The Rim Gods

by A Bertram Chandler

  As we flew towards the city—red brick, grey-roofed houses on the outskirts, tall, cylindrical towers, also of red brick, in the centre—we saw the Shaara and the Hallicheki ahead of us, flying in from their ships. A Queen-Captain, I thought, using my binoculars, with a princess and an escort of drones. A Hallichek Nest Leader accompanied by two old hens as scrawny and ugly as herself. The Shaara weren't using their blimp and the Hallicheki consider it beneath their dignity to employ mechanical means of flight inside an atmosphere. Which made us the wingless wonders.

  I reduced speed a little to allow the opposition to make their landings on the flat roof of one of the tallest towers first. After all, they were both very senior to me, holding ranks equivalent to at least that of a four-ring captain in the Survey Service, and I was a mere lieutenant, my command notwithstanding. I came in slowly over the streets of the city. There were people abroad—pedestrians mainly, although there were vehicles drawn by scaly, huge-footed draught animals and the occasional steam car—and they raised their black-furred faces to stare at us. One or two of them waved.

  When we got to the roof of the tower the Shaara and the Hallicheki had gone down but there were a half-dozen blue-smocked guards to receive us. They saluted as we disembarked. One of them led the way to a sort of penthouse which, as a matter of fact, merely provided cover for the stairhead. The stairs themselves were . . . wrong. They'd been designed, of course, to suit the length and jointure of the average Darbanese leg, which wasn't anything like ours. Luckily the Council Chamber was only two flights down.

  It was a big room, oblong save for the curvature of the two end walls, in which were high windows. There was a huge, long table, at one end of which was a sort of ornate throne in which sat the High Governor. He was of far slighter stature than the majority of his compatriots but made up for it by the richness of his attire. His smock was of a crimson, velvetlike material and festooned with gold chains of office.

  He remained seated but inclined his head in our direction. He said—I learned afterwards that these were the only words of English that he knew; he must have picked them up from some visiting space captain—"Come in. This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"

  "I was wondering," said Kitty Kelly coldly, "just when you were going to get around to saying that."

  "He said it, not me. But I have to use that greeting once in every story. It's one of my conditions of employment."

  And where was I [he went on] before I was interrupted? Oh, yes. The Council Chamber, with the High Governor all dressed up like a Christmas tree. Various ministers and other notables, not as richly attired as their boss. All male, I found out later, with the exception of the Governor's lady, who was sitting on her husband's right. There were secondary sexual characteristics, of course, but so slight as to be unrecognizable by an outworlder. To me she—and I didn't know that she was "she"—was just another Darbanese.

  But the fair sex was well represented. There was the Queen-Captain, her iridescent wings folded on her back, the velvety brown fur of her thorax almost concealed by the sparkling jewels that were her badges of high rank. There was the Shaara princess, less decorated but more elegant than her mistress. There was the Nest Leader; she was nowhere nearly as splendid as the Queen-Captain. She wasn't splendid at all. Her plumage was dun and dusty, the talons of the "hands" at the elbow joints of her wings unpolished. She wore no glittering insignia, only a wide band of cheap-looking yellow plastic about her scrawny neck. Yet she had her dignity, and her cruel beak was that of a bird of prey rather than that of the barnyard fowl she otherwise resembled. She was attended by two hen officers, equally drab.

  And, of course, there was Mary, almost as drab as the Hallicheki.

  The Governor launched into his spiel, speaking through an interpreter. I was pleased to discover that Standard English was to be the language used. It made sense, of course. English is the common language of Space just as it used to be the common language of the sea, back on Earth. And as the majority of the merchant vessels landing on Darban had been of Terran registry, the local merchants and officials had learned English.

