Ride the Star Winds (66 page)

Friends
. . . The words somehow formed themselves in Grimes’s mind.
Friends. We are friends. Friends.

But the grunted reply held doubt, skepticism. Shirl went on singing her song of peace and Darleen whispered to Grimes, “It might be better if you went back into the boat, John, to leave us to deal with these . . . people.”

“No,” said Grimes stubbornly. After all, he was the captain, wasn’t he? And captains do not leave junior officers to face a danger while retiring to safety. And he already had Seiko’s death (do robots die?) on his conscience.

Both the girls were singing again, in chorus. Perhaps, thought Grimes, he should join in—but he knew neither the tune nor the words. And the silkies, grunting, were still advancing. Belatedly Grimes realised that those on the wings of the oncoming column had accelerated their rate of advance, were executing a pincer movement. He turned, to see that his retreat to the boat was cut off.

Friends . . . . We come as friends . . . .

And were those wordless grunts making sense, or were the silkies pushing their message telepathically?

You . . . friends. Perhaps. Him—no. NO.

It was his clothing, thought Grimes. Perhaps the captains of Drongo Kane’s ships had accompanied the fur hunters on their forays. Perhaps anybody wearing gold braid on his shoulders and on his cap was as much a murderer as the axe-, knife- and harpoon-wielding colonists in their rough working clothes.

Shirl and Darleen were getting the message. They closed in on Grimes, one on either side of him. They went on singing. And what was the burden of their song now: Love me, love my dog . . . ?

Whatever it was it made no difference.

Even on land the clumsy-seeming silkies could be amazingly quick when they wanted to be. A golden-furred giant reared up impossibly on its tail and hind flippers before Grimes and then fell upon him, knocking him sprawling. He heard the girls scream as they were similarly dealt with. And then there he was, on his back, a great, befurred and whiskered face over his. At least—there are, more often than not, small, compensatory mercies—the thing’s breath was quite sweet.

A flipper, a great slab of heavily muscled meat, lay heavily on his chest, making breathing difficult. Other flippers held his legs down and others, working clumsily but surely, were spreading wide his arms. He squirmed and managed to turn his head to the right. He saw that his right wrist, supported by a flipper that had closed around it like a limp mitten, had been raised from the ground. And he saw that a wide mouth, displaying the large, blunt teeth of the herbivore, was open, was about to close upon his hand. He remembered, in a flash, the horror stories he had heard about the silkies, their raids on coastwise villages, the mutilation of their victims. It made sense, a horrid sort of sense. It was only his hands, his tool-making, weapon-making, weapon-wielding hands that had given man dominion over the intelligent natives of this world.

He wondered if the silkies would kill him after they had chewed his hands off. It didn’t much matter; he would very soon die of loss of blood.

The chorus of grunts all around him changed. There was the strong impression of fear, alarm. Had Steerforth, using the Number 2 boat, come to the rescue? But although there was noise enough the distinctive clatter of an inertial drive unit was absent.

A human arm came into his field of view, a hand caught the mutilation-intent silkie by the scruff of its almost non-existent neck, lifted and made a sidewise fling in the same motion. A foot thudded into the side of the beast who was holding Grimes down. He caught confused glimpses of a naked female body in violent motion. At one stage four of the silkies succeeded, by sheer weight, in capturing her—Shirl? Darleen?—imprisoning her under the heaving mound of their bodies. But Shirl and Darleen were dancing around the outskirts of this living tumulus, kicking, burying their hands into soft fur and tugging ineffectually.

There was a sort of eruption and Seiko, the black hair of her once elaborate wig in wild disarray about her face, rose from its midst, stepping slowly and gracefully down over the struggling bodies. She walked to Grimes, caught him by the hands (and it was strange that her hands should be so cold, human-seeming as they were) and lifted him effortlessly to his feet.

She said, “I am sorry that I was late, Captain-san. But it was a long climb back up.”

“You got here in time,” Grimes told her. “And that’s all that matters.”

“The silkies . . .” said Shirl.

Yes, the silkies. They were retreating to the sea, but slowly.

Darleen ran after them, let herself be immersed in that ebbing tide of multicolored bodies. She was singing again. Shirl joined her. Seiko stayed with Grimes but she, too was singing.

