Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  She watched him, tried to follow suit. She did not manage too badly. Then her lips twisted in revulsion. She swallowed with an effort.

  “Raw fish!” she exclaimed.

  “Of course. With boiled rice, and seaweed . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t eat this. It looks pretty but it tastes like what it really is.”

  “But it’s sushi. . .”

  “I don’t give a damn what it’s called.”

  It was just as well that materials for making snacks were to hand in Grimes’s refrigerator. With any luck at all Miss Otoguro would never know that the feast which she had so lovingly prepared had been devoured by only one person. (And even if she ever did find out all that would really matter to her was that the commodore had enjoyed it.)

  The stewardesses had cleared away the debris of the meal and Kitty Kelly set up her recorder, one lens trained on Grimes, the other upon herself.

  “Carry on drinking saki,” she ordered. “That bottle and the tiny cup will look interesting . . . Now—and I promise you that this isn’t for broadcasting unless you agree—isn’t it true that your nickname when you were in the Federation Survey Service was Gutsy Grimes?”

  His prominent ears flushed. “Yes, it is true. I admit that I’ve always liked my tucker. But I’m a gourmet rather than a gourmand. The meal that we’ve just enjoyed is proof of that.”

  “That you’ve just enjoyed, you mean.”

  “All right. I enjoyed it.”

  “Do you always enjoy exotic foods?”

  “Almost always.”

  “Can you recall any occasion in your long career upon which exotic foods played a big part, Commodore?”

  Grimes grinned. He put down his saki cup, picked up his pipe, slowly filled and lit it. He said, through the acrid, wreathing cloud, “As a matter of fact I can . . .”

  “It was (he said) when I was captain of the Survey Service’s census ship Seeker. I’d been given a sort of roving commission, checking up on human colonies in the Argo sector. Also I’d been told to show the flag on one or two inhabited planets with whose people, even though they weren’t human, strictly speaking, the Federation wanted to keep on friendly terms. Spheres of influence and all that. Even though the Interstellar Federation was—and still is—the Big Boy, other, smaller spacefaring powers wanted to be Big Boys too. The Duchy of Waldegren, for example. The Empire of Waverley . . .”

  “And now,” she interrupted him, “the Rim Worlds Confederacy.”

  “We,” he said stiffly, “have no Imperial ambitions.”

  “Spoken like a true Rimworlder, even though you were once a Terrie.”

  All right, all right, so I was a Terrie then (he went on). I held the rank of lieutenant commander in the Federation Survey Service. I was captain of FSS Seeker, one of the census ships. I was counting noses and, at the same time, showing the flag. I’d been ordered to do this latter on Werrississa, the home planet of a non-human civilization.

  Not that the Werrississians are all that non-human. There are, in fact, some far-fetched theories to the effect that Werrississa was colonised from Earth by some pre-Atlantean culture. The resemblances between them and us do seem to be too close to be accounted for by parallel evolution—but, given enough time, evolution can come up with anything. And, although sexual intercourse is possible between humans and Werrississians, such unions are always sterile.

  What do they look like, you ask? To begin with, they’re tall, the adults, male and female, running to two meters and up. They’re slender, although their women are subtly rounded in the right places. They’re wide-mouthed but thin-lipped. Their noses tend to be aquiline. Their eyes are huge, like those of some nocturnal mammals on Earth and other worlds. Hair coloring? From black through brown through gold to silver, but that silver is no indicator of age. Long, slender hands and feet, four-digited.

  Clothing? Except for occasions when working gear is required, translucent, ankle-length robes, usually white, are worn by both sexes. Sandals tend—or tended when I was there—to be ornate. Both sexes wear jewelry—rings, ear-clips, bracelets, anklets.

  They regard outsiders—rightly so, in many cases—as uncultured barbarians. They set great value on face. They attach great importance to etiquette. Their highest art form is cookery.

  “For you,” she said, “a paradise.”

  “It would not have been for you,” he told her, “after the way in which you turned up your nose at that excellent dinner.” “Do they like their food raw too ?” she asked.

