Upon a Sea of Stars

by A Bertram Chandler

I thought that whether or not she approved, I was going to wear shirt-and-shorts rig while on this planet. I didn’t know for how long I should have to stay; the agreement was that I should wait until the mission was well established and, at intervals, send reports to Warrenhome by means of my Carlotti radio. I couldn’t get through directly, of course. The messages would have to be beamed to Baniskil, the nearest planetary Carlotti station, and relayed from there. After I was gone, Agatha would have to wait for the next Survey Service ship to make a call—which might be a matter of months, or even years—before she could make further contact with those who had been her flock.

  Anyhow, we stood there in the sunlight, the warm breeze, myself enjoying the environment, she obviously not. We did not talk. We watched the small crowd walking out from the town. As they grew closer, I could see how like they were to humans—our kind of humans—and how unlike. Their faces had eyes and nose and mouth, but their ears were long, pointed, and mobile. The hair on their heads was uniformly short and a sort of dark olive green in color. There was a complete absence of body hair. Their skins were golden brown. There was a something . . . odd about their lower limbs. (Their ancestors, I discovered later, had been animals not dissimilar to the Terran kangaroo.) But they all possessed what we would regard as human sexual characteristics. Apart from necklaces and bracelets and anklets of gold and glittering jewels, they were all of them naked.

  Their leader, a tall man with a strong, pleasant, rather horselike face, walked up to me, stiffened to what was almost attention and threw me quite a smart salute with his six-fingered hand. Obviously he was not unused to dealing with visiting spacemen and, even though he himself went naked, knew the meaning of uniforms and badges of rank.

  He said, in almost accentless Standard English, “Welcome to Stagatha, Captain.”

  I returned his salute and said, “I am pleased to be here, sir.”

  This did not suit the lady bishop. She was the VIP, not myself. She said a few words in a language strange to me. I was not entirely surprised. I knew that each night during the voyage she had retired to her bed with a slutor—a sleep tutor. She must, somehow, have obtained the necessary language capsules from that visiting Survey Service ship, Cartographer. I should have made some attempt myself to learn the language—but linguistically I’m a lazy bastard and always have been. Wherever I’ve gone I’ve always found somebody who could speak English.

  The Stagathan turned to Agatha Lewis and bowed. Despite his lack of clothing it was a very dignified gesture. She returned this salutation with the slightest of nods. She went on talking in a harsh, angry voice. He grinned, looked down at himself and gave a very human shrug. She went on talking.

  He turned to me and said, “For you I am very sorry, Captain. Now we go.”

  They went.

  After I had gazed my fill upon a fine selection of retreating naked female buttocks, I turned to the bishop and asked, “What was all that about, Your Reverence?”

  She looked at me very coldly and said, “I was telling these heathen, in their own language, to cover their nakedness.”

  I said, greatly daring, “They are dressed more suitably for this climate than we.”

  She said something about lecherous spacemen and then returned to the ship. I followed her. I busied myself with various minor chores while she opened one of the large trunks that had been put aboard before we left Warrenhome. She seemed to be unpacking. It was clothing, I noticed, that she was pulling out and spreading over the deck. She must be looking, I thought, for something cool to wear during the heat of the day. The next time I looked at her she was stowing a quantity of drab raiment into a large backpack.

  When she was finished she said, “We will now go to the city, Captain Grimes.”

  “We haven’t had lunch yet,” I told her.

  “Doing the Lord’s work, according to His bidding, will be nourishment enough,” she told me. “Please pick up the bag that I have packed and follow me.”

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “It is essential,” she said, “that we arrive in the central square prior to the noon service.”

  “Why?”

  “It is not for you to question the Lord’s bidding.”

  I said that I was a spaceship pilot, not a porter. She said that as long as I was on the payroll of her Church I was obliged to do as she required. I wasn’t sure of the legality of it all but . . . After all, I had to live with the woman. Anything-for-a-quiet-life Grimes, that’s me. I did, however, insist that I dress more suitably for the expedition than in what I was wearing at the time—long trousers, shirt, necktie, and uniform jacket. I went into the shower cubicle with a change of clothing and emerged in short-sleeved, open-necked shirt, kilt, and sandals. She glared at me.