  The Governor, through his mouthpiece, said that he welcomed us all. He said that he was pleased that Imperial Earth had sent her representative, albeit belatedly, to this meeting of cultures. Blah, blah, blah. He agreed with the representatives of the Great Space-faring Powers that it was desirable for some sort of permanent base to be established on Darban. But . . . but whichever of us was given the privilege of taking up residence on his fair planet would have to prove capability to conform, to mix . . . . (By this time the interpreter was having trouble in getting the idea across but he managed somehow.) The Darbanese, the Governor told us, were a sporting people and in Barkara there was one sport preferred to all others. This was racing. It would be in keeping with Darbanese tradition if the Treaty were made with whichever of us proved the most expert in a competition of this nature . . . .

  "Racing?" I whispered. In a foot race we'd probably be able to beat the Shaara and the Hallicheki, but I didn't think that it was foot racing that was implied. Horse racing or its local equivalent? That didn't seem right either.

  "Balloon racing," muttered Spooky Deane, who had been flapping his psionic ears.

  I just didn't see how balloon racing could be a spectator sport—but the tapes on Darban with which we had been supplied were far from comprehensive. As we soon found out.

  "Balloon racing?" asked Kitty Kelly. "From the spectators' viewpoint it must have been like watching grass grow."

  "This balloon racing certainly wasn't," Grimes told her.

  The Darbanese racing balloons [he went on] were ingenious aircraft: dirigible, gravity-powered. Something very like them was, as a matter of fact, invented by a man called Adams back on Earth in the nineteenth century. Although it performed successfully, the Adams airship never got off the ground, commercially speaking. But it did work. The idea was that the thing would progress by soaring and swooping, soaring and swooping. The envelope containing the gas cells was a planing surface and the altitude of the contraption was controlled by the shifting of weights in the car—ballast, the bodies of the crew. Initially, positive buoyancy was obtained by the dumping of ballast and the thing would plane upwards. Then, when gas was valved, there would be negative buoyancy and a glide downwards. Sooner or later, of course, you'd be out of gas to valve or ballast to dump. That would be the end of the penny section.

  I remembered about the Adams airship while the interpreter did his best to explain balloon racing to us. I thought that it was a beautiful case of parallel mechanical evolution on two worlds many light years apart.

  The Queen-Captain got the drift of it quite soon—after all, the Shaara know airships. Her agreement, even though it was made through her artificial voice box, sounded more enthusiastic than otherwise. The Nest Leader took her time making up her mind but finally squawked yes. I would have been outvoted if I hadn't wanted to take part in the contest.

  There was a party then, complete with drinks and sweet and savoury things to nibble. The Shaara made pigs of themselves on a sticky liqueur and candy. Spooky Deane got stuck into something rather like gin. I found a sort of beer that wasn't too bad—although it was served unchilled—with little, spicy sausages as blotting paper. Mary, although she seemed to enjoy the sweetmeats, would drink only water. Obviously our hosts thought that she was odd, almost as odd as the Hallicheki who, although drinking water, would eat nothing.

  They're nasty people, those avians. They have no redeeming vices—and when it comes to real vices their main one is cruelty. Their idea of a banquet is a shrieking squabble over a table loaded with little mammals, alive but not kicking—they're hamstrung before the feast so that they can't fight or run away—which they tear to pieces with those beaks of theirs.

  After quite a while the party broke up. The Nest Leader and her officers were the first to leave, anxious no doubt to fly back to their ship for a tasty dish of live
worms. The Queen-Captain and her party were the next to go. They were in rather a bad way. They were still on the rooftop when Mary and I, supporting him between us, managed to get Spooky Deane up the stairs and to the boat.

  None of the locals offered to help us; it is considered bad manners on Darban to draw the attention of a guest to his insobriety. We said our goodbyes to those officials, including the interpreter, who had come to see us off. We clambered into our boat and lifted. On our way back to Adder we saw the Shaara blimp coming to pick up the Queen-Captain. I wasn't surprised. If she'd tried to take off from the roof in the state that she was in she'd have made a nasty splash on the cobblestones under the tower.

  And I wasn't at all sorry to get back to the ship to have a good snore. Spooky was fast asleep by the time that I landed by the after airlock and Mary was looking at both of us with great distaste.

