Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  There was a murmur from the crowd, more than a murmur, a chorus of shouts. “She is a witch! Kill her! Kill her!”

  Then, abruptly, Seiko regurgitated the acid that had been poured into her. The burning stream struck Gardiner full in the face. He dropped the bottle, which shattered, and screamed shrilly, clawing at his ruined eyes.

  Incongruously the robot murmured, “I . . . am . . . sorry. But my . . . circuits . . . were not . . . designed to . . . take such punishment . . .”

  Grimes was not sorry. The Chief Law Enforcer had deserved what he got. (To how many flesh-and-blood women had he applied this acid test?) And the bottle was broken and, hopefully, it would take some time to fetch a new one and, meanwhile, anything might happen . . .

  Grimes hoped.

  Chapter 28

  The whimpering Gardiner was led away by two of his subordinates. Presumably whoever passed for a doctor in this town would be able to assuage the pain, although not to do anything to save the man’s eyesight. But that was the least of Grimes’s worries. His main concern was for Seiko, for Shirl and Darleen and for himself. He reproached himself for not having carried to the beach, in addition to the recorder, a portable transceiver so that, at all times, he would have been in communication with his ship.

  But he had never dreamed that Coffin would go to the extremes to which he already had gone—and to what extremes was he yet to go? And you, Grimes, of all people, he told himself, should have learned by this time that allegedly civilized people are capable of anything, no matter how barbarous.

  Coffin was speaking. “There is no doubt that the woman is a witch. Not only has she survived her ordeal uninjured but she has severely injured my chief law enforcer. She must pay the penalty.” He paused judicially, turned his head to stare at Grimes, Shirl and Darleen. “It was my intention to order that the acid test be applied to the other three accused. Unfortunately no further supply of acid is readily available. So I shall, therefore, temper justice with mercy. Grimes, Kelly and Byrne will be given the opportunity to confess and to recant. Should they do so, their ends will be swift and merciful. Should they not do so, they shall be executed in the same manner as their mistress. They will be permitted to watch her sufferings and, hopefully, such spectacle will be a stimulus to their consciences.

  “Bring the faggots!”

  Men and women brought bundles of sticks. (These must, thought Grimes, have been prepared well in advance.) They piled them around the stake to which Seiko was chained, concealing the lower half of her body. A law enforcer poured some fluid—flammable oil, it was—over the faggots. He struck a long match, applied the flame all around the base of the pile.

  With a loud whoosh the oil ignited and there was an uprush of smoky fire. Seiko’s hair—but it’s only a wig, thought Grimes—flared and crackled. Then the initial fury of the burning oil subsided but the faggots had caught, were snapping in the heat, emitting sparks, sending their flames curling up around Seiko’s body. Although the cloth of her coveralls was flame-resistant it was beginning to char and to powder. A sigh, a horribly obscene sound, went up from the mob as one perfect breast was exposed.

  Suddenly, audible even over the crackling of the fire, the murmurs of the crowd, there was a startlingly loud click! Seiko, who had been sagging in her bonds, stood erect. Her wrists, which had been tied behind her back, were already free, the flames having burned away the rope. But even if this had not been the case it would not have mattered. The strength that she now exerted to snap the chains would have been more than enough to break mere vegetable fiber. As she stood there, ridding herself of the last of her bonds, the crumbling remnants of her clothing fell from around her smoke-smudged body. She was like, thought Grimes, Aphrodite rising from the sea—a sea of fire. And he, even at this moment, had to repress a giggle. A Venus without arms, a Venus de Milo, he might accept—but a bald-headed one was altogether too much. (Her body paint had survived the fire although her wig had not.) Even so, she was beautiful—and not only because her escape from the pyre had brought a renewal of hope.

  Men were shouting, women and children were screaming, but none dare approach this vengeful she-devil. Coffin was bellowing, “Seize her! Seize her! Strike her down!”

  “Good on yer, Seiko!” yelled Darleen. “Show the bastards!”

