Glory's People

by Alfred Coppel

“Nothing can exceed lightspeed, Kr-san. Nothing,” the Yamatan declared.

  “Not in the universe as we know it, nephew,” the Shogun said softly.

  Amaya whispered, as if to herself, “The sound of one hand clapping.”

  “Just so, Sailing Master,” the Shogun said. “A follower of the Buddha has less trouble than most accepting such a life principle. In precolonial times didn’t some Terrestrial cosmologists hypothesize about an infinity of multiple universes? If universes are infinite in number, is the idea of a universe without space or time so impossible then?”

  Duncan said, “On Planet Armstrong of Barnard’s Star there is a school of physics taught that states time and space form a Klein bottle. Others say no, that is too complex and inelegant, the universe must be shaped like a Moebius strip, finite and one-sided.”

  “Intellectual games,” Kantaro protested.

  “Perhaps so,” Duncan said. “But our adversary is no intellectual game--it is real, and it can intrude into our space-time. Each time it does it comes to destroy. We don’t know why. But we must try to stop it, or this is as far into Deep Space as Mankind is ever likely to go.”

  “What action do you intend to take, Kr-san?” the Shogun asked.

  “I had hoped we would have more time to plan,” Duncan said. “But that’s unlikely now. Our first concern is to lure the Intruder away from Yamato. Our last experiences with it suggest to me that it has learned most of what it finds necessary about human beings. It isn’t complimentary to us, Shogun. In spite of how well we have fared in the business of predation and fighting, we are not formidable by comparison with the threat. That leaves us guile.”

  “Can we deceive it?” Kantaro demanded.

  “We believe it to be intelligent and sentient. So it can be deceived. If we are subtle enough,” Anya Amaya said.

  Duncan broke off to address Glory by spoken word. “Any change in position of the Sprite?”

  “A change in intensity only, Master and Commander.”

  “That may mean it is surfeited,” Duncan said. “We have to assume so.”

  From the wall com-units came Dietr Krieg’s voice from the surgery. “We must keep the thing’s movements from the colonists, Captain.”

  “That is not acceptable, Kr-san,” Kantaro said sharply.

  “Not even possible, Kantaro-san,” Duncan said. “There is no way we can disguise our emotional sendings. I feel certain that we are leaving a wake of psychic disturbances behind us. If we could be found in Deep Space, there is no way we can hide here.” He turned to Minamoto no Kami. “I intend to use one of your ships and crew to trail behind Glory, between the ship and the intruder.”

  “With such members of my contingent as I choose to send, Kr-san.”

  “Not you, Shogun.”

  “No,” Minamoto no Kami said sadly. “I am too old to be of use in a battle.” He turned to his nephew. “But you, Kantaro. If the Minamoto are to survive, a Minamoto must have a part in the battle for survival.”

  Amaya was looking aghast at Duncan. “You, Duncan? Bait?”

  “If need be, Anya.”

  “Glory won’t permit it,” she said desperately. .

  “It is Glory who commands it, Sailing Master.”

  The Shogun looked thoughtfully at the holograph. “Out of a universe without time or light,” he murmured, lifting his gaze to the two syndics standing before him. “We Yamatans have our own cruel version of the principle. The intruder comes to take lives like a ninja. There comes a time when we are all warriors of darkness. Say what you require, Kr-san. If it is within Ya-mato’s power, you shall have it.”

  PART II

  When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning.

  --Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure

  23. “You May Become The Last Sailing Master”

  From a distance of 150,000 kilometers the ruddy surface of Yamato’s planetary ocean glistens like a sheet of burnished copper. The cyclonic storm systems of the Yamatan spring mottle the surface of the planet with light and shadow. Yamato has completed one full revolution since Glory broke orbit. The Goldenwing ’s present course is a translunar injection aimed at sling-shotting around Moon Hideyoshi and then on to Tokugawa, the methane satellite Yamatan scientists believe is the smaller of an early two-planet system with Yamato itself. From Tokugawa, the plan is to leave the plane of Amaterasu’s ecliptic in the hope that the intruder will be distracted from populated Planet Yamato and Moon Hideyoshi. From the command pilot's seat aboard the mass-depletion vessel chosen by Shogun Minamoto no Kami and his daimyos for the first hazardous probe at the intruder, Duncan can see the western hemisphere of Planet Yamato from pole to pole. He is concerned that the Red Sprite is no longer visible. The lack makes the conditions of a possible encounter even more uncertain than Buele had calculated.

