Glory

by Alfred Coppel

Still shivering in the cold air of his personal compartment, Jean Marq arose and slipped into a skinsuit. Among the clutter of his personal gear he found his stash of Dust. Duncan knew that he had brought Dust aboard, because Duncan knew everything. But Masters seldom interfered with the vices of their crewmen. Only if they reduced the efficiency of the ship did they enforce their authority. Duncan Kr was not a disciplinarian. He ruled by example, not by threat.

  Marq broke the seal and inhaled deeply. Dust gave him no pleasure. What it did was dull remorse.

  He pushed off and floated to the terminal in the wall and plugged in. Glory told him the state of voyage, ship, and crew.

  Duncan and Anya Amaya were conning the ship. Glory was tacking away into a region of the Oort Cloud swept almost clean by the gravity of Drache, the great white gas giant that guarded Luyten 726’s outer marches. Young Damon was EVA, surrounded by monkeys. What did the youngster find to talk about with those half-machine, half-animal things? Some Dust would do that one no harm whatever. Ng’s acrophobia was like a stench in the ship, Marq thought,

  The neurocybersurgeon had unplugged himself and was relaxing in his pod, dreaming up who knew what Germanic grandiosity. He was listening to Wagner. The Liebesnacht. The bulkhead microphones picked up the music. There was no real privacy anywhere aboard a Goldenwing. For safety’s sake, no crewman could ever be out of touch.

  On impulse, Marq asked that Glory show him the frozen corpse of Han Soo in the hold. The computer imaged the old Celestial’s still face and Marq saw it clearly. He felt a pang of deep sorrow. Han Soo had been Marq’s only friend aboard the Glory.

  Marq closed his eyes and studied the calm, distant face. It was like an ivory carving: the smooth features, closed eyes behind sloping epicanthic folds. Those eyes, Marq thought, had opened first in the valley of the Yangtze River. And they had closed for the last time eight light-years from Earth, after a life that a downworlder would think was as long as forever.

  We share the emptiness, Old Man, Marq thought. You sleep dreaming of Earth as I do. But you will never awaken more.

  The computer showed him that Duncan and Anya were both naked in the bridge pods. Though it was common practice among Starmen to go nude if they chose, it still sent a shaft of sensation through Marq’s loins to sense the image of the naked teenaged girl conning the ship. She would never have bared her breasts to the sun of Provence, he thought, yet she lay naked as a newborn in her working pod without a second thought. She slept with Duncan and Krieg and Damon without prejudice. And she would have done so with Jean Marq, too, but for Marq’s need to do penance. Anya Amaya’s New Earth open sexuality was like a splinter in Jean Marq’s flesh. Eros was a demon, a destroyer of men.

  Marq told the computer to inform Duncan that he was awake and ready to stand his watch. Then he detached the computer drogue from his socket and allowed the heavy cable to retract into the fabric wall.

  His face was stubbled and there was a sour taste in his mouth, but he did not wash himself or clean his teeth. Marq deliberately neglected his body. He seldom shaved, washed infrequently. He almost never visited the spinning segment of Glory’s hull where gravity to order was simulated by centrifugal force and the Starmen could exercise with weights and springs. Han Soo had once told Marq that his physical neglect was deliberate, a self-inflicted punishment. Jean Marq accepted that judgment. Since there was really no God, it fell to each man to pass sentence on himself for his sins.

  He was vaguely hungry, but as always, the thought of suckling on the feeding tube nauseated him. From time to time young Damon, who fancied himself a great chef, would open the vast galley--designed to feed thousands-- and create a sumptuous meal, a feast for monarchs. But the daily business of nourishing the crew was handled by Glory herself, who did not much care whether or not the food was elegant, only nourishing. Jean Marq, once a gourmet, likened eating ship’s fare to the consumption of offal. With the need to recycle everything on long-duration voyages, the simile was not pure hyperbole.

  Marq turned from the terminal and caught a glimpse of his doll in her half-open drawer. “She” was a quasi-living, speaking paracoita (a name given such devices by an ancient writer named Wolfe, who speculated vastly about Earth’s future), an almost ludicrously buxom product of the sex laboratories of Yoni Island, on Nightwing in the Ross Stars. Driven beyond endurance by abstinence early in his first voyage, Jean had purchased the grotesque artifact. She was a low-level android designed to perform coitus on demand. “Better than Lefty’s sister,” the vulgarians of Yoni had said of their product. But Marq, shamed by what he had done, never used her. She rested in her transparent case, a plastic sepulcher decorated with erect phalluses and gaping labia.

