This time, the thing that drove it was self-created, a thick, dark mingling of loneliness and fury.
A kilometer from Glory's quarter, very near the englobature that Broni and Clavius were guarding, a black rent in space began to form.
Damon Ng, who had been tense and silent ever since boarding the MD ship, cradled Pronker and studied the ominous, growing distortion of space shown in the imaging screens.
Damon was both proud and terrified that Duncan had chosen him to accompany him on this desperate thrust at the Terror. Ever since his childhood in the tree-cities of Planet Nixon, he had been cursed with an assortment of psychological challenges he must face.
He had no sooner begun to control his rampant acrophobia than he now found himself serving as a casualty replacement for a man whose courage and skills were untouchably above his own. Duncan had meant well when he explained that he would be expected to bring the Yamatans and their small craft back if Duncan himself should be unable to do so.
The very idea of such a responsibility chilled Damon Ng to the marrow. Pronker put his forepaws on Damon’s chest and raised his head so that his amber eyes were on a level with Damon’s brown ones. The message was clear: “Do not fear. I am with you. “
26. To The Near Away
Bruele, lying in his control pod in Glory's bridge with Big twitching beside him, had an astral-eye’s view of the first contact.
Using a dozen of the imaging cameras scattered throughout the Goldenwing’s rig to localize his view, he had placed himself, in effect, a half-dozen kilometers off Glory’s port quarter and facing forward along Glory’s track. The Voersterian boy had learned to enjoy these EVA-by-proxy affairs. He had heard the Sailing Master discussing his skill with the Cybersurgeon a number of times, and her opinion seemed to be that Buele was showing a greater Talent at these out-of-body tasks than had anyone ever before in Glory’s history.
Duncan had told him that even though he himself had learned to enjoy the business of projecting his anima (a Jungian term, Buele learned from Glory’s computer) out of the ship and into Near Space, he had never found the task easy. Even Mira’s assistance did little to reduce the cold, chilled loneliness the procedure brought about. Yet Buele found it a simple matter to project his awareness almost anywhere within a hundred-kilometer englobature of the ship. The presence of his friend Big made the task more pleasant rather than easier. Buele had begun to wonder if it might not be possible to extend his anima much farther into space than he had so far done. The boy often wondered how his early mentor, Mynheer Osbertus Kloster, the Astronomer Select of Voerster, with whom Buele had lived much of his early life on the Grassersee, would respond to his potboy’s developing gifts. Buele remembered the old scientist with genuine affection; it saddened him to know that the laws of relativity had already forever separated him from those early years at Stemheim in the company of the ancient one-meter refracting telescope that had been brought so lovingly and at such great expense from Earth.
I would have become Brother Osbertus’s heir, Buele thought, although I never guessed it then.
Differences of class and status had made an adoption appear impossible. But it had never been as far out of reach as it had seemed before Goldenwing Gloria Coelis had appeared in Planet Voerster’s sky. Buele had come to realize that old Osbertus had truly loved him. So much so that an orphan lumpen boy might actually have turned Voersterian society on its head and become a part of the Mynheerenshaft. Eliana, Broni’s mother, the rebellious Voertrekkerschatz who became the Elmi, would have sanctioned it. Buele had no doubt of that.
These thoughts brought Buele a certain sadness for what might have been. He was, after all, a son of Planet Voerster, and life at Starhome had been gentle and rewarding.
But the paths to the future are obscure and unforeseen. In those days Buele could not have known that his future lay in the sky, not peering at it as the stars wheeled over the Sea of Grass. The ways of Brother God, he told himself often, are strange, indeed.
Buele felt Big beside him, large paws twitching as the cat visualized the sky in his own terms: a dark savannah, redolent of menace and thick with the spoor of a great dire wolf.
“Speak to Clavius, Big, “ Buele sent. “Let him calm you. “
For reply, the large young tom extended his foreclaws to grasp Buele’s naked flank. Buele bore it stoically. Big was an excitable personality. Most particularly when he felt himself Outside the ship and vulnerable.
