Frederik Pohl - The Sweet, Sad Queen Of The Grazing Isles

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The Sweet, Sad Queen Of The Grazing Isles.By Frederik Pohl

From Pohlstars

version 1.0

THE SWEET, SAD QUEEN OF THE GRAZING ISLES

At the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago in 1982 I was part of a

panel

discussing the work of the late Cordwainer Smith (pseudonym of the Johns

Hopkins

political science professor, Paul M. A. Liriebarger). Paul Linebarger was an

author whom I published extensively as long as he lived while I was editing

Galaxy in the 1960s, and one whose work I greatly admire still. He was not

merely a contributor but a friend, for which reason he tolerated my practice

changing almost every title of the Cordwainer Smith stories I published.

(Other

writers were less forgiving.) While talking about this on the panel, it

occurred

to me that it was a long time since I had made up a Cordwainer Smith story

title. So I amused myself (in the boring periods while other people were

talking) by inventing titles for stories Paul had never written, but should

have. The one I liked best was this one. . . and so, that afternoon, as part

my self-imposed regime of defacing four pages of clean paper with writing

every

day of my life, I began to write a story to go with the title. I do not think

is a "Cordwainer Smith story' by any means. But I did borrow one of his

favorite

devices in the writing of it- perhaps some readers will detect which one.

In Twenty and Three, born at sea, Her daddy endowed her a legacy. In Twenty

and

Ten her brother Ben Stole the inheritance back again. She loves but she

loses,

she weeps as she smiles, The sweet, sad queen of the grazing isles

BECAUSE I DID THE OLD COMMODORE A FAVOR, he promised I would always have a

job

with the Fleet. I always did. I always do still, because even now I have the

job. The title and the pay and the working conditions have changed a dozen

times, and these times not the best of them. But even Jimmy Rex knows I have

that right to a job, and grants it. Meanly.

The favor I did for Commodore Mackenzie was done long before he was a

Commodore,

and I could have gone to jail for it. Jason, he said, give me a month. I need

extension on my loans, thirty days at most, and if you give it me, you'll

never

have to worry again as long as you live. I will worry, though, I said-a boy

still in his twenties, just a keypuncher in the records section of a

bank-I'll

worry about the law, at least until the statute of limitations runs out,

because

buggering the records is a penal offense. Only if they catch you, he said,

laughing, and that they can't do. For you'll be at sea, where the land law

cannot reach. It was his first oaty-boat that was building at the time, you

see,

and he had used up all his wife's money and all he could cajole out of his

first

two financial backers, and the third one, the big one, was trying to make up

his

mind to plunge.

He was a powerful man even then, James Mackenzie. No older than forty. no

gigger

than most but the blue eyes flashed and the smile was sure, and he knew how

talk a person toward any place he chose. But what decided me was not

Mackenzie.

It was his young wife, the lady Ella. She loved him. So I worked overtime one

night, and displayed his file, and changed a few dates, sweating with fear.

had his thirty days. And the backer did, at the last minute, come through

with

the money to finish the boat, and so James William Mackenzie became the

Commodore.

He was a son of a bitch, Commodore Mackenzie, but he had style. Fifty shares

stock I got and a title: Executive Assistant to the Fleet Captain. Very

grand.

Even if the fleet was still only a single vessel. But even one oaty-boat is a

huge and costly machine, two hundred thousand metric tons of hull and works,

towing twenty kilometers of tubes and pumps, with a deck the size of a

township.

The Commodore did something you won't believe with that deck, or at least

with

the part forward of the bridge. He planted it. He pumped aboard half a

million

cubic meters of San Francisco Bay bottom muck while the boat was still at the

builder's dock. The water ran off through the scuppers, and the soil

remained.

