Glory's People

by Alfred Coppel

  Others, retainers and attendants with closer personal ties to the Shogun and his family, reacted to the loss of the Lord Mayor of Yedo according to how highly they esteemed him. Since Minamoto Kantaro was a highly visible member of Planet Yamato’s ruling class, there were loud lamentations.

  Funereal grief and ceremonial death were traditions imported from Earth, and such traditions were matters of enormous importance to all colonists, wherever they might have settled among the Near Stars. For the Yamatans, the forms of communal grief were described in detail in the Monogatari no Hachiman. Each daimyo and dependent, down to the most rustic Lord, had in his library ancient scrolls depicting the ten thousand ways of samurai death and the rituals surrounding each.

  Dragonfly was filled with members of a social class to whom death was not an enemy, but a demanding master. The shogunal barge’s salon was filled with emotional sounds, practiced often and uttered now as signs of respect for Minamoto no Kami and, indirectly, all the Yamatan descendants of the ancient Tokugawa clan.

  But of all the lamentations voiced aboard Dragonfly, those softly uttered by the ninety-year-old Shogun were the most sincere.

  Clavius perceived the disappearance as a scene upon some dark savannah, lighted by a thin crescent of yellow moon and a few stars dimmed by the oppressive atmosphere. Clavius had reluctantly been constrained by his duty to the pride to stay with his human female. She rested fitfully in a low dish of dusty ground, her naked body trembling with each silent shower of the tachyons that fell upon both girl and cat out of the distant night.

  Clavius had sensed the presence of the Other. He had sensed it looming behind the first swirl of force that indicated space was about to change character. The black cat bottled his tail and made himself large, showing long teeth in a saber-toothed snarl. Whenever danger approached, Clavius saw himself as a massive black smilodon, but still dwarfed and made small by the enormity of the Other.

  For the first time Clavius had the disconcerting perception that the menace approaching was not a living being in the sense that the Folk understood the idea of living.

  Among the Folk one was alive until one was killed or became dead. When that happened, there was a short period of investigation as each of the Folk used the acute senses of touch and smell and hearing to reassure himself that something that once lived no longer did.

  If the dead were prey, there would be ritual play, then an offering to the Matriarch, sometimes even to the humans. But this was pro forma. Next came the decision whether or not to eat the recently living prey. Such was the normal pattern among the Folk; such it had always been.

  The rip in the sky began to open, and Clavius danced sideways beside the sweating, fearful girl. He snarled and growled at the sky. Somewhere out there were Mira, the mother, and Hana, a kitten too new to face what was suddenly racing down out of the dark sky.

  Clavius saw the sky’s mouth open. Black lips were laced with electric violet spittle. A great howling deafened him and he very nearly turned to run.

  But he could not leave the girl. He could not.

  He did not see, except with his mind. There was the vast, black, empty savannah. The thin yellow moon had never really existed except in some chained ancestral memory that survived an eon and more since remembered by that smilodon who lived on Earth a million years ago.

  Where the moon had been, there was the mouth of the sky. And into that mouth bounded the animas of Mira and little Hana, and with them their human partners.

  Clavius roared a challenge, but the Other ignored him. Instead the mouth of the sky closed like the jaws of a predator far greater than Black Clavius.

  The cat struggled against the urge to shriek in fear. Instead he burrowed against the thrashing girl’s sweat-damp breasts, never taking his wide eyes from the darkness where the sky had been.

  Deep within Glory where Dietr Krieg had his surgery and infirmary, the psychic shock of the MD’s disappearance was muted by the Goldenwing’s protective mechanisms. It was not to Glory’s advantage that her crew of Wired Starmen should be incapacitated by the loss of any one or two of their number. But syndics were often more vulnerable than they imagined themselves to be.

  Krieg, of all aboard Glory, considered himself an unsentimental man. He had never been particularly tolerant of young Damon Ng, and over the uptime years he had taught himself to deal with the Rigger in a peculiarly severe and inflexible manner. He had, in fact, always thought of Damon as a kind of Cybersurgeon’s copybook exercise in practical psychiatry.

