Glory

by Alfred Coppel

  Wired, Duncan shared the protothoughts of the simian-brained cyborgs who inhabited the rig. Duncan even detected the melancholy grace notes released by Han Soo’s slowly dissolving synapses in the comb.

  Sentience, Duncan thought, was fragile. But final death in the cold of space can be a slow business.

  As Master and Commander--the syndicates were always drawn to ancient ranks and titles--Duncan was aware of all Glory contained, including her crew.

  He shared Mathematician Jean Marq’s troubled sleep as he sweated through his nocturnal bout with remorse. Each night of every voyage the Frenchman returned to a sunny field long ago in Provence where, over and over, he committed rape and murder.

  Dietr Krieg, a saber-blade of a man recruited at the advanced age of thirty-four downtime years, was not sleeping. Duncan felt him nearby.

  Dietr, too, was presently hard-wired to the ship’s computer. But he was not concerned with Glory or the Oort Cloud or anything whatever pertaining to Luyten or the voyage. Krieg’s passion was medical knowledge for its own sake. Unlike the others of the syndicate, he never felt a twinge of regret or loneliness. He could as easily have worn a black SS uniform in the Dark Century of Earth, performing grotesque experiments on living men and women. He would have done this without heat or rancor, but with a vast curiosity--much the same sardonic curiosity he expressed when he fitted Mira, a four-year-old Abyssinian cat, with a computer interface. Krieg’s only truly human trait was his sense of the prodigious.

  As Glory transited the dangerous Oort Cloud, Krieg reclined in his quarters, wired to the computer and absorbing a new medical program he had acquired at the last planetfall, on Gagarin. His brain was receiving information at billions of baud. Duncan, aware of the neurocybersurgeon, knew he would not be able to retain data absorbed at such speed. Duncan knew that Krieg knew it, too. But the surgeon was addicted. Hunger for knowledge of his art was what had enticed him into space. “Downside,” he had once said to Duncan, “how long could I live? Eighty years? Ninety? How much could medicine progress in that time? But if my years are uptime, I can suck medicine dry.”

  Perhaps, Duncan thought. There are many wonders. But Dietr lacks a heart. There are things he will never know.

  An impression of fear brushed Duncan’s consciousness. It came from young Damon, the last recruit of the Glory syndicate. Damon Ng, fifteen and newly Wired. It was his task to back up the monkeys, to handle whatever problems they could not. It was the most menial task aboard Glory and the most physically challenging. The Rigger must go EVA many times each voyage and must often climb to the tops, fifty kilometers from the hull of the ship.

  Damon Ng was chosen on Grissom, the second planet of Ross 154, a forested world of thousand-meter-tall trees. The natives of Grissom spend all their lives under a green canopy. They see the stars rarely. Damon, like many of his generation on Grissom, was raised on fantastic tales of space and Starmen. When the Glory syndicate dispatched Krieg and Han Soo downworld on Search, the young man begged his family to give him to Glory.

  He quickly discovered that without the comforting ceiling of green leaves above his head he was neurotically acrophobic. A climb into Glory’s rigging never failed to call up a choking panic. Yet he went extravehicular at every opportunity, determined to conquer his fear.

  It was Dietr Krieg who had introduced Damon to the process of “desensitization.” No psychiatrist, Krieg was curious about the efficacy of such therapy. When Duncan questioned the wisdom of sending a terrified Rigger EVA, Dietr said, “It is an old Earth method, Duncan. If a horse throws you, you must get back into the saddle.”

  Duncan asked drily, “Does it work?”

  “It may,” Dietr Krieg replied. “But how would I know? I am a neurosurgeon, not a feelgood.”

  At the moment there was a minor tangle at the blocks of the starboard mizzen top. A monkey could clear it easily, but Damon Ng was determined to master his phobia. Duncan allowed it because to shield young Damon would be to destroy him. A frightened man between the stars was a menace to himself and to his syndicate.

  At this moment Damon was at the mizzen top, untethered, clearing the block and weeping with silent terror.

