Glory's People (2 page)

“Enough,” Duncan said.

Amaya sighed. “Yes, Master and Commander.”

They returned to the tub for a final dip and then rose to stand in the air-dryers until their skins glowed.

In the bedroom, Duncan selected a silken skinsuit. It was sea blue and worked with almost invisible silver threads. “Have you something like this in your room, Sailing Master?” he asked.

“Much grander,” Amaya said as her naked backside vanished though the force-field into her part of the suite.

In minutes she was back, in a scarlet skinsuit with an overkimono of scarlet and gold silk. She had caught her hair in a long chignon with a golden comb. Rare metals were not rare on Yamato, Duncan thought. That, at least, was a promising development.

“Come look at this,” Duncan said, and led the way to the window wall facing north. He opened a panel, exposing a keyboard. He used the keyboard to produce an image of the night sky of Yamato on the window.

The constellations of this portion of Near Space were familiar. Despite the eleven light-years between Amaterasu and Sol, the skies were Earthlike. Sirius A dominated the deep sky and Orion the Hunter looked much the same as he looked from Earth. The two ringed gas giants of Tau Ceti’s outer system, Toshie and Honda, named for ancient Tokugawa vassals, were still in the dark blue sky. Stars and planets often shone in daylight on Yamato, easily overcoming the dim light of the yellow G8 star the natives called Amaterasu.

“Kantaro-san gave me a key to the scanner,” Duncan said.

“To what purpose, Duncan?” Amaya had a tendency to distrust men. It was bred into her Centauri genes.

“I suspect he may know why we have come.”

“How remarkable. Zen understanding a mere few parsecs from the Land of the Dragonfly.”

“Don’t sneer at these people, Anya. They’ve come closer than anyone in space to lightspeed travel. You remember why we are here.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Look.” Duncan manipulated the keyboard to recall the eleventh hour of full dark last night, a time when none of Yamato’s three moons was in the sky. A bright point of light swept across the sky.

“
There
. Did you follow it?”

“It was
Glory
?”

“Yes. But did you notice the Trojan points?”

Amaya frowned at the projected image. “Run it again.” Duncan repeated the display. At the moment when
Glory
's tiny image could be framed in the center of the observing field, he froze the image. “There. Leading and trailing. What do you see?” A hundred twenty degrees ahead and a hundred twenty degrees behind
Glory
could be seen dim points of light.

“Yes. Satellites?”

“Warships, I think. There are several in synchronous orbit as well. These people are frightened.”

“Not of us, surely.”

“I don’t know yet. But I am encouraged.”

“Oh. God, Duncan,” Amaya said tremulously. “Must we return to that so soon?”

Duncan laid his hands on her silken shoulders. “Have we a choice, Anya?”

The truth was, he thought, that all the crew was in what the psychiatrists called denial. The memory of the battle they and the people from the Twin Planets had fought both with and against one another, and finally, terrifyingly, against the force they had come to think of as “the Terror,” lived just below the level of human perception.

Did
Glory
's cats, Mira’s pride, feel the same way? On the voyage from Ross 248 to Tau Ceti the cats had been secretive and withdrawn--occupied, Amaya said, with cats’ business. Duncan hoped with all his being that the beasts were not withdrawing from their human partners. Without them, the Terror could burst from nowhere, ready to devour souls. He used the religious term deliberately, in a reversion to his childhood on the dour Calvinist seaworld of Thalassa.

“We have come for help, Anya. And to give warning.” Amaya ran a hand over the beautiful silk brocade she wore. “If only we could forget, Duncan. If only we could live like this.” Duncan put his hand on her head, fingers resting on the drogue socket that marked her completely and forever as a Wired Star-man and a Goldenwing syndic.

“I know,” Amaya whispered. “I know.”

Duncan extinguished the visual interface on the window wall. “Then let’s be diplomats, Sailing Master,” he said.

