Chapter 14
FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE Grimes tried to forget the details of the remainder of the voyage. Thinking of it as a preview of hell might have been an exaggeration, but it was most certainly not a foretaste of heaven, and in purgatory (we are told) there is hope. Hope was a quality altogether absent from this cramped cell with its boredom, its savorless food, the hateful company of the hating woman who spoke only to snarl at him, who had lost all interest in her appearance and who had become a compulsive eater, whose once trim body had become a mass of unsightly bulges, whose breasts were sagging, whose hair fell in an unsightly tangle about her sweaty, fattening, sullen face. Even so small a comfort (small comfort?) as his precious pipe with a supply of tobacco would have made conditions slightly less intolerable, but he was denied even this.
But every voyage must have its end.
And then, at long last, came the time when Grimes woke from an uneasy sleep. The light in the cabin was changing, shifting, deepening from pink to violet and its perspective was no longer that of a cube but a tesseract. Tamara’s sprawled, naked figure was as he had first known it, long-legged, firm-bodied, with the fine bone structure of her face prominent. She was snoring, but even that normally unlovely sound was musical . . .
Abruptly perspective, light and color were again as they always (for how long? for too long) had been. But sound was different. There was something lacking—and that something was the all-pervasive thin, high whine of the Mannschenn Drive. So, thought Grimes, Baroom was making planetfall. So in a matter of a few hours, or even less, it would be landing stations.
He touched the woman on a fleshy shoulder. Her eyes slowly opened. She looked up at him with an expression that at first was oddly eager but that almost immediately became one of extreme distaste.
She muttered, “It’s you. I was dreaming, but . . . Lemme sleep, damn you.”
He said, “Tamara, we’ve arrived. Or almost arrived. They’ve just shut down their Mannschenn Drive . . .”
“And so bloody what? Take your filthy paws off me!”
He snarled back at her, “For the love of the Odd Gods of the Galaxy pull yourself together, woman! We shall be landing shortly. I don’t know on what world but we’re liable to be meeting strangers. And you’re a mess.”
“And you’re no oil painting yourself, Grimes!”
He ignored this. “You’re a mess. The way you are a sex-starved second mate of a sixth rate star tramp wouldn’t look at you!”
She glared at him, heaved herself to her feet. She shuffled to the drip tray on the bulkhead, used a scrap of rag to stop the outlet and then, using another piece of the rag from Grimes’ longjohns, washed herself all over. Somehow after the ablutions she was beginning to look as she had looked before the imprisonment. She struggled into her longjohns and the elastic fabric moulded and constrained her figure. Then, using her long fingernails as a comb, she tried to arrange her hair. Without proper treatment it would not regain its lustre but the worst snarls were out of it
She snapped, “Am I fit for parade, Captain?”
He admitted, “It’s an improvement.”
“Then may I suggest that you do something about yourself?”
Grimes tried, but without depilatory cream it was an almost hopeless task. He pulled on the trunks that were all that remained of his space underwear.
He sat down in a corner of the cell to wait.
She sat down in the opposite corner to wait.
At last a variation of the beat of the inertial drive told them that they were coming in to a landing.
There was a very gentle jar. The inertial drive fell silent.
There was a mechanical hooting sound that began suddenly, that stopped as suddenly.
There was a brief thudding that could have been a burst from an automatic cannon. There was silence.
She raised her eyebrows, asked, “Well?”
He said, “I don’t know.”
She sneered, “You’re the expert.”
There was more silence.
Suddenly the door opened, admitting six drones. Careless of the minor wounds they inflicted with their sharp claws they stripped the humans, dragged them out into the alleyway, down ramps to an airlock, both doors of which were open, admitting bright sunlight, a cool breeze. Instead of a ramp extending from the outer door to the ground there was a platform. On this was a cage—a light yet strong affair with aluminum bars. Grimes and Tamara were thrust into this and the door was slammed shut after them with a loud clicking of the spring lock. The deck of interwoven metal swayed under their feet, throwing them off balance.
