First Command (75 page)

She got her hands under his naked shoulders, tried to lift him. He got his hands about her shoulders, pulled her down. She struggled, kneeing him in the groin. He let go and she stood up, stepping back from him. The shirt had been torn from her upper body. In spite of the pain that she had inflicted on him he felt a surge of desire, reached out for her exposed breasts. She stepped back another pace.

He wanted her—but to get up to go after her was too much trouble.

But he muttered, “Do’n’ go . . . Do’n’ go . . . I . . . want . . . you . . . always . . . wanted . . . you . . .”

Her face was glistening oddly. Dimly he realized that she was weeping. She said, “Not
here.
Not
now.
Pull yourself together. Come back to the ship.”

He said—the words were coming more easily now, but were they his? “I . . . hate . . . ships . . . All . . . True . . . Followers . . . hate . . . ships . . . Stay . . . here . . . Be . . . happy . . .”

Her face and voice hardened. She said, “I’ll get you out of here by force!”

He was fast losing interest in the conversation. He reached out languidly from the omnipresent manna, chewed and swallowed.

He muttered, “Try . . . this . . . Make . . . you . . . human . . .”

But she was gone.

It did not matter.

The warmth of the communal life of the cavern surrounded him.

There were women.

And always there was the manna.

He slept.

He dreamed.

He was one of the crowd being harangued by the Pastor.

“We must sever all ties with Earth!” he heard. “We are the true, the real True Followers! Were we not saved by God himself from death and from deadly sin? But these Earth-men, who have intruded into our paradise, who have strayed from the true path, refuse to believe . . .”

“So burn the houses, my people! Destroy everything that links us to faithless Earth, even our herds and our crops!

“God’s own manna is all that we need, all that we shall ever need!”

And somebody else—Grimes knew that it was one of the community’s physicians—was crying over and over, in a sort of ecstasy, “Holy symbiosis! Holy symbiosis!”

Crackling flames and screaming pigs and the voices of the people, singing,

Bread of Heaven, bread of Heaven,

Feed me till I want no more, want no more . . .

Again the too bright light and again the hand shaking his shoulder . . .

“Wake up, John! Wake up!”

“Go ‘way . . .”

“John! Look at me!”

He opened his eyes.

She had placed her torch on a ledge so that it shone full upon her. She was naked. Diamonds gleamed in the braided coronet of the hair of her head and even in the heart-shaped growth at the scission of her thighs. She was a spaceman’s pin-up girl in the warm, living flesh.

She said softly, “You want me. You shall have me—but not here, among these degenerates, this filth.” She turned slowly, saying, “Follow . . .”

Almost he made the effort to get to his feet but it was too much trouble. With faint stirrings of regret he watched her luminous body swaying away from him. Once she turned and beckoned. He wondered vaguely why she should be wearing such an angry expression. And before she reached the mouth of the cave he had fallen back into sleep.

A long while or a little while—he had no way of knowing—later he awoke. After a few mouthfuls of manna he crawled until he found a woman.

And slept again.

And dreamed.

Subtly the dreams changed.

There were, as before, memories from the minds of the colonists who had long lived in symbiosis with the fungus but there were now other memories—brief flashes, indistinct at first but all the time increasing in clarity and duration. There were glimpses of the faces and the bodies of women whom he had known—Jane Pentecost, Maggie Lazenby, Ellen Russell, Una Freeman, Maya . . .

The women . . .

And the ships.

Lines from a long-ago read and long-ago forgotten piece of verse drifted through his mind:

The arching sky is calling

Spacemen back to their trade . . .

He was sitting in the control room of his first command, the little Serpent Class courier
Adder,
a king at last even though his realm, to others, was a very insignificant one. Obedient to the touch of his fingers on the console the tiny ship lifted from the Lindisfarne Base apron.

All hands! Stand by! Free Falling!

The lights below us fade . . .

And through the dream, louder and louder, surged the arhythmic hammering of a spaceship’s inertial drive.

He awoke.

He scooped a handful of manna from a nearby clump.

He chewed, swallowed.

