Glory's People (9 page)

Mira had accepted that Buele must stand in for Duncan. She could sense him still demanding her attention. With a swift switch of her slender tail and a trilled command, Mira marshaled her young hunters and prepared to fight the dragon.

Minamoto Kantaro left the chashitsu as he had entered it, submissively on his knees. He did not stand erect until the teahouse was hidden from view among the garden trees. Where the path left the clearing and curved into a grove of Earth sequoias, he paused and brushed the stones and needles from his ornate court-dress.

Many of Kantaro’s peers--samurai all--would have scorned his caution, but Minamoto no Kami was not only the elected Shogun of Planet Yamato, he was also the hereditary daimyo of the Domain of Honshu and Kantaro’s uncle and clan lord. If that were not enough, there was a genuine affection between the two men.

When the colonists for Tau Ceti left Earth, they had been forced to abandon much. But ancient traditions had been brought to the new lands by Goldenwing
Hachiman
.
Gimu
and
giri
, the concept of obligations to nation and family that for two thousand Earth years had been the heart of bushido, were, if anything, stronger on Planet Yamato than they had ever been on Earth. Under the Tau Ceti sun the complexities and contradictions of Japanese life not only survived--they throve.

Hachiman’s
journey had been organized by Japanese who sought to revive the historic past. Like their ancestors under the Tokugawa Shoguns, Yamatans had isolated themselves. They had reconstituted the old religions, the animist Shinto and the self-disciplining Zen Buddhism. These faiths did not deal in absolutes. One died and was reborn, but not into some fantasmic paradise--not at all. One was reborn into the real, physical world. This freedom from paradise allowed Yamatans to deal with each day pragmatically.

Like their Terrestrial ancestors, the Japanese of Tau Ceti, despite their obsession with loyalty and obedience, could shift allegiances in a heartbeat. Many of ancient Japan’s civil wars had been decided in this way, by a sudden change in the loyalty of a daimyo--in the language of pre-Jihad, technical Earth, by a paradigm shift.

Minamoto Kantaro was experiencing such a paradigm shift. He was close to convincing himself that the failure of a ninja before the ryokan in Yedo--an extremely rare event--might be a signal of guidance from Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess.

For near to a thousand Terrestrial years the people of Planet Yamato had lived undisturbed in isolation eleven light-years from Earth. The unexpected arrival of
Gloria Coelis
raised strange ghosts from the Japanese past.

Long ago, the black ships of Commodore Perry’s naval squadron had appeared at the entrance to Yedo Wan and demanded that Japan open itself to the
gaijin
. There were Yamatans who still regarded that long-ago event as the beginning of the road that led to the destruction of Japanese culture and civilization. Great cities were burned in bitter wars, and eventually Japan was nearly obliterated by the Muslim Jihad.

The mayor of Yedo was a young man in whom modernity and a reverence for the past were constantly at war. He had watched with chauvinistic pride the breakthroughs in FTL research. The genius of Yamatan scientists appealed enormously to his Zen samurai sensibilities, but success had brought mystery--even dread. Kantaro was, like most of his class, an isolationist. If asked, he would have said that it “was in the genes.” The unexplained disappearance of inertial-mass-depletion-engine-powered spacecraft had affected him in the same manner it had affected many of the more senior daimyos, and the unexpected appearance of
Glory
stimulated ancestral fears.

Kantaro sensed a presence as he strode through the Shogun’s garden toward the command post of the shogunal guard. The appearance of the
gaijin
ship, the Mayor of Yedo thought, was forcing decisions all over the planet. Decisions that no one, save possibly his uncle, the Shogun, wanted to make.

The redwood grove covered the seaward side of a long, narrow plateau. Through the great forest Kantaro could see the exposed shallows, the planetary ocean, ruddy gray, streaked with the coppery sheen it sometimes acquired when Amaterasu was high.

At the moment the sea beyond the tidal flats was calm and smooth as a tabletop. In less than an hour it would be roiled by tides raised by the swift passage of the smallest and nearest of Yamato’s satellites. At the moment, in the dark band below the coppery sky, Moon Hideyoshi showed only a thin crescent as it rose from the sea.

What were the MD scientists about up there? Kantaro wondered. Were the scientists making any attempt to discover why the ships of which they had grown so proud were vanishing? Or were they, in the manner of good Yamatans, allowing the ruling samurai to solve the mystery in their own way?