Grimes looked up, saw through streaming eyes (the sunlight was painfully bright after the dimness to which they had become accustomed) a blurred shape like a fat torpedo. It was a blimp, he realized, one of the non-rigid airships that the Shaara invariably used inside an atmosphere in preference to inertial drive powered craft. He looked down and back.
Baroom had landed in a wide meadow, a field under cultivation, crushing beneath her bulk row upon row of low bushes. Close by her was the gold-gleaming Little Sister, dwarfed by the huge Shaara ship. Over and around both vessels flew the bee people—princesses, drones, workers—rejoicing in the exercise of their wings. There was another blimp in the air, motionless.
He turned, barely conscious that his naked skin brushed Tamara’s bare breasts, looked ahead. There was a town or a village there, buildings of almost human architecture. Between this settlement and the spaceships was a charred patch on the ground, an untidy, cratered patch of dark grey in the yellow grass (or what passed for grass), a scattering of angular, twisted wreckage. A ground vehicle? The burst of a cannon fire that they had heard?
“Where are they taking us?” she demanded. “Where are they taking us?”
“To that town,” he replied.
“But why? But why?”
He made no answer. There was none that he could give. He looked up to the strong escort of armed drones that was accompanying the blimp. He looked ahead again. The air over the town was alive with swarming mote’s. He knew that these were more drones. And yet it was no Shaara city that they were approaching. Such a center of population would have consisted of domes great and little, not buildings that, in the main, were like upended rectangular blocks.
The blimp flew slowly over the town, finally stopped and hovered over a wide central square. There was a new looking structure in the middle of this, a metal platform around which were standing Shaara—two princesses, twenty drones, a half dozen workers. Above the cage a winch hummed and rattled. Grimes and Tamara were lowered swiftly to the platform where the workers caught the bars around them in their claws, positioning the portable prison. The winch cable was unhooked from its ring-bolt. The weight released, the blimp lifted rapidly, turned and flew off in the direction of the spaceships.
One of the princesses started to call, her voice box turned up to maximum amplification. It was in no language that Grimes had ever heard although she seemed fluent enough in it. By ones and twos and threes the people emerged timorously from the buildings and streets around the square. They were more human than merely humanoid although blue-skinned, bald-headed without exception and with horn-like protuberances above where their eyebrows would have been, had they been a hairy race. They were clad, men, women and children alike, in drab grey robes, neck-high and ankle-length, with sleeves falling half over their three fingered hands.
The princess continued her incomprehensible spiel, the people stared stolidly through dull crimson eyes. The princess waved a contemptuous claw at the captives. The people stared. Then a man broke out from the small crowd of which he had been a member. A metallic object gleamed in his hand, a cumbersome pistol. Two of the drones fired simultaneously, slicing him into smoking collops. The stench of burned meat was sickening. A sort of moan went up from the assembled natives. The princess delivered a last peroration, then fell silent. At last, obviously dreading that they would meet the same fate as the dead man, three women lifted the blood-oozing pieces into a small, two-wheeled hand-cart, trundled it away.
The sun blazed down.
There was no shade.
There were almost invisible, sharply biting, flying things.
Tamara sagged heavily against Grimes, slumped to the deck of the cage. She had fainted. Grimes clung to the bars, his head whirling, his vision dimming, fighting down his nausea. He knew that he could not long hold on to his own consciousness.
And then two of the workers produced from under the platform a light, folding framework that they set up about the cage, that was topped by a sheet of opaque plastic. The shade, briefly, was as welcome as a draught of ice-cold water. Another worker pushed a jug and a bowl of the sickly pink pabulum into the cage at Grimes’ feet. The surface of the latter was soon black with the tiny flying things.
He looked from it to the huddled, unconscious woman. Should he try to revive her? She seemed to be breathing normally enough. It would be kinder, he decided, to leave her in oblivion.
From the direction of the spaceships came two bursts of automatic gunfire. The crowd moaned. A blimp flew overhead, in no hurry, going nowhere in particular.
Without too many contortions Grimes managed to sit down, avoiding contact with the woman’s perspiring skin. He took a sip from the jug. The water was as flat and lukewarm as usual. He looked with distaste at the contents of the bowl.
He would have sold his soul for a smoke.
