Glory's People

by Alfred Coppel

  As the three auxiliaries from the Goldenwing drew to within a hundred kilometers of the Yamatan flotilla, Broni smiled with delight. The Yamatan mass-depletion ships were small, but they were slender as swallows with solar-cell wings not too unlike, at this distance, the wings that Glory spread. Tiny by comparison, but brave, Broni thought, the instincts of a Voersterian noblewoman showing through the decorum of a young female syndic about to meet the males of a fanatically paternalistic colonial society.

  It had taken Broni the better part of a shiptime year to take to syndic ways. She still felt more at ease in a skinsuit, which was what she wore now. A grand skinsuit it was, too. Vibrant with embroidery and appliques of the constellations of Near Space picked out in gold and silver. Dietr Krieg had encouraged her to don finery. “It will not do to let these colonials outshine us, Broni liebchen. Use the replicators--let Glory outfit you like a princess.”

  Broni ignored the temptation of reminding the Terrestrial that she was, in point of fact, a princess. Or as near as made no difference. On Voerster a Voertrekkersdatter was almost royal.

  At fifty kilometers Broni could make out the ornate decorations on the Shogun’s barge. It was an odd combination of Yamatan spacecraft and ancient Japanese junk. Its solar cells resembled closely the battened sails she had seen in Glory's database, and the hull was decorated with dragons and demons with scales of brilliant gold that burned in the rose-colored sunlight of Tau Ceti.

  Buele and Damon had closed in on either side of the shuttle she piloted, and Broni was satisfied with the precision of their station-keeping. Duncan would notice. So would Amaya, but unlike Duncan, she would make cutting remarks if all was not done perfectly.

  Recently Broni had begun to feel a certain rivalry with the Centauri woman. She was troubled by it, but whenever Amaya and Duncan went off alone together, for whatever purpose, Broni felt twinges of jealousy. Dietr explained the reason for this, though Broni would have much preferred that he did not. But that was the Terrestrial’s way. He was capable of remarkable sympathy and understanding, but it was always from without. Dietr Krieg was the least empathic of all Glory's syndics. Too much brain and too little heart, Broni thought, with an understanding beyond her years.

  Clustered protectively around the Shogun’s barge, the experimental MD ships looked delicate and fragile. They might be, thought Broni, but they carried within them a technology that might well mean the end of the Goldenwings. The thought made her shiver with distaste. At a hundred kilometers behind the shuttle and its accompanying sleds, Glory was still a dazzling sight. Broni never saw the great ship without a thrill of joy and pleasure. The thought that one day she might never sail again, that she might spend eternity orbiting some minor planet light-years out from the worlds she helped colonize and supply and repopulate, was more than could be borne without melancholy.

  “I love you, Great Ship, “ she thought. “You are my life. “

  That was an actual as well as a figurative truth. The artificial heart beneath Broni’s budding breasts would not keep her alive in a true-gravity well. Broni and Glory would live and die together.

  12. The Mephitic Chameleon

  Minoru Ishida, a man sometimes known as Tsunetomo and at other times simply as “Master,” stood with a group of low-ranking samurai near a vision port thoughtfully regarding the spacecraft the Shogun’s barge was overtaking.

  Ishida, who did not at all resemble the black, menacing figure encountered by Minamoto Kantaro in the Shogun’s garden only a day ago, was dressed in the modest garb of a ronin probationer in the ranks of Clan Takeda of Kai. Takeda outfitted his retainers with simple gray and brown silk. They were discouraged from wearing gold or silver ornaments, a simple prohibition to enforce because the Daimyo Yoshi of Kai paid the lowest wages in all Yamato. Lower, even, than the penurious Lord Genji of Hokkaido. Like all present save the Starmen, Ishida wore a grav unit beneath his hakama and kimono. The costly units belonged to the clans. Few samurai ever accumulated the price of such a device, but they were glad for the use of them, for dignity’s sake. None of the daimyo were willing to face the syndics on their home ground without the perceived advantage of being able to plant their feet firmly. The spectacle of a hundred or more Yamatan lords and their samurai floating helplessly about in free-fall was not to be tolerated. Ishida found this sardonically amusing. Like all ninja, he had been disciplined in nullgrav martial arts.