  Duncan feels still another faint, faint sending from the brain of Han Soo. In the cold it takes a life many days to complete its dying. The sending carries the faint scent of soil, the smell of earth. Duncan will ask permission from the Voertrekker-Praesident to lay Han Soo in the ground of Planet Voerster.

  Duncan suspects there may be trouble about this. The Afrikaaners who settled Voerster are as bigoted now as they were when they abandoned Earth. But Duncan is prepared to demand a suitable grave for his dead astro-programmer.

  Duncan Kr--it was once Kerr--is a tall man, long-boned and pale of skin with shaggy dark hair. His face is homely, but finely modeled. He has eyes that are clear, pure blue and set in deep sockets that by now, in his fortieth year, are nested in tiny webs of wrinkles. He has the face of a man grown accustomed to seeing great distances.

  His people, Clan Kr, were very long ago Scots from the islands of Earth called Hebrides. But for seven generations Clan Kr had lived in a bleak seaside village called Chalkmeer, a settlement of stone huts and a stone pier on the north coast of the continent of Sin on Thalassa of Wolf 359, eight light-years from Earth. Thalassa is a world of saltwater and stone, a perpetually wintry world with a single, great satellite that raises tides of two hundred meters once each forty-day month. Huge tides and storms dominate the single- enormous sea of Thalassa. Sin is the only continent. It is gray-green with oxygen-producing lichens. What remains of Thalassa is a gray-green ocean. The land is all rocks and mountains, and it lies under snow for two-thirds of the long, 900-day year.

  As a colony Thalassa has not been a success. Life is too difficult and the colonists too few. Humanity is slowly, inexorably losing its grip on the planet. But Duncan‘s people have always been seafarers and fisherfolk. They are stolid and determined--despite the fact that the colony actually began to die the day the sleepers left Goldenwing Aristotle’s planetary shuttle and stood to stare in silent dismay at their world.

  But for generations they have endured, though each long year there are fewer of them.

  Until Duncan was eleven, Earth Standard, he, like all the few children of Thalassa, trolled for the red-furred fishes of the deep ocean. These sad creatures cried out in pain when they were gaffed into the boats, and Duncan, a natural empath, felt their pain and sickened.

  His parents were dour, but not unkind. They had no time for therapies and disappointments. Duncan was put to work ashore, to help the women of Chalkmeer grow barley in the interstices of the rocks on which the village perched above the sea.

  Duncan was one of six children of a marriage group consisting of four men and a dozen women. The dour Scot settlers grudgingly had chosen this form of marriage as a hedge against the sea, which killed men and left widows.

  Duncan was willing and strong for his age, and he might have lived out a life there by the Thalassa Sea in the rocky village of Chalkmeer.

  But when Glory appeared in Thalassa’s night sky, the clan met at the Scone Stone by firelight, and as the flames leaped skyward, considered how best to deal with the Starmen.

  Glendora Kr, the clan’s Yearleader, mounted the Stone and spoke to the gathered people. “The Starmen have come back, as the Computer predicted that they would do. But we have no goods to sell nor money with which to buy. We have no items they can carry into the sky, for the fishes have surrendered only enough furs to supply the grand folk of Sin. The Wired Ones, they know many things. They surely know our state. Then we must consider: why are they here? “

  Rob Kr, thought to be Duncan’s father, spoke up. “They have come on Search. They will ask for one of our sons or daughters.” He regarded his fellow clansmen soberly. “They will never take a child unwilling, but if we refuse them they will never return.” He glanced up at the windswept night sky.

  Glory, in synchronous orbit over
the land of Sin, was a bright golden star near the limb of Bothwell, the great moon of Thalassa. “They will descend in a shuttle that rides on fire. The Good Book Program describes it all. I put it to you that we must let them leave us satisfied we have treated them with respect.” He looked sadly around the circle of the burning stone fire. “We all know that one day--who can say when?--our children or our children’s children will need the goodwill of the Starmen. So let us select a child, and ask that they choose that one and no other, for the great sea is broad and we are few.“ Rob Kr sat himself down in silence.

  Katryn M’donald, the mother of twelve strong daughters, said to the Yearleader: “What Rob says is so. The Starmen must always smile on us.”

