Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  A skirling of bagpipes came over the intercom. I assumed that it was the mess call. I was right. Sir Hamish led the way into his dining room. The long table, with its surface of gleaming tiles, each with a different tartan design, was already set. Sir Hamish’s artificers had done him proud, were doing us all proud. At each place were the native eating utensils in polished bronze—slup, splik and skirroo. There were the bronze wine flasks, the cups made from the same alloy. There were place cards, with names both in English and the flowing Werrississian script.

  Sir Hamish took the head of the table, of course, with a local lady on his right and her “social function husband” on his left. (The Werrississians have a multiplicity of wives and husbands—mates for all occasions.) I sat below the native woman and Maggie below the man. Then another native couple, then Marlene and MacMorris, then the last Werrississian pair. Below them was the covey of Imperial Navy commanders—(E), (N), (C), (S) and (G)—all looking rather peeved at having to sit below the salt.

  Sir Hamish’s mess waiters were well trained, efficient. They were drilled in local customs. First they poured each of us a goblet of the sweet, sticky wine—it was, as it should have been, at room temperature but I’d have preferred it chilled—and there was a round of toasts. We toasted the Emperor James XIV of Waverley, whose gold-framed, purple-draped portrait was on the bulkhead behind Sir Hamish’s chair. The gentlemen toasted the ladies. The ladies toasted the gentlemen. We all toasted our host. By this time it was necessary to bring in a fresh supply of the bronze flasks. Unluckily it was still the same sickly but potent tipple. I looked rather anxiously at MacMorris. He didn’t have a very good head for drinks and was liable after only one too many to insist on dancing a Highland fling. But I needn’t have worried about him. He was a Scot more than he was a Terran and it was obvious that he, aboard a warship owned by the only essentially Scottish spacefaring power, was determined to be on his very best behavior. It was an effort but he was capable of making it. The toasting over, he was taking merely token sips from his cup.

  I looked at Marlene. I knew little about her drinking capacity and behavior. What I saw worried me. She was downing goblet after goblet of the wine as fast as the steward could refill them. Her hair was becoming unfixed. The black, floppy bow at the neck of her shirt was now lopsided. One button on the front of the garment was undone.

  The first course came in.

  I’ve forgotten its native name but it was, essentially, bite-sized cubes of meat, fish, vegetables and other things coated in a savoury batter and deep fried. For these we used the spliks, the long, sharp skewers. The Werrississian guests made complimentary noises and, as was their custom, ate rapidly, their implements clicking on the china plates with their thistle pattern. Sir Hamish and his officers ate almost as fast and so did we Seeker people—with the exception of Marlene. It seemed to me that about half of her meal was going on to the table and the other half on to her lap, and from there to the deck. I was very sorry that Maggie wasn’t sitting beside me instead of opposite. Had I been next to her I could have whispered to her, begged her to do something, anything, about her fellow scientific officer before she disgraced us.

  The table was cleared but the spliks were left for use on the next course. This consisted of cubes of a melon-like fruit rolled in a sort of aromatic sugar. To my great relief Marlene seemed to have regained control of herself and succeeded in putting at least seventy-five percent of the sweet morsels into her broad mouth, although by this time her lipstick was smeared badly.

  Plates and spliks were removed by the attentive stewards. Goblets—where necessary—were refilled. I looked imploringly at Sir Hamish; surely he must realize that Marlene had had enough to drink, more than enough. He looked at me. There was a sardonic expression on his craggy face that I didn’t like at all. I looked at Maggie. She knew what was passing through my mind. I could read her expression. It said, What can I do about it?

  Plashish was next—a sort of clear soup, with shreds of something like cheese floating in it, served in shallow bowls. We all plied our slups, the long-handled spoons, holding them as we had been taught, by the very end of the shaft. All? No, there was one exception. Marlene, of course. She did try, I admit, but gave it up as a bad job. Then she lifted the bowl to her mouth, with two hands, and lapped from it . . .

