The Rim Gods

by A Bertram Chandler

  The pinnace grounded not far from where Mary and I were standing. Or where I was standing; Mary was on her hands and knees desperately trying to tear off a strip of fabric from the ruined envelope to cover herself. The outer airlock door opened. A group of officers in full dress blues disembarked. Captain Daintree was in the lead. I knew him. He was a strict disciplinarian, a martinet. He was one of the reasons why I had not been sorry to leave Aries.

  He glared at us. He recognised me in spite of my non-regulation attire. He stood there, stiff as a ramrod, his right hand on the pommel of his dress sword. I still think that he'd have loved to use that weapon on me. His face registered shock, disbelief, horror, you name it.

  He spoke at last, his voice low but carrying easily over the distance between us.

  "Mr. Grimes, correct me if I am wrong, but your instructions, I believe, were merely to maintain a Terran presence on this planet until such time as an officer of higher rank could take over." I admitted that this was so.

  "You were not, I am certain, authorised to start a nudist club. Or is this, perhaps, some sort of love-in?"

  "But, sir," I blurted, "I won the race!" Even he could not take that triumph from me. "I won the race!"

  "And did you win the prize, Commodore?" asked Kitty Kelly.

  "Oh, yes. A very nice trophy. A model, in solid gold, of a racing balloon, suitably inscribed. I have it still, at home in Port Forlorn."

  "Not that prize. It's the body beautiful I mean. The inhibition-and-clothing-shedding Miss Marsden."

  "Yes," said Grimes. "She shed her inhibitions all right. But I muffed it. I should have struck while the iron was hot, before she had time to decide that it was really Beadle—of all people!—whom she fancied. He reaped what I'd sown—all the way back to Lindisfarne Base!

  "When you get to my age you'll realise that there's no justice in the Universe."

  "Isn't there?" she asked, rather too sweetly.

  Grimes Among The Gourmets

  Commodore Grimes, although he hated to admit it even to himself, was coming to look forward to the visits paid by Kitty Kelly to his ship. Faraway Quest was immobilised at Port Fortinbras, on Elsinore, and would remain so until such time as her engineers were able to effect repairs to the old vessel's inertial drive. Originally an Epsilon Class star tramp, built for the Interstellar Transport Commission, she had been obsolescent when she entered the service of the Rim Worlds Confederacy. Her main propulsive machinery was hopelessly out of date and engineroom spares were not easily procurable. New eccentrics—but conforming to a long outmoded design—were being fabricated in Rim Runners' workshops in Port Forlorn, on Lorn. Nobody was busting a gut on the job. Meanwhile the venerable Quest, her future employment a matter of no great urgency, stayed put.

  Shortly after the Rim Worlds survey ship's arrival at Port Fortinbras, Grimes had been interviewed by Kitty Kelly of Station Yorick. He had been inveigled into spinning her a yarn about one of his adventures during his younger days in the Federation Survey Service, which she had recorded. It had been broadcast on her Kitty's Korner tri-vi programme and Station Yorick's viewers had lapped it up. She had been told to wheedle more tall stories out of the crusty old spacedog. Grimes had not been at all displeased to learn that most of his crew now watched, and enjoyed, Kitty's Korner.

  This day she had told him that she would, if it suited his convenience, be calling aboard at a later time than usual. He suggested that she take dinner with him before the recording session. She was pleased to accept the invitation.

  Grimes's paymaster—who was also the ship's catering officer—was Miss Keiko Otoguro. Learning that the commodore would be dining with his guest in his day cabin she asked him if she could serve one of the traditional meals of her ancestral people. She told him that she had been for a ramble along the seashore and had collected various seaweeds that would be suitable for the menu that she had in mind. Grimes assented happily. He had always loved exotic foods. And, he thought and hoped, a sumptuous repast laid on especially for the beautiful, blue-eyed, black-haired Kitty Kelly might soften her attitude towards him. (He had already tried the "candy is dandy but liquor is quicker" approach but it hadn't worked.)

  So Kitty Kelly was sitting in an easy chair in the commodore's day cabin, displaying her excellent legs. Grimes, seated facing her, was admiring the scenery. Both were sipping large pink gins.

  She said, "I enjoy a meal aboard a ship now and again, even though autochefs tend to make everything taste the same."

  "Not necessarily," he told her. "A lot depends upon how much imagination is employed in the programming and upon what spices are available. But the dinner that we shall be enjoying is not from the autochef. My paymaster prepared it with her own fair hands . . ."

  There was a light tap at the door. Miss Otoguro entered the cabin, carrying a lacquered tray with bottles, glasses and tiny porcelain cups. She was followed by two stewardesses with larger trays upon which the food had been set out. There was just enough room on the big coffee table for the meal and the drinks.

  She uncapped a bottle of cold beer, poured into two glasses. Then, from a gracefully shaped porcelain bottle, she filled two of the little cups.

  She said formally, "Dinner is served, Commodore-san."

  He replied with equal formality, "Thank you, Paymaster-san," then added, "there's no need for you to play Mama-san, Keiko. We can help ourselves."

  She smiled but there was a hint of disappointment in her voice as she said, "As you please, Commodore."

  When she and the girls had left Grimes said, "She has very old-fashioned ideas about the proper place of women in the universe. But she's not a Rimworlder by birth. She was brought up on Mikasa . . ."

  Kitty was looking at the meal laid out on her tray.

  "But this is beautiful. . ." she whispered. "Like flowers . . . It looks too good, almost, to eat. . ."

  "Keiko's specialty," he told her. "Only for very honoured guests."

  He raised his saki cup in a silent toast. She raised hers, sipped. She made a grimace.

  "But this is warm . . ."

  "That's the way it should be served."

  "Oh. I think I'll stick to beer. And didn't your Miss Keiko forget knives and forks?"

  Grimes picked up his ivory chopsticks, used them to mix mustard with the soy sauce in a little bowl. He then picked up what looked like a pink and white and green blossom with the implements, dipped it in the sauce, brought it to his mouth. He chewed and swallowed appreciatively.

  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 civilisation.

  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 metres 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 colouring? 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 jewellery—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 civilised 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?"

  "Civilisation and advanced technology," she told me, "do not necessarily go together. But these," she continued, "are a very civilised people. Perhaps too civilised. 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 effect, 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, specialised 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 flavour? 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.