Amaya looked through the wall at the mountainous northern horizon. There had been nothing like the Fuji range on New Earth. As the first of the colony worlds NE had repeated most of the mistakes made by the collectivist states of Earth, levelling mountains, relocating rivers, changing the weather, regimenting the people. The result had been tragic. Life on New Earth was regimented, constrained, an ultimate expression of the ancient war between the genders. The first expeditions to the bleak new world had been heavily staffed by angry women and “sensitized” men. A crash program of artificial aids to procreation had resulted in men being relegated to sperm producers. The gender experiments had not prospered. Finally, in extremis, the power to rule had been surrendered to the militant feminists who remodeled NE’s government into a school for survival without joy or pleasure.

How will my homeworld meet the Terror when it comes
, Amaya wondered.
Should I even care?

I must
, she thought.

Duncan said, “Ready? We have a schedule to keep.”

“Lead, Master and Commander,” she said.

Glory
passed in low orbit over Yamato’s Inland Sea, so called by the Yamatan colonists because it was separated from the Great Ocean by the coastlines of the planet’s three continental islands. It was a sea far more vast than the Japanese Inland Sea of Earth from which it drew its name. Everything was on a larger scale on Planet Yamato. The seas were larger and emptier, the islands were near continents, mountainous and varied. Yet the planet, being less dense, massed only eighty-seven percent Earth normal.

Yamato had been discovered by a Japanese probe in the decade of the Jihad, and migration had been planned well in advance of the full horror that exploded from the mountains of Asia Minor. The colonists of Yamato prided themselves on their historic--and fortunate--foresight.

Whether the legends of the
Monogatari no Hachiman
were true or not, the fact was that three voyages of the
Hachiman
succeeded in populating the island-continents Honshu, Kyushu, and Takeda. A thousand years after Lander’s Day, the population of Yamato stood at 200,000,000. By any standard, Yamato was one of the more successful colonies of Earth’s Age of the Exodus.

On Kyushu the colonists had concentrated their heavy manufacturing and their flourishing space program. Once each seventh orbit, the
Gloria Coelis
overflew the Kyushu City spaceport. It was there that Anya and Duncan had been requested to land their sled. From the spaceport they had then been flown, rather ostentatiously in Cybersurgeon Dietr Krieg’s opinion, by the Yamatans to the planetary capital, Yedo. It was a sophisticated display, and intended to be so. A show, Krieg thought, designed to impress the people of the
Gloria Coelis.

It had succeeded. But
Glory
, herself, impressed the colonists far more. The last call of the
Hachiman
had taken place six hundred planetary years ago, and save for old tri-d photographic images and many beautiful (but inaccurate) screens and paintings, there had been nothing to prepare the people of Yamato for the reality of the ancient artifact now orbiting their world.

The vast ship glistened in the warm light of the G8 star. Her skylar sails were furled on her twenty-kilometer spars, exposing her monofilament rigging to throw spears of light with each change in the angle of the soft light from Amaterasu.

It pleased Yamatan sensibilities that seen from Earth, their sun was a part of the constellation Cetus, or in their language, Ku-jira, the Whale. Two of Yamato’s three moons, Oda and Toyotomi, were white. Tokugawa’s methane atmosphere shone with a creamy yellow light. With their pelagic primary, they seemed suitable companions for the beautiful Goldenwing that had brought hundreds of thousands of aesthetically trained Yamatans onto their rooftops in a festival mood.

Already celebrating the approaching Cherry Blossom Front moving north on Honshu, the folk of Yamato had greeted the arrival of
Glory
with street theater, Noh performances and origami festivals. Orbiting Yamato once each ninety-eight minutes,
Glory
displayed herself differently on each successive pass.

Her hull was of woven monomolecular fabric stretched over a titanium frame as fragile and delicate as the skeleton of a bird. The observation domes of her “weather” decks glittered like great diamonds in the yellow light of Amaterasu. There were dozens of smaller transparencies in the ship’s thousand upper compartments, placed under the nine masts so that the Wired Starmen could observe the sails and the work of the “monkeys”--the cybernetic organisms who performed the more dangerous tasks in the rig. These transparencies flashed diamantine in the shifting light.

Mizzens and foremasts extended ten kilometers from deck to topmast, mainmasts twice that. At the moment, the hove-to ship was being conned by the junior syndics: the Astroprogrammer, Broni Ehrengraf; Damon Ng, the Rigger; and the one-time Supernumerary and present Theoretical Mathematician, young Buele. Broni and Buele had joined the ship in the Luyten Stars.

