Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  Grimes said, “It’s a pity that we scared them all off.”

  “What else did you expect?” demanded Shirl. “They must have thought that the boat was something new being used by the fur hunters.”

  “But we can try to call them back,” said Darleen.

  She kicked off her shoes, shrugged out of her boiler suit, stepped out of her brief underwear. She waded out into the still water. “It’s cold.” she complained. But she walked on, slowly but steadily. Grimes wondered why she did not swim. Then suddenly she assumed a squatting posture, lowering herself until she was completely submerged. She lost her balance of course and floated, face down, her prominent buttocks well above the surface. From around the region of her head came a flurry of bubbles.

  She came up for air, inhaling deeply, and then repeated her original maneuver. Again she came up for air and this time struck out for the shore. She waded out to where Grimes, with Shirl and Seiko, were standing.

  “It is no use,” she said. “I cannot sing under the water.”

  “I can,” said Seiko. “I am guaranteed to be waterproof at any depth. But what must I sing?”

  “It will be a call,” Darleen told her. “A sound that will carry a long way, a very long way, under the sea. When we were on Earth we studied many things. We listened to the recordings of the whale songs and tried to understand them and to make the same sort of music ourselves. And it was a whale song that I was trying to sing just now. Its meaning is, put into words, ‘Come to me. Come to me.’”

  “I suppose that it was Admiral Damien who suggested this course of studies,” commented Grimes.

  “It was,” Darleen admitted. “But he never thought to have taught us to sing under the water.”

  “What sounds must I make?” asked Seiko.

  Darleen started to sing. It was an eerie ululation with an odd rhythm. It was something that one felt rather than merely listened to. There was the impression of loneliness, of hunger for close contact. It was a call, a call that any sentient being, on hearing it, would be bound to answer.

  And the call was being answered.

  From nowhere, it seemed, the birds—if they were birds—were coming in, squawking discordantly, circling overhead. Grimes didn’t like the looks of them—those long, curved, vicious beaks, those wings that looked leathery rather than feathery, those whiplike, spiked tails . . . But Darleen sang on, and was joined by Seiko.

  And those blasted flying things were getting lower all the time.

  Shirl tore a piece of seaweed from a nearby pile, a broad, fleshy slab. She threw it, spinning lopsidedly, aloft. It hit one of the birds. It staggered off course, splashed clumsily into the sea. It seemed to be injured, fluttering and croaking. At once the entire overhead flock ceased their circling and dived on to their disabled companion in a feeding frenzy. It was not a pretty sight. By the time they had finished, at least half a dozen stripped carcasses were sinking to the bottom and the wings of several more of the creatures did not seem to be in good enough repair to carry them for any great distance.

  Darleen stopped singing, although Seiko continued. The New Alician followed Shirl’s example and armed herself with a makeshift throwing weapon. The birds, their grisly feast (or the first course of it) over, took to the air again and this time made straight for Grimes and his party. Shirl and Darleen effectively launched their missiles, and again, and again, but this time the predators ignored their fallen companions.

  “Stop singing!” barked Grimes to Seiko.

  Enchanted by the sound of her own voice she ignored him.

  “Stop singing!” Who the hell did she think she was? Madame Butterfly? “Stop singing!”

  With his right index finger he made a jab for where he estimated her navel, with its ON/OFF switch, to be under the concealing clothing. It hurt him more than it did her but he did succeed in gaining her attention.

  She turned to him and said severely, “That was not necessary, Captain.”

  “It most certainly was, you . . . you animated cuckoo clock!”

  “If you say so.”

  But the flying things had lost interest. They circled the party from the boat one last time and then flapped off to the eastward. One of them, a straggler, voided its bowels. It seemed that it must have made allowance for deflection; the noisome mess came down with a splatter onto Grimes’s right shoulder, befouling his gold-braided shoulder-board.

  “Don’t you have a superstition,” asked Shirl sweetly, “that that is a sign of good luck?”

