Glory's People

by Alfred Coppel

  Pronker sat alertly in the special bubble Damon Ng had added to his space armor. From this vantage point he could see the monkeys moving through the lower reaches of the rig, clearing halyards and unfurling sails, setting them to reflect the light of the red sun.

  Pronker understood what it was the half-living creatures were doing because his person, the human tom known as Damon, had such an open mind that he had learned to regard it as his own. He surmised that all the scurrying activity of the half-critters in the rig had to do with the wish of the great-queen-who-is-not-alive to move from where she presently was to where she preferred to be.

  Mira had taught all the Folk that the desires of the great queen were important and that they were to be fulfilled at once, even at the risk of injury or death.

  The idea of injury, let alone death, was alien to Pronker. In his young life there had been scuffles with his littermates, but these small battles were never allowed to escalate into serious catfights. A small scratch or bite customarily received soothing attention from the mother, or, recently, from his own human tom.

  Pronker, like all the Folk, had been encouraged by Mira to visit the newly modified Monkey House and to spend time with the dull and timid creatures who lived there. The cats were instructed to reassure the half-alive chimp-machines that they were not in danger any longer.

  The “any longer” was because at a place where the sky had been very different, some humans who did not belong on the great queen had come aboard with their ugly auras and killing instruments. For reasons totally incomprehensible to Pronker, they had blundered in amongst the monkeys and killed one, terrifying the others so that they were afraid to leave their lair.

  The monkeys were not the work of he-who-cuts and so could not be modified. The cats were commanded by the mother to reassure the foolish creatures that they were once again safe. Visits to the Monkey House had bored Pronker, but they improved after the young tabby bonded with Damon, who could explain (with exasperating tedium and difficulty) what it was the monkeys were required to do. Or rather to resume doing.

  The young human tom had fears not unlike those of the monkeys, but he managed to control them. Pronker found this remarkable. When he, Pronker, was frightened, he either fought or took flight. The mother explained that these were not always the only options, and she instructed Pronker to learn from Damon. This Pronker did. None of the Folk ever failed to do what the mother demanded of them. Some did it well, some poorly. But Mira’s command was the law of the pride.

  Reassuring the foolish monkeys had not been difficult. The duty had been divided among Pronker, Big, and Paracelsus (who behaved loftily because he was bonding with he-who-cuts). And the critters were remarkably adept at picking up signals from the Folk and the great-queen-who-is-not-alive. No one of the Folk dared to ask Mira why the boring monkeys had to be reassured, and no one did. But now, watching from within Damon's metal skin, Pronker realized that the monkeys had a place in the great queen’s scheme of things. Approvingly, he watched them darting about in the golden web of the rigging. They appeared to be playing, but Damon said no, that they were doing things that must be done.

  The concept “must be done ’’ was not an easy one for Pronker or any of his siblings to grasp. The human idea of work was quite absurd. Why should any creature do what he or she had no desire to do? A cuff and a growl from Mira warned that certain behavior might result in punishment. But this “work“ was something quite different.

  Damon conveyed to Pronker that work was something one did without compulsion because it was necessary. Pronker pondered this odd idea and concluded that it might have something to do with subsistence, or at least with the process of obtaining food.

  But since the great queen had taught all the Folk to operate the food dispensers as soon as they opened their eyes, and the task was simple and undemanding, the concept of work remained unimpressive.

  Still, his human tom seemed tediously devoted to it and Pronker did not object. It gave him an opportunity few of the Folk had to see the great-queen-who-is-not-alive from a new and interesting perspective.

  He put his cold nose in Damon's ear as a gesture of appreciation.

  The Rigger mouthed the antivertigo caplet he had tongued out of his first-aid kit. Pronker’s chill kiss made him smile, although he still felt somewhat nauseated at being high in the rig again. It was the first time in more than a month of shiptime.

  But he was delighted to see how well the monkeys were performing. For a Monkey House crew that a short while ago had been in complete revolt, refusing absolutely to stir into the sailplan, the swarming enthusiasm of the small cyberorganisms was a great relief to Damon Ng.