“What is it? What do you sense? What do you feel?”
Buele dealt gently with his partner. It was better to soothe Big than it was to challenge him. The latter could be a painful experience, whether it was in space, among the Folk, or simply at the food replicator. Big had a tom’s fighting spirit, an active imagination and an enormous appetite for the fish-flavored concoctions Glory had taught him to select from the feeding consoles.
These, and other thoughts very like them, were never far out of Buele’s mind. Life aboard Gloria Coelis was a forever-fermenting challenge, and Glory herself was a never-flagging source of facts, theories, expatiations, suggestions, pointers, discourses and elaborations on tens upon tens of thousands of subjects Buele found fascinating. Save for Duncan himself, who had a very special sort of relationship with Mira, Buele’s relations with the Folk were farther advanced than anyone’s aboard, even Broni’s, whose bonding with Clavius was deeper and more powerful than anyone, even Broni herself, knew.
The result was that the boy, listed in Glory's computer only as “Supernumerary” (Glory declined to limit Buele’s usefulness), had a more focused grasp of the environment Glory inhabited and the ambience she created for her people than any of the older syndics--perhaps even including Duncan Kr.
None of this bestowed upon Buele an attractive physique nor a charming personality. In this respect he remained what he had always been, a lumpen potboy, largely self-schooled, untactful, and a human being of enormous courage.
It was this last trait that was required now as, lying in his bridge-pod and accompanied by the anima of the large comatose tomcat beside him, he seemed to float off Glory's stern quarter as the very fabric of space formed a dark vortex, a construct that resembled an accretion disk and a swiftly deepening whirlpool of fuliginous blackness that began as a single microscopic point and expanded rapidly into a ravening tower of spinning dark shot through with a fine network of ultraviolet electrical discharges.
From invisibility the manifestation grew into an abominable spinning rent in the sky that towered far above the tall spars of the speeding Goldenwing.
The com circuits aboard both Glory and the MD ship came alive with crackling urgency. But the nearness of the electrical disturbances in the black vortex scrambled all electronic communications. For the moment, each Starman, each familiar, and each ship was isolated by the intensity of the disturbances.
In the image-world inhabited by Buele and Big, the image that most expressed the cat’s vision of the world was a wolf shape of grotesque proportions. Big’s anima appeared, expanded, larger and larger still, a silhouette of remarkable menace, back arched, tail brushed, claws extended, fangs threatening in a mouth framed by black lips drawn back in a snarl of violent, outraged anger.
This image appeared to Buele in an interval so short that it was unmeasurable. There was no sound in space, but Buele heard Big’s raging, howling challenge--a scream that pierced the high registers and became a supersonic wail of rage.
For just one moment Buele felt the Terror’s response. A cold heat, a sullen fury, confusion and that bitter emotional streak of loneliness. It seemed to Buele that he lay at the bottom of an enormous spinning vortex while unseen, far above him, Big--grown into an enormous image through which the Near Stars shone only dimly--crouched, snarling and holding at bay the darker creature.
Bueie had a flash of childhood memory.
He was an abandoned child on the night roads of Planet Voerster and he had stumbled upon a kraal of Kaffirs sacrificing to the Six G
iants--the bright planets of Voerster’s winter sky. There were chants and wails, and the child Buele shivered as he remembered the talk heard of Kaffirs sacrificing Voertrekker babies in their search for nature's few bounties.
The seekers appeared in the starlit night, an old Kaffir shaman and his mud-masked apprentices. They were using rods in rhabdomancy, searching for edible wild roots in the clay soil of the plain below the Shieldwall.
The shaman found him and Buele tranced into his first remembered exercise of what syndics would one day call his “Talent. “ For an instant, the boy was that shaman. He felt the caked mud on his cheeks, the dirt beneath his feet, the pull of a penis-sheath decorated with stones, the pain of a broken molar, the hunger that drove him.