  Glendora, still standing on the Stone, said to Katryn, “Do you offer one of your girls?”

  “I will if I must.”

  The clan children, all who were old enough to attend the meeting at the Stone, murmured, some fearfully, a few expectantly.

  Rob Kr stood again. “I have the candidate. My Duncan loves the sea but hates the hunt. He is one we can spare.”

  Rob was known as a loveless man, but the clansmen whispered at this and the Preacher murmured, “‘Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.’“

  “That is a brave thing you do, Rob,” said Glendora, who was Duncan’s birth mother. “It is fit that I join you in it.”

  And when the Starmen rode their shuttle down and the then-captain of the Glory, a man old even in uptime, named Washington, with black skin and white hair, was met with fish and salt (the gifts of submission on Thalassa), Glendora Kr called Duncan and offered him to the Starman,

  It had been a hundred and fifteen long years since last a Goldenwing paused at Thalassa, but the clansmen knew the ritual. Washington felt young Duncan’s skull gently and then asked, “Will you travel with us, boy? To the stars?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, sir,” Duncan replied.

  The choosing was not complete until Duncan had been examined for suitability by another ancient Starman, a neurocybersurgeon. When this was done, Duncan’s forehead was painted with a star and Chalkmeer launched into three days of bittersweet celebration.

  The clans from kilometers around were represented and there was even a delegation from the Meeting House in Edinburgh. The Starmen, all of whom were aged, said that they had postponed their Search until reaching the Wolf Stars because great Starmen were born under the sign of the Wolf. It may have been flattery, but if it was it was well intended and the clansmen of Chalkmeer were pleased. In those few days Duncan was treated with more love and affection than he had ever known in his father’s cold croft. After the feasting Duncan was taken to a newly built, clean croft and there given aphrodisiacs mixed in strong beer, and for three nights until Moon Bothwell waned, he was visited by each of the nubile girls in Clan Kr, so that his genes would not be lost to the breeding pool.

  Then he was decorated with garlands of barley, wrapped in red furs and escorted to the shuttle with songs and bagpipes.

  It is many years uptime since that day and those nights by the great ocean. On Thalassa eighty years have gone by. Rob and Glendora Kr are dead. The sons and daughters Duncan spawned in the ceremonial croft have grown old with families of their own. Like all Starmen, Duncan imagines that one day he will revisit the world of his birth. He will not. When Starmen do return to their starting points, they find only weathered headstones over the folk they once knew.

  2. DEORBIT DAY IN VOERSTERSTAAD

  Frowning with peevishness, Ian Voerster, Voertrekker-Praesident and leader of the majority party in the Deliberative Assembly, sat wrapped in furs as the open electric carriage turned the comer at the Gate of Advance and started down the long, narrow avenue toward the Kongresshalle.

  Sedate, he thought. That was the word for the progress of his limousine. If the ornate wagon made fifteen kilometers in an hour it was doing well. Once there had been cars on Voerster that ran on petroleum. But the Rebellion had put paid to all that. The theories remained, but the war with the kaffirs had destroyed the infrastructure of a once-technological society. In the case of hydrocarbon fuels, the Rebellion had smashed the refining and cracking plants brought in pieces from Earth on the Milagro. And like so many other things, the tools to rebuild them were simply not available. Nearly a thousand years after the kaffir uprising, Voerster remained a rustic planet. A backwater. Ian Voerster often dreamed the dream of many Voertrekker-Praesidents before him. If only a Goldenwing could be captured and used exclusively to resupply Voerster. But it would never happen. There were too few Goldenwings, and space was too vast. If a Goldenwing called twice in a century, it was a near miracle.

  At close intervals along Advance Street, police militia in dress uniforms stood at attention. It was what was due the Head of State since the Rebellion, but Ian Voerster viewed the scene with distemper. The driver, a kaffir called Joshua, and the plainclothes bodyguard, a Trekkerpolizei of the Wache--the Security Troops--named Ryndik, sat like book-ends, one ebony, one white, on the driver’s bench. Ian Voerster prized kaffirs able to remain silent--a gift rare among the garrulous blacks. Ryndik, too, spoke seldom--so seldom, in fact, that there were rumors around Voertrekkerhoem that the bodyguard had been captured by wild kaffirs who cut out his tongue. The rumor was as untrue as it was grotesque. Such atrocities had not been perpetrated on Voerster since the Rebellion. But silent kaffir and laconic policeman sat dispassionately together on the carriage bench, wrapped, as was Ian Voerster, in furs against the bitter sea wind that blew across the city from Amity Bay.