  Seeker being a survey ship proper rather than a warship (he went on) she carried quite an assortment of scientists. Men dressed as spacemen, as the saying goes. Women dressed as spacewomen. Commissioned ranks, of course. One of them was Dr.—or Commander—Maggie Lazenby. She outranked me, although I was still the captain. She was my tame ethologist. She was supposed to be able to tell me what made alien people tick.

  Shortly after we set down at the spaceport just outside Wistererri City she gave me a good talking to. She was good at that. “These are people,” she said, “who were civilized while we were still living in caves.”

  “So how come,” I asked, “that they’d only gotten as far as the airship when we made our first landings on this world in our interstellar vessels?”

  “Civilization and advanced technology,” she told me, “do not necessarily go together. But these,” she continued, “are a very civilized people. Perhaps too civilized. There’s a certain rigidity, and too great a tendency to regard all outworlders as uncultured barbarians. In matters of dress, for example. We tend to be casual—even in uniform unless it’s some sort of state occasion. Short-sleeved shirts, shorts—and for women very short skirts. Luckily you received the local dignitaries in full dress, with all your officers, including myself, attired likewise. But I couldn’t help noticing the horror with which the City Governor and his entourage regarded the stewardesses who brought in the refreshments . . .”

  “They were correctly and respectably dressed,” I said.

  “By our standards. And on my home world nudity wouldn’t have caused so much as a raised eyebrow.” (Maggie came from Arcadia, where naturism is the accepted way of life.) “But I’m not running around naked here. And you and your crew are not going to run around half naked when you go ashore. Arms and knees, female as well as male, must, repeat must, be covered.”

  “But it’s summer. It’s hot.”

  “A good sweat will get some of your fat off,” she said.

  So . . . When in Rome, and all that. But I didn’t like it. My crew didn’t like it, even after I’d explained the reason for my order. But it wasn’t too bad for the women. Maggie went into a huddle with the paymaster—oddly enough she was, like Miss Otoguro, in this ship, of Japanese origin—and between the pair of them they cooked up a shoregoing rig based on the traditional kimono, made up from extremely lightweight material. Miss Hayashi looked very attractive in hers. Maggie looked odd at first—to my eyes, anyhow—but I had to admit that it suited her; the green, silky cloth matched her eyes and was an agreeable contrast to her red hair . . .

  “You seem to have had quite a crush on this Maggie,” commented Miss Kelly.

  “Mphm. Yes.”

  So there was shore leave. The male personnel suffered; even the nights were uncomfortably warm and nowhere was there air-conditioning. The ladies, in their filmy but all-concealing dresses, flourished. For daytime excursions Yoshie Hayashi issued parasols and also, for all occasions, paper fans. Oh, we could have used the parasols, and the fans too, but neither, somehow, seemed masculine. And we sweated. By the Odd Gods of the Galaxy, how we sweated! Official banquets are bad enough at any time but they’re absolute purgatory when you’re wrestling with unfamiliar eating irons and literally stewing inside a dress uniform.

  “The eating irons?”

  You’ve seen me using chopsticks—but the Werrississians use a sort of single chopstick. They come in three varieties. There’s what is, in ef
fect, just a sharp-pointed skewer, quite good for spearing chunks of meat or whatever. Then there’s a long handled affair with a sort of small, shallow spoon on the end of it. You can eat a bowl of soup with the thing, but it’s a long process and, if you hold it properly, unless you have a very steady hand most of the fluid food finishes up in your lap. And the last one’s a real beauty. At the end of it is an auger with a left-handed thread. And it’s used only for a very special dish.

  You didn’t like Keiko’s sushi. It’s just as well that she didn’t prepare sashimi for us. It’s also raw fish, but even more so, if you know what I mean. You don’t? Well, the fish is only stunned, not killed, before being prepared. While you’re picking the bite-sized pieces off the skeleton it comes back to life and twitches its fins and looks at you . . . I came quite to like it while I was stationed on Mikasa Base for a while; the junior officers’ mess, where I took most of my meals, specialized in a traditionally Japanese cuisine. So, having eaten and enjoyed sashimi, I was quite able to cope with leeleeoosa. It’s a sort of thick worm. Alive and wriggling. The skin’s rather tough and rubbery but it tends to dissolve when you chew it, this process being initiated by the sauce, mildly acid in flavour, into which you dip it.

