Glory's People

by Alfred Coppel

  As they flew swiftly toward the place Clavius thought of as the inner lair, the tom could sense his siblings--those who had been matched by Mira to humans of their own--assembling. Outside the great queen was the domain of the Beast. Each of the Folk had his or her own vision of the thing that stalked them. To Clavius it was a great dog with bloody jaws. The blood, he thought with a shiver, smelled and tasted of the Folk. He had never seen a dog, but he knew enough to be afraid. It was part of the wisdom given him before he was weaned.

  Tonight Mira was yowling warnings to her pride that there was danger inside. The cats, being young and with little real experience of danger, reacted in their own individual ways.

  But Clavius realized that safe play and secret learning were almost at an end. A time of tooth and claw was upon them all.

  Big, the cobby tom who had attached himself to Buele, was not the quickest of Mira’s pride, nor the most intelligent. But under the influence of the Voersterian boy’s extraordinary empathic Talent, Big was far advanced along the path to direct communication with the human syndics.

  He had progressed to the point of adopting the habit of using human names. He recognized Big as his own name. He even knew what it meant--though he thought it foolish, since Buele, indeed any of the humans aboard, was far larger and more massive than Big. But that was the way humans thought.

  Buele had discussed with him the human view of the other syndics (most particularly the young queen, Broni) and the feline view of the rest of Mira’s pride. Between cat and boy a lingua franca had begun to develop. Because of Buele’s inability to articulate cat sounds or assume the necessary postures to transmit feline body language, the language they were developing was more human than cat. But the human meanings of words were slurred, elided, and modified by Big’s peculiar worldview. For example, to “discuss “ did not imply the tedious and tendentious human way of worrying a topic. Instead it suggested an acceptance, and even an understanding, of the way each participant in the exchange viewed the problem. This did not mean that the encounter could not explode into a furious matter of tooth and claw. The cats understood that there were times when nothing less would serve. The humans had apparently once known simple truths, but time had dulled their natural senses.

  To Buele, the simple statement “I am hungry“ meant a desire to visit a food replicator. To Big the same phrase meant the scent and taste of Mira’s breasts, the anger and sorrow of being weaned, the half-joy, half-fury of quarreling with a sibling, and even the possibility of fighting and killing. Only then came the learned memories of the food replicators and the satisfactions they offered.

  Both Buele and Big were intensely interested in the phenomenon of the wolf-dog-dragon that flashed with the speed of thought about the night outside the great queen. They feared it. They dreaded summoning it with their anger or pain or sorrow.

  But they were steadfast in their knowledge that it must be faced, and killed because it stalked them relentlessly and would until either they or it were dead.

  Big understood death better than did Buele. There were few vermin aboard the great queen, but those there were had been used by Mira as prey for her offspring. To show them death taught them the value of life.

  It was a terrible, simple lesson, but a profound one.

  Anya Amaya watched with some annoyance as her fellow syndics arrived and took their accustomed places in the bridge. She was still shaken by the clarity of the message she had received from Hana. Un-Wired, she had not expected it. Something profound was taking place aboard Glory.

  The idea of suspecting a cat of some kind of human conspiracy was lunacy. But was it, really? Mira and her breed were not ordinary cats. Dietr’s meddling had changed them into something quite different than they would have been had they been brought out of cold-sleep as any other mammal aboard Glory had been. Now, thought Anya Amaya, here were Buele, Broni, Damon, and Dietr Krieg, all accompanied by cats. It was unsettling, as though she were being excluded from something important taking place just out of her sight and hearing. The Sailing Master was still brooding on this as Duncan and Mira came though the valve.

  There was a tear on one arm of Duncan’s skinsuit; blood stained the fabric. There was anger in his lean, lined face. Amaya knew that anger. It manifested itself in a darkness that settled on Duncan when he blamed himself for putting his ship and his people at risk.

  Without preamble he anchored himself to the control console and addressed himself to the group. “I thought we had left the worst of Yamatan politics behind when we agreed to meet here on Glory. I was mistaken.” He held aloft an object five centimeters in diameter. “This is a throwing star. In the hands of one who can use it, it can kill. If it were not for Mira, it would have killed me.”

