez, “but I think I see what you mean. I do necessarily agree with you.”

  For what seemed a long time the Lopez couple and Grimes smoked in silence, Su Lin and Ram Das watching them impassively. Then Grimes asked a question.

  “What was that army dirigible doing here, Mr. Lopez?”

  “Major Flattery is a personal friend, Your Excellency. He was paying a social call.”

  “Indeed? His ship seemed to be loading some sort of cargo.”

  “It is our custom,” said Lopez, “to make small gifts to our departing guests.”

  “Indeed? And I suppose that these same guests make gifts to you in exchange. Like folding money.”

  “A plantation owner,” said Lopez coldly, “expects to make some small profit.”

  “Talking of plantations,” said Grimes, “I would like to inspect yours.”

  “I have nothing to hide, Your Excellency,” stated Lopez. “Ram Das, ask Mendoza Sahib to attend me here. At the same time arrange for two trishaws to be waiting in the portico.”

  “To hear is to obey, Sahib.”

  The butler silently left the room.

  Chapter 28

  Grimes looked curiously at Mendoza when that gentleman eventually made his appearance. He could have been a survivor from the long defunct British Raj in India. He was tall and thin, deeply tanned, black-haired and with a pencil-thin moustache. His eyes were startlingly blue against the dark skin of his face. He was clad in spotless white—shoes, trousers with a knife-edge crease, a high-necked, gold-buttoned tunic. Under his left arm was a white sun helmet.

  He stiffened to attention as he faced his employer.

  “Sir?”

  He could have been a subaltern of some crack Indian regiment of the old days called before his colonel to be given his orders.

  “Ah, Mr. Mendoza. This gentleman is the new Governor, Commodore Grimes . . .”

  Mendoza bowed stiffly in Grimes’s direction. Grimes disentangled his legs and, with Su Lin’s assistance, got to his feet. He extended his hand. After what seemed to be a long hesitation Mendoza took it. It was like, thought Grimes, getting a fistful of cold, wet, dead fish.

  “The Commodore,” said Lopez, “would like a tour of the plantation. I assume that his . . . er . . . servant will accompany him.”

  “Yes,” said Grimes, “Su Lin will be coming with me.”

  “You spacemen!” chuckled Lopez. It was a dirty chuckle. He flinched under Grimes’s hostile glare then went on hastily, “I beg your pardon, Your Excellency, but members of your profession do have a reputation, you know.”

  “If a world such as New Venusberg,” said Grimes coldly, “were obliged to depend upon spacemen for its prosperity it would very soon go bankrupt.”

  “Yes, yes. Of course. I was merely jesting. And now, if you will accompany Mr. Mendoza, he will show you everything that you wish to see. Dinner will be awaiting you on your return. Do you appreciate Oriental cuisine, such as Indian curries?”

  Grimes said that he did. Then he and Su Lin followed Mendoza from the room, leaving Lopez and his consort to the enjoyment of their shared pipe.

  The trishaws were waiting in the portico, each powered and piloted by a scrawny man, both of whom had an almost black, dusty skin. Two pairs of yellow eyes regarded Grimes and the girl incuriously, looked to Mendoza with a mixture of respect and fear. Fear was predominant.

  “Will you ride with me, Your Excellency?” asked the plantation manager. “Your servant can bring up the rear.”

  Grimes would far sooner have ridden with Su Lin but the arrangement proposed by Mendoza made sense. He would be able, when sitting alongside the visitor, to point things out and to explain. (He would be able, too, to distract Grimes’s attention from things that he should not be seeing.)

  He climbed into the passenger basket of the leading trishaw while the driver sat impassively, his gnarled feet on the pedals. Mendoza joined him. The man was redolent of some male perfumery. Grimes sniffed disgustedly. He would much sooner have been smelling Su Lin’s clean scent.

  Mendoza gave orders in a language strange to Grimes. Then, “Jao!” he snapped. “Juldi jao!”

  “Atcha, Sahib!”

  The trishaw took off like a rocket, its spinning wheels spattering the loose gravel of the driveway to port and to starboard. Grimes turned his head to look astern. The vehicle with Su Lin was following.

  “We shall pass, first, through the laborers’ compound,” said Mendoza. “As you will see, Your Excellency, our workers are well and adequa
tely housed.”