  The William Wallace people were trying to look even more shocked than their native guests but I knew that the bastards were glorying in the discomfiture of the Sassenachs. Us. And Sir Hamish—may the Odd Gods of the Galaxy rot his cotton socks!—was looking insufferably smug. He had shown the Werrississians that even though the representatives of Waverley insisted on wearing their own native dress they could comport themselves at table far more decently than the minions of Terra. And the Werrississians? They were gravely embarrassed. Their complexions had faded from the usual pale cream to an ashy grey. They were obviously avoiding looking at Marlene.

  The plashish course was over. The leeleeoosa was (were?) brought in—the deep bowls of lukewarm water in which the meaty worms were swimming, the smaller bowls of sauce. I daren’t look at Marlene to see how she was managing. I was having my own troubles, anyhow. So was Maggie. So was MacMorris. We’d practised enough with skirmos—both aboard Seeker and in restaurants ashore—but somehow our acquired skill seemed to have deserted us. We’d stab, and make contact with our prey, and twist—yet every time our intended victims would wriggle free. But Sir Hamish and his people were eating as expertly as the Werrississian guests . . .

  It was Maggie first who twigged what was wrong. She stared at me across the table. She raised her left hand with forefinger extended, made a circular motion. I finally realised what she was driving at. The skirroos at our places, those long, bronze augers, had right-handed threads. I impaled one of the tasty worms without trouble then, dipped it in the sauce, brought it up to my mouth, chewed. I felt that I’d earned it. MacMorris, as befitting an engineer, had made the discovery himself. He was eating fast and happily.

  I looked down and across the table at Marlene. She was having her troubles. I tried to catch her attention but she was concentrating too hard on her bowl of leeleeoosa. She had her skirroo in both hands. She brought it down like a harpoon. She must have driven the point through the tough, rubbery skin of a worm by sheer force. She lifted it out of the bowl. She didn’t bother to dip it in the sauce but brought the wriggling thing straight up to her open mouth. If it had made the distance it wouldn’t have mattered, but . . . It slipped off the end of the skirroo. It fell on to Marlene’s ample bosom. It found the gap in her shirt front where the gilt button had come undone. It squirmed into the opening.

  Marlene screamed. She jumped to her feet, oversetting her leeleeoosa bowl. There were worms everywhere. Maggie guessed her intentions but did not reach her in time to stop her from ripping off her shirt. She was wearing nothing under it. Her breasts were her best feature, but they were big. It seemed as though somebody had launched a couple of Shaara blimps into Sir Hamish’s dining room.

  The Waverley officers stared appreciatively. The Werrississians, male and female, covered their eyes with both hands. Sir Hamish got to his feet, glared at me—but I knew that this was a histrionic display put on for the benefit of his native guests.

  “Commander Grimes,” he said, “you and your officers have abused my hospitality and gravely embarrassed my other guests. You will please leave my ship. I shall be vastly obliged if you never set foot aboard her again.”

  “Sir Hamish,” I said to him, “none of this would have happened if our places had been set with the correctly left-hand-threaded skirroos.”

  He said, “I thought that I was doing you a favor. All my people have found it far easier to use right-handed skirroos of our own manufacture.”

  And so we slunk off William Wallace in disgrace, what little dignity remaining to us dissipated by the tussle that we had with Marlene to stop her from stripping completely; she was convinced that one of the spilled worms had wriggled
from the floor up her leg.

  Back aboard Seeker we almost literally threw the fat, drunken girl into her cabin. MacMorris—whose mind was reeling under the shock of having been thrown off a Scottish ship—went to his quarters to sulk and to console himself with whisky.

  Maggie came up to my flat to console me. We held a post mortem on the disastrous evening. We’d thought that we, playing along with the local prudery regarding dress while the Waverley crew flaunted their short kilts, had made ourselves the most favored aliens. But Sir Hamish had turned the tables on us. Of course, Marlene’s strip act had been an unexpected bonus to him.

  So that was that. I had to carry the can back, of course—after all, I was the captain. My popularity rating with the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty sank to what I thought must be an all time low.

