Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  The lights came on in the house as the hover-car approached. His father was still doing well, thought the spaceman, could still afford all the latest in robotic home help. The wide drive, dull-gleaming permaplast bordered with ornamental shrubs, had been swept clear of the dust that here, in the Red Center, got everywhere. Ahead, the wide door of the big garage slid up and open. The old man reduced speed at the very last moment and slid smoothly into the brilliantly lit interior. Gently sighing, the vehicle subsided in its skirts.

  Grimes senior was first out of the car. Gallantly he assisted the ladies to alight—not that any of them needed his aid—leaving his son to cope with the baggage. A door slid open in one of the side walls. In it stood a woman—a transparent woman? No, not a woman. A robot in human female form, with what appeared to be delicate, beautifully fashioned, gleaming clockwork innards, some of the fragile-seeming wheels spinning rapidly, others with a barely perceptible movement.

  “Come in,” said this obviously hellishly expensive automaton. “This is Liberty Hall. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.”

  “Cor stiffen the bleeding crows!” said Grimes.

  Matilda Grimes laughed without much humour. “Just one of George’s latest toys,” she said. “It came programmed with a standard vocabulary but he added to it.”

  “Too right,” said the robot in a pleasant contralto.

  “I like her,” maintained George Whitley Grimes.

  “You would,” his wife told him.

  Meanwhile it—she?—advanced on Grimes, arms extended. What was he supposed to do? he wondered. Shake hands? Throw his own arms about the thing in a stepbrotherly embrace?

  “Let her have the bags, John,” said his father.

  It took them from him, managing them with contemptuous ease, led the way into the house. The workings of the machinery in her hips and legs was fascinatingly obvious. It was like, in a way, one of those beautiful antique clocks that spend their working lives in glass domes. And what would it be like, he wondered, to make love to an eight-day clock? Down, boy, down! he snarled mentally at his, at times kinky, libido.

  They sat in the big, comfortable lounge, Shirl and Darleen in very deep armchairs that caused them to make a display of their long, long legs. Grimes noticed that his father’s eyes kept straying toward the two New Alicians. Perhaps, he thought, it was no more than biological curiosity. Those amply displayed lower limbs were not quite human. Or perhaps the old man was betraying another sort of biological interest. Grimes could not blame him. Like son, like father . . . .

  “Shirl,” asked Matilda Grimes sweetly. “Darleen . . . Aren’t you chilly? Wouldn’t you like to put on something warmer?”

  “It is quite all right, Matilda,” said Shirl. “We often wear less than this. John can tell you. . . .”

  His mother looked at him coldly and said, “You never change much, do you? I remember when you were only twelve, when we were living in that old house in Flynn Street, and you appointed yourself secretary of the Flynn Street Nudist Club which held its meetings by the pool in our backyard . . . As I recall it, you were the only male member.”

  “And I had to shift my workroom to the front of the house,” said George Whitley Grimes. “The view from the back windows was too distracting.”

  “And I,” said Matilda, “had to cope with an irate committee of local mothers who had discovered how their little bitches of daughters were spending their afternoons . . .”

  “And I,” said George, “had to stay away from the pub for fear of being beaten up by the fathers of those same little bitches.”

  Shirl and Darleen laughed.

  “You Earthpeople, as we are discovering, have such odd ways of looking at things,” said one of them.

  “Not all of us,” said Grimes senior. “And not any of us for all of the time.”

  The robutler rolled in with the pre-dinner drinks. It was an even bigger and more elaborate model than the one that had been in service at the time of Grimes’s last visit to the parental home, reminding him of a suit of mechanized battle armor built to accommodate at least three Federation Marines simultaneously. With it came the house robot that Grimes was now thinking of as Clockwork Kitty. Like its predecessor the robutler took spoken orders and, in its capacious interior, seemed to hold a stock of every alcoholic drink known to civilized man—and, quite possibly, a few that weren’t. There were ice cubes, spa water and fruit cordials. There was a fine selection of little eats.

