Ride the Star Winds (71 page)

Seiko brought up the rear. Again her body was smoke-blackened. She approached Grimes and bowed formally. “Captain-san, it is over. We spared the church and a large hall adjacent, and the people are huddled in these buildings, praying.”

“How many killed?” demanded Grimes.

“Nobody by intent, although two or three may have died accidentally. But we let them seek refuge in their houses of worship and I refrained from applying the torch to these.”

“You did well,” said Grimes at last. “All right. The sooner we’re back on board the ship the better.”

“I am sorry, John,” Seiko told him. “I cannot accompany you.”

“That’s an order, damn it!”

“Which I cannot accept. I was built to serve, John, as well you know. But you do not really need me. They . . .” she gestured toward the sea, to the silky heads, their eyes gleaming with reflected firelight, that were turned inland, looking at the humans and the robot. “They need me, much more than you do.”

“She is right,” said Shirl and Darleen as one.

Above the roar of the burning town, beating down from the sky, was the arrhythmic clatter of a small craft’s inertial drive. One of
Sister Sue’s
lifeboats made a heavy landing not far from where Grimes was still trying to argue with the women. From it jumped Steerforth and Calamity Cassie, each with a laser pistol in hand.

“You’re all right, Captain?” demanded the chief officer. “We saw the flames and thought that we’d better take action.”

“You did right,” said Grimes. “And now you can get us back to where we belong.”

“Good-bye, Harald,” said Seiko. “Good-bye, Cassie. Tell the others good-bye for me.”

She was, Grimes noticed, holding her right hand protectively over her navel.

“We can’t leave you here, Seiko,” objected Steerforth.

“She can look after herself,” said Grimes harshly. “And, in any case, it’ll be days yet before
Sister Sue
is capable of lifting off. If—no,
when
—you change your mind, Seiko, you’ll know where to find us.”

The boat, with Steerforth at the controls, clattered upward. The chief officer made a circuit of the seaport area before setting course for the spaceport. New fires had broken out; alongside their jetties the schooners were ablaze.

She was thorough, was Seiko, thought Grimes. Very thorough. It would be a long time before, if ever, there was another silky hunt on New Salem.

All that next day he was expecting her to come walking back up the ramp, into the ship. And the day after, and the day after that . . .

Chapter 29

The mess was well
on the way to being cleaned up.

The destroyer
Pollux
had been within range of
Sister Sue’s
Carlotti radio, even though the signals had been broadcast and not beamed. She had dropped down to the spaceport, with Grimes usurping the functions of New Salem Aerospace Control. (Presumably the lady who usually did the talking to incoming traffic was still huddled in the church with her badly frightened fellow colonists.)

Her captain, Commander Beavis, had served under Grimes many years ago and was cooperative. Damien must have told him that Grimes was once again, although secretly, an officer of the Federation Survey Service, senior to Beavis. That gentleman managed to imply that Grimes could issue orders rather than mere suggestions. But appearances were maintained for the benefit of the crews of both ships. Grimes was the innocent shipmaster whose life, and the lives of certain of his officers, had been threatened by the people of this world. Beavis was the galactic policeman who had come hurrying to the rescue.

Beavis had the people and the equipment to be able to do something about the plight of the colonists, whose city had been almost entirely destroyed. He set up a sizeable township of tents, complete with field kitchens and a hospital. He interrogated various officials and recorded their stories. Then, aboard
Sister Sue
, he heard Grimes’s report and watched and listened to the playback of the various tapes—one of them heavily edited—including that final one, which had been recovered, undamaged, from the beach. He interviewed Shirl and Darleen and Steerforth and Cassie.

Then when he was alone with Grimes, relaxing over a drink, he said, “I shall put all this material in Admiral Damien’s hands as soon as possible, sir. He’s going to love it—and so will Madame Duvalier. I rather think, somehow, that the New Salemites are going to be resettled—preferably on some world with no animal life whatsoever . . . .”