  Well and adequately housed they may have been, although Grimes had his doubts. The trishaws sped between rows of barrack-like buildings, drab gray, of poured concrete construction. The windows were tiny, unglazed, some screened by dirty rags fluttering lethargically in the light breeze. There seemed to be children everywhere—black, skinny, naked brats of both sexes. But they were not running and shouting and screaming as children should. They were squatting silently in the dust, staring at nothing. There were a few adults abroad—withered, ancient crones shuffling on their various errands, old men sitting in doorways conversing among themselves in low voices.

  These adults, despite their apparent age, seemed to be showing far more life than did the children. They stood up as the two trishaws passed, salaaming deeply. And Grimes thought that he read hate in their yellow eyes.

  “Mr. Mendoza,” he said, “shouldn’t these kids be at school?”

  “School, Your Excellency? What for? Whatever skills they will need when they join our work force they will learn from their parents.”

  “Shouldn’t they be . . . playing?”

  “Playing, Your Excellency?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen children on more worlds than you’ve had hot dinners and, more than once, I’ve cursed the noisy little bastards. But these. . . . Anybody would think that they were doped.”

  “They are, Your Excellency.”

  “What!”

  “It is their way of life. Their parents start them on the dreamweed almost as soon as they are weaned. By adolescence they have built up at least a partial immunity and are able to function as members of the work force.”

  “What a life!” exclaimed Grimes.

  “They have never known any better, Your Excellency. And who can say that they are not happy, sitting there and dreaming their dreams?”

  “Would you want your children to grow up like that, Mr. Mendoza?”

  “I have no children, Commodore Grimes. It is extremely unlikely that I shall ever be a father. To me the necessary preliminaries, undertaken with a woman, would be extremely distasteful.”

  His voice must have carried. From the following trishaw came Su Lin’s scornful laugh.

  The manager lapsed into sullen, haughty silence. The vehicles sped on, hardly slackening speed when, once they were clear of the compound, there were hills to negotiate. The road was now a winding one, threading its way between hillocks on each of which the fleshy stems and leaves of the dreamweed flourished. In this locality the crop was not yet ready for harvesting; the predominant colour of the vegetation was a greenish blue. As they progressed, however, Grimes saw an increasing number of purple leaves.

  And then they came to an area in which the harvest was in full swing. On either side of the winding roadway rose the glowing purple mounds, over which crawled the small, dark-skinned people, their white loincloths in vivid contrast to the almost-black of their thin bodies. They were working in pairs—usually it was the man who wielded the knife, hacking the fleshy leaves from the thick, convoluted stems while a woman filled a basket with the yield. Filled baskets stood by the roadside, awaiting collection. Overseers moved among the workers. These wore white jackets and turbans as well as loincloths. Their skin was lighter than those of the laborers, their build heavier. They carried short whips.

  The air was heavy with a sweet yet acrid aroma. Grimes wondered if it were safe to breathe. He asked Mendoza as much.

  “Perfectly safe, Your Excellency,” the manager told him scornfully. “The dreamweed has to be taken orally—chewed and swallowed. If you care to look you will see the fieldhands doing just that. Doesn’t it say in the Bible, ‘Thou shall not muzzle the ox that treads the corn’?” He barked an order to the trishaw driver and the vehicle slowed to a crawl, as did the one carrying Su Lin. “On the other hand, it is not desirable that the ox make a pig of himself. As that man there is doing.”

  The person indicated was working far more slowly than the others. The leaves that he was hacking from the stems he was stuffing into his busily chewing mouth while his woman, holding her almost empty basket, watched.

  An overseer was making his way around and over the tangle of stems, shouting angrily. The man paid no heed, although his woman put out a hand to try to catch his wrist as he was raising another bundle of leaves to his mouth. He shook her off, went on chewing. The overseer was now within striking range. He raised his whip and used it, slashing the addict across the face. The laborer screamed shrilly. He brought up his long, heavy knife to ward off the whip that was descending for a second blow. And then there was a flurry of fast action, after which the whipwielder was staring stupidly at his right wrist from which the bright red, arterial blood was spurting, then at his hand, still clutching the whip, on the ground at his feet. The woman was wailing loudly; it seemed odd to Grimes that so loud a noise could come from so small a body. But she was soon quieted. The knife silenced her, slashing down onto the juncture of scrawny neck with thin shoulder.

  There was blood everywhere.