  He had always found it difficult to understand how and why it was that when he left Planet Nixon to join the Wired Ones aboard Glory he had been given the job of Rigger. It was the one task that required a Wired One to be outside the ship for long periods of time and on frequent occasions.

  It seemed a long while ago that Damon had left the tree-cities of Nixon for cybersurgery and a life in space. He knew that his Talent was adequate, but no more than that. Duncan, who was conducting the Search himself, had taken a liking to the awkward and fearful boy Damon had been.

  His first years aboard the Goldenwing had been made difficult by Jean Marque, the Supernumerary who had been driven to madness by memories of a killing on Earth. Jean had been a difficult and frequently cruel man. But then there had also been Han Soo, the ancient Astroprogrammer who had actually been born on the home planet, and who had died in space on the journey to Voerster, an aged man in ship-years, and a veritable immortal in down-years. Han Soo had been kind to Damon.

  So, too, had Anya. Her ways were rough and joking, but in the way of Wired Starmen, she had instructed Damon in sexual matters and had defended him against Marque.

  But nothing had cured his aching acrophobia. He had coped with it, but just barely. Until now. Somehow (and despite the vertiginous nausea to which he remained vulnerable) he was now so nearly free of his phobia as to hope that he was cured.

  Duncan and Amaya were delighted. Dietr (who had rather taken Jean Marque’s place as Damon Ng’s personal harpy) remained unconvinced and insisted on a full protocol of medications--which Damon accepted. But Damon knew Dietr’s medications were not the reason for his improvement.

  It was Pronker. Damon had not the slightest doubt. Since Pronker had taken to riding inside Damon’s space armor, the dozen-kilometer-tall spars and Glory's sails were no longer a golden purgatory. He often wondered what he would do when he had to go out alone, wearing only a helmet and skinsuit, relying only on Pronker’s remote Talent, his own, and the interface provided by Pronker himself.

  From his location high on the port-side mainmast Damon watched the monkeys attentively assisting the servomechanisms that extruded the skylar courses from the spars. As the gleaming sails caught the light of ruddy Tau Ceti, great shafts of golden light slashed through the spidery webbing of the rig. Each stroke of brilliance left a cometlike trail through the haze of monofilaments, and the light-retention quality of the material from which the stays and braces were made glowed for several seconds after the reflections had passed. The effect was stunning, and Damon was filled with a sense of amazement that he had never really noticed these beautiful effects before now. Without fear of falling clutching at him, he looked at his environment very differently than before.

  Pronker, he observed, had no particular interest in the light show. He looked, and then looked away, out there, beyond the long reach of the spars and yards, past the slowly deploying sails, parsecs beyond the planet still filling three-quarters of the dark sky. Damon derived a dividend of satisfaction from Pronker’s scrutiny of the dark and distant sky.

  Diligently guarding his young queen, the human girl Broni, Black Clavius sat like a carving on the curve of the Astroprogrammer’s pod. His tail was wrapped neatly against his body, but the tip twitched and lashed with each sending from Broni.

  She was
responding to the feel of tachyons on her bare skin, which was as sensitive as Black Clavius's own. Broni was Wired, totally at one with the great-queen-who-is-not-alive. This brought her into a tight rapport with the cat, who sat unblinking, staring through the girl’s senses and the great queen’s at the gas-giant planet the Yamatans called Handar, barely detectable near the limb of the red sun.

  It was near that bright point of light that the Hunter had struck last. The imprint left in the fabric of space by the creature’s raping entrance was still discernible to Black Clavius. He saw it as the still partially open mouth of a black lair, within which were the half-consumed remains of strange life-forms that neither Clavius nor the great-queen-who-is-not-alive had ever seen, bits of life neither cat nor ship would ever truly see.

  They had originated in a place far beyond the Folk’s ability to leap, past the limits of Glory’s humans’ ability to travel. Only the Hunter, the Terror, the Outsider--each being aboard the great queen had a secret name for it--could reach so far or so swiftly. The disturbing thoughts made Clavius draw his black lips back to expose his formidable fangs in a reflexive challenge.