  Grimes snarled wordlessly and went back into the boat to find some tissues to clean himself off.

  When he rejoined the others Seiko was getting ready to make her submarine solo. She had taken off her clothing and was standing there beside the naked Darleen, in her skillfully applied coat of paint looking far more human than the flesh-and-blood girl; there was no oddness about the joints of her lower limbs, no exaggerated heaviness of the haunches. Tomoko had certainly done a good job on her, even to the coral nipples and the black pubic hair.

  The robot removed her dark glasses, handed them to Shirl. Now, with those utterly colorless eyes behind which there was a hint of movement, she did look unhuman—but she was still beautiful.

  She said, “It is a pity that I cannot take off the wig, but it is secured by adhesive . . . .”

  Grimes wondered what that beautifully elaborate coiffeur would look like when she came out of the water.

  She walked down to the verge of the calm sea, Darleen beside her. Her movements were more graceful than those of the New Alician—more graceful but less natural. She waded out, Darleen waded out. Darleen stopped when the water was at shoulder level. Seiko, with her much greater specific gravity, kept going. Before long she had completely vanished.

  Had she started to sing yet?

  Grimes supposed that she had done so.

  He hoped that it would be the silkies who answered the call and not, as on the first trial, some totally unexpected and unpleasant predators. He looked out over the sea, to the weed patches, to the low, dark shapes of the other rocky islets. He saw no signs of life.

  Suddenly Darleen called out something. He could not make out the words. He saw her dive from her standing posture, her lower legs and long feet briefly visible above the surface. By his side Shirl hastily stripped then ran out into the sea and also dived from view.

  Should he join them?

  This would be foolish, especially as he did not know what was happening. Besides, he was not all that good a swimmer. All that he could do was wait.

  At last a head reappeared above the surface, then another. Shirl and Darleen swam slowly in until the water was shallow enough for them to find footing, then waded the rest of the way. Grimes went down to meet them.

  “What’s happening?” he demanded.

  “Seiko . . .” gasped Darleen.

  “We . . . We’ve lost Seiko . . .” added Shirl.

  Darleen recovered her breath and told her story. She had watched Seiko walking along the smooth rock of the sea bottom, presumably singing as she did so. And then, quite suddenly, she had vanished. Darleen dived then and swam underwater to where she had last seen Seiko. There was a crevasse, not very wide but very, very deep. Shirl joined her and both of them tried to swim down into this fissure. They had glimpsed, in the depths, a pale glimmer that might have been Seiko’s body—and then even that had vanished.

  “We shall miss her,” said Shirl sadly.

  Everybody aboard Sister Sue would miss her, thought Grimes. Robot she might be (might have been?) but she was a very real personality. Her father, who had played Pygmalion to her Galatea, would be saddened when he was told of Seiko’s passing.

  He said, “If we had deep diving equipment we might be able to do something. But we haven’t . . .”

  He looked out over the calm sea, to where he had last seen Seiko. He saw something break surface and momentarily felt a wild hope. But it was not the lost robot. It was a great, gleaming, golden shape and it
was followed by others, golden, rich brown, black, silvery gray. The silkies, called by Seiko’s song, were coming back.

  “We have company,” he said to the girls. “Get ready to talk.”

  Chapter 21

  They retreated toward the center of the islet, making their stand by the boat. Shirl and Darleen did not resume their clothing although they had carried it with them, also the boiler suit, shoes and sunglasses that Seiko had been wearing.

  “It will be better,” said Darleen to Grimes, “if we meet the silkies naked. They will associate clothes with humans, the sort of humans who have been slaughtering them. Perhaps you, too, should undress . . .”

  “Not bloody likely,” said Grimes.

  As a matter of fact he was already feeling naked. He should have brought some sort of weaponry from the ship, either a Minetti automatic pistol or a hand laser. Or both.