Damon Ng, the present watch-keeper, had initialized the cameras on board to make images for the
Sailing Directions
. Wired sailors never lost an opportunity to add to the
Directions
.

Dietr Krieg, the Cybersurgeon, was unoccupied by duties to the ship. While in orbit, Dietr became Supernumerary, and neither he nor the cats of Mira’s pride--no one knew precisely how many there were--had specific duties to perform. This gave the physician time to return to his endless attempts to communicate directly with Mira.

At this moment Dietr was engaged in a task that both consumed and distressed him, and had ever since he had surgically altered the matriarch of
Glory
’s pride, connecting her (for good or ill) to the mainframe computer.

Mira, the ten-year-old queen, sat still as an Egyptian statue on the Cybersurgeon’s worktable. She did this willingly, but somehow with an attitude that expressed weary contempt for Dietr and his inability to communicate with her kind in any meaningful way.

The radio link Dietr had installed in the cat’s small skull showed only in the hair-thin antenna that made wireless linkage between animal and ship’s computer possible. Nine shiptime years had passed since Krieg performed the surgery. In that time he had repeated the procedure on many of Mira’s kittens. Until he had discovered, thanks to Buele and much to his own chagrin, that the electronic link was no longer vital. Somehow, whether by accident or design, Mira’s offspring had developed the ability to communicate with
Glory
without further physical intervention by the surgeon.

Mira and her pride would have been, Dietr often thought, a Terrestrial animal-breeder’s nightmare. Her first litter had resulted from an artificial insemination performed by the Cybersurgeon on his first voyage aboard
Glory
. The newer members of her pride were the result of random matings among siblings and, in some cases, matings with Mira herself.

Dietr puzzled over the variety that resulted from so small a gene pool, and he puzzled even more over the strange capabilities of the pride. How did Mira succeed in passing to her offspring the faculties Dietr Krieg thought he alone had the ability to bestow? And why did a ten-year-old queen, who should have been showing the signs of advancing feline middle age, have the physique of a cat just rounding into full maturity? How long would Mira and her kittens live?

More profound questions remained to be answered. How did Mira and her pride sense the presence of what the syndics of the
Gloria Coelis
had come to know, chillingly, as the Terror? How did the cats sense--no, it was more precise than that--how did they perceive the force, whatever it was, that had taken life so savagely during the ill-considered attempt to hijack
Glory
by the bitter people of Nimrud? Without the cats,
Glory
's syndics would be dead--along with their would-be conquerors--and the
Gloria Coelis
would be a splintered, scattered wreck drifting between the stars.

Dietr regarded the cat attentively. There had been a time when Mira and her responses to the doctor’s “modification” would have been simply exhibits in Dietr Krieg’s medical collection. Dietr was aboard the Goldenwing not because he had ever had a calling to become a Wired Starman, but because the time dilation of near-lightspeed gave a man of science the ability to spread--to elongate--his normal span of years, sampling the science of many worlds.

It had not worked exactly that way. Dietr had sampled many colonial sciences, but few had been the equal of the Terrestrial science he had left light-years and centuries behind. During his tenure as medical syndic aboard
Glory
, the ship’s wake extended from Sol to Aldrin to the Wolf Stars to Barnard’s Star to Epsilon Indi to Voerster in the Luyten Stars to Ross 248. Nowhere had he found the medical miracles he had been seeking. Instead he had performed them.

He stared at Mira, who stared back. “And I don’t know how I did it,” he said aloud. “Why won’t you speak to me?”

Mira’s tail gave a single lash. Somehow he knew that was a message of understanding. Not a caring message. He had been around
Glory
’s pride long enough to know they cared nothing for human ambitions. Theirs was a far more basic world. Perhaps the word was
natural
. Whatever it was, it lay out there beyond Dietr’s human capabilities.

“You have taught me humility, you little monster,” he said. “Who would have imagined it?” The Cybersurgeon was not a humble man.

He used to joke with Duncan, who had a far closer bond with Mira and her get than Dietr, that since he had made Mira what she was, the queen should at least be grateful. Duncan usually replied with some variation on the question: “First you had better discover exactly what she is, don’t you think?”