  There was a meter of broken chain in Seiko’s right hand. She threw it. It wrapped itself around Coffin’s neck, all but decapitating him. His two clerks squealed in terror, dived under the table, from the surface of which the pastor’s blood dripped down upon them. Seiko stepped out of the fire, flames and sparks splashing about her feet. Two law enforcers, braver or more stupid than their fellows, ran at her with heavy clubs upraised. She countered their assault with the savate technique that she must have learned from Shirl and Darleen; her long right leg flashed out while she pivoted on her left heel; first one man and then the other (although there was almost no interval between the two blows) were the recipients of a crippling kick to the groin. In horror Grimes noted that the trousers of each unfortunate were smouldering where the kicks had landed. Seiko’s feet must be almost redhot. (But it was her feet for which he felt concern, not the genitals of the law enforcers.)

  He felt the heat emanating from her body as she approached him, as her hands reached out for his chains. But she was careful not to touch him.

  She said, “Do not worry about me, John. I am heat-resistant. I feel no pain, as you know it. And it was the heat of the fire that released my master switch . . .”

  She left him to his own devices, went to free the two New Alicians.

  Grimes looked around, fearing fresh attack. But the light of the oil lanterns on their posts revealed a waterfront empty save for himself and his women, the body of Coffin sprawled over the table and the two still-living (but for how long?) bodies of the law enforcers. The pair of clerks had made their escape unnoticed.

  “Well,” said Grimes with deliberate matter-of-factness, “that seems to be it. We’ve had our incident. Let’s get back to the ship. Come, Shirl. Come, Darleen. And you, Seiko, can guard our rear.”

  “I am staying,” said the robot.

  “Seiko, I order you to come with us.”

  “John, your father was my original owner. He ordered me to protect you when necessary.”

  “Then protect me as I walk back to the spaceport.”

  She said, “We could be attacked.” With a long forefinger she touched her navel. “I have learned my vulnerability in a scrimmage. A club, a flung stone, even a heavy fist and I can be jolted into near-immobility. There is only one way to ensure your safety. Those people . . .” she gestured toward the town, “ . . . must be taught a lesson.”

  It was not toward the houses she ran but to the slipway, up which the schooners were hauled for the scraping and caulking of the underwater portions of their hulls. It was toward the slipway that she ran, and down the slipway. When her body entered the black water there was an uprising of steam.

  Then she was gone from sight.

  “Crazy robot!” grumbled Grimes. “Being cooked must have affected her brain . . .”

  “She knows what she is doing, John,” said Darleen loyally.

  “Does she? I wish that I did.” He could sense that from darkened windows he was being watched. He wondered how long it would be before the New Salemites, seeing that the most dangerous witch had plunged into the sea, would come pouring out of their houses to exact vengeance for the death of their pastor and the injuries inflicted upon his law enforcers. He said, “I think that we should be getting out of here.”

  Shirl said, “But we can’t leave Seiko . . . “

  “I know,” said Grimes. “But . . .”

  “Do you hear her?” Shirl asked Darleen.

  “Yes.” Then, to Grimes, “Do not worry so, John. Everything will be all right.”

  From whose viewpoint? he wondered.

  Then up the shipway she strode. The sea had washed the grime of smoke and fire from her pale body. U
p the slipway she strode—and behind her, a living tide, surged the silkies. As she passed Grimes on her way inshore she made a gesture that was more formal salute than cheery wave. And the silkies grunted—in greeting or talking among themselves? But Shirl and Darleen replied in kind.

  The robot and her army reached the sea frontage of the town. There was shouting and screaming, the splintering crashes as doors were burst in, as wooden walls succumbed to the onslaught of tons of angry flesh and blood. Fires started in a dozen places—the result of overturned lamps or lit by intent? Grimes did not know but suspected that Seiko was exacting retaliation in kind for what she had undergone. Fires started, and spread.

  “This has gone too far,” said Grimes.

  “It has not gone far enough,” Shirl told him. “The silkies said to us that she had told them that they were not to kill. To destroy only, but not to kill. That’s the trouble with robots. They have this built-in, altogether absurd directive that human beings are never to be harmed by them.”

  “Wherever did you get that idea?” asked Grimes.

  “While we were waiting for you on Earth we did quite a lot of reading. There were some books, classics, by an old writer called Asimov.”

