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Sail the Sea of Stars - chapter 11

 
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 13, 2016 5:11 pm    Post subject: Sail the Sea of Stars - chapter 11 Reply with quote




Chapter 11

Tall Tales and the Cargo Hold


The days rolled by as we neared Timbuk 3, and the crowded ship took on the flavor of a small town. Some of the Rembrandt's passengers volunteered to help the over-worked food service personnel, and as a result it became possible to get a meal without waiting in line for an hour. Because privacy was so scarce, people began finding out-out-the-way places to be alone for a while.

Chief Engineer Jimmy Lewton was making a routine inspection in the engineering section when he climbed a ladder that led to a dimly lit catwalk, one of several dozen which were woven among the complex machinery of the ship's engines. When he got to the top of the catwalk he found a young married couple who had previously been honeymooning aboard the Rembrandt. They were now honeymooning like crazy on Jimmy's catwalk. Jimmy scrambled down the ladder so fast he almost ended up in sick back with the recuperating combat crewmen.

Some of the injured combat crewmen had been released from sick bay, proudly brandishing their bandages and casts. War stories enjoyed a renewed popularity as the newly released warriors told and retold their tales of struggle and strategy, victory and defeat.

However, many of the Candlelight's people had not made it through the fighting. They were put to rest with honors on the morning after the battle. Danceea and I met for breakfast and then we joined the shuffling crowds of somber people, all headed for the huge main airlock complex. The six interior bridges were crowded with people when we arrived at the big room, the one with the clear crystalsteel wall that looked out onto the stars. We were fortunate to find a place to stand among the crowd that was filling up the area beneath the bridges, an open expanse of the big room's floor which could be rolled back to expose the cargo hold.

Unfortunately, most of the crewmen and former passengers had to view the funeral services on monitors throughout the ship.

Gumjaw brought the Candlelight to a halt in space. In the main airlock complex, one of the exterior boarding bridges was extended for twenty feet into space. Six crewmen in pressure suits went through the airlock — the pallbearers for this funeral among the stars, carrying the first of the bodies wrapped in the sailcloth for a traditional burial at sea. The pallbearers feet were held down by magnetic boots, the weightless bodies floating between them. Captain North stood by the transparent inner door of the airlock and read a passage from the Bible. His voice was heard by everyone all over the ship, including the pallbearers outside through the headsets in their helmets.

The six pressure-suited crewmen stood on the extended section of the boarding bridge holding the weightless body between them while Captain North read the first name from his list. Then the men ceremoniously sent the shrouded bodies sliding off among the stars. The body of the next deceased crewmen was passed through the airlock to men outside.

One by one the deceased were sent floating off into space, propelled by human hands — the hands of the crewmen who had known them. As I watched the ceremony I realized that the space-suited pall bearers were hearing each of the names, so they knew who they were committing to the bright sea of stars each time they pushed a coffin away from the Candlelight.

The Candlelight's crew accepted death with a stoicism derived from either their belief in the hereafter or their acceptance that death was the final end to a person's existence. But even in the Armed Forces, combat does not occur often enough for anybody to get blase' about death. War hasn't been entirely eradicated — it's just been greatly discouraged on the interstellar level. But when fighting does break out, it tends to be over very quickly.

Disputes between the various races are settled by the Council of Justice. Any defiance of a decision rendered by the Council is answered by the combined might of the Armed Forces. The Alliance doesn't waste much time with the idea of a "fair fight". The Council of Justice decides what is fair, and the Armed Forces does the fighting. On rare occasions this has resulted in the near-total annihilation of the guilty race. A sad necessity.

During the time between these infrequent conflicts, the starships of the Alliance Armed Forces keep pretty busy. The galactic stellacruisers, for example, have the most advanced medical facilities available in the galaxy. Whenever a major outbreak of disease occurs on some planet, a stellacruiser can be there within a few days at most, lending its facilities to the discovery (or mass production) of a cure. If the disease is something new, the Alliance often finds it best to send a ship crewed by a species with a drastically different physiology than one afflicted by the illness. Thus the medical staff are highly unlikely to contract the disease while investigating it.