  So you have these . . . worms swimming around in a bowl of tepid water. You select your next victim. You jab, then twist left-handed. You dip in the sauce, bring it to your mouth and chew. The flavor? Not bad. Rather like rare steak, with a touch of garlic.

  Fortunately I’d been able to get in some practice before the first official dinner at which leeleeoosa was served. Maggie had done her homework before we came to Werrississa. She, like me, enjoyed exotic foods. The ship’s artificers, acting on her instructions, had run up a few sets of working tools. Of course, we weren’t able to test our skills on real live and wriggling leeleeoosa until after we’d set down and Miss Hayashi had been able to do some shopping. But we’d sort of trained on sukiyaki, the strips of meat bobbing around in boiling water made a fair substitute for the real thing. It was the lefthanded thread on the skewer that took the most getting used to.

  Then HIMS William Wallace, one of the big ships of the Navy of the Empire of Waverley, dropped in. Her classification was more or less—more rather than less—of our Constellation Class battle cruisers. Her commanding officer was Captain Sir Hamish McDiarmid, Knight of the Order of the Golden Thistle &c, &c and &c. Like me, he was showing the flag. His flag. He had a far bigger ship to wear it on. But she was a warship, not a survey ship. She was long on specialists in the martial arts but short on scientists. Ethologists especially. Nonetheless, I was to discover later, he had done some research into local lore before inflicting his presence on the Werrississians.

  But national pride influenced him. The kilt, in a variety of tartans, is worn throughout the Empire on all occasions, by both men and women, with uniform and with civilian clothing. Longish, heavy kilts are for winter, short, lightweight kilts are for summer. Traditionally nothing is worn under these garments—all well and good when they’re long and heavy but liable to offend the prudish when they’re short and light.

  Not that the Werrississians were prudish. It was just that, as far as they were concerned, there were things that are done and things that just definitely aren’t done. They were prepared to tolerate outworlders and their odd ways but they didn’t have to like them when such odd ways were offensive. I was grateful to Maggie for her good advice. Here was (comparatively) little, lightly armed Seeker whose people were happily conforming, and there was the huge William Wallace whose men strode arrogantly along the avenues of the city flaunting their bare knees—and more on a breezy day. They realized that the natives liked us while thinking that they were something that the cat had dragged in in an off moment. They resented this. They openly jeered at our women in their long gowns, carrying their parasols, calling them Madam Butterfly. I heard that they were referring to me as Lieutenant Pinkerton . . .

  “Who were they, when they were up and dressed? “ asked Kitty.

  “Two characters in an opera who were dressed more or less as we were dressed,” said Grimes. “Very unsuitably—as far as Pinkerton was concerned—for the climate.”

  But, as I said, Sir Hamish had done some research before his landing on Werrississa. I learned later that he had earned quite a reputation as a gourmet. He had even been known to sneer at the Waverley national dish, the haggis. He had, as I had done, insisted that all his people familiarize themselves with local dishes and eating implements. They even carried their own working tools with them, tucked into their sporrans, when they went ashore. It was reported to me by some of my officers, who had dined in the same restaurants, that the William Wallace personnel were quite skilful with these, even with the skirroo, the implement used when eating leeleeoosa. Yet it wasn’t enough. They might eat like civilized people but they dressed like barbarians. We both ate and dressed properly.

  And yet we were all members of the same race, whereas the Werrississians, for all their similarities, weren’t. There had to be some fraternization between the two crews. I invited Sir Hamish to take lunch with me aboard Seeker—and, unlike some people whom I will not name, he thoroughly enjoyed his sushi. He told me that he was planning a dinner aboard William Wallace for local dignitaries and would be pleased if I would attend together with three of my senior officers. I was happy to accept the invitation. Then—we’d had quite a few drinks and were getting quite matey—I asked him if he’d be serving haggis, piped in the traditional way. He wasn’t offended. He laughed and said, “Not likely, Grimes. I ken well that you people are putting on a big act o’ being civilized while we’re just hairy-kneed barbarians. But I’ll demonstrate that, when it comes to civilized living, we’re as good as anybody. It’ll be a Werrississian menu, prepared by my chefs . . .”