  “Then what about him?” Grimes gestured toward the pastor’s body. “Wasn’t he harmed? Fatally, at that.”

  “Yes, John,” said Darleen patiently. “But he was going to harm you, and Seiko was doing her best to protect you.”

  The town was ablaze now, the roaring of the flames drowning out all other noises coming from that direction. Satisfied with the havoc that they had wrought, the silkies were returning to the sea. There was light enough for Grimes to see that some were wounded, with great patches of fur burned from their bodies. Others bled from long and deep gashes. But their musical grunting sounded like a chant of victory.

  Seiko brought up the rear. Again her body was smoke-blackened. She approached Grimes and bowed formally. “Captain-san, it is over. We spared the church and a large hall adjacent, and the people are huddled in these buildings, praying.”

  “How many killed?” demanded Grimes.

  “Nobody by intent, although two or three may have died accidentally. But we let them seek refuge in their houses of worship and I refrained from applying the torch to these.”

  “You did well,” said Grimes at last. “All right. The sooner we’re back on board the ship the better.”

  “I am sorry, John,” Seiko told him. “I cannot accompany you.”

  “That’s an order, damn it!”

  “Which I cannot accept. I was built to serve, John, as well you know. But you do not really need me. They . . .” she gestured toward the sea, to the silky heads, their eyes gleaming with reflected firelight, that were turned inland, looking at the humans and the robot. “They need me, much more than you do.”

  “She is right,” said Shirl and Darleen as one.

  Above the roar of the burning town, beating down from the sky, was the arrhythmic clatter of a small craft’s inertial drive. One of Sister Sue’s lifeboats made a heavy landing not far from where Grimes was still trying to argue with the women. From it jumped Steerforth and Calamity Cassie, each with a laser pistol in hand.

  “You’re all right, Captain?” demanded the chief officer. “We saw the flames and thought that we’d better take action.”

  “You did right,” said Grimes. “And now you can get us back to where we belong.”

  “Good-bye, Harald,” said Seiko. “Good-bye, Cassie. Tell the others good-bye for me.”

  She was, Grimes noticed, holding her right hand protectively over her navel.

  “We can’t leave you here, Seiko,” objected Steerforth.

  “She can look after herself,” said Grimes harshly. “And, in any case, it’ll be days yet before Sister Sue is capable of lifting off. If—no, when—you change your mind, Seiko, you’ll know where to find us.”

  The boat, with Steerforth at the controls, clattered upward. The chief officer made a circuit of the seaport area before setting course for the spaceport. New fires had broken out; alongside their jetties the schooners were ablaze.

  She was thorough, was Seiko, thought Grimes. Very thorough. It would be a long time before, if ever, there was another silky hunt on New Salem.

  All that next day he was expecting her to come walking back up the ramp, into the ship. And the day after, and the day after that . . .

  Chapter 29

  The mess was well on the way to being cleaned up.

  The destroyer Pollux had been within range of Sister Sue’s Carlotti radio, even though the signals had been broadcast and not beamed. She had dropped down to the spaceport, with Grimes usurping the functions of New Salem Aerospace Control. (Presumably the lady who usually did the talking to incoming traffic was still huddled in the church with her badly frightened fellow colonists.)

  Her captain, Commander Beavis, had served under Grimes many years ago and was cooperative. Damien must have told him that Grimes was once again, although secretly, an officer of the Federation Survey Service, senior to Beavis. That gentleman managed to imply that Grimes could issue orders rather than mere suggestions. But appearances were maintained for the benefit of the crews of both ships. Grimes was the innocent shipmaster whose life, and the lives of certain of his officers, had been threatened by the people of this world. Beavis was the galactic policeman who had come hurrying to the rescue.

  Beavis had the people and the equipment to be able to do something about the plight of the colonists, whose city had been almost entirely destroyed. He set up a sizeable township of tents, complete with field kitchens and a hospital. He interrogated various officials and recorded their stories. Then, aboard Sister Sue, he heard Grimes’s report and watched and listened to the playback of the various tapes—one of them heavily edited—including that final one, which had been recovered, undamaged, from the beach. He interviewed Shirl and Darleen and Steerforth and Cassie.