  As the various orders were extruded on trays they were deftly removed by Clockwork Kitty and handed to the correct recipients. Bowls of nuts and dishes of tiny savories were placed on convenient low tables.

  George Whitley Grimes raised his condensation-misted glass of beer to his son and said, “Here’s to crime!”

  The two girls, who also were drinking beer, raised their glasses. Grimes raised his glass of pink gin. Matilda Grimes set her sherry down firmly on the table.

  “That,” she stated, “is a dangerous toast to be drinking in the presence of this son of mine. I still have not forgotten that court of inquiry into the piracy with which he was involved. We have yet to hear, from his lips, the full story of what happened when he was Governor of Liberia—but I have little doubt that there were more than a few illegalities . . . .”

  “Not committed by me, Matilda,” Grimes told her. “Don’t forget that I was the Law, trying to put a stop to other people’s illegal profits.”

  “Hah!” his mother snorted. “Oh, well, you weren’t impeached. I suppose that we must thank the Odd Gods of the Galaxy for small mercies. But we have yet to hear about what really happened on New Sparta . . . .”

  “You shall, my dear, you shall.” He laughed. “Oh, I was guilty of one crime. I did ‘borrow’ a Survey Service courier . . . .”

  “And you crashed it,” said Darleen a little maliciously.

  “It was the fault of the weather,” said Grimes.

  Matilda laughed. “All right, all right. And I suppose that you still hold that reserve commission in the Survey Service that’s supposed to be such a secret and get sent hither and yon to do that man Damien’s dirty work for him.” She looked long and hard at Shirl and Darleen. “And am I right in assuming that the pair of you are also members of the good admiral’s department of dirty tricks?”

  The girls looked inquiringly at Grimes. He decided that he had better answer for them.

  “If you must know—but keep it strictly to yourself—Shirl and Darleen are both probationary ensigns in the Service.”

  “And what is their specialty?” asked Matilda.

  “Unarmed combat,” Grimes told her. “Or combat with anything handy, and preferably sharp, that can be flung. Such as . . .”

  Shirl picked up a shallow, round dish that was now empty. She turned it over so that its convexity was on the down side. With a sharp flick of her wrist she threw it from her. It circled the room, returned to her waiting hand.

  “Flying saucers yet!” said Grimes’s father.

  After a second drink they went in to the dinner that was served by the efficient Clockwork Kitty. With the first course there was some slight embarrassment. It was Grimes’s fault, of course. (But just about everything was.) He should have told his mother that the ancestors of the New Alicians had been kangaroos. Even though these people were now classed as human and, like true humans descended from the original killer ape, omnivorous, they refused kangaroo tail soup, once they learned what it was. But they had strong stomachs and enjoyed the excellent crown roast of lamb once they had been assured that it was of ovine origin.

  Grimes himself managed a good dinner despite the fact that he was talking most of the time. He had not been able to visit his parents on the first occasion of his return to Earth from Liberia, via New Sparta. A very thorough debriefing had occupied practically all of his time. So now there were questions to be answered, stories to be told. He was still answering questions and telling stories when the party returned to the lounge f
or coffee and brandy. Grimes and his father smoked their pipes, Matilda cigarillo and Shirl and Darleen—they were picking up bad habits—cigarettes in long, elegant, bejeweled holders.

  Finally Darleen seemed to be having trouble stifling a yawn. It was infectious. George said, “I don’t know about you people, but I’m turning in.” Darleen said, “If you do not mind, Matilda, we shall do so too.”

  Matilda grinned. “Not with my old man, you won’t! The maid will show you to your rooms.”

  Clockwork Kitty led them away, leaving Grimes alone with his mother.

  She smiled at him a little sadly. She said, “I need hardly ask you, John, need I? But, just to satisfy my curiosity, which one is it?”

  Grimes was frank.

  “Both of them,” he said.

  “What! Not both at once?”

  As a matter of fact this had been known but Grimes’s mother was, in some ways, rather prudish. And, apart from anything else, there was the matter of miscegenation. The old prejudice against the underpeople still lingered.

  “Shirl,” lied Grimes.