In that remembered moment, Buele was many things.
What he was not was afraid.
Broni Ehrengraf, lying with Clavius in her bridge-pod, experienced many things at once. She heard Big’s yowl of feline rage and fear even through the thick walls of Buele’s pod and her own. It was a cry that Clavius amplified with his own feral cry of anger. Broni experienced the cat’s fury as well as his terror, and she experienced it as a free anima in space on Glory's port bow. Moments before she had been in psychic free-flight beside Glory; despite the general apprehension that dominated the Goldenwing and all aboard her, the girl had been unable to reject totally the pleasure her present empathic state gave her.
She knew that she trailed Buele in the process of learning to control and command her own Talent, but her skills had grown in the months since leaving the Ross Stars. She had allowed herself a touch of arrogance in recent days. .
Amaya, who had become Broni’s primary mentor aboard Glory, had been less critical since the encounter in the Ross Stars. And even Duncan, who could regard self-satisfaction with great suspicion, seemed to be pleased with Broni’s progress as a syndic.
But though the Voersterian girl had learned something of the techniques of psychic battle at Ross 248, this new encounter was of a different order of magnitude.
What her anima perceived was the same rent in space that Buele and Big had seen. She saw it less clearly, and consequently more uncertainly. The very concept of space itself having sufficient physical reality to be ripped like a piece of cloth was alien to any and all the science to which she had been exposed during her life on Planet Voerster. The discussions with her fellow syndics aboard Glory had been intellectual exercises of the sort difficult to translate into actual events.
Yet against all reason the rift in space existed and was swiftly growing larger. Broni felt the demanding presence of Anya Amaya.
“Back to the ship, Broni. “
“But Duncan is out there!” Broni’s protest was as firm and as resolute as she could make it. Duncan is my exemplar, my true father, my lover. And I am Voertrekker, the girl thought, I cannot desert him.
She could feel Duncan at a distance, Duncan and Mira together making ready to take some desperate action. Anya seemed to know what it was. Why did the Sailing Master know and not she?
Anya Amaya commanded: “Broni! Obey me!”
All that the girl felt for Duncan, all the imaginings and the sexual dreams, all the fear of losing his protection, turned her ordinarily orderly mind into that of a frightened child.
Again, Amaya: “Back to Glory, Broni! Back!”
Broni wanted desperately keep her fear at bay, but her skill was insufficient. The stygian rent loomed and the Near Stars vanished. The edges of the spatial tear grew veined with dancing violet plasmas.
Broni sensed the full threat of the Terror. It was overpowering. At this distance it filled the sky. But the image was real, not hers. It came from Clavius--an unreal half bird, half dragon. A basilisk. But Clavius kept it at bay.
Broni watched in horror as the Yamatan MD ship began to react to the forces of the Gateway. It seemed suddenly to be veined with ultraviolet light, and it was no longer firmly shaped. Its outlines melted and flowed with the plasmas in the Gateway. What had been a spaceship was transforming itself into a fluorescent stain in black water, no longer a solid thing, but a liquid image, an object in transition from an objective reality into a metaphor. It flowed ever more swiftly out of a universe Broni knew and into one that neither she nor anyone within a million light-years would recognize.
And Broni remembered a thing the original Black Clavius would often say when he appealed to his God: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
As a sick child she had taken comfort from the black Starman’s words. Her failing heart had often taken her close to the valley of the shadow. But now her courage faltered.
The mass-depletion ship elongated as it passed the event horizon, spilled into a spinning maelstrom of other-space, attenuated into a streak of fading light that could have been a dozen meters or a thousand kilometers long--and vanished.
PART III
If one will do it, it can be done.
--Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure
If it can be done, it will be done.
--Western dictum
27. Are They Dead?
Anya Amaya thought she was prepared for what she had witnessed, but a stab of deep grief and terrible fear told her that she was not. In the instant the Yamatan spacecraft flowed through the Gateway and disappeared--in that instant Anya knew that all Duncan’s oblique attempts at preparing her for what might come had failed.