  Minoru Ishida had changed his appearance from a warrior of darkness into an undistinguished man of middle age, overweight and heavy-lidded from soft living. The personal retainers of the Yamatan daimyos often took on the characteristics of their Masters, and the Lord of Kai was slow-moving and pompous. Only Ishida’s eyes peering sharply out of a puffy face warned the onlooker that this was not an ordinary man. A close examination of his weapons carried the same message. The katana and wakizashi of his daisho were new, not family heirlooms, made of the best gray Yamatan steel, harder and sharper than any weapons ever forged by the swordmasters of ancient Japan.

  In addition to the traditional daisho carried by a samurai, Ishida had secreted about his person a set of six throwing stars, a wire garrote, and a selection of knives. He needed none of these tools of his trade. At the request of the daibatsu, the government-industrial combine, he had dispatched dozens bare-handed. Ninja used the old-style weapons only when the death needed to be correct.

  The guardian animal of the ninjas was the mephitic chameleon, a breed native to the islands on the homeworld. Despite the fact that no such animal existed on Planet Yamato, the kami was well chosen, a powerful symbol of death and duplicity.

  Ishida stood staring in apparent stupidity out of a port. To his companions he was simply the ex-ronin Ishida, a dull, aging man hired to do menial tasks for the higher-ranking members of Lord Yoshi’s retinue.

  After the failure in the center of Yedo City, Ishida had assumed the killing task himself as a matter of honor. There was no more proficient killer on Planet Yamato, and so the Wired One was as good as dead.

  But not before time. The original task had been merely to kill the gaijin in front of the people of Yedo. But it had got beyond that now. The Ninja Society might benefit vastly from the knowledge that could be had from the Starmen. One close look at their enormous starship could not fail to impress. Ishida had been prepared for that. But the Goldenwing’s sheer mass daunted even the Master of Yamatan Ninja. He had never seen a craft of sea, air or space one-hundredth the size of the Gloria Coelis. It was true that mere size was no fair measure of the treasures the vast craft might contain, but having taken the trouble to view the starship through the twenty-meter telescope on Moon Hideyoshi, some few of the daimyos, the ones who had originally contracted for the ninja to liquidate the foreigner, now expressed a willingness to allow some delay in destroying the stranger. Not that it really mattered. In any case, the Ninja Society’s decision to murder the Starman was now immutable. All that remained to be decided was when and under what circumstances. And these choices were Tsunetomo’s to make.

  Minamoto Kantaro was in the same compartment of the Dragonfly as Ishida, but though he had looked squarely at the ninja a dozen times, he had failed to recognize the man who had so contemptuously declined to kill him in his uncle’s garden. Members of the ninja caste on Yamato were skilled in many things. The art of assuming characteristics not one’s own was child’s play for the ninja Tsunetomo.

  “Gods,” a young Oda retainer breathed in awe to Kantaro. “The thing is enormous. “

  “But beautiful,” said a companion. “Have you ever seen anything so grand?” The retainers crowded at the viewport pressed one another to get a better view.

  At forty kilometers, the sun angle had changed so that the ruddy light of Amaterasu was refracted through Glory's rigging of translucent monofilament. The effect was breathtaking. The vast ship seemed to glow with jewelled fire. The fretwork on bow and stem (the work of Glory's first crew of syndics, who whiled away the long months of the first mi
ssion tamping gold leaf into the creases and crevices of the Goldenwing’s long, curving shear-line) made a pattern of golden fire dancing along the hull with each change of angle and aspect. The Yamatans, trained since infancy to respond to exhibitions of aesthetic beauty, murmured with pleasure.

  Ishida allowed his attention to shift from the Goldenwing to the high-ranking daimyos who stood above the deck on a steel mezzanine with the Shogun and the members of his personal security detachment. The ninja’s hand vanished into a bolse to fondle a throwing star. Fondling death-dealing artifacts gave Ishida much pleasure.