  Broni squirmed under the increasing rain of tachyons on her naked skin. Clavius, now reaching his full tomhood, felt the tingling, piercing sensations, too. He growled as if to frighten away a competitor. Inside the pod, where Broni lay blank-eyed and Wired to the ship, the odd mixture of human and feline sexuality made her well-defined nipples rise.

  Broni had calculated the maneuvers needed to free Glory from her low orbit around Yamato, and she used her surrogate eyes in the dozens of cameras scattered throughout the sailplan to watch the spreading skylar. She was aware of Damon and Pronker out there in the rig, and of the monkeys swarming along the spars, ready to intervene should any of the millennium-old system fail and cause a jam.

  Broni was also aware of Anya Amaya in the pod next to her. The Sailing Master was programming the computer subsystems to hoist the sails in a predetermined and efficient order--a task she had performed a thousand times before.

  Broni sensed an almost sullen dissatisfaction in the Sailing Master, but she was too young and inexperienced to understand the cause.

  Black Clavius, however, understood perfectly.

  Duncan, also Wired, but not on the bridge, was with Mira in his favorite place within the carapace, where he could watch the last of the retreating daimyos’ MD ships dropping out of orbit and disappearing below the limb of Planet Yamato. The last vessel, the one piloted by the samurai Baka, would be seen once again before Glory left orbit on a course for the space around Toshie.

  The syndics had been unanimous in their objection to Duncan going anywhere alone. They were convinced--and with good reason, Duncan conceded--that the ninja must still be aboard. It was improbable that his employers would have taken their failed assassin with them back to Yamato.

  But Duncan refused to be escorted everywhere, in fact anywhere, aboard his own ship. “Mira will be with me,” he said. “She will watch over me better than any of you could do.”

  Duncan Kr being Duncan Kr, the discussion ended there.

  In several lower compartments below the bridge deck, the Yamatans waited uneasily. Even those who had been in space before were awed by the idea of moving so large an object as the Gloria Coelis out of orbit and out into the ever more threatening dark.

  19. The Red Sprites

  The evolutions of a Goldenwing leaving low planetary orbit are unlike any other maneuver in space. Though Glory is constructed of the lightest materials available at the time of her building, a mass of several million metric tons of inertia is being set in motion solely by the pressure of light from the local stellar primary and by the millennial wind of tachyons streaming out of the vast black hole at the galactic center.

  For Glory this evolution requires the setting of all her eighty million square meters of gossamer golden skylar, from main courses to the third-and fourth-level skys’ls and tops’Is and a full suit of spankers, jibs and stays’Is.

  With majestic deliberation, the Goldenwing’s delta-V begins to increase. From orbital velocity she slowly accelerates, and her separation from the planet below grows. Light flashes from her yards and sails. St. Elmo’s fire dances through the rigging in the attenuated atmosphere. Her syndics and their helpers guide the great shimmering arcs of skylar as they unroll from within the thousands of yards. To observers on the planet below the sight is breathtaking. Every meter of sail is being spread to the light and wind. It is near to miraculous, the Yamatans say, that they can spread such a golden field of light-capturing, tachyon-taming skylar in the time it takes to complete one orbit of Yamato. In the short time of Goldenwing Gloria Coelis’s stay at Yamato, the colonists have become knowledgeable. Were the gaijin ship in orbit around Toshie or Honda, Tau Ceti’s gas giants, the Yamatans tell one another, the deep-gravity wells would hold the Goldenwing captive for several ship-days.

  But Glory is under weigh and accelerating, and to those aboard, the aspect of the planet they are leaving changes. The sun angle shifts, becoming steeper, so that the coppery light burns into a coppery sea. The storms that hide the southern ice cap turn brighter, like silvery swirls of liquid metal.

  Most of the MD spacecraft that had sheltered within the starship's vast interior have completed their reentry.

  All save one, the last Hokkaidan vessel, piloted by Baka Ie.

