The Rim Gods

by A Bertram Chandler

  "How come," asked Kitty, "that we've never seen mood opals here? Most Terran fads drift out to this part of the Galaxy eventually."

  "There aren't any mood opals anymore," Grimes told her. "It seems that the polishing process, which removed the outer crust, exposed the jewels to the atmosphere and to radiation of all kinds. After a few years of such exposure, the once-precious stones would crumble into worthless dust."

  * * *

  Well (he went on), that was my first visit to Sheol. Naturally it sparked my interest in the mood opal trade. I suggested to my agents that they try to organize for me the shipment of the next parcel of precious stones to wherever it was they were going. But the Interstellar Transport Commission had that trade tied up. Every six months one of their Epsilon-class freighters would make a very slight deviation during her voyage from Waverly to Earth, and it was on Earth—in Australia, in fact—where the opal polishers plied their trade. I pointed out that it was only a short hop, relatively speaking, from Helmskirk to Baroom, the nearest Shaara colony world, Surely, I said, the Shaara could polish their own mood opals. But it was no-go. They always had been polished in some place called Coober Peedy, and they always would be polished in Coober Peedy, and that was that.

  Meanwhile, I made friends among the warders on Sheol. Some of them were almost human. Their close association with the quote, criminal, unquote classes had rubbed off much of the arrogant sanctimoniousness so prevalent on the primary. There was one—Don Smith was his name—whom I even trusted with one of my guilty secrets. He would share morning coffee, generously spiked with the rum that I had persuaded the autochef to produce, with me. When there was any delay between the discharge of the cargo I had brought and the loading of the mood opals that I should be taking back, he would take me on conducted tours of the prison.

  There were the hydroponic farms, where most of the workers were women, some of them, despite their hideous zebra-striped coveralls, quite attractive. Some of them, and not only the attractive ones, would waggle their hips suggestively and coo, "Hello; spaceman! I'll do it for a cigarette!" And Don would grin and say, "They would, you know. I can arrange it for you." But I refused the offer. I didn't trust him all that much. Besides, my stock of cigarettes—which I kept aboard only for hospitality and not for my own use—had been impounded by the blasted customs.

  There were the workshops, where convict labor, all men, assembled machines at whose purpose I could do no more than guess; I haven't a mechanical mind. There was the printery and there was the bookbindery. I was invited to help myself from the stacks of new books, but I did not take advantage of the offer. Collections of sermons of the hellfire-and-damnation kind are not my idea of light reading to while away a voyage. There was the tailor's shop, where both warders' uniforms and convicts' uniforms were made. There were the kitchens and there were the messrooms. (The prison officers' food was plain but wholesome; that for the convicts, just plain, definitely so.) There were the tunnels in which the mood-opal miners worked. It was in one of these that I was accosted by a man with dirt-streaked face and sweat- and dust-stained coveralls.

  "Hey, Skipper!" he called. "How about my hitching a ride in your space buggy away from here? I can make it worth your while!"

  I stared at him. I didn't like the cut of his jib. Under the dirt that partially obscured his features was a hard viciousness. He had the kind of very light and bright blue eyes that are often referred to as "mad." He looked as though he'd be quite willing to use the small pickax he was holding on a human being rather than on a rock.

  I decided to ignore him.

  "Stuck-up bastard aren't you, Skipper. Like all your breed. You deep-spacers think yourselves too high and mighty to talk to orbital boys!"

  "That will do, Wallace!" said Don sharply.

  "Who's talking? You're not in charge of this work party."

  "But I am." Another warder had come up. He was holding one of the modified stun guns that were the main weaponry of the guards; on the right setting (or the wrong setting, if you were on the receiving end) they could deliver a most painful shock. "Get back to work, Wallace. You're nowhere near your quota for the shift—and you know what that means!"

  Apparently Wallace did and he moved away. Don and I moved on.

  "A nasty piece of work," I said.

  "He is that," agreed Don, "even though he is a spaceman like yourself."

  "Not too like me, I hope."

  "All right. Not too like you. He got as high as mate of the Jerry Falwell, and then he was caught smuggling cigarettes and booze in and mood opals out. If only the bloody fool had done his dealing with the right people and not with the convicts! I suppose that it's poetic justice that he's serving his time here as an opal miner."

  I supposed that it was.

  And then we wandered back to Little Sister, where, after half an hour or so, I loaded two small bags of mood opals—in their rough state they looked like mummified dog-droppings—and embarked a couple of prison officers who were returning to the primary for a spell of leave. Although they were (a) female and (b) not unattractive, they were not very good company for the voyage.

  My next trip back from Sheol to Helmskirk I had company again. Unexpected company. For some reason I decided to check the stowage in the cargo compartment; there was a nagging feeling that everything was not as it should be. This time there were no mood opals, but there were half a dozen bales of clothing, civilian work coveralls, that had been manufactured in the prison's tailor's shop. At first glance nothing seemed amiss. And then I saw a pool of moisture slowly spreading on the deck from the underside of one of the bales. Aboard a ship, any kind of ship, leaking pipes can be dangerous. But there were no pipes running through and under the deck of the compartment; such as there were were all in plain view on the bulkheads, and all of them were intact.

