Glory's People

by Alfred Coppel

  Damon bowed deeply, as Glory's database had taught that he should, and said in Yamatan Japanese, “Welcome aboard Gloria Coelis, Minamoto-sama. I am Damon Ng, Starman.” He indicated the movement in the gathering crowd where Broni was approaching. With just a touch of vainglory, he added, “And this is Starman Broni Voerster, formerly Voertrekkersdatter of Planet Voerster and now a member of this syndicate.”

  “Well done, Damon.” Duncan Kr stood below the Dragonfly's open hatch. “Well done, Broni.”

  Damon’s eyes widened. Duncan wore a skinsuit of an opulence never before seen aboard Glory. As did Anya, who materialized beside him. Yamato, thought the Rigger, must be a world of fabulous wealth. He had heard the childhood stories, of course, that on Earth the Japanese had paved the streets of their capital, Kyoto, with golden bricks. He had doubted such tales until now.

  Minoru Ishida, surrounded by the detachment of Clan Takeda samurai and stepping with the awkward precision of a man wearing a gravity harness, moved away from the anchored spacecraft toward a valve opening in a distant, arching wall of monofilament fabric.

  The entire Yamatan contingent, over one hundred strong, travelled like a ceremonial procession across the vast hangar deck toward what the young syndics had announced as private accommodations for the Shogun and his many escorts. Ishida knew Minamoto no Kami well enough to know that he allowed all this pageantry because it was part and parcel of the business of governing the powered classes of Planet Yamato. The nearer one came to authority, Ishida thought sardonically, the farther back in time one had to reach for the ceremonials and rituals of the people.

  In his persona of Tsunetomo, the Master Ninja had become perhaps the planet’s greatest authority on the mythic past of the Japanese colonists whose descendants now populated the Amaterasu System. Outsiders--gaijin--might have difficulty understanding a people who lived their ordinary lives in business dress and surrounded by every convenience a sophisticated technology could provide, yet performed their government functions dressed like characters in a Noh play. Outsiders would almost certainly imagine that such people were primitive at heart, rather than the reverse, which was the actuality.

  The business of governing the colony established by Golden-wing Hachiman under the Tau Ceti sun was as complicated and as sensitive as ruling the Home Islands on Earth had ever been. Yamatans did not take to strangers, and tended to look down upon them (even such strangers as the Starman syndics who had long ago planted the people on Planet Yamato). The colonists had long since ceased to think of themselves as colonists. Their ties to the homeworld were mythic, psychological, and not at all physical.

  The islands on Earth whence these people had come were in the seismic region known as the Ring of Fire, a circle of great faults surrounding the largest ocean on the homeworld. They were repeatedly subjected to catastrophic earthquakes. Yet in antiquity the ancestors of these folk had been known to pridefully reject aid from gaijin in times of disaster. While cities burned and thousands died, the offers of help from “outside” were refused.

  Tsunetomo understood this, and the reason for it. Ethnic isolation had produced a closed culture. It remained closed even light-years from the islands that spawned it.

  Now another catastrophe threatened. Tsunetomo-Ishida did not for one moment doubt that the threat was real. The cosmos, after all, was a place of darkness and danger. But the offer of help from strangers from beyond the near stars was worse than any threat from the Near Away. One danger promised only war and destruction. The other promised change.

  Duncan, walking carefully in his unfamiliar Velcro slippers, considered that so far, at least, the conclave had begun well. Glory’s database was somewhat out of date. A Goldenwing’s situation made that ever likely. But it had prepared both Anya and himself for the odd quirks of the Yamatan sense of dignity.

  He had refused out of hand Minamoto Kantaro’s offer of gravity packs. The very notion of such a thing had set Anya Amaya’s eyes to rolling in a feminist outburst of opinion about Yamatan social ethics. Duncan had promised her that once all were safely accommodated aboard Glory, all the syndics would be free to return to their normal free-fall behavior. It seemed probable that at such a time the Shogun and Kantaro would be able to remind the daimyos (most of whom had never been offworld) that the Starmen had their own ways, and their own ideas of dignity and that their ability to be at ease in zero-G was no waza--no trick, no mere performance.

