Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  The master looked up from his sighting telescope, murmured, “She’ll do.” Both hands went to the console before him. He said, “Look out through the side ports and aft, Commodore. This is worth watching.”

  It was.

  From the control room—which, like the bridge of a seagoing ship or the conning tower of a submarine, was a superstructure—there was a good view astern. Grimes could see the engine pods, four to a side, their now motionless four-bladed airscrews gleaming in the harsh sunlight. He could see the stubs of three of the masts—W to port, N on the centerline and E to starboard. S, of course, was beneath the hull and not visible, except in the periscope screen. But those stubs were stubs no longer. They were elongating, extending, stretching like impossibly fast growing, straight-stemmed trees. And as they grew they sprouted branches, foliage—the yards and the sails. The royals at the head of each mast were fully spread before the process of telescopic elongation was completed.

  There was disorientation then, visual confusion, upset balance as the star wind filled the sails. What had been up was up no longer. Aft was still aft, but it was also “down.” Chairs swung in their gimbals, as did some of the instruments. Other equipment was cunningly designed so that it could be used from almost any angle.

  Grimes realized what was happening but, twisting his body awkwardly in the chair, still stared in fascination aft and down through the polarized glass of the viewports. He had seen the sail plan of this ship, of course, had helped to draw it up; but this was the first time he had watched a lightjammer actually making sail. He mentally recited the names of the courses. He had insisted the old nomenclature be used. Northsail, lower topsail, upper topsail, topgallant, royal . . .

  He turned away at last, asked, “Do you usually make sail all in one operation, Captain?”

  Listowel laughed. “Only when I have guests in the control room.”

  Sonya laughed, too. “John would prefer to see all hands out in spacesuits, clambering in the rigging like monkeys.”

  “The good old days, eh?” Listowel unsnapped his seat belt. “Roll and go. Hell or Llanith in ninety days—and the sun’s over the yardarm.”

  Grimes took one last look at that splendid suit of sails, black against the glare of the Lorn sun, before he got up to follow Listowel and Sonya from the control room. He realized that he would have to get his spacelegs back. In this inertialess ship, in spite of the already fantastic acceleration, the distinction between up and down was a matter of faith rather than of knowledge.

  They enjoyed their drinks—more of the Llanithian whisky—in Listowel’s comfortable day room, where Sandra joined them.

  “How are the customers?” her husband asked her.

  “There’s only one this trip,” she told him. She flashed a smile at the guests. “I don’t count the commodore and Mrs. Grimes as real passengers.”

  “Who is it?” asked Grimes. “Anybody I know—or should know?”

  “Perhaps you should know her, sir. She’s a missionary.”

  “Why wasn’t I warned?” demanded Listowel.

  “I’m warning you now, Ralph.”

  “What’s her name? What nut cult is she trying to peddle?”

  “She’s the Reverend Madam Swithin. Rather an old dear, actually. She’s a missionary for the United Primitive Spiritualist Church.”

  “And she thinks she’ll be able to convert the Llanithi?”

  “She’ll probably convert some of them. After all, given the right conditions you can convert anybody to anything.”

  “But United Primitive Spiritualism—” muttered Listowel disgustedly.

  “They have something,” Sonya told him. “I’ve had some odd experiences and so has John.”

  “I only hope she’s not at my table,” said the master.

  “Where else could I put her, Ralph? After all, she is a person of some importance in her church. I couldn’t put her with the junior officers.”

  “I’m sorry about this, Commodore,” Listowel said.

  “Don’t worry, Captain. We’ll survive somehow,” Grimes told him.

  The Reverend Madam Swithin was, as Sandra had said, rather an old dear, but the sort of old dear whose idea of conversation is asking endless questions. Yet it could be said in her favor that she enjoyed the excellent food prepared by Sandra and served by the efficient stewardess and that she did not belong to one of those sects that regard alcoholic beverages as sinful. It took her some little time to get things sorted out, however. She knew that a commodore is superior to a captain and so assumed that Grimes was master of Pamir. She asked him why he wasn’t wearing a uniform. Then she asked why Pamir wasn’t named according the general Rim Runners principle, with the “Rim” prefix.