  Dietr immediately reached for the star. Aboard Goldenwing Glory weapons were his concern. None of the other syndics had the experience or the desire to become expert.

  “Be careful,” Duncan said. “I think the points are poisoned.”

  Amaya was by his side. She touched the bloodstained tear in his skinsuit. “Mira did this?”

  “Yes. She saw the damn thing coming. I don’t know how. If she hadn’t I’d be floating dead in the dorsal ob-deck.”

  Mira; clinging to the console beside Duncan, looked inscrutable. The other cats lashed their tails.

  “See, Brother Duncan,” Buele said, “they all know.”

  “Leave that for a minute, boy,” Dietr Krieg said brusquely. To Duncan he said, “Did the star touch you at all?”

  “Only my hand. It didn’t break the skin.”

  “I can give you an inoculation to be safe.”

  Duncan looked at the somber faces around him. “After what happened in Yedo I should have taken better precautions. It could have been any one of you. We will take care now. But first we have a decision to make. We can’t go into Deep Space with an unknown assassin aboard.”

  “We must tell the Shogun,” said Broni. Killing had been common on her homeworld, but an attack on a Master and Commander aboard his own ship was a sacrilege. To colonists--and Broni was the descendant of colonists--the Master of a Goldenwing was a mythic, untouchable figure. The ninja attack in the square of Yedo might have been excused as a flash of local political beastliness. But not an attempt aboard Glory. That was an outrage. Broni, and all the syndics, had taken it as an article of faith that such barbaric behavior would remain on the planet’s surface.

  Damon said, “The Shogun must account for it, Master and Commander.” As always in times of stress or danger, syndics had a tendency to become archaic in their use of the language of the ancient seas of Planet Earth.

  “All in time, Damon,” Duncan said. “Wire up, all of you. And never mind considerations of privacy. I want you all to let the cats join in.” He smiled ruefully. “Mira paid their dues.”

  The Starmen socketed their drogues. Instantly perceptions widened. Each member of the crew partook of Duncan’s singular memory of the event. What was most remarkable was that they could experience the event through Duncan’s perceptions and through Mira’s. The cats reacted first, arching their backs and bottle-brushing their tails as they experienced Mira’s precisely recalled memory of the moment when she sensed the danger in the shadows. Big, and therefore Buele, reacted with alarm and anger. The large young tom’s reaction to most challenges was one of aggression. Now he growled and searched imaginary shadows for a perceived threat. He saw a human form, unrecognized, but clearly one of the Yamatan colonists. Each of the animals amplified the impression for the human to whom they had attached themselves. The result was a burst of sensation brimming with warning signals and impressions that would be instantly recognized by any of the Wired Ones on the bridge. The would-be assassin could not hide from the feline senses of Mira and her children. The cats paid no attention to human names because they were without true meaning. But the thrower of the star, regardless of his ability to shed one identity for another, was now a marked being aboard the Goldenwing. He was pre
y.

  Duncan brought the conclave back to a human level. “Does anyone recognize him?”

  It was Amaya who had spent the most time studying the Yamatans on the inbound journey, she who might best understand them. Duncan, she felt, was darkly angry at the notion of treachery from the Yamatans.

  Anya sent, “If he is a ninja he is totally focused, totally committed. He will have to be killed. “

  All received the impression of a man spaced--thrust into the void without armor or breathing gear. It was the traditional way of death for miscreants aboard spacecraft since the days of the first Mars missions in the dawn of the Space Age.

  Dietr added his opinion, an odd mélange of academician’s equivocation and Teutonic sense of a need for rigid justice and discipline: “If, Sailing Master. If. We must be certain. We should not offend the Yamatans. “

  Duncan felt the spillage of outrage and anger from Anya Amaya. The Sailing Master was easily the most emotional of all the Starmen aboard Glory, and her New Earther’s anger could be explosive.

  The cats responded to her state with anger of their own. What threatened Duncan threatened the great-queen-who-is-not-alive. What threatened her put at risk the cats’ whole universe.