He sailed it up toward Tacoma for the deep-water fitting and steamed slowly

around the wettest, stormiest part of the Pacific Coast until the rain had

rinsed it clean. Seeds and slips and bulbs and saplings came aboard, and by

the

time we were on our first cruise there was grass there, and gardens, and the

beginnings of a grove. For his dear lady Ella hated the sea. So Owner's

Quarters

were an apartment below deck and a terrace above, and if you looked only

forward

you could think you were in some fine manor house with the weather always

balmy

and the lawn as steady as any on Earth. The weather was always fine because

oaty-boats are never in bad weather. That is why they are boats, instead of

drilling platforms or moored barges, so that they can seek out the places

where

sea and air are best to do their work.

And for four years they were happy, and I was happy, and the great boat

steamed

slowly through the fruitful patches of the southern ocean, sucking up the

cold

and pitting it against the warm, and, oh, how the money rolled in! And we

were

happiest of all in the fourth year, when Ella was pregnant. She was a tiny,

frail woman, all spirit and no stamina, and there were times when in even the

calmest seas she seemed unwell. Yet as a pregnant woman she bloomed, prettier

than ever and glowing with the child inside. The baby was born, even prettier

than her mother. It was in the month of May, and so they called her May, and

then the happiness stopped because Ella died. It was not childbirth alone-she

had the best of doctors, flown in from Sydney and San Francisco. It was

cancer.

She had known she had it, and kept it secret, and wouldn't let them cut it

away

because it would have cut away the unborn child as well. Childbirth merely

finished her off.

It was her wish to be buried on land. The Commodore walked dry-eyed through

the

crew quarters and crooked a finger at an oiler's mate named Elsie Van Dorn. A

large, plain woman, but a kind one. And when he came back from the funeral,

took all the Fleet stock that was in Ella's name and put it into baby May's,

and

gave me a new job. "Van Dorn will be May's nursemaid, he said, "but you'll be

her godfather. That was a joke, I think, because we had been told that money

was

his god. "You're Managing Director of the May Mackenzie Trust, and if you do

anything wrong with it I'll kill you. Even if I die for it. Even if I die

first,

for I'll leave a little sum of money and some orders, and someone will be

watching who has a gun. He still owed me for the favor I had done him, you

see,

but he remembered what it was.

And for seven years baby May grew, and wasn't a baby any more.

There are little girls with a face so fine and a look so sweet that they'll

break your heart. May was one. She was slight for her age, and all her life.

Yet

even when she first toddled she would pause, and stick her thumb in her

mouth,

and gaze out over the privet and the boxwood hedges at the southern seas with

ancient mariner's look of sadness and resignation that made you forget the

rumpled hair and the dragging diaper; and when she was old enough to talk and

tie her shoes, I fell in love. It is not a thing I want to have laughed at

and

so I will say no more, but it's true. I did. I loved her truly and purely,

and

went on doing so. Not as a godfather.

She had a father's love for those seven years, though. She was the

Commodore's

only daughter and his only legitimate child-the only child of his I saw then,

for the bastard was away at school and then at work in the Fleet's landside

offices. He was busy every minute, the Commodore, but he always found time to

see May and to play with her, and to tuck her in at night. I was less busy

than

that. There was not much work attached to being the Managing Director of the

May

Mackenzie Trust, for every penny of it was invested in the oaty fleet, two

ships, and then seven, and then a dozen; the money rolled in, but every spare

penny went back into building more. So I competed with Elsie Van Dorn. I

became

May's other nanny. They were the best years I have ever lived. I took her

with

me around the boat. We watched the dry ammonia powder being pumped out of our

belly into the hold of a tanker, kerchiefs to our noses to keep from

sneezing,

and we listened to the screaming hydrogen flow as it went into the

refrigeration

ships, the huge red flags warning us not to light a match or scratch a

spark-as

though anyone in the Fleet were such a fool! We watched the huge slow

spinning

of the low-pressure turbines as they transformed the heat into power, and we

waved good-by to the crews of the scout skimmers as they went out to seek

colder

depths and warmer air to steer toward. Every member of the crew knew May, and

petted her when she would let them. They weren't truly a crew. They were more

like a city, for we had power workers and fertilizer chemists and

oceanographers

and engineers and navigators and cooks and cleaning men and fire wardens and

ship's master and five assistants to guide us and half a dozen gardeners for

the

greensward and the farms on the afterdeck. There were more than eighteen

hundred

human beings on board, and I think May knew the name of every one. She knew

none

better than me. I was her godfather and her friend. There were a hundred

other

children on board, and four who were her special friends, but there was no

person who was more special than I.