Fantastically the tide turned. Led by Shirl and Darleen the silkies came slowly back. The two New Alicians draped themselves decoratively about Grimes, their arms about his neck. Seiko stood behind him, her hands on his shoulders. And they sang, all three of them, and the silkies’ song in return held, at last, a note of acceptance. One of the beasts—was it the golden-furred giant who had knocked Grimes down?—made a slow, somehow stately approach to the humans (the true human, the two humans by courtesy, the pseudo-human). He (Grimes assumed that it was he) gently placed one huge flipper on the toe of Grimes’s right shoe.

“Touch his flipper with your hand, John,” whispered Darleen.

Grimes, who kept himself reasonably fit, managed this without having to squat. He straightened.

“You are accepted,” said Shirl.

“It makes a change,” said Grimes, “from having my hands eaten.”

The musical conversation with the silkies continued. Becoming bored, Grimes pulled out and filled his pipe.

“Stop!” Shirl snapped. “To these people fire is one of the badges of the murderer, just as clothing is.”

At last it was over. The silkies returned to the sea. Grimes and the girls went back into the boat. The clothing of Shirl, Darleen and Seiko had been lost in the scuffle but this, in this day and age, did not much matter. In the ship’s sauna everybody was used to seeing everybody else naked.

Grimes set course back to the spaceport. For most of the flight Shirl and Darleen amused themselves by trying to restore Seiko’s borrowed hair to some semblance of order. (That wig would never be the same again.) Grimes lent her his sunglasses.

He decided to land the boat by the after airlock rather than to bring her directly into the boat bay. Cleo Jones had informed him, when he called in to say that he was on the way back, that there was some slight trouble with the boat bay doors which had been discovered after his departure and which was still not rectified.

The belly skids made gentle contact with the dirty concrete of the apron. Grimes shut down the inertial drive, opened the airlock doors. The four of them stepped out into the pleasantly warm, late afternoon sunlight.

Grimes joked, “I hope that Mr. Steerforth doesn’t give you girls a bawling out for being in incorrect uniform!”

But it was not only Steerforth who strode down the ramp from the ship’s after airlock. Pastor Coffin, his severe black with its minimal white trimmings, was with him, was in the lead.

Coffin’s craggy face was pale with fury. He glared at the three naked women. He declaimed, “So you Have deigned to return from your orgy, your debauching of these once innocent creatures. . . .”

“I wish that there had been an orgy . . .” whispered Shirl.

Either Coffin did not hear this or had decided to ignore it. “I called upon your ship, Captain, to lodge a complaint. A strong complaint. You did not obtain permission to take one of your boats for an atmospheric flight. Your officer has been trying to make excuses for you, telling me that no copy of port regulations has been received on board. This excuse I was prepared to accept; after all, you are strangers here. But I was not told for what purpose you made your flight.”

“I am sure that nothing untoward happened, Pastor,” said Steerforth placatingly.

“Then how do you explain this shameless display of nudity—and on, of all days—the Sabbath? I shall be sending a strong message of complaint to your owners.” He realized his mistake. “A strong letter of complaint to the Bureau of Interstellar Transport. Meanwhile, any further excursions by your ship’s boats are forbidden.”

It was useless trying to argue.

“Get on board and get dressed,” Grimes ordered the girls. Then, to Coffin, “Rest assured, sir, that I shall remove my obnoxious presence from your world as soon as possible.”

He left Steerforth to bear the brunt of the pastor’s continued fury as he made his way up the ramp into the ship. Had he stayed he would surely have lost his temper with the man.

Chapter 22

After a while
Steerforth joined Grimes in the latter’s day cabin. He announced indignantly, “I finally got rid of the sanctimonious old bastard. You certainly didn’t help matters by showing up with no less than three girls flaunting their nudity. In fact I’m wondering how I can bring myself to serve under such an unprincipled, atheistical lecher as yourself, sir.”

“I’m sorry,” said Grimes, not without sincerity. “But he’d started on you, before I got back, so I let him finish on you. You knew what it was all about. I didn’t. Had I stayed I should only have been dipping my oar into unknown waters.”

“Into troubled waters,” said the chief officer. “Into waters made even more troubled by yourself. And those blasted girls.”