  “Are you going native, Captain?”

  “No, Your Reverence. I have changed into suitable shore-going civilian rig.”

  “You are not to accompany me dressed like that.”

  “Then hump your own bluey,” I told her.

  She didn’t know what I meant, of course, so I had to translate from Australian into Standard English.

  “Then carry your own bag,” I said.

  She didn’t like it but realized that if we wasted any more time in argument we should be late for the noon service. She swept out of the ship with me, her beast of burden, plodding behind. It was too hot a day to be encumbered with a heavy backpack but, at least, I was less uncomfortable than I should have been in formal uniform.

  In other circumstances I should have enjoyed the walk—that springy almost-grass underfoot, the tuneful stridulations of what I assumed to be the local version of insects, occasional colorful flights of what I assumed to be birds but later discovered to be small, gaudy flying mammals.

  But I was unable to loiter. Her Reverence set the pace, and a spanking one it was. That woman, I thought, must have ice water in her veins, to be able to stride along like that while wearing all that heavy, body-muffling clothing. We came to the boundary of the field, to a dirt road, to the beginnings of the houses. There were people abroad, coming out of the low buildings, setting off in the same direction as the one that we were taking. There were men and women and children. They looked at us curiously—as well they might!—but not in an unmannerly fashion. They were dressed—undressed—for the climate. Her Reverence was suitably attired for a midwinter stroll over a polar icecap.

  We came to the central square. It was paved with marble slabs but, breaking the expanse of gleaming stone, were beds of flowering bushes and fountains in the spray of which the sun was making rainbows. In the middle of the square was a tall obelisk, surrounded by concentric rings of gleaming metal—brass? gold?—set in the marble. Hard by this was a tripod made of some black metal from which was suspended a huge brass gong. A tall, heavily muscled man—I’ll call him a man, at any nude resort on Earth or any Terran colony world the only glances that he would have attracted would have been admiration—naked apart from his ornaments of gold and jewels, was standing by the tripod, holding, as though it were a ceremonial spear, a long-handled striker with leather-padded head. A woman—and she was truly beautiful—was sitting cross-legged, all her attention on the slow, almost imperceptible shortening of the shadow cast by the obelisk.

  She turned to the man by the gong, uttered one short word. His muscles flexed as he raised the striker, brought the head of it, with a powerful sweeping motion, into contact with the surface, radiant with reflected sunlight, of the great brass disc.

  A single booming note rolled out and the people, from streets and alleys, came flooding into the plaza. They were marching rather than merely walking, dancing rather than marching, and the clashing of their glittering cymbals was not without an odd, compelling rhythm. They were unclothed (of course), all of them—the men, the women, and the children—although bright metal and jewels glowed on glowing, naked flesh. They formed up into groups, all of them facing inwards, towards the central obelisk. The . . . the timekeeper was standing now, a
rms upraised above her head. She was singing, in a high, sweet voice. It was not the sort of noise that normally I should have classed as music, the tonality was not one that I was accustomed to, the rhythms too subtle, but here, in these circumstances, it was . . . right. The man at the gong was accompanying her, stroking the metal surface with the head of his striker, producing a deep murmuring sound. And all the people were singing.

  I didn’t need to understand the words to know that it was a hymn of praise.

  “What are you standing there for?” demanded the she-bishop.

  “What else should I do?” I countered.

  She snarled wordlessly, literally tore the backpack from my shoulders. She opened it, spilled the drab heap of secondhand clothing onto the marble paving. Close by us were children, about twenty in this group, who, until now, had been ignoring us. Her Reverence snatched up a rust black dress, forced it down over the body of a struggling, bewildered little girl. “Can’t you help?” she snarled at me. By the time that she got her second victim clothed, the first one was naked again and running to the timekeeper, the priestess, bawling with fright and bewilderment.