In an area as big as our galaxy, such rare occurrences as supernovas happen about once every fifty years. Even though they are usually foreseen years in advance, it's still a monumental task to relocate the citizens of one or more planets. Convoys of starships are organized to evacuate the populace before their sun mutinies and destroys their planet. Near the galactic core, where stars are often located light-weeks apart, one nova can set off two or three others, and this necessitates an exodus that staggers the mind.

Imagine a line of starships hundreds of miles long, comprised of every conceivable type, some of which are impossibly huge, all plowing along in hyperdrive. Galactic stellacruisers zip up and down the line, transferring food stores between vessels, helping others to patch up repairs and modifications which were made in haste before the evacuation. More stellacruisers and stellascouts precede the convoy, blazing the trail ahead to make sure there are no tragic surprises in store, like black holes — or rogue planets which are streaking along at nearly light speed.

Science is still guessing as to the origin of these speeding rogue planets, but the most popular theory is that they have been ejected from a white hole. Unfortunately, nobody has actually found a white hole yet, but that really doesn't prove a thing. It is, after all, a big galaxy. It only seems small because of our speedy little starships.

Naturally, we miss a lot during the trip.

_________*________________*________________*_________

Danceea and I had dinner together that evening, and I greased the palm of the mess hall coordinator to get us a table in a quiet corner. That ancient phrase (grease the palm) was one of several I had used that puzzled Danceea, so I told her about the millions of old movies, documentaries, cartoons, short subjects, and educational programs that were available through the ship's library. I explained how there were many crewmen aboard who loved nothing better than to sit back and watch some old black-and-white, two-dimensional, monophonic classic of early cinematic artistry, thrilling to the exploits of Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks (junior and senior), Burt Lancaster, Mark Hamill, and John Wayne.

I told Danceea that once, about a year ago, I had made myself a local hero by instructing Gracie to fabricate a plausible soundtrack for all the old silent movies we had in the library, extrapolating plausible dialog from the plot of the film and the events being shown, as well as the characters' lip movements and the written text that periodically appeared on screen. Although the cinema purest threatened to throw me out an airlock for altering these beloved silent movies, other movie buffs were ecstatic about being able to run classics like The Black Pirate and Metropolis with well-done dialogue and sound effects dubbed in. Gracie even managed to pick music that fit the mood of each scene after I told her to compare similar scenes in movies from 1930s and 1940s.

It was a prime example of how good Gracie was getting at understanding human behavior. Her success at such a creative task kept me awake nights pondering the whole "self awareness" debate concerning artificial intelligence.

_________*________________*________________*_________

After dinner, Danceea and I started prowling through the busy ship again.

We ran across Chief Sandusky, whom Danceea remembered from the incident aboard the Beltherian ship. Sandusky revealed an unexpected charm by inviting us to his cabin, where he offered us his best bourbon. After one taste, we apologetically asked for glasses of wine. (Any wine!) Sandusky didn't seem offended, and he poured us each a glass of something called Ch??teau Margaux — which was so much better than the bourbon we'd had earlier, Danceea and I guzzled it down like we'd just crawled across the Sahara and would have gleefully French kissed a camel just to moisten our parched lips.

Sandusky's five roommates (three fellow crewmen and two Rembrandt passengers) were all at dinner. Danceea and I listened to tales of Sandusky's days as a Field Study Protector. A Protector is a member of the armed expedition who accompanies scientific teams which investigate newly discovered, uninhabited planets. The chief poetically described a Protector as the point man for the march of civilization. It didn't sound like anything the chief would usually say, so I chalked it up to the bourbon.

Sandusky told us of his first assignment as a Protector, when he and the rest of the Field Study Team had been sent to a planet called Quick Wind. The honor of naming an new uninhabited planet traditionally goes to the discoverer. The Field Study Team soon learned the source of Quick Wind's name when they discovered it had a nasty habit of developing atmospheric frontal waves which rolled across entire continents a 200 miles an hour, blowing everything to kingdom come.

It was a real pity, said Chief Sandusky, because other than that it was nice little planet.

Sandusky's second assignment as a Protector took him to a planet called Primeval, so named because its equatorial region was crawling with great dinosaur-like beasts which slogged around in the steamy swamps, eating each other. However, about midway between the equator and the poles of the planet was an area perfectly suitable for habitation.

Just don't go south for the winter.