  I am immune to grief, he thought. I do not feel loss or loneliness. A Cybersurgeon must be stronger than ordinary men.

  He sat at his workstation erect and still, stunned by his bereavement. Damon, he thought, and Duncan--good God, Duncan. For the first time in many years, Dietr Krieg, physician of Earth, wept like a woman.

  28. Epiphanies

  For the occupants of the MD ship there was first a flash of blue-shifted light as the plunge toward the singularity steepened. Duncan was overwhelmed with the strangeness of the fall. It happened with no consciousness of time passing, no sense of space changing, even as the ship and all it contained assumed the threadlike proportions demanded by the Einsteinian hypothesis.

  Duncan was aware of the stretching of space as the ship passed through the singularity, but there was no visual indication within of what his Talent told him was actually taking place Outside. In theory, they should all be dead, stretched into singular chains of atomic constituents by the massive gravity of the Gateway. But it was not happening that way. He was swept by a terrified anxiety. Was anything happening? Or were they all dead, experiencing an undreamed-of reality of pure perception?

  Duncan grasped the padded arms of the fighting chair. The sensations were real enough. He felt disembodied, but the action of the mass-depletion coils girdling the ship could explain that. The others in the ship, Kantaro, the Kaian retainer Ishida, Damon and the cats looked real enough, though Damon seemed stupefied by the fall.

  No, if this was death, then what was it out there? The screens of the external imagers were blank washes of shifted light, fading even as Duncan watched. What replaced the light was not the expected darkness. It was an emptiness, a blankness, beyond the Thalassan’s experience. The experience, he thought, was as though he were trying to see without the organs of sight. It was, to his human senses, nothing.

  How was it possible that within the ship no shapes changed, no spatial or temporal relationships were transformed?

  “Higashi-san,” Duncan said. “Does this happen when the MD coils open a Gateway?”

  The young Yamatan was pale and wide-eyed. “No, Kr-sama. A mass-depletion gate opens into another space. But not like this one. I have never seen that. “ He indicated the blankness of the imaging screens.

  “Rotate the ship through three hundred sixty degrees,” Duncan ordered. “Enable all scanners.”

  The instruments on the console before Duncan reacted sluggishly. That was to be expected, because the mass-depletion engine reduced the inertia of the ship and all it contained nearly to zero. But the scanners remained as blank as before.

  Duncan guessed that the ship and what it contained were locked in a bubble of reality held together by the output of the MD engine. The bubble was maintained by a voracious consumption of energy in the mass-depletion coils. What would happen when the craft’s inertia dropped to zero? When an MD moved through a gate of its own creation and then consumed all the inertia it had carried through, it would run out of power and fall back into normal space--though often at a vast distance from the site of the original gate. Duncan suspected that this was a very different reality. He had serious doubts that the MD coils would be able to generate enough force to create another singularity. We may have crossed a barrier through which we cannot return, Duncan thought. And meanwhile, the Terror, the Outsider, was still nearby. The reality within the bubble was thick with threat.

  Mira cast herself adrift in the near-null gravity; she floate
d with claws extended, teeth bared, ears flattened against her skull. Duncan saw that small Hana had assumed an almost identical posture of aggression. He probed empathically, seeking to co-opt Mira’s mental images. He could not. The sensory equipment of the Folk was more sensitive than humans’ by orders of magnitude.

  Duncan reacted to the proximity of the old enemy with self-discipline. Fear was unacceptable, as was hatred or anger. Those emotions attracted the Terror as blood in the water attracted the sharks of Earth’s oceans. He shut away his dread and despair. I came here to find you, he thought. Show yourself. The challenge created an angry wave that washed over and through the MD ship. So the content of null space and the reality within the bubble were interactive, Duncan thought. That meant It could reach them. Perhaps it also meant that they could reach It.