  “Forgive me, Kr-san,” Kantaro said when they embarked on the Dragonfly, “but it will be necessary to show the daimyos that you are serious people, even though you do customarily float about in free-fall.”

  Amaya had mercifully avoided making any comment. For which Duncan was grateful. Dealing with colonials taught one to accept the absurd with complete seriousness.

  Duncan’s attention shifted to Broni. The Voertrekker girl, resplendently arrayed in a skinsuit she imagined would both satisfy Yamatan male-dominant prudery and still impress the visitors with the capabilities of Glory's ancient replicators, had already attracted a substantial cadre of admiring young samurai about her as she led the procession out of the cavernous hangar deck and into one of Glory's more commodious passageways. Buele had joined her, as had Damon, both young men assuming the solemn faces they considered suitable for ambassadors of goodwill. Big, who had been riding with Buele, was briefly seen in free flight as he vanished into the holographic forest Broni had created.

  Duncan tongued his com unit and subvocalized to Dietr, who had been instructed to stand by in the carapace compartment nearest the bridge with a full assortment of antivertigo nostrums. It would not take long for the more adventurous Yamatans to slip out of their grav harnesses and try the freedom of moving about unencumbered in the null gravity. Unfortunately, adventurousness was no proof against the nausea free-fall could induce.

  “Are you ready for surgery, Cybersurgeon?” he asked with hidden amusement. The notion of Dietr administering to a crowd of motion-sick Yamatan businessmen-samurai elicited a sardonic amusement in Duncan. There was little enough to smile about, he thought. The telescopic images of the last Yamatan MD ship being consumed--there was no better word for it--by the fiery portal that had opened without warning out near Planet Honda chilled the blood. In the mythology of his people, the Thalassans, ice-giants and dragons lived beyond the curve of the world--a vast distance away to a people who earned their keep in skin-boats. No one actually believed the myths, of course, but they were part of the culture, brought by the clans from Earth along with the ancient tartan patterns of their weaving and a taste for Scotch whiskey. The fisherfolk of Thalassa lived a harsh life on their rocky islands, but they were not ignorant. They knew the difference between stories and real life.

  And now, after so many years and so far from Earth, did the myths became real? Somewhere in the vast literature of the homeworld there was a phrase: Here there be dragons .... and real, terrifying death. I am a simple man, Duncan Kr thought, looking at the high, arching ceiling of the great hold. But this is my life, and I must defend it.

  “Duncan?”

  “Yes, Dietr. “

  “I asked you if many were coming down with motion sickness. “

  “Not yet. The grav harnesses are clumsy. They’ll start shedding them and then you will have patients. “

  “I can hardly wait. “

  Dietr, brilliant surgeon that he was, had never lost his Teutonic parochialism. He will meet his match with these people, Duncan thought. He glanced at Anya, walking between Kantaro and the Shogun. She was smiling and talking animatedly. Apparently even New Earther feminism had its limits. Perhaps it was the opulence of the brocade kimono she wore. She seemed very different from the image he knew best: the naked Sailing Master floating in the gel of her pod, Wired to Glory and guiding a ship as large as a city and populated primarily by ghosts.

  Dietr, too, was having fretful thoughts.

  When the Gloria Coelis broke orbit at Nineveh and began to ride the Coriolis wind back t
oward Tau Ceti, the Cybersurgeon had been silently dubious about Duncan’s hope of finding allies for the coming battle with the Terror. It had been Dietr Krieg’s experience that human beings were neither the brave nor the idealistic creatures they believed themselves to be. It had never been a simple matter, the Cybersurgeon believed, to enlist soldiers in an unwinnable war.

  But Duncan believed, and therefore so did Glory's other Wired Ones. Dietr had watched developments at Yamato first with doubt, then with amazement, as Japanese colonials, a race of transplants who appeared to imagine themselves players in some centuries-old Noh drama, abandoned their real lives as entrepreneurs and engineers and businessmen, and followed Duncan emotionally into space, where the most horrible enemy ever faced by spacefaring Man waited. It was a revelation of how powerfully Duncan Kr affected those around him, and it was an epiphany of the romantic way the Yamatans saw themselves: as true samurai.