  He watched the silkies lolloping up the natural ramp. Great, ugly—apart from their beautiful pelts—brutes they were, like obscenely obese Terran seals, more like fur-covered slugs than seals, perhaps, with hardly any distinction between heads and bodies, with tiny, gleaming eyes and wide, lipless mouths which they opened to emit not unmusical grunting sounds. And Shirl and Darleen were making similar noises, although it was more cooing than grunting.

  Friends . . . The words somehow formed themselves in Grimes’s mind. Friends. We are friends. Friends.

  But the grunted reply held doubt, skepticism. Shirl went on singing her song of peace and Darleen whispered to Grimes, “It might be better if you went back into the boat, John, to leave us to deal with these . . . people.”

  “No,” said Grimes stubbornly. After all, he was the captain, wasn’t he? And captains do not leave junior officers to face a danger while retiring to safety. And he already had Seiko’s death (do robots die?) on his conscience.

  Both the girls were singing again, in chorus. Perhaps, thought Grimes, he should join in—but he knew neither the tune nor the words. And the silkies, grunting, were still advancing. Belatedly Grimes realised that those on the wings of the oncoming column had accelerated their rate of advance, were executing a pincer movement. He turned, to see that his retreat to the boat was cut off.

  Friends . . . . We come as friends . . . .

  And were those wordless grunts making sense, or were the silkies pushing their message telepathically?

  You . . . friends. Perhaps. Him—no. NO.

  It was his clothing, thought Grimes. Perhaps the captains of Drongo Kane’s ships had accompanied the fur hunters on their forays. Perhaps anybody wearing gold braid on his shoulders and on his cap was as much a murderer as the axe-, knife- and harpoon-wielding colonists in their rough working clothes.

  Shirl and Darleen were getting the message. They closed in on Grimes, one on either side of him. They went on singing. And what was the burden of their song now: Love me, love my dog . . . ?

  Whatever it was it made no difference.

  Even on land the clumsy-seeming silkies could be amazingly quick when they wanted to be. A golden-furred giant reared up impossibly on its tail and hind flippers before Grimes and then fell upon him, knocking him sprawling. He heard the girls scream as they were similarly dealt with. And then there he was, on his back, a great, befurred and whiskered face over his. At least—there are, more often than not, small, compensatory mercies—the thing’s breath was quite sweet.

  A flipper, a great slab of heavily muscled meat, lay heavily on his chest, making breathing difficult. Other flippers held his legs down and others, working clumsily but surely, were spreading wide his arms. He squirmed and managed to turn his head to the right. He saw that his right wrist, supported by a flipper that had closed around it like a limp mitten, had been raised from the ground. And he saw that a wide mouth, displaying the large, blunt teeth of the herbivore, was open, was about to close upon his hand. He remembered, in a flash, the horror stories he had heard about the silkies, their raids on coastwise villages, the mutilation of their victims. It made sense, a horrid sort of sense. It was only his hands, his tool-making, weapon-making, weapon-wielding hands that had given man dominion over the intelligent natives of this world.

  He wondered if the silkies would kill him after they had chewed his hands off. It didn’t much matter; he would very soon die of loss of blood.

  The chorus of grunts all around him changed. There was the strong impression of fear, alarm. Had Steerforth, using the Number 2 boat, come to the rescue? But although there was noise enough the distinctive clatter of an inertial drive unit was absent.

  A human arm came into his field of view, a hand caught the mutilation-intent silkie by the scruff of its almost non-existent neck, lifted and made a sidewise fling in the same motion. A foot thudded into the side of the beast who was holding Grimes down. He caught confused glimpses of a naked female body in violent motion. At one stage four of the silkies succeeded, by sheer weight, in capturing her—Shirl? Darleen?—imprisoning her under the heaving mound of their bodies. But Shirl and Darleen were dancing around the outskirts of this living tumulus, kicking, burying their hands into soft fur and tugging ineffectually.