  Duncan remembered well the feel of the encounter in the Ross Stars. But this time perhaps the adversary was not totally the aggressor. It had been surprised by the pursuit of the MD ship. It was likely that it had never been surprised before. There was the familiar burning rage, and even the streaks of angry loneliness Buele had once claimed to discern. But the sullen fury was less than the killing force Duncan had expected to encounter.

  Mira’s images seemed to come with incredible speed. She called furiously. Duncan had a flash memory of the images Mira sensed. Once they had lurked out there at great distances. But no longer. The man was certain that Mira--and possibly Hana and Pronker, as well--could see the adversary clearly.

  For the First time since the fall through the singularity, Damon Ng stirred out of his frightened torpor.

  “Calm, Damon,” Duncan said. “Calm.” To Kantaro he called, “What does Hana see?”

  “I cannot tell, Kr-san. It is indistinct.”

  It was too soon for the mental bridge between Kantaro and Hana to carry much useful information. It was even possible that the link would never really form. It will take time, Duncan thought, and have we time?

  It came to him that in this null space where they found themselves, the familiar parameters did not exist. If there was no true space, then could there be time? For many months aboard Glory Duncan had considered and hypothesized about the Terror’s ability to ignore all the Einsteinian limitations. Was this the true answer? Did the Klein bottle of Creation contain universes where neither time nor distance had any reality?

  Mira growled and bared her teeth. The cat sensed the Terror nearby. Whether the image was accurate Duncan had no way of knowing. But Mira was tracking the enemy. Why was it that the lack of time or space failed to deter her? It had never inhibited her ability to see and feel the enemy at a distance that in her native universe might be extragalactic. What the Folk ignored, Duncan thought, did not inhibit them. It was the first of many epiphanies.

  The second epiphany, and not a pleasant one, was that the Yamatans might suddenly have been pushed beyond their ability to respond. If this were true, the mistake was Duncan’s, whose dour and melancholy disposition had prepared him, almost from birth, to cope with the unbelievable.

  Kantaro was shaken, but still in command of himself. How much of that was due to small Hana? Had Glory and, through her, Mira, prepared Hana for what might come? Kantaro had lived thirty standard years in preparation for this trial. Hana had lived six weeks. Broni might say it was a wonderment. And it was.

  The Kaian retainer Ishida presented a divergent set of problems. Mira despised him on sight. Even before passing through the singularity, she had avoided him, hissing at him if he drew near.

  The man himself seemed befuddled by their situation. As well he might be, thought Duncan. A Yamatan samurai retainer, more than most men, would require the assurance of an orderly world and of his place in it. Not a peaceful world, far from it, for Ishida was not a peaceful man. That was evident in his every word and action.

  But was he capable of clinging to his rationality in this place where they found themselves? That would remain to be seen.

  Kantaro’s voice seemed thin, attenuated. “Kr-sama--what is happening to us?”

  Duncan’s own voice sounded strange, as though the bubble containing the ship were fragile, allowing the reality within to leach away slowly. “We are in a kind of null space, a place beyond the singularity we passed. So far we have a small initiative. The Terror is startled. Can’t you feel it? Mira does, and so do the other cats.”

  The MD pilot, Yamaguchi, spoke hoarsely. He was pallid, like a man slipping into shock. “It has never happened like this before, Kr-sama, never. An ordinary jump for a ship like this is short, almost instantaneous. No one has ever found a place like this one.” The “and returned” was not spoken, but it was there.

  His tone had the shrill component of one who stood on the edge of an abyss.

  “We passed through Its singularity,” Duncan said. “The MD coils are probably what is keeping us alive. Look at the imagers. What do you see?”

  “Nothing, Kr-sama,” the pilot said. “Nothing at all.” He sounded on the verge of hysteria.

  “There is nothing to see, Yamaguchi-san,” Duncan said. “There is no space, no time outside our own perception.” It was not courage the MD pilot lacked. It was belief. Yamaguchi simply found it near to impossible to find himself--here.

  Duncan sympathized. He was struck by the stunning thought that even if a return should be possible, the MD ship might pass again through the singularity into a universe or a reality--the words were interchangeable in this situation--in which a year or ten thousand years had passed.