  Grimes told her, “In these vessels we’ve tried to revive the names of the old sailing ships, the Terran windjammers. Unluckily most, if not all, of the most famous names are being used by Trans-Galactic Clippers—Thermopylae and Cutty Sark and so on.”

  “Are Trans-Galactic Clippers lightjammers like this one, Commodore?”

  “No, Madam Swithin. But the original clippers were very fast sailing ships and long after sail had vanished from the seas the name ‘clipper’ was still being used by the operators of other forms of transport—road services, airlines and so forth. One of the first little ships to fly to Earth’s moon was called Yankee Clipper.”

  “How interesting, Commodore. The usage gives one a sense of continuity, don’t you think? And now, Captain, when do you think you’re getting this clipper of yours to Llanith?”

  “ETA is just three weeks subjective from now.”

  “You said ‘Hell or Llanith in ninety days’,” Sonya reminded him.

  “Ninety days objective,” He told her. “But only three weeks as we shall live them, Mrs. Grimes.”

  “And is there really any danger of the ship’s getting wrecked? Not that I’m frightened, of course. I know that there is no death.”

  Sandra joined them at the table, bringing coffee. “Don’t worry, Madam Swithin. That ‘Hell or Llanith’ is just an expression that Captain Listowel picked up from a book about the famous windjammers. There was a captain on the trade between England and Australia who used to say, ‘Hell or Melbourne in ninety days!’”

  “And as I was saying, dear, such a sense of continuity. So fascinating to think that you sailing ship captains are reincarnations of the old sailing ship captains. The wheel has come full circle and you have been reborn—”

  Listowel was beginning to squirm uncomfortably in his chair. The junior officers at their tables—obviously listening—were starting to look amused. Grimes endeavoured to steer the conversation on to a fresh tack.

  “And when, Captain,” he asked, “do you start the reaction drive?”

  “A week from now, Commodore, as soon as we have point nine recurring on the Doppler Log. Then we have a week of full acceleration and FTL flight. Then we have to decelerate. And then, all being well, we’re there.”

  All being well, thought Grimes. But if all is well, I shall have made this trip for nothing.

  III

  She was a fine ship, this Pamir, and most efficiently run—but, to one accustomed to a conventional starship, uncannily quiet. Grimes missed the incessant, noisy, arhythmic hammering of the inertial drive, the continuous thin, high keening of the Mannschenn Drive. Here the only mechanical noises were the occasional sobbing of a pump, the soft susurrus of the forced ventilation.

  On she drove, running free before the photon gale. The Rim Stars astern were ruddily dim—the suns of the Llanithi Consortium blazed intensely blue ahead. And on the beam, mast and sails in black silhouette against it, glowed the great Lens of the Galaxy, unaffected by either red or blue shift.

  The needle of the Doppler Log, after its initial rapid jump, crept slowly around its dial. Point eight, point eight five, point eight seven five . . . Grimes tried to imagine what the ship must look like to an outside observer, tried to visualize the compression along the fore and
aft line. But to see her at all that mythical outside observer would have to be in another ship traveling in the same direction at the same speed—and then, of course, he would observe nothing abnormal.

  And what would happen if Pamir hit something—even only a small piece of cosmic debris—at this fantastic velocity? So far the lightjammers had been lucky—but what if their luck suddenly ran out? The question, as far as her crew was concerned, was purely academic. They would never know what hit them—although after weeks or months or years the brief flare would be visible in the night skies of Lorn and Llanith.

  At last came the time for the final acceleration—and the reversal of atomic charges. Again Grimes and Sonya were guests in the control room, watching with fascination. Listowel explained, “This isn’t half as bad as that moment when the temporal precession field of the Mannschenn Drive is initiated. Oh, you’ll feel something. We all do. Just a microsecond of tension and, at the same time—as the charges are reversed—what we call a scrambled spectrum. But there’s none of the dithering about in and on alternate time tracks that we experienced when we first discovered the effect.”