  Great ninjas before him had made Yamatan history by assassinating Shoguns. For Ishida, the temptation to make history was always present, he thought ruefully, withdrawing his empty hand. When all this was done, he thought, he must have a long retreat in the mountains of Hokkaido. Solitude always healed the psychological wounds he inflicted upon himself in the course of performing his dark duties.

  The male gaijin stood at the port with Minamoto Kantaro. He was a tall, melancholy man with deep, far-seeing blue eyes. He would bear watching, Ishida thought. And he would be best killed by stealth. He had the look of an experienced warrior. Who knew what battles he had fought, or where. He was explaining something about the Goldenwing to Minamoto. The retainers pressed near to hear what he had to say.

  The ninja looked away and back at the golden apparition that was now rapidly filling space. The thing was, as the awestruck samurai had said with such feeling, simply enormous. Amidships, it had a midship beam of almost a quarter kilometer, yet it was so long it seemed slender and graceful as a bird. Ishida wondered how it would look with golden skylar spread from the thousands of yards crossing its ten-kilometer-tall masts.

  Three small craft, glittering like diamond chips in the roseate light of Amaterasu, had taken stations around the Shogun’s barge. One was a shuttle comparable in size to the MD ships accompanying the Dragonfly; the others were sketches of spacecraft, one fitted with a bubble, the other no more than an open frame, both with simple reaction engines working. The gaijin called them sleds. Ishida wondered at the primitive technology they represented.

  The Yamatan ships assumed a line-astern formation, apparently in response to some orders from the craft from the Goldenwing. In a long arc, all approached the starship’s stern, where a huge hatch was in the process of opening, displaying a cavernous interior lit with illumination that matched exactly the shade and color of Amaterasu. If the Starmen had contrived that as a courtesy to their visitors, it was neatly done, Ishida thought. Familiar light-tones and intensities would be calculated to make the colonists feel more comfortable and at ease in surroundings that were, assuredly, stranger than any Yamatans had experienced since the days of their transit aboard Goldenwing Hachiman.

  Ishida watched as the range closed. With each meter travelled the starship appeared to expand until it seemed that it would fill all the sky. Could it possibly be true, Ishida wondered, that such a construct was crewed by six people? Perhaps a reevaluation of the technology he was so recently tempted to disparage was in order.

  Attended by its flotilla of MD ships, Dragonfly approached the looming stem of the Goldenwing. The opening now was displayed in its true dimensions. From one side of the open hatch to the other was two-thirds of a kilometer, perhaps even more. The fittings that Ishida could see were posts and strakes of what appeared to be titanium--a metal used sparingly in Yamato because of its rarity and cost. The opening easily accommodated Dragonfly, whose pilot carefully followed the foreign shuttlecraft into the huge interior.

  The passengers had fallen into a hushed silence. Not one of them had ever been inside a human construct of this size. Even the temple of Hachiman in the necropolis of Kyoto on Kyushu was not so large as this single great space within the Goldenwing. They call her “Glory of Heaven, “ Ishida thought. She is well named. But she is made of fragile titanium bones and monofilament fabric. Her sails must be as delicate as an insect’s wing. To murder her Master could very well bring about her destruction.

  He smiled a secret smile. That would be a ninja act of murder that would cause Yamatans still a thousand years unborn to shudder with terror.

  13. These Are Samurai?

  The great stern hatch descended soundlessly in the hard vacuum, blotting out the shining, coppery image of Yamato, and beyond, the brilliant disks of the nearer moons, Hideyoshi and Nobunaga.

  Dragonfly and the MD spacecraft occupied only a fraction of the deck space within Glory's vast hangar. The fabric bulkheads curved inward with the air pressure elsewhere within the ship, but as the great hatch closed, atmosphere began swiftly to build within the compartment.

  Warned to stay within their vessels until a safe environment was established, the Yamatans pressed against the ports of their ships, staring at their surroundings with undisguised awe.

  Broni, delighting in her speed-learned Japanese, broadcast instructions over the shuttle’s communications net. She hoped that Duncan was paying close attention and appreciating how much effort she had made to become instantly proficient in the language of Yamato, and how much information she had absorbed through her still-new neural drogue.