  The Supernumerary, having assimilated almost the entire canon of knowledge about the Terror possessed by Glory, had warned that if the Sprite was, as Duncan suspected, a manifestation of the Intruder’s manner of ingesting planetary plasmas, its disappearance could only mean that its task was completed and the Terror was charged with what must surely be trillions of gigawatts of electrical energy generated by the vast dynamo of Planet Yamato’s aurora borealis.

  Because the syndics had never actually seen the Terror, only its horrifying effects and manifestations, Duncan had hoped that the Sprite would remain in place above Yamato’s pole. He desperately needed a semifixed manifestation of the intruder in an environment of light, time and space. But this had not happened.

  The Terror might be temporarily inert, but it was not far away. Duncan could feel its presence, as could Mira, Hana, and Pronker, who prowled the small bridge of the MD ship, investigating nooks and comers, all the while lashing their tails, meowing and growling.

  Amaya had protested Duncan’s decision to take Damon as the second syndic in the MD probe. She insisted that the task was rightly hers and that Damon and Pronker were needed aboard Glory to handle the monkeys and be available for sudden changes in the sailplan. Duncan rejected her contention, leaving her no room for discussion or recourse. “You are the Sailing Master, Anya,” he said. “You remain to command in my absence. That’s the end of it. No more argument.”

  Before boarding the MD craft in the hangar deck, Duncan had instructed Glory’s computer to record his personal recommendations for the future operation of Goldenwing Gloria Coelis.

  Buele would be surprised, Duncan knew, if he survived the coming encounter and managed a return, that Amaya would be Glory’s Master only until Buele was ready to assume command. Knowing Anya’s pride and her drive for excellence, it had not been an easy message to convey.

  “A Talent of such dimensions as Buele’s can’t be wasted, Anya, “ Duncan recorded in his Sailing Instructions. “It has been my intention to groom the boy for command. His Talent is greater than any of ours. Eventually, he must be Master and Commander of Glory.” In his Personal Log, intended to be heard only by Anya, he said, “I leave it to you, dear Anya, to know when it is time to relinquish command to Buele. Until then, keep the syndicate together. You may become the last Sailing Master of the last Goldenwing. It is a task I would demand of no one else. “

  For a long and painful moment Duncan had wished he had someone upon whom he could lean, someone with whom he could share the responsibility for the gamble he was taking. But there was only Glory, and in the final analysis Glory was a machine--a wondrous construct, but still a device. Computers were marvels of calculation and organization, but original thought came only from living beings. He absently caressed Mira’s small head as he reminded himself that all he, all anyone, knew of the Terror came from encounters in the Ross Stars and in Deep Space. We have never even seen the Intruder, Duncan thought bleakly. All we know is what it has done--what it has destroyed as we watched. And all that Glory knows is what her computer has filed away in her vast data bank. Lines of code, no more.

  The theory that the Red Sprites were subsets of
the Terror in a gravity well, feeding on the immense manifestations of the belts of cosmic energy surrounding planets, was only that, he told himself. A theory.

  His thoughts were too disturbing to dwell upon. Better to concentrate upon the second tier of problems his leaving Glory to fight independently created. Better to convince himself that he was not abdicating too great a responsibility to Anya Amaya.

  Duncan understood what he was asking of the New Earther, but he was clear in his mind that only she, of the present syndics of Goldenwing Gloria Coelis, could protect his beloved ship against an uncertain future.

  I have, in effect, written a will, Duncan thought grimly. A bitter necessity. In other times and circumstance, aboard vessels crewed by hundreds, as were the clipper ships of ancient Earth, command would devolve, upon the death or loss of a vessel’s Master, to the next in rank.

  But sailing the tachyon trades aboard a Goldenwing crewed by six Starmen made it imperative that command fall to the syndic with the greatest abilities. The paucity of Talent had historically made it necessary to sail the Goldenwings with as few as four and seldom more than a dozen empathic crew members. There was no question of command following the archaic notion of rank.

