Glory's People

by Alfred Coppel

  She twisted so that she lay in the air with her face upward, painted golden by the sunlight reflected from the great shining sails of skylar above her. Beyond lay the hard, methane yellow disk of Tokugawa, presently framed between the starboard foremast and its supporting shrouds. Farther beyond still lay the dusting of stars that formed the eternal background for a Goldenwing’s celestial hemisphere. To port lay the star nearest Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, which the Yamatans called Eridanusu, five light-years away. So near, in fact, that one could almost see the sixteen points of light that were Epsilon Eridani’s solar system of gas giants.

  The light of Amaterasu played on the concave surface of Glory's sails from astern. Anya tried to make out the reflection of the MD ship, but she could not. The reddish light of Amaterasu was too bright on the stacked courses, stays’ls and mains.

  Broni and Buele were doing a creditable job of sail-handling, she thought. Their feline familiars were making it easier for them to deal with the temperamental monkeys, whom Anya could see, in brief flashes, as they moved through the rig.

  The cats were sharpening everyone’s reactions and responses. Every syndic was performing at a steadily higher level. Except me, Anya thought bitterly. Damn them.

  Duncan, even though he was kilometers astern, must have caught her momentary anger. She could feel his swift disapproval, followed by his empathic sending of support and control.

  She was tempted to remove the drogue from her socket, and the temptation appalled her. She had never, ever, considered hiding from her shipmates.

  She felt a soft thump on her breast and a tingle of pinpricks. She found herself looking closely into the face of a tiny black-and-white kitten whose eyes were the color of topazes. The small face was an inch from hers. The tiny needle-claws were fixed in her skinsuit.

  Her first reaction was instinctive. She caught the small cat and pushed it away so that it spun helplessly in the near-zero gravity. The result was a twisting recovery and an angry mew of protest.

  Before she could retreat, Anya felt the claws in her shoulder. The kitten had swiftly returned and fixed itself once more to Anya’s skinsuit. It lowered its head and butted Anya’s cheek. The Sailing Master was shocked at the clarity of the sending. Before she could disengage the tiny critter, she heard an explosive command in her mind.

  “Don't!”

  Anya was stunned to realize that she had received the command so clearly. It had even been delivered with a New Earth arrogance Anya had not heard in years.

  “You are mine, “ the kitten sent.

  It isn't possible, the Sailing Master thought. Cats have no human language.

  The little beast was female. That came through with great clarity.

  “Where have you come from?” Amaya asked.

  Was it a kind of madness to address a creature that could not be more than two months old as though it were an intelligent human being?

  Amaya was rewarded with a sending of confused images.

  The Sailing Master saw a long flight through familiar plena. The view was from behind, and she felt in her own muscles the determination of a small creature working very hard to catch up. From this perspective the Amaya ahead was a fleeing giantess. There followed a swift leap though a closing valve. And at last, satisfaction. Huntress’s claws firmly fixed in ... Anya Amaya.

  Anya cupped the kitten in her two hands and looked into the topaz eyes. Artemis, the Sailing Master thought. What else?

  Despite the fears and concerns of the moment, Anya Amaya, syndic and native of New Earth, felt a great warming in her breast. At last, she thought, at last.

  The kitten squirmed in her hands, struggling to be free. Amaya sensed her outrage at being restrained. The message was crystal clear: “I am not a pet. “

  “You have much to discover that will delight you, Sailing Master.”

  The sending came from Duncan. It was miraculous in its clarity, swift and distinct. It had come from Duncan to Mira to Glory to Artemis to Anya.

  Anya released the small cat and remained very still until Artemis anchored herself again firmly to the skinsuit.

  Anya Amaya sent, “I hope I have time to learn, Master and Commander.”

  Anya felt a soft tattoo on her shoulder. The little cat was kneading her, doing what Broni called making bread, by pressing first one small paw and then the other on Anya’s flesh.

  Unwilling to disturb Artemis’s gesture of trust, Anya Amaya floated silent and unmoving in the still air of the carapace deck. The stars overhead slowly rotated through the glowing rig as Glory changed attitude. Long spears of red sunlight strobed through the mist of spars and monofilament. Anya closed her eyes and listened to the soft, whispering purr of the small creature on her shoulder.