  "I'm not a wowser," said Kitty Kelly.

  "Help yourself, then. And freshen my glass while you're about it."

  Bright and early the next morning [he went on, after a refreshing sip] two racing balloons and an instructor were delivered by a small rigid airship. Our trainer was a young native called Robiliyi. He spoke very good English; as a matter of fact he was a student at the University of Barkara and studying for a degree in Outworld Languages. He was also a famous amateur balloon jockey and had won several prizes. Under his supervision we assembled one of the balloons, inflating it from the cylinders of hydrogen that had been brought from the city. Imagine a huge air mattress with a flimsy, wickerwork car slung under it. That's what the thing looked like. The only control surface was a huge rudder at the after end of the car. There were two tillers—one forward and one aft.

  Dalgleish inspected the aircraft, which was moored by lines secured to metal pegs driven into the ground. He said, "I'm not happy about all this valving of gas. You know how the Shaara control buoyancy in their blimps?"

  I said that I did.

  He said that it should be possible to modify one of the balloons—the one that we should use for the race itself—so as to obviate the necessity of valving gas for the downward glide. I prodded the envelope with a cautious finger and said that I didn't think that the fabric of the gas cells would stand the strain of being compressed in a net. He said that he didn't think so either. So that was that, I thought. Too bad. Then he went on to tell me that in the ship's stores was a bolt of plastic cloth that, a long time ago, had been part of an urgent shipment of supplies to the Survey Service base on Zephyria, a world notorious for its violent windstorms. (Whoever named that planet had a warped sense of humour!) The material was intended for making emergency repairs to the domes housing the base facilities. They were always being punctured by wind-borne boulders and the like. When Adder got to Zephyria it was found that somebody had experienced a long overdue rush of brains to the head and put everything underground. There had been the usual lack of liaison between departments and nobody had been told not to load the plastic.

  Anyhow, Dalgleish thought that he'd be able to make gas cells from the stuff. He added that the Shaara would almost certainly be modifying their own racer, using the extremely tough silk from which the gas cells of their blimps were made.

  I asked Robiliyi's opinion. He told me that it would be quite in order to use machinery as long as it was hand-powered.

  Dalgleish went into a huddle with him. They decided that only the three central, sausage-like gas cells need be compressed to produce negative buoyancy; also that it would be advisable to replace the wickerwork frame enclosing the "mattress" with one of light but rigid metal. Too, it would be necessary to put a sheet of the plastic over the assembly of gas cells so as to maintain a planing surface in all conditions.

  Then it was time for my first lesson. Leaving Dalgleish and the others to putter around with the still unassembled balloon I followed Robiliyi into the flimsy car of the one that was ready for use. The wickerwork creaked under my weight. I sat down, very carefully, amidships, and tried to keep out of the way. Robiliyi started scooping sand out of one of the ballast bags, dropping it overside. The bottom of the car lifted off the mossy ground but the balloon was still held down by the mooring lines, two forward and two aft. Robiliyi scampered, catlike, from one end of the car to the other, pulling the metal pegs clear of the soil with expert jerks. We lifted, rising vertically. I looked down at the faces of my shipmates. Better him than us, their expressions seemed to be saying.

  Then we were at treetop height, then above the trees, still lifting. Robiliyi scrambled to the rear of the craft, calling me to follow. He grabbed the after tiller. The platform tilted and above us the raft of gas cells did likewise, presenting an inclined plane to the air. We were sliding through the atmosphere at a steep angle. I wasn't sure whether or not I was enjoying the experience. I'd always liked ballooning, back on Earth, but the gondolas of the hot air balloons in which I'd flown were far safer than this flimsy basket. There was nothing resembling an altimeter in the car; there were no instruments at all. I hoped that somewhere in the nested gas cells there was a relief valve that would function if we got too high. And how high was too high, anyhow? I noticed that the underskin of the balloon, which had been wrinkled when we lifted off, was now taut.