  Lieber Gott, Dietr thought, the universe is a far, far stranger place than I had ever imagined it to be.

  For the first time the practical, prosaic Cybersurgeon felt an approving brush across his mind. It came from near and far, from the hidden vastnesses of Glory.

  From the cats by all that is holy, Dietr thought.

  And from Glory herself.

  14. The Lord Of Kai

  We have been aboard this vast hulk for a hundred hours, Minamoto-sama,” the Lord of Kai complained, “and we have done nothing but look at ghastly images of the way in which people died at Nimrud. What is the point?”

  Yoshi Eiji was the descendant of “late ones”--meaning colonists who arrived at Yamato aboard the second, and seldom mentioned, Goldenwing, Musashi. The latecomers had arrived a mere century of local time after the Hachiman colonists, and, as had happened before in other places, their arrival was not met with rejoicing. Musashi’s passenger list had been rife with social misfits and low-caste workers from the Home Islands. In a pattern often repeated in the colonization of Near Space, the Jihad on Earth drove away first the able and adventurous and then the less so, the less capable and the burdens on a slowly collapsing Terrestrial economy.

  Every colonized world that absorbed more than one shipload of colonists had a similar disadvantaged minority. But if the Japanese of Yamato were parochial to an unpleasant degree, they were also, and above all else, pragmatists. Their history on Earth told of repeated occasions of the lower castes being allowed, in times of great need, into positions of leadership. The Taiko Hideyoshi, one of the founders of Terrestrial Japan, had begun his career as a foot soldier in the ranks of the vassals of Oda Nobunaga. When the Lord Oda made him samurai he had been too poor to own a horse. Yet he, with Oda and Tokugawa Ieyasu, created a nation that lasted for a thousand years.

  Some of the Musashi latecomers found the new world to their liking. Peasants became entrepreneurs, mechanics became engineers, village lawyers became politicians and sometimes even statesmen. A few of Yamato’s great clans were founded by such men. The descendants of the Yoshi, who arrived on Yamato late and penniless, now ruled the domain of Kai and the spaceport on Moon Hideyoshi.

  Yoshi lacked the steel of his ancestors, but he had their shrewdness and self-interest. He had come up to Goldenwing Glory with misgivings; he remained to suffer the discomfort of zero gravity and the fear of great spaces, both within and without the great ship. But Yoshi was aware that the gaijin had experienced something truly remarkable in the Ross Stars, and his politician’s instinct told him he could not yet abandon the gathering and return to the planet. First, the Shogun must commit totally to this suicidal fool’s errand.

  Yoshi did not lack intelligence; his unmet need was breadth of vision. Cupidity told him that if his mass-depletion ships were the only, or at least the first, colonial vessels freely to roam Near Space, it would be much to Yoshi Eiji’s advantage. But someone must first discover a method of protecting Yamatan ships from the thing that had happened out near Planet Honda. Otherwise crews would soon refuse to launch.

  Yoshi was by training an off-planet engineer. He had never worked at his profession, and was in fact not very good at it. But he was a shrewd politician and he understood how important it might be to acquire the technology of whomever or whatever was ravaging MD ships. With such magic in his hands, Yoshi believed, the next shogunate might be his for the taking, for Minamoto no Kami was in his nineties.

  The Shogun regarded his visitor dourly. Lord Eiji, he thought, was exactly the sort of man who rose to power among a people isolated from their true roots.

  But he listened. Yoshi was a bellwether of discontent, capable of giving an early warning of serious dissent among the daimyos.

  At the moment Yoshi was still playing the samurai. He was addicted to the Japanese fixation on acquiring a famous name. As the Lord of Kai, on Earth once the domain of the Mountain Lord Takeda Shingen, he yearned to be allowed to adopt the Takeda name for his own. There were no real Takedas left and had not been for fifteen hundred years, but a favorable recommendation from the Shogun would make Yoshi Eiji, parvenu, into a descendant of the great Mountain Lord.

  So far there was no sign that Minamoto no Kami would even consider such a thing.