  “Dress?” I asked.

  “Formal, o’ course. Ye’ll be wearin’ your dinner uniforms. We’ll be wearin’ ours. An’ we’ll be cooler than you’ll be—from the waist down, anyhow. My private dining room will have to conform to local ideas of comfort, temperaturewise . . .”

  I was rather sorry then that I couldn’t back out, but it was too late. Later, when I passed the word around, nobody was keen to accompany me. At last Maggie said that she’d come to hold my hand. The other two victims were MacMorris, my chief engineer, and Marlene Deveson, one of the scientists. A geologist, as a matter of fact. Not that it matters.

  Then the Big Day came round. Or the Big Night. We met in the air-conditioned comfort of my day cabin for a drink before walking the short distance to Sir Hamish’s ship. We were all tarted up in our best mess dress, tropical. It would still be too hot for comfort with the white bum-freezer over the starched white shirt, the long, black trousers. The two ladies were slightly better off, with high-collared, epauletted, long-sleeved shirts only on top of their ankle-length black skirts. At least they were not required to wear jackets. Maggie looked good, as she always did, no matter what she was or wasn’t wearing. Marlene looked a mess. She was a short girl, fat rather than plump. Her round face was already sweaty. Her hair, greasily black, was a tangle. Two of her shirt buttons had come undone.

  We allowed ourselves one small whisky each. Sir Hamish would be serving Scotch and it wouldn’t do to mix drinks. Then Maggie made a check of Marlene’s appearance, frowned, took her into my bathroom to make repairs and adjustments. When they came out shirt buttons had been done up and hair combed and brushed into a semblance of order.

  We took the elevator down to the airlock, walked slowly down the ramp. William Wallace was a great, dark, turreted tower in ominous silhouette against the city lights. (Sir Hamish did not believe on wasting money on floodlighting, even when he was showing the Thistle Flag.) It was a hot night. I’d started perspiring already. I had little doubt that the others were doing likewise. We made our way slowly across the apron. The heat of the day was beating up from the concrete.

  We climbed the ramp to William Wallace’s after airlock. The Imperial M
arine on duty—white, sleeveless shirt over a kilt with black and red tartan, sturdy legs in calf-length boots—saluted smartly. I replied. Inside the chamber we were received by a junior officer, clad as was the Marine but with black and gold tartan and gold-braided shoulder boards on his shirt. More saluting. We were ushered into the elevator, carried swiftly up to Sir Hamish’s suite.

  He received us personally. He looked very distinguished. From the waist up he was dressed as I was—although he had more gold braid on his epaulettes than I did, more brightly ribboned miniature medals on the left breast of his mess jacket. And he was wearing a kilt, of course, summer weight and length, in the Imperial Navy’s black and gold tartan. His long socks were black, with gold at the turnover. There were gold buckles on his highly polished black shoes.

  And he, I was pleased to see, was feeling the heat too. His craggy face under the closely cropped white hair was flushed and shining with perspiration. But he was jovial enough.

  He exclaimed, “Come in, come in! This is Liberty Hall. Ye can spit on the mat an’ call the haggis a bastard!”

  “Are ye givin’ us haggis, then, sir?” asked MacMorris eagerly.

  “No. ‘twas just an expression of your captain’s that I modified to suit my ship. We don’t carry tabbies in the Waverley Navy.”

  Both Maggie and Marlene gave him dirty looks.

  “Tabbies?” asked Kitty Kelly.

  “In the old days of passenger carrying surface ships on Earth they used to call stewardesses that. Today all female spacegoing personnel, regardless of rank or department, are called tabbies. But not to their faces.”

  “I should hope not.”

  We were the first guests to arrive. We were taken into Sir Hamish’s sitting room—he had quarters that would have made a Survey Service admiral green with envy—introduced to his senior officers, plied with excellent Scotch. Then the young officer who had received us on board ushered in the native guests. There were six of them, three male and three female. They looked pale wraiths. They accepted drinks from the mini-kilted mess steward although they regarded his hairy knees with distaste. Rather pointedly they made polite conversation only with those of us from Seeker, we were properly dressed even though our hosts were not. Their command of standard English was quite good.