The blasted girls made their entrance. Shirl and Darleen were in correct uniform and Seiko was wearing her Madame Butterfly outfit. But either her wig had been replaced by a less formal one or it had been shorn to a page boy bob. With them came Calamity Cassie, ostensibly to make some minor repairs to the small refrigerator in Grimes’s bar. (“Are you sure that you want her?” Ms. Scott had asked. “Do you like your beer warm, Captain, or having to do without ice cubes?”)

“Sit down, everybody,” ordered Grimes. “Yes, you too, Seiko. But first of all fetch us drinks.”

“And for myself, Captain-san?” asked the robot sweetly.

“If you want one. What do you fancy? Battery acid?”

Cassie laughed. “She’ll find none of that aboard this ship. But, believe it or not, there are some archaic wet storage cells over in that apology for a workshop . . .”

Over the drinks Grimes told the story, from his viewpoint, to Steerforth and Cassie. Shirl and Darleen told their almost identical stories. Seiko told her story.

“So, sir,” said Steerforth at last, “it seems certain that the silkies can be classified as intelligent beings, even disregarding the claims—which I do not doubt—that Shirl, Darleen and Seiko have been in some sort of telepathic communication with them, there is that gruesome business of their gnawing off people’s hands . . . .”

Grimes shuddered. “Gruesome,” he said, “is rather too mild a word.”

“Could be, sir. But it’s a very apposite act of revenge, the sort of revenge that only an intelligent being could conceive.” He was warming up to his theme. “What gave us our imagined superiority over certain other intelligent inhabitants of the Home Planet, Earth? The cetacea, I mean. Our hands. Our tool-making, weapon-making, weapon-using hands. With our hands we built the whaling ships, made the harpoons and the harpoon guns. With our hands we launched the harpoons—and continued to do so even after it was generally accepted that the whales are intelligent beings. There was too much money, big money, tied up in the whaling industry for it to be brought to an immediate stop.”

“And there’s big money tied up in the silkie industry,” said Grimes. “Luckily most of it is El Doradan money, and in the Terran corridors of power the El Doradans have at least as many enemies as they have friends. And the silkies have precious few of either. Mphm.”

“We . . .” began Shirl, “ . . . could be their friends,” finished Darleen.

“And I,” said Seiko.

“And in any case,” said Steerforth, “all of us here are being paid to be the silkies’ friends.”

“Not enough,” complained Grimes, on principle. “And I still don’t feel inclined to extend the right hand of friendship to a being who, only a short while back, was going to chew it off.”

“But he didn’t,” said either Shirl or Darleen.

“No thanks to the pair of you,” grumbled Grimes ungraciously. “If it hadn’t been for Seiko . . .”

“I did only what I had been programmed to do, by your honored father. To look after you,” said the automaton in deliberate imitation of the sort of intonation usually employed by not truly intelligent robots, humanoid or not.

Grimes felt that he was being ganged up on by the female members of his crew.

He said, “We can’t hang around indefinitely, even though you, Cassie, might be able considerably to delay the progress of the repairs. We have to bring matters to a head, somehow, to engender some sort of situation that will require Federation action . . .”

“But don’t forget, sir,” pointed out Steerforth, “that
Sister Sue
is not a unit of the Survey Service’s fleet, and that only the few of us, gathered here in your day cabin, are commissioned officers of the Survey Service.” He smiled briefly at Seiko. “With one exception, of course. But you are, in every way that counts, one of us.”

“Should I feel flattered?” she asked.

Steerforth ignored this. “We are not entitled,” he went on, “to put the lives of the civilian crew members at risk, any more than we have done already. You’re a very skillful saboteuse, Cassie, but even with sabotage accidents can and do happen. I had my fingers crossed during our near-crash landing.”

Grimes drew reflectively on his pipe. “What about this?” he asked at last. “Shirl and Darleen—and Seiko—can talk to the silkies. Once a line of communication has been established it’s bound to improve. Suppose that the girls are able to persuade the silkies to abandon the rookeries within easy reach, by schooner, of Port Salem and to re-establish themselves on the other side of the planet . . .”

“That, sir,” said Steerforth, “would be only a short-term solution to the problem. These local schooners would be quite capable of making long ocean voyages—just as the whalers did on Earth’s seas. And as for finding the new rookeries—your old friend Drongo Kane could instruct his captains to use their boats to carry out aerial surveys.”