  To use the paracoita, he felt, would be to abandon the last of his humanity. He intended to set the thing adrift in deep space, but somehow had never managed to do it. Uptime passed and the paracoita traveled with him, reclining in her case, silent but ever ready, acquiescent, and virginal.

  Bareheaded and barefoot, Marq launched himself into the transit tube that had swallowed Mira. It was a fabric entrail, one of thousands that wound through Glory’s inner spaces. It was .kept open primarily by air pressure, although there were titanium ribs at intervals. If punctured, the tube would pinch shut to isolate the damage until it could be repaired by a monkey, or if the damage were really serious, by a member of the crew in space armor. To a man as practiced as Jean Marq, a transit tube was like the barrel of a gun to a bullet. He, and all the others, could literally fly through Glory.

  Duncan Kr lifted himself from the glyceroid and floated free. Without bothering to dress he moved to an auxiliary panel and activated the spar cameras. A holocube came alive with the computer image of Glory’s rig. Sails gleamed gold in the light of the Luyten sun--still distant with a barely discernible disc. The intricate web of the monofilament rig made a fantastic pattern of silvery threads against the black of space.

  The star Glory was approaching looked slightly bluer than it was and the stars astern were red-shifted. Glory carried a substantial percentage of light-speed, though she was using her backed royals and main t’gallants to bleed off velocity. The sails nearest the hull coruscated with a shower of inhibited tachyons. They created a glow of St. Elmo’s fire along the spars. The effect was startlingly beautiful, even to an old hand like Duncan. The golden fire transformed Glory’s top hamper into a living design, glittering against the night.

  Still connected, Duncan said: “Anya, Jean can take over now. Disconnect.”

  “Yes, Duncan.” The thought was clear and without overtones. When Anya sailed, she was a sailor, nothing more.

  Duncan studied the holograph of Glory’s rig. To his practiced eye the location of the hundred or more monkeys was clearly visible. And so was Damon, falling free, a dozen meters from the mizzentop. Duncan could read his fear from his spread-eagled position and the pulsebeat of apprehension that leaked through from the telemetry to the computer interface.

  “Damon. This is the Master. Use a tether, damn it.”

  “Don’t be angry, Duncan.” There was a mental quaver in the transmission.

  “I’m not angry. But use a tether when you are EVA from now on. That is an order.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That should make him happy.”

  Duncan turned to see Jean Marq on the bridge. When the Master did not reply to Jean’s comment, the Frenchman said, “He does it on purpose, you know. He enjoys being terrified.”

  The glow from the holocube showed the Mathematician’s stubbled face and hollow eyes. The cadence of his speech made Duncan aware that he had Dusted immediately upon waking from his nightmares.

  “I know why he does it, Jean,” Duncan said. “Are you fit to take your watch? I can stay on if you want.”

  “I am all right, Duncan. Are we about free of the Oort Cloud?”

  “We are in Drache’s swept space.”

  “In the wake of the Dragon,” Marq said. “How fitting.” His eyes fl
ickered as Anya rose from her pod and pulled her drogue free. It retracted into the Conn Panel and the girl floated out of the pod and stretched, Mira-like, arching her back and extending her arms and legs. Her fine, dark hair formed a cloud around her small, well-shaped head. She smiled at the Frenchman and said, “Hallo, Jean. Rest well?”

  Marq wondered if she had been spying on him. But no. He knew that Anya was more sensitive to Glory and all her sailing parts, than to the living things inside her. Except, perhaps, Mira. She loved the cursed animal and her brood of kittens. It disgusted the mathematician that Mira’s pregnancy, too, had been arranged by Krieg with a vial of frozen genetically enhanced cat sperm. Marq looked away from the naked Anya as tiny fires raced through his nervous system. Dust and sexual arousal had conflicting effects. Marq wondered if that was why he Dusted.