  “Just as well,” grunted Grimes. “Alternate time tracks are among my pet allergies.”

  Listowel was watching the log screen, which gave him far finer readings than the dial, to six places of decimals. Grimes and Sonya watched, too.

  999993 . . . The crimson numerals glowed brightly. 999994 . . . 999995 . . . The 6 was a long time coming up . . . . Ah, here it was. 999997 . . . 999998 . . . There was another long delay. Then the final 9 appeared briefly but flickered back to 8.

  “Go, you bitch, go,” Listowel was whispering. 999999 . . .

  “It’s holding, sir,” whispered one of the officers.

  “I have to be sure . . . Now!” After the long days of quiet sailing the screaming roar of the rocket drive, carried by and through the metal structure of the ship, was startingly loud. There should have been brutal acceleration, but there was not. There was not a physical sense of acceleration. Yet Grimes felt as though he, personally, were striving to lift some impossibly heavy weight. He felt as though he were pressing against some thin yet enormously tough film that stubbornly refused to break.

  Then it burst.

  There was real acceleration now, driving him down into the padding of his chair. He was dimly aware that Listowel—a strange Listowel, who looked like a photographic negative, whose shorts-and-shirt uniform was black instead of the regulation white, whose face had become oddly negroid—was doing things, explaining as his hands moved over the console. His voice, normally light, was a deep, grumbling bass. “Have to pivot the sails, Commodore. Edge on, or we’ll be taken aback—”

  Suddenly things snapped back to normal.

  Color and sound were as they should be and the acceleration had eased to a fairly comfortable one gravity. Grimes took mental stock of himself. Yes, he was still Commodore John Grimes of the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, astronautical superintendent of Rim Runners. And he was still aboard Pamir. He turned to look at his wife, who smiled back at him rather shakily. And Sonya was still Sonya.

  So far so good.

  And the log screen?

  Blue numerals now—1.000459 . . . 1.000460 . . . The final 1 flashed up and then, in steady succession: 2, 3, 4, 5 . . .

  All my years in deep space, thought Grimes, and this is the first time I’ve really traveled faster than light . . .

  “So . . . we are all anti-matter now, Captain?” asked the Reverend Madam Swithin that evening at dinner. She did not wait for a reply, but went on, “But what about our souls, our essential essences?”

  “I’m afraid, madam, that that’s rather outside my province,” replied Listowel.

  “And what do you think, Commodore?”

  Grimes grunted through a mouthful of steak.

  “But the Llanithi have souls,” the missionary went on. “Otherwise I should not be traveling to their worlds.”

  A rather uncomfortable silence was broken by Sonya. “Tell me, Madam Swithin—do you ever, in your séances, establish communication with the departed spirits of non-human entities?”

  “Frequently, Mrs. Grimes. One of our mediums has as her control a Shaara princess, who last enjoyed material existence five hundred standard years ago. And recently, during a service in our church in Port Farewell, a spirit spoke through the officiating medium and said he was—that he had been, rather—a people’s marshal on Llanith. What is a people’s marshal, Captain?”

  “It’s roughly equivalent to a police commissioner on our worlds, madam,” replied Listowel.

  Sonya sipped from her wine glass, then asked, “One thing has always rather puzzled me, Madam Swithin. One of the doctrines of your church is reincarnation. How does that fit in with that large number of disembodied spirits who are always present at your séances to say their pieces?”

  The motherly little woman smiled sweetly at Sonya. “There is reincarnation, as we believe—as we know—Mrs. Grimes. But the soul is not reincarnated into a new body immediately after its release from the old one. In the case of ordinary people the delay is not a long one. It is the extraordinary people, the outstanding personalities, who often have to wait for centuries, or until a suitable vehicle for their rare psyches has become available—”

  “In other words,” said Grimes, who was becoming interested, “until the genes and chromosomes have been suitably shuffled and dealt.”