“If they could find some way of harvesting plants really brutally they’d do it,” said Grimes. “In spite of all that’s happened they still regard themselves as the Almighty-created Lords of Creation. And, more and more, I’m coming to the opinion that any life, all life, should be treated with respect and compassion.”

“Even robots, sir?” asked Beavis with deceptive innocence.

Grimes laughed. “All right, all right. There was that bloody tin messiah, Mr. Adam, years ago. He got what was coming to him; I wasn’t sorry then and I’m not sorry now.”

“I was thinking of Seiko, sir.”

“Mphm.”

“She would pass for a very attractive woman. You must miss her, sir.”

“I suppose I do,” admitted Grimes. “But she’ll be back. She’ll know when I’m due to lift. She’ll be back.”

At last the repairs were finished and the fresh water tank refilled. All that remained to be done was the recalibration of
Sister Sue’s
Mannschenn Drive. While this was being carried out only a skeleton crew would remain on board—Grimes himself in the control room, Flo Scott in the inertial drive room and, of course, all the Mannschenn Drive engineers in their own compartment, making their abstruse calculations and arcane adjustments. The theory of it was that if anything should go wrong, if the ship fell down a crack in the Space-Time Continuum, the captain and his top-ranking technicians might—just might—be able to get her back to where and when she belonged. Ships—only a very few ships but ships nonetheless—had been known to vanish during the recalibration procedure. Of that very few an even smaller number had come back, and not to the planets from which they had made their unscheduled departures. Sometimes, after only a very short absence from the normal universe, their crews had aged many years. Sometimes, during an absence of years, only minutes had elapsed for the personnel. Some crews claimed to have met God; others told horrifying stories of their narrow escapes from the clutches of the Devil. Grimes, good agnostic that he was, did not believe such tales, saying, if his opinion were asked, that it is a well-known fact that the temporal precession fields engendered by the Drive have an hallucinatory effect upon the human mind.

Recalibration, to him, was a process similar to old-fashioned navel gunnery, the procedure known as bracketing. Under . . . Up . . . Over . . . Down . . . still. Under . . . Up . . . Right on! Salvoes!

So he sat in
Sister Sue’s
control room, smoking his pipe, waiting for Daniel Grey, the Chief Manschenn Drive Engineer, to start doing his thing. He looked out through a viewport, saw his people, together with a number of Beavis’s officers, standing by the stern of
Pollux
, watching. Grey’s voice came from the intercom speaker, “All ready, Captain.”

“Thank you, Mr. Grey. Commence recalibration.”

He heard—and felt—the deep hum as the rotors of the Drive commenced to spin, a hum that rapidly rose in pitch to a thin, high whine with an odd warbling quality. Outside the scene changed.
Pollux
was no longer there. Neither were the spaceport administration buildings. The planet was as it had been before the coming of man. Under, thought Grimes. The scene changed again. There were only ruins of buildings, barely recognizable as such under the growth of bushes and small trees.

Over.

Then
under
again, with a few rough shacks to mark where the spaceport proper would one day be.

Over
. . .

The familiar buildings were there, but showing signs of dilapidation. Grimes got up from his seat, looked down through the port at the concrete apron. It was cracked in many places, with weeds thrusting through the fissures. He went down from the control room to his quarters. There was an odd unfamiliarity about them. Who was the auburn-haired woman whose holographic portrait was on the bulkhead behind the desk in his day cabin? It wasn’t Maggie, although there was a certain similarity. In his bedroom he took his uniform cap from the wardrobe, looked into the mirror to adjust it to the right angle. With fast dissipating puzzlement he noted the strange cap badge above the gold-braided peak, a rather ornate winged wheel, and the single broad gold band, the insignia of a commodore, on each of his shoulderboards. Passing through his day room he flicked a good-humoured salute at the portrait of Sonya.

He took the elevator down to the after airlock, walked down the ramp to the cracked and scarred concrete. His first lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander Cummings, saluted smartly. Grimes returned the salute. He said, “I’m taking a morning stroll, Commander Cummings. To the old seaport.”

“Shouldn’t an armed party be going with you, sir? After all, according to the data, the natives aren’t overly friendly towards visitors.”