  There was a sort of eruption and Seiko, the black hair of her once elaborate wig in wild disarray about her face, rose from its midst, stepping slowly and gracefully down over the struggling bodies. She walked to Grimes, caught him by the hands (and it was strange that her hands should be so cold, human-seeming as they were) and lifted him effortlessly to his feet.

  She said, “I am sorry that I was late, Captain-san. But it was a long climb back up.”

  “You got here in time,” Grimes told her. “And that’s all that matters.”

  “The silkies . . .” said Shirl.

  Yes, the silkies. They were retreating to the sea, but slowly.

  Darleen ran after them, let herself be immersed in that ebbing tide of multicolored bodies. She was singing again. Shirl joined her. Seiko stayed with Grimes but she, too was singing.

  Fantastically the tide turned. Led by Shirl and Darleen the silkies came slowly back. The two New Alicians draped themselves decoratively about Grimes, their arms about his neck. Seiko stood behind him, her hands on his shoulders. And they sang, all three of them, and the silkies’ song in return held, at last, a note of acceptance. One of the beasts—was it the golden-furred giant who had knocked Grimes down?—made a slow, somehow stately approach to the humans (the true human, the two humans by courtesy, the pseudo-human). He (Grimes assumed that it was he) gently placed one huge flipper on the toe of Grimes’s right shoe.

  “Touch his flipper with your hand, John,” whispered Darleen.

  Grimes, who kept himself reasonably fit, managed this without having to squat. He straightened.

  “You are accepted,” said Shirl.

  “It makes a change,” said Grimes, “from having my hands eaten.”

  The musical conversation with the silkies continued. Becoming bored, Grimes pulled out and filled his pipe.

  “Stop!” Shirl snapped. “To these people fire is one of the badges of the murderer, just as clothing is.”

  At last it was over. The silkies returned to the sea. Grimes and the girls went back into the boat. The clothing of Shirl, Darleen and Seiko had been lost in the scuffle but this, in this day and age, did not much matter. In the ship’s sauna everybody was used to seeing everybody else naked.

  Grimes set course back to the spaceport. For most of the flight Shirl and Darleen amused themselves by trying to restore Seiko’s borrowed hair to some semblance of order. (That wig would never be the same again.) Grimes lent her his sunglasses.

  He decided to land the boat by the after airlock rather than to bring her directly into the boat bay. Cleo Jones had informed him, when he called in to say that he was on the way back, that there was some slight trouble with the boat bay doors which had been discovered after his departure and which was still not rectified.

  The belly skids made gentle contact with the dirty concrete of the apron. Gri
mes shut down the inertial drive, opened the airlock doors. The four of them stepped out into the pleasantly warm, late afternoon sunlight.

  Grimes joked, “I hope that Mr. Steerforth doesn’t give you girls a bawling out for being in incorrect uniform!”

  But it was not only Steerforth who strode down the ramp from the ship’s after airlock. Pastor Coffin, his severe black with its minimal white trimmings, was with him, was in the lead.

  Coffin’s craggy face was pale with fury. He glared at the three naked women. He declaimed, “So you Have deigned to return from your orgy, your debauching of these once innocent creatures. . . .”

  “I wish that there had been an orgy . . .” whispered Shirl.

  Either Coffin did not hear this or had decided to ignore it. “I called upon your ship, Captain, to lodge a complaint. A strong complaint. You did not obtain permission to take one of your boats for an atmospheric flight. Your officer has been trying to make excuses for you, telling me that no copy of port regulations has been received on board. This excuse I was prepared to accept; after all, you are strangers here. But I was not told for what purpose you made your flight.”

  “I am sure that nothing untoward happened, Pastor,” said Steerforth placatingly.

  “Then how do you explain this shameless display of nudity—and on, of all days—the Sabbath? I shall be sending a strong message of complaint to your owners.” He realized his mistake. “A strong letter of complaint to the Bureau of Interstellar Transport. Meanwhile, any further excursions by your ship’s boats are forbidden.”