  On the hillock both workers and overseers were scrambling desperately away from the scene of the maiming and the killing. Down in the road the trishaw drivers were attempting to turn their vehicles so that they could return to the safety of the compound. The madman, purple froth spattering from his working mouth, his yellow eyes glaring, was jumping down the hillside toward them, miraculously avoiding being tripped by the tangled roots and stems.

  Su Lin’s trishaw was around, making off downhill. Grimes’s trishaw was turning. As it did so it heeled over. Mendoza fell heavily against Grimes—and Grimes fell out on to the roadway. He scrambled to his feet. He would have run but, in his fall, he had twisted his right leg. He was weaponless. He looked around frantically. A stone to throw at the fast advancing homicidal maniac . . .

  But there weren’t any stones, and it was a very long time since, as a very junior officer in the Survey Service, he had taken a course in unarmed combat.

  He decided that if he were to die all his wounds would be in front. He would not turn his back on his murderer. And perhaps—perhaps!—he might be able to cow the man into submission with his best quarterdeck glare . . .

  The killer was down on the road now, loping toward Grimes. Grimes stood there, facing him.

  “Stop!” he barked.

  And the man did stop and momentarily—but only momentarily—the light of sanity gleamed in his yellow eyes. Then he came on again, the bloody knife upraised.

  “Stop! Drop that knife!”

  The man came on.

  Grimes heard running feet behind him. So Mendoza, he thought, had returned to sort things out. Presumably he was used to such emergencies and, probably, armed.

  But it was not Mendoza. It was Su Lin. She ran past Grimes as he shouted at her, “Get back, you stupid bitch! Get back!”

  She had something in her right hand, something small that gleamed golden in the sunlight. Grimes recognized it. It was the lighter that she had used to ignite the tobacco in his pipe.

  He staggered after her. He had to save her from the madman, even though it might cost his own life.

  The maniac screamed dreadfully. Before he threw up his hands, his knife dropped and forgotten, to cover his face Grimes saw the two-meter-long flame, a thin pencil of intense radiance, that slashed across the mad, staring eyes, searing and blackening them. There was a sickening stench of burned flesh in the air. Then the man, hunched and moaning, turned and shambled blindly away. Sightless, he could not keep to the road. He crashed into the dreamweed plants, tripped and fell heavily. His thin, high whining was a dreadful thing to hear.

  Su Lin, the lethal lighter back in a pocket, stopped to pick up the knife.

  “What . . . What are you going to do?” asked Grimes.

  “Finish him off quickly,” she said. “It will be the kindest way.”

  She was right, of course.

  Grimes made no attempt to stop her but did not watch.

  Chapter 29

&nbs
p; The two trishaws returned.

  Mendoza got out of the leading one, walked past Grimes and Su Lin to where the huddled form of the dead maniac was sprawled face down, the hilt of his knife protruding from his back. Two of the overseers were squatting by the corpse, talking in low voices. The manager went to them, was obviously questioning the men. He returned to the governor and the girl. His expression, decided Grimes, was an odd combination of condemnation and disappointment.

  He said, “This is a serious matter.”

  “Too right it is,” said Grimes. Then, “And where were you when the shit hit the fan?”

  “A man is dead, Your Excellency.”

  “For all the help that you were, I could be dead too. As for your dead man—he is responsible for one death himself. Possibly two.”

  “But this is a serious matter, Your Excellency. This woman may be your servant but she is a native of this world—and not a citizen. Only citizens may carry weapons.”

  “Only citizens, Mr. Mendoza?” Grimes gestured toward the dead man. “Was he a citizen? What about his knife?”

  “A working tool, Commodore.”

  “And a murder weapon.”

  Mendoza ignored this.

  He said to Su Lin, “Give me your flamethrower, girl. It will have to be produced as evidence when you are brought to trial.”

  Grimes thought hard and fast.

  He said, “It is not hers to give to you, Mr. Mendoza.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is my lighter. During my career as commodore of a privateer flotilla I found it convenient to carry on my person gadgets such as that lighter—seemingly innocent but capable of being used in selfdefense . . .” While he was speaking he was filling his pipe. “I had to use it once,” he went on untruthfully, “to quell a mutiny . . .”

  “Then what is she doing with it?”

  By this time the bit of Grimes’s pipe was between his teeth. Su Lin lit it for him, using a flame of normal dimensions and intensity.

  “You see what she’s doing with it,” Grimes said through a cloud of acrid smoke. “She regards this as part of her duties.”