  Robiliyi shouted shrilly, "Front end! Front end!" We scuttled forward. He pulled on a dangling lanyard; there was an audible hiss of escaping gas from above. He put the front-end tiller over and as we swooped downward we turned. The treetops, which had seemed far too distant, were now dangerously close. And there was the clearing from which we had lifted with Adder standing there, bright silver in the sunlight. But we weren't landing yet. We shifted weight aft, jettisoned ballast, soared. I was beginning to get the hang of it, starting to enjoy myself. Robiliyi let me take the tiller so that I could get the feel of the airship. She handled surprisingly well.

  We did not return to earth until we had dumped all our ballast. I asked Robiliyi what we could do if, for some reason, we wanted to get upstairs again in a hurry after valving gas. He grinned, stripped off his tunic, made as though to throw it overboard. He grinned again, showing all his sharp, yellow teeth. "And if that is not enough," he said, "there is always your crew person . . . ."

  We landed shortly after this. Robiliyi reinflated the depleted cells from one of the bottles while Beadle and Spooky collected ballast sand from the banks of a nearby brook.

  Then it was Mary's turn to start her training.

  "Mary? Was she your crew, your co-pilot, for the race?"

  "Yes."

  "But you've impressed me as being a male chauvinist pig."

  "Have I? Well, frankly, I'd sooner have had one of my officers. But Mary volunteered, and she was far better qualified than any of them. Apart from myself she was the only one in Adder with lighter-than-air experience. It seems that the sect of which she was a member went in for ballooning quite a lot. It tied in somehow with their religion. Nearer my God to Thee, and all that."

  Well [he went on], we trained, both in the balloon that Dalgleish had modified and in the one that was still as it had been when delivered to us. The modifications? Oh, quite simple. A coffee-mill hand winch, an arrangement of webbing that compressed the three central, longitudinal gas cells. The modified balloon we exercised secretly, flying it only over a circuit that was similar in many ways to the official, triangular race track. The unmodified balloon we flew over the actual course. The Shaara and the Hallicheki did likewise, in craft that did not appear to have had anything done to them. I strongly suspected that they were doing the same as we were, keeping their dark horses out of sight until the Big Day. The Shaara, I was certain, had done to theirs what we had done to ours—after all, it was a Shaara idea that we had borrowed. But the Hallicheki? We just couldn't guess.

  * * *

  And we trained, and we trained. At first it was Robiliyi with Mary or Robiliyi with myself. Then it was Mary and I. I'll say this for her—she made good balloon crew. And I kidded myself that she was becoming far less un
touchable. In that narrow car we just couldn't help coming into physical contact quite frequently.

  Then the time was upon us and we were as ready as ever we would be. On the eve of the Great Day the three contending balloons were taken to the airport. The Shaara towed theirs in behind one of their blimps; it was entirely concealed in a sort of gauzy cocoon. The Hallicheki towed theirs in, four hefty crew hens doing the work. There was no attempt at concealment. We towed ours in astern of our flier. It was completely swathed in a sheet of light plastic.

  The racers were maneuvered into a big hangar to be inspected by the judges. I heard later, from Robiliyi, that the Nest Leader had insinuated that the Shaara and ourselves had installed miniature inertial drive units disguised as hand winches. (It was the sort of thing that they would have done if they'd thought that they could get away with it.)

  We all returned to our ships. I don't know how the Shaara and the Hallicheki spent the night but we dined and turned in early. I took a stiff nightcap to help me to sleep. Mary had her usual warm milk.

  The next morning we returned in the flier to the airport. It was already a warm day. I was wearing a shirt-and-shorts uniform but intended to discard cap, long socks, and shoes before clambering into the wickerwork car of the balloon. Mary was suitably—according to her odd lights—dressed but what she had on was very little more revealing than her usual high-necked, longsleeved, long-skirted dress; it did little more than establish the fact that she was, after all, a biped. It was a hooded, long-sleeved cover-all suit with its legs terminating in soft shoes. It was so padded that it was quite impossible to do more than guess at the shape of the body under it.