Danceea and I left Sandusky's cabin about 9:30 pm. The chief walked us to the door like the father of a teenage girl who was going out with her new boy friend. He must have felt that our romance had gotten off to a noble start when I'd saved Danceea's life. Sandusky had been both a good host and a skilled yarn teller, knowing just when to stop, leaving the audience wanting more. We really did want more, so our next port-of-call was the cabin of Sam and Beth Kellogg (Mr. and Mrs. Gumjaw, the chief helmsman and his wife). The Kellogg's were currently sharing their cabin with another married couble, displaced from the Rembrandt. As soon as we sat down with the Kelloggs and their temporary cabin mates I said, "Sam, this gal doesn't believe you were a pilot for an agricultural supply service before you signed your first contract with the Alliance Armed Forces."

That's all it took. Gumjaw grinned and proceeded to tell us about his younger days on the planet of this birth. It was called Hinkle's Home, named after Julius Hinkle, a short self-styled adventurer who met a Simbeggian freighter captain in a space port bar called Duffy's Revenge on Dusseldorf Two. Hinkle overheard the non-human captain and his first mate discussing a previously undiscovered planet they had stumbled upon. The Alliance paid a monumental finder's fee for information about uninhabited planets that were suitable for colonization. The crafty Mr. Hinkle had recently heard that ordinary tobacco smoke made Simbeggians blissfully intoxicated, so he sat down with the unsuspecting nonhumans, lit up a cigarette, and made his new friends very happy.

Pretty soon he had the coordinates of the new planet, and he hastily departed for the Nolajax system to file his claim. In all fairness to Hinkle, it should be noted that he used a good portion of his finder's fee to buy two tons of cigarettes, which he left for the Simbeggian crew when they arrived at the Nolajax system to report the new planet. The Simbeggians sold the cigarettes on their home world for a sizeable fortune. Julius Hinkle used the rest of his finder's fee to buy the choicest piece of real estate he could find on the planet that now bore his name, and he settled down there to enjoy the fame he had always wanted.

Hinkle's Home is a beautiful, mountainous planet with farms nestled into the valleys and clinging to the sides of the mountains. When Samual Kellogg was about eighteen he had flown a delivery service for an agricultural supply firm. He told us about the time a rockhog had gotten loose in the cargo compartment and ate its way into a package which contained a drug used on live stock to stimulate their nervous system and encourage breeding. Gumjaw said the two thousand pound beast had almost kicked the aircraft apart because there was nothing in the cargo compartment for it to breed with!

By the time Sam finished his tale of unrequited love, it was getting late. Danceea and I departed, thanking our host and hostess for their hospitality. Danceea wanted to explore some more, so explore we did. We poked our noses into places aboard the Candlelight that I had not seen since my first few curious weeks aboard ship.

"It's going to seem awfully quiet around here after you folks leave," I said as we strolled along.

"You won't have to sleep on the floor any more."

"I'm starting to like it."

"Not really."

"Okay, not really, but there have been other things that compensated for the crowded condition."

She gave me a sly look. "What other things?".

"Are you fishing for a compliment?"

"Shamelessly. What other things, Newcastle?"

"Like meeting you," I said.

"Not really."

"Yeah, really. You're good to be with. You're fun to talk to. You've got impeccable taste in everything which you agree with me on."

After a burst of laughter she said, "How incredibly pompous!"

"See? That's another thing. You've got a great sense of humor. What a gal."

We entered the brightly lit, well-populated cargo hold, where more than nine hundred crewmen and Rembrandt passengers had set up housekeeping among the mountains of boxes, crates, barrels, and bundles that filled the huge room. A reasonable effort had been made to arrange the cargo (most of it from the Rembrandt) so that there were clear aisles criss-crossing the room. But the job of loading it had been necessarily rushed, so the aisles were a crooked labyrinth of odd angles and varying widths.

"Boy, what a circus!" said Danceea.

"Hey, I may move down here."

Air mattresses and foam mats were laid out on every horizontal surface. The piled-up cargo was often stacked in a pyramid shape, and the stairway-like layers were occupied by the noisy citizens of this make-shift community. Conversation flourished as the chief source of entertainment, but there was one other pastime that caught my attention. Roughly one out of every ten people were carrying a palmcom (a palm-sized computer/phone/camera). It took me a few minutes to realize that many of the palmcoms was running an informational video concerning our surface leave planet, Tason.