  Things started to happen then.

  I was unarmed, of course, with not so much as a stungun on low power. Contrary to so many space stories the toting of firearms by spacemen, merchant spacemen especially, on other people’s planets is not encouraged. It didn’t take long for two hefty wenches to immobilize me, one on each side of me, both of them holding me tightly. I could do nothing but watch as four men seized Agatha, threw her down to the paving and, despite her frenzied struggles, stripped her. A knife gleamed and I yelled wordlessly—but it was being used as a tool, not a weapon, to slice through cloth and not through skin. Her long body, revealed as the last of underwear was slashed away, was disgustingly pallid. It needn’t have been. She could have made use of the UV lamps every time that she had a shower during the passage out, as I had done. She was pallid and she was flabby, physically (at least) far inferior to those who were punishing her for her act of . . . sacrilege. Yes. Sacrilege. They held her there, in the blazing noonday sunlight, while the rags of her clothing were gathered up, and those other rags, those donations of used clothing with which she had tried to clothe the happily naked.

  There was that pile of drab, tattered cloth and there was that big lens, a great burning glass, that was brought to bear upon the rubbish, concentrating upon it the purifying rays of the sun. There was the acrid smoke, and then the first red glimmer of smolder, and then flames, almost invisible in the strong sunlight.

  And all the time Agatha was writhing and screaming, calling out not in Standard English but in the Stagathan language that she had learned. What she was saying I did not know, but it sounded like (and probably was) curses.

  The bonfire died down.

  A man whom I recognized as the leader of the party that had come out to the ship strode up to me. His face was grave.

  “Captain,” he said, “take this woman from here. She has insulted our God.”

  I said lamely, “She means well.”

  He said, “The path of the Mountain We Do Not Name is paved with good intentions.”

  My two captors released me.

  The four men holding Agatha Lewis’s wrists and ankles let go of her. She stumbled to her feet and stood there in that classic pose, one arm shielding her breasts, the other hand over her pudenda. With a younger, more shapely woman the attitude would have been prettily appealing; with her it was merely ludicrous. Her face was scarlet with humiliation. But it wasn’t only her face. And it wasn’t only humiliation. It was sunburn.

  Kitty said, “When you mentioned the gleam of a knife I thought that you were going to tell us that Bishop Agatha suffered the same sort of martyrdom as Saint Agatha. Her breasts were cut off.”

  Grimes said, “I know. I did some checking up. There was so much odd parallelism about the whole business. But my Agatha suffered no worse than severely frizzled nipples. Very painful, I believe. I lent her my shirt for the walk back to the ship but, by that time, it was too late.”

  So we got ourselves back to the ship (he continued) with Her Reverence in a state of shock. It had all been such a blow to her pride, her prudery, her own kind of piety. The pyschological effects were more severe than the physical ones, painful as those most obviously were. And she had to let me apply the soothing lotions to her body. Oh, she hated me.

  Once she was muffled up in a robe, wincing as every slightest motion brought the fabric into contact with her inflamed breasts, I said, “It is obvious, Your Reverence, that you are not welcome here. I suggest that we get off the planet.”

  She said, “We shall do no such thing.”

  She wanted her bunk set up then and the privacy screen put in position. I busied myself with various small tasks about the ship, trying not to make too much noise. But I needn’t have bothered. I could hear her; the partition was not soundproof. First of all she was sobbing, and then she was praying. It was all very embarrassing, far more so than her nudity had been.

  Late in the afternoon she came out. As well as a long, black robe, she was wearing her wide-brimmed hat and almost opaque dark glasses. She walked slowly to the airlock and then out onto the grassy ground. I followed her. She stood there, staring at the westering sun. Her expression frightened me. Rarely have I seen such naked hate on anybody’s face.

  “Your Reverence,” I said, “I am still of the opinion that we should leave this world.”

  “Are you, an Earthman, frightened of a bunch of naked savages?” she sneered.