  “If you will please be so kind as to stay within your ships until the atmosphere in the compartment is fully established. Syndic Kr-san will tell you when it is safe to debark. “

  The use of the archaic word debark appealed to Broni. Even on Voerster, where two-thirds of the planet was ocean, such ancient expressions relating to ships and the sea were seldom used. But Duncan, a native of pelagic Thalassa, would appreciate the appropriateness of her phrasing.

  The hangar illumination rose as the hatch descended and closed. Glory had duplicated the light of morning on Yamato. In the distance, holographic forests of Terrestrial pines lent a feeling of open, mountainous country.

  Damon Ng, dismounting from his sled, stood respectfully before the still-latched hatch in Dragonfly's belly. The Shogun’s barge was equipped with large and antique gravity controllers designed fifty planetary years before for the comfort of the then Shogun. They were being used now to keep the mass of the ship suspended three meters above the woven monofilament deck.

  The Goldenwing sailors created a sense of wonder by the size and purpose of their great ship, but the Yamatans were a proud people, a people secure in their scientific and technological skill. There were things about which they could feel superior to the Starmen. It had surprised many aboard Dragonfly that the syndics made no effort to create and manipulate gravity. And it pleased them that there were technological accomplishments they, the Yamatans, had achieved that the Starmen had not.

  Damon Ng, standing now with unlatched helmet and gripping the deck beneath him with Velcro soles of his boots, was as impressed as the Yamatans could have wished with the spectacle before him of their massive ship hovering above the hangar deck as steadily as if it were anchored with mooring and spring lines.

  He spoke into his com unit: “The atmosphere is now breathable, honored sirs. You may open your hatches and debark. “

  The hatches of the barge dilated, extruded handsomely decorated ladders. The Yamatans began to descend. Their silk clothing, kimonos and hakamas finely embroidered with gold and silver dragons and mythical designs, rustled as they moved. Damon made a great effort to retain an impassive face, but on Nixon, the wooded forest world where he was born, no one, no matter how wealthy or highborn, wore such magnificent clothing.

  Warriors wearing two swords thrust through their blood-red sashes descended to the softly giving deck of the hangar bay. The grav units they wore were state-of-the-art devices fitted closely to the wearer, but they still marred the line of the Yamatans’ sartorial magnificence with their bulk. Nor were the armed men accustomed to wearing the grav harnesses. The samurais’ movements were not exactly what they would have been on the surface of the planet below. They moved like men burdened. Damon wondered why they should so handicap and trouble themselves, but Broni had explained that the Yam
atans were too “dignified” to endure zero-G. Theirs was a society of ancient proprieties.

  As the samurai reached the deck, Damon realized that they wore stylized, lacquered armor over their magnificence. The thin-gauge steel pieces were decorated with fine macramé in brilliant colors, each article of armor secured to the next with cords of bright colors. The helmets on their heads were inlaid with gold and silver designs, and each displayed a crest--the device, or mon, of the individual warrior’s clan. The effect was one of barbaric splendor.

  Damon also noted that each man wore a laze pistol in his sash. Ceremonial guards they may be, the Rigger thought, but they do not rely on antique swords to protect their Shogun.

  That individual descended to Glory's deck with perfect dignity. He was less fully armored than the fifteen or so samurai who had preceded him, but his clothing was even more sumptuous. The silk he wore was a black of deepest night worked with diamond stars in the constellations seen, not from Yamato, but from ancient Earth, the homeland.

  Damon had to remind himself that these were people who, in the ordinary course of working days, wore outfits similar to the skinsuits the Starmen favored--though not so revealing. This was clearly an occasion of tremendous ceremonial importance.

  Yamatans continued to debark from the barge and from the small MD ships moored nearby. A circle formed around Damon and the Shogun. The Rigger wondered if this were proper, he being a junior member of the Goldenwing’s crew. But it was not like Duncan to object. Duncan wondered what his forebears (most of them time-dilated years dead by now) would think of the agoraphobic countryman they had consigned so willingly to the service of the Wired Ones standing in conversation with the glittering rulers of Planet Yamato.