It seemed almost as though Glory herself were mourning. A cybernetic spasm spread like a cold wave through the empty holds and passageways of the Goldenwing.
Every mind and heart aboard the great-queen-who-is-not-alive was shaken by it. Anya was first aware of Broni’s cri de coeur, accompanied by a frightened yowl from Black Clavius. The sense of both cries was: “Are they dead?”
The fear expressed by Broni and her partner was a true measure of how dependent on Duncan Kr were Goldenwing Gloria Coelis and her people.
Anya felt a thickening of emotion in her throat. For a decade of uptime years she had been Duncan’s second-in-command, disciple, quondam lover and faithful friend. Now, in this one terrible moment for which she had only imagined herself prepared, she became his mourner, as did the ship and every living thing on her.
Anya held Artemis too tightly and struggled to contain her near panic. Gallantly, the little cat did not struggle to be free.
In their control pod, Buele and Big experienced the disappearance of the MD ship as a sudden vanishing. Their loss focused upon Damon and Pronker, with whom they had been spending much time recently. Buele felt the loss of the Rigger acutely; since arriving at Tau Ceti the two young men had developed a genuine fondness for one another. Now both Damon and the Captain were swiftly, shockingly, gone. To make a bad situation worse, Pronker and Mira, the matriarch of all the Folk aboard, were also gone. Overwhelmed with fear and grief, Big emitted a shrill and anguished yowl that filled the pod.
Buele’s breath expanded under his ribs until it seemed he must suffocate. His bare legs and arms extended, jerked, drummed against the padded sides of the metal pod. The inexperienced but combative Big reacted as his kind had responded to the unknown for millennia. Everything nearby became an enemy. Cornered, the young tom prepared to fight or flee. He leaped onto Buele’s naked breast, claws extended, back humped, fur bristling.
It was Glory who saved the boy from serious injury. The great-queen-who-is-not-alive took command and suppressed Big’s desperate response. Buele’s sense of loss was less easily banished. He felt suddenly lost in emptiness and grief-stricken.
Big released his bloody grip on the young man’s smooth chest and began to lick away the blood, grooming him apologetically.
In the hangar deck, where the Yamatans had gathered around their Shogun aboard the Dragonfly, a link from the external imagers in the Goldenwing’s rig showed them what had happened to their MD ship.
Reactions were varied. To Lord Yos
hi, the would-be samurai, the sight of the spacecraft flowing like water into a crevasse was terrifying. He had been toying with a grand dream of becoming a hero to the bakufu lords of Yamato, but the disappearance--so swift, so easily accomplished, as though Man and his works were nothing--squelched what little fighting spirit he had been able to muster. All mysterious things were frightening to Lord Yoshi.
But the event was real. It had happened. And to the point, it had happened to others. There was a lesson in that, Yoshi thought shakily. And like the natural entrepreneur he was, the Lord of Kai began to search for an advantage in this sudden turn of fate.
Yoshi Eiji imagined that the disappearance now eliminated the troublesome ninja. And, as a bonus, it also wiped from the political slate the person of Minamoto no Kami’s nephew and heir apparent.
The nonagenarian Shogun was grief-stricken, though his iron personal discipline kept his feelings hidden from his retainers. Yet he had been prepared. The master of the Goldenwing had made it clear that a battle must be fought, and that he intended that it should be fought as far as possible from both his ship and from the millions of colonial descendants living on the continental islands of Yamato.
The colonials made a prodigious effort to remain as outwardly calm as their Shogun. None were calm. They had seen the imagers’ visual report of what had taken place a very few kilometers from the ship in which they were contained. They had seen the rustling terror of the ship’s monkeys as they tumbled from the rig, falling in nightmare slowness to the vast, empty deck, and from there crawling and scrambling for the imagined safety of the Monkey House.
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