  We must retain a link with our own actuality, he thought. It was vital. To relinquish that link meant madness.

  Damon Ng was succumbing to the stress. His eyes widened, tried to roll back in his skull. Pronker sought him out and fastened himself to his skinsuit. Pronker’s sending--a cry for help--was so powerful that Mira and Hana reacted by seeking close physical contact with the young tom. Somehow the group sending created an image Damon could interpret. He said hollowly, “It is running from us, Captain. We must follow.”

  It was what Duncan had hoped for, yet had dared not expect, the smallest weakening in the Outsider’s merciless behavior. But he had to be certain. “How do you know?” Duncan demanded.

  Damon put his arms around the cats in his lap who were struggling to be understood. Pronker and Mira yowled with a mixture of fright and anger. Hana, young and with powers not fully developed, sought comfort by attempting to burrow through the slick skinsuit and touch Damon’s flesh.

  “I don’t know. They do.” His eyes were glazing. He looked Wired. Without Glory's massive computing power sustaining their psychic Talents that should be impossible, Duncan thought. Yet what did “should be” and “impossible” mean in this place--if place it was?

  Ishida spoke in a flat, uninflected voice. “The pilot is fainting, Kr-san. Shall I take over?” In fact, the Kaian retainer was right. The pilot was sinking more and more deeply into shock.

  Duncan lifted the weightless Yamatan from his seat and took his place. His knowledge of colonial vessels was almost primitive. But plainly this nameless mass-depletion spacecraft was of the first generation of things to come. If we live, Duncan thought. If we survive and return ...

  That was Duncan’s third epiphany.

  Mira launched herself at Duncan, eyes wild and tail brushed. It was a pose Duncan knew well. She assumed it often when, in the privacy of the Captain’s quarters aboard Glory, they played with crumpled balls of paper and lengths of cord. But Mira was not playing now. With her ears flat against her skull and her small but formidable teeth bared, she had the look of a predator making a sudden, final rush at her prey.

  I do not know if we humans are ready, Duncan thought. But Mira is ready. Mira, in fact, is ready for war.

  Was the Terror weaker than Duncan remembered it from the Ross encounter? There might be unsuspected reasons. How long had it lived in this null space that might be native to it? A hundred centuries? A thousand? Once again his humanity betrayed him. Human beings li
ved by the clock and calendar, but Time had no meaning here. Had never had meaning. There was no past, no future, only a null-dimensional ... what?

  Duncan reined himself. He could feel the deep and terrible loneliness of this place without sun, stars, without light or sound or time or distance. Few humans had ever been so divided from their own kind.

  Duncan treated his momentary weakness with self-contempt. Surely a man who spent a solitary boyhood in the open skiffs of Chalkmeer, one who, before he could walk or swim, learned from the adults of his marriage group how to face the toothed, fur-bearing fishes alone under the great red glow of Moon Bothwell, could face this raging emptiness?

  He had actually stalked the Terror hoping to find some weakness. Had he done so? Its use of the Red Sprite to feed from the Yamatan aurora was an activity none of the syndics had seen before. How efficient was the energy transfer? How much life must the entity consume to perform the miracle of the Gateway, so like a black hole in miniature? But though it ate life, it consumed energy in many forms. The transfer of power from the Yamatan aurora had been a dazzling, daunting, intimidating event.

  There is so much we do not know, Duncan thought. What weapons might one use against such an entity? And where was the monstrous thing? Outside the ship, his human eyes could see nothing.

  How large was the Terror? No human had ever seen it fully materialized and lived. The Collective of Nimrud’s soldiers had discovered that. They, at least, were granted the mercy of dying under their own sun.

  Possibilities were racing across the landscape of Duncan’s mind. He broke through the blindness and glimpsed the rocky coast of Thalassa in a driving rain. Lost in the mist and distance, a furred leviathan was thrashing furiously in the tumultuous sea. Was it wounded? Old? Surrounded by enemies? Dying?

  Or was it not there at all?