“I’ve been here before, Commander. And the ones who most certainly were not friendly were the human colonists. And, as you know, they were resettled.”

“As you please, sir. But . . .”

“I shall be all right, Commander.”

You always are, you old bastard
, he could almost hear the officer thinking.

And—old bastard
? he thought. Yes, he was getting old. Not in mind, not even in body, but in years and experience.

The road from the spaceport to the seaport, along which he had first walked so many years ago, was still passable. Nonetheless he began to wish that he had taken one of the ship’s boats instead of making the journey by foot. At any age at all he did not enjoy having to force his way through bushes. Although the sunlight was not especially hot he had worked up a good sweat by the time that he got to what had been Salem City. The charred ruins were not yet completely overgrown and the church and the hall, in which the colonists had taken refuge, were still standing.

Like rotting fangs the jetties still protruded into the sullen sea, from which projected, at crazy angles, the fire-blackened spars that had been the masts and yards of the schooners.

The slipway, still in a good state of repair, was almost as he remembered it.

And up it walked Seiko.

She was as she had been when he first saw her, in his parents’ home. The transparent, glassy skin had been cleaned of all vestiges of body paint and beneath it glittered the beautiful intricacy of that non-functional yet busy clockwork. Her well-shaped head was bare of the last trace of hair. But something had been added, one item of clothing. She wore a broad belt of gleaming metal mesh with a golden buckle—more shield than buckle—that covered her navel.

She bowed formally. “Captain-san.”

He bowed in return. “Seiko-san.”

She said, “This is Liberty Hall. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.”

He laughed and said, “You haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

“Why should I have done so, John? The silkies are not a humorless people.”

She looked intently at his cap badge, the braid on his shoulders.

Grimes asked, “What’s puzzling you?”

She said, “Your ship is the same. I saw her coming down. But your uniform is different.”

Grimes told her, “She is no longer my ship. Oh, I command her, but I no longer own her. And her name has been changed. She is now
Faraway Quest
, the survey vessel of the Rim Worlds Confederacy, in whose naval reserve I hold the rank of commodore.”

“And all the people I knew, when she was
Sister Sue
and you were owner as well as captain?”

“They have all gone their various ways, Seiko.”

“I would have liked to have met Shirl and Darleen again . . .”

“I still hear from them, about once a standard year. Eventually they returned to their home planet, New Alice.”

“When next you write, please give them my regards.”

“I shall do so.”

“And when next you are on
your
home planet, John, please give my regards to your respected parents.”

Grimes told her, regretfully, “They are both long gone.”

“Then will you, for me, make obeisance at their tomb and pour a libation?”

“I shall do that,” promised Grimes.

The pair of them fell silent, looking at each other, a little sadly. It was a companionable silence.

Grimes broke it. He said, “You can have your old job back, if you want it.”

She replied, “Thank you. But the silkies still need me. I am their hands and their voice. I speak for them to the occasional visitors to this world, human and non-human. Were I not here there would be acts of aggression and exploitation.”

“So that’s the way of it,” said Grimes.

“That is the way of it,” she agreed. Surprisingly she took him in her strong arms, affectionately pressed him to her resilient body. Grimes did not resist. She released him. “Good-bye, John. You must return to your ship. To your ship. We may meet again—I hope that we do. We may not. But always, always, the best of luck.”

She turned away from him, walked down the slipway to the sea, an almost impossibly graceful, glittering figure. It seemed to Grimes that the silkies had been waiting for her. There was a great flurry of spray as she entered the water, a chorus of musical gruntings.

And then she and they were gone, and Grimes started his walk back to the ship, cursing the spiky bushes on the overgrown road that seemed to be determined to hold him prisoner on this planet.

He was sitting in his chair in the control room. The Drive had been recalibrated. All hands had returned on board, had proceeded to their lift-off stations. Steerforth looked curiously at Grimes’s forearms, bare under the short-sleeved uniform shirt, at his knees, bare under the hem of his shorts.

“Those scratches, sir. . . . How did you get them? You look as though you’ve been in a cat fight.”