  “I really don’t know how you can tell one from the other. Well, John, you’re a big boy now, a four-ring captain and a shipowner, and you’ve been a planetary governor . . . And commodore of a pirate squadron,” she added maliciously. “You’re old enough and wicked enough to look after yourself. And the girls’ rooms are next to yours in the west wing.

  “But I do wish that you would find some nice, human girl and settle down. Isn’t it time?”

  “I’ll get around to it eventually,” he promised her.

  He kissed her good night then made his way to his quarters. The double bed, he saw, was already occupied. By Shirl.

  And Darleen.

  >

  Chapter 5

  “Wakey, wakey!” caroled an annoyingly cheerful female voice. There was a subdued clatter as the tea tray was placed on the bedside table. Morning sunlight flooded the room as curtains were drawn back. “Rise and shine! Rise and shine for the Black Ball Line!”

  Grimes unglued his eyelids and looked up at Clockwork Kitty as she stood over the tousled bed, the rays of the sun glitteringly reflected from the intricacy of moving clockwork under her transparent integument. (But those delicate wheels, on their jeweled pivots, were no more than decoration, an expensive camouflage for the real machinery of metal skeleton and powerful solenoids.) Somehow her vaguely oriental features, which possessed a limited mobility, managed to register disapproval. Although Shirl and Darleen had returned to their own rooms before dawn, it was obvious, from the state of the bed, that Grimes had not slept alone.

  He blinked. Yes, that faint sneer was still there. A trick of the light? Just how intelligent was this robomaid? Oh, he was thinking of Clockwork Kitty as she—but spacemen are apt to think of almost any piece of mobile machinery as she. Just another example of his father’s sense of humor, he decided. The old man had added certain expressions to her programming, just as he had added to her vocabulary. An historical novelist with a keen interest in maritime history would, of course, know the words of quite a few of the old sea chanteys, such as “rise and shine for the Black Ball Line”. . .

  “Milk, sir? Sugar?”

  The automaton poured and stirred efficiently, putting the milk and sugar into the cup first. (And that, remembered Grimes, was something that his mother always insisted on.)

  “Thank you, Kitty,” he said. (It cost nothing to be polite to robots, intelligent or not. And when one wasn’t quite sure of a robot’s actual intelligence it was better to play it safe.)

  “Kitty, sir?”

  “My name for you. When I first saw you I thought of you as ‘Clockwork Kitty.’”

  “The master’s name for me,” said the robomaid, “is Seiko. I was manufactured by the Seiko Corporation in Japan, the makers of this planet’s finest household robots. Prior to our highly successful venture into the field of robotics we were, and indeed still are, the makers of this planet’s finest timepieces. Robomaids such as myself are a memorial, as it were, to the Corporation’s origins . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” Grimes interrupted hastily. What was coming out now was some of the original programming, a high-powered advertising spiel. “Very interesting, Kitty—sorry, Seiko. But I’d rather be getting showered, depilated and all the rest of it. What time is breakfast?”

  “If you will make your order, sir, it will be ready shortly after you appear in the breakfast room.”

  “Surprise me,” said Grimes.

  He looked thoughtfully after the glittering figure as it moved silently and gracefully out of the room.

  Grimes senior, who was a breakfast table conservative, tucked in to a large plate of fried eggs, bacon, sausages and country fried potatoes. Matilda toyed with a croissant and strawberry conserve. Shirl and Darleen seemed to be enjoying helpings of kedgeree. And for Grimes, after he had finished his half-grapefruit, Seiko produced one of his favorite dishes, and one that he had not enjoyed for quite a long time. The plump kippers, served with a side plate of thickly cut new brown bread and butter, tasted as good as they looked.

  Matilda, he decided, must have told Seiko what he would like. He commented on this. She, looking surprised, said that she had given no orders whatsoever regarding her son’s meal.

  So . . . A lucky guess? Do robots guess? But Seiko was absent in the kitchen so he could not make further inquiries until she returned to clear the table. And when she did so the humans were busy discussing the day’s activities.

