His Majesty's Starship Read online

  “Psalms?” she said, puzzled.

  “One hundred and fifty songs collected together in the Bi-”

  “I know what the psalms are,” she said, impatiently. And she did. A lot of them had been set to truly beautiful music by musicians past and present. “Which one?”

  “Several. A lot of them talk about the glory of God’s creation. The sky, the thunder. Remember they were written by a desert people. Paradise was green hills and fertile land. Free flowing, clean, unprocessed water. Animals roaming about in the open.”

  “And?”

  Peter touched his chest. “And, I’m a Martian and I’ve never seen any of these things, until now. I want to see more and more and drink it in, and-” He waved the hand in a dismissive gesture. “That’s what. I said you wouldn’t understand.”

  “No, I can understand.” Julia was surprised, whether at him or at herself she couldn’t tell. But, yes, she could understand a man moved by beauty who wanted to see more. It made perfect sense and she said so.

  “You think so?” Now he was looking bashful.

  “I think so.” She gave him her friendliest smile to make up for her earlier bad temper. “I think we’ll have a great time.”

  *

  “Did you have any luck, Excellency?” Subhas Ranjitsinhji looked suitably solicitous on the aide’s display. Krishnamurthy was strolling through the Dome’s gardens, aide in one hand, the other behind his back. It was drawing on for evening: the sun was low and red, the air was warm and dry but not unpleasantly so. Always his favourite time of day, on any planet.

  “No, Subhas, I did not.” Krishnamurthy sighed, not sounding at all angry. His hopes had not, after all, been high but he always at least tried the most economical solution to any problem first. “He isn’t parting with it and the sole copy in existence is up on Ark Royal.”

  “Ark Royal’s friends have moved into a defensive formation around it, Excellency.”

  “So I was aware.” Krishnamurthy stopped and looked up at the sun, now so low he could look directly at it and not hurt his eyes. Tomorrow was the Convocation. This time tomorrow, that sun and everything upon which it shone might be his. “I think the time has come, Subhas.”

  “Execute?” Ranjitsinhji said, his face eager.

  Krishnamurthy sighed again, then nodded. “Execute,” he said.

  - 16 -

  21 May 2149

  Sharman flew east over the Roving’s main continent towards the night, cruising at supersonic speed over the plains and mountains and desert, and Julia Coyne finally began to feel nervous. They were going into the unknown and this time there wasn’t even a briefing pack to prepare them for whatever might lie ahead. Even Arm Wild’s presence was only just reassuring.

  She sneaked a look at the others with her. Arm Wild was in his chair, staring silently into the distance with cat-like passivity that was all the more intense because she couldn’t even begin to guess what his body language was saying. All she knew was that he was a great admirer of the performer Leaf Ruby and he said he was just as honoured by this invitation as she. The unexpectedly nature-loving Peter was in the seat next to her.

  They were four miles up and supersonic, so getting much feel of the Roving was hard; but even so, when she looked out of the small windows Julia got the hinted shapes of a great, unknown continent. Yes, the Rusties were here first, but the Roving was still by and large empty. It could almost crush you if you thought too much about it: which way to go? Where to turn? Where to start exploring, finding out about the place?

  Well, circumstances had dictated the answer, at least for her and for Peter. Start in the highlands.

  It was already dusk when Sharman got there, slowing to subsonic and coming down to meet the ground. Tall, steep mountains were picked out on the radar, their positions carefully stored in Sharman’s memory for future reference. Now sharp peaks were rising above the boat but Adrian flew them on. Arm Wild had gone forward to the cockpit to translate the orders of the Rustie flight controller, out there somewhere in the dark.

  “Come round five degrees eastwards,” Arm Wild said.

  “Five degrees aye.” Sharman banked.

  “You should be able to observe the landing field now.”

  “I have it,” Adrian said.

  “Land when you’re ready.”

