Chapter 16
ALTHOUGH THE DISCHARGE of Sister Sue’s inward cargo had been only two days’ work, with no overtime involved, there was a delay of over a week before her loading for El Dorado could be started. Grimes took advantage of this respite to fly to Alice Springs to visit his parents. Williams could be trusted to look after things during the captain’s absence and Damien had raised no objections. (Grimes wondered if legally the Rear Admiral could have done so but deemed it polite to ask his permission before leaving Port Woomera.)
The city of Alice Springs had changed little since Grimes’ last time there. There were, he thought as the dirigible made its approach from the south and he looked out and down through the promenade deck windows, a few more white domes in the residential districts, an increase of the market garden acreage, vividly green in the desert, crisscrossed by shining irrigation canals. There seemed to have been a proliferation of the grey yet scintillant solar power collection screens.
His father and mother were waiting for him in the lounge at the base of the mooring mast. His maternal parent had changed very little; she was still tall and straight and slim, still with gleaming auburn hair that owed little to artifice. But his father had aged, more so than had been apparent in the small screen of the telephone when Grimes had called from Port Woomera. He, too, was tall but stooped and his abundant hair was white. His face was heavily lined. Yet the old boy, thought Grimes, looked prosperous enough. His historical romances must be paying him well.
They boarded the family electric runabout and drove to the Grimes home on the outskirts of the city, Matilda Grimes at the controls while the two men sat and talked in the back. His parents, Grimes discovered, had moved to a much larger house, one surrounded by a lush, sprinkler-fed garden. When the car stopped, a housebot of the latest model emerged to handle the baggage and contrived somehow to register disapproval of the single, small, battered case brought by the guest. Another uppity robot, thought Grimes, but said nothing.
Finally the three humans disposed themselves in the comfortably furnished sitting room, sipping the fragrant tea that Mrs. Grimes had made personally. “There are some things,” she said, “that robots just can’t do properly.” Her son agreed with her.
Afternoon tea gave way to pre-dinner drinks as the colors of the garden, seen through the wide picture window, dimmed and darkened in the fast gathering twilight. But not every plant faded into near invisibility. Grimes was pleased to see that the Mudooran sparkle bush that, as little more than a seedling, he had brought to his parents as a gift had not only survived but flourished, was now a small tree decorated with starlike blossoms, softly self-luminous, multicolored.
His mother saw what he was looking at.
She said, “We have always loved that bush, John. We’ve told ourselves that as it survived in what, to it, is an alien environment so you would survive. And, like it, you have not only survived but done well. A captain and a shipowner.” She frowned slightly. “But I still wish that you could have become a captain in the Survey Service.”
Grimes laughed. “So you still think that your illustrious ancestor . . .”
“And yours!” she snapped.
“. . . would not have approved of my career. You’d have liked to have seen me become Admiral Lord Grimes, just as he became Admiral Lord Hornblower. But unless I emigrate to the Empire of Waverley I’ll never become a lord. Not that I can imagine King James elevating me to the peerage.”
“But John was a captain in the Survey Service,” said the elder Grimes.
“At times,” his wife told him, “you display an appalling ignorance of naval matters, inexcusable in one who is not only an historical novelist but who prides himself on the thoroughness of his research. John was captain of a Serpent Class courier—but his actual rank was only lieutenant. He was captain of bigger ships—first as a lieutenant commander, then as commander. But he never wore the four gold rings on his sleeve.”
George Whitley Grimes laughed. “Anybody who is in command is a captain, no matter what he does or does not wear. What do you say, John?”
“I’m a captain,” said Grimes. “I’m called that.”
“But a merchant captain,” said his mother. “It’s only a courtesy title. And the uniform you wear is only company’s livery.”
“But my company,” Grimes told her. “Far Traveler Couriers. And what Survey Service captain owns the ship that he commands or wears uniform trimmings of his own design?”
“But you still aren’t a Survey Service captain,” said his mother stubbornly.
But I am, my dearest Matilda, he thought. I’m Captain John Grimes, Federation Survey Service Reserve. It’s a pity that I can’t tell you.
***
Later during his stay Grimes talked with his father about the old-time privateers, trying to draw upon the old man’s fund of historical knowledge.