"Stop for a second," I said to Danceea. We halted in the crooked aisle, surrounded by people and cargo and noise. "Listen."

From a dozen different palmcoms came the melodic voice of the narrator on the information video. Every palmcom was at a different part of the video, so the narration was a jumbled mass of overlapping words.

I gazed around the spacious cargo hold and felt the general enthusiasm which pervaded the Candlelight's personnel.

"Wow. I guess my fellow crewmen are a trifle excited about going to Tason."

"Sure sounds like it."

We started walking again, winding our way through the busy maze, drinking in the mad energy of it all. The ever-present palmcoms provided a montage of disjointed sentence fragments, fading in and out as we passed by them.

The purpose of this presentation is to acquaint you with some of the facts about the binary planets called Tason and Dante. This program is required viewing for all . . .

. . . Alliance Armed Forces, and as such your conduct is especially important. Again, congratulations and we hope you enjoy . . .

. . . called Tason and Dante. This program is required viewing for all service personnel who have been awarded a surface leave on Tason. Both Tason and Dante are terrestrial planets, though Dante is so volcanic . . .

. . . Tason remains unaffected by the tidal stress while Dante is constantly disrupted . . .

. . . generously laced with rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds, nearly all soil-bearing portions of the planet's surface are covered with lush vegetation, making Tason one of . . .

. . . the close proximity of Tason, the sister world. The two planets orbit each other's center of gravity at a distance of less than one hundred sixty thousand kilometers, causing both planets to experience tremendous tidal stress. Planetary geologist have been baffled for centuries as to how Tason remains unaffected by the tidal stress while Dante . . .

. . . an opportunity for service personnel to meet and converse with of the galaxy's most fascinating life forms . . .

. . . dedicated to providing an exciting and rewarding period of recreational enjoyment . . .

. . . and we hope you'll enjoy your surface leave on Tason.

The purpose of this presentation is to acquaint you with . . .


Groups of crewmen huddle around anyone with a palmcom showing the video, nudging each other back and forth as they watched the small monitors. Lone individuals could be seen perched high atop a mountain of crates, holding a palmcom and gazing at screen.

I found myself listening hard to the fragments of information we heard in passing. Enthusiasm is contagious, and there was a full-fledge epidemic going on here.

Danceea and I made our way across the huge cargo area and left the babbling crowd of Cargo Hold City behind. It was close to midnight, but I enjoyed the young lady's company so much I didn't want the evening to end.

"Everybody seems to be in a festive mood tonight," I said. "What would you like to do, now?"

"Ummm . . . let's cruise the escalators."

Here was a game we had played before. The Candlelight had three sets of escalators that zig-zag-zigged from the lowest deck to the highest. Every deck had a step off/on point along the sides of the escalators. So, Danceea and I would ride up an escalator, glancing down the corridors of each off/on point we passed, just to see what might be going on among the crowded ship's populace.

On deck four there was a massive group sing-along in progress. We heard the enthusiastic-but-undisciplined group's singing before we reached their deck, and we continued to hear them long after we had passed. Higher up, we went by a deck that was having an impromptu dance contest. We stopped and joined in, but we were quickly disqualified from the competition because we did too little dancing and too much hugging. Somehow I still felt like the winner.

We saw card games and chess matches, joke-telling contests and exercise sessions, heated debates and quiet conversations. The Candlelight's over-crowded cabins were not able to provide their occupants with any real privacy, so many people had just opened their cabin doors and turned each deck into a miniature community. This was the eve of their last day aboard ship, and they were celebrating.

After finally saying goodnight to Danceea around 2:00 AM I went to my cabin to put in an hour studying the Beltherian log. Even though the log had already been transmitted to Alliance Sector Central for a thorough analysis, I knew that Captain North would keep asking me if I had discovered anything useful. So, each day I studied the log for an hour or so in the hopes of finding something that would satisfy the captain.

My four roommates were fast asleep as I sat cross-legged on my foam mat. I wore the interface headset and spoke quietly to Gracie as we scanned through the data. Next to me, sound asleep in bed, was my boss Fernie Mann, his colossal nose sticking straight up in the air up like Pike's Peak, dimly illuminated by the room's night light.

