Ride the Star Winds by A. Bertram Chandler

Author:A. Bertram Chandler [Chandler, A. Bertram]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Space Opera, Adventure, Fiction
ISBN: 9781451638127
Google: MkcHfAEACAAJ
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2012-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Grimes’s parents were waiting in the lounge at the base of the mooring mast. His mother embraced him, his father took his hand and grasped it warmly between both of his. Then Grimes introduced the two girls. He realized that he could not remember which one had been given Kelly as a surname and which one was Byrne. Why the hell, he asked himself, couldn’t Damien have had them entered in the books as sisters? As twin sisters, even. They looked enough alike. (Some little time later he raised this point with the two New Alicians. “But the admiral is very thorough, John,” Darleen told him. “To put us down as being related would have made nonsense of his files. It was explained to us. It is all a matter of blood groups and such . . . .”)

The older people did, as a matter of fact, look rather puzzled when Shirl and Darleen were introduced. But they asked no questions and, in any case, the Grimes household was one in which the use of given names was the rule rather than the exception.

Baggage was collected and then the party boarded the family hover-car. Grimes senior took the road in a direction away from the city, deviated from this on to what was little more than a rough track, heading toward what the old man called his private oasis. By now it was quite dark and overhead the black sky was ablaze with stars. In the spreading beam of the headlights green eyes gleamed with reflected radiance from the low brush on either side of the track. For a while an old man kangaroo bounded ahead of the vehicle until, at last, it collected its wits and broke away to the right, out of the path of the car.

The lights came on in the house as the hover-car approached. His father was still doing well, thought the spaceman, could still afford all the latest in robotic home help. The wide drive, dull-gleaming permaplast bordered with ornamental shrubs, had been swept clear of the dust that here, in the Red Center, got everywhere. Ahead, the wide door of the big garage slid up and open. The old man reduced speed at the very last moment and slid smoothly into the brilliantly lit interior. Gently sighing, the vehicle subsided in its skirts.

Grimes senior was first out of the car. Gallantly he assisted the ladies to alight—not that any of them needed his aid—leaving his son to cope with the baggage. A door slid open in one of the side walls. In it stood a woman—a transparent woman? No, not a woman. A robot in human female form, with what appeared to be delicate, beautifully fashioned, gleaming clockwork innards, some of the fragile-seeming wheels spinning rapidly, others with a barely perceptible movement.

“Come in,” said this obviously hellishly expensive automaton. “This is Liberty Hall. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.”

“Cor stiffen the bleeding crows!” said Grimes.

Matilda Grimes laughed without much humour.

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