  Duncan removed his drogue and suffered that familiar diminution of vision when he separated himself from Glory. He turned again to watch the holocube in which a tiny Damon approached the masthead complex of blocks and halyards aswarm with monkeys. Who were probably setting things to rights, Duncan thought sardonically; the halyards were beyond Damon’s merely human efforts. Through the rig one could see the distant shape of Smuts, another of the gas giants, making a transit of the Luyten sun. Glory’s speed was still affecting the apparent celerity with which things were happening in downtime. As the great planet moved across the face of its primary in uptime seconds, downtime hours were passing. Earlier, in deep space, the time dilation would have been greater.

  “Any word from below?” Jean Marq asked, taking the Master’s drogue and preparing to connect.

  “I sent Colonist Kloster the latest ephemeris,” Anya said, twisting in air and heading for the transit tunnel.

  Marq settled the drogue into his socket with practiced movements. His awareness did not encompass all, as Duncan’s had. Some men were less sensitive than others. But he was sufficiently aware of Glory to be left safely with the conn.

  “I relieve you, Master and Commander” he said formally. Tradition, ritual, and the Master’s privileges were vital aboard a Goldenwing. They were the elements of the Wired Ones’ law, without which life in deep space was impossible.

  Duncan waited until the Frenchman had settled into the warm glyceroid before closing the hatch on the pod.

  He spoke to a wall microphone and said, “An Amber Watch should be sufficient, unless you think differently.” A vessel’s condition of readiness was described by the hue of the Watch. Green for sailing an interstellar sound. Amber for a state of wary alertness, required in locations such as the Oort Cloud. And Red for those rare times when the Coriolis force exploded into the violence of tachyon storms, far rarer in deep space than the hurricanes and typhoons on old Earth.

  “We won’t make another midcourse correction until we are well inside the orbit of Thor. There is some debris in Drache’s trojan point, but nothing massive.”

  The words “Marq aye” whispered from the speakers. Duncan patted the covered pod and left the bridge.

  Anya was waiting for him in the transit tube. “Are you tired, Duncan?”

  “No.”

  “Good. The dorsal?”

  “I want to check on Han Soo first.”

  “I’ll come along,” Anya said. She had been fond of the old Celestial. He had been teaching her calligraphy at the moment of his death.

  Duncan led the way down the transit tube into the ventral sections of the ship, past the banks where the Donkeys, the EVA tractors, were kept. The tubes were lighted by a single fiber-optic thread spun through the fabric in a spiraling design. As one flew through the tube the peculiar lighting made it appear that the tube, rather than the observer, was in motion. It could be unnerving to the unwary. Duncan paused at the valve to hold 1009, where Han Soo’s frozen body was tethered in a vast emptiness.

  The air in the hold stood near the absolute zero of space. Duncan opened a compartment and handed Anya a coldsuit and took one for himself. It was a plastic body coverall with hood and faceplate that could protect one for a few minutes. Long enough, the theory went, to allow one to contrive other measures for survival. The theory was absurd, but the coldsuits were useful.

  Duncan opened the transparent valve and floated into the dark hold. The suit had a small light fixed to the helmet. In its glow Duncan and Anya Amaya could see that Han Soo was exactly as they had left him after preparing his body for a cold hold.

  “I keep expecting him to open his eyes and speak to me,” Anya said.

  “Han Soo has said all he will ever say,” Duncan said.

  It was a deep trauma for all when a Goldenwing lost a crewman in space. Terrible if by accident, almost as bad if, as in the case of Han Soo, the cause was natural. There was something about the vast isolation of a ship between the stars that made the loss of a single life a wrenching, melancholy thing to experience. Han Soo himself had once wondered aloud: “What must a lone soul experience, being cast out of its body in these emptinesses? How fast do you imagine a soul can travel across these spaces, if it is going home?”

  Duncan made the Sign of the Fish over Han Soo. It was a completely spontaneous gesture, a remnant of his almost forgotten childhood, when he worshiped with his marriage group in the stone kirk on the cliffs overlooking the great sea of Thalassa.

  Anya Amaya saw and smiled. On New Earth there had been no religion. The people had considered themselves totally rational beings, without the need for psychic crutches. Only in the matter of female fertility were they fanatical. But Anya was a tolerant girl, aware of Duncan’s peculiarities, and slightly in love with him despite them all.