  George Grimes said, “I’m afraid that I shall have to leave you young people to your own resources today. I’ve a deadline to meet. The trouble with the novel I’m working on now is that I’m having to work on it. It’s just not writing itself.”

  “Why not, George?” asked Grimes.

  “Because it’s set in a period of Australian history that, somehow, makes no great appeal to me. Eureka Stockade and all that. I somehow can’t empathize with any of the characters. And, although it’s regarded by rather too many historians as a minor revolution that might have blown up into something larger, it was nothing of the kind. It was no more than a squalid squabble between tax evaders and tax collectors. But I got a handsome advance before I started writing it, so I’d better deliver on time.”

  “And I have to stay in today myself,” said Matilda. “I’ve got the ladies of the Alice Springs Literary Society coming round for lunch. I’m afraid that you’d find them as boring as all hell—as I do myself, frankly. So why not take the car, John, and a packed midday meal, and just cruise around? I’d suggest Ayers Rock and the Olgas, but at this time of the year they’re infested with tourists. But the desert itself is always fascinating.”

  And so it was that, an hour later, Grimes, Shirl and Darleen were speeding away from the low, rambling house, heading out over the almost featureless desert, the great plume of fine, red dust raised by the vehicle’s fans swirling in their wake.

  Grimes gave Ayers Rock and Mount Olga a wide berth—the one squatting on the horizon like a huge, red toad, the other looking like some domed city erected on an airless planet. Over each hovered a sizeable fleet of tourist dirigibles. Grimes could imagine what conditions would be like on the ground—the souvenir stalls, the refreshment stands, the canned music, the milling crowds. Some time he would have to visit the Rock and the Olgas again, but not today.

  He came to the Uluru Irrigation Canal. He did not cross it but followed its course south. The artificial waterway was poorly maintained; the agricultural project that it had been designed to service had been cancelled, largely due to pressure by the conservationists. But water still flowed sluggishly in the ditch and, here and there along its length, were billabongs, one of which Grimes had known very well in his youth. It would be good, he hoped, to visit it again.

  And there were the tall ghost gums standing around and among the waterworn rocks that some civil engineer with the soul of a landscape gardener had brought in, probably at great expense, to make
the artificial pool look natural. And there was the water, inviting, surprisingly clear, its surface dotted here and there with floating blossoms. These were not of Terran origin but were, as a matter of fact, Grimes’s own contribution to the amenities of this pleasant oasis, carnivorous plants, insectivores, from Caribbea. The billabong was free from mosquitoes and other such pests. (He recalled that some businessman had wanted to import these flowers in quantity but the conservationists had screamed about upsetting the balance of nature.)

  He stopped the car just short of the ornamental bounders. He and the girls got out, walked to the steeply shelving beach of red sand. He said, “How about a swim?”

  “Crocodiles?” asked Shirl dubiously.

  “There weren’t any last time I was here.”

  “When was that?” asked Darleen.

  “Oh, about five Earth years ago.”

  He got out of his shirt, shorts and underthings, kicked off his sandals. As one the girls peeled the white T-shirts from the upper parts of their tanned bodies, stepped out of their netherwear. Naked, long-legged and small-breasted, they seemed to belong to this landscape, more than did Grimes himself. They waded out into the deeper water. Grimes followed them. The temperature of the sun-warmed pool was pleasant. They played like overgrown children with a beach ball that some family party had left on the sand. (So other people had found his private billabong, thought Grimes. He hoped that they had enjoyed it as much as he was doing now.) They decorated each other’s bodies with the gaudy water lilies, the tendrils of which clung harmlessly to their wet skins. Finally they emerged from the water and stretched themselves to dry off on the surface of a large, flat rock which was partially shielded from the harsh sunlight by the ghost gums.

  Then Grimes felt hungry. He got to his feet and walked to the hover-car, taking from it the hamper that had been packed by Seiko. The sandwiches were to his taste—ham with plenty of mustard, a variety of strong cheeses—and the girls enjoyed the sweet and savory pastries and the fresh fruits. The cans of beer, from their own special container, were nicely chilled.