  “Right-o.” Adrian bit his lip and fired the verticals, then cut the main engines until Sharman was hovering, then began to set the boat down. For the first time in his life, Julia realised, Adrian was ending a flight in a way that wasn’t docking with a ship or putting down on an automated landing pad with radio beacon, ground crew and full facilities. In space the Rusties had antigravity and step-through but down here the simple life was quite sufficient for them and Adrian was literally landing in a field.

  “Cross wind,” Adrian said, and made manual compensation. The noise of the verticals peaked as the boat touched down with a gentle bump. The engines died to a quiet murmur and he grinned triumphantly at her. “No problem!”

  “Well done,” she said.

  “Hey! I could land anywhere.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He looked at one of the displays. “It’s chilly out there. Twelve degrees, ten knot wind, pressure lower than sea level-”

  “It would be.”

  “-I mean, a lot lower. No running around.”

  “We won’t.” Julia went aft to find Peter ready by the door. “Open up.”

  The door opened and there was a hiss of air leaving the cabin: yes, the air was thin up here. And distinctly cooler than the west coast: she felt the chill cut in before her weathersuit’s heater began to compensate.

  “Well, let’s go,” Peter said, and led the way. Julia remembered to take the pack of provisions from one of the lockers before following. They really were the first people to be in a totally alien environment on this world: not a thing out there had been designed or created with humans in mind.

  An even more prosaic need than food and drink had already been taken care of, in the small room at the rear of Sharman’s cabin.

  “Get a good distance away!” Adrian called. “I’ll pick you up in three hours.”

  The three of them stepped down onto the ground and walked away from the boat. A crowd of Rusties came trotting towards them and the one in the lead stopped in front of Arm Wild. The two touched their graspers for a moment, speaking in their own language.

  “This is Leaf Ruby,” Arm Wild said in Standard. “Before I acquaint you we should move away from your ship.”

  Sharman’s engines powered up again as they left the cordoned off area and they turned to watch it go. The noise was deafening. Peter and Julia covered their ears and the Rusties rolled their own ears up – something Julia hadn’t seen before and which made her want to chuckle. Sharman lifted with apparent reluctance and with a deceptive slowness, and then the roar doubled and the nose tilted upwards and it flew off. In a few seconds it was just a burning light in the sky, and they heard the noise of the engines go to full throttle and the sonic boom echo around the mountains as the boat blazed away, up and back to Ark Royal.

  And now, Julia really did feel alone. She glanced over at Peter and resisted the urge to hold his hand – not because he was male or particularly good-looking but because, not counting straight up, he was the only human for thousands of miles around.

  “Leaf Ruby asks us to pursue,” Arm Wild said.

  Surrounded by a knot of Rusties they left the landing field and headed for a gap in the trees a hundred yards away. The path was marked out by flaring beacons that gave out a delicious warmth as they passed by. Julia took a close look at the Rusties, wearing only their usual harnesses and ornamentation, and wondered how they managed to keep warm. It seemed that the “flakes’ of rust on their skin were contracted together, not hanging so loosely but forming a more solid shell around their bodies. Maybe that was how they did it.

  They left the trees and found themselves looking out over a small town.


  “Wow,” Peter said, and Julia felt it too.

  They were standing on the rim of a large natural bowl and were looking down on the buildings, lit up by a mixture of artificial light and fires that gave the place a very homely appearance. The stone, as far as they could tell in the dim light, was somewhere between yellow and grey: the buildings were very straight in their lines, generally much longer than they were tall with a very definite sense of symmetry. It felt like an old place. The buildings merged into one another and into the landscape. Nothing was glaringly new. It was very lived in. This wasn’t Capital, a planned city despite its natural feel. This was a proper Rustie community.

  They were led along a winding gravel path that made its way down the edge of the bowl, and Julia was seeing more Rusties together in one place than ever before. Fat ones, thin ones, big ones, small ones – she smiled at the sight of one or two very small ones indeed, clinging onto the backs of larger Rusties.

  The number of heads bobbing along at waist level made a purely human association in Julia’s mind and she felt she was surrounded by children, or a mother duck surrounded by her brood. She had to stop herself reaching out and tickling Leaf Ruby between the ears.