  “What a good way of putting it, Commodore. I must remember that.” She looked at Grimes as though she were viewing him as a potential and valuable convert which, Grimes realized, he could be. Why can’t I keep my big mouth shut? he asked himself. “You will agree, Commodore, that a special sort of character is required for the captain of a ship?”

  Grimes made a noncommittal sound.

  “And that an even more special kind of character is required for the captain of a sailing ship—”

  “I did,” admitted Grimes cautiously, “bear certain qualities in mind when I appointed the masters and officers to these lightjammers—and not all of those I selected passed the rather rigorous training.”

  Listowel muttered something about bumbling around in blimps over the Great Barrens, but subsided when Grimes glared at him.

  “And how many lightjammers does your company operate, Commodore?”

  “At the moment, four. Pamir, Herzogen Cecile, Lord Of The Isles and Sea Witch. As the trade expands we shall require more tonnage, of course. Preussen and Garthpool are on the drawing boards. And the Rim Worlds Navy has the plans for at least three sailing warships.”

  “Four ships. And five more some time in the future. But what of the thousands of sailing captains who must have lived in the days when their vessels were the only long-distance transport on Earth? Many of those souls must still be waiting for reincarnation.”

  “One of my ancestors might be among them,” said Grimes.

  “Really, Commodore?”

  “Yes. He was a Barbary Corsair—but before that he was master of an English ship in the Mediterranean trade. A forced convert to Islam who decided to play along and do as well for himself as possible—”

  “Are you sure that he was never reincarnated, John?” asked Sonya. “Some of the less savory episodes in your past haven’t been far short of piracy.”

  “I might be able to find out for you, Commodore,” said Madam Swithin eagerly. “I am more of an administrator than a medium, but I do have powers—”

  “Thank you,” Grimes told her. “But I think I’d rather not know.”

  Pamir drove on, no longer scudding before the photon gale but riding the thunder of her rocket drive. Ahead was an impossible star cluster—the suns of the Llanithi Consortium blue-blazing, the Rim Suns sullenly smoldering embers. Astern was—nothing. On she drove, outrunning light, until the time came for deceleration.

  The reaction drive was shut down and, at his controls, Listowel carefully pivoted his sails. Northsail, eastsail, southsail and westsail he tu
rned, trimming them so that the radiance from the Llanithi stars was striking their reflecting surfaces at an oblique angle. Grimes, watching the Doppler Log screen, saw the numerals change from 25.111111 to 25.111110, to 25.111109 . . .

  All four lower courses were now exerting full braking effect and the lower topsails were trimmed, squared. 23.768212 . . . 23.768000 . . . 23.759133 . . . Upper topsails next. 19.373811 . . . Topgallant sails . . . The log was winding down rapidly and ahead one of those vividly blue stars was a star no longer, was beginning to show an appreciable disk. Now the royals. 12.343433 . . . 11.300001 . . . 10.452552 . . . 8.325252 . . . 5.000000 . . . 2.688963 . . .

  So far there was no sensation. The ship was inertialess, her structure and crew protected from the forces that should have exploded them through the darkness and emptiness in a blazing flare of energy.

  1.492981 . . . 1.205288 . . . 1.200438 . . . 1.113764 . . . 1.000009 . . .

  The countdown was slowing.

  1.000008 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

  1.000000 . . .

  As when the light barrier had been broken, there was the feeling of unbearable tension. Something snapped suddenly. The stars ahead diminished in number, although those remaining were still blue. Astern, dim and distant, the Rim Stars reappeared.

  And the figures in the screen were now in red light: 999999 . . . 999998 . . . 999997 . . .

  “Sir.” Willoughby, the chief officer was pointing. Out to starboard, just abaft the beam, was a star where no star should or could be—a point of greenish radiance that steadily brightened.

  “Captain! Commodore!” It was Madam Swithin’s voice. What the hell was she doing in the control room?

  “Mr. Wallasey,” said Listowel to his third officer, “please escort this lady down to her cabin.”