Kantaro paused beside a particularly massive
Sequoia giganteum
and paused to regard the scene before him. The contemplation of nature--called “viewing”--was an artistic discipline of the samurai class, and here at the edge of the Shogun’s garden there was much to contemplate. Sheer cliffs, striated with sandstone, granite, and basalt, plunged down to the sea. The tidal flats were exposed by the gravitational pull of Moon Tokugawa, out of sight now behind the trees. Several hectares of shallow seabottom normally concealed by water were exposed. The underwater plants and corals glistened in the ruddy sunlight of Amaterasu.

Before the tide would rise again, Tokugawa and Hideyoshi together would expose twenty kilometers of seabottom. Beyond the low, receding edge of the sea, coppery swirls in the water reflected the coppery weather patterns in the sky. Clouds were seldom white on Planet Yamato.

Kantaro detected the soft whirring noise of a tilt-rotor patrolling between Mount Kagu and the sea. Had the police found the corpse of the ninja? Kantaro wondered. Depending on how well fuelled the antigravity pack the man wore was, his headless corpse could have fallen into the sea a dozen or more kilometers downwind by now, or it could have risen into the jetstream that kept Yamato’s atmosphere in constant motion. If the former, well and good. The Four Islands spanned two dozen degrees of longitude; all else was water. Though finding a ninja’s corpse wearing a nullgrav unit might cause many questions to be asked. A nullgrav unit was worth the ransom of a fief.

But if the harness were heavily fuelled, the inept killer might now be on his way to Moon Hideyoshi or points far beyond. Kantaro sincerely hoped so.

He stepped clear of the forest and stood for a moment at the edge of the precipice. To the north Mount Kagu rose like a ghost of Fujiyama from the copper-tinged stratus clouds around the mountain’s base.

Kantaro recalled a haiku written aeons ago by the poet Taruhito about another Mount Kagu, on the homeworld:

The mists of spring
Hang on Mount Kagu,
The hill that fell from the skies.

Was it so? he wondered. Did the original mountain fall into the Land of the Dragonfly from the skies? From heaven? What dark power in his heart had chosen this particular haiku to be remembered at this moment?

“The ‘mists of spring’ were very different on Earth,” a low voice said behind him.

Kantaro was startled. But the silent approach was warning enough to make him turn very slowly.

A man, masked and all in black, said, “It is written in the Monogatari no Hachiman that the mists of Earth are pale gray and white. Here they are the color of the furnishings on my katana.”

Minamoto Kantaro took swift notice that the black-gloved hands were on the black-lacquered sheath of the man’s sword. It was a katana of great antiquity, surely brought from Earth aboard
Hachiman
. The man before him was Tsunetomo, the Grand Master of Ninjas. It could be no other. The Ninja Order on Yamato was ever present, yet secret. Ninjas lived by the wisdom of the
Hagakure
, the Book of the Samurai. Apart, but always nearby, always ready. Kantaro did not ask how Tsunetomo had come this far into the Shogun’s garden, alone and unapprehended.

The hired ninja had failed to kill Duncan Kr in Yedo, and as swiftly as this the Master appeared--ready to retrieve the failure with his own far superior killing skills. This was the way of the ninja. Once having been aimed at a victim, they did not stop until death.

“It would be best,” Kantaro said, dry-mouthed, “if no further action were taken against the
gaijin
here, Tsunetomo-san.” “The choice of place and time is yours, Minamoto-san,” the ninja said. “Within limits.” The dark, basilisk’s eyes left Kantaro’s face for a moment and looked out over the sea. “How beautiful is Yamato,” he said. “A treasure to be cherished and guarded.”

Kantaro felt the words like the flick of a lash. He had been uncertain about killing the
gaijin
. They were, after all, almost sacred persons. Who could know what the kami of their great vessel might do to those who shed the blood of Wired Starmen?

But the daimyos, meeting secretly without Minamoto no Kami, had taken the decision, and Kantaro had been moved to join them. What was it the first Tsunetomo wrote in the
Hagakure
? “In the Way of the Samurai, one needs neither loyalty nor devotion, but simply to become desperate in the Way. Loyalty and devotion are themselves within desperation.”

The words of the
Hagakure
were familiar to all Yamatan samurai. The
meaning
of the words only the ninja understood.

“It was karma that your warrior failed, Master,” Minamoto Kantaro said. “The Shogun is of the opinion that we should listen to the syndics until we learn what we face.”