  “Naked, perhaps,” I said, “but not savages.” I pointed almost directly upwards to where one of the big solar-powered airships, on its regular cargo and passenger run, was sailing overhead. “Savages could never have made a thing like that.”

  “Savagery and technology,” she said, “can coexist. As you should know.”

  “But these people are not savages,” I insisted.

  “You dare to say that, Captain Grimes, after you witnessed what they did to me, the messenger of God.”

  “Of your God. And, anyhow, you asked for it.”

  Even from behind her dark glasses her eyes were like twin lasers aimed at me.

  “Enough,” she said coldly. “I would remind you, Captain Grimes, that you are still my servant and, through me, of the Almighty. Please prepare to lift ship.”

  “Then you are taking my advice?”

  “Of course not. We shall proceed forthwith to the Mountain That Is Not Named.”

  Oh, well, if she wanted to do some sight-seeing, I did not object. Tourism would get us into far less trouble (I thought) than attempting to interfere with perfectly innocent and rather beautiful religious rituals. Quite happily I went back into the ship, straight to the control cab, and started to do my sums or, to be more exact, told the pilot-computer to do my sums for me. Little Sister, although a deep-space ship in miniature, was also a pinnace quite capable of flights, short or long, within a planetary atmosphere. She joined me as I was studying the readouts, looking at the chart and the extrapolation of the Great Circle course.

  “Well,” she asked.

  “If we lift now we can be at Nameless Mountain by sunrise tomorrow, without busting a gut.”

  “There is no need to be vulgar, Captain. But sunrise will be a good time. It will coincide with their dawn service.”

  I didn’t bother to try to explain to her the concept of longitudinal time differences and, in any case, possibly some town or city was on the same meridian as the volcano—but then, of course, there would be other factors, such as latitude and the sun’s declination, to be considered. So I just agreed with her. And then, with the ship buttoned up, I got upstairs.

  It was an uneventful flight. I had the controls on full automatic so there was no need for me to stay in the cab. Too, according to the information at my disposal, there was very little (if any) traffic in Stagatha’s night skies. The sun ruled their lives.

  We were both of us b
ack in the control cab as we approached the volcano. She was looking disapprovingly at the mug of coffee from which I was sipping. I hoped sardonically that she had enjoyed the glass of water with which she had started her day. Outside the ship it was getting light, although not as light as it should have been at this hour. We were flying through dense smoke and steam, with visibility less than a couple of meters in any direction. Not that I had any worries. The three-dimensional radar screen was showing a clear picture of what was below, what was ahead. It was not a pretty picture but one not devoid of a certain horrid beauty. Towering, contorted rock pinnacles, evilly bubbling lava pools, spouting mud geysers. . . . The ship, still on automatic, swerved to steer around one of these that was hurling great rocks into the air. . . .

  I said, “We’re here.”

  She said, “We have yet to reach the main crater rim.”

  “The main crater rim?” I repeated.

  “You’re not afraid, Captain, are you? Didn’t you tell me that this ship of yours can take anything that anybody cares to throw at her?”

  “But . . . An active volcano . . . One that seems to be on the verge of blowing its top in a major eruption. . . .”

  “Are you a vulcanologist, Captain?”

  So we stood on, feeling our way through the murk. There was more than volcanic activity among the special effects. Lightning writhed around us, a torrent—flowing upwards or downwards?—of ghastly violet radiance that would have been blinding had it not been for the automatic polarization of the viewports. And ahead was sullen, ruddy glare . . . No, not glare. It was more like a negation of light than normal luminosity. It was the Ultimate Darkness made visible.

  Little Sister maintained a steady course despite the buffeting that she must be getting. And then she was in clear air, the eye of the storm as it were. We could see things visually instead of having to rely upon the radar screens. We were over the vast crater, the lake of dull, liquid fire, the semi-solid, dark glowing crust through cracks in which glared white incandescence. In the center of this lake was a sort of island, a black, truncated cone.