  “Who lives here, Arm Wild?” said Peter. “What do all these First Breed do?”

  “They are artists,” Arm Wild said. “It is the speciality of the Highlands clan, just as my clan, the Southern Plains, has always been known for yielding diplomats.”

  Julia’s heart pounded and she looked around with a fresh eye. A whole community given to art. Wonderful! Nothing on Earth had ever been quite so dedicated. It was then that she knew where she wanted her life to go. She would serve her remaining three years with the Fleet, or see if she could buy herself out early, and then come back here. Whoever won the bid, they surely wouldn’t object. She would return to this bowl in the mountains where the Highlands clan gave itself to art, and together they would form the first ever cross-species cultural institute. She would-

  Peter had stopped walking and was looking at a nearby wall. Close-up, she could see it was covered with what she assumed were hieroglyphics. A frieze ran around the edge of the wall, displaying Rusties of all shapes and sizes and stylised in the same way as the Rusties of the monument back in Capital, but she was certain the rest of the patterns were writing.

  Arm Wild said something to Leaf Ruby and the rest of the Rusties trotted off. Arm Wild stayed and walked over to the wall.

  “The history of the pride that abides here,” he said. “This section describes the births and deaths in a certain year three centuries ago, when Tail Star was Pride Senior.”

  “It’s ideogrammatic, isn’t it?” Peter said suddenly. Each glyph had a common core – a flattened oval, lying on its side – and around it were wiggles and squiggles. “I know how important bodytalk is to you. This-” He indicated the oval “-is a First Breed body, and these-” Now it was the surrounding trappings that he pointed to- “qualify the meaning somehow.”

  “Exactly right,” said Arm Wild.

  Julia gaped at Peter. “How-”

  He beamed at her. “I don’t know which end of an octave you hit a quaver with but I know object-oriented symbolic programming.”

  Julia looked around. The place reminded her of Maya cities back on Earth. The clean cut, dressed stone buildings crowded with foliage; the earthen paths between them; the fires burning against a backdrop of thick forest and the jagged black line of distant mountains at sunfall. The overall low-tech feel and the general feel of antiquity-

  Antiquity. “Arm Wild, how old is this place?” she said.

  “This pridehall was fabricated about nine hundred years ago,” Arm Wild said. “Up there, the top right corner of the wall: that is the date of foundation.”

  1249, Julia thought. “That’s not right!”

  “I attest that it is.”

  “But ...”

  Peter saw the problem and came to the rescue. “What she means, Arm Wild, is, we didn’t know you had been on this world so long. You’ve always said you’re only a century or so ahead of us, but-”

  “This is our home world,” said Arm Wild.

  “Yeah, okay, you were born on this colony-”

  “It is not a colony. There is no other world. Only this.”

  They looked at him and he looked back. His bland, unreadable stare suddenly seemed more alien than ever.

  “But, your invitation said-” Julia began.

  “The invitation said, ‘We have a world which we would like to share with you.’ It went on to say, ‘There is room for both our races there. We call it the Roving.’ I assisted in the drafting of the invitation and there is not an error in it.”

  “But ... surely you’ve always said it was a colony-” said Peter.

  “You said it was a colony,” Arm Wild said. “Your preconceptions did the talking.”

  “So-” Peter said.

  Arm Wild turned away. “We should hurry. Leaf Ruby will soon begin.”

  There was a natural amphitheatre in the side of the bowl and the Rusties were gathered there, facing into it. The backdrop of the stage was a sheer wall of uncarved, weathered rock; boulders of different shapes and sizes were scattered at random around the floor of the basin.

  Cushions were provided and they sat down. A disembodied Rustie voice spoke out of the darkness and Arm Wild translated. “In honour of its guests from Earth, Leaf Ruby is to perform its most celebrated work, ‘The Attack of the Alpine Clan’.” From the murmuring and shuffling around them, Julia deduced the audience was pleased at the treat.

  The show began.

  A spotlight shone on a ledge halfway up the cliff and Leaf Ruby stood there, suspended on an island of rock floating in the dark. The Rustie began the gasp-and-wiggle combination that was fulltalk and Julia set her aide to record it all. Arm Wild continued to translate.