  “If you had the sense to stick to civilized food,” said Kitty Kelly, “that sort of thing would never happen . . . But I don’t know much about the Galaxy outside the Shakespearian Sector. This Werri-whatever-it-is . . . I suppose that it’s now well and truly inside the Waverley sphere of influence.”

  Grimes laughed. “As a matter of fact it isn’t. I heard that after we’d left Sir Hamish and his senior officers were invited to a very genteel garden party thrown by no less a dignitary than the Grand Coordinator. It was a windy day. They should have had sense enough to wear their winter weight kilts . . .

  “It was the Shaara, of all people, who got a foothold (talonhold?) on Werrississa. After all, you don’t expect a really alien alien to have the same nudity taboos, the same table manners, as you do. We humans are so like the Werrississians that every difference was exaggerated.”

  “Just as differences between members of the same species are,” she said. “Some like raw fish and seaweed. Some don’t.”

  Grimes and the Odd Gods

  FARAWAY QUEST, the Rim Worlds Confederacy survey ship, was still berthed at Port Fortinbras, on Elsinore. She was still awaiting replacements for the rotors of her outmoded inertial drive unit. More than once, in strongly worded Carlottigrams, Commodore Grimes had requested, demanded almost, that he be allowed to put the repairs in the hands of one of the several local shipyards. Each time he received a terse reply from the Rim Worlds Admiralty’s Bureau of Engineering which, translated from Officialese to English, boiled down to Father knows best. He unburdened his soul to the Rim Worlds ambassador on Elsinore.

  “Can’t you do something, Your Excellency?” he asked. “There’s my ship been sitting here for weeks now. My crew’s becoming more and more demoralized. . . .”

  “As well I know, Commodore,” the ambassador agreed. “You’ve some hearty drinkers aboard your vessel, and when they drink they brawl. Perhaps you could stop the shore leave of the worst offenders. . . .”

  “And have them drinking and brawling aboard the Quest? Or, if I really put my foot down, slouching around in a state of sullen sobriety? There’s only one thing to do. Get them off this bloody planet and back where they belong, back to their wives and families or, in the case of the tabbies, to their boyfriends.”

  “Some of your female personnel are even greater nuisances than the men,” said the ambassador.

  “You’re telling me. But as an ambassador, Your Excellency, you pile on far more Gs than a mere commodore, a commodore on the reserve list at that. Can’t you do something?”

  “I’ve tried, Grimes. I’ve tried. But it’s all a matter of economics. The Confederacy just does not have the funds in any bank in the Shakespearean Sector to pay for a major repair and replacement job. Those rotors will have to be manufactured on Lorn, and then carried out here in whatever ship of the Rim Runners fleet is due to make a scheduled call to Elsinore. . . .”

  “And meanwhile,” the commodore said, “there are mounting port dues. And the wages that everybody aboard Faraway Quest is getting for doing nothing. And the three square meals a day, plus snacks, that all hands expect as their right. And. . . .”

  “I’m a diplomat, Grimes, not an economist.”

  “And I’m just a spaceman. Oh, well. Theirs not to reason why, and all that. And now I’ll be getting back to my ship, Your Excellency.”

  “What’s the hurry, Commodore? I was hoping that you would stay for a few drinks and, possibly, dinner.”

  “I have an appointment,” said Grimes.

  The ambassador laughed. “Another interview for Kitty’s Korner? I always watch that program myself. And I’ve heard that Station Yorick’s ratings have improved enormously since Miss Kelly persuaded you to treat her viewers and listeners to your never-ending series of tall tales.”

  “Not so tall,” growled Grimes.

  “Perhaps not. You have had an interesting life, haven’t you?”

  An hour or so later, in his sitting room aboard the old ship, Grimes and Kitty Kelly were enjoying the simple yet satisfying meal that had been brought to them by one of the stewardesses. There were sandwiches constructed from crisply crusty new bread, straight from Faraway Quest’s own bakery, and thick slices of juicy Waldegren ham, the flavor of which derived from the smoldering sugar pine sawdust over which the meat had been smoked. (Almost alone among the ship’s personnel, Grimes liked this delicacy; that was a good supply of it in the ship’s cool stores. He was pleased that Kitty, hitherto inclined to be an unadventurous eater, enjoyed it, too.) There was a variety of cheeses—Ultimo Blue, Aquarian Sea Cream, and Caribbean Pineapple and Pepper—altogether with assorted pickles and the especially hot radishes that Grimes had insisted be cultivated in the ship’s hydroponic farm. There was Australian beer—some while ago Grimes had done a private deal with the master of a Federation star tramp not long out from Earth—served in condensation-bedewed pewter pots.