  A warm contentment totally unsuited to the moment and to the hazards stalking the ship suffused Anya.

  We are being robbed, she thought. We have a right to feel at rest, to feel united to our ship and our shipmates. So stay alert, syndic, lest the darkness know and attack you for anger or for joy. Control your animus, lest that bring the Terror through invisible Gateways.

  She had to cradle the kitten. She could feel the rumble of the tiny throat with her fingertips. The little cat’s eyes were closed. Amaya brushed her lips across the kitten’s small round head. The eyes did not open. In the baffling way of cats, Artemis had fallen asleep.

  25. I Am With You

  The Master Ninja Tsunetomo, deeply set in his impersonation of the low-ranking samurai Ishida Minoru of Kai, sat in the lotus position on the vanadium-steel deck of the MD craft and studied the syndic in the fighting chair.

  The gaijin had long bones, and he was thin, with a melancholy face and deeply set eyes the color of the snow lakes of Hokkaido. None of these things announced a formidable warrior, yet the round-eye had escaped two ninja attacks--one delivered by the Master Killer of all the Order. That made him formidable. And he was even more to be feared if his people were anything at all like he was. Did they really speak to animals? Sometimes it seemed so. And did they have the skill to teach ordinary men to do the same? Ishida glanced at Minamoto Kantaro at the navigation station. A neko perched familiarly on the Minamoto’s shoulder. Was it truly a cat, or was it some alien being masquerading as a household pet? Much remained to be learned before another attack was made on the gaijin Captain.

  Lord Yoshi Eiji had at least solved a part of the problem. By delivering Kr-san alone and separated from his people into the ninja’s hands he had made the Order’s task simple, if not easy.

  They were a strange lot, these Wired Ones, Tsunetomo thought. It was said that when they Wired themselves to their ship through those hideous sockets in their heads they became what passed for warriors of darkness in their worlds. How else to explain their mysteries? They seemed to speak with their machines as well as animals. Tsunetomo had seen them do it. There was a weird quality of all-knowingness about them and their precocious cats.

  There were telepathic exchanges among them. Even though excluded, one could feel it. Tsunetomo was certain that the neko with the long gaijin had somehow warned him of the attack in the huge, empty dark of the Goldenwing’s carapace.

  The challenge of assassinating a man so protected filled Tsunetomo with excitement. The killing of his animal familiar was only slightly less appealing. Yamatan ninjas might wait generations before the Sun Goddess Amaterasu again offered them so pure a challenge.

  All the talk about the mysterious force outside the ship and the hideous way it killed made no impression on the Master Ninja. Though they themselves were shadow warriors and unseen killers, ninjas had no inclination to create any demons more formidable than those whose rice they had eaten and whose sake they had drunk in the secret conclaves of the Order.

  Tsunetomo watched the man in the fighting chair intently. The foreigner was a worthy challenge to the greatest ninja of the age. He was the only man Tsunetomo had attacked and failed to kill. A ninja could not live long with such shame.

  “K
antaro-san.” Duncan spoke aloud.

  “Hai, Kr-san?” The Lord Mayor of Yedo was transfixed by the images sweeping past the exterior imaging cameras on the MD ship’s hull. It had been a very long time since Kantaro had piloted a spacecraft. He had been a novice pilot when his uncle, the Shogun, plucked him from Orbital School for training in the life of a Yamatan politician.

  He drew his eyes away from the displays with an effort and swivelled his chair to face Duncan. Hana trilled softly and leaped the distance between Kantaro’s station and Duncan’s. She landed on Duncan’s lap and leaned against his chest, purring loudly. Mira, atop the fighting chair’s exterior imager, regarded her second-generation offspring with aloof but watchful interest.

  “There’s been no chance to speak of tactics,” Duncan said.

  “No, Kr-san. None,” the Yamatan replied.

  Duncan sketched a mirthless smile. “That is because we have no tactics. You should understand that--I regret there was no time to tell you so.”