***
He was awakened by Tamara shaking him. When he had dropped off to sleep he had been too hot; now he was uncomfortably chilly. And yet it was still light. He blinked, realized that the glaring illumination came from three floodlights trained upon the cage.
She was babbling, “All these people, staring at us . . . But have something to eat. I saved you some. It tastes better than usual.”
Grimes could guess why but only said, “Not just now, thank you. Any water left?”
“Yes.”
He rinsed his mouth, swallowed. He got carefully to his feet, his joints creaking. In spite of the glaring floodlights he could see that the Shaara guards—or their reliefs—were still on duty, that the square was still crowded with citizens who must be prisoners as much as the two humans, although not as closely confined.
Then the lights went out.
Almost immediately a great oblong of bright illumination appeared on the wall of one of the tall buildings surrounding the square, down the facade of which a huge white sheet had been stretched. After a flickering second or so a picture appeared.
Grimes had seen it before.
Tamara had seen it before.
Again they watched themselves writhing in naked abandon on the deck of Little Sister’s main cabin, again they listened to their wordless cries. But they were hearing more than the noises that they had made on that long ago occasion. The crowd was . . . growling. Its front ranks surged inwards, towards the cage, hesitated when the amplified artificial voice of a Shaara princess boomed out, when a drone machine gunner fired a noisy but harmless burst into the air.
But their guards made no attempt to stop the natives from throwing things, may even have ordered them to do so. As one the Shaara buzzed aloft, above the trajectory of the missiles—the rotten fruit, the garbage, the ordure. They returned to earth when the barrage had spent its fury, fired more machine bursts into the air while the princess in command ordered the mob to disperse. A worker threw a couple of rough blankets into the cage, another one pushed in a fresh jug of water, another bowl of the pabulum.
The princess said, “You will sleep.”
Grimes and Tamara huddled together in their misery. Neither said anything. Neither slept.
***
The sun was well up when the blimp came to carry the cage back to the ship. With first light the mob had turned out in force to stare at the prisoners, to make threatening gestures, held at bay only by the Shaara display of weaponry. Grimes and Tamara were almost happy when their swaying prison was lifted high above the hostile crowd, thankful when they were set down on the platform outside Barooms airlock. They submitted with near-cheerfulness to the ordeal of a hosing down before they were released from the cage and dragged inside the vessel.
Their familiar cell was almost homelike.
She asked in a frightened voice, “Grimes, what was all that about?”
He replied, “I don’t know . . . But . . .” He ransacked his memory. “I have read reports on this planet—I think. I have seen films . . . Those blue-skinned people, with the odd horns . . . And, as I remember, odd ideas. It’s off all the trade routes, but the odd tramp calls here—Shaara, Hallichecki, as well as those from the human worlds . . .” The memories were coming back. “There was an incident—a Dog Star Line ship, and four of the officers, two men and two women, bathing naked in a lake. They were mobbed, stoned. Three of them died. The Dog Star Line screamed to the Admiralty. One of our—sorry, one of the Survey Service destroyers was sent here—not quite a punitive expedition, although it could have developed into one. But all that came of it was a directive to all Survey Service commanding officers and to all shipmasters that local prejudices, such as the nudity taboo, were to be respected. But there was, I believe, a show of force now that I come to think of it. The village near which the murders happened was razed to the ground, but with no loss of life . . .”
A snore interrupted him.
He saw that she was curled up on the padded deck, sleeping soundly.
He sighed, tried to sleep himself.
At last he did, but not before his memory had supplied him with more details about this unimportant planet, this world just waiting to be snapped up by one of the major powers but so poor, so far from anywhere that only a Shaara Rogue Queen would be tempted to seize the prize . . .
Darijja . . .
Dominant race, mammalian humanoids . . .
Major religion, Darajjan, the worship of the god Darajja . . . Puritanical, condemning all sensual pleasures, sexual intercourse especially . . .
Older religion Deluraixsamz, worshipping fertility deities Delur and Samz. Adherents now persecuted minority . . .
Grimes thought, And now they have a new persecuted minority—us.
He drifted into a twitching, nightmare-ridden sleep.