  Actually, Ian Voerster’s white servants all loved ceremonial occasions. The Voertrekker chose them from families of soldiers and policemen who had a taste for the panoplies of power. Whether or not kaffir Joshua or any other loved Voertrekker holidays and ceremonies, the Voertrekker-Praesident never wondered or cared.

  The crowd of kaffirs and white lumpen lining the streets of Voersterstaad had shown minimal respect, but they had been sullen. Deorbit Day marked the anniversary of the departure of the Voertrekker colony ship from Earth, and for this reason the Convocation always began at the hour of breaking orbit from Earth’s Moon. In that place, long ago, the hour had been 1322 hours Greenwich Universal Time. The First Landers had immortalized the event by setting the opening of the summer Convocation of the Deliberative Assembly to 1322 Western Province Time. The fact was that no one had any idea of the relation, if any, between the two times. Ian Voerster was fond of quoting the Law of Unintended Consequences. In the case of commemorating Deorbit Day with a Convocation, the First Landers could not have foreseen the great Kaffir Rebellion or the Security Laws which followed, namely the Kaffir Curfew--a law, passed by the Deliberative Assembly, enjoining all kaffirs to be in their townships by 1800 hours. Since the Rebellion, all Voertrekker ceremonials were scheduled to begin after the kaffirs were out of sight. Except the Deorbit Day Convocation, whose hour had been established long ago and very far away.

  The effect was to force the races to share this one Convocation. Voertrekkers disapproved, because it seemed an improper mixing of white and colored. Kaffirs disapproved because inclusion in this occasion made them acutely aware that they were excluded from the others on Voerster. The Preachers of Elmi seemed to delight in telling their black congregations that they should love Voerster because it was as much theirs as it was the Voertrekkers’. So Elmi, as white as a snow-peak, was said to have believed. The thought irritated the Voertrekker-Praesident. The cult, for generations only an annoying kaffir fantasy, was now fashionable among University students and even some Kraalheeren.

  In his heart Ian Voerster, like many Voertrekkers, disliked sharing Deorbit Day with the kaffirs, but as the Voertrekker-Praesident, Ian was the guardian of traditions, which demanded that the Deorbit Day Convocation ceremonials be paraded before kaffir and Voertrekker alike at the hour stated by th
e First Landers. Even after so long, the Rebellion still loomed like a threatening shadow over the rulers of Voerster. But courage, too, was a tradition among Voertrekkers, and it would have been bad form to admit that the inhabitants of the townships still had the power to make Voertrekkers tremble.

  Beauty had not been a consideration when the state’s architects designed the government buildings of Voerster. Public construction was designed to be daunting to the eye. It was. The Kongresshalle and the surrounding structures-- the Ministry of Defense, the Treasury, the Police Academy, and Home Barracks--had all been designed after the kaffirs were put down and confined to the townships. The architecture was as massive and suspicious as Voertrekker society--resentful and alert.

  The halle had the look of nothing else on the planet. Not even the heavy buildings of Pretoria University, two thousand kilometers across the Sea of Grass on the eastern shore of the continent, were so uncompromising. Voertrekker taste naturally ran to stone lodges and bermed manor houses. Dwellings, while always built to larger-than-human scale, crouched low to seek shelter from the constant winds. But the Kongresshalle was arrogant. Its high facade was lined with galleries of blind stone arches, each constructed to collapse on an advancing enemy when the keystone was removed. Above the arches, gray stone walls were pierced with narrow gun-ports high above ground level. Truncated towers stood at each corner of the vast structure, and from each flew the Voertrekker flag--a white cross on a field of black--and under the planetary flag, the banner of one of the four provinces.