  “Anya. Control. “ Duncan’s sending was measured and reined. “Remember what we face out there. “ It was too easy to allow anger to build. It was contagious. And the Terror fed on it. Fed?

  Duncan wondered. Perhaps strong emotions were only signposts for the stalking death, guiding it across parsecs and centuries. But the strongest impression Duncan had had, even when he had been adrift in the Ross System and filled with the realization that death was very near, had been fury.

  Buele picked up on Duncan’s thought with startling swiftness. “It is more than that, Brother Captain.” The syndics’ attention focused on the Voersterian boy.

  “Say more, Buele, “ Dietr Krieg sent. “Say more. “

  “I felt sadness. Grief. Loneliness.”

  The syndics recoiled almost physically from what they sensed was a genuine sympathy for the thing that tracked them across space, eager to kill.

  “You are an idiot, boy!” The Cybersurgeon snapped aloud. The change from empathic communication to spoken language made the cats uncomfortable. Mira arched her back and bared her teeth at Dietr Krieg.

  “Don’t threaten me, you saber-toothed little monster. The boy is talking like a fool,” he said.

  His own companion, Paracelsus, growled softly. Para relished the closeness of the pride, of the Folk, and of the syndics. He was distressed by whatever disturbed it.

  Mira’s sending, urging patience, calmed him. Para was particularly prone to the feline trait of showing indecision when no defined reason for a quick choice of behavior was indicated by the situation. He nevertheless uttered another, softer, growl. It was the young tom’s way of establishing psychological territory, what Buele would call a “yes, but” growl.

  “I am sorry, Brother Captain, “ Buele addressed himself to all, but it was Duncan he wanted most to convince. “I know it was angry. It wanted you, Brother Captain. But it was sad, too. A deep, deep sadness. It may be lonely. “

  ‘Try that one on Glory,” Dietr Krieg said, again aloud.

  Duncan addressed himself to the entire crew. “Dietr--all of us--we must remember. Glory is a machine. A marvelous one that every year and every kilometer in space makes still more marvelous. But she is still a device. The cats know. See how they treat her. They love her but they seem to understand better than we what she is. The great-queen-who-is-not-alive. She holds terrabytes of knowledge and we can use it, but we cannot expect her to decide questions like this for us. All that Glory knows about the Terror is what she--and we--have learned on these voyages. Don't just dismiss what Buele tells us. Glory will confirm it. But we need to know much more. “

  The fear that Duncan had felt in his own close encounter with the dark stalker still masked the essence of what Buele had declared. In the oceans of Earth, he wondered, did the fleeing prey feel grief for the shark?

  An attack by a ninja was a political act on Planet Yamato, bloody-minded, but tolerable. But not aboard a Goldenwing. It broke the covenant between colonists everywhere and the Wired star sailors. Without that covenant man in space became utterly isolated by interstellar distances.

  But Buele’s statement had shifted the agenda of the meeting, causing a momentary confusion.

  Now, to Duncan’s surprise, Broni Ehrengraf spoke as one among equals. The girl cradled Black Clavius and said, “An important decision has to be made. “

  Dietr Krieg bridled. The Cybersurgeon, being the least empathic of the Starmen, was the last to realize that something unique was happening to the group. He framed his statement as loftily as he knew how. Broni was, after all, only a girl. The male chauvinism of the homeworld had never been eradicated. The Jihad had seen to that.

  The cat Paracelsus regarded the physician intently. He-who-cuts was about to make himself foolish. Para’s tail lashed in irritation. Mira disciplined him with the subsonic growl all her kittens knew well.

  Dietr Krieg drew heavily on Glory's database. Amaya looked speculatively at him. As he moved about, his drogue coiled and uncoiled in the null gravity. The Serpent of Eden, Anya Amaya thought, remembering her Bible lessons that marched so strangely with the matriarchal feminism of New Earth.

  Dietr addressed Broni formally, and by the title she bore aboard Glory: “What decision, Astroprogrammer? What is there about that thing that needs some new decision from us?”