  They left the cold hold and returned the suits to the locker. They flew swiftly “upward” past the spin section, through the empty comb holds to the highest level under Glory’s dorsal surface. They floated into a compartment, large, as all spaces on Glory were, but warm and dark.

  Anya somersaulted to a stop and floated in between fabric deck and titanium frame overhead.

  “How shall it be?’

  She knew the answer, of course. With Duncan it was always under the stars and the rig, the two things he loved most in all the universe. Young Ng preferred it dark, the more womblike the better. Krieg favored a blaze of interior light that turned the space into a large laboratory, and his performance was usually as cold and brilliant as his surroundings.

  Jean Marq? Anya could only guess. He was a man with a badly damaged libido. Once, quite by accident, she had glimpsed the entombed paracoita he kept in his compartment. She thought it the saddest thing she had ever seen.

  She made a dancing spin in the darkness and passed a hand across the light sensors, A section of the overhead opened, became transparent. Instantly the space was filled with the overwhelming presence of the stars. Glory’s sails, hectares of them, reflected the light of the Luyten sun endlessly, the repeating patterns gilded by the golden skylar. The rig, seen from this angle, was like an expanding maze of a web spun by some magical cosmic spider. And through it shone the red-shifted stars behind and the blue-shifted stars ahead. The effect was breathtaking. Duncan’s upturned face showed his joy. Anya floated to him and rested her small, pointed breasts against his back, her arms around his neck.

  “How you love it,” she said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What a lovely man you are, Duncan Kr,” she said.

  Many kilometers above the hull’s curving flank, and resembling a fly in the web, Damon Ng prepared to work his way slowly downward. The name Damon had been assigned to him by Glory’s computer when he first reported aboard for his cybersurgery. His birth name was Eight; he was the eighth of a clone raised to young manhood under a thousand-kilometer-long canopy of green on the large island of Nixon on the planet Grissom, second from the sun Ross 128.

  Damon’s mother was a machine of sorts, not of metal and glass, but of fibers and sap and chlorophyll. An incubator tree. Women on Grissom were rare in the early days and the practice of cloning humans, co
nsidered immoral on the once-crowded Earth, was adopted. Young clones were raised in nests provided by the incubator trees. The human parents from whom the cloneable cells were taken did not involve themselves with the young. Nurture was left to specially trained individuals who guided the nesting generation through life as far as puberty, at which time the clone’s specialty in life was selected.

  Damon, however, was Chosen by the Starmen, and he willingly abandoned his life under the towering trees.

  Now he struggled against his acrophobia every minute of every hour of every uptime day. At this moment his ordinarily ruddy face was livid with fear despite the tether he had fastened to the rig at Duncan’s order.

  He could feel himself shaking, his stomach cramping, his suit tainted by the smell of urine. He had wet himself when he had drifted a dozen meters from the mizzentop. Going outside was an agony. Even an hour in Glory’s observatory with the transparent dome brought the cold sweat.

  It was Krieg who had told him that it might be possible, if he persevered, to desensitize himself by going extravehicular at every possible opportunity. However, there were no guarantees, Krieg had said dispassionately.

  Damon ordered the importunate monkeys away and saw that they had already cleared the halyard. Gibbering softly with fear, he disconnected his tether from the top and snapped the lead onto a running stay. Intellectually he now knew that it was impossible for him to drift away from Glory as he descended the several kilometers to the hull, but the assurance did not appreciably lessen his dread.

  He tongued his radiophone to life inside his helmet and instructed the monkey cyborgs to resume their normal routine, which entailed patrolling the rig for six hours, then returning to the monkey comb--familiarly called the Monkey House--for two hours of recharging and self-maintenance.

  Damon touched his reaction controls and backed away from the mizzentop, taking great care not to entangle himself in the maze of stays and braces. Above him the starboard mainmast towered, all sails set. The maintop was twenty kilometers farther away from Glory’s hull than was the mizzentop, where Damon Ng floated on his tether. Thirty kilometers below, lost in the geometric complexity of the mizzen spars lay Glory’s long, fabric hull. She resembled the antique airships of Earth that Damon had seen in the teaching spools on Grissom. Dirigibles were the approved method of transport on Voerster, he had heard, though nothing he would encounter there was nearly as impressive as the great airships of ancient Earth.