  Buele would not be ready to command for years, but eventually he would take over Glory because his was the ability--no, perhaps even the destiny--to become Glory's Master and Commander. He had the Talent without which the great ship simply could not be sailed.

  As the MD pilot, Yamaguchi Kendo, a Kaian boy of not more than nineteen planetary years, let the small spacecraft fall astern of Glory, the others aboard--Duncan, Damon, Kantaro, and Ishida, the sullen retainer of the Lord of Kai put aboard by Yoshi Eiji’s specific demand--searched the sky for some sign of unusual menace. They could discern none.

  But the Intruder was nearby. The cats remained tense and quarrelsome, crouching, gathered as if to attack, with ears flattened and warning mutters for anyone approaching them.

  Mira’s response to the retainer Ishida was particularly hostile. Duncan studied him intently. The man’s hooded eyes were blank, almost without sheen. Was this the man who had attacked him in the carapace? Duncan wondered. If he were, Mira would tell Duncan in a dozen different ways. But at the moment the new surroundings and the growing separation between Mira and her Folk seemed to have silenced the small cat.

  “It is all right, queen, “ Duncan sent carefully, “we are safe together. “

  Does she believe that? he wondered. Do I believe it?

  Duncan watched Kantaro Minamoto carefully. The young Mayor of Yedo was staring intently at Lord Kai’s retainer. The ruler of Kai had insisted that Ishida was the best of his warriors, and highly trained in the art of spaceship handling. Whether this was true remained to be seen. Duncan lived with the suspicion that Ishida’s talents lay in a vastly different direction. But only when Mira became less distrait would she be able to tell him.

  24. Anya’s Familiar

  Distraught by Duncan’s decision to occupy what the Yamatans called the fighting chair aboard the MD craft, Anya Amaya fled down the plena toward the carapace deck where she and Duncan had so many times made love.

  On the bridge Broni and Buele lay Wired and naked in their pods. Their enhanced personas ranged far on either side of Glory's track.

  On the hangar deck the Shogun and his people waited aboard the barge Dragonfly while Kantaro and the retainer Ishida joined Duncan on the MD ship.

  As Anya flew through the fabric tubes she could sense the unseen presence of Mira’s Folk--some, but not all, cats who had been enhanced by Dietr’s experimental surgeries.

  By this time the Starmen of Glory had lost track of the number of still unnamed felines belonging to Mira’s pride who roamed the vast empty compartments of the ship. Dietr contended that he had not artificially inseminated any of the last generation of cats, that they had been reproducing in the normal, feline way. Which Anya had no reason to doubt, but she still found it difficult to believe that the recently born no longer required Dietr’s surgical interventions in order to Wire to Glory's computer. All she had ever learned about genetics (and genetics was a subject of surpassing interest on New Earth) told her that what Dietr reported could not be so.

  Yet Duncan had cautioned her against closing her mind to any possibilities. He loved to quote Twentieth-Century Terrestrials, the last thinkers, he said, before the nightfall of the Jihad. One of these men, with the strange name of Eden Phillpotts, once wrote that the universe was “full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

  How like the Master and Commander that was, Anya thought. She felt Glory's interior winds drying the tears on her cheeks. Damn you, Duncan, she thought bitterly. I am weeping for you already, mourning you even as we fly to our own destruction.

  There was no chance, she told herself, no chance at all that Duncan could survive an encounter with the Intruder in so flimsy a shell as a Yamatan mass-depletion ship. Space would open up unseen, the Terror would slip through, raging, and consume all it could reach.

  If we had enough time, the New Earther thought. If we had hours and days to put distance between us and the darkness, its powers might be diminished. But it was nearby. She could feel its presence, stirring, pressing, questing. What was Minamoto Kantaro thinking now? No longer could the young man take refuge in ancient samurai traditions. No armor, no war fans. Only the thin shell of a flimsy, experimental relativistic spaceship.