  The efficiency of the monkeys, who recently had been cowering fearfully in the Monkey House, was an improvement on monkey performance measurable in orders of magnitude. Somehow, Damon Ng realized, Mira’s pride had hugely reinforced the half-living cyborgs’ resistance to fear of strangers. The fact that there were still a substantial number of Yamatan colonists aboard the great-queen-who-is-not-alive was being ignored by the monkeys, who swarmed almost joyously through the intricate maze of the Gloria Coelis’s rig.

  Damon was in his pod between Broni and Amaya, aware that ordinarily during this maneuver he would be high in the rig, watching to prevent any one of ten thousand possible glitches to which sailing craft were susceptible. He was even slightly regretful that for this particular departure Duncan had instructed him to stand his watch at his post on the bridge with his fellow syndics.

  Damon was Wired, deeply into psychic symbiosis with the ship, all his perceptions enhanced. He began to feel the tingling excitement of tachyons on his skin, and the mental expansion of his senses reaching far out from Glory. He was grateful that this manner of standing Rigger’s Watch was intended to test the recovery of the monkeys, rather than a concession to his phobia. Pronker had grown to enjoy his extravehicular adventures and would have much preferred the mastheads to the pod in which they lay. But he understood.

  The cat reclined beside him in the warm gel. An observer might have thought him asleep. He was not. Duncan was receiving a steady stream of impressions from Pronker, whose senses were Outside with those of others of his kind: Big, Black Clavius, and Para--all empathically ranging the volume of space around Glory.

  Damon’s hand touched the cat gently. Pronker’s tail twitched in acknowledgment. His attention was Outside with his litter-mates. This was the first time a team of the Folk had participated directly in a move of the great-queen-who-is-not-alive. All were intent on the search they were conducting. They could sense the presence of Mira and the dominant tom ranging about the great queen. There was a strangeness out there. They could all feel it. But it was not the signature of the great wolf, though it had the same electric charge that made the fur stand on end. The cats’ excitement was pronounced, but unfocused.

  Para's syndic, he-who-cuts, is also Wired. He is lying in his own pod inside the slowly pulsing fabric walls of Glory’s sick bay and surgery. Dietr Krieg’s task at departure times is to monitor the life signs of the syndics on the bridge. It is recorded that at times in the far past, the empathic control of millions of square meters of sail and thousands of kilometers of stays, braces and halyards had become too much for certain unfortuna
te star sailors and there had been hysterical outbreaks and even bloody murders on starship bridges.

  It is Cybersurgeon Krieg’s belief that such emotional explosions may explain the disappearance of several of the earliest Goldenwings, though recent events suggest darker causes. But whatever the reasons for past disasters, Dietr does not intend that any mental or psychic collapses should overtake the syndics of his ship. He has already lost one Starman to madness on Voerster. He does not intend to lose another.

  Paracelsus, whose empathic prowess is far superior to that of he-who-cuts, lies across the foot of the medical pod, one eye lazily open to observe the Wired Cybersurgeon within, while the remainder of his attention prowls through dark space ahead of Goldenwing Glory, ahead of Black Clavius and Big and Pronker. Mira would not approve of this sort of freelance prowling, but for the moment the mother is otherwise occupied and the young tom is deliciously on his own.

  Para is adventurous, but not foolhardy. He controls his questing carefully, never allowing the essence of his mind to roam out of sight of the enormous glittering bird that is the great-queen-who-is-not-alive. Instinct tells Para that what he is experiencing is being shared, though on a far lower level of sensitivity, by he-who-cuts. If Para ventures too far off, he-who-cuts might grow alarmed. The human is an odd, tangled ball of heroic desires, sexual repressions, tender affections and a powerful, overall need to be loved by his fellow syndics. By the Folk, as well, though this particular hunger lies very deep, hidden under the many layers of a multiphasic personality.

  Para sees it all, but in simple, feline terms. He-who-cuts should simply present his pheromones and allow all aboard to accept him or fight him.

  But the great-queen-who-is-not-alive has already made Para far too sophisticated to believe that this will ever happen. It is a pity. He-who-cuts might be a formidable fighter, capable of winning status for himself and his companion. But no.