  The reply, and the manner in which it was given, surprised the Cybersurgeon--surprised them all, save Buele. Broni displayed a polished empathy and situational understanding that made her statement translucently clear. Her sending was precise and to the point: “Do we kill it, or do we allow it to kill us?”

  She looked from one to another across the bridge deck. “We don’t sail under some mythic prime directive nor are we commanded by God to sacrifice ourselves. We fought it at the Twin Planets, and Glory saved us. But the choice of fight or flee--was one that we made. Now we have to decide again. “ Her vision was so empathically clear that the moral dilemma she posed touched each syndic deeply and personally. Duncan drew a deep breath, expanding with sudden pride. For the first time since Glory had lost the Astroprogrammer Han Soo to old age before Planet Voerster and Supernumerary Jean Marque at Einsamberg, Glory's people were one. He looked at the Cybersurgeon and was gratified to see the realization and gratification in his face as well. It was not necessary to probe Dietr’s mind. Broni’s coming of age as a Starman was as pleasing to the physician as it was to all the others. It was as though each had touched hands with all the others. I had forgotten the joy and pride of full unity, Duncan thought. Since Eliana, I have brooded alone too often. I have not done all that I should have done for Glory’s people. It was the second time within moments he had felt justified in using that unique description of the Goldenwing’s crew. He indulged himself still again. In all the Universe, he thought, only we are Glory’s people.

  Eliana Ehrengraf's daughter is a complete syndic at last, he thought, a creature of Deep Space--as are we all. In the true meaning of the word, he felt Wired.

  Glory announced suddenly: “Master and Commander, the colonists are convened on the hangar deck. They ask that you and the Sailing Master join them. “

  Duncan pulled the drogue from his socket. At once the vast globe of awareness that he had commanded grew small. Parsecs became mere kilometers.

  In ancient Rome, Duncan suddenly remembered, a Commander returning in triumph from the wide world to the City was provided with a slave to ride in his chariot through the tight confines of the Forum, whispering so that only the hero could hear: “Remember, you are only a man.”

  Mira trilled softly in his ear.

  Thank you, small queen, he thought. I will remember.

  17. The War Fans

  With their customary industry, the Yamatans had transformed the hangar d
eck into a fantasy simulacrum of their world. The holographic forest Broni and Buele had so proudly put in place for Glory's visitors remained, Earthly pines in the distance, but the hectare where the MD spacecraft had been parked had been changed by the visitors to resemble a clearing in the Shogun’s garden on the planet below.

  Not to be outdone in holography by their hosts, the Yamatan engineers had installed their own hologenerators to create a clearing on a tableland above the image of an arm of the coppery Yamatan sea. The spacecraft had been formed into a circle around the barge Dragonfly, their lazegun ports covered with paper disks decorated with origamis of three inward-pointing hollyhock leaves. These were the leaves found in the mon of the Tokugawa clan, which Minamoto no Kami, by right of descent, claimed as his own family crest.

  Screens of stretched paper bearing the same ancient device had been assembled in an open circle, and here the Shogun, his generals, and a score of high-ranking daimyos sat on camp stools awaiting the arrival of the gaijin. Aligned on either side of the formation stood the lower-ranking members of the Yamatan delegation. It was the first time they had presented themselves to the syndics in this way. The three-man crews of the thirty MD ships stood unarmored, but still dressed in traditional silk. Still lower-ranking members of the daimyos’ staffs formed a third, outer circle. All told there were over a hundred Yamatans on hand. These engineers and scientists and businessmen had transformed themselves into a circle of anachronism.

  To Duncan and Anya Amaya, the effect of the fantastical scene was of having travelled back in time to feudal Japan. Shogun and daimyos, clearly the centerpieces of the display, were ceremonially dressed in the hakamas, kimonos and the lacquered and gilded armor of that distant place and time. They sat like statues, the steel face masks exposing only their mouths and their dark eyes.

  Duncan, who had been exploring the Japanese history in Glory's database, noted that Minamoto no Kami wore a steel helmet decorated with large, curving horns of gold. Glory's database held images of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the victor of Sekigahara, wearing such a helmet.