  Then when he was alone with Grimes, relaxing over a drink, he said, “I shall put all this material in Admiral Damien’s hands as soon as possible, sir. He’s going to love it—and so will Madame Duvalier. I rather think, somehow, that the New Salemites are going to be resettled—preferably on some world with no animal life whatsoever . . . .”

  “If they could find some way of harvesting plants really brutally they’d do it,” said Grimes. “In spite of all that’s happened they still regard themselves as the Almighty-created Lords of Creation. And, more and more, I’m coming to the opinion that any life, all life, should be treated with respect and compassion.”

  “Even robots, sir?” asked Beavis with deceptive innocence.

  Grimes laughed. “All right, all right. There was that bloody tin messiah, Mr. Adam, years ago. He got what was coming to him; I wasn’t sorry then and I’m not sorry now.”

  “I was thinking of Seiko, sir.”

  “Mphm.”

  “She would pass for a very attractive woman. You must miss her, sir.”

  “I suppose I do,” admitted Grimes. “But she’ll be back. She’ll know when I’m due to lift. She’ll be back.”

  At last the repairs were finished and the fresh water tank refilled. All that remained to be done was the recalibration of Sister Sue’s Mannschenn Drive. While this was being carried out only a skeleton crew would remain on board—Grimes himself in the control room, Flo Scott in the inertial drive room and, of course, all the Mannschenn Drive engineers in their own compartment, making their abstruse calculations and arcane adjustments. The theory of it was that if anything should go wrong, if the ship fell down a crack in the Space-Time Continuum, the captain and his top-ranking technicians might—just might—be able to get her back to where and when she belonged. Ships—only a very few ships but ships nonetheless—had been known to vanish during the recalibration procedure. Of that very few an even smaller number had come back, and not to the planets from which they had made their unscheduled departures. Sometimes, after only a very short absence f
rom the normal universe, their crews had aged many years. Sometimes, during an absence of years, only minutes had elapsed for the personnel. Some crews claimed to have met God; others told horrifying stories of their narrow escapes from the clutches of the Devil. Grimes, good agnostic that he was, did not believe such tales, saying, if his opinion were asked, that it is a well-known fact that the temporal precession fields engendered by the Drive have an hallucinatory effect upon the human mind.

  Recalibration, to him, was a process similar to old-fashioned navel gunnery, the procedure known as bracketing. Under . . . Up . . . Over . . . Down . . . still. Under . . . Up . . . Right on! Salvoes!

  So he sat in Sister Sue’s control room, smoking his pipe, waiting for Daniel Grey, the Chief Manschenn Drive Engineer, to start doing his thing. He looked out through a viewport, saw his people, together with a number of Beavis’s officers, standing by the stern of Pollux, watching. Grey’s voice came from the intercom speaker, “All ready, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Grey. Commence recalibration.”

  He heard—and felt—the deep hum as the rotors of the Drive commenced to spin, a hum that rapidly rose in pitch to a thin, high whine with an odd warbling quality. Outside the scene changed. Pollux was no longer there. Neither were the spaceport administration buildings. The planet was as it had been before the coming of man. Under, thought Grimes. The scene changed again. There were only ruins of buildings, barely recognizable as such under the growth of bushes and small trees.

  Over.

  Then under again, with a few rough shacks to mark where the spaceport proper would one day be.

  Over . . .

  The familiar buildings were there, but showing signs of dilapidation. Grimes got up from his seat, looked down through the port at the concrete apron. It was cracked in many places, with weeds thrusting through the fissures. He went down from the control room to his quarters. There was an odd unfamiliarity about them. Who was the auburn-haired woman whose holographic portrait was on the bulkhead behind the desk in his day cabin? It wasn’t Maggie, although there was a certain similarity. In his bedroom he took his uniform cap from the wardrobe, looked into the mirror to adjust it to the right angle. With fast dissipating puzzlement he noted the strange cap badge above the gold-braided peak, a rather ornate winged wheel, and the single broad gold band, the insignia of a commodore, on each of his shoulderboards. Passing through his day room he flicked a good-humoured salute at the portrait of Sonya.