The Rim Gods

by A Bertram Chandler

  "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' ran 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 had 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 routi
ne 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.

  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, arms 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.