“Perhaps the most famous, or notorious,” said the author, “was Captain Kidd, although most people think that he was a pirate. He was tried as such, found guilty and hanged. For murder as well as piracy. During a heated altercation with his gunner, one William Moore, he broke that officer’s skull with a wooden bucket.”
“I murdered William Moore as I sailed,” sang Grimes tunelessly.
“I murdered William Moore as I sailed,
I knocked him on the head
Till he bled the scuppers red
And I heaved him with the lead
As I sailed . . .”
“So you know something of the story,” said Grimes’ father.
“Yes. But carry on, George.”
“Kidd was commissioned as a privateer. He was authorized both to seize French vessels—at that time England was at war with France, a very common state of affairs—and to hunt down pirates. It was alleged that he joined forces with these same pirates and accumulated a huge treasure, which, to this day, has not been found . . .”
“If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em,” said Grimes.
“Not a very moral attitude, young man. But it seems possible, probable even, that Kidd was framed. There were some very dirty politics involved. The Governor of New York, then a British colony, had his reasons for wishing Kidd silenced. Permanently.”
“Mphm,” grunted Grimes. What dirty politics would he be getting mixed up in, he wondered.
“And then,” his father continued, “there was the literary buccaneer, Dampier. He was one of the first Europeans to reach Australia. He made his landings on the west coast and was impressed neither by the country nor its inhabitants. He actually started his seafaring career as a pirate but somehow acquired a veneer of respectability. He was actually appointed by the British Admiralty to command one of their ships on a voyage of exploration. After that he sailed as a privateer, making two voyages. On the second one he hit it rich . . .”
“So there was money in privateering,” said Grimes.
“Of course. Why else should a group of merchants buy a ship and fit her out and man her as what was, in effect, a privately owned man-o’-war? But the days of the privateer, on Earth’s seas, were finished by the Second Hague Conference in 1907, Old Reckoning. Then it was ruled that a warship must be a unit of a national navy.”
“You’ve been swotting this up,” accused Grimes.
“As a matter of fact, I have. I’m working on an ‘If Of History’ novel. About the Australian War of Independence, which started with the Massacre at Glenrowan, when the Kelly Gang slaughtered all the police aboard the special train. In actual history, of course, the special train was not derailed—the Glenrowan schoolteacher, Curnow, flagged it down before it got to the torn-up track—and it was the Kelly Gang that was wiped out . . .”
“I know, I know. And Ned Kelly is supposed to have been a freedom fighter. But he was a bushranger, not a privateer.”
“Let me finish, John. Among the characters in my novel is a millionaire American shipowner who’s very anti-British. And he has two of his ships fitted out as privateers to harry Pommy merchantmen.”
“Cor stone my Aunt Fanny up a gum tree!” exclaimed Grimes. “The things you come up with! I’d just hate to be a character in one of your books!”
“I still think that the Australian War of Independence was a possibility,” said the writer. “And, back in 1880, privateering was still legal. Anyhow, I got interested in the subject and carried on with more research. As far as I can gather, the 1907 Hague Conference ruling still holds good—but possibly only insofar as the Federated Worlds are concerned. It could be argued that any planet not in the Interstellar Federation can make its own rules. On the other hand, I have learned that the Federation’s Interstellar Navigation Regulations are observed by just about everybody.”
“I could have told you that,” said Grimes. “They’re taken as a model by all spacefaring races. But, getting back to the subject of privateering, there have been astronautical precedents. The notorious Black Bart, for example. He—like Captain Kidd—is widely regarded as having been a pirate. But he always maintained that he was a privateer. His planetary base was within the sphere of influence of the Duchy of Waldegren. The Duchy tolerated him, as long as he paid the taxes. They tolerated and, at times, used him. They weren’t very fussy about whom they employed—they still aren’t—any more than Black Bart was fussy about who employed him.”
“Why all this interest in privateering, John?” asked his father.
“Oh, well, I guess that it’s an interesting topic.”
“You aren’t thinking of going privateering?” asked the old man sharply.
“Who? Me?” countered Grimes.
“I wouldn’t put it past you. But if you do, don’t let your mother know. It’s bad enough that you never got to be a four-ring captain in the Survey Service, but if you become a privateer she’d tell you never to darken her door again.”
And what if I became both? Grimes asked himself.
But he said nothing.