  “Perhaps there is no need,” Kantaro said. “Perhaps it has gone far away.” Even as he said this, he knew it to be untrue. He was receiving a somewhat muddled sending from Hana. Something about a pack of black dogs stalking her through the dry grass of some alien equatorial plain. He knew it was equatorial because Hana had seen a distant sky, harsh with the summer of a G0 sun. And the white summer light was Earth. The impression was dreamlike and filled with contained fear. Hana had never seen Earth. Hana had seen only the massed and woven plena and compartments of the Goldenwing Gloria Coelis. But she knew Earth. She knew Earth as Kantaro himself knew it. It lived in racial memory.

  Duncan said, “They can do that, Kantaro-san. I don’t know how. You will see more clearly when you become accustomed to her. And better still when she matures.”

  Kantaro should have shown delight. But instead he shivered and returned to watching the images of Near Space on his console screens.

  From the stern Glory was slender-flanked and spiky with masts and yards that seemed to Kantaro like the spokes of a wheel. He had not noticed this manifestation when first he saw Glory from the Shogun’s lounge aboard Dragonfly. With the masts and spars all laden with vast hectares of golden skylar, the Goldenwing had grown perceptibly smaller in the last few minutes. Running before both the solar wind and the Coriolis trade circling out of the galaxy’s center, Glory was gaining speed from a storm of photons and tachyons against the gleaming golden skylar.

  This, Duncan had told him, was Glory's finest point of sail. The rest of the syndic crew, Duncan had said, did have a tactic--a simple one. He had told them to open as great a distance as possible between themselves and Planet Yamato.

  The appearance of the Red Sprite and some research and calculation with Glory's powerful mainframe had alarmed Duncan. It was not a certainty, but possible, that the Sprite could not only drain the plasmas of the aurora, but also life from a planetary populace as well. It might be far-fetched, Duncan had said, but it was not to be considered impossible that the Red Sprite could be used to make a direct attack on the people of Yamato.

  If that were so, Kantaro’s world was in deadly peril. He had seen images of men dying under attack by the Terror. The thought of such flaming deaths taking place by the tens of thousands on the streets of his Yedo filled the Yamatan with dread.

  Yet even this is denied me, Kantaro thought bitterly. If I do not rein my emotions, I may call the horrid thing down upon us.

  He glanced covertly at Duncan. But wasn’t that exactly what Kr-san wished to do? Hadn’t Kantaro heard Anya-san’s cry of anger and anguish as she accused Kr-san of baiting a trap with the MD ship and its people?

  Duncan sensed the surge of conflicts in the younger man. Hana had felt them most profoundly and complained to Mira, who passed the conflict on to Duncan. In effect, she said, “I will stand with you, fight beside you, help you. But the solution is yours, dominant tom. “

  How like the matriarch that was, Duncan thought. Mira and her kind were as complex as any human, but their instincts remained as straightforward as they had been before Felis libyca became a god in Egypt. The Folk were creatures of infinite variability, but their core belief was simple. Mira was informing Duncan, “Challenge me, and I will fight or flee. If there are other choices you must make them. “

  Duncan was by now well aware of how Mira and her get responded when faced with the unthinkable. The blurred image that came from Kantaro’s Hana was charged with feline imagery and tension. Duncan received it only incompletely, but he smelled the dry grasses and heard the black dogs barking under the African sun.

  He projected an empathic sending at the small cat, making himself large and protective. She responded with a trill and a tiny growl. Duncan was pleased to sense that Kantaro was comforting her, offering protection. The exact form of the Yamatan’s sending was indistinct because he was untrained, unpracticed and clumsy in the method. But Hana was reassured and for the moment that was enough.

  On the sunward side of the two ships’ track, their changing attitude unmasked the ring that circled Moon Tokugawa. The thin cut of a line it had displayed while Glory was in orbit, around Yamato broadened like a wound opening. Duncan had suggested to Minamoto no Kami that all the people on Tokugawa should be evacuated. But there had not been sufficient time. Duncan hoped that he, the MD ship, and Glory would be enough to distract the stalking Terror. He had the chest-tightening feeling that they were all on the edge of a massacre. The unpredictability of the situation was unnerving. But this was a moment for patience. Each second of shiptime that passed was a second plus a fraction of downtime that increased Planet Yamato’s slight margin of safety. For the moment let that be enough, Duncan thought, willing time to pass.