  Nibbling a last radish with her strong while teeth, Kitty slumped back in her chair. Grimes regarded her appreciatively. As she always did, she was wearing green, this time a long, filmy, flowing dress with long, loose sleeves. Above it, the food and the drink had brought a slight flush to the normal creamy pallor of her face, a healthy pallor, set off by the wide scarlet slash of her lips. Below her black glossy hair, this evening braided into a sort of coronet, her startlingly blue eyes looked back at Grimes.

  She murmured, “Thank you for the meal, Commodore. It was very good.”

  He asked, “And will you sing for your supper?”

  She said, “You’re the one who’s going to do the singing.” She looked at the bulkhead clock. “It’s almost time that we got the show on the road again. And what are you going to talk about tonight? Your adventures as a pirate?”

  “Not a pirate,” he corrected her stiffly. “A privateer.”

  “Who knows the difference? And who cares? Or what about when you were governor general of that anarchist planet?”

  “Too long a story, Kitty,” he said. “And too complicated. By All the Odd Gods of the Galaxy, there never were, before or since, such complications!”

  She said thoughtfully, “That . . . that oath you often use . . . By All the Odd Gods of the Galaxy . . . Did you ever get tangled with any of these Odd Gods?”

  He told her, “I’m an agnostic. But . . . there have been experiences.”

  She got up from her chair, went to the case containing her audiovisual recorder, opened it, pulled out the extensions with their lenses and microphones.

  She said, peering into the monitor screen. “Yes, that’s it. Pipe in one hand, tankard in the other . . . And now, talk.”

  “What about?”

  “The Odd Gods, of course. Or, at the very least, One Odd God.”

  He said, “Oh, all right. But I must get my pipe going first.”

  As you know (he started at last), I left the Federation Survey Service under something of a cloud after the Discovery mutiny. For a while I was yachtmaster to the Baroness Michelle d’Estang, an El Doradan aristocrat, and on the termination of this employment she gave me the yacht’s pinnance, which was practically a deep-space ship in miniature, as a parting gift. I called her—
the pinnance, not the baroness—Little Sister and set up shop as Far Traveler Courier Services. I’d carry anything or anybody anywhere, as long as I got paid. There would be small parcels of special cargo. There would be people waiting to get to planets well off the normal interstellar trade routes.

  It was a living.

  I didn’t make a fortune, but there was usually enough in the bank to pay port’s dues and such and to keep me in life’s little luxuries. It was lonely for quite a lot of the time but, now and again, there were passengers who were pleasant enough company . . . Yes, female ones sometimes, if you must know. But it was the female ones who usually got me into all kinds of trouble. Mphm.

  Well, I’d carried a small parcel of urgently needed medical supplies to a world called Warrenhome—no, the inhabitants weren’t descended from rabbits but the name of the captain who made the first landing was Warren—where they were having some sort of plague. A mutated virus. After I’d made delivery and received the balance of the payment due to me, I lost no time in placing the usual advertisements in the usual media. I decided that I’d wait around for a week and then, if nothing came up, get off the planet. There was talk that that virus, a nasty one, might mutate again.

  Luckily (I thought at the time) I didn’t have long to wait for my next job. I returned to Little Sister, after a yarn with the Port Captain, just before any usual lunchtime. I saw that a tall woman was approaching the airlock door from the opposite direction to myself. She was dressed in severe, ankle-length black with touches of white at throat and wrists. On her head was an odd sort of hat, black, with a wide, stiff brim. The skin of her strong-featured face was white; even the lips of her wide mouth were pale. Her eyes were a hard, steely blue.