And then the Commodore one morning came to breakfast in May's room, as he

always

did when he was aboard, and looked tired, admitted he'd had a bad night's

sleep,

got up from the table, fell face down on his plate, and died.

I could forgive the Commodore for dying. He didn't plan to do it, and it

happens

to us all. But I will never forgive him for dying with his will so written

that

his bastardly bastard son, Ben, became May's guardian until she was thirty

years

old.

He was aboard before the body was cold and had moved into the Commodore's

rooms

before the smoke of the Commodore's cigars was aired out. The will gave him

the

voting rights on May's stock. I could forbid him to sell a share. I could

take

the dividends and invest them anywhere I chose-but where was there a better

investment than the oaty fleet?

I could, in fact, do nothing.

For a month, then, I looked over my shoulder every minute, expecting to see

the

Commodore's hired assassin, but the assassin never came. All that came was a

note, one day, mailed from Papua New Guinea via the boat's air service, and

all

it said was, "It's not your fault, this time.

The Commodore never broke a promise to me but two. The first was that he'd

have

me killed if I failed to protect May's interest. I did fail her then, and knew

had, but I didn't die. The other promise was that I would never have to worry

again, because after he died, for twenty years and more. I did nothing else.

Later on, in Twenty-three, The queen she married, but not to me. Later still,

Twenty-four, A scowling imp of a son she bore. She bore him and raised him

for

years and miles, The son of the queen of the grazing isles.

When May was fifteen, Van Dorn went at last back to the engines, and May went

off to school. She took her four friends with her, the four other Mays with

whom

she'd grown up, but Ben would not allow me to join them. "You can keep your

job

and your pay, Jason, he said to me, "but leave my sister May alone, for when

she's ready to fall in love it will be with a rich boy and a sensible boy and

handsome boy, and not with a dirty old man who sleeps with her socks under

his

pillow. That was a lie. I told him it was a lie. But what was behind it was

lie, for the love was still there. If May had been five years older, if she

had

been a year older even, I might easily have told her what I felt before I let

her go. And might have got a good answer, perhaps. There was thirty years

between us, and I am not handsome. But she was easy with me, and trusted me,

and

had good reason for trust.

So Ben the Bastard fouled Owner's Quarters with his fat dark wife and their

sallow brat, Betsy, who never liked me. Nor I her, to be sure. That whole

family

was repellent. I never knew Ben's mother, but I knew who she was. A file

clerk

in a lawyer's office. The Commodore seduced her to get a look into the

lawyer's

contract files, where there was something worth money for him to see. He got

his

look. She got his child. He would never marry her, of course, for she hadn't

dime, and when she pupped his bastard, he was long gone away. I will say for

the

Commodore that he acknowledged the son. He paid the bills to bring him up,

even

when it was hard for him. He sent the boy through school and gave him a place

with the Fleet, though not at sea, but would never give him his name.

So it was Benjamin (which means "gift of God ) Zoll (for that was the woman's

name) who came aboard with the will in his pocket and the resolve in his

heart

to reign.

Well, he had more than arrogance. He was a mean- hearted man, but a

hardworking

one. The first day he was over the side in a diving mask, discovering cracks

the antifouling plates and surfacing in a fury. Twenty maintenance workers

lost

their jobs that day, but the next crew kept the plates repaired, and we saved

thousand dollars worth of steaming fuel a week.

An ocean-thermal generating boat lives off the temperature difference between

deep water and sun-warmed surface water. The top water warms the working

fluid-

a halocarbon with a low boiling point-and it becomes steam and goes through

the

low-pressure turbines to make electricity; the electricity splits water into

hydrogen and fixes nitrogen from the air, and we sell what it makes. The

difficulty is the halocarbon working fluid. It is too expensive to vent to

the

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Frederik Pohl - The Sweet, Sad Queen Of The Grazing Isles

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