  “The clans of the Bay Coast and the Peninsula were neighbours,” he said. Julia blinked because it appeared that in two areas the floor of the theatre was suddenly covered with Rusties. She looked again and saw that the effect was just shadows on the boulders. Glancing around, the only light source she could see was in the form of a couple of bonfires; other Rusties were using wood cut-outs to cast shadows.

  “Their grazing lands were wide and flat. The water was clean-” Arm Wild paused. “I am sorry. That was a very clever pun that always amuses me. I question that you caught it.”

  “Um, no,” Julia said, still taken with the shadow play below.

  “No matter. The sense of rhythm is probably lost in translation too. The ... there is no translation, be rapid, tell me a large Earth predatory animal-”

  “Lions?”

  “-the lions were few and the ... again, another ...”

  “Tyrannosaurs?”

  “... tyrannosaurs had been driven out. There was serenity in the land.”

  The fires flared up and Julia jumped. Leaf Ruby’s voice became louder, its gestures more urgent.

  “The summer was long and hot but there was no cause for worry. The leaves were drier than usual but still they gave sustenance. The streams dwindled to trickles but the rivers still ran and the wells were deep.

  “On ... our calendar cannot be translated easily, I am sorry ... on a particular date in the Peninsula, four hundred years ago, flames and lava spewed forth from the earth.”

  Now it really did seem that streams of molten rock were running down the cliff face, glowing red and wicked. The theatre was suddenly a glimpse into Hell.

  “The sky darkened and ash blew across the grazing lands, but still there was no worry, for the earth fires had come before and the people of the Peninsula had survived. The blaze lasted only two and a half days and the Peninsula clan prepared to move on to areas where the ash and lava had not fallen.”

  A new element was being added to the flowing lava: the flow was from above but a new, different glow was coming from below. More orange than red, it seemed that flames were licking up the
cliff. Leaf Ruby stood in the heart of an inferno.

  “The fires from the earth returned whence they had come but their children spread out across the land. The trees and the grazing lands were consumed. There was nowhere for the Peninsula people to go.”

  The story went on and Julia was swept up in it. It didn’t matter that all the skills and nuances being used by Leaf Ruby were completely lost on her, or that apparently part of the form was to repeat whole chunks of text verbatim, faithfully echoed by Arm Wild. The fires swept over the entire peninsula and their smoke clouded the sky for hundreds of miles around. The Peninsula clan was forced to move south to the Bay Coast and the Bay Coast clan didn’t want them. The Bay Coast wasn’t as naturally rich as the Peninsula had been and the long drought hadn’t been kind there either; the vegetation was tough and sparse and the last thing the occupants needed was a much larger refugee population sweeping in and doubling the drain on resources. The clash of the two clans was shown vividly by the shadows, where it seemed the two masses of Rusties swept violently into one another.

  The Bay Coast clan, not wishing to condemn their neighbours to starvation, offered them the use of sub-standard grazing lands that the Bay Coast clan didn’t want, which could have supported perhaps a tenth of the Peninsula clan. The Peninsula clan pressed for more but the Bay Coast clan couldn’t provide it. The clans began a mutual sniping campaign, individual prides encountering and first insulting, then fighting, then massacring one another. The fighting spread from the prides to the lodges and then to the clans themselves.

  The Peninsula clan was larger, it could more easily afford the losses and it was desperate. At the final battle it seemed certain that the Bay Coast clan would be annihilated.

  And then the Alpine clan attacked.

  Julia mentally filled in the sound of a cavalry bugle as a new horde of Rusties swept in from stage left: bigger, larger, fiercer but still only shadows. The battle was long and brutal but the Alpine clan was larger still than either of the others. After a week of fighting the Peninsula clan sued for peace, asking only that it not be made to return to the old lands. By now, sheer attrition had worn it down to a manageable size and it was merged with the Bay Coast clan. Its Pride Seniors were put to death and Bay Coast Seniors installed instead. Peace reigned again.