  Almost I dipped my finger into the seepage to bring it back to my mouth to taste it. Almost. I was glad that I hadn't done so. I smelled the faint but unmistakable acridity of human urine.

  I went back to the main cabin, to my arms locker, and got out a stun gun and stuck it into my belt. And then, very cautiously, I unsnapped the fasteners of the metal straps holding the bale together. The outer layers of folded clothing fell to the deck. I stepped back and drew my stun gun and told whoever it was inside the bale, in as stern a voice as I could muster, to come out. More layers of clothing fell away, revealing a sort of cage of heavy wire in which crouched a young woman. She straightened up and stepped out of the cage, looking at me with an odd mixture of shame and defiance.

  She said, "I shouldn't have had that last drink of water, but I thought that I should half die of thirst if I didn't . . . ." She looked down at the sodden legs of her civilian coveralls and managed an embarrassed grin. "And now I suppose, Captain, that you'll be putting back to Sheol and handing me over."

  I said, "I can hand you over just as well at Port Helms."

  She shrugged. "As you please. In that case, could I ask a favor? The use of your shower facilities and the loan of a robe to wear while my clothes are drying . . . I have to wash them, you know."

  I thought, You're a cool customer. And I thought, I rather like you.

  Despite her ugly and now sadly bedraggled attire, she was an attractive wench: blonde, blue-eyed, and with a wide mouth under a nose that was just retrousse enough, just enough, no more. She had found some way to tint her lips an enticing scarlet. (The women convicts, I had already learned, used all sorts of dyes for this purpose, although cosmetics were banned.) And I remembered, too, all the fuss there'd been about taking showers and such, all the simpering prudery, when I had carried those two women prison officers.

  So I let her use my shower and hang her clothes in my drying room, and lent her my best Corlabian spider silk bathrobe, and asked her what she would like for dinner. She said that she would like a drink first and that she would leave the ordering of the meal to me.

  It was good to be having dinner with a pretty girl, especially o
ne who was enjoying her food as much as she was. The autochef did us proud, from soup—mulligatawny, as I remember—to pecan pie. The wines could have been better; an autochef properly programmed can make quite a good job of beer or almost any of the potable spirits, but as far as, say, claret is concerned, is capable of producing only a mildly alcoholic red ink. Not that it really mattered on this occasion. Everything that I gave my guest to eat and drink was immeasurably superior to the prison food—and, come to that, streets ahead of anything that could have been obtained in any restaurant on Helmskirk.

  After the meal we relaxed. I filled and lit my pipe. She watched me enviously. I let her have one of my spare pipes. She filled it with my shredded, dried, and treated lettuce leaf tobacco substitute. She lit it, took one puff, and decided that it was better than nothing, but only just.

  "Thank you, Captain," she said. "This has been a real treat. The drinks, the meal, your company . . . ." She smiled. "And I think that you've been enjoying my company, too . . . ."

  "I have," I admitted.

  "And won't you feel just a little bit remorseful when you turn me in after we arrive at Port Helms? But I suppose that you've already been in touch with the authorities by radio, while I was having my shower, to tell them that you found me stowed away . . . ."

  I said, "I'll get around to it later."

  Her manner brightened. "Suppose you never do it, Captain? I could . . . work my passage . . . ." The dressing gown was falling open as she talked and gesticulated, and what I could see looked very tempting—and I had been celibate for quite a while. "Before we set down at Port Helms, you can put me back in the bale. The consignees of the clothing are members of a sort of . . . underground. They have helped escaped convicts before."

  "So your crime was political?"

  "You could call it that. There are those of us, not a large number but growing, who are fighting for a liberalization of the laws—a relaxation of censorship, more freedom of thought and opinion . . . . You're an off-worlder. You must have noticed how repressive the regime on Helmskirk is."

  I said that the repression had not escaped my notice.

  "But," she went on, "I do not expect you to help me for no reward. There is only one way that I can reward you . . . ."

  "No," I said.

  "No?" she echoed in a hurt, a very hurt, voice.

  "No," I repeated.

  Oh, I'm no plaster saint, never have been one. But I have my standards. If I were going to help this girl, I'd do it out of the kindness of my heart and not for reward. I realize now that I was doing her no kindness. In fact, she was to tell me just that on a later occasion. A roll in the hay was just what she was needing just then. But I had my moments of high-minded priggishness, and this was one of them. (Now, of course, I'm at an age when I feel remorse for all the sins that I did not commit when I had the chance.)

  She said, "People have often told me that I'm attractive. I would have thought . . . . But I can read you. You're a businessman as well as a spaceman. You own this little ship. You have to make a profit. You're afraid that if it's discovered that you helped me, you'll lose your profitable charter. Perhaps you're afraid that you'll become one of the inmates of Sheol yourself, like Wallace . . . ."