The Master Ninja’s hand rested on the hilt of his katana. His eyes took on the look of a zealot. “Where are you going, Lord Mayor?” he asked.

He whispers like an oracle
, Kantaro thought. “I have just now been sent to assemble the daimyos.”

“A decision has already been made.” The Ninja Master continued to speak in that otherworldly voice. Ninjas were priests and monks of a terrible sort.

Kantaro’s palms began to sweat. To have acquiesced to a public assassination of a stranger was not beyond the pale of behavior for a daimyo of Planet Yamato. Politics, after all, was a risky calling. But to agree now to the cold-blooded murder of a man with whom the Shogun was negotiating in the Shogun’s own teahouse was another matter. Despite what the Hagakure said, loyalty
did
matter. In other places the first Tsunetomo wrote glowingly of loyalty.

I am not so depraved a samurai that I can ignore it
, Minamoto Kantaro thought. But to draw his sword against a ninja--against this ninja, the most skilled on Planet Yamato--was an act of seppuku.

Though he could not see the other man’s mouth, Kantaro knew somehow that he was smiling. Grimly, no doubt. The way Death smiled.

Tsunetomo bowed. “As I have said, Minamoto-san. Time and place are yours to select. Within reason.”

He turned with a swift grace that was almost inhuman. In a stride he was in the shadow of the giant trees. In two he had vanished.

Kantaro flexed his aching hands. He closed his eyes and then opened them, looking again at the vast emptiness of the planetary sea stretching away to the west. Moon Hideyoshi had risen fifteen degrees into the western sky and his crescent was now nearly lost in the ruddy light of Amaterasu.

Kantaro had forgotten to ask the Master what had happened to the failed assassin’s body. He flushed. It would have been presumptuous to remind the Master of the failure again.

Kantaro began again to walk toward the guardpost where communications equipment could connect him with anyplace on the Four Islands. As he walked, his geta sank into the soft, loamy soil and Yamato seemed to bestow a gentle caress. The scent of pine and native flowers was almost unbearably sweet and poignant.

What a wonderful thing it is to be alive, the Mayor of Yedo thought, breathing deeply the thin, cool air of his native world.

To the north, though the trees, Kantaro could make out the steep slopes of Mount Kagu, “the hill that fell from the skies.”

When he was a child, studying the ancient poetry, his master told his students that Mount Kagu’s beauty was a gift from the sky gods. He thought of that often.

As he walked through the conifers his personal com pinged with the Shogun’s personal code.

“Kantaro,” he said.

Minamoto no Kami’s voice was steely. “Another MD ship has just been lost,” he said. “We are running out of time. Order the daimyos to assemble in Yedo by midmoming. There will be a council aboard the syndics’ Goldenwing.”

It was like a blow. The Goldenwing and her people were taking over the life of Yamato.
The hill that fell from the skies
.

Goddess
, he thought, looking toward the invisible ship in orbit,
how many gifts from the sky can Yamato take?

The message from Duncan and Anya reached
Glory
at the moment Damon Ng was facing the first cyborg rebellion in the history of star-sailing.

In conformity with the ukase given him by Acting Captain Dietr Krieg (the young Starman always thought of the Cybersurgeon’s commands in such florid terms), Damon had issued the computer inputs needed to alert the monkeys and set them in motion.

The young man’s empathy warned him that Dietr’s command to work should probably not have been issued so abruptly in this time and place. Dietr was a fine medic, but as a bridge officer he left much to be desired.

Though no one was certain of the reason, every Starman knew that monkeys behaved oddly in deep-gravity wells. In addition to this fact of a Starman’s life,
Glory's
syndics well knew that the thousand cyborgs aboard had been deeply shocked by the deliberate attack of the Nimrudite boarders with whom
Glory
had had to contend in the Ross Stars.

Nimrudite attackers had blundered into the Monkey House, panicked, and lasered the harmless creatures where they reclined in the power racks, killing one and injuring others. The entire monkey contingent had been aghast. On some Goldenwings monkeys were denied free choice and worked to death at only the most primitive, labor-intensive tasks. They were, in fact, called monkeys because their tasks were those relegated to the “deck apes” on the transoceanic racers of ancient Earth. But on
Glory
monkeys were treated differently. Duncan insisted that their semisentience be respected and their safety considered. Deaths among
Glory’s
monkeys had been unknown since Duncan had assumed the rank of Master and Commander.