  “We have weapons,” Lord Yoshi declared, puffing his full face into a samurai mask as he had been trained to do, acting ‘military’. “We are aboard an antique whose time has passed. Why can’t we simply arm this empty hulk and send it out to do what it should have done in the Ross Stars?”

  He imagined the Lord Takeda Shingen might speak so. The samurai lord who had died during a siege because of his wish to listen to the flute playing of an enemy soldier had been a prodigious warrior.

  But Shingen’s death had brought to the lordship his son, a feckless young man who did not heed his father’s dying advice to stay in his mountains. He had marched his splendid army down to the coastal plain, where the combined forces of Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu had shot it to pieces with imported muskets at a river crossing called Nagashino. The mournful tale had been told with tears for two millennia. It was one of the best-remembered laments of a people who loved laments--the sadder the better.

  Yoshi Eiji yearned to be a true Takeda of Kai.

  The compartment occupied by Minamoto no Kami was as austere as any other aboard Glory. In her larger spaces, the Goldenwing was capable of using holographs and illusions to create an astonishing range of environments from the information in her data bank. But the actual living quarters aboard were plain, without ornamentation, functional. The Goldenwing had been designed by Spartans, Minamoto no Kami thought approvingly.

  He said to Yoshi, “Are you suggesting that Wired Starmen do our fighting for us?” He had known the Lord of Kai for forty years and he had never liked him.

  “It has yet to be proven, Minamoto-sama, that it is our fight. But if it should be, would it not be better to let the gaijin do it?”

  The Shogun waited for him to make the next, obvious, statement. That even if there should be fighting and dying to be done that it had become Yamato’s business only because the Wired Ones had been followed into the Amaterasu System.

  But Yoshi Eiji did not. He was a man who was cautious in all things. Most of the daimyos Minamoto had dragooned into coming aboard the Goldenwing saw themselves as samurai (which they were not), and as a reincarnation of the bakufu--the ancient military government of Japan--which had ruled the Home Islands until the formation of the daibatsu--the cabal of industrialists who had ruled Japan in peace and war until it was destroyed by the Jihad.

  But we are none of those things, Minamoto thought wearily. We are simply colonists far from Earth, isolated in Near Space, and in danger.

  This enterprise was vital to Yamato and, eventually, to all the colony planets. The evidence the gaijin presented was compelling. Everyone aboard now had seen holographic reconstructions of the engagement fought in the Ross Stars. Minamoto no Kami was not a squeamish man, but the sight of a man being consumed by fire from within was not easily forgotten.

&n
bsp; But the Lord of Kai found it unpleasant to consider so grave a threat. In this he had companions. The sentiment among the daimyos was shifting away from risking their precious ships in a confrontation with a power they did not understand. Secret meetings had been held, and a consensus was growing. Let the gaijin do it. Surely it was they who had brought the danger to Amaterasu space.

  Yoshi Eiji was neither a soldier nor a scientist. He hired soldiers and scientists. As many as he required for whatever task needed doing. All this talk of a fleet of ships, manned by samurai--including their daimyos--and led by the strangers, was an absurdity.

  Yoshi had opposed welcoming the gaijin from the moment Goldenwing Gloria Coelis appeared in Yamatan telescopes. He was among the daimyos who contributed to the fund for hiring a ninja to kill the strangers in Yedo. When the attempt failed, Yoshi Eiji was shaken. A ninja failure was a thing that had happened only a dozen times in nearly the last four hundred years.

  Though occasionally a fool, Lord Yoshi could also be a realist. I am no warrior, he told himself. I covet Old Takeda Shin-gen’s name and fame, but not his battles. Substituting lazeguns for katanas made fighting too dangerous. It was a great pity, for the Lord of Kai was second to no one in his love of the trappings of bushido. But he had no intention of confronting any powerful enemy with a weapon in his hand. A man could get killed doing a thing like that.

  “I only suggest, Minamoto-sama, that we should arm this ship with laze cannon and distance it from Yamato,” he said carefully. “We have the means. We even have the men to fill a proper crew for this ghost ship if they are needed. The gaijin want aid. Let us give it to them and send them on their way. A ship or two to collect the mysterious technology of the invaders--that I am prepared to contribute.”