  Four hours later, in the exterior image screen Duncan’s finely tuned perceptions could detect the first slight reddening of the stars astern. The percentage of the speed of light attained at this point was infinitesimal, but it was detectable. Details of the Goldenwing could no longer be discerned without magnification of the image. To starboard and astern, the half-disk of Planet Yamato occupied an eighth of the dark sky. Moon Tokugawa stood high and large in the holographic image, its methane atmosphere bright yellow against the blue-black of space.

  At the mass-depletion-engine console, the Kaian crewman sat in a state of what was plainly high tension. Duncan would have wished for an older man in that position, but the Lord of Kai had insisted on “giving the gaijin-san the very best pilot among his retainers.” Whether this was so or not, Duncan had no way of knowing. He had not been favorably impressed with Yoshi Eiji, but it was obvious that the Shogun had had his particular reasons for holding the contingent from Kai aboard Glory when with the ceremony of the war fans he had contemptuously dismissed the rest of the company of samurai. It plainly stated that this small ship, Kantaro, the dark-visaged warrior Ishida, and young Yamaguchi at the pilot’s station were the best aid Minamoto no Kami could offer in the shadow war to come.

  “Yamaguchi-san,” Duncan said. “What percentage of light-speed have we reached?”

  The young pilot, conscious of his low status, used the ancient designation for the Captain of a vessel. “One point three percent, Kaigun taisa. “

  As the lightspeed percentage rose, Duncan knew, a spaceship’s mass would normally increase. But the Yamatan engineers had devised an engine that reversed the expected effects and caused mass to deplete, leaving the ship on the very cusp of Einsteinian reality, able to open a Gateway into an adjoining universe--if a state of being without true space or time could be called a universe.

  In such a state the MD could, in effect, jump to another locus and instantly return to normal space--vast distances from where the first locus had been opened. It was an achievement of enormous potential: instantaneous movement unaffected by relativistic limits.

  But this effect was attained, the Yamatan scientists had explained to the syndics, by a huge consumption of energy. If an MD “outjumped” its energy reserve by more than f
ifty percent, it would return to normal space to become a derelict, unreachably far from its point of origin.

  Duncan intended to use the MD’s capabilities not as a means of far travelling, but as an intrusion on the Terror’s own space-not-space.

  The chances for disaster were too large to compute. The MD’s weapon was not very formidable; no one knew with certainty how long Terrestrial animals could survive in the blankness beyond the mass-depletion portals. And worst of all was the inability to know with certainty that the Terror would be there--rather than in one of uncounted similar contiguities of the known universe.

  “Kaigun taisa-sama. “

  “What is it, Yamaguchi-san?”

  “I am getting fluctuations in our energy reserves.”

  It was far more than that, Duncan thought. Mira had leapt across the console to be physically near him. Hana returned to Kantaro, and as she did so she uttered a yowl of mingled anger and fear. Duncan felt a psychic buildup that seemed about to swamp his empathic sense. It was an effect he remembered with dread from his encounter with the stalking Outsider in the Ross Stars. One’s physical senses became overloaded. Skin, sensitized by the tingling bombardment of tachyons, grew painful to the most ordinary touch. Mira was growling and yowling with her own discomfort. Duncan could feel her seeking refuge in his mind, and he could “see” the image she had of the encounter. Long ago, and often enough to remember, he recalled that Mira--the first of the enhanced cats--would sense the threat at a vast distance, dire wolves prowling through a dark, primeval night. “We are the prey”: The thought was clear and urgent. Duncan reacted to a kind of spillage from some unknown, unknowable place. Raw emotion, not human, not animal, but more clearly alien than it had been during the battle aboard Glory near Ross 248. His talent supercharged by fear, Duncan recognized the difference in the two occasions. In the Ross Stars encounter, the Terror had been drawn by the chaotic emotions of contingents of two warlike people.