After an hour of scanning routine data in the log, my eyelids began to droop and Gracie kept tell me to go to bed. But then I stumbled onto something that stirred my drowsy brain. It appeared to be a complete copy of Dr. Carrington's notes and data concerning the strange artifact that he and his team were en route to investigate. I was impressed by the fact that the Beltherians had realized Carrington's importance and had downloaded his files into their own log. Very thorough thieves, those Beltherians.

At the end of Carrington's data I found Surprise Number Two. The Beltherians had transmitted Carrington's data to a planet called Jaronu. I discovered that Jaronu had a Beltherian colony which coexisted with the indigenous population.

I composed a brief report on what I had discovered, and then I sent it to the on-duty communications officer so he could transmit it to Alliance Sector Central. Then I said goodnight to Gracie and curled up on my mat like a faithful dog, asleep by his master's bed. I hoped Captain North would ask me soon if I'd found anything interesting in the pirate ship's log.

Ah-ha, now that you mention it, Captain . . .

_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 13, 2016 11:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The most "Heinlien-esq" chapter so far. That's a compliment by the way!

One note- The ship would not have to be brought to a standstill during the funeral services, just dropped out of hyperspace or whatever.

I greatly like the first person aspect. It works well here.
I'm really interested in the characters by this point.
Good job!

Gord
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2016 9:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

_________________________________

Thanks for the encouragement. Very Happy

As for the ship coming to a full stop, I included that detail because it seemed the most respectful way to honor the dead. Like putting aside everything else during the ceremony.

But when you mentioned it —


Gord Green wrote:
One note- The ship would not have to be brought to a standstill during the funeral services, just dropped out of hyperspace or whatever.

— I started wondering if it was an actual part of the traditional ceremony. As luck would have it, it is. Wikipedia says this in the first paragraph of it's article on the subject.

Wikipeida wrote:
In preparation, the officer of the deck calls All hands bury the dead, and the ship is stopped (if possible). The ship's flags are lowered to half mast. The ship's crew, including a firing party, casket bearers and a bugler, are assembled on the deck.

So, I just got lucky on that one. Very Happy

However, when I was getting ready to post this chapter, I reluctantly made a last minute change in the burial description. The manuscript (first written in 1982) describes the bodies as being in coffins, with the usual handles on the sides that the space-suited pall bearers used to ceremoniously shove the coffins away from the ship.

The mental image of the men gripping the handles and giving the coffins a gentle push has always appealed to me. (In the movie version, we'd see a shot of the ship in the distance, while one of the coffin's slides past the camera. I wonder if I could make a picture for that shot? Smile )

But when I was getting this chapter ready for posting I suddenly thought I was wrong to put the bodies in coffins, and that the bodies should be sewn into sailcloth, to make the ceremony more like the time-honored maritime tradition.

However, the Wikipedia article clearly states that the body can either be wrapped in sailcloth or enclosed in a coffin (referred to in the article as a casket).


Wikipedia wrote:
The casket bearers tilt the platform with the casket, so that the casket slides off the platform into the ocean.

So, now I'm torn between wanting the ceremony to honor the centuries-old tradition of burial at sea and wanting to change the description back to the way I've pictured it for decades, with the coffins.

What do you think? You don't have years of preconceived notions to sway your opinion, so which should it be: sailcloth wrapping, or coffin with handles?

_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2016 2:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I would picture a sort of shell-like coffin (Think the photon torpedo tube from ST-RoK) with recessed handles. Possibly with a decal of the persons home country/planet. Black and silver and having a built in memorial/headstone.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2016 2:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Perfect! Maybe not black though, just because the photon torpedo/coffins were black — but hell yes, to all the rest! Very Happy

_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2016 5:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The ship probably fabricates "as needed" items, so why not metal with an light or dark oak or mahogany finish?

You wouldn't want a light or colorful finish.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2016 7:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

That sounds perfect. I'll change it back to coffins before I publish it. Thanks for setting me straight. Very Happy

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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Sun May 06, 2018 5:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Today I finally gotten around to removing the damn "???" in Sail the Sea Stars that some of the punctuation marks turned into when we moved All Sci-Fi from Randy's server to my own, and when I read our discussion above about "coffins vs traditional sailcloth wrappings" I realized that the traditional sailcloth works much better for this "burial at sea" scene.

But the published novel has, I think, coffins. So, I'll have to change that for future printings of the novel from Amazon.

_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)
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