  "I never said that I wasn't going to help you," I told her. "But there are conditions. One condition. That if you are picked up again, you say nothing about my part in your escape."

  When she kissed me, with warm thoroughness, I weakened—but not enough, not enough. And before the sleep period I rigged the privacy screen in the main cabin, and she stayed on her side of it and I stayed on mine. The next "day"—and I maintained Port Helms standard time while in space—she dressed in her all-concealing coveralls, which were now dry, instead of in my too-revealing bathrobe. We had one or two practice sessions of repacking her in the bale. And before long it was time for me to repack her for good—as far as I was concerned.

  And I made my descent to the apron at Port Helms.

  * * *

  There was, of course, something of a flap about the escape of a prisoner from Sheol. The authorities, of course, knew that if she had escaped, she must have done so in Little Sister—but I was in the clear. The ship was under guard all the time that she was berthed in the air lock. Too, there was a certain element of doubt. In the past convicts had hidden for quite a while in unexplored tunnels, and some had even died there. Convicts had been murdered by fellow inmates and their bodies fed into waste disposal machinery.

  And then Evangeline—that was her name—was picked up, in Calvinville. She had been caught leaving pamphlets in various public places. She was tried and found guilty and given another heavy sentence, tacked on to the unexpired portion of her previous one. She kept her word insofar as I was concerned, saying nothing of my complicity. She even managed to protect the clothing wholesalers to whom her bale had been consigned. Her story was that this bale could be opened from the inside, and that after her escape from it, at night, she had tidied up after herself before leaving the warehouse.

  Inevitably, I got the job of returning her to incarceration. (The repairs to the prison tender Jerry Falwell were dragging on, and on, and on.) She was accompanied by two sourpussed female prison officers returning to Sheol from planet leave. These tried to persuade me—persuade? Those arrogant bitches tried to order me—that during the short voyage there should be two menus, one for the master, me, and the warders, and the other, approximating prison fare, for the convict. I refused to play, of course. The poor girl would eat well while she still had the chance. But there were no drinks before, with, or after meals, and I even laid off smoking for the trip.

  And so I disembarked my passengers and discharged my cargo at Sheol. I'd not been able to exchange so much as a couple of words with Evangeline during the trip, but the look she gave me before she was escorted from the ship said, Thanks for everything.

  So it went on, trip after trip.

  Then it happened. I was having an unusually long stopover on Sheol, and my friend, Don Smith, suggested that I might wish to see, as he put it, the animals feed. I wasn't all that keen—I've never been one to enjoy the spectacle of other people's misery—but there was nothing much else to do, and so I accompanied him through the maze of tunnels to one of the mess halls used by the male prisoners. Have you ever seen any of those antique films about prison life made on Earth in the latter half of the twentieth century? It was like that. The rows of long tables, covered with some shiny gray plastic, and the benches. The counter behind which stood the prisoners on mess duty, with aprons tied on over their zebra-striped coveralls, ladling out a most unsavory-looking—and -smelling—stew into the bowls held out by the shuffling queue of convicts. The guards stationed around the walls, all of them armed with stun guns and all of them looking bored rather than alert . . . . The only novel touch was that it was all being acted out in the slow motion imposed by conditions of low gravity.

  Finally, all the convicts were seated at the long tables, their sluggishly steaming plastic bowls—those that were still steaming, that is; by this time, the meals of those first in the queue must have been almost cold—before them, waiting for the prison padre, standing at his lectern, to intone grace. It was on the lines of: For what we about to receive this day may the Lord make us truly thankful.

  As soon as he was finished, there was a commotion near the head of one of the tables. A man jumped to his feet. It was, I saw, Wallace, the ex-spaceman.

  "Thankful for this shit, you smarmy bastard?" he shouted. "This isn't fit for pigs, and you know it!"

  The guards suddenly became alert. They converged upon Wallace with their stun guns out and ready. They made the mistake of assuming that Wallace was the only troublemaker. The guards were tripped, some of them, and others blinded by the bowls of stew flung into their faces. Their pistols were snatched from their hands.

  "Get out of here, John," said Don Smith urgently. He pulled me back from the entrance to the mess hall. "Get out of here! There's nothin
g you can do. Get back to your ship. Use your radio to tell Helmskirk what's happening . . . ."

  "But surely your people," I said, "will have things under control . . . ."

  "I . . . I hope so. But this has been brewing for quite some time."

  By this time we were well away from the mess hall, but the noise coming from it gave us some idea of what was happening—and what was happening wasn't at all pleasant for the guards. And there were similar noises coming from other parts of the prison complex. And there was a clangor of alarm bells and a shrieking of sirens and an amplified voice, repeating over and over, "All prison officers report at once to the citadel! All prison officers report at once to the citadel!"

  Don Smith said, "You'd better come with me."

  I said, "I have to get back to my ship."