  Was the Terror watching? She wondered why it had not already swept Goldenwing Gloria Coelis and her people into hell. Duncan must have been right when he guessed that the Red Sprite somehow held it immobile as it drank in the power of Yamato’s aurora borealis. But now the Sprite had vanished. Was the Terror waking?

  The Sailing Master reached the carapace deck and dove through the barely open valve into the familiar, starlit cavern. She hastily opened a drogue compartment and, pulling the drogue cable after her, leaped upward toward the transparent overhead fifty meters above. She spanned the silent distance, settling the drogue into her skull socket. She hungered for privacy to face her grief, yet she ached for the comfort of the Wired state.

  As Glory expanded her Talent, reality exploded around her. The enhancement suffused her consciousness. The gestalt provided by the ship and by her shipmates was warm and familiar. Each time it happened, it seemed to be happening for the first time. Every time the drogue locked into her skull it was the rebirth of the raw girl from New Earth. The universe pinwheeled into wonder all around her.

  She projected her anima past the carapace, beyond the glowing net of the rig, away from the gleaming gold of the hectares of skylar Glory flew. It seemed that the tachyon wind’s particles penetrated her flesh to tingle against her blood and bones. She felt as airy as one of the meter-long dragonflies of New Earth’s narrow floral jungle. It was said that the short-lived creatures were so finely made that mere light kept them aloft in the still air of equatorial New Earth.

  It had been months since Duncan and Anya had floated in the starshot darkness of this vast space. Yet the very fabric of the bulkheads seemed to have absorbed the psychic memories of all that had transpired here. She closed her eyes and remembered the slow floating lovemaking here in the time before the planet-fall at Voerster, where Duncan fell in love with Eliana Voerster, Broni’s mother, and then lost her to some stem sense of duty she had felt she must obey.

  Her friend and Captain had turned inward, sustained by his own sense of duty to Glory and to all who sailed in her. But Anya thought, My simple love was something he could always accept, even after you, Eliana of Voerster.

  It was here, too, that Anya the Sailing Master instructed the children of the ship, Broni and Buele, who had never truly seen the stars until they emerged from Dietr’s surgery as Wired Starmen.

  At this very moment the animas of the two young Voersterians were out beyond Glory's bow-wave, accompanied by their feline familiars, guarding the ship from ahead as Duncan guarded her from behin
d, where the Terror prowled.

  Dietr, Wired in his surgery, greeted her wordlessly. He had been concerned about her from the moment Duncan announced that he was taking the fighting chair in the trailing MD craft. The Cybersurgeon did not delude himself that he was an expert on the psychology of human interactions, but he had made a study of wars and weapons and he was not impressed with Yamatan military preparedness. Their armament was capable, the Cybersurgeon thought, of pyrotechnics and not much else. The combination of Yamatan arms and Duncan’s stem sense of duty had all the syndics concerned, Anya Amaya most of all.

  “Anya, everyone aboard is nominal, “ Dietr sent. “Even the colonials are reasonably calm. “

  Amaya was not so certain of that. The Yamatans were more sophisticated than Dietr Krieg credited. They lived an interior life, deeply affected by their admixture of Zen and animist religions. This was a mind-set that Dietr was incapable of penetrating. They could be on the verge of an emotional outbreak and the Cybersurgeon would know nothing of it until the storm broke.

  Anya felt the disapproval of Dietr’s familiar, Paracelsus, reacting to her reservations about the Cybersurgeon. It was astonishing, Amaya thought, how well matched to his or her human associate each cat had become. One could almost imagine Para meowing with a Terrestrial German accent.

  The notion brought a near-smile. She wiped at her eyes with the heels of her hands, as she had long ago as a child on New Earth.

  She felt a distant sending from Duncan. She could not decipher it fully, but she felt his concern for her and the caress of his unique mind. How she envied the other syndics with their feline familiars. She had seen at once how the cats facilitated the empathic bond among the Starmen. It was not fair that only she should still be isolated.

  A year ago, she thought, the idea of describing her state as “isolated” would never have occurred to her. But much had changed aboard Glory since Mira’s first litter began to mature. Now, with the prowling felines everywhere in the ship, a whole new level of empathic interdependence was standard. What more it was, Amaya did not know. She knew only that she was less a part of life aboard Glory than she had been.