Somehow it was not the same as it had been; there was a hint of bitterness, a rancidity. He relieved himself where he lay and then crawled over and among the recumbent bodies until he found a receptive woman.

Like a great, fat slug . . .
he thought briefly.

(But what was a slug? Surely nothing like this beautiful creature. . .)

After he was finished with her and she with him he drifted again into sleep, even though that mechanical clangor coming from somewhere outside the cave was a growing irritation.

He dreamed more vividly than before.

He had just brought
Discovery
down to a landing in the Paddington Oval on Botany Bay. His officers and the Marine guard behind him, he was marching down the ramp to the vividly green grass. Against the pale blue sky he could see the tall, white flagstaffs, each with its rippling ensign, dark blue with the cruciform constellation of silver stars in the fly, with the superimposed red, white and blue crosses in the upper canton.

There was a band playing.

He was singing in time to the familiar tune:

Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda,

You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me . . .

He awoke.

There was still that arythmic hammering, drifting in from somewhere outside—but the music, vastly amplified, almost drowned the mechanical racket.

Up jumped the swagman, sprang into the billabong,

“You’ll never catch me alive!” cried he . . .

And what was this noisome billabong into which he, Grimes, had plunged? Would his ghost still be heard after he was gone from it? Would his memories of Deep Space and the ships plying the star lanes remain to haunt the swinish dreamers of Farhaven? Would that honest old national song replace the phoney piety of the True Followers’ hymn?

Manna! he thought disgustedly, kicking out at a dim-glowing mass. It splattered under his bare foot and the stench was sickening. He was seized with an uncontrollable spasm of nausea. Drained and shaken he stumbled toward the cave entrance, the music luring him on as though he were one of the Pied Piper’s rats. He tripped over sleeping bodies. A woman clutched his ankle. He looked down at her. He could not be sure but he thought that she was the one responsible for his original downfall. Almost he brought his free foot smashing down on to her sleepily smiling face but, at the last moment, desisted.

She was what she was, just as he was what he was—and he had wallowed in the mire happily enough . . .

He stooped and with both hands gently disengaged her fingers.

He staggered on, finally out onto the ledge. The sunlight blinded him. Then at last he was able to see her, hanging above the valley, beautiful and brightly golden,
The Far Traveler.
It was from her that the music was blaring. It ceased suddenly, was replaced by the amplified voice of Big Sister.

“I am sending the pinnace for you, Captain Grimes. It will come as closely alongside the cliff as possible. The robots will help you aboard.”

He waited there, naked and filthy and ashamed, until the boat came for him.

Chapter 21

Grimes—clean,
clothed, depilated but still shaky—sat in the Baroness’s salon telling his story. She listened in silence, as did the omnipresent Big Sister.

When he was finished Big Sister said, “I must make a further analysis of the fungus specimens. Drug addiction among human and other intelligent life forms is not unusual, of course, but the symbiotic aspects of this case intrigue me.”

“And the dreams,” said Grimes. ‘The dreams . . . I must have experienced the entire history of the Lost Colony . . .”

“For years,” said Big Sister, “the fungus has been nourished by the waste products of the colonists’ bodies—and when they have died it has been nourished by the bodies themselves. It has become, in some way that I have yet to discover, the colonists. Is there not an old saying: A man is what he eats? This could be true for other living beings. And the symbiosis has been more, much more, than merely physical. By eating the fungus you, for a while, entered into the symbiotic relationship.”

“Very interesting,” commented Grimes. “But you must have known what was happening to me, even if not why or how. You should have sent in the robots to drag me out by force.”

“Command decisions are not my prerogative,” said Big Sister smugly. “Her Excellency did suggest that I attempt a forcible rescue but I dissuaded her. It was a matter for humans only, for humans to resolve for themselves, essentially for a human of your sort to resolve for himself. I know very well, Captain Grimes, how you hate robots, how your dislike for me has prevented you from being properly grateful for your rescue from Commander Delamere’s clutches.” There was a brief, almost human chuckle. “I did think that Her Excellency would be able to recapture you by the use of a
very
human bait, but her attempt was not successful . . .”

Grimes looked at the Baroness, remembering her as he had seen her. His ears burned as he flushed miserably. If she were embarrassed by her own memory of the occasion she did not show it.

“So,” went on Big Sister, “I made use of what I have learned of your peculiar psychology—your professional pride, your rather childish nationalism, your very real love of ships.” She paused, then said, “A man who loves ships can’t be all bad.”

“A man,” said the Baroness coldly, “who could refuse what
I
offered can’t be all man.”

He said, “I am sorry. I am truly sorry. But I was under the influence of the . . . manna . . .”

She said,
“In vino veritas,
Captain Grimes. And worst of all is the knowledge that the cacophony of a ship’s engines, the trite music of a folksong about an Australian sheep stealer, succeeded where
I
failed. I will tell you now that I had intended that a relationship—not permanent but mutually satisfying—would develop between us. There is little likelihood now that this will come to pass. Our relations will remain as they have been since I first engaged you, those between employer and employee.”

She turned away from Grimes, addressed the playmaster, ‘Take us up, Big Sister, up and away from this planet. I prefer not to remain on a world where I was unable successfully to compete with drug sodden degenerates or with an unhuman electronic intelligence.”

Grimes wondered if Big Sister was feeling as resentful as he was himself. Probably not, he thought. Nonhuman electronic intelligences must surely be unemotional.

Chapter 22

So
The Far Traveler
lifted from Farhaven, with Grimes far less in actual command of the vessel than he ever had been, proceeding in the general direction of the Shakespearian Sector, out toward the rim of the galaxy.

It was quite a while before the after effects of the drug wore off and until they did so Grimes was treated as a convalescent. It was during this period that he noticed a subtle change in Big Sister’s attitude toward him. He had, almost from the start, envisaged her as a bossy, hard-featured woman, hating and despising men. Now the imaginary flesh with which he clothed the electronic intelligence was that of an aunt whom, during his childhood, he had liked rather than loved, feared slightly, obeyed (for most of the time) during a period when his parents, away traveling, had left him in her charge. He recalled the unsuspected soft side of her nature which she had exhibited when he had been confined to his bed for some days after he had made a crash landing in the hot-air balloon that he had constructed himself, suffering two broken ribs and a fractured ankle.

She had pampered him then, just as Big Sister was pampering him now (and as the Baroness most certainly was not). Nonetheless, a year or so later, he had been very surprised when this aunt had embarked upon a whirlwind romance with a Dog Star Line second mate who was enjoying a spell of shore leave on Earth, returning with this spaceman to his home world. (Now, he thought, remembering, he would not have been surprised. As a child he had regarded the lady as a dragon but she had been the sort of tall, lean auburn-haired woman that the adult Grimes always fell for.)

Much as Big Sister reminded him of this aunt, thought Grimes, he could not imagine her eloping with anybody or anything. He supposed that, having saved him, she regarded herself as being responsible for him.

Eventually, when Big Sister decided that he was functioning as well as he ever would function, he was bidden to the Baroness’s presence.

The lady said, “I am informed that I once again can enjoy the services of my yachtmaster. Can you, out of your long and wide experience in the Survey Service, suggest our next port of call?”

He thought hard then said doubtfully, “Kinsolving?”

“Kinsolving,” she stated, “is not a Lost Colony.” (She must have been having a good rummage in Big Sister’s memory bank.) “It is one of the Rim Worlds. For some reason the colony was abandoned. There are now no people there at all. The object of my research, as well you know, is social evolution in the Lost Colonies. How can there be social evolution when there is nobody to evolve?”

Grimes tried not to sigh too audibly. He was never at home in this lushly appointed Owner’s Suite or in the comic opera uniform that he was obliged to wear during these audiences. He would have been far happier in his own quarters. At least there he could smoke his pipe in peace. But his employer did not approve of smoking. Fortunately she did not disapprove of the use of drugs other than tobacco, such as alcohol—and, Grimes was bound to admit, her robot butler mixed a superb dry martini. He was appreciating the one that he was sipping; Big Sister had at last given him permission to drink again.