Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

  She stated rather than asked, “Captain Grimes.”

  Her voice was deep for a woman, resonant.

  I said, “I have that honor, Miz . . . ?”

  She said, “You may call me Madame Bishop.”

  I asked, “And what can I do for you, Miz Bishop?”

  She said coldly, “Bishop is my title, Captain Grimes, not my surname. I understand that you are seeking employment for yourself and your ship. I shall employ you.”

  I let us both into the ship, seated her at the table in the cabin while I went through into the little galley. I asked her what she would like to drink. She told me coldly that she would appreciate a glass of water. I brought her one, and a pink gin for myself. She looked at this disapprovingly. I pulled out my pipe and filled it. She as good as ordered me to put it away. It wasn’t so much the words that she used but the way in which she said them. But I had been learning, ever since I set up in business for myself, that the customer is always right. I put my pipe back in my pocket.

  She asked, “How soon can you lift ship, Captain Grimes?”

  I said, “As soon as I’ve paid on my bills and cleared outwards.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes.”

  She asked, “Are you capable of making the voyage to Stagatha?”

  I’d never heard of that world, but Little Sister was capable of going just about anywhere in the galaxy. I told her yes.

  “What will be the single fare for one passenger?”

  I couldn’t answer this at once. I didn’t know where Stagatha was or how far it was from Warrenhome. I asked her to wait while I switched on the playmaster. She told me that she did not approve of frivolous entertainment. I told her that the playmaster screen served as the read-out for Little Sister’s computer and library bank. I don’t think she believed me until the requested data began to appear.

  In a short while I had all the information required. The voyage would take six weeks. Then there were all the various expenses accruing over this period—depreciation, insurance, consumption of stores, the salary that I—as owner—was paying to myself as master. And so on, and so on. After all, I had to show a profit. I told her how much I should be asking.

  She said, “We are not a rich church, Captain Grimes, but we are not a poor one. And has it not been written that the laborer is worthy of his hire?” She allowed herself the merest hint of a smile. “Too, you are the only laborer available at this moment of time.”

  “Is this voyage a matter of some urgency?” I asked.

  “The Lord’s work is always urgent,” she told me.

  And so it was that I contracted to carry Bishop Agatha Lewis, of the Church Of The Only Salvation, from Warrenhome to Stagatha.

  He paused, looking down into his now-empty tankard. Kitty refilled it for him, refilled her own.

  She said, “So far we haven’t had any Odd Gods. These Only Salvation people seem to have been just another nut cult, probably with their own translation of the Christian Bible slanted to make it fit their own beliefs.”

  He said, “Even without special translations you can interpret the Bible in a very wide variety of ways, find in it Divine Authority for just about every aberration of which the human race is capable. But the Church Of The Only Salvation did have its own Bible. Bishop Lewis gave me a copy. I tried to read it but the writing was appallingly bad. As far as I’m concerned there is only one Bible. The King James version.”

  After she was gone, to get herself organized, I made myself a sandwich lunch and tried to get more information about Stagatha from the library bank. It was an Earth-type planet with about the same proportion of land to water. The inhabitants were humanoid. I’ve often wondered why there are so many humanoid, as near as dammit human, races throughout the galaxy. Was there some Expansion, from Somewhere, before the dawn of history? But on every world there is the evolutionary evidence that cannot be denied that Man descended from lower life forms. Or is there some Divine Plan?

  But I’m just a spaceman, not a philosopher.

  There were photographs of typical Stagathans. These could have been taken on practically any beach on Earth or any Man-colonized planet. The males were, to all outward appearances, well-endowed (but not abnormally so) men. The females tended to be busty, but firm-breasted. The only thing odd was that these photographs had been taken in the streets of a Stagathan town, not at a seaside resort. I finally got around to looking at the vehicles and buildings in the background. Electric cars (I thought). Dwellings, offices, shops—but nothing over one story and everything with a flat roof.

  And that was all. There was no trade with other worlds, no exports, no imports. There had been very little contact with outsiders since the first landing by Commodore Shakespeare, that same Commodore Shakespeare after whom your Shakespearean Sector was named. Every so often some minor vessel of the Survey Service would drop in, just showing the flag and for rest and recreation. But why, I wondered, should the Church Of The Only Salvation be interested in the planet?

  But I had things to do. Bills to pay, outward clearance to be obtained and all the rest of it. Not much was required in the way of stores; my tissue culture vats were in good order and I could program the autochef to turn out quite fair imitations of Scotch whiskey and London gin. Flour I needed, and fresh eggs, and a few cases of the not-too-bad local table wines. Regarding these, I based my order on what I regarded as normal consumption by two people for the duration of the voyage. I could have cut that order by half. . . .

  I made my pre-liftoff checks. Everything was in order, as it almost always was. She was a reliable little brute, was Little Sister. When I was walking around the outside of her, just admiring her, a small motorcade approached from the spaceport gates. There were four archaic-looking ground cars, black-painted, steam-driven, each emitting a thick cloud of dirty smoke from its funnel. From the first one Bishop Agatha Lewis disembarked, followed by half a dozen men and women, dressed in plain black and with broad-brimmed black hats like the one she was wearing. The men were all heavily bearded. Similar parties got out from the other three cars.

  I walked up to the she-bishop and threw her a smart salute. She did not quite ignore me, but her curt nod was of the don’t-bother-me-now variety. She made no attempt to introduce me to the assembled elders and deaconesses and deacons or whatever they were. Oh, well, I was only the captain. And the owner. I was only a space-going cabbie. I went back inside the ship to sulk.

  Before long an elderly woman, followed by four men, carrying between them two heavy trunks, came in. She asked me, quite politely, “Where do we put these?” I showed them. The men went back outside.

  She sat down at the table, noticed the tea things that I had not cleared away yet after my afternoon break.

  She asked, in a whisper, “Do you think that I might have a cup, Captain?”

  I made a fresh pot and, with a clean cup, brought it in to her. I could hear some sort of hymn being sung outside, one of those dreary ones all about the blood of the lamb and so forth.

  She murmured, as she sipped appreciatively, “We shall all miss the dear bishop. But we, the synod, decided that she would be the right and proper person to send to Stagatha.” She helped herself to a chocolate biscuit, crunched into it greedily. “Surely the similarity of the names is no coincidence. There was a St. Agatha, you know. Not that we approve of the Popish church and their beliefs.” She poured herself more tea, added cream and was generous with the sugar. “Yes. We shall all of us miss the dear bishop—although, perhaps, her interpretation of the Word has been a mite too strict.”

  I said, “I still haven’t been told why Bishop Lewis is going to Stagatha.”

  She said, “I thought that you knew. It is because those unhappy people, on that world, are living in a state of darkness, are brands to be plucked from the burning. We heard about it from a spaceman, a young fellow called Terry Gowan, one of the engineers aboard the Cartographer, a Survey Service ship. Would you know him?”

  I sa
id that I didn’t. (It is truly amazing how so many planetlubbers have the erroneous idea that everybody in Space, naval or mercantile, knows everybody else.)

  “A very nice young man. A religious young man. His ship set down here a few weeks after a visit to Stagatha. One of our people went on board her with books and pamphlets. The only one of the crew who was interested was Terry. He came to our prayer meetings. He talked about Stagatha. He brought us audio-visual records that he had taken. We were shocked. Those people, as human as you and me, going about completely . . . unclothed. And their heathen religion! Do you know, they worship their sun. . . .”

  I didn’t see much wrong with that. After all, sun-worship is logical. And as long as you don’t go to the horrid extreme of tearing the still-beating hearts out of the breasts of sacrificial virgins, it has much to recommend it. The sun, after all—your sun, Earth’s sun, Stagatha’s sun, anybody’s sun—is the source of all life. And there are Man-colonized planets, such as Arcadia, where naturism is a way of life, although the Arcadians don’t quite make a religion of it.

  “None of the other churches,” the old lady went on, “has sent a missionary to Stagatha. But somebody has to. . . .”

  “And Bishop Lewis was your obvious choice,” I said.

  “Why, yes,” she almost laughed.

  I was beginning to like the old dear. She had told me, as plainly as she could, that dear Agatha was being kicked upstairs. Literally.

  Suddenly she stiffened and with a swift motion pushed her half-full teacup across the table so that it was in front of me. She was just in time. Bishop Lewis came into the cabin and stood there, staring down at us suspiciously.

  She asked, “Why are you still here, Sister Lucille?”

  The old lady got to her feet and bowed deferentially and said, “I was just keeping Captain Grimes company while he had his tea, Your Reverence. And I was telling him about our work.”

  “Indeed?” Her voice was very cold. “Since when were you one of our missioners, Sister Lucille?”

  That business with the teacup had been a fair indication of which way the wind was blowing, but I made sure.

  I asked, “Would you care for tea, Madame Bishop? I asked Sister Lucille to join me, but she refused.”

  “As she should have done, Captain Grimes, and as I shall do. Nowhere in Holy Writ are such unclean beverages as tea or coffee mentioned. Members of our Church are forbidden to partake of them.”

  And that was that.

  He paused for refreshment, sipping from his newly filled tankard.

  Kitty asked, “And what about wine? That’s mentioned quite a few times.”

  “Yes,” said Grimes. “Noah planted a vineyard and then made his own wine after he ran the Ark aground on Mount Ararat. Then he got drunk on his own tipple and the Almighty did not approve.”

  “But, in the New Testament, there’s the story of the wedding feast and the water-into-wine miracle.”

  “According to Bishop Agatha, and according to her Church’s own translation of the Bible, that wine was no more than unfermented fruit juice.”

  I’ll not bore you (he went on) with a long account of the voyage out to Stagatha. It was not one of the happiest voyages in my life. On previous occasions, when carrying a female passenger, I found that familiarity breeds attempt. Mutual attempt. But there just wasn’t any familiarity. At nights—we maintained a routine based on the twenty-hour day of Warrenhome—the portable screen was always in place, dividing the cabin into two sleeping compartments. Once we were out and clear and on the way, I put on my usual shirt-and-shorts uniform and Her Reverence ordered me—ordered me, aboard my own ship—to cover myself decently. Smoking was forbidden, except in the control cab with the communicating door sealed. Meals were a misery. I regard myself as quite a fair cook and can make an autochef do things that its makers would never have so much as dreamed of, but . . . Boiled meat and vegetables for lunch, the same for dinner. Breakfast—boiled eggs. No ham or bacon, of course. The wine that I had stocked up with went almost untouched; I just don’t like drinking it during a meal while my companion sticks to water. And she soon went through the ship’s stock of orange juice—she liked that—leaving me with none to put with my gin.

  She had brought her own supply of tapes for the playmaster, mainly sermons of the fire-and-brimstone variety and uninspiring hymns sung by remarkably untuneful choirs. Some of those sermons were delivered by herself. I had to admit she had something. She was a born rabble rouser. Had she been peddling some line of goods with greater appeal than the dreary doctrines of her freak religion, she might have finished up as dictator of a planet rather than as the not-very-popular boss cocky of an obscure sect. Might have finished up? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  I dutifully read the Bible, in that horridly pedestrian translation, which she had given me. I did not think that I should ever become a convert. Unluckily, I was rather low on reading matter of my own choice—books, that is—and my stock of microfilmed novels I could not enjoy because of her continuous monopoly of the playmaster.

  Anyhow, at last the time came when I stopped the Mannschenn Drive unit and Little Sister sagged back into the normal Continuum. There were the usual phenomena, the warped perspective and all that, and (for me) a brief session of déjà vu. I saw Agatha Lewis as a sort of goddess in flowing black robes, brandishing a whip. It frightened me. And then things snapped back to normal.

  I had made a good planetfall. We were only two days’ run from Stagatha and made our approach to the world, under inertial drive, from north of the plane of ecliptic. There was no need for me to get in radio touch with Aero-space Control. There wasn’t any Aero-space Control. As far as I could gather from the information in my library banks, Entry Procedure for just about every known planet in the galaxy, one just came in, keeping a sharp lookout for airships, selected a landing place, and landed. It all seemed rather slipshod, but if the Stagathans liked it, who was I to complain?

  The planet looked good from Space. Blue seas, green and brown land masses, relatively small polar ice-caps. There was very little cloud except for a dark and dirty-looking patch of dense vapor that practically obscured from view most of a large island almost on the equator. I studied it through the control cab binoculars and could see flickers of ruddy light within it. It could only be Stagatha’s only active volcano. According to Survey Service accounts, it was unnamed and regarded with a sort of superstitious horror. Nobody ever went near it. Looking down at it I thought that I could understand why. Even from a great distance I got the impression of utter ugliness.

  Whenever possible, when making a landing on a strange planet with no spaceport facilities, I adhere to Survey Service standard practice, timing my descent from close orbit to coincide with sunrise. That way every irregularity of the ground is shown up by the long shadows. Agatha Lewis had told me to set the ship down as close as possible to one of the cities. Not that there were any real cities, just largish country towns, most of them on the banks of rivers, set among fields and forests.

  So I dropped down through the early-morning sky, feeling the usual sense of pleasurable anticipation. I enjoy shiphandling and, too, this to me would be a new and almost certainly interesting world. But I wasn’t as happy as I should have been. She insisted on coming into the control cab with me, which meant that I was not able to smoke my pipe.

  My own intention had been not to pass low over the town. Inertial drive units are noisy—to anybody outside the ship, that is—and it would be, I thought, stupid to annoy the citizenry by waking them before sparrowfart. But Agatha Lewis insisted that I make what I considered to be the ill-mannered approach. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about disturbing the sleep of the natives. But I did interrupt their dawn service. They were in the central plaza, all of them—men, women, and children—wearing their symbolic black cloaks that they threw aside as the first rays of the rising sun struck through between and over the low buildings. They stared up at us. We stared down. The bishop
hissed in disgust at the sight of all that suddenly revealed nakedness.

  She . . . she snarled, “Now you know why I have come to this world. To save these poor sinners from their utter degradation.”

  I said, “They didn’t look all that degraded to me. They were clean, healthy. Quite attractive, some of them. . . .”

  “But their heathen worship, Captain Grimes! The baring of their bodies. . . .”

  I said, “If God had meant us to go around without clothes we’d have been born naked.”

  “Ha, ha,” interjected Kitty Kelly.

  “You’re as hard as she was,” Grimes told her. “She didn’t think that it was very funny either. But it shut her up. I was able to land Little Sister in peace and quiet.”

  “And then you got your gear off and went to romp with the happy nudists, I suppose.”

  “Ha, ha. Not with her around.”

  So I landed in the middle of this grassy field. Well, it looked like grass, and some odd-looking quadrupeds were grazing on it until we scared them off with the racket of the inertial drive. I made the routine tests of the atmosphere, not that it was really necessary as the Survey Service had already certified it fit for human consumption. I opened up both airlock doors. Bishop Agatha was first out of the ship. She stood there, in her stifling black clothing, glaring disapprovingly at the sun. I joined her. The fresh air tasted good, was fragrant with the scent of the grass that we had crushed with our set-down, with that of